Some (not all) of US police are uniquely unqualified to deal with this.
You need to be able to show some compassion in this job and try to actually help people instead of just being a squad of gun wielding weirdos who show up to cart any suspicious people away, guns blazing.
In most other countries police has an active role in settling disputes using empathy and compassion, instead of just arresting people and locking them away.
The way US police tend to operate fits well within a justice system that is focused on draconic punishment instead of rehabilitation and reintegration though.
Some people need a guiding hand to find back into society. In the US you're liable to get kicked into the mud and danced upon instead.
> In most other countries police has an active role in settling disputes using empathy and compassion, instead of just arresting people and locking them away.
This sounds false to me outside of some Western European areas but I don’t have data to support it
But IIRC these central/eastern European countries don't have very high crime. I presume what GP meant is that one should also look at other places with comparable size crime problems.
I mean comparing Baltimore to (say) Prague is a bit like comparing it to Malibu, I'm not sure we learn much. But compare it to districts of Rio, for instance, and then maybe we can learn something about how different policing approaches play out.
Sadly I couldn't find the number of arrests made in any useful comparison, but US police have a policy of "taking people in" for almost any offense, so I'd expect it to roughly match that.
Can you explain what you see in this graph? I'm baffled, I don't know what "suspects" means, nor why Canada has 10x as many as Mexico. (Presumably the x-axis is police per million population, or similar.)
Violent crime was at extremely negligible levels in the fifties. In just 3-4 decades to the 90s it ended up increasing (per rate) by around 800%. That's a part of where the hyper-tough on crime laws came from, and it's also when you started seeing an increasing militarization of the police.
Violent crime then decreased by about 50% to 2014, though that still of course leaves us at a level multiple times higher than where we started. And it's now back on the rise. Here are the raw numbers [1]. They're quite interesting to consider.
Something I'm quite curious about on Hacker News, preempting the downvotes can people explain what they find offensive about data?
Eh. This might be a case of not really having good data.
Looking at the "data", one would conclude that Autism is on the rise. But we didn't even know what it was not too long ago. And we sure as hell didn't check for it. There are more diagnoses of Autism because we're actually looking now.
Today, domestic violence would be classified as a violent crime. In the fifties, it was called keeping your wife in line.
Lynching a black man was a way to keep him away from your pristine daughter in the fifties. Now. It's a crime.
I think this is a rather extreme mischaracterization of a society, but proving things like this statistically is not possible. Because, while it may be a mischaracterization, you are certainly correct that domestic violence was much more normalized (even if still extremely rare) and you likely would have seen a much lower reporting rate because of this. So that problem does cause an issue with getting down to the very exact number.
Fortunately, there's a much simpler response. Just referencing the data from the provided link (starting in the 60s) [1], the increase in crime is for literally every single category of crime. And most saw very dramatic increases: robbery 400%, assault 500%, burgularly 300%, theft 300%, auto theft 300% increase, etc. You can cast uncertainty on some of the figures but the extremely high rate increases paired with the fact it was spread across literally every single crime leaves little 0 doubt that there was absolutely an exponentially increasing crime rate between 1960 and 1991.
As one aside, that 1991 date is really quite peculiar. Nearly every single crime hit its peak in that year. You'd expect different crimes to decline at different rates or even statistical noise to have played a role. Yet at a glance the only crime that didn't hit its peak in 1991 was forcible rape, which peaked in 1992. The 'Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act' [2] formalizing the increasing militarization of police (which would really go into overdrive after the North Hollywood shootout) was passed in 1981.
I didn't downvote you. In the past I have referred to the same table that you link. But it doesn't substantiate your point about crime rates in the 1950s because the data set starts at 1960. You may be correct, but your link doesn't show it. I would be interested in US violent crime rates in the decades before 1960 if you can find a similar table covering that time range.
It's because you only hear about the bad things. Sure there are some crazy cops like everywhere else. But all in all I'm certain most cops are good people who just want to help citizens and remove the bad guys.
A friend of mine explained his viewpoint as... Sure, there's only a few bad apples doing horrible things. But then there's a LOT of cops, and their union, that help/stand up for those bad apples. If you're not taking a bribe, but you are actively looking away when your partner is; you're the bad guy. There's the well known blue wall of silence, and everyone that makes up that wall is part of the problem.
Defenders of police misconduct tend to cite the "it's just a few bad apples" line without noting the full adage is "a few bad apples spoils the barrel".
Ok, some are great, but when you see that the ‘bad guys’ in the police face no consequences for their actions, the police force looses respect in the eyes of the public. And that’s a normal reaction. But they can earn it back, though it seems, through their training and instructions, they quite often prefer intimidation over respect.
Call me when the Fraternal Order of Police stops defending bad cops that were found guilty in a court of law, declaiming the “injustice“ that took place.
These guys are supposed to uphold the law, instead they prop up murderers and accuse the justice department of railroading “innocent” cops. See “Police union blasts ‘sham trial and shameful’ Van Dyke guilty verdict” [0]
I'm not so sure: I think there's a cultural problem with American policing. I get the sense that US police expect immediate compliance with their Any failure to comply is met with escalation of force rather than with reason. This is the "Ask, Tell, Make" philosophy of policing.
Contrast this with the principles of policing by consent [0] that define the ideals (though not necessarily the reality) of policing in the UK and many other countries.
You obviously don't live in america then. Police are heavily trained to DE-escalate the situation. I know, I'm a person of color and the few times I've had to deal with the police, they were polite, courteous and professional.
The thing is is survivorship bias often shows in the media. most police encounters are not reported in the media because it's common and everyday. But the very few that turn into a big production get reported because it gets ratings. So through survivorship bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, the problem seems bigger than it actually is.
Are you a “person of color” or are you Black? How tall and big are you? I’m Black and 5 foot 5. No one sees me as a threat. My step son is s big guy who immediately is seen as threat until he starts talking - he’s lived in the burbs all of his life.
To paraphrase Chris Rock, some jobs can’t have bad apples. No one would accept it if the Delta CEO said “most of our pilots are good people, some just like to fly into mountains every now and then.”
But you're going to hear a lot about "a few bad apples spoil the barrel" as if it's okay to talk about people like disposable fruit. Think for a moment, would those people be okay with letting the police use that reasoning?
I would agree that most US police are not qualified to deal with the issues of trust. Part of that is that they don't have the training, part of that is that there are centuries of bad history in the way of it, and part of it is that for police to do this in a better way would require a lot more police per 1,000 citizens, which is hard to get political support for.
I'm not sure that it's true that "most other countries" police work the way you're saying. There's a good book on the problems of policing world-wide, " The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence
by Gary A. Haugen,Victor Boutros".
Scandinavian countries in particular tend to do better in encouraging rehab and reintegration. Part of it is definitely related to cost, those countries tend to have stronger funding for their prison/reform systems.
Draconic punishment is not ideal especially because criminals return to society with less prospects and are likely to turn to crime once again. That is if they return at all.
I think it's a vicious cycle. Many countries with less "crime" require less police, therefore they can be more selective about the people they hire and spend more money to train them. In the US, policing and prison are huge industries, and at a certain point there are not enough qualified individuals to go around.
Now imagine the TSA and Border patrol and many other government security institutions. So many cast offs.
There aren’t enough qualified candidates because they literally are not interested in hiring people that can think for themselves rather than blindly follow orders and protocol. I know how petty this statement sounds, and you’re probably thinking “ok there, someone has an axe to grind or needs to learn some nuance,” but read this news article about what (legally!) disqualifies a candidate from being hired as an officer:
Another point is the kind of work police has to deal with. In a low crime country police almost never has to deal with criminals with weapons or guns, so they never have to fear for their lives. This means that people who don't like violence don't mind joining the police. However in USA where police have to engage in lots of violence just to do their job the people who want to join the police are very different.
