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Comment by throwayyy479087 | Hacker News Reader

I used to agree, but how do you square that with articles like this: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mayor-eric-adams-nypd-r...

>"In New York City, we've identified 716 individuals, 716 individuals, who are responsible for approximately 30 percent of the shooting incidents since 2021," NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael Lipetri said.

>10 men have been arrested 485 times since the change in bail law.

Are you sure we're locking up too many people? Or is it that we live in a country with a lot of crime? I don't really know anymore.

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In New York, as in many places, crime is still at a pretty historic low. Depending on your sources and your categories, down as much as 50-75% since peaks in the 80s and 90s.

It's definitely not that we currently live in a country with rampant criminality.

Adding onto that, Google says the NYPD budget is over 5 billion dollars a year. If there really are less than 1000 people responsible for so much violent crime, this seems like institutional ineptitude on a pretty staggering scale.

It's up ~40% in the last 3 years.

> If there really are less than 1000 people responsible for so much violent crime, this seems like institutional ineptitude on a pretty staggering scale.

They arrest them, but the state lets them out. A lot of state reps are openly against any form of prison/jail for criminals - this is what those policies produce.

_"They arrest them, but the state lets them out. A lot of state reps are openly against any form of prison/jail for criminals - this is what those policies produce."_

I call bullshit. You've been watching too much right-wing propaganda. Name some of these reps.

I don't know about state representatives, but Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, is explicitly against zealous prosecution of violent crimes (e.g., armed burglary) that don't result in actual physical harm. He was later forced to backpedal on that position.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/manhattan-da-alvin-brag...

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-manhattan-da-alvin-b...

As a prosecutor, he also engaged in racially-motivated prosecution of a clear case of self-defense until public pressure forced him to back off.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-video-shows-girlfr...

NYC officials are pro-criminal, anti-everyday person.

Wikipedia has a telling graph of the murder rates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#Murders....

40% up from pandemic lows sounds concerning, but we're still down near the bottom of a 30 year decline.

And from: https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/stats.htm, NYC had anywhere from 120,000 to nearly 300,000 arrests each year from 2012 to 2021. 10 people abusing bail reform? 716 shooters? These numbers are many orders of magnitude lower than the number of people affected by crime and the criminal justice system in New York every year.

> but how do you square that with articles like this

One city having a bail problem does not invalidate the observation that the US has an abnormally large prison population for a developed country [1].

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2018/06/28/us/mass-incarceration-fiv...

I actually think it’s part of a vicious cycle— putting people in jail makes it much more likely that they’ll commit another crime. Not only because of who they are around, and the circumstances of their imprisonment, but because of the many opportunities closed off to them after being incarcerated.

Further, I think that extreme inequality breeds crime, especially violent crime. This is a country with the most extreme inequality in modern history.

If the police knows that, they should be able to prove that.

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