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In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

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Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, many of us that grew up in SoCal recall the heist that led to the so called 'assault weapon' ban I always heard it was events in California (and Diane Feinstein being a key player) that created the ban, but I never heard a specific event in SoCal being the catalyst. Wikipedia cites a school shooting in Stockton in 1989 and an office shooting in San Francisco in 1993. Outside of the state, Wikipedia also cites…

Reply All Podcast, ep 127/128 seemed to claim it's actually not that much better in NYC now. Instead they claim the way of reporting crimes has changed to make the numbers look better than they actually are https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34

I listened to that a few years ago. I don't believe it makes exactly the claim as your summary.

In discussions about New York there is a popular myth that policing caused the crime rate drop, and I think that is what the podcast was challenging. Not necessarily that there wasn't a drop at all. There was across the entire country. Not for the reasons some police departments would like to believe.

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t find anything on a quick Google that shows differences between 1980 and present. I did find this though: https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless... That site states homelessness across the country is down 12% from 2007 - 2019, but it is up 9% in California in the same time period. I think this validates asking the question of whether or not tech has been detrimental to general human welfa…

Mentally ill thrown out on the streets, and scarcity of housing are the major factors.

Mental illness is something that gets regurgitated a lot and it is a part of the problem, but it’s ignoring the working homeless. The social contract in society is if you work hard and have a job that you’ll prosper, or at least have food, water, and shelter.

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/30/652572292/working-while-homel...

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#183
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bank robbery every hour? More like a reminder that primitive tendencies can revert Society back to its violent mean really quickly and that in turn instilled a need to want to preserve what we have and build resilient communities to that end as we all felt vulnerable to that ever-present danger. The fact that no one speaks to their neighbors now is a stark contrast to my childhood in the late 80s and 90s where ev…

> More like a reminder that primitive tendencies can revert Society back to its violent mean really quickly and that in turn instilled a need to want to preserve what we have and build resilient communities to that end as we all felt vulnerable to that ever-present danger. Or, you know, not live in perpetual fear of society breaking down, which is something afforded to us by thousands of years of progress and innumer…

Not being in perpetual fear of society breaking down seems like a good way to see society break down. What else motivated millenia of sacrifice?

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#184
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what you are telling me, all those movies, it's not just Hollywood magic, it's reality? Ugh.

You ever see Taxi Driver? Apparently that movie's depiction of NYC in the 70s was not that far off from reality, and it's jarring.

You can still see remnants of it, e.g. the Port Authority--aka the world's seediest bus terminal. But, as someone who lived in Manhattan for a summer in the mid-80s, it's hard to see things like the "Disneyfication" of the Times Square area as having too much of a downside.

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#185
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That $40k home isn’t so cheap when you make $13k and interest rates were 11-15%. With a decent down payment (lets say ~15%) that's still less than 5 years salary even with interest, which would be completely acceptable terms especially since cost of living was way more affordable back then and the population had ~10 million people less than today in the 90s. Just to give you context that's more in population increa…

I reckon you can find tons of ex-hippies who would say “California will never go back to what in was in the ‘70s”, when they were already onboard Janis Joplin’s Big Yellow Taxi (written in 1970 and inspired by Hawaii, but massively popular in 1974 California too) and decrying the loss of “Steinbeck’s California”. Places change, and places with little historical roots as most of the US tend to change even faster. That…

> Janis Joplin’s Big Yellow Taxi

Joni Mitchell :)

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#186
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this talking point (one I’ve put to good use over the last 20 years) is on shakier ground recently. Crime rates have have been rising for several years now in many U.S. cities and in some cases they’ve eclipsed the 90s highs. https://www.officer.com/command-hq/technology/computers-soft...

Have you read your own article? Numbers are spiking for 2020. I wonder why? A global pandemic, mass unemployment, lockdowns, political tensions.

[deleted]

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#187

When pundits --on either side of the pollical spectrum--talk about how bad America is or how things are on the verge of collapse societally, show them stats such as this. By almost every metric, as bad as things may seem, they were objectively worse decades ago. Yeah, it feels like people are angrier than ever, especially online, but Twitter is not real life. A combination of increased tech surveillance, longer priso…

> When pundits --on either side of the pollical spectrum--talk about how bad America is or how things are on the verge of collapse societally, show them stats such as this. By almost every metric, as bad as things may seem, they were objectively worse decades ago.

Don't forget that you're only looking at LA right now and your claim that things "were objectively worse decades ago" only generalizes to the cities on the West/East Coast. In contrast, rural areas are worse off economically compared to 30, 40 years ago.

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#188

Yeah, many of us that grew up in SoCal recall the heist that led to the so called 'assault weapon' ban, it was completely legal to have a long barrel rifle with 30 round magazines in CA prior to that--they could be open-carried if not loaded back then if I recall correctly, too. This was around the time of the LA riots in the 90s, too... which in my mind all happened at the same time as I recall being a kid sat in fr…

> many who live here don't even realize that California (both alta and baja) pre-dates the existence of the US and British colonialism by a significant margin. Alta California was first colonized in 1769, not long before a bunch of British colonies on the other side of the continent that had been settled for quite a while broke off to form the USA; Baja was colonized from 1683. Neither predates British colonization o…

this is still well before us/british colonialism in california though..

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#189
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this talking point (one I’ve put to good use over the last 20 years) is on shakier ground recently. Crime rates have have been rising for several years now in many U.S. cities and in some cases they’ve eclipsed the 90s highs. https://www.officer.com/command-hq/technology/computers-soft...

Have you read your own article? Numbers are spiking for 2020. I wonder why? A global pandemic, mass unemployment, lockdowns, political tensions.

Please don’t ask people if they’ve read the article. It’s obnoxious.

And, no, it isn’t just 2020. The homicide rate in St. Louis bottomed out in 2003 at a rate of 21.8 per 100k. By 2014 it had more than doubled to 49.9. By 2015 it had nearly tripled to 59.3 per 100k.

And it’s even higher now. It’ll end this year in the 70s per 100k, eclipsing the 1993 high. It’s been a steady march up from the bottom.

And the trend is similar in other cities.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_St._Louis

Re: In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

#190
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, homicide rates in some U.S. cities are nearing (and in some cases eclipsing) their early 90s highs. As I often do, I’ll use St. Louis as an example here, because it’s the city I happen to be most familiar with, but this is happening all over. I completely bought the story you’re telling and never thought we’d ever see homicide rates matching the gang-war carnage of early 90s St. Louis, but we’re blowin…

My point was that if you baselined how good or bad you thought humans were by the crime rates in the 80s, you'd come away thinking humans were way more violent than they are. I think the same holds for 2020 - if you assess human nature by how people act when they're in the midst of a global pandemic, you'd come to the same incorrect conclusion. Another way to put it is that much of our behavior is dictated by our env…

> I think the same holds for 2020

The homicide rate in St. Louis bottomed out in 2003 at a rate of 21.8 per 100k. By 2014 it had more than doubled to 49.9. By 2015 it had nearly tripled to 59.3 per 100k. (It’ll end this year in the 70s per 100k). The rates have been rising for a long time. It’s not just 2020.

And the trend is similar in other cities.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_St._Louis

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