The small numbers of African-origin minorities in Scandinavian countries commit more crime per capita than those in the United States. (The same is also true internally within the Unites States when differentiating between northern and southern states). I'm afraid that Scandinavian models haven't solved the minority crime problem, but only make it worse. Sometimes far worse, as in Oslo, etc.
> It doesn't take much effort to find articles claiming to have the 'truth' about the relationship between immigrants or refugees and Swedish crime. Yet the real truth is that there is no up-to-date public data on the ethnic background of criminals in the country, with existing figures more than a decade old.
Do you have reputable citations for Oslo/Norway crime by ethnic background that demonstrate what you assert? Norway says overall rates are down, which would be weird if the influx of refugees was increasing crime: https://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/crime-rates-decrease-norw...
So why did Sweden stop reporting numbers on minority crime? And why have they taken down their "most wanted" list from the internet?
There was an SVT (Swedish public broacasting) report on rape convictions in 2018 by national background, you'll find. The BBC has good coverage of it in English.
As far as the Norway question, you do realize that minorities are a very small part of Norwegian population, and it would be sort of bizarre (and racist!) to imagine them driving overall crime?
Last time Sweden released an official study they were very over-represented. The numbers for the following groups are the rate compared to natives, 1 means that they would commit the same amount of crime as Swedes:
Västasien (West Asia) 3.7
Nordafrika (North Africa) 4.6
Östafrika (East Africa) 3.5
Övriga Afrika (Rest of Africa) 5.2
(The numbers written in the study had native swedes at 0.8 so I multiplied these numbers by 1.25 to normalize it)
Nothing since then has shown that the rates have changed, so you can assume that they are still valid. Everybody knows that these groups are over-represented and that accepting immigrants increases crime, that isn't really a part of the debate. You can argue why they are over-represented, such as poverty and discrimination, but not that there are more criminals among them.
Anyhow, wrt America, even the worst right wing propaganda doesn't show our African immigrants committing as much crime as African Americans, so the Swedish model seems to work at least somewhat.
>>>The way US police tend to operate fits well within a justice system that is focused on draconic punishment instead of rehabilitation and reintegration though.
US law enforcement agencies have conducted joint training with Israeli experts for decades. So it should be no surprise that our police forces have taken on a callous "siege mentality".[1]
> Cooperating with law enforcement is often morally and practically unthinkable for the city’s most vulnerable
The article has a really big blind spot, in that it fails to mention the Drug War even a single time.
If you want to understand why America's police act like an occupying army- the militarization of weapons and approaches, the festering hostility between the police and the policed, the heavy-handed suspicion and disregard for those under their protection- then you have to start with the Drug War.
Policing against victimless crimes is fundamentally a different endeavor than policing against normal violent or property crime. In a rape, assault, or robbery there's a clear victim to come forward. Crime gets reported, police investigate, criminal gets arrested, community improves from having a violent psychopath off the streets. It's a simple formula, everybody's happy.
But when you're trying to police the crimes of drugs or prostitution or illegal lemonade stands, there is no aggrieved party. Just two or more people engaged in a mutually voluntary transaction. Hence there's no way to stop this activity besides butting into people's lives, violating their privacy, kicking down doors, and harassing random people on the street. You're no longer hauling away lunatics that hurt people. You're arresting mothers, sons, and boyfriends who are just trying to make a living.
If you want the police to be respected and valued by the communities that they police, then focus on restricting their activities mainly to victim-centric crimes. The resolution of which provides tangible value to the policed. Adopt a Portuguese-Style approach to drug policy, where usage and low-level dealing of drugs is decriminalized and treated as a health rather than criminal issue.
Parts of it go back to Prohibition too. The original push to get police into cars was partially just to let them cover more ground. But part of it was that cars would separate them from the neighborhoods they covered a bit and prevent them from absorbing local mores about what sorts of activities were harmless instead of what the law said.
What you're saying is true but only in a society where you simply allow all drugs. Ideologically I am of this inclining since I don't think the government has a right to determine what people should or should not be able to put in their own body, but at the same time I also think this is a path that is detrimental for society. A few factors you don't hit on:
- many drugs are addictive and this can lead to addicts turning to crime to try to fuel their addiction. yes we could offer more public support for such things, but these tend to be lifestyle choices that people revert to over and over.
- some drugs themselves can have a strong connection with abnormally violent and dangerous behavior - for instance, PCP.
- other drugs can have potentially extreme side effects even with minimal usage. olney's lesions / brain lesions are but one example. of course the same is true of e.g. alcohol, but the quantities involved are quite different.
- any drug that is illegal will result in a black market. this black market tends to trend towards violence. there is potentially big money to be made in drugs and criminal enterprises tend to attract criminals who don't just constrain their violation to their product.
It always felt weird to me that most of the rationale for policing drug use is based on preventing the crimes a user might commit while on drugs, rather than just the prosecuting the crimes they actually do commit while on drugs.
"You can't do heroin because you'll get addicted and might steal in order to fuel your addiction."
"But I haven't actually stolen anything yet, so what crime has been committed?"
Are there any other cases of a victim-less activity where we preemptively arrest/prosecute people because that activity might lead to crime someday?
Threatening the public is not victimless. Not sure where folks are coming up with that. I can fire a gun at a crowd, and if it doesn't hit anybody, its 'victimless'. Not a crime?
so lets follow that logic... you are driving a car down the street and because you could screw up and hit me you are attempting murder and should be charged ?
You are so far into the wrong here its sad... not only sad but the fact you cant see it is scary for the future of this nation
Legality (must be a law) ...
Actus reus (Human conduct) ...
Causation (human conduct must cause harm) ...
Harm (to some other/thing) ...
Concurrence (State of Mind and Human Conduct) ...
Mens Rea (State of Mind; "guilty mind") ...
Punishment.
Speeding and attractive nuisances are only victimless if you squint, as they both pretty clearly are statistically harmful to others (not when I speed a bunch of people feel the need to say I'm sure).
Public intoxication less so, but it is also mostly used as a pretext to remove people from public spaces in cases where it is obvious they shouldn't be there.
Speeding is also mostly treated as a minor infraction, not quite a crime. Sure, if you really do it good, you can get detained for an extended period of time, but you really have to do it good to end up in that situation.
The reason people get mostly minor monetary fines for speeding is because we as a society really don't care if people violate the statute so long as they're not being unreasonable about it and it's mostly used as a revenue/probably cause/fishing tool. Ditto for public drunkedness, don't be an ass and it's not a problem.
Speeding, public intoxication, etc. in the typical cases don't have victims because we as a society have decided that we are not victimized by small increase in risk of a negative outcome.
However, writing statues that we expect to be violated and then leaving it up to the cops' discretion is not exactly a recipe for the fairest outcome.
Attractive nuisance is a tort, not a crime. No one gets arrested for it, they get sued if someone gets injured.
Speeding is arguably not victimless. Someone pointed out the "shooting into a crowd without hitting anyone" analogy, which is apt. You're engaging in immediately threatening and dangerous behavior.
Public intoxication is also not victimless; that's the "disorderly" part of "drunk and disorderly" (whether it gets enforced correctly/equally is a different discussion.) This is actually a great example of my point: you can get as drunk as you want, and no one will care until you start disturbing the peace, being belligerent, damaging property, urinating in public spaces, etc. If you're drunk and sitting in a bar quietly, it's not a problem. We don't arrest you because you might drive drunk later, we wait until you actually drive drunk. We treat other drugs completely differently.
