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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

We in the west have surrendered with weak punishments and lax enforcement for anti social behaviour. In many cases even abolishing laws or putting in place public policy that prevents the imprisonment of people who commit "low level" crimes. There's a certain segment of the population who will (largely unsuccessfully) try to shame you if you promote a tough on crime approach.

In my country the entire justice system has been hijacked by activist judges who are hell bent on promoting these whacky ideas and letting serious criminals go virtually unpunished.

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As others have pointed out the US has a massive prison population.

Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.

Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for

This is what China has done. Aside from drug crimes it doesn't seem like they punish any harsher than the rest of the world, they just have an incredibly good ability to follow up. If you smash the window of a store, they will find you and you'll have to pay for it. Just the knowledge that there is an almost 100% chance of having to pay to restore anything you break seems all that's needed to stop the destruction of public spaces.

On the less extreme end, Europe also has much higher rates of catching criminals and punishes then less. I understand the US is really the outlier.

I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.

I don't think the police is underfunded in the US though?

It simultaneously is and isn't. It's overfunded on things that don't matter for the problem at hand - traffic enforcement using full fledged officers in expensive vehicles, militarized SWAT teams, regulations requiring huge officer presence at all events, etc. But it's underfunded on what would change things for the better - foot patrols, investigation, etc.

This is why you can get pulled over for a broken taillight in the US and have 3 police cars behind you complete with a K9 unit, but if that same car gets stolen, you'll probably get asked to make a report and never hear a peep from the police again.

Reminds me of a story I read recently where they deployed a SWAT team to deliver a letter. I thought it must have been fake, but maybe not..

(It was news because the old building's stairs couldn't support the weight of the SWAT team and collapsed, injuring many of them.)

Look at officers per 100k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... France has 422, Germany 349, Italy 456, US 242. There are countries that are super safe like Japan and Singapore with only 255 and 174 but I think it's safe to say that the US probably is better compared to France here. China also has only 258 but I think they make up for it through surveillance which isn't welcome in the US.

The US also doesn't train police officers well compared to most European countries. In the US it takes just a few months to become a police officer. In Germany it takes years.

Very good conversation on the general topic: https://youtu.be/6gMwh3jkWy0?is=MiTI5N1wdEpd_izP

The thing there that the West has not been able to accept to achieve this is the surveillance state. Just look at Flock.

I'm not sure anyone has really cracked how to get it done without that part, though certainly tweaking the spending from prisons to police would help a lot. The trouble in the US at least is people (rightly) don't trust police, and don't want to give them more power, so it also needs to be paired with reform on that front for the population to accept it.

Because cameras alone do nothing useful, and there's precious little evidence these are being used to help address petty vandalism.

The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.

I'm just not sure that stronger punishment and enforcement is going to be the answer here. It seems like many of the Asian cultures have a much higher level of social cohesion even without the threat of punishment. How do we get (back) to higher social cohesion in the West? I recall seeing a film of a shanty town somewhere in the US during the Great Depression. It was very neat and tidy. What happened between then and now?

America has a low social cohension because of global immigration instead of targeted immigration compare to China. America use to share a culture because people came from the same places and shared the same religion and had a common history going back to the Romans.

....sadly more true than anyone here would probably like to admit. I love having Indian coworkers and there’s a large Indian population where I am at, but they are just completely separated in every single way from everyone else. and they keep it that way.

my Pakistani coworkers are absolutely wonderful. Sweet, hard-working, very enjoyable to talk to, but their families and lives are just a totally different universe and they don’t share it.

The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. i’ve seen inside some of the homes, and they are filled with independent black power movie posters about shooting Whitey. No kidding.

I know it takes a village, but when people are so very different and forced to be near each other, it doesn’t mean that they will socialize or help each other; it’s like living on two different planets. there’s all kinds of social research showing this now, and what you get is micro segregation along income lines, rather than everyone helping each other and lifting up the community together.

