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There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate, not necessarily severity. The problem in the USA and Europe is that the disproportionate arrest rates of minorities is attributed to societal failures that one of the competing dominant political arms can use to attack the other in order to further their own political interests. So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.
The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.
The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements. Disproportionate amounts of resources are invested in cleaning up after noncooperatives, and even more are invested in resources to gently nudge them into being cooperative of their own recognizance or accommodating their preferences through rehabilitation and custodial services. Some people get off on being as difficult as possible because they fundamentally hate the people offering them help to begin with, and self-flagellating to absolve the noncooperative of their responsibility does not lead to greater resource utilization efficacy.
Just like how drug-testing welfare recipients does not meaningfully capture significant amounts of drug abusers or signalling immigration crackdowns does not actually catch many illegals, these programs are meant as signals to the noncompliant that mercy is no longer guaranteed. Less fare evaders will use the services on offer to begin with, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.
Maybe the answer is the Tom Paris rebuttal.
That's without counting the effects downstream from Broken Windows Theory. Which despite mainstream academia trying for decades to tarnish it, is so obvious from observation of humans and human nature that it still holds a quasi-tautological position in my thinking on this.
It is often a private choice, and it is harder to notice if this has any downstream effect because ressources are deployed to clean up, as you've mentionned. I've started to prefer bus queues to point out antisocial elements. Who, when coming up to wait at a bus stop that has an obvious, clear, nonambiguous line of people queueing up for the bus, decides to ignore the queue entirely, without any mitigating factors (joining a friend being barely acceptable). There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.
Why is it sad?
Are you happy when someonetakes cuts in front of you to get a limited resource (like a seat on a filling bus)? When people line up in order of arrival there's a certain fairness.
Yeah -- not what I was asking about. The question is why it's sad that there are patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues. To me this implies some 'ought'-style thinking that I can neither model nor understand. Should cultures or people all be identical? If not, doesn't that imply differences? Is the sentiment of the person to whom I was responding merely a reflexive genuflection toward prevailing political ideology, or did he mean something else by it?
Within a nation, yes, I believe it's best for the nation to share a single culture. There can be lots of room for personal preferences some might like to sit in the back of the bus others near the front etc but I think nations are best when it's a smaller nation built around a shared culture universal to the nation. Multicultural nations should assimilate or subdivide.
For example I'm of German descent and I think the forced assimilation of Germans during World War I should happen to all the population groups in America. It would be a painful transition but the results would make the nation a better place.
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I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.
It's also interesting to note that for the bus queues, the demographics at fault are not exclusively those you're probably thinking about. Yes, they are overrepresented, but some of the most frequently offending demographic I notice are elderly women (of all races).
I am torn on this.
On the one hand, the fact that offenders are disproportionately members of a certain demographic group makes it harder to gather the political support needed to crack down on fare evasion; this is, indeed, sad, sad because it is a reflection of how thoroughly the mind-virus of wokeism and its opportunistic infection of “disparate impact”-ism has infected the body politic.
On the other hand, what’s not sad is the fact that much-needed and even-handed punishment of fare evaders would affect certain demographics disproportionately. As I see it, the reputation or good name of one’s visible demographic group—race, sex, certain religions, perhaps class insofar as indicated through clothing and mannerisms—is a commons in the economic sense. However, unlike the economist’s favorite example of grazing land, the reputation of one’s demographic group cannot possibly be privatized to avoid the tragedy of the commons: liberals and wokeists (when tactically convenient) tend to argue for a form of “privatization”, viz. “treating people as individuals” and not stereotyping. But the fact remains that humans are too good at pattern matching and stereotypes remain stubbornly accurate in their predictions. And the brute fact also remains that some demographic groups do a good job of maintaining a positive reputation for the group, even at some individual cost, while others overgraze the commons and then complain about unfair treatment.
To be maximally fair, it truly does suck to be judged negatively by the color of your skin, or some other attribute you didn’t choose, when in fact you’re an upstanding pro-social citizen who bucks the stereotypes. The solution here is twofold:
As the unjustly-judged individual, you should put pressure on your group—even if you didn’t choose to be a member of that group!—to do a better job of maintaining the commons, since it’s never going away.
The system as a whole must punish all individuals swiftly, surely, and harshly enough that the calculus of “Well, I’m already going to be seen as $NEGATIVE_STEREOTYPE anyway; might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb” does not make sense.
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As for the reason elderly women are often taking antisocial actions, I would hasard the reason is the same as anyone else. People, but men especially, are quickly thaught in life that them taking antisocial actions will usually make people around them angry. Sometimes this anger will turn to confrontation, and rarely (but sometimes) that confrontation will turn to violence. Minorities in majority white countries know that they could potentially turn it around if confronted by a white person by claiming it's racism so some of them abuse that. And elderly women (of any race) are the most oblivious demographic of all, because they are completely insulated from the consequences of antisocial actions as anyone confronting them immediately looks like the bad guy in the situation. If they had the physical ability to jump turnstiles, I have no doubt they would.
Alternatively, instead of thinking about elderly women as antisocial turnstile jumpers, you could think about the reasons an elderly woman might want to have first dibs for seats on a bus — like being elderly and frail and needing to sit down.
Elderly women should be offered accessible seats on a bus, for sure. But I think they need to either wait for people to offer these seats, or they should ask if other would mind if they went first. For an able young person, refusing to let an elderly person sit is itself antisocial. But them just taking for granted they are owed this is rude and antisocial, and I think most people (and most elderly women) know this.
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I don't know that I'd characterize it as "reflexive genuflection," but the way I interpreted the statement was that it's sad that the specific pattern that's observed is sad (rather than that it's sad that there is a pattern at all, which is what the text actually says, which I took to be carelessness), because the prevailing ideology makes it difficult to solve the problem due to making the act of publicly noticing this specific pattern severely punishable. Now, I'm personally not sure that ignoring such patterns is meaningfully harmful to our ability to address the problem of the kinds of antisocial behavior that's being discussed, but certainly many people in this forum seem to believe otherwise.
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I think that there is a very real sense in which surety of consequences is a more effective deterrent than severity. IME lots of people who might roll the dice on a 5% chance of something very bad happening become an order of magnitude more careful/conservative/cooperative when presented with a 50% chance of something moderately bad happening.
I believe that you, I, and the NYP are all in broad agreement here.
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