"Shooting into a crowd" is an intentionally reductionist comparison meant to remove nuance so the reader reaches a specific conclusion. The fact of the matter is that we (we = society) do not condone any level of shooting into a crowd whereas we find certain situation specific levels of drunkenness and speeding perfectly fine. Speeding, public intoxication, etc. in the typical cases don't have victims because we as a society have decided that we are not victimized by small increase in risk of a negative outcome. However, there is some situation dependent hard to pin down threshold where we decide society is victimized and basically everyone agrees the crime is worth prosecuting.
It was meant to make clear the 'increased risk to the public' issue, which was apparently received loud and clear.
I think you made all the rest up. "We as a society" I read as very subjective. I for instance don't regard risky public behavior as victimless. Am I not part of your society?
It's almost certain that the decriminalization or legalization of all drugs would be a massive boon for society.
As practical examples such as Portugal show, it generally leads to a significant drop in both drug use and the detrimental factors associated with it. More police time and money can be spent on real crimes, and jails are free from many non violent offenders.
The last last point is a particularly significant benefit for the USA as the justice system has such an irrational focus on punishment over rehabilitation, so most prisons serve more as criminal training camps.
The militarization of the police has come primarily from the militarization of criminals. Before the Valentine's Day Massacres, criminals had better cars and weapons than the police, allowing them to fight and win against the police. Prior to the LA shooting spree, police had no way to fight a criminal armed with assault weapons and no training on how to do so without endangering the public. When I lived in St. Louis, once the riots started to happen the police got tanks and other military equipment from out of state and then never let go of them (massive over-reaction to protestors that were not anywhere near as rough as you saw on TV, but that's what happened).
I think you're right that the drug war was a factor, but I think you're wrong in why it was a factor. It's not some arbitrary distinction between what you deem to be a "victimless" crime, as if there was never such a thing in the 1700s and 1800s. The reason is that it's an arms race. The police always want to be better equipped and trained at dealing with a situation than they people they're up against. If it's unarmed protestors, they want organized formations and tear gas. If it's a drug cartel with assault weapons, the police want tanks and helicopters.
So if I have this straight in St Louis when the people are protesting against police brutality, the polices solution is to be more brutal? No kidding it’s an arms race.
I’ll even bet they are using kettling to invoke a reaction from protestors. They aren’t passively responding to protestors, they are active antagonizing the public to justify their brutality.
Criminalizing victimless behavior prevents enforcement of violent/property crime too. Would a prostitute report being raped by a john? Maybe, but it seems unlikely when they have to worry about getting thrown in the system themselves.
I'm going to quote a previous comment of mine here, because I think your rhetoric is shallow:
>Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc.
> But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.
I am not saying that. I'm saying that considering the government to act only violently is a gross mischaracterization of reality such that even if you define things such that it is technically true, it is not a useful position to take.
My government has never forced me to do anything with a threat of violence -- I have been threatened with different manners of obvious inconvenience, but if that is no more acceptable to you than an actual threat of violence, then I'm afraid that is an unproductive, reductive, and uncompromising opinion.
So taxes are purely voluntary in your country? Must be nice!
EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING a government "asks" of you comes with the implicit threat of violence for those who do not comply. There is only one tool in the box.
I agree with this line of reasoning as well. Drug trafficking is punishable by death in Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. Other East Asian countries _highly_ criminalize drugs and have significantly lower crime rates along with significantly higher rates of police reporting.
The US is a violent place even without guns. The murder rates for non-gun violence are still astronomical compared to other developed countries. It's likely always been violent place, so how does that change?
That is highly misleading. If you look at the overall per capita rates of violent death since 1776 it's clear that on average Europeans are far more violent than Americans. Limiting the count of deaths to just those that meet the legal definition of "murder" is disingenuous.
Now just hold on a second. Show your work, please. I don't think of the US overall as having much violence. I face nearly no risk of home invasion, mugging, or anything, really, and that is true for the vast majority of Americans.
Let's be honest: US murder rates are high because of one particular demographic of people involved in particular criminal enterprises. Drug war or no, that is the reality. There are neighborhoods in the nearby cities I don't go near because of the possibility of becoming involved in a violent encounter, probably only due to my being white in a non-white area. Meanwhile, I can go pretty much anywhere else in the US and never have a concern. Why is that?
Mass shootings? Please. They are vanishingly low on the probability of dying chart. I worry more about crossing the street. Those are sad events. So are car crashes, plane crashes, E Coli outbreaks, cancer, heart disease, etc.
The worst thing is how "gun violence" is counted separately and those figures includes things like suicides and police shootings of people in the act of committing felony crimes. Those statistics are ginned to the max in order to mislead the public in support of additional civil disarmament. The implications of that are speculative, but I would say it is so that the next round of subjugation and abuse of the public can take place under the color of law without the threat of push back to those doing the pushing.
If you look at violent crimes in European countries, there is more of it there but they only report crimes once the case has been cleared. No conclusion=no crime mentioned. It is a gigantic lie. If European nations are so safe, how come the cops are nearly always paired with soldiers armed with rifles? You see this everywhere across Europe, in fact. In all those gun-free paradises over there, what threat is on their minds? Or is that just a big show to keep the public in fear?
As I have noted, if you aren't involved in criminal activities, your chances of being acted upon violently in the US are very low.
I'm pretty sure that the number of guns really doesn't help. If I were a police officer, I would be much more nervous in the US than most of Europe (to make an example).
I never understood why either. For some reason American music tastes (hip-hop) often glorify greed, crime, and lawnessness and our culture does relatively little to call this behavior out. It's actually NORMAL in american culture to be blase about music that is openly violent, racist, and sexist. It really is indicative of a sick society. Most people that I approach the subject about is "yeah, so what?"
>Crime gets reported, police investigate, criminal gets arrested, community improves from having a violent psychopath off the streets. It's a simple formula, everybody's happy
Wrong, even in simple assault cases it's possible for the victim to be charged with the assault if the person committing assault goes to the court house first and files charges. This blocks the ability of the victim to file charges and allows police to pursue them as the criminal.
Is this not universal in US? If police on scene don't file charges or arrest anyone, it's a "race to the court house" with the first person to file having priority.
Not only is it "not universal", it's vanishingly uncommon.
A small handful of states permit "private prosecution" of crimes, with very significant limitations. It certainly can't be used to shut down the victim in the fashion you describe.
Yea INAL, but the race to the court house was the way a lawyer explained it to me. This is in fact how it works in TN. It's not a private prosecution, it's public.
"This is because without a weapon or serious injury the only crime would that could be charged is second degree assault which is a misdemeanor in Maryland. The police can only arrest in misdemeanor cases if they actually witness the events. Otherwise, the police are supposed to simply write a report and advise the combatants as to the procedures for filing charges against one another. "
Re: here because out of reply subthreads:
I'm not mixing the two up. I called the police after having my jaw broken in a one sided assault and filed a report. The assailant went to the court house and filed charges officially and one week later I was charged with assault. This was leveraged by the public prosecutor to prevent me from filing civil and criminal charges against the assailant as terms for myself not being prosecuted or subject to a trial by jury. The only people who seem to be aware of this situation are lawyers and law-savvy repeated violent offenders who use it to escape prosecution.
> In most counties prosecutors review the charges before they are formally filed.
I can't find any indication TN permits these sorts of private prosecutions.
I suspect you're mixing up filing charges with making a complaint or police report. Being the first to reach out to police/prosecutors may count in your favor (credibility-wise, not on a raw legal level) as the alleged assailant filing their own complaint afterwards looks more like retaliation for fairly obvious reasons.
Internationally, countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income. I think if you want to talk about The Drug War in the US, you need to talk about institutional racism and its roots in a history of slavery. There are myriad ways in which the African American community has been victimized in the US and it's all interrelated. You can't really isolate "this one thing."
