Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities

Is the fear of punishment the only thing that keeps people from doing criminal acts?

1. People speed and park wrongly despite both of these being illegal

2. A huge majority of people aren't assholes all the time, despite this not being illegal

3. Murders do get committed though it's illegal

4. Most stuff isn't stolen even though it is very difficult to catch someone breaking into houses

There's a book called Three Felonies A Day which posits that the average American commits three serious crimes every day despite the overwhelming majority of those folks not meaning to. https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=three+felonies+a+day The reason for this is that the laws are written broadly enough that entirely innocent acts could be construed to be strict-liability crimes that require absolute adherence; intent does not enter into the equation.

If society is not falling apart even if the average American is in fact committing three felonies a day, then it stands to reason that perhaps the law as a whole is over-written and could stand to be reduced. This new informal policing policy in New York might end up being further evidence of such problems.

Further people have found that in many cases persuasion is much more effective than compulsion. In the UK they've found that they can replace speed cameras (which issue tickets) with radar controlled signs that display smiley or frowny faces and that's much more effective at getting people to slow down. The theory goes that compulsion is a very ephemeral threat and that the police can't be everywhere at once ticketing everyone who's speeding all the time and people know it. But just asking them to slow down with no threat is more effective since it's polite.

https://www.google.com/webhp?q=speed+cameras+persuasion+comp...

A similar theory was used to great effect by King Frederick of Prussia to get people to eat potatoes. Decrees did nothing to make people plant them, but declaring the potato to be a royal food and nobody but the king could eat it caused people to plant it either out of spite or a desire to flout the rules. http://www.historynet.com/ask-mhq-king-frederick-ii-of-pruss...

I'd take a significant bet that opex is much higher than capex for that stuff.

I'm not sure that NYC residents who have been subjected to profiling and stop-and-frisk harassment would agree with that characterization.

I have not read that book, but the answer here sort of blows it up:

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-a...

(That too many things are crimes is probably something I agree with; that accounting companies must only destroy documents according to retention policies and not after they find out one of their clients is a giant fraud is not something that worries me)

I work in Manhattan and visit fairly shitty areas of Brooklyn and Queens regularly. These past few weeks have been the first time since I moved here that I've felt safe in the presence of cops. I'd read about enforcement being down just after the funeral for the officers shot in the Bronx but it really didn't click until a pair of them walked down the street by me in Chelsea. They didn't look at my SO like they were ready to beat the shit out of him for once. They were actually laughing and looked approachable.

I think all this little passive aggressive "protest" will prove is that the world isn't going to end when the police stop hassling the young, non-white and homeless. I'm surprised they don't realize they're pulling the curtain back on their own charade.