ScootyHoofdorp t1_ix8d53l wrote
Baltimore has created a culture where there is no reason not to commit crimes and solve problems with guns, because there is so little chance of being held accountable for it. We need to convince people that they will be worse off if they pull the trigger, and we have not yet done that. An actual perceivable threat of jail time is one way to do that. Studies have shown that creating a perception of the swiftness and certainty of prison time reduces crime. Lengthy prison sentences are not required, but there needs to be consequences. Programs like the Group Violence Reduction Strategy also aims to convince people that pulling the trigger is not their best option and has shown promise so far. It's all about incentives. With an ineffective police force and criminal justice system, all the incentives are in place for murder to flourish. Of course, we also need to be addressing poverty, blight, bad schools, food insecurity, etc. But, if we're not pursuing approaches to reduce crime in the near to mid term, we're not actually serious about saving lives.
[deleted] t1_ix8fy3k wrote
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Velghast t1_ix8hnqq wrote
Getting kids off the street is a good start. The youth around here glorify the street. When kids dont think they are worth shit they aspire to be "king" of the streets and running their block. Why? No idea.
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ix8pt3a wrote
It's not super complicated. Most people generally want to control their own destiny, which most often means controlling whatever resources are available to them. In rich neighborhoods, that means money...so going to school, getting a job, and/or starting a business are the ways to control that resource. In poor neighborhoods, there is little money, so one of the few resources available to control is territory. So, some people will inevitably assert claim to it and fight over it.
FolkYouHardly t1_ix9qi7h wrote
>moment in my life no matter how bad things were that I thought that someone’s death would help my situation. I had poorly educated parents, bad neighborhoods, public education, and the rest. I have to think that my socialization was different in some key ways from the ones th
The Wire properly shows how an innocent elementary school kids turn into gangbanger.
Cunninghams_right t1_ixbv9sv wrote
certainly most people who grow up in bad situations don't turn into killers. it takes less than 1 in 1,000 to create problems for a city. I'm not sure how you find the bad apples and separate them without doing unjust things. I suppose you can arrest more folks for lower level crimes before they become killers and try to reform when with more time in jail/prison/rehab/mental hospital, but arresting more and jailing more isn't a popular idea right now.
[deleted] t1_ixc8af4 wrote
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Cunninghams_right t1_ixdxkui wrote
yeah, I think also reforming the way schools are run would be important, but that's a very hard thing to do well. maybe some gradual shift to charter schools but being careful to avoid the problems that some private schools run into due to inequalities in who gets in
Sivla-Alegna t1_ix9astd wrote
As someone that use to commit a fair amount of petty crimes, I never once thought about the consequences before or during the acts. In the rare instance that I didn't think about the consequences, it was afterwards, which isn't super helpful in preventing crime. And humans have an uncanny ability to justify things that they have done, even subconsciously. "Those people have so much, they won't really miss it." "It's a coproation with billions in profits, they don't need all that anyway." "They have insurance that will cover everything." "My life sucks, this isn't going to make it any worse." "Atleast I'd get 3 meals a day and a warm bed in jail." "It's not like I have other options." "If I don't do it, someone else will. I might as well be the one benefiting from it." .......
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ixcnc0q wrote
Yeah, that all makes sense. Real world data on a bigger scale disagrees with your conclusions, though. The perception of punishment comes from largely from policing and the presence of police. We even have a local example that demonstrates that quite well. The aftermath of the Freddie Gray riots proves that when there's less policing, there's more crime.
Bun_Bunz t1_ix8en48 wrote
Yeah no, Baltimore robbed most of these people of an education and a way forward. Your whole premise is that these people have anything to live for to care about to begin with. A lot of them are homeless or close to, or have absent parents, no community. Hard to give a fuck without those things. You don't just join a gang cuz it's fun!
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ix8r5fy wrote
I agree with you that most of these people are lucky to have even a sliver of an opportunity for a productive and healthy future. But, if everyone in the city who had little to live for was willing to kill, our murder rate would be much much higher. If poverty was inextricably tied to crime across the board, homeless people would be killing each other all the time, but that's obviously not the case. Let's not strip impoverished people of their agency and ability to make choices. The vast majority of poor people don't choose violence. The conclusion that some people are simply willing to inflict harm on others while others are not is unavoidable.
