131–140 of 141 posts
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The cost of punishment has also skyrocketed. Keeping someone in jail "a few years to cool off" costs a fortune.
I've said it before: we need the Starship Troopers style public floggings for all crime. Eliminate expensive jails, and corporeally punish the offenders immediately and publically.
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In California, state law holds that stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanor, which means that law enforcement probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors will let it go. Most packages are probably under the $950 threshold, so there is no enforcement. Why bother investigating and arresting when the DA won't prosecute and they'll be let out immediately?
This is repeatedly brought up, but the same barrier is over $1500 in Texas[1]. Sooo..what is happening here? I am genuinely confused. [1] https://www.reneaflores.com/criminal-defense/theft-crimes/mi...
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That doesn't pay. Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time. Both are against the law, so they're doing their job either way. Kind of. Although as another commenter noted, I've noticed they've become strangely lax about even citing moving violations since Covid. Makes you wonder what they are even doing, then.
I don't even think that it's lucrative per se, but rather that it's straightforward. Cop sits there playing candy crush, magical radar artifact makes a noise, they look up, chase down that car, then check a box on a pre-printed citation where they don't even have to think about which law to cite. But (real example) same road, clearly marked as trucks prohibited from left two lanes - a shed larger than many houses mea…
I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car wit…
I think it's because policing in general is not at the standard it once was. Currently police are only rewarded for "big busts", but it's the smaller crimes that make all the difference to the individual. In the UK for example, only something like 4% of burglaries get investigated at all. We're talking about the police not turning up at all. A neighbour down the street had a car stolen from their drive, under no less…
Sure. The point is this is a matter of policy. Someone's policy. Some people in there (1) choose to prioritize this or that, (2) choose to reward doing nothing, (3) choose to promote those who do that, etc, (all the way to) actively protect cops who are active nuisances themselves.
This does not "just happen" except in the sense of "it has become acceptable". Accepted by whom? Voters at some point? But not always. In the US, most cops are extremely well insulated from the voters. And they haven't had to care about your standards for a long time. If ever really.
I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car wit…
In California, state law holds that stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanor, which means that law enforcement probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors will let it go. Most packages are probably under the $950 threshold, so there is no enforcement. Why bother investigating and arresting when the DA won't prosecute and they'll be let out immediately?
Although to be fair, wasn't / isn't a lot of this "why bother" actually a political protest and retaliation against that DA and the citizenry that elected them? Not even doing something else with their time, but not doing much? And to be fair again, the joke in San Francisco is that "not doing anything" is a safer alternative for some of the population. Safer than "doing something else". This is messed up every which way.
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It's not strange at all. Driving is dangerous enough as it is. Adding the extra anxiety of getting lit up by a speed-limit camera for accidentally exceeding the speed limit does not make it safer. Plus, we Americans are inventive. If there were no traffic cops, the wealthy and mischievous would simply modify their cars to hide their license plates when driving past speeding cameras on their normal route.
> the wealthy and mischievous would simply modify their cars to hide their license plates when driving past speeding cameras on their normal route This is a good way to meet the local police in any jurisdiction with cameras. We hate speed cameras because Americans like to speed. There is a minority that is privacy focussed. But the majority hate it because most we drive unsafely [1]. [1] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2016…
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That doesn't pay. Pulling over a citizen with a job and citing them for speeding is a much more lucrative use of their time. Both are against the law, so they're doing their job either way. Kind of. Although as another commenter noted, I've noticed they've become strangely lax about even citing moving violations since Covid. Makes you wonder what they are even doing, then.
They realized that solving crimes pays just as well as playing candy crush, and the latter is less effort and more fun
There was / is also the effective strike against DAs and courts.
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I think it heavily depends on what local district attorneys policies are. Police may not see a point in taking a risk by apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later anyway. Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
> apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later Should this not be the expectation for low-level/nonviolent offenses, under the presumption of innocence?
Release after a minor arrest should be as expected of course. In most isolated offenses, not even an arrest preferably even - since "arrest" can come with massive baggage in the US. It's refusing to even bother collecting records, documenting, tracking, and in the end arrests which means that the initial offences essentially did not exist. So that the next offenses are still initial offenses - and don't exist.
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I think it heavily depends on what local district attorneys policies are. Police may not see a point in taking a risk by apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later anyway. Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
I've seen press about police departments making such an argument, and it seems really disingenuous. The implied claim is that if no charge will be pursued by the DA then there's "no outcome" or point in doing any police work or arrest. However, when cops feel any kind of animus, it's really apparent that they can make life awful for people by harassing, intimidating, or assaulting who aren't doing anything illegal. T…
Simpler explanation: "Get home safe at the end of the day" is by very far the priority in US police. By outright policy. This gets translated with EVERYONE showing up when one of their colleagues gets an idea of doing something. All the more so that this probably looks good in the end-of-day paperwork, and counts as having done something. And is perfectly safe. And you get to chat with your colleagues while on the clock.
I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. For instance, find out where porch thieves like to hit. Plant a package there and park a patrol car there for a few hours and chances are you'll catch someone. Or put in a tracker. A cop can get a bike stolen in hours in the right neighborhoods in NYC. If a youtuber can park their car wit…
> I've come to believe that acceptance of crime is a choice by officials. Many low level crimes I've witnessed are trivial to catch. > And it's only a handful of people engaged in this low level crime. Arrest a few. And if they have a dozen prior arrests, like many of them do, keep them in jail for a while. The USA easily has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, and yet Americans like this say…