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Train burglaries in LA

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Re: Train burglaries in LA

#181

Post by [deleted] »

kqr wrote: post #112
jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing this is a two part issue. One, we cannot get rid of physical security, as everyone should have the right to protect themselves and their property. Two, the way to prevent crime from happening is to make people feel in the heart and soul that crime is morally wrong and destructive for the community around them. This is not instinctual human behavior. For those who learn this and live this, great. For those who…

> everyone should have the right to protect themselves and their property. To be clear, this is a political ideal of the Roman Empire that has influenced much of modern civlisation, it's not an inevitable state of humanity.

[deleted]

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#182

Post by barrenko »

buran77 wrote: post #157
kqr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US. Taking a leaf from Deming, we have a system, a process, a society that creates a certain, relatively stable, number of criminals per year. Trying to address specific criminal acts or specific criminals is just meddling that can backlash as easily as it can help. When you have a stable source of trouble, it makes no sense to try…

> Indeed. There's so much focus on short-term solutions for crime – even outside of the US. There's an old nugget that if anyone could time-travel they'd go back in time and kill Hitler. Nobody would go a few more years back to educate him. People are not educated to look at the big picture but to react in the moment. Stop the theft as it's happening. Shoot. This goes best with societies where taking a life is consid…

It's not just education, it's shitty parenting. You'd recursively have to educate Hitler's parents, and to do that you have to educate their parents etc. ad nauseum. Pretty soon you'd blow your stack. Naive interventionism is worse than just whacking Hitler.

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#183

Post by buran77 »

mngnt wrote: post #145
dusted wrote: post #102

My observation from the comment sections to this post-apocalyptic video is the following: People focusing on how to prevent the theft of these cars, funding police, armed guards on trans, better security. I think this is an interesting perspective, it's very "American", it's like it has been accepted by these commenters that rampant thievery is a perfectly natural part of life and so, must be worked around rather tha…

The cause is the same as it always has been: it is easier for some people to get to the desired standard of living by stealing/other crime than by working. Why crime us going up? Because of higher desired standard (every body needs an iPhone, brand name shoes and hats), more difficulty with earning a wage (largely, difficulty getting a job at all) and decreased difficulty in crime (defunding police, more aesily avail…

When risking getting caught stealing is more attractive than working then it's safe to say the working opportunities for those people aren't worth almost anything.

People take the easier option. You choose "lock your trains well" despite knowing the answer will be "crack those locks well" because it was the easy answer. The view is simple. Eventually the train will be a rolling mountain of steel protected by an army. Your fishing lure will cost an arm and a leg because protection costs are up. And the thieves will just be relegated to do slave work (the work that shouldn't exist in those conditions but society was too busy locking the train well to bother protecting its most vulnerable members) or starve because those are the only options on the table.

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#184

Post by snowgrove »

DanHulton wrote: post #130
throwawaysea wrote: post #16

Soft on crime policies like restorative justice simply attract crime. No consequences means no deterrent. It’s not surprising this happens in LA - George Gascon is the DA and he’s facing increasing support for his recall ( https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/liberal-beverly-hill... ).

How do reconcile that view with this just... Not happening in other countries with much softer policing?

I’ve read that the magnitude of punishment has less of a deterrent effect on crime compared to the certainty of receiving punishment at all. Softer consequences that you will probably face, as in parts of Europe, are different from harder (on paper) consequences that you will likely escape under a progressive prosecutor in the US. See the Chicago, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Baltimore DAs for examples of this.

Edit: And don’t confuse American police/law enforcement, who are often harsh to say the least, with the legal arm of the criminal justice system. In many US cities the two are often at odds, as lax prosecutors and DAs release criminals almost as soon as police apprehend them. The Washington DC Chief of Police in particular complained about this recently.

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#185

Post by SamReidHughes »

DanHulton wrote: post #125
jsiaajdsdaa wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing this is a two part issue. One, we cannot get rid of physical security, as everyone should have the right to protect themselves and their property. Two, the way to prevent crime from happening is to make people feel in the heart and soul that crime is morally wrong and destructive for the community around them. This is not instinctual human behavior. For those who learn this and live this, great. For those who…

You want to know why I don't steal? It's because I don't have to. I have sufficient security of income and opportunity that it's not necessary. I'm not bragging, though, what I'm getting at is that you're missing a huge part of why people steal - maybe even the largest part: because they feel they have to survive, or because it's okay because society is stacked against them. This is what above was talking about when…

The baseline wage for people able-bodied enough to raid a train is $32K/year in Southern California.

