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I have littered a nonzero number of times in my life and dodged fares even more (especially when I was a poor student). The chance that anything bad would have happened to me if I had been caught for it was basically zero, and I assume that those for whom it is not the case (i.e. the dumb and impulsive criminals you are talking about) realise this. This breeds resentment (even monkeys, I think, have been found to be sensitive to differential treatment) and presumably reduces buy-in into society from those who are at the short end of this equation.
Now, I know that people on the law-and-order spectrum like seeing criminality (especially non-white-collar criminality, i.e. the type they can't imagine themselves engaging in) in absolutes, where you are either a law-abiding citizen or a criminal who always and at all times is about as bad to the society surrounding them as they can manage to be; therefore there is no point in negotiating or doing anything other than identifying and locking them up ASAP, and in particular they would see "reduced buy-in into society" as a moot concern since they are already being antisocial criminals who don't buy in. However, I don't think this is true; most criminals probably don't engage in antisocial acts nearly as often as they could, and I'd wager they don't commit murder or even smash random windows in all situations they know they could get away with it. In fact they probably subscribe to 90% of the same society-sustaining narrative as the law-and-order crowd, with only some cutouts they have rationalised for themselves to violate it in specific ways in particular contexts. If you make criminals feel that they can't be equal members of society even on their "down-"/law-abiding time, this might just stop being the case, and life for everyone would make a turn for the worse.
(Arguably the US is already halfway there in places with certain minorities being actively fed the narrative that society is not for them, but I assume that the set of criminals that would be caught by "turnstile enforcement anarcho-tyranny" - because this is what it would read to someone whose self-narrative is "productive member of society who sometimes has to stray off the good path for very valid reasons" - is not just a subset of those minorities.)
Removing serious criminals from the streets is good, regardless of how black people feel about it. And arresting people who commit minor crimes is a very valid way to do that.
I'm honestly a little irritated that none of the responses seem to really want to engage with my actual question, which is whether this particular type of crackdown could result in a net loss to society because criminals and criminal-adjacent people will start behaving worse.
Yes, I get that you don't like criminals, and think that removing them is good, and that arresting people who commit minor crimes is a "valid" (what exactly does that mean here?) way to do that. Taken at its most likely interpretation, this is a boring, mainstream position with no nuance and no utilitarian receipts shown. Why do you believe those things? If it's just axiomatic, then talking about it is not really appropriate for the venue, since the only way in which a moral axiom can be persuasive is by showing off a +1 to adherent numbers and hoping for conformism.
No, arresting people who commit minor crimes is not a valid way to get serious criminals off the street. Arresting serious criminals who have outstanding warrants for serious crimes when they happen to get caught committing a minor one is. These are not the same thing.
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Well, I don't like people disagreeing with me on the internet, and I would assume you don't get a lot of opportunity to post from prison either...
(Quips aside, "I don't like it" really doesn't amount to much as an argument to remove "it" entirely in the general case. Have you thought through all the different contexts in which the same argument would lead to clearly nonsensical conclusions?)
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I think they're much less opposed to it than white progs, frankly.
Saw a recent poll, 82 percent of black dem voters consider crime to be a high priority to them. For white Dems, the number is 31 percent. They live in wildly different spheres, totally disconnected in terms of exposure to the ass end of these high minded but out of touch policies.
Not disputing that. But even inside the frame of reference, the decision to prioritize the feelings of black people over real world crime control is, well, a choice, and not an obvious one either, and needs to be called out as such.
The fact that the choice happens not to be grounded in any particular real world data about the feelings of black people is irrelevant to that point- crime control is more important than the feelings of any one group.
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If you had been caught, you would have been fined.
If a dumb and impulsive criminal is caught littering or fare jumping, they will be fined as well. If they have outstanding warrants, they will be arrested -- because they have just been caught for something other than littering or fare jumping as well.
it depends i guess. I fare jumped in the US many times because I saw that the tickets were never checked. Eventually they did check and my punishment was being asked to get off the train and I had to walk the rest of the way, which was not that big of a deal but felt like an idiot. Would not recommend. This was 12 years ago
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I'm aware. (Not sure about littering, where I lived.) It was a calculated risk I could take.
The bottom line still is that they couldn't take what for me is a calculated and very bounded risk. Fast food can give me gastric distress, but sometimes still is the best option; fare dodging can give me a 40 euro fine, but sometimes likewise is the best option. If criminals were reliably arrested on sight in gastronomic establishments, would they think of it as "shucks, guess it was my bad for doing crime once" or as "fuck this society that has made it clear I can't live in it normally"?
Getting caught having outstanding warrants is doing crime at least three times.
The first crime for which the warrant is issued, the second crime of dodging the warrant, and the third crime that you got caught perpetrating.
Why shouldn't we arrest triple criminals exactly?
Littering and fare-dodging are hardly what one typically thinks of as a "crime" (or, well, as I said above, I'm an unrepentant multiple-time criminal along with approximately everyone I know).
Responding also to @Jiro above, this is in fact the essence of the question I'm asking - is it actually for the better to arrest criminals no matter what? No human has ever lived in a society anywhere close to a 100% capture rate for law-breakers, and I for my part am not only not ready to tear down that fence but also feeling iffy about it constantly getting pushed around and climbed over. It seems likely to me that plenty of criminals with outstanding warrants continue living a mostly positive-sum life in society; some of them may have passed by my window without breaking it, passed me by in a dark alley without mugging me, and sold me food at a convenience store. I don't think it's obvious that it's worthwhile to reduce incentives for them to do so, just so you can capture some greater percentage of them. I assume the "what's the punishment for being late?" story is pretty widely known around here, too.
Yes, stealing from and polluting the commons is bad actually.
Yeah, so is driving SUVs, not separating your garbage, making noise at night when people are trying to sleep and enjoying yourself when others have it worse than you. People still do those things at times.
The reason you shouldn't arrest triple criminals according to even the nominally criminalised subset of the mildly antisocial behaviours I have admitted to sometimes comitting above is that we would wind up arresting enough people to paralyze society immediately, and even if you postulate that things would eventually settle down in a new equilibrium where people don't litter or dodge fares ever, you'd just have created a society that is actually on average worse for everyone involved because it turns out that you lose more utility from having no choice but to walk home 20km if you lost your wallet once than you lose on over the same time period from letting the occasional fare-dodger get away with it.
SUVs have emissions standards, one could argue they should be made more strict but society has decided what the limits on the personal comfort to car pollution question are and SUV drivers are in bounds. All of your examples are doing things within the social contract. This is just so many unimpressive excuses for low trust antisocial behavior.
This isn't what happened though, is it?
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It's not "doing crime once". It's "having an outstanding warrant because I missed a court appearance for another crime I committed". People with outstanding warrants aren't supposed to be able to live in society normally; they're supposed to be arrested.
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The fact that criminals can't jump turnstiles without going to jail is irrelevant because they should be going to jail anyway. They're not supposed to be able to live in society normally because they are supposed to be taken out of society.
If criminals were arrested on sight in restaurants, it would be fine that criminals can't go to a restaurant, because they're supposed to be in jail where they can't go to a restaurant anyway.
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