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Saying that society should recognize that these people are garbage and not give a damn about them is a position that can only be taken if one is very selective about whom this categorization refers to, and this selectivity is why activists protest and call opinions such as yours inherently racist, or classist, or whatever. When Mr. Penny decided to put Mr. Neely in a chokehold, his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Giving him a free pass on this seems reasonable enough, but only because we have the additional context that this was a black, homeless, schizo, ne'er do well. Suppose, on the other hand, a white, middle-class, student at a prestigious university (possibly your son) got drunk and started making a scene on public transit. A group of black passengers were made uncomfortable by his behavior and the young man died after on of these passengers put him in a choke hold. When I was in my early 20s being drunk, loud, and obnoxious on public transit was a regular occurrence, as we could go to the club in the city on 50 cent drink night without having to drive or park. Just a few years ago a friend of mine went into a similar rant about Taco Bell on the train back to the hotel after the 2018 ACC Championship Game in Charlotte. And if the counterargument is that Neely was obviously a dangerous hobo then that just confirms the suspicions of all the social justice do-gooders that you expect the rules to be different for certain people, and we're supposed to expect people to be able to tell the difference based on the way a guy's dressed or whether we think he's mentally ill or homeless or, mast damningly, whether he's white.
I remember a similar storyline back when black guys getting shot by cops was in the news more often, and most of the conservatives I know kept pointing out that one has an obligation to obey when a police officer tells you to do something. As a guy in his '30s this seemed reasonable, until I looked back at my own life and realized that by these people's standards I'd have been dead a long time ago. Yes, I agree generally with the argument that if a police officer decides to arrest you then what happens afterward happens on his terms, not yours, and if you have a problem with that you can bring it up in court. On the other hand, any teenager who is told to stop by police is going to start running. I wasn't a bad kid by a long-shot—I only got two write-ups in four years of high school, and one was for a class cut—but I still liked to occasionally indulge in the kind of mischief kids indulge in, like drinking in woods of indeterminate ownership or stealing pumpkins from farm fields and shit like that, and this would sometimes end with a fat, black cop chasing a bunch of spry kids through fields and woods. I once got away because I crawled under a fence that the guy couldn't fit under. If we took these statements about a duty of compliance to their logical conclusion, the officer had every right to shoot me. After all, I had clearly committed a crime, ignored his orders and fled. And it was clear that he wasn't going to catch me unless he could stop me from a distance. And this was for the same type of "quality of life" shit a lot of law and order types are complaining about. How would you like it if property you paid for was being used without permission by people on quads and dirt bikes during the day, cutting trails you don't want, contributing to erosion, and scaring away huntable animals, and then at night the same kids would come back and build fires and leve beer cans and fast food wrappers everywhere? People in rural areas have gotten in trouble for putting up tripwires and spike strips and other kinds of booby traps to keep people from trespassing, and while there's some pushback it's understandable that parents get pissed when criminal trespass results in serious premeditated injury. If we develop standards they have to apply to everybody, and few people realize what the implications of this would be.
He did not have every right to shoot you, and odds are he was well aware of that, since using deadly force to subdue a fleeing criminal has been unconstitutional for almost 40 years now and police academies across America teach this to every class. The only instances in which using deadly force to subdue a fleeing criminal is permitted is when the officer has a reasonable belief that the criminal poses a substantial threat to someone's life.
Posts like this exemplify the dishonesty in all discourse surrounding black crime and the consequences imposed upon it. Hardly anyone is shot because they were running away from the cops. Many (most?) cases involve people who were actively attacking the cops, like Michael Brown, or attacking someone else, like Makhia Bryant. Breonna Taylor was shot because her drug dealer boyfriend opened fire on the cops, and they fired back. These are experiences far removed from the lives of the white libs who do this "Aww shucks, who didn't do a little horsing around when they were kids?" routine, and yet there is always this pretense that it could happen to anyone. Have you ever charged a cop and tried to steal his gun? Have you ever picked up a knife and tried to stab someone? Have you ever dealt drugs out of your apartment, or lived with someone who did? If not, why pretend the law and order types aren't in touch with reality?
I wasn't discussing the actual law, I was discussing the rhetoric from conservatives in my social circle that suggests that a cop has the right to do anything to force compliance. In any event, the case you referenced states that they aren't allowed to use deadly force unless "the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others." In practice this isn't a particularly difficult standard to meet. Recall the Antwon Rose shooting where the officer shot a fleeing suspect and was acquitted by a jury with three black jurors and a black foreman. In an attempt to quell protests that erupted in the wake of the verdict, the foreman went on local television and explained that the law gives police wide latitude in these situations and changing that law is the job of the legislature, not a criminal jury. While my own underage drinking experience probably wouldn't fall into that kind of situation, the Rose case was pretty big here and most conservatives defending the police were of the opinion that anyone who ran deserved to get shot, and I used my own experiences to push back against this argument.
Again, Antwon Rose was fleeing from a police stop of his car that had been used 10 minutes prior for a drive-by-shooting. Under those circumstances, the cops had every reason to believe the inhabitants of the car posed a significant threat to the lives of others - they had been shooting at people just 10 minutes ago! You have absolutely no experiences that are even remotely similar to this! Why keep up this "There but for the grace of God go I" act?
Because, again, it's not about the actual circumstances but about the rhetoric. In the days after the shooting it wasn't known that the police officer in the Rose case pulled the vehicle over based on anything other than a vague description, and it certainly wasn't known that Rose was involved in the actual shooting. The protestors made it seem like the kids had no idea why the vehicle had been pulled over and simply ran out of instinct when confronted by the officer. Conservatives at the time said that, even assuming that the protestors' account of events was true it didn't matter; by virtue of having deliberately disobeyed the orders of a sworn officer and run the kids were tempting fate. Same thing with the George Floyd case—the guy was in custody, unarmed, restrained, and not going anywhere, and again some people acted like the officer should have been given carte blanche because Floyd wasn't 100% compliant. I din't have any disagreement with the Rose verdict once the facts came out, but some people simply said facts be damned, only criminals run from the cops. That's what I'm arguing against.
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Correction: Have you ever dealt drugs out of your apartment, or lived with someone who did, and also had a DEAD BODY in your car?
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Have you ever actually lived downtown in a large city with a substantial homeless population? You can identify this class of homeless person by smell from an entire subway car away. And the ranting really isn't the kind of thing you see with normal wasted people. None of this is really to say that I endorse the more extreme points of the previous poster but lets not play dumb, your average city dweller is not mistaking normal drunk people who happen to be black for the belligerent homeless.
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Do you think most people would be capable of using that 30 seconds of observation to arrive at an educated guess regarding Mr. Neeley's criminal history that