Xanny t1_ixibnd7 wrote
Its a generational thing. This whole narrative traces back hundreds of years, but the recent threads have been - poor blacks working labor jobs, the industry died, the whites fled, the city ripped out their streetcars and means of getting around, and they were still here. So they turned to what was left - drugs and crime. The violence was less prominent in the start of the decline because the transition was slow. Jobs gradually lost, people gradually left. The ones who stayed were the ones who participated, enabled, or profited from the emerging culture of violence. It consumes everything else until its all that is left. Kids today are born 5+ generations into this shit.
cologne_peddler t1_ixbi9nk wrote
>An actual perceivable threat of jail time is one way to do that.
Yea bruh I'm sure most criminals are making detailed decision flowcharts about which crimes to commit and how much punishment they can expect from committing those crimes 🙄
Lmao where the hell are you getting the idea that there's no "perceivable threat of jail time?" People committing crimes associated with poverty generally consider death or jail to be inevitable. So that kinda pokes a huge hole in your little theory.
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ixcl2vp wrote
It's not my theory, bud
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence
cologne_peddler t1_ixd5jfo wrote
It's not that theory either lmao. We're talking about murders here bruh, not purse snatching or fights. A study on general crime deterrence doesn't prove that more police activity is going to have an impact on murder rates specifically.
People have already tried to find a correlation between adding cops and crime reduction. The best they could come up with is mixed results; and in the case of murder rates, a number of cities that increased police presence, arrests, etc saw increases or no impact in murders committed.
Look, you're not the first person to grasp at straws in an attempt to prove that there's some viable short term criminal justice solution to murder rates. People have been failing to make this argument for decades just like you have.
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ixdbclb wrote
There's data for that too: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when-you-add-more-police-to-a-city-what-happens
cologne_peddler t1_ixdew98 wrote
Lmao bruh that's one of the very attempts I'm referring to. Holy shit, I didn't expect you to go finding sources that support my point.
>The economists also find troubling evidence that suggests cities with the largest populations of Black people — like many of those in the South and Midwest — don't see the same policing benefits as the average cities in their study. Adding additional police officers in these cities doesn't seem to lower the homicide rate.
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ixdrx0w wrote
The overall trend still holds. Obviously, there are other problems in Baltimore that would prevent just throwing a bunch of extra cops into the streets from being an effective solution. You can try all you want to make it seem like I'm advocating for blind reliance on policing to solve all of our problems with crime, but I don't believe that and I never said that. In my initial comment, I said that creating the perception of swift and certain punishment was ONE WAY to reduce crime, and it can work here too. BPD needs to restore trust with our communities in order to be effective, and they clearly have a long way to go. But it's not as if Baltimore is so unlike any other city that policing could never be a viable option for crime deterrence. European countries have much larger police forces per capita than we do here, and their crime rates are significantly lower. There's a reason there aren't any large cities without police: Policing works, no matter how politically inconvenient that may be for you. Focused deterrence, violence interruption, and any other number of strategies can work here too and I'm glad they're being deployed. And, to reiterate what I said before, all of this should be in addition to materially improving peoples lives and outcomes. But, to cast policing aside as a way to deter crime is to spit in the face of the people who actually live in the communities torn apart by violent crime who are asking for more police.
cologne_peddler t1_ixgjcya wrote
>The overall trend still holds.
No. The "overall trend" does not hold lol. That's exactly what those words I quoted from your source detected. That it doesn't.
>Obviously, there are other problems in Baltimore that would prevent just throwing a bunch of extra cops into the streets from being an effective solution.
Mhm. That's very observant of you. It would invalidate this paragraph-breakless epistle of yours, and yet you forged ahead anyway.
>You can try all you want to make it seem like I'm advocating for blind reliance on policing to solve all of our problems with crime, but I don't believe that and I never said that.
You're making unfounded assertions about the efficacy of a destructive institution. If that's not advocating for blind reliance, I don't know what is.
>In my initial comment, I said that creating the perception of swift and certain punishment was ONE WAY to reduce crime, and it can work here too. BPD needs to restore trust with our communities in order to be effective, and they clearly have a long way to go. But it's not as if Baltimore is so unlike any other city that policing could never be a viable option for crime deterrence.
