I wonder gang related violence gets more coverage only if it results in innocent victims. Deserved vs undeserved. Probably does.
I would also like to stop gang violence but this often means “throwing the book” at gang members, which is often disliked by many activists.
I myself live in a safe area of a major city, and there are gang murders in my neighborhood occasionally. It makes my relatives and friends ask how I can live here. But a grown man shot in his car at 3am over a drug deal doesn’t make me feel that less unsafe, and I have kids here
Gang membership is skewed younger and often includes "children" (depends on definition) 14+. Makes it a little tricky about lifestyle choice when dealing with minors.
If you google this you will find plenty of examples that made the news, and not all of them do.
https://abc13.com/post/houston-police-increasing-patrols-7-y...
Here is an article including two such examples. One kid was sitting down eating dinner and the other was sitting in a car. They were both shot totally incidentally during shootouts they had nothing to do with.
If so, I do not know how to tell you that this sounds insane..
That homicides make the news much more than car accidents, and stray bullets make the news at all, is kinda the point of the article.
The fact is that if there are guns around, there is a little bit of danger especially if they are loaded. Stricter gun laws tend to produce less gun violence and accidents.
Nobody joining a gang is making a rational reckoning of the risk/reward of getting caught by the police, partly because they don't plan to get caught and partly because the much larger risk is getting killed.
And the people getting arrested and prosecuted are primarily not the people calling the shots or driving recruitment of new members.
The best way to put a dent in gang violence is to disrupt gang recruiting, and one of the better ways to do that is to improve societal safety nets so joining a gang is less attractive.
Sure, throwing the book doesn't get you 100%. But am I supposed to believe that increasing the penalty for doing the wrong thing doesn't decrease the frequency of the wrong thing? Having everyone you know in your crime circle being in jail vs. roaming free certainly has an effect on your decisions to join/stay.
Yes. There is substantial evidence that increasing the severity of punishment does not reduce crime rates.
For example: https://www.academia.edu/download/55552845/the_economics_of_...
Then how would you explain El-Salvador? They went from the homicide capital of the world in 2015 to the 8th safest place in the world [1] in less than a decade. And "all" that they did was dramatically bumped up the penalties for gang membership, round up gang members, and threw them in militarized prisons as opposed to the typical gang reinforcement retreats. Crime dramatically plummeted and you ended up with a president with an approval rating upwards of 90%.
From my perspective in modern times we've trialed both soft and hard systems on crime. The soft systems in general have had very poor results except in places that already had no issues with crime (e.g. Norway), whereas the hard systems have demonstrated phenomenally positive outcomes. Places like the US have a major problem with things like privatized prisons that create a commercial incentive for incarceration, but I think these are tangential to the topic.
[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/650516/global-safety-starts-sli...
But back to the actual thread: the majority of gang violence is against other gangs. This is unlike other high-crime areas (for example, places with high rates of carjacking) where criminals are targeting people just moving through the area.
I think perceptions of criminality is a very important metric because it controls for the possibility of numbers being juked. If everybody thinks crime is going up, but the numbers say it's going down, then it's possible there's some sort of collective delusion. But it's also possible that the numbers are being juked, or that various biases (like declines in rates of reporting) are driving a numeric decline in crime even as crime rates climb.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-...
That’s a wild idea. Collective perception is juked by default. You’re basically trying to use vibes as a check on data.
Of course you're right that subjective experience will be biased, but it will usually be biased in a relatively fixed way. And so changes in this overtime create arguably the most valuable measurement that exists. Like during the previous administration, trying to brow beat people into believing that the economy was awesome because 'look at these totally-not-fake numbers' was just so dystopic.
So for example, we tend to overestimate threats rather than underestimate them. Yet in El Salvador we now have the overwhelming majority of people (at the 8th highest rate in the world) say they feel safe walking alone at night. That is just an extremely informative datum. I'd also add that people's actions are based on their perceptions. Gallup hits on this in a reasonable way in that survey linked earlier:
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"In our uncertain world, it’s not enough to make sure that people are safe. They also need to feel safe. When people feel safe, they devote time and energy to learning opportunities and to their relationships with their families, communities and workplaces.
Feeling safe fosters trust in these relationships. This trust forms a foundation for collaboration, cooperation and social development, which makes communities more resilient to challenges such as natural disasters, economic downturns, political conflicts or health crises like the recent pandemic."
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