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Comment by dr_petes | Hacker News Reader

You could argue that those areas have more crime because they have a disproportionate amount of cops to observe crime.

They have a much higher murder rate too. Murder is not caused by "cops observing crime."

Murder is just one crime. Take for example Wage Theft. Which accounts for as much as $50 billion a year ^1 (more than robberies).

And yet, you won’t see cops arresting a manager at a store for stealing from their workers.

[1](https://inthesetimes.com/article/wage-theft-union-labor-bide...)

Wage theft is also not the type of crime that is caught by police on patrol. Having more cops in a neighborhood wont stop wage theft. Wage theft requires reports of misconduct and an investigation.

You're comparing apples to oranges.

That's the point, though. That "these are where police arrest a lot of people" isn't necessarily "these are where the most crimes or the most criminal damage happen".

Police could absolutely patrol for wage theft. It would look somewhat different from how police patrol for other crimes, but we know where it happens and how it is committed. In fact, because wage theft can only happen in specific places and only be committed by a small subset of people, it would be much easier to prevent wage theft via patrol than almost any other crime.

Yet we treat it as a report-only crime, to be prosecuted after the fact rather than prevented by policing. It seems like that's mostly a matter of police priorities.

And that would be a poor argument. Common sense would say otherwise.

It's important to note that common sense itself is a bias. It's a bias towards what we already think. Don't mistake that as trying to say that for "we should avoid priors" - that's not possible. What would it take for you to soften (not move) your priors on the common sense that "police aren't co-creators in crime through the act of observation"?

police aren't co-creators in crime

Police aren’t co-creators of crime, they’re co-creators of crime statistics. Crimes that go unreported, with no arrest made, are invisible to crime statistics. When the police arrest someone and charge them with a crime, it counts as both an arrest and a reported crime.

So even if crime were uniformly distributed across the city, if police spent the majority of their time in one neighbourhood they’d make more arrests there and so it follows that the statistics would show higher crime in that neighbourhood.

Instead of reacting, why don't you get curious instead?

I stand by my claim. Crimes are social facts. They exist within a reality supported by whichever laws those with the monopoly of violence believe in. Crimes exist within the symbol register of thought. I'll ask you a question in return, why did you choose your ontology of crime among all those that could possibly exist?

Police are also demonstrably co-creators of crime.

We know very well that police injure and kill people—disproportionately people of color—at a much higher rate than the general population.

We also know that they (technically legally, but c'mon, it's theft) steal large amounts of money and other property from people through civil asset forfeiture.

Are you arguing that more police does help against crime, but does not raise the amount of crime discovered by the police?

How is it a poor argument? If a crime is committed but there's no relevant reporter to observe it, it won't get counted as "crime", correct?

I think it also depends on your definition of crime or the type of crime that is being committed as outside of the scope of truly violent crimes or crime where there is a clear victim there are a lot of crimes that really should not be a crime in the first place (like possession of certain plants) and there may be many instances of truly victimless crimes that would go "uncaught" and thus untracked if an authority figure was not observing them.

Common sense is a poor argument.

"Crime" has multiple elements: the law, the act, the observation, and the prosecution.

We disproportionately outlaw things that poor people do. ("The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.") We disproportionately observe poor people, as shown by this article. We disproportionately convict poor people, who can't afford bail or good legal representation.

Yet people always want to jump to that other element. The disproportionate crime rates can't be due to all those other things, it must be due to them committing more crimes.

The only thing we can say for sure is that poor people commit different crimes. They use different drugs and in different settings; they are more likely to commit theft than embezzlement; they are more likely to cause property damage than violate building codes. The rest is made murky by an unfair legal system and a societal tendency to treat crimes of poverty as individual in nature and crimes of wealth as systemic failures.

You could say that, but you would look quite silly.

Not in every case.

https://www.livescience.com/59329-drug-alcohol-addiction-wea...

> By age 22, lifetime rates of addiction to drugs or alcohol were 11 to 16 percent among women from affluent families, which is similar to the national norms; the rates were 19 to 27 percent among men from affluent families, twice the national norms, according to the study.

> But a more troubling trend emerged by age 26: Lifetime rates of addiction to drugs or alcohol were 19 to 24 percent among women from wealthier upbringings and 23 to 40 percent among men from those families. These rates were three times higher than the national average for women, and two times higher in men.

This does't match up with drug arrest rates.

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