It's an unproven way to reduce crime you mean. Anyhow, in your initial comment, you painted this as a near term solution to homicides in Baltimore. Now you're saying BPD has "a long way to go" to restore trust in order to be effective. So it's not a near-term solution at all. Not only is your reasoning faulty, you're also inconsistent.
>But it's not as if Baltimore is so unlike any other city that policing could never be a viable option for crime deterrence. European countries have much larger police forces per capita than we do here, and their crime rates are significantly lower.
"European countries?" Putting aside that you're comparing a non-uniform assortment of nations, you're just presuming that their lower crime rates are due to the size of their police forces. Typical causation/correlation fuckup. And I'm being generous by taking your word on the correlation.
>There's a reason there aren't any large cities without police: Policing works, no matter how politically inconvenient that may be for you.
Policing works because large cities have police? This is such puerile reasoning lol.
Endowing cops results in people of color being brutalized at the hands of the government. That's not "politically inconvenient" for me, privileged white guy, its a threat to my existence.
>And, to reiterate what I said before, all of this should be in addition to materially improving peoples lives and outcomes.
Yea, let's empower a violently racist institution to pursue a course of action of unproven benefit. Experimental state violence is OK as long as we run it alongside materially improving lives 🙄. That's such an easy call to make from one's perch in Federal Hill.
How about this - just improve material circumstances. That has a closer correlation to crime rates than turning cops loose in the streets with nebulous mandates. Your crime and punishment fetish can wait.
>But, to cast policing aside as a way to deter crime is to spit in the face of the people who actually live in the communities torn apart by violent crime who are asking for more police
Lmao white guy engages in selective hearing of Black people, uses cherrypicked points of view to support his sophistry. This scam is as old as racism in America itself.
I'm sure you don't actually know anyone in a disadvantaged community of color, but the feeling that cops are a net negative is fairly common one. The idea that there's a universal desire for more boots on the ground is fucking laughable. But tell me more about spitting in faces...
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ixhty39 wrote
The sum total of your rebuttal to my claims is: "nuh-uh." You provide no data to support your positions, you flippantly disregard any actual evidence I point to, and you twist my words every chance you get. "Cops are bad" is an easy position to take, but there's a lot more nuance to this than it seems you're able to acknowledge.
I'm careening towards that cliché definition of insanity by trying again with some actual evidence and data, but here we go:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html
I don't know if 81% of black Americans saying they want police to spend the same amount or more time in their neighborhoods can be considered "near-universal", but this is America, so 81% agreement on anything is pretty damn conclusive. I've tried to find any polling that says a majority of black Americans want less police and less police funding. I can't find anything that says that because the opposite is true. Pew research found 76% of black Americans want more or the same police funding. Explain to me exactly how this is cherry picked.
Also, if policing can do absolutely nothing to reduce homicides, how do you explain the fact that BPD pulled back in 2015 and murders skyrocketed? Baltimore is neither the first nor the last city to experience very similar trends. Also, how do explain the fact that homicides plummeted in NYC in the 90s and inequality arguably just got worse? The evidence is clear that solving poverty is not as clean of a solution to crime as you think it is.
cologne_peddler t1_ixivj5f wrote
>The sum total of your rebuttal to my claims is: "nuh-uh."
Well yea, Professor...my entire point is that you you don't have evidence to prove these weak ass arguments lmao. I'm essentially poking holes in your unfounded assertions. Duh.
>You provide no data to support your positions, you flippantly disregard any actual evidence I point to, and you twist my words every chance you get. "
All I'm doing is pointing out how your sources don't support what you're saying. That's my "data" lol.
>I'm careening towards that cliché definition of insanity by trying again with some actual evidence and data, but here we go:
Lmao it's always funny watching disconnected white folk use polls to explain Black people's feelings. Lol this shit is basically sketch comedy. Why do so many of yall do this without appreciating the absurdity?
>I don't know if 81% of black Americans saying they want police to spend the same amount or more time in their neighborhoods can be considered "near-universal", but this is America, so 81% agreement on anything is pretty damn conclusive.
Your little poll also says
>Fewer than one in five Black Americans feel very confident that the police in their area would treat them with courtesy and respect.
>
>However, 59% of the relatively small group of Black Americans who are "not at all confident" that the police would treat them with courtesy and respect want the police to spend less time in their neighborhood.
