US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4028

On July 28 2023 04:14 Slydie wrote:


According to freakonomics the main reason was.... drumroll... More liberal abortion laws. More parents who did not think they could take care of their children 20-30 years prior did not have them.

The criminals were never born.

On July 28 2023 03:13 ChristianS wrote:
(Edit: @Drone, I hadn’t read any responses after that before posting)

Yeah, I mean, I’m skeptical of anybody that tells too confident a causal story (especially a local one) about 90’s crime rates, considering crime was insanely high and nobody knew why or what to do about it, and then it dropped precipitously everywhere, all at the same time, again without anybody really knowing why. Like, if bee populations are dying off everywhere, it’s natural to seek a causal explanation, but it should be pretty obvious somebody insisting “it’s because this farmer in Iowa switched pesticide brands” doesn’t have the whole story.

In New York specifically, it more or less coincides with Jack Maple essentially “moneyballing” the police, reworking the whole system around measuring and responding to crime rates. It’s a nice success story, and plausible enough to me, although the next thing that happens is terrible and predictable: police departments everywhere rebuild themselves around gaming crime statistics, which has all kinds of negative side effects. Sometimes they’re incentivized to lower them, resulting in department-wide efforts to downscale any reported crimes; other times they’re incentivized to raise them, resulting in (at best) upscaling reported crimes or (at worst) sending out cops to find somebody, anybody, to ticket or arrest.

A bit of a digression: my dad’s Mormon LDS, and he used to tell me stories about when he went on his mission to Brazil. Apparently there were monthly meetings at the mission where leadership would talk strategy about how to improve performance. One month it was “We’ve had a lot of first meetings this month, but a pretty low percentage lead to people requesting follow-up visits. So this month we’re really pushing to get that percentage up!” The next month it was “Okay, the percentage went up, but now first visits are down. Let’s try to get out there and make more first visits!” But it was obvious what was happening: when they wanted more first visits, missionaries would report any brief conversation in the street as a “first visit.” When they wanted better conversion to follow-up visits, they’d only report “first visits” of people that seemed genuinely interested.

This is a fundamental challenge in data-driven approaches even if you’re genuinely trying to solve the problem. But another element to this is that when police departments get good at manipulating the stats, that gives them political leverage. Wanna get elected on a platform of criminal justice reform? Well how do the cops feel about your reforms? If they don’t like them, there’s a pretty good chance crime rates will be up next time you’re up for re-election. It doesn’t really matter whether your underlying philosophy about “addressing root causes” or whatever was right, because before you can worry about *actually* lowering crime you have to first figure out how to *seem* to lower crime, or you’ll just get kicked out of office.

Although that might be less of a factor these days because people just don’t care if the stats say crime is down. Trump’s whole “American Carnage” campaign was just completely dismissive of the fact crime rates were down basically everywhere; they just kept shouting “criminals are destroying your country” anyway and voters bought it. Or that SF recall election for Chesa Boudin or w/e that BJ keeps bringing up? My understanding is that crime statistics didn’t even show an increase! But a right-wing meme campaign made her name synonymous with rising crime anyway, so she was gone.

At any rate, the net result is that when you have places (like SF!) clearly going through some dramatic and destabilizing changes, the only response available to governments is authoritarian: mandatory minimums, more cops, more military equipment, bigger police budgets. Anything else is political suicide, even though that’s basically the same shit local governments were trying in, like, 1982 and it didn’t really work.

On July 28 2023 04:14 Slydie wrote:


According to freakonomics the main reason was.... drumroll... More liberal abortion laws. More parents who did not think they could take care of their children 20-30 years prior did not have them.

The criminals were never born.

On July 28 2023 04:32 NewSunshine wrote:

Well, if you're suggesting that, by contrast, Right-wingers rolling us back 50 years and banning abortion did so knowing it would exacerbate a host of social problems including poverty and crime, so that they can then point to the existence of those problems as evidence that we're not electing enough right-wing officials into office, and that it's some kind of vicious cycle...

Well, I'd be shocked at the thought.

On July 28 2023 05:51 Slydie wrote:


That seems far fetched to me. Right wingers do not care about the social consequences of stricter abortion rights. They fight for foetuses and sexual moralism. Once the babies are born they could not care less. They won.

On July 28 2023 13:05 Falling wrote:

This is a fun hot take in liberal circles. But by population, the pro-life crowd is one of the most likely groups to adopt children, which is no joke strictly on the financial end these days. As such, I don't see this as especially compelling argument except to gain internet high fives.