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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

In the US we have all of the downside of surveillance with none of the upside. Other places with competent police have vanishingly low crime rates. Crime is deterred because there’s little chance of getting away with it.

In the US we still have domestic spying and facial recognition at airports but somehow car theft is still possible. In the Bay Area people even openly shoplift.

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You believe that no other factor explains the difference better? The reason is "incompetent police"? Why did the US not have the same problem in the past? You would explain it as somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation? Why don't you list some of the other countries that you believe have things figured out, and we can see what they have in common, other than "competent police"?

> somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation

It isn’t as far-fetched as you make it sound. If the incentives stop rewarding competence, then people focus on other stuff instead.

This seems inline with the general decay we’ve seen across the Western world where actually doing work and doing it well has a lower ROI than engaging in shenanigans to artificially boost one’s earnings such as office politics, fraud, etc. A certain airplane maker recently got to see the end result for example.

The cops were even worse before. The crime wave of the 80s and 90s was way worse than what we have now and that was just the continuation . We’ve always had this problem.

>You would explain it as somehow, across the entire country, all police, at all levels, just become incompetent sometime in the last generation?

Over a longer time, and not just police, but yes. I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

Qualified immunity and the George Floyd protests have done a lot to make policing worse in the US.

In those "other places" the causation is opposite, the crime doesn't need to be deterred because it's treated as a systemic issue which is solved through social safety nets and other egalitarian measures.

Look at what the NYPD is doing right now, they spend $6 billion a year. They're spending millions more to claw back 5 figures in lost subway fares. That's tax payer highway robbery.

Atlanta recently rolled their helicopter out (at least $60k per sortie) to catch a guy who shoplifted $100 from Walmart. Something's clearly not working here.

The police are only as competent as the laws are. If the criminals know that they will be released the same day with no consequences then there is no point in catching them.

> The police are only as competent as the laws are.

The police are (often deliberately and strategically) far less competent at achieving the goals of the laws than the laws, assuming good-faith enforcement, themselves permit them to be.

Wait, are the criminals catching something in your talking point? Why would the criminals thinking that they will be released with no consequences stop the police doing what the taxpayers pay them to do?

If you park in the Mission District, chances are someone’s gonna smash your window and grab your stuff. Calling the cops? Eh, don’t expect much. They show up late or not at all, and even if they catch someone, they're out again fast. So, what’s the point?

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/14w5plt/serio...

Top rated answer: >> Give criminals more hefty punishments because they are usually not put in jail for long and charges are often dropped. Usually when arrested the same offenders are smashing and grabbing again right after release.

I don’t think you addressed the point that it is the job of the police to apprehend those who break the law. It should not matter what happens after that as that is not what the tax payers are paying them to do. Is it ok that the police are not doing their job any longer? Is this behavior of theirs positively or negatively affecting crime?

When you won't sacrifice for society, no one else will either.

You are statistically probably well educated, probably working in tech, and probably earning 2x or more than a police officer with none of the danger. As a tech person, you could probably trivially write a query that would tell you what camera to look at at what moment, or have the engineering background to develop a system to find where people fence bikes and stolen laptops.

Instead you're probably making some asshole VC or CEO richer by selling out the future for next quarters profits. That police officer actually has skin in the game making society a better place and is literally in harms way when they do their job.

You think the government owes you something, but what I don't think you fully realize is that the government is us; we are the government, you and I.

I apologize for lack of a link or hard data, but I read somewhere that statistically speaking it's more dangerous to be married to a police officer than to be police officer. Lines up with numerous articles on domestic violence committed by members of law enforcement.

I think this misses the point. It’s not that the government doesn’t have the resources or the capability, and we just need to step up and help. They do. They can and do buy cell phone location data, ad tech data, and all other sorts of bespoke data like car tire pressure unique IDs. All of this created by well-paid Silicon Valley companies and aggregated by no-name government contracting companies like Anomaly 6, VenTel and Babel Street. The reason it’s not put to better use is that the US can’t figure out whether we have a right to privacy (in which case the government needs to knock it off) or whether we should prefer safety.

And still people randomly get assaulted in a supposedly 1st world leading city.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/women-report-assault-incidents-...

The reason I post this is because I read it this morning and it's the first thing that pretty much popped in my head here. You guys have a huge gap in policing and enforcement of punishment. It's so blatantly broken and broken on purpose by the left/establishment/politicans/etc.

8 million people in a small area... things are going to happen

crime is down overall and the media's job these days is to get clicks... hyping crime is a tried and true way to do that

Heh what is even worse about crime reporting in the US is the news never really reports on crime rates in small cities and suburban areas. You'll see people arguing online how NYC or whatever big city is a hive of scum and villiany and completely miss the small town they live in has a higher per capita crime rate. It's all a bunch of rage bait built on if it bleeds it leads.

I honestly think the stats are being twisted and a lot of crime goes un-reported, hence the appearance of crime going down. As much as I hate the media and their constant call-to-outrage, some aspect of what they're now doing is trying to inform people that "there's a problem here".

Everyone has an opinion

Singapore has 6 million and an order of magnitude less crime. Their murder rate is 30-40x lower.

30-40x murder rate is wildly incorrect. According to 2022 stats I found, Singapore had 7 murders for a pop of 5.6mil (1.25/mil) and NYC had 30 for a pop of 8mil (3.75/mil)... that's 3x.

Maybe that's just fewer guns and better mental health supports (whether official or cultural).

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