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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>However, I think he ignores a really salient distinction: a lot of these "crimes" like the laws against graffiti, exist not because the acts themselves are particularly heinous, but because they're proxies for things that are dangerous, namely gang activity.

Millions of people do graffiti -- and very few of them have anything to do with "gang activity".

This "proxy" notion doesn't hold. Neither would such retribution to such "offences" be fair even if it was so.

In fact, sending people to jail for such trivial stuff is a more effective introduction to serious crime than their initial offences.

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The conditional probability that someone will tag given that he is a gang member is high. Gangs mark their territory in this way. The legislators, probably not even knowing who Bayes is, feel free to reverse the conditional and say that the probability someone is a gang member given that he tags is also high.

At the least, they are not fully independent events, so it's not totally idiotic. If you combine that with broken window theory, it makes a lot of sense [to the cops] to rely on such statutes as a way to fight gangs at the same time as other petty crime.

you've reversed the condition. what matters is the probability they are a gang member given they tag. in gang fueled areas this probability will be high. at a general average, it's probably very low.

Legislators are bad at math. Didn't you know?

I'd like to see the statistics that lead you to believe that very few of the people that "do graffiti" have anything to do with gang activity. Perhaps you mean the fully commodified art form which is practiced on building walls with the owner's full permission but with a certain kind of serif and flare? Or maybe you mean the occasional lewd remark on a bathroom wall? Certainly, you are not referring to the vast majority of graffiti you might see in public places in New York, LA, Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, Baltimore, or any other giant city which is in fact a log of blood, death, and hatred committed in service to gangs.

    Millions of people do graffiti -- and very few of them have anything to do with "gang activity".

I imagine that depends on where the crime takes place. If you're in the ghetto tagging a wall it's far more likely to be gang related than it would be if it were some kid in the suburbs.

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