runsWphotons

You can see my comment below for some facts about the Netherlands. They do, literally, have a militarized police (the gendarmerie) which has civilian duties while operating under the defense ministry (and having military duties as well). They operate at airports, do border control, protect state assets (especially in capitol), do crowd control at major events, contain riots etc. You will see them if you go and even try to look.

Their normal police is very similar to America's in number and capability. They may be trained better, which seems like an argument for better training.

I have the opposite hypothesis: I think more police, even from the NG, will help. I think if our society is more criminal, for whatever reasons, it should be policed more. I do not see any good arguments for how having a few hundred NG deployed will strip me of any important liberty, and I think it is much better than tech solutions in that regard.

We now have a test case, and we can come back and see.

I will add that in addition to my longer comment, I doubt that "wealth gap" has much at all to do with these differences in criminality.

Yes, the US has a high gini coefficient. But the median income is very similar to the netherlands, with NL being maybe 5000$ higher. Median wealth per capita is very similar between the two and Americans have slightly higher purchasing power, although again pretty similar. I don't think crime is higher in the US because rich people are sending the poor into a murderous rage, and if it is so then it just indicates there really is a culture problem.

Bureau of Justice statistics says that the US has about 1,200,000 police across agencies. Given a US population of 340 million this is about 283 people per employee (it says this includes civilian personnel, idk how many): https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/census-state-and-lo....

The Netherlands has about 51,000 police officers. They also have 14,000 support officers and some other civilians with some law enforcement powers (I will leave these out since idk how civilian support officers counted in BoJ stats). That is something like 352 people per officer (18 million over 51,000). On top of this there are around 7,000 gendarmie who you will see around at events or government sites, under the ministry of justice.

Australia has a little less per capita (27 million people, 65,000 officers 415:1) but also their defense forces have some domestic authorities that in the US might be law enforcement. Some forces are protesting because they want to hire more people, take that for what you want.

I wouldn't call this a drastic difference and in my anecdotal experience, as opposed to yours, the police are about as visible in all three places, maybe more so in Australian cities because they walk around in large groups wearing hi-vis.

Note that these are similar police presence rates despite probably higher crime in the US (I guess this would depend on offence). If you have higher crime, why wouldn't you have more police?

In contrast to what you say, crime clearance seems to be much higher in the Netherlands. The homicide clearance rate is around 80% compared to 50-65% in the US (depends on year). I believe clearance rates for burglary are also several times higher. So the laws are better enforced.

Colombia, since you brought it up, has a very similar police presence to all of the above. They should probably get more since they have 5x the murders of the US.

I do not really see the relevance of the attitude towards healthcare bill costs to this discussion. Your view of the US as extremely over policed compared to other societies seems misguided based on the data, and maybe driven by ideology since you bring up mostly irrelevant facts like hospital costs (these don't generally bankrupt the homeless in America because they usually don't pay anyway, since they have no money and just go to emergency room). The statistics I see on homelessness do not even indicate that America has a particular homelessness problem in comparison to the Netherlands, for example, in fact they are right next to one another on this list (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...) with Australia being higher. I am sure you can quibble about how the statistics here are collected or what it means.

My thesis is simple. I think Americans commit more crimes because they are more criminal and it is more normalised in society. I think we have all the laws we need, but a lot of inertia preventing us from enforcing them. I think this is particularly true in certain urban areas. I think deploying hundreds of national guardsmen in the capitol is an interesting experiment which stands some chance of changing this a bit, and that it comes as minimal cost to civil liberties of law abiding citizens. Maybe it will work or maybe not, but it doesn't seem outrageous for a city with 200 murders per year in the richest country on earth. I think a more criminal population requires more intensive policing than a less criminal one.

"Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access."

So have more police to enforce the laws? Why is there this belief that increasing police cannot do anything? Again, I bet this works and that DC has lower crime during the period the NG is there. It is empirical, let's see.

Why should I live in a more dangerous society than the Netherlands (which isn't "nordic")? Or Australia? I fit in those places fine. Why can't we have that at home? Why is this level of crime acceptable just because it is lower than 1980? What liberty do I give up by having some guardsmen standing around?

Is it really? It is not hard to go the hague and see gendarmerie. I see police all over Europe when I go. If they apply less force, it may be because the population is less criminal, or perhaps they get better people into their forces. I think Europeans have way more regulations that are enforced.

The claim that "more" won't change anything is empirical. Let's come back in a few months and see if DC is safer or not--I will admit if I was wrong.

Again, I think this is an interesting solution because it is actually less invasive than all the tech solutions to just have guys on the street who watch and maybe come up and talk to you and then forget about it. If you are just going about your day peacefully, are you going to lose anything here?

