People here still seem to have faith that the institutions generally work as intended.
Police stations are now fortresses, as are most of the government departments. The state has made a definite choice: the hard hand, no help, and absolute priority to their own protection. Normal crime, like theft from stores, what people want the state to work on, is not even prosecuted anymore. You'd have to steal from a big store, in the city center, while an agent is there to have any chance of getting arrested (only youngsters, whom they can arrest indefinitely without evidence and convict even when innocent, ever get persecuted. Of course, the lack of evidence standards in cases against minors raise the question exactly how often these convictions (sorry "protection measures", not convictions) are fabricated. Let's just say the relation between police and youngsters is strained for some reason).
People want this to stop, and so they want more protection of the state. The French state, of course, could be said to have been less than effective in stopping these riots and the destruction. People, including representatives, are just point blank assuming this will help the police to be effective.
That the police is the cause of the riots does not seem to make a big impression. "Do not shoot people moving away from you in the face" is clearly to much for the police to handle. When you ask people "what else would you want people to do?" there are no answers, because especially nobody wants the obvious option: another long-term national strike.
Ironically the state has done nothing but grow. This is the fundamental conflict: everyone has to "save" (especially people who can't), but not the state. With inflation people have to spend ~11% less, effectively. The state has decided their absolutely necessary expenses will not even have to return to pre-pandemic levels.
People want protection, that's why this gets approved. But the state, where they believe to get this protection, is the direct cause of most of the problems people face.
You're missing the most important detail: especially in Western/Northern Europe, people are taught from childhood on that the state is there to protect you, and protecting yourself is a risk. Europeans aren't just lazily asking for protection, they simply weren't raised to defend themselves from trespassers and assailants without the thought of potentially suffering consequences (even if it is just defamation).
Of course these people are going to beg the state to do it, handing over whatever privacy or independence they believe not needed. They don't know any better. They've been raised on 'knives will be used against you' from toddler age.
As far as property crime against businesses is concerned, we absolutely should be telling people it's a risk to intervene. We should actively dissuade drugstore clerks from risking life and limb to stop someone from stealing a cart of sudafed in exchange for minimum wage at will employment with no benefits.
We are still waiting for an example of a sane society where the opposite is true.
Make HN Great Again!
Yeah, and we call that “civilization”.
If you cannot rely on the state for security, then you're basically living in the contemporary version of the pre-modern world (South America bas manu good examples of that, but the US isn't really, people do rely on 911 more often than not)
Once enough people realize that "the state" can't be everywhere at once and start committing crimes, things start to break down.
That's a (ideologically driven) myth though: if there's just one thing to learn from the twentieth century, it's that even with limited available technologies, a State that wants to be everywhere, can be everywhere, and it's only getting more true as technology advances[1]. And NSA alone collects enough information today to be able to solve the large chunk of unaddressed crime in most of the developed world, it's just a matter of political will regarding resource allocation (with a little bit of Baumol's cost disease, but it's not the main factor at play).
Having a state that is effectively everywhere is of course not something desirable either (again, the lessons from the past century) but the state abandoning its role is a politically constructed situation (it's what you get when laissez-faire becomes a religious theme).
[1] and it fact, it is because the reach of state steadily increased during the early-mid modern period that we've reached the current state of things. It's not that people haven't yet learned that the state cannot be everywhere, it's that states spent several century building the ability to be everywhere, which in turn led to this confidence from the population (and unfortunately to totalitarism sometimes…)
As a normal person, I don't care about petty shoplifting but I would expect from the state for example to investigate murders.They're poorly investigated in general because they are hard to clear and you can't put them in your stats whereas arresting a youngster and taking his weed counts as a solved case.
I think people keep on thinking that "the rich" feel they have some kind of moral obligation to help them. As we've seen time and again, they do not. And they will even go out of their way to protect their money. See all the fiscal arrangements they set up to "optimize" taxation.
How and when are they going to see that ? In my country, there newspapers headlines about how supermarkets have egregious margins. Is this true ? I don't know, but they don't mention shoplifting in the articles.
> I think people keep on thinking that "the rich" feel they have some kind of moral obligation to help them. As we've seen time and again, they do not.
The rich do not have a moral obligation to help us but they do have a legal obligation to pay their taxes and give back to societies they live in and benefit from like everyone else.
I am not sure it's moral obligation but they could also have the decency to stop spending so much money in lobbying, politics and information campaigning in order not to pay their due proportionally to what they own. Is this not accurate anymore : https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-w...
Where I live, shoplifting is a "sensitive" political issue, so it's very unlikely companies will cite it as such. But in the US, people are seemingly more open about it:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/walmart-ceo-says-shoplifting...
https://torontosun.com/news/world/walmart-closing-up-shop-co...
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/worker-closing-dow...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11965589/The-stores...
> The rich [...]
Sure, I agree with your points, but they don't matter that much for the present discussion about stores closing.
Even putting that aside, are you seriously in favor of people stealing just because it's from Big Corp(tm)? Because the victims are the 1%?
Please re-contemplate exactly what you are arguing for, because small frustrations add up and are ultimately what topple societies and countries. Those shoplifters aren't Robin Hood.
It seems that's just your opinion. There's no reason that it is the case least you think policing depends on the will of individual police and not of the objectives of the department. Policing shoplifting isn't even the same job as investigating homicide or market crimes.
> Even putting that aside, are you seriously in favor of people stealing just because it's from Big Corp(tm)? Because the victims are the 1%?
> Please re-contemplate exactly what you are arguing for, because small frustrations add up and are ultimately what topple societies and countries. Those shoplifters aren't Robin Hood.
Someone shoplifting to put food on one's table and clothes on one's body is a Robin Hood, it's just that taker and the receiver are the same person :) I don't think it should be legally but provided it is to feed and clothe yourself and not say resell, I don't think it's morally wrong either.
Sure inability to enforce the law does topple societies, but the inability for people to fill their basic needs does too, the lack of accountability of people in power even more.
People everywhere still seem to have faith that the institutions generally work as intended.