>> ... countries that export illicit drugs are countries that have a shortage of legal exports and desperately need a cash income.
I don't think China lacks export opportunities, yet is the source of most all of the worlds fentanyl-type drugs. Up until a couple years ago Canada was a huge source of pot for the US. Canada has a thriving export market. Mexico too.
I'm curious about this link between racism and drugs. When I was growing up in Italy, during the 80s, drugs were a pretty big issue, and we had our own "war on drugs", but at the time there were basically no black people here, so it couldn't be linked to race.
A tldr for the US would be that we tend to arrest poor people and people of color more and punish them more than we do well-heeled white people. On average, blacks in the US are a lot poorer than whites, so they get subjected to that twice over.
It doesn't necessarily mean they do more drugs than whites. It just means that "the war on drugs" is often just one more justification for a long history of coming up with excuses to throw blacks in jail and generally crap on their lives.
The US has a talent for either framing rules in a way that causes trouble for people of color or interpreting behavior by people of color differently than the same behavior by a white person.
I get it, but I would be cautious in making it look like the war on drug was created just/mostly because of racism, because something very similar happened even in countries where that wasn't a reason.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
>> If you want to understand why America's police act like an occupying army... then you have to start with the Drug War.
Go back much further than that. Go back to the civil rights movement. Go back to jim crow. The history of the American war on drugs was born of racism and continues its birthright. That is the real sticking point, the source of the high emotions surrounding drugs. The drug war is a proxy for much more difficult issues.
There was definitely racism in the passing and enforcing of these laws.
There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help. When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score, she's going to ask the her elected representatives for help.
Intent absolutely matters - think murder vs. involuntary manslaughter, or even first degree versus second degree murder. A lot of legal definitions of crimes even include the statement "with intent to..." - "drug possession with intent to distribute" is a good example.
It's also completely besides the point here, as we're discussing the statement:
> There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help.
arguing that these sorts of drug-related crimes motivated some communities to embrace "hard on crime" attitudes.
That latter paragraph sounds a lot like the things people say when they want to deny racism was part of the war on drugs.
What often gets missed is that high up members of the Republican party are on record as intentionally escalating the war on drugs to attack their enemies (black people and anti war hippies amongst others).
So if they thought that the war on drugs wasn't a "problem" but rather an opportunity, then they have no incentive to "solve" the problem, in fact quite the opposite. Any consequences that then follow from drug related crime must ultimately fall at their door, not the person they've led into addiction by policy.
As a concrete example, Bush Sr.'s famous speech on crack involved begging a drug dealer to come to Pennsylvania Avenue so they could include that fact in it.
> But obtaining the crack was no easy feat. To match the words crafted by the speech-writers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents lured a suspected District drug dealer to Lafayette Park four days before the speech so they could make what appears to have been the agency's first undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity, according to officials familiar with the case.
> In fact, when first contacted by an undercover DEA agent posing as a drug buyer, the teenage suspect seemed baffled by the agent's request.
> "Where the {expletive} is the White House?" he replied in a conversation that was secretly tape-recorded by the DEA.
> "We had to manipulate him to get him down there," said William McMullan, assistant special agent in charge of DEA's Washington field office. "It wasn't easy."
"Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."
"In 2013, the ACLU published a report titled "The War on Marijuana in Black and White". The report found that despite marijuana use being roughly equal between blacks and whites, blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."
> "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows and look at a white woman twice."
This one is the original marihuana legislation, predating Nixon's war on drugs, right?
> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."
When was this originally published? I keep seeing it in a 2016 magazine, which is a bit odd given how groundbreaking a revelation it is. Especially considering the quote was collected 22 years prior, and the man died 17 years prior. Was this around and just not well known at the time?
> "In 2013, the ACLU published a report titled "The War on Marijuana in Black and White". The report found that despite marijuana use being roughly equal between blacks and whites, blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."
Adverse impact, problematic enough, does not imply something was made with racist intent.
> Adverse impact, problematic enough, does not imply something was made with racist intent.
It shows that the intent continues to be racist. This disparity is ongoing, not historical; if it's truly not racist, why not bring the amount of possession charges in line with usage?
> It shows that the intent continues to be racist.
It shows the impact, not the intent, continues to be racist. It doesn't really say anything about intent, at least without a lot more data. If white and black usage differ in kind somehow - say, pot brownies vs smoking on the street (I have no idea if there is a racial disparity here) - it could lead to a difference in police involvement without any racial discrimination.
indeed, and as another poster pointed out, it could also be because police monitor high crime areas more strictly, and so the arrests related to marijuana tends to reflect that fact.
Incidental arrests arise from higher police presence in minority’s neighborhoods due to higher instances of major crime in those neighborhoods.
If I go fishing for redfish I’m going to end up catching a lot more saltwater fish incidentally. Doesn’t mean I hate freshwater fish, that just means in not fishing in an area where I’m going to find many freshwater fish.
> The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
There are reasons to be skeptical of this alleged quote by Ehrlichman.
As user GatorD42 pointed out when this was brought up before:
>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).
This is an amazing and explosive quote - if Baum had included it in his book in 1996 I am sure it would have garnered a great deal of attention. Instead Baum would not include it in his book, but instead would wait for decades later when Ehrlichman was no longer around to dispute it.
At any rate, if the quote was actually said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:
>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
You are deeply incorrect.
The drug war is an explicit war on non-whites; the drug war disproportionately effects POC more than any other factor by an enormous amount.
This is not correct. Just look at marijuana: people stoked racist fears in order to make it illegal, and today four times as many black people as white people are arrested for possession, even though usage is roughly equal. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marijuana-prohibition-racist_...
I agree. "Born out of racism" is too strong. I'm not even sure what it means exactly. Was racism rampant at the time? Yes. But the war on drugs still would've happened if there was no racism.
Those rugurgitated figures on black vs white drug use vs convictions misses the boat. Go to any city and recognize the color of people that control the drug market. The majority of them are not white. The police don't focus on users, they focus on dealers-- that's where the violent crime is. If you don't want to buy drugs in the city, go to a jamband show. A microcosm of this phenomenon is the nitrous scene. Who makes up the nitrous mafia? Black dudes in black hoodies. They sell to nearly all-white hippies. If you try to sell nitrous(compete with the mafia) you will be beaten up or killed. The nitrous mess is a blight on the otherwise positive, peaceful music scene. If you were to try to stop it, who would you go after? The peaceful users who are in actuality the root of the problem, or the violent dealers?
> Go to any city and recognize the color of people that control the drug market. The majority of them are not white. The police don't focus on users, they focus on dealers-- that's where the violent crime is.
Even with simple possession charges, police are looking to bust dealers(or at least players in the game), not users. With players you can make deals and move up the chain, users are a dead end. The disparity in charges of possession doesn't necessarily signify racism to me.
The early days of the drug war, the ban on pot, was very much a racial thing. There were "scientific" studies and political speeches focusing on how dangerous it would make the negro population, how black men high on pot would be raping white women. Generations later, the crackdown on crack cocaine, as opposed to the more expensive normal cocaine, also broke down along racial lines. The drug wars in other countries, those without America's racial history, have been very different. What makes the US drug war what it is, as opposed to say Canada's or the UK's, is its grounding in America's 'unique' race relations.
Ah yes, the United States force countries to criminalize drugs as a part of its racist master plan to keep down the black man.
(I wonder what the Chinese think of your claim that the pressures of western colonialism is why drugs are illegal? Thank goodness the British forced China to criminalize opium...)
As an immigrant, I entirely disagree with that. I believe it's not a specific city or "war on drugs" problem.
As it was clear in the my own country (xUSSR), the criminals are developing their code, where "snitches get stiches" and any cooperation with law enforcement is forbidden by it (e.g. in a prison so called "thief in laws" won't to do any work).