>
>When factoring in those who are at least somewhat confident that the police would treat them well, a majority of Black Americans (61%) are generally confident, but this is still below the 85% seen nationally, including 91% of White Americans.
I get that you don't actually talk to any Black people, but the conflicting sentiments in your own source should give you pause. Somewhere between "80% of Black people don't want fewer cops in their neighborhoods" and "75% of Black people don't have confidence in being treated fairly by cops" is a group of people who are probably sympathetic to the idea that maybe that entire institution is ineffective. I've had those conversations. Even the people who ultimately disagree aren't as intransigent as some coddled Federal Hill brat who's never been been mistreated or brutalized by cops.
>https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html
And prior to Civil Rights passing, 60% to 70% of Black people polled thought mass demonstrations hurt efforts for racial equality.
The idea of defunding cops is relatively new in mainstream discourse, and in the little time it's been here, it's been oversimplified, misinterpreted or demonized without nuance. So it's entirely unremarkable that 90% of people polled aren't on board after sitting with it for a couple years. If this were 1963, you'd be holding a newspaper and shrieking at protestors too lol.
>Also, if policing can do absolutely nothing to reduce homicides, how do you explain the fact that BPD pulled back in 2015 and murders skyrocketed?
Where the fuck are you getting this from, the FOP website? The whole "cops pulled back and things got worse" bullshit is dumb ass police union propaganda. Fucking do better.
>Also, how do explain the fact that homicides plummeted in NYC in the 90s and inequality arguably just got worse? The evidence is clear that solving poverty is not as clean of a solution to crime as you think it is.
Right...you mean the decade the poverty rate fell precipitously? When unemployment fell to under 5% for the first time in decades? Yea, I'm sure that refutes the correlation between poverty and crime somehow.
You can lead a fool to data but you can't make him understand it.
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ixp08lw wrote
It seems that you're the one who is proving my point. The fact that black people don't think that cops will treat them fairly but STILL want them in their neighborhoods clearly shows that they believe cops can prevent and address crime. That's the only logical way to reconcile the 81% figure and the 75% figure. I don't buy that that large of majority of black people have no idea what they're talking about, and that's what you want me to believe.
I think we've gone back and forth about policing enough. We're not going to change each other's minds. But, I do genuinely want to know if you have any ideas for addressing the murder rate in the near to mid term. To put some rough numbers on that, how do we get under 200 murders in 5 years' time? Do you even think that's possible?
cologne_peddler t1_ixpyvsm wrote
Your ✌️point✌️ is that one part of an opinion poll reflects the unmovable sentiment of a group of people you never interact with. I told you why this point was flawed:
-The conflicting sentiment in the poll itself
-Polling around new ideas move. A lot. Again, if this were 1960, you'd be using a poll to explain that Black people really want everyone to stop demonstrating. And that would have been an idiotic thing to propose.
The idea that American policing is a failure took seed and germinated in Black communities..places where those failures are most plainly manifest. So to be all "sEe ThEy wAnT cOpS bEcAuSe tHiS pOlL sEz So" is oblivious white guy shit. You're like a caricature of a privileged gentrifier lol. If this were 1990 you'd be the "some of my friends are Black" guy.
Anyway, there's no quick policing solution to elevated crime rates. There's only ineffective, reactionary bullshit that further victimizes marginalized people. Relying on cops to address society's structural deficiencies is dead. I feel like more privileged white people need to get slaughtered by cops before yall fucking get it. I mean, it took an opioid epidemic tearing through the burbs for you all to rethink our punitive approach to drug addiction.
ScootyHoofdorp t1_ixx4go7 wrote
I should have expected that you'd provide just as many ideas for how to reduce violent crime as you have datapoints to support the idea that a majority of black people want less police.
MontisQ t1_ix97a9f wrote
>Baltimore has created a culture where there is no reason not to commit crimes and solve problems with guns
It's not just Baltimore culture, it's American culture. It seems that the first step in a disagreement is to pull a gun. That goes for white, black, urban, rural, etc.
DfcukinLite t1_ixb7cdx wrote
You’re getting down voted but you’re absolutely right.
MontisQ t1_ixdggyq wrote
Yea, I guess people think I’m saying that Baltimore doesn’t have this culture or problem. But if people think they are going to go to a different city to escape gun violence, I’ve got bad news for them…
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