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Comment by nativeit | Hacker News Reader

The issue is the economic and societal problems that drive desperation and widening inequality. It is symptomatic of the short-term thinking and opportunistic nature of an economic model that inherently ignores the implications of its incentives and how their impacts will affect all stakeholders other than investors and their share prices. Let’s not pretend that more incarceration and law enforcement encounters will fix anything, they’re much more likely to further exacerbate the root problem.

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Sure. On the other hand, arresting 11 specific people reduced bike theft by 90% in London: https://www.itv.com/news/2024-02-26/a-police-sting-uncovered...

When crime gets to the point where a police tactic as simple as "putting out a bait bicycle, waiting for it to get stolen, and then following it to a warehouse of stolen bicycles" results in a huge reduction of actual crime committed, then maybe the solution isn't purely about wealth inequality.

Sure sure but when it turns out 90% of crime is from 11 people it stops making sense to pass laws punishing all people of a certain class and/or giving police incredible amounts of power with little or no oversight.

Well a lot of the sub-$500 petty theft are done by junkies trying to get their fix for the day, and with opiate addiction getting worse, not better, in the US, there are many of these types and the day-by-day thefts add up over the years. Throwing a repeat offender in jail for a couple weeks is often the only time a junkie will kick, so it kind of does solves the root problem for these individuals. Even some hard-ass jurisdictions have half way houses.

Source: me, an ex junkie, and had junkie friends. Go ahead and write this off as an anecdote, but it's an anecdote repeated thousands upon thousands of times.

I'd make the case your viewpoint is symptomatic of the power of bad ideas. In this case, specifically accepting the idea that individuals do not have responsibility for their own actions or for how they relate to the people around them.

It also, in a weird way, infantilizes and removes agency from marginalized people. You can in fact be both marginalized and honest, and most marginalized people are.

And the rich can, in fact, be rich and not steal. Maybe we should put our efforts towards stopping the infantilization of the rich thieves that are responsible for the vast majority of theft in this country? Or are we only gonna clutch our pearls at the petty crime?

We could also acknowledge two problems simultaneously, without downplaying or minimizing either. That way, neither you nor your imaginary rhetorical opponent is "clutching their pearls".

Ridiculous of you to act like this denies their responsibility. When the rich steal millions from the poor daily we should absolutely expect an increase in crime. To blame this solely on the poor is a denial of the responsibility of the rich.

I mean, can't it be both? Individuals have personal agency and are responsible for their own actions. Individuals also respond to incentives which, in aggregate, alter the observed distribution of those individual decisions. The problem can be addressed at both levels.

You're partly correct - people are getting more desparate and hopeless because their prospects are grim, and nihilistic because they feel their lives have no meaning. That's a problem and crime will continue to get worse as these feelings pervade American society.

But also, we need to arrest and prosecute criminals, because not doing so encourages crime. It accelerates the downward spiral.

It’s organized gangs that have found a loophole: commit “greasy crimes” at scale where the individual crimes are below a threshold. This is similar to the epidemic of small hit large scale online scams and mail fraud, but in person.

It’s a new kind of organized crime enabled by digital technology.

I’d happily pay more in tax to jail every thief in the country.

Be careful that you yourself or some of your relatives don't end up in jail for white collar crime with that approach. You know less about others than you think.

I think white collar crime should be prosecuted, even if it might æffect me or my relatives. Is that controversial now?

I was talking more about the misguided approach of "trying to get every last criminal" by being overzealous in policing.

Par for the course for HN to misinterpret it, of course.

Certainly the courts should still exist under this hypothetical.

How much more would you pay?

Most people affected by economic and social problems do not resort to theft to solve their problems. In fact, they are probably far more likely to be a victim - either directly out of sheer proximity or indirectly as stores close and opportunities fade away due to all the theft being allowed in their community.

We arrested more people for 30 years and crime went down. There is loads of data that more police in the right places deter crime. All my LEO friends know who that are arresting because they arrest the same people over and over. Crime is driven by a small number of bad actors.

I remember what ten years ago in San Francisco the cops found a guy shot to death in Bayview. Cops suspicion was he broke into the wrong car and a gang member shot him.

Guy had been arrested over a hundred times for breaking into cars in the previous couple of years. So this guy was breaking into several cars a day every day for years and only stopped when someone shot him.

I definitely feel that old school habitual criminal laws were over strict and subject to abuse. But not having them at all is also bad.

Drugs drive theft, not inequality.

Anecdotally most of theives I have known of here in New Zealand (Christchurch) are driven by wanting to buy hard drugs.

In my experience poorer people here seem to have fairly strict morals against theft.

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