I wanted for most of my life for people to get along and the world to be a better place, thinking that education and modern access to information could somehow make things better. It seems that was entirely and completely wrong. when people have any kind of discomfort at all about new culture or new person or new idea? They pretty much just run away.

The people here on hacker news are probably an exception, because we are here searching for commentary and interesting ideas and new information.

What an awful society you live in.

It is not like that where I live.

The first generation of immigrants have trouble, natural enough. But are very keen that their children do better.

As for racism: Most racism here is systemic, from the state. There is casual ignorant racism, of course, but little hate.

What a mess has been made of your country. You should work to fix it.

It took us a lot of work to get here, and we have a long way to go. But I cannot imagine living in a society such as you describe.

Where I’m from, Sweden, typically it is the second and third generation immigrants who exhibit antisocial behaviour.

Its true im many places. First generation hard working. Second generation lives in the inprint of the first generation. Third generation has no connection to the original homeland and tries to find connection or it turns to antisocial behaviour.

The first generation could hardly be classified as “hard working”, the sad fact is many of them live on (generous) welfare.

You only have to look at Trump; third generation immigrant.

His grandfather made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in Whitehorse during the Gold Rush years, his father compounded that with an actual real estate 'empire' and the grandson 'earnt' money via dodgy wealth transfer schemes and sank much of it into get rich quick scams and branding deals based on fraudulent representation and money laundering, now leading the country in historic levels of open corruption.

Ok, this is very different from the situation in Sweden. Many were analphabets and live completely segregated from mainstream society with little hope(or wish) to integrate with Swedish society.

I agree with your analysis of the Trump family who have been detrimental for US society.

Near as I can tell, Trump III is also an analphabet, living completely segregated from mainstream society with little hope(or wish) to integrate with Swedish society (or US for that matter).

Good point.

Questions for Sweden might be "How did the US integrate all the illiterate Irish?" (and should they do the same), "How did Australia integrate many non English speaking / writing Vietnamese 'boat people'?", etc.

Unless Sweden in majority is prepared to broom out all that they have accepted in, then this how it is, a mix of cultures having to find common directions and minimise friction over the next generation and a half.

These are valid questions the western Europe dodged for far too long. Looking the other way created the rightwing monster of today.

Worth specifying that this also applies to the "good" immigrants such as the Poles, not just the much vilified Muslims. The kids of Polish immigrants really struggle. And if you go a generation back, the Vietnamese boat refugees had similar issues: their kids really had issues, there were Vietnamese criminal gangs in Oslo in the 90s. The ex-Yugoslav organized crime groups were maybe more notable in that they were often first generation, but they're mostly a memory too by now. Then there's the "hapas", children of Asian women who immigrated by marrying native men. Scandinavia hasn't seen much trouble with them - yet. But I think there's some danger here, online I've seen some worrying communities.

I think identity rootlessness is an underestimated factor in immigration woes. Youth of all kinds can often be exploited into adopting a destructive self-identity, but some groups are more vulnerable. One notorious Swedish gang actively recruits from the foster care system.

I think less people expected those to cause generational trouble and so a common pro-migration argument 1-2 decades ago was that these people from mena regions would assimilate. After all the people from (in our case italy) mostly already did.

It's wild to see how this flipped completely around in such a short time and now some markers of integration seem to go backwards and at the same time some consider it biggoted to demand/expect assimilation.

or the third generation are just natives at that point, and will commit crimes at a similar rate to the native populace?

> The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit.

Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them?

The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offer to maintain smoke detectors. (It probably didn't hurt that I was also good for bumming cigarettes off of and slowing down to have a chat.)

YMMV, but showing up and doing work was apparently what my neighbors in East St. Louis and Atlanta wanted.

Wait, so the smoke detector thing is real? I assumed it was just a racist stereotype.

It's something of a meme that's grounded in reality, but it's honestly less grounded in race and ethnicity than it is in socioeconomic status.

That said, there's a joke that the white people version of this is the little bug in the lower right corner of the Windows desktop background that tattles on you for not having activated.

Which, like, y'know, that's fair.

