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Comment by cobrausn | Hacker News Reader

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I normally hate people who just throw quotes up to answer a question, but this one seemed appropriate.

I will never live in NYC (though I do travel upstate quite a bit). There are plenty of large cities in the world that are safe or safer without also being police states.

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Except it's not "a little temporary safety" or "essential liberties".

First, crime has come down by huge amounts in NYC. Some crimes, like murder are 1/4th or 1/5th of the peaks in the 1980's. For decades now, we've seen a huge increase in safety in NYC.

Second, I question whether most of the police actions are giving up essential liberties. I can see how some might think so, but I can see how many would not.

I don't think that subway checkpoints and stop-and-frisks were part of the reason that crime went down; in fact, I'm pretty sure that subway checkpoints are a very recent post-911 creation.

And I'd say that public transportation is a pretty essential liberty in NYC.

> First, crime has come down by huge amounts in NYC.

As many other commenters have mentioned, the decrease in crime is not related to the removal of civil liberties. The crime decreases occurred prior to the implementation of many of these policies.

> Second, I question whether most of the police actions are giving up essential liberties. I can see how some might think so, but I can see how many would not.

They are infringing on constitutional rights. I don't see how those rights could be seen as anything but essential.

It seems you made a serious mistake -- you assumed that it is the stop and frisk and invasion of privacy and all these other police practices that lowered the crime rate.

How do you know crime rate hasn't been lowered everywhere because of say, global warming?

    "There are plenty of large cities in the world that are safe or safer without also being police states."

Can you name one?

Tokyo

It's a stretch to say Tokyo is any less a police state than NYC given Japanese weapon laws and mass CCTV survellience.

> given Japanese weapon laws

Gun rights are not the be all and end all of freedom.

> mass CCTV survellience

I see absolutely nothing wrong with the use of CCTVs to monitor public places (or the use of them to monitor private places by the owners of those places). If civilians are allowed to record the police in public, then the police should be allowed to record civilians in public too.

That's all well and good, but does that (CCTV surveillance) fall into what cobrausn quoted (Benjamin Fraklin?) above?

I guess it's a matter of perspective or opinion. Where do you/we draw the line?

You have an odd definition of police state, then. People control and unchecked intelligence gathering on citizens are essential to a repressive power apparatus.

The point of cobrausn is that NYC takes this too far while other large cities do not. I'd argue the safest cities in the same class as NYC are probably as much police states. At least in regards to violent crime. Petty crime rates are difficult to compare uniformly across cultures.

Well that's easy then -- enact weapon laws in US instead of frisking random people but only _if_ you think that it is what is making Tokyo safe.

Since NYC has about the highest level of personal intrusion, I'd say all of the ones that have a lower crime rate.

Luxemburg, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich, and so on. And within the US there are plenty as well:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/26/safest-cities-ten-lifestyle...

and

http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-repor...

New York doesn't even enter the top 50 when it comes to safety in the second table there.

And in Canada Toronto, Vancouver.

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