We seem to have gotten a surveillance state with cameras and sensors (and censors) everywhere that somehow doesn't police easily solvable/preventable crime. If I thought there was some big civil liberties tradeoff I might think differently, but it seems like we lost those while still having to buy our deodorant from behind locked cabinets and occasionally getting shot by some guy with ten priors.

The complaints and protests that this goes against civil liberties has just started to ring hollow because there are few visible serious efforts to protest the real abuses of civil liberties which mostly come from tech and the surveillance economy. Somehow the energy is directed against guys in uniform standing around making sure the street doesn't get turned into a drag race.

No, I think the answer is that is only different in that Americans in DC are more criminal. Both places have strict gun laws with licensing requirements. In both places you can get illegal guns, and these are the ones used in crime if a gun is used, otherwise it will be an illegal knife. However in the Netherlands the laws are followed and/or policed better. Maybe now in DC the laws will be enforced better too, and maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave. I predict that few people lose any liberty and that this experiment reduces certain crimes (like street murder, assaults, random robberies/muggings) a lot.

How is this different from the netherlands?

DC has incredibly strict gun laws. I doubt many of the weapons used in crimes are legal. I don't think you will be truly any less free having national guard soldiers walking around. Actually seems better than the usual dystopian tech solutions people come up with. Maybe they will try it for thirty days and people will like it.

DC seems to have more murders than the netherlands each year despite being 25 times smaller. I guess what one considers safe is very subjective.

If you have it and the enemy doesn't you almost certainly will win. If both of you have it, casualties probably go up.

The evidence this stuff is harming mental health is weak. We also shouldn't let academics with manipulative studies undermine freedom in society.

So the government is going to manage that better? It is funny there is a push to lower the voting age to 16 but also this push to keep adolescents away from information about the world until that age.

Australia didn't make this decision collectively, some politicians who read Haidt's book did.

how does it work?

It wasn't much like China at all in my opinion. China heavily directs its economy, subsidising industries and players it thinks are critical to compete. Their companies aren't simply "given room". The US had protectionist tariffs and gave land to railroads and stuff, but nothing like the kind of industrial policy in modern China. Nor did the US really stay out of wars, although Civil War aside it mostly avoided bad entanglements where it couldn't win or winning cost a lot.

If you don't want your kid using the internet then don't let them. No need to throw the whole society under the bus.

Until somewhat recently America had an advantage in commercialising the basic research. But now increasingly we fund some basic research to the tune of tens of millions of dollars only to see it commercialised overseas (often by China but by others too), often when technical know how is exfiltrated and patents ignored. This reduces the expected benefit of funding the research.

Science has been a big part of the US dominant lead but I think it is quite a stretch to say it is how America ascended. Historically it is better case that America ascended through industrial and commercial might which led to the victory in WW2 (in which the nuclear bomb was a small footnote in reality--much more important after).

The growth gains are how the funding produces an eventual return but this is increasingly globalised (i.e. there is not always a particular gain to Americans). Some company in Europe might be the one which wins the market, giving everyone lower prices but only the european taxpayer a special gain. There is a kind of tragedy of commons here. Science is probably advanced the most when there is a dominant industrial commercialising power which foots the bill?

I can understand disagreeing but it is funny that someone asked for a justification and then downvoted someone providing one, without even knowing if the person actually even endorses that line of thought. Liberalism truly is dead.

Sounds like Reddit

With a few hundred highly trained consultants spread through major markets and working directly with contractors with decent jobflow to train them, it could work.

The Harvard Crimson seems to have done a decent job in a couple articles. It seems some of the request is legal, and some is broad so they don't know what to do. They were probably waiting for this action to file a lawsuit, since now they can argue they complied.

Is there a good analysis of which demands are illegal? Is Harvard suing?

I sort of agree with you, but also don't buy into the victim narrative from Harvard, which has been happy to comply with illegal requests before and has clearly violated Civil Rights laws for years.

It is about grant money, not salaries.

It is weird that this is downvoted. No one else is close to making up the funding. And Harvard is just ignoring requests from DHS? They were warned for a month? If the Secretary of Homeland Security sends a letter requesting information, do you not have to comply?

Yeah for the kissing number stuff people can find slight improvements if they want. It usually isn't worth it because it provides no insight. But maybe when you generate a lot of them one or some family will turn out to be interesting.

Tons of people above are suggesting he was "disappeared" with no sources (and no real cases of this really happening otherwise, recent cases have all had paperwork). Seems fair to ask and suggest a more likely alternative.

I will take the other side of that bet.

What do they invest in?

What?