The drugs, especially hard drugs and prostitution are not victimless crimes. Human traffiking is a problem, the impact of drug addicts who is looking for new dose is real.
Citizens shooting each other is conflict resolution, which only becomes a police issue when people know no other resolution than violence. By the time conflict reaches the police, it's escalated to where third parties like the police can only clean up after.
If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, teaching social and emotional skills to children would help a lot, though would take a generation to see widespread results. Our schools not only don't teach social and emotional skills, they teach submission to authoritarian rule and remove what could teach social and emotional skills: recess, free play, the arts (doing them not history or appreciation). Schools are among the most authoritarian institutions. (I recommend Peter Gray's Freedom to Learn blog https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn, especially
Children’s Freedom: A Human Rights Perspective: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201902...).
Schools could help a lot, specifically, teaching skills through experience, not abstract facts to fill out bubbles on standardized tests.
You might also be interested in my books, which teach the social and emotional skills of leadership, initiative, and entrepreneurship, based on courses I teach at NYU.
One of my past students used the Initiative skills to teach the Leadership material to youths in Gaza https://leadpalestine.com. Every situation is unique and it's just one project, but his project shows promise of teaching youths before they get caught up in violence. He tells me that the program helps change views of leadership from command-and-control, authoritarian to based in understanding and support, though I'm oversimplifying. I'm just sharing one example.
I'm a white male, near 1% income and I live in a small town about 30 miles outside a major U.S. city and I'm terrified of the police.
We've stopped holding the police accountable for their actions and it's out of control. Local government, state government, prosecutors and most of all the Unions are to blame. Yeah, the Union, I'm the son of a Union executive and Unions have lost their way.
The Union is supposed to protect the possibility of a loss of a job position, the individual from unacceptable working conditions and unjustified sanctions, but they should also be holding the individual up the standards of conduct, but that's been lost. The union should be wanting to oust a bad cop, the position won't go away, so there is no loss of a job position, but if the individual isn't living up the the standards of behavior it reflects badly on the rest of the organization, and harms their strength. I watched my father walk union members off jobs because of poor performance, and after repeated failures throw them out of the union.
The unions themselves have become a very dangerous criminal gang, they carry weapons, they control people's lives, and they basically have no accountability. The populace is afraid, the politicians are afraid, and the legal system is afraid. The police have become paramilitary goon squads with their own agenda.
A friend's uncle just retired from a southern police force, while he was working he was pulled over 10's of times for DUI and was never charged because he's a cop. Now that he's retired he's drunk all the time and is constantly getting pulled over and driven home, but he's never been charged. He's only had a few minor accidents that got covered up because the police threatened the other driver. He'll keep doing this until he actually kills someone, then it will be interesting to see if anything happens.
Until the police are held accountable the problem is going to keep getting worse. Career criminals who are victims aren't the only people at risk, we are all at risk.
The "unarmed black man shot and killed by police" is heavily pushed by media companies because, well, its an emotional issue that gets ratings, sells newspapers, and gets clicks. Same thing with "terrorist threats", shark bites, and airline crashes. People view it because it's dramatic and it sticks in your head more because of it.
This bias is called "availability bias" and it causes people to see the problem as much greater than it actually is.
The reality of the availability bias isn't in question, it's whether or not people's belief about police brutality is accurate and if not, why it isn't. Sure, the AB is real. It MAY be a factor in why people think black people are killed in proportionally higher numbers than people of other races, but what's relevant is whether or not it's actually happening.
I didn't know this, so I concede, somewhat. But my broader point remains. Availability bias makes the problem seem much much larger than it actually is.
The issue isn't just being killed by police - It's also being beaten by police, having things unlawfully seized by police, being unjustly cited or arrested by police, and so on. So yeah, being unjustly arrested and spending a weekend in jail waiting to be arraigned on Monday is better than being killed, but it still sucks.
One inaccuracy in the article refers to the Freddy Gray case in Baltimore. It refers to "Police opposed the prosecutions, and many began to do their jobs passively in protest." Police were ordered to stand down. From.the.mayor's.office.
Also, the culture there is still very much not to snitch. Most victims there know their killers. Many are killed in view of witnesses, and others know exactly who killed who. But they wont talk about it. They fear and distrust each other and the police.
Baltimore is its own kind of nuts. Where every man has to be for themself. You have the gangs looking for you, you have the police looking for you, and then you have the corrupt police working for gangs looking for you. The safest thing you can do is keep your mouth shut. Whatever you say is eventually going to find it’s way back to someone who wants to hurt you.
I blame this on the war on drugs. The risk and reward from the drug trade has gotten so high that a human life isn’t worth much. Distributing pays well. Getting a life sentence from being caught is the risk. So, in a dealers mind, taking life to prevent theirs from being taken is justified.
It is not always brought up, but the anabolic steroid epidemic among police is having the dual corrosive effect of increasing individual aggression and reducing respect for the law among police officers.
It's not only the steroids themselves messing with your brain, it's also the fact that you work out in a shady gym and buy them from your dealer gym buddy.
Arlington has recruitment trouble, like so many other police forces around the country. Normal people don't want to join the steroid-addled gang, that leaves only highschool bullies who don't mind the low pay and love hassling the public.
Because the administration of police/defensive-forces is monopolized by the state, citizens don't have the option to hire alternative service providers that might meet their needs better[1]. Similar to a municipality selling a monopoly of ISP rights to a ISP megacorp (read Comcast, Time-Warner), the resulting lack of competitive forces degrades the service. Like most municipal-granted monopolies, the only way a citizen can get choice in those services (public schools, police, road administration) is to be wealthy enough to move, if not you're a serf.
[1] People often confuse:
1. State-monopolized administration of 'public' services.
2. Mandated spending (supplied through tax) with private administration. (This is the model Sweden uses[2])
“The department seems to be assigning some blame to the victims rather than assessing its own inability to bring the violence under control.”
How do you do any kind of fair analysis without just presenting data? If the cops used inflammatory language, then shame on them. But if it was just numbers, it's hard to argue against clean data.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadYou need to be able to show some compassion in this job and try to actually help people instead of just being a squad of gun wielding weirdos who show up to cart any suspicious people away, guns blazing.
In most other countries police has an active role in settling disputes using empathy and compassion, instead of just arresting people and locking them away.
The way US police tend to operate fits well within a justice system that is focused on draconic punishment instead of rehabilitation and reintegration though.
Some people need a guiding hand to find back into society. In the US you're liable to get kicked into the mud and danced upon instead.
This sounds false to me outside of some Western European areas but I don’t have data to support it
I mean comparing Baltimore to (say) Prague is a bit like comparing it to Malibu, I'm not sure we learn much. But compare it to districts of Rio, for instance, and then maybe we can learn something about how different policing approaches play out.
https://i.ibb.co/gMtDhgQ/b.png
Full PDF: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Crime-stat...
Sadly I couldn't find the number of arrests made in any useful comparison, but US police have a policy of "taking people in" for almost any offense, so I'd expect it to roughly match that.
In places where the police have an active role in settling disputes, they also enjoy more respect from the community.
Violent crime then decreased by about 50% to 2014, though that still of course leaves us at a level multiple times higher than where we started. And it's now back on the rise. Here are the raw numbers [1]. They're quite interesting to consider.
Something I'm quite curious about on Hacker News, preempting the downvotes can people explain what they find offensive about data?
[1] - http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Looking at the "data", one would conclude that Autism is on the rise. But we didn't even know what it was not too long ago. And we sure as hell didn't check for it. There are more diagnoses of Autism because we're actually looking now.
Today, domestic violence would be classified as a violent crime. In the fifties, it was called keeping your wife in line.