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#186

Post by savolai »

mngnt wrote: post #145
dusted wrote: post #102

My observation from the comment sections to this post-apocalyptic video is the following: People focusing on how to prevent the theft of these cars, funding police, armed guards on trans, better security. I think this is an interesting perspective, it's very "American", it's like it has been accepted by these commenters that rampant thievery is a perfectly natural part of life and so, must be worked around rather tha…

The cause is the same as it always has been: it is easier for some people to get to the desired standard of living by stealing/other crime than by working. Why crime us going up? Because of higher desired standard (every body needs an iPhone, brand name shoes and hats), more difficulty with earning a wage (largely, difficulty getting a job at all) and decreased difficulty in crime (defunding police, more aesily avail…

I've seen how tricky participating in society with a cheap android phone can get. Your memory runs out all the time when you try to have apps critical for everyday life, and your privacy is sold to highest bidder. Everything takes more time and is less reliable.

Until we as a society can honestly look at what reasonable amount of well being in information societies looks like, it's tricky to tell those with less what is reasonable to expect of quality of life.

Yes, mimetic desire is a real power too. Is that really what's at play here?

Who has the right to draw the line between basic well being and an utopia?

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#187

Post by Someone »

gonehome wrote: post #163
DanHulton wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to know why I don't steal? It's because I don't have to. I have sufficient security of income and opportunity that it's not necessary. I'm not bragging, though, what I'm getting at is that you're missing a huge part of why people steal - maybe even the largest part: because they feel they have to survive, or because it's okay because society is stacked against them. This is what above was talking about when…

There are a lot of poor people who are not thieves. I’ve always felt this framing condescends to them. Sure, there’s certainly more incentive to steal at the academic extremes (bread for your starving family), but people raiding trains for packages is something else. There should be police response to this, and people doing it should get charged.

I don’t see anybody arguing that people doing this shouldn’t get charged.

I do read people (rightfully, IMO) claiming that societal changes can significantly decrease the number of people doing this.

I don’t believe USA has so many people in prison because its population _is_ more criminal than that of other countries.

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#188

Post by Kiro »

Z0rr0 wrote: post #140
rrdharan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a silly and needlessly anti-American framing. There’s plenty of high profile theft in Europe - more in fact, since the security is so lax: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/world/europe/Picasso-and-... European “security” has also given us gems like the Brussels and Manchester arena bombings. I don’t know why people in glass houses insist on throwing so many stones.

You are confusing high profile art theft in Europe with low profile UPS theft in the US. The trains are clearly being robbed out of desperation by the poorest citizens. If those citizens lived in the EU, they would have free healthcare, free education, unemployment subsidies and housing. And so they would not be forced to steal our packages.

It's not that simple. Look at Sweden. We have all those things and delivery companies have stopped delivering to certain areas due to their trucks being robbed.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/skane/malmobon-sylvias-adr...

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/uppsala/postnord-stoppar-p...

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#189

Post by radu_floricica »

Having the community police its members can only be done with the proper external incentives to that community. The times in history where clans or family managed their own delinquents where also times where the clan or family as a whole was called to pay for the damage.

What we have here is not a sudden lapse in morals - it's a result of, rather on purpose, individualism. Since the community has nothing to lose or gain, the community just stands aside and looks.

As an aside, this reminds me of gypsy villages in Romania - places where lines of concern between insiders and outsiders are so sharply drawn, that from the outside it looks like complete lawlessness. It's not - it's lawless only if you're an outsider, and that village doesn't care about you.

Social mechanisms can be pretty complex (and fascinating). TBH, rather than trying to figure them out, it might be easier in cases like that to just throw manpower (and cameras) at the problem. But long term - this is where it's very much worth it to have cops work with/as social workers and get embedded in their communities. That this got to where it got speaks volumes about police and citizens there being in a purely adversarial context - otherwise the first old lady to meet a cop 6 months ago would have told him what's going on and who's started it.

Re: Train burglaries in LA

#190

Post by mysecretaccount »

mngnt wrote: post #145
dusted wrote: post #102

My observation from the comment sections to this post-apocalyptic video is the following: People focusing on how to prevent the theft of these cars, funding police, armed guards on trans, better security. I think this is an interesting perspective, it's very "American", it's like it has been accepted by these commenters that rampant thievery is a perfectly natural part of life and so, must be worked around rather tha…

The cause is the same as it always has been: it is easier for some people to get to the desired standard of living by stealing/other crime than by working. Why crime us going up? Because of higher desired standard (every body needs an iPhone, brand name shoes and hats), more difficulty with earning a wage (largely, difficulty getting a job at all) and decreased difficulty in crime (defunding police, more aesily avail…

> defunding police

Police budgets are, by and large, still increasing in the US.

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