This is exactly my experience. I moved into a black neighborhood and it's real bad for me. My neighbor, a white elderly woman, organizes sort of community events, but it's 90% white people from nicest houses.

> a common history going back to the Romans.

Native Americans are not related to Romans.

Slaves brought by force from Africa neither.

Neither of those two groups were citizens of America historically.

Which Asian cultures are you speaking about which have high social cohesion without threat of punishment? Singapore will punish anti-social behaviour like vandalism with mandatory caning, or fine you heavily for jay walking. In Japan police will intervene much more readily in cases of public intoxication and even noise complaints.

For more serious anti social behaviour like gun crimes, violent crimes and drug trafficking there are very strong mandatory penalties up to and including corporal punishment and execution.

Conviction rates in these countries are upwards of 99%. So in cases of intervention a punishment is almost certain.

Is the problem social cohesion or mental illness and meth and fentanyl addiction?

Stronger punishments? Probably not, but better enforcement? I believe so.

It has repeatedly been shown that the severity of punishment does not sway crime nearly as much as the certainty of punishment does [1]. This all feels like a byproduct of the hyper-individualism we have in the West and the US, especially.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/670398

Indeed. Wasn't there a study where a policeman stationed on a street corner decreased crime or something even if he was just standing there doing nothing? Like a scarecrow effect.

Of course people will come out and scream Gestapo! And talk about their freedoms, but are the only two choices in life complete anarchy and a police state? Can't we live somewhere in the middle like a reasonable society? It's really just slippery slope fallacies all the time like either we don't police at all or do north korea style surveillance.

Also the demonization of police, the need is to have better police, not no police! It's just absurd what people come up with, it's so unreasonable yet these ideas gain such a large following.

there are police booths on many street corners in urban areas of china. they're very common, and people don't act afraid of them. the most common interaction you see is people asking them for directions

Sorry I don't understand your reply. Are you agreeing with me? The police booth is not to make you afraid. The idea is that it would deter pickpockets and other petty crime just by being there, regardless of whether the booth was meant to do so or not. Yes it could just be a almost retired security guard inside giving out directions but that would still work better than nothing at all.

So how come the weak-on-crime Western European countries are not drowning in homeless drug addicts?

It's probably the difference you can also notice between Switzerland and Germany for example. Take rough sleeping: in Germany it's there (no, not LA-style but still noticeable). In Switzerland they get immediately rounded up and taken to a shelter, no "muh freedom" discussion just housed. Add warm meals and a community and the light at the end of the tunnel starts to be be noticed. Of course mentally ill will come out again, so at some point they will have to be institutionalized. Nobody belongs on the streets, no matter what the gop is telling.

There's a growing amount of visible homlessness near here in Brussels and the other big cities in Belgium and a lot of other western european cities

Influences related to migration have overwhelmed whatever support systems there are to tackle this.

The United States is certainly part of the west, and we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR.

The idea that we are soft on crime is insane.

Harsher punishments do not lead to lower crime.

> we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR

Crime is committed at a higher rate than in any other advanced nation, though some of the others are catching up.

> The idea that we are soft on crime is insane

Not even a little bit insane. There are a million criminal laws on the books that do not get enforced at all. For example, I live in a state that is stereotypically conservative and "tough on crime" and any marijuana-related products are strictly illegal, most often at the felony level; yet I constantly smell it while driving on the road, no less! People are smoking while driving all the time. This cannot be described as anything but soft on crime.

The US system was overall built by and for people who are largely self-governing. This philosophy gets in the way of a true hard-on-crime pivot.

And yet your prisons are full of people in jail for marijuana related crimes.

Because putting people in prison for weed does not stop people smoking weed.

You don't go to jail for possession of weed in most US states. You won't even go to jail for dealing unless you've been busted multiple times or you're moving heavy weight.

When you see statistics about people incarcerated on marijuana charges, what they normally obscure is either that's not the only charge or they pled down from something more serious.

There isn't a single person in federal custody there for marijuana possession and only that.

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