Lynching a black man was a way to keep him away from your pristine daughter in the fifties. Now. It's a crime.
Fortunately, there's a much simpler response. Just referencing the data from the provided link (starting in the 60s) [1], the increase in crime is for literally every single category of crime. And most saw very dramatic increases: robbery 400%, assault 500%, burgularly 300%, theft 300%, auto theft 300% increase, etc. You can cast uncertainty on some of the figures but the extremely high rate increases paired with the fact it was spread across literally every single crime leaves little 0 doubt that there was absolutely an exponentially increasing crime rate between 1960 and 1991.
As one aside, that 1991 date is really quite peculiar. Nearly every single crime hit its peak in that year. You'd expect different crimes to decline at different rates or even statistical noise to have played a role. Yet at a glance the only crime that didn't hit its peak in 1991 was forcible rape, which peaked in 1992. The 'Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act' [2] formalizing the increasing militarization of police (which would really go into overdrive after the North Hollywood shootout) was passed in 1981.
[1] - http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Cooperation_with_Civi...
Defenders of police misconduct tend to cite the "it's just a few bad apples" line without noting the full adage is "a few bad apples spoils the barrel".
These guys are supposed to uphold the law, instead they prop up murderers and accuse the justice department of railroading “innocent” cops. See “Police union blasts ‘sham trial and shameful’ Van Dyke guilty verdict” [0]
0: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2018/10/5/18460941/police-union...
Contrast this with the principles of policing by consent [0] that define the ideals (though not necessarily the reality) of policing in the UK and many other countries.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
The thing is is survivorship bias often shows in the media. most police encounters are not reported in the media because it's common and everyday. But the very few that turn into a big production get reported because it gets ratings. So through survivorship bias, confirmation bias, and availability bias, the problem seems bigger than it actually is.
I'm not sure that it's true that "most other countries" police work the way you're saying. There's a good book on the problems of policing world-wide, " The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence by Gary A. Haugen,Victor Boutros".
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1733234333
Draconic punishment is not ideal especially because criminals return to society with less prospects and are likely to turn to crime once again. That is if they return at all.
Now imagine the TSA and Border patrol and many other government security institutions. So many cast offs.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
> It doesn't take much effort to find articles claiming to have the 'truth' about the relationship between immigrants or refugees and Swedish crime. Yet the real truth is that there is no up-to-date public data on the ethnic background of criminals in the country, with existing figures more than a decade old.
Do you have reputable citations for Oslo/Norway crime by ethnic background that demonstrate what you assert? Norway says overall rates are down, which would be weird if the influx of refugees was increasing crime: https://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/crime-rates-decrease-norw...
There was an SVT (Swedish public broacasting) report on rape convictions in 2018 by national background, you'll find. The BBC has good coverage of it in English.
As far as the Norway question, you do realize that minorities are a very small part of Norwegian population, and it would be sort of bizarre (and racist!) to imagine them driving overall crime?
Västasien (West Asia) 3.7
Nordafrika (North Africa) 4.6
Östafrika (East Africa) 3.5
Övriga Afrika (Rest of Africa) 5.2
(The numbers written in the study had native swedes at 0.8 so I multiplied these numbers by 1.25 to normalize it)
https://www.bra.se/download/18.cba82f7130f475a2f1800012697/2...
Nothing since then has shown that the rates have changed, so you can assume that they are still valid. Everybody knows that these groups are over-represented and that accepting immigrants increases crime, that isn't really a part of the debate. You can argue why they are over-represented, such as poverty and discrimination, but not that there are more criminals among them.
Anyhow, wrt America, even the worst right wing propaganda doesn't show our African immigrants committing as much crime as African Americans, so the Swedish model seems to work at least somewhat.
US law enforcement agencies have conducted joint training with Israeli experts for decades. So it should be no surprise that our police forces have taken on a callous "siege mentality".[1]
[1]https://theintercept.com/2017/09/15/police-israel-cops-train...
The article has a really big blind spot, in that it fails to mention the Drug War even a single time.
If you want to understand why America's police act like an occupying army- the militarization of weapons and approaches, the festering hostility between the police and the policed, the heavy-handed suspicion and disregard for those under their protection- then you have to start with the Drug War.
Policing against victimless crimes is fundamentally a different endeavor than policing against normal violent or property crime. In a rape, assault, or robbery there's a clear victim to come forward. Crime gets reported, police investigate, criminal gets arrested, community improves from having a violent psychopath off the streets. It's a simple formula, everybody's happy.
But when you're trying to police the crimes of drugs or prostitution or illegal lemonade stands, there is no aggrieved party. Just two or more people engaged in a mutually voluntary transaction. Hence there's no way to stop this activity besides butting into people's lives, violating their privacy, kicking down doors, and harassing random people on the street. You're no longer hauling away lunatics that hurt people. You're arresting mothers, sons, and boyfriends who are just trying to make a living.
If you want the police to be respected and valued by the communities that they police, then focus on restricting their activities mainly to victim-centric crimes. The resolution of which provides tangible value to the policed. Adopt a Portuguese-Style approach to drug policy, where usage and low-level dealing of drugs is decriminalized and treated as a health rather than criminal issue.
- many drugs are addictive and this can lead to addicts turning to crime to try to fuel their addiction. yes we could offer more public support for such things, but these tend to be lifestyle choices that people revert to over and over.
- some drugs themselves can have a strong connection with abnormally violent and dangerous behavior - for instance, PCP.
- other drugs can have potentially extreme side effects even with minimal usage. olney's lesions / brain lesions are but one example. of course the same is true of e.g. alcohol, but the quantities involved are quite different.
- any drug that is illegal will result in a black market. this black market tends to trend towards violence. there is potentially big money to be made in drugs and criminal enterprises tend to attract criminals who don't just constrain their violation to their product.
"You can't do heroin because you'll get addicted and might steal in order to fuel your addiction." "But I haven't actually stolen anything yet, so what crime has been committed?"
Are there any other cases of a victim-less activity where we preemptively arrest/prosecute people because that activity might lead to crime someday?
Oddly enough in AZ you are supposed to have a victim for a crime yet you can be charged with criminal speeding and there be no victim.
You are so far into the wrong here its sad... not only sad but the fact you cant see it is scary for the future of this nation
Legality (must be a law) ... Actus reus (Human conduct) ... Causation (human conduct must cause harm) ... Harm (to some other/thing) ... Concurrence (State of Mind and Human Conduct) ... Mens Rea (State of Mind; "guilty mind") ... Punishment.
Without a victim you have no crime
Public intoxication less so, but it is also mostly used as a pretext to remove people from public spaces in cases where it is obvious they shouldn't be there.
Speeding is also mostly treated as a minor infraction, not quite a crime. Sure, if you really do it good, you can get detained for an extended period of time, but you really have to do it good to end up in that situation.
Speeding, public intoxication, etc. in the typical cases don't have victims because we as a society have decided that we are not victimized by small increase in risk of a negative outcome.
However, writing statues that we expect to be violated and then leaving it up to the cops' discretion is not exactly a recipe for the fairest outcome.
Speeding is arguably not victimless. Someone pointed out the "shooting into a crowd without hitting anyone" analogy, which is apt. You're engaging in immediately threatening and dangerous behavior.
Public intoxication is also not victimless; that's the "disorderly" part of "drunk and disorderly" (whether it gets enforced correctly/equally is a different discussion.) This is actually a great example of my point: you can get as drunk as you want, and no one will care until you start disturbing the peace, being belligerent, damaging property, urinating in public spaces, etc. If you're drunk and sitting in a bar quietly, it's not a problem. We don't arrest you because you might drive drunk later, we wait until you actually drive drunk. We treat other drugs completely differently.
I think you made all the rest up. "We as a society" I read as very subjective. I for instance don't regard risky public behavior as victimless. Am I not part of your society?
As practical examples such as Portugal show, it generally leads to a significant drop in both drug use and the detrimental factors associated with it. More police time and money can be spent on real crimes, and jails are free from many non violent offenders.
The last last point is a particularly significant benefit for the USA as the justice system has such an irrational focus on punishment over rehabilitation, so most prisons serve more as criminal training camps.
I think you're right that the drug war was a factor, but I think you're wrong in why it was a factor. It's not some arbitrary distinction between what you deem to be a "victimless" crime, as if there was never such a thing in the 1700s and 1800s. The reason is that it's an arms race. The police always want to be better equipped and trained at dealing with a situation than they people they're up against. If it's unarmed protestors, they want organized formations and tear gas. If it's a drug cartel with assault weapons, the police want tanks and helicopters.
I’ll even bet they are using kettling to invoke a reaction from protestors. They aren’t passively responding to protestors, they are active antagonizing the public to justify their brutality.
No, they brought in that equipment to deal with the riots. If it was just protesting but not rioting then that would be a different story.
The tools are a force multiplier which is necessary when you're outnumbered. There are fewer police than rioters.
This is related to the economic dynamics of military surplus and nothing more.
The US is extraordinarily violent. That's where you need to start: why is violence so common and acceptable in the US?
What is not common in the US is a respect for others. The police do not respect the citizens. The citizens dont respect the police or the govt.
Respect is earned. Tell me you think the police or govt has earned our respect ? Because of this mutual lack of respect violence is almost certain.
>Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc.
> But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.
This is insane... who defines that group ? Are all govts legitimate ? Do all govts get to define violence ?
There is no ethical violence or all violence is ethical because your reasons arent more valid than someone elses
My government has never forced me to do anything with a threat of violence -- I have been threatened with different manners of obvious inconvenience, but if that is no more acceptable to you than an actual threat of violence, then I'm afraid that is an unproductive, reductive, and uncompromising opinion.
How is that not violent ?
EVERYTHING, absolutely EVERYTHING a government "asks" of you comes with the implicit threat of violence for those who do not comply. There is only one tool in the box.
Let's be honest: US murder rates are high because of one particular demographic of people involved in particular criminal enterprises. Drug war or no, that is the reality. There are neighborhoods in the nearby cities I don't go near because of the possibility of becoming involved in a violent encounter, probably only due to my being white in a non-white area. Meanwhile, I can go pretty much anywhere else in the US and never have a concern. Why is that?
Mass shootings? Please. They are vanishingly low on the probability of dying chart. I worry more about crossing the street. Those are sad events. So are car crashes, plane crashes, E Coli outbreaks, cancer, heart disease, etc.
The worst thing is how "gun violence" is counted separately and those figures includes things like suicides and police shootings of people in the act of committing felony crimes. Those statistics are ginned to the max in order to mislead the public in support of additional civil disarmament. The implications of that are speculative, but I would say it is so that the next round of subjugation and abuse of the public can take place under the color of law without the threat of push back to those doing the pushing.
If you look at violent crimes in European countries, there is more of it there but they only report crimes once the case has been cleared. No conclusion=no crime mentioned. It is a gigantic lie. If European nations are so safe, how come the cops are nearly always paired with soldiers armed with rifles? You see this everywhere across Europe, in fact. In all those gun-free paradises over there, what threat is on their minds? Or is that just a big show to keep the public in fear?
As I have noted, if you aren't involved in criminal activities, your chances of being acted upon violently in the US are very low.
Wrong, even in simple assault cases it's possible for the victim to be charged with the assault if the person committing assault goes to the court house first and files charges. This blocks the ability of the victim to file charges and allows police to pursue them as the criminal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_courthouse
A small handful of states permit "private prosecution" of crimes, with very significant limitations. It certainly can't be used to shut down the victim in the fashion you describe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#United_Sta...
The "race to the courthouse" article you linked doesn't even specify which country it applies to, and cites zero sources.
It appears to refer to https://definitions.uslegal.com/r/race-to-the-courthouse/, which isn't about criminal prosecutions at all. It's about certain civil law situations.
https://www.marylandcriminalattorneyblog.com/carroll_county_...
"This is because without a weapon or serious injury the only crime would that could be charged is second degree assault which is a misdemeanor in Maryland. The police can only arrest in misdemeanor cases if they actually witness the events. Otherwise, the police are supposed to simply write a report and advise the combatants as to the procedures for filing charges against one another. "
Re: here because out of reply subthreads:
I'm not mixing the two up. I called the police after having my jaw broken in a one sided assault and filed a report. The assailant went to the court house and filed charges officially and one week later I was charged with assault. This was leveraged by the public prosecutor to prevent me from filing civil and criminal charges against the assailant as terms for myself not being prosecuted or subject to a trial by jury. The only people who seem to be aware of this situation are lawyers and law-savvy repeated violent offenders who use it to escape prosecution.
https://www.enlawyers.com/1836/attorney-information/maryland...
> In most counties prosecutors review the charges before they are formally filed.
I can't find any indication TN permits these sorts of private prosecutions.
I suspect you're mixing up filing charges with making a complaint or police report. Being the first to reach out to police/prosecutors may count in your favor (credibility-wise, not on a raw legal level) as the alleged assailant filing their own complaint afterwards looks more like retaliation for fairly obvious reasons.
I don't think China lacks export opportunities, yet is the source of most all of the worlds fentanyl-type drugs. Up until a couple years ago Canada was a huge source of pot for the US. Canada has a thriving export market. Mexico too.
It doesn't necessarily mean they do more drugs than whites. It just means that "the war on drugs" is often just one more justification for a long history of coming up with excuses to throw blacks in jail and generally crap on their lives.
The US has a talent for either framing rules in a way that causes trouble for people of color or interpreting behavior by people of color differently than the same behavior by a white person.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
Go back much further than that. Go back to the civil rights movement. Go back to jim crow. The history of the American war on drugs was born of racism and continues its birthright. That is the real sticking point, the source of the high emotions surrounding drugs. The drug war is a proxy for much more difficult issues.
There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help. When a single mom can't buy her kid a bicycle because the last 3 have been stolen out from under him by addicts looking to score, she's going to ask the her elected representatives for help.
That seems like burglary/robbery rather than a drug-related offense.
It's also completely besides the point here, as we're discussing the statement:
> There was also definitely communities overran with drug related crime that were desperate for help.
arguing that these sorts of drug-related crimes motivated some communities to embrace "hard on crime" attitudes.
What often gets missed is that high up members of the Republican party are on record as intentionally escalating the war on drugs to attack their enemies (black people and anti war hippies amongst others).
So if they thought that the war on drugs wasn't a "problem" but rather an opportunity, then they have no incentive to "solve" the problem, in fact quite the opposite. Any consequences that then follow from drug related crime must ultimately fall at their door, not the person they've led into addiction by policy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/tours/s...
> But obtaining the crack was no easy feat. To match the words crafted by the speech-writers, Drug Enforcement Administration agents lured a suspected District drug dealer to Lafayette Park four days before the speech so they could make what appears to have been the agency's first undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity, according to officials familiar with the case.
> In fact, when first contacted by an undercover DEA agent posing as a drug buyer, the teenage suspect seemed baffled by the agent's request.
> "Where the {expletive} is the White House?" he replied in a conversation that was secretly tape-recorded by the DEA.
> "We had to manipulate him to get him down there," said William McMullan, assistant special agent in charge of DEA's Washington field office. "It wasn't easy."
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."
"In 2013, the ACLU published a report titled "The War on Marijuana in Black and White". The report found that despite marijuana use being roughly equal between blacks and whites, blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decriminalization_of_non-medic...
This one is the original marihuana legislation, predating Nixon's war on drugs, right?
> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."
When was this originally published? I keep seeing it in a 2016 magazine, which is a bit odd given how groundbreaking a revelation it is. Especially considering the quote was collected 22 years prior, and the man died 17 years prior. Was this around and just not well known at the time?
> "In 2013, the ACLU published a report titled "The War on Marijuana in Black and White". The report found that despite marijuana use being roughly equal between blacks and whites, blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession."
Adverse impact, problematic enough, does not imply something was made with racist intent.
It shows that the intent continues to be racist. This disparity is ongoing, not historical; if it's truly not racist, why not bring the amount of possession charges in line with usage?
It shows the impact, not the intent, continues to be racist. It doesn't really say anything about intent, at least without a lot more data. If white and black usage differ in kind somehow - say, pot brownies vs smoking on the street (I have no idea if there is a racial disparity here) - it could lead to a difference in police involvement without any racial discrimination.
If I go fishing for redfish I’m going to end up catching a lot more saltwater fish incidentally. Doesn’t mean I hate freshwater fish, that just means in not fishing in an area where I’m going to find many freshwater fish.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
>...Baum claims Ehrlichman said that to him in 1994 while he was researching for a book he published in 1996 about the drug war. He didn't include the quote in that book, but instead published it in 2012 and again in 2016, after Ehrlichman had died (in 1999).
This is an amazing and explosive quote - if Baum had included it in his book in 1996 I am sure it would have garnered a great deal of attention. Instead Baum would not include it in his book, but instead would wait for decades later when Ehrlichman was no longer around to dispute it.
At any rate, if the quote was actually said by Ehrlichman, it doesn't actually describe the drug polices of the Nixon administration. While Nixon is remembered for "war on drugs", the actual substance of his policies seem to be different than what people think it was:
>...I have been fortunate over the years to discuss the distorted memory of Nixon's drug policies with almost all of his key advisors as well as with historians. Their consensus is that because he was dramatically expanding the U.S. treatment system (by 350% in just 18 months!) and cutting criminal penalties, he had to reassure his right wing that he hadn’t gone soft. So he laid on some of the toughest anti-drug rhetoric in history, including making a White House speech declaring a “war on drugs” and calling drugs “public enemy number one”. It worked so well as cover that many people remember that “tough” press event and forget that what Nixon did at it was introduce not a general or a cop or a preacher to be his drug policy chief but…a medical doctor (Jerry Jaffe, a sweet, bookish man who had longish hair and sideburns and often wore the Mickey Mouse tie his kids had given him).
http://www.samefacts.com/2011/06/drug-policy/who-started-the...
http://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/race-and-drug-war
https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
The disparity is in charges of possession. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/racial-disparity-in-marijuana...
Race has little to do with the criminalization of such drugs, as evidenced by the answer to the above question.
(I wonder what the Chinese think of your claim that the pressures of western colonialism is why drugs are illegal? Thank goodness the British forced China to criminalize opium...)
As it was clear in the my own country (xUSSR), the criminals are developing their code, where "snitches get stiches" and any cooperation with law enforcement is forbidden by it (e.g. in a prison so called "thief in laws" won't to do any work).
The drugs, especially hard drugs and prostitution are not victimless crimes. Human traffiking is a problem, the impact of drug addicts who is looking for new dose is real.
If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, teaching social and emotional skills to children would help a lot, though would take a generation to see widespread results. Our schools not only don't teach social and emotional skills, they teach submission to authoritarian rule and remove what could teach social and emotional skills: recess, free play, the arts (doing them not history or appreciation). Schools are among the most authoritarian institutions. (I recommend Peter Gray's Freedom to Learn blog https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn, especially Children’s Freedom: A Human Rights Perspective: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201902...).
Schools could help a lot, specifically, teaching skills through experience, not abstract facts to fill out bubbles on standardized tests.
You might also be interested in my books, which teach the social and emotional skills of leadership, initiative, and entrepreneurship, based on courses I teach at NYU.
Initiative: https://www.amazon.com/Initiative-Proven-Method-Bring-Passio...
Leadership Step by Step: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/...
One of my past students used the Initiative skills to teach the Leadership material to youths in Gaza https://leadpalestine.com. Every situation is unique and it's just one project, but his project shows promise of teaching youths before they get caught up in violence. He tells me that the program helps change views of leadership from command-and-control, authoritarian to based in understanding and support, though I'm oversimplifying. I'm just sharing one example.
We've stopped holding the police accountable for their actions and it's out of control. Local government, state government, prosecutors and most of all the Unions are to blame. Yeah, the Union, I'm the son of a Union executive and Unions have lost their way.
The Union is supposed to protect the possibility of a loss of a job position, the individual from unacceptable working conditions and unjustified sanctions, but they should also be holding the individual up the standards of conduct, but that's been lost. The union should be wanting to oust a bad cop, the position won't go away, so there is no loss of a job position, but if the individual isn't living up the the standards of behavior it reflects badly on the rest of the organization, and harms their strength. I watched my father walk union members off jobs because of poor performance, and after repeated failures throw them out of the union.
The unions themselves have become a very dangerous criminal gang, they carry weapons, they control people's lives, and they basically have no accountability. The populace is afraid, the politicians are afraid, and the legal system is afraid. The police have become paramilitary goon squads with their own agenda.
A friend's uncle just retired from a southern police force, while he was working he was pulled over 10's of times for DUI and was never charged because he's a cop. Now that he's retired he's drunk all the time and is constantly getting pulled over and driven home, but he's never been charged. He's only had a few minor accidents that got covered up because the police threatened the other driver. He'll keep doing this until he actually kills someone, then it will be interesting to see if anything happens.
Until the police are held accountable the problem is going to keep getting worse. Career criminals who are victims aren't the only people at risk, we are all at risk.
The "unarmed black man shot and killed by police" is heavily pushed by media companies because, well, its an emotional issue that gets ratings, sells newspapers, and gets clicks. Same thing with "terrorist threats", shark bites, and airline crashes. People view it because it's dramatic and it sticks in your head more because of it.
This bias is called "availability bias" and it causes people to see the problem as much greater than it actually is.
https://www.factcheck.org/2015/11/trump-retweets-bogus-crime...
Starting with the most obvious point, the Crime Statistics Bureau of San Francisco doesn't exist.
Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability
edit:
> The reality of the availability bias isn't in question, it's whether or not people's belief about police brutality is accurate
It would be nice to have some objective evidence showing why this example is a special case immune to availability bias.
The issue isn't just being killed by police - It's also being beaten by police, having things unlawfully seized by police, being unjustly cited or arrested by police, and so on. So yeah, being unjustly arrested and spending a weekend in jail waiting to be arraigned on Monday is better than being killed, but it still sucks.
I blame this on the war on drugs. The risk and reward from the drug trade has gotten so high that a human life isn’t worth much. Distributing pays well. Getting a life sentence from being caught is the risk. So, in a dealers mind, taking life to prevent theirs from being taken is justified.
Here's a shining example from Arlington, TX: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2014/02/12/ex-arlingto...
Arlington has recruitment trouble, like so many other police forces around the country. Normal people don't want to join the steroid-addled gang, that leaves only highschool bullies who don't mind the low pay and love hassling the public.
[1] People often confuse: 1. State-monopolized administration of 'public' services. 2. Mandated spending (supplied through tax) with private administration. (This is the model Sweden uses[2])
"People Are Hiring Private Police Squads in Detroit" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pt6hnabnkU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq3vVbdgMuQ
How do you do any kind of fair analysis without just presenting data? If the cops used inflammatory language, then shame on them. But if it was just numbers, it's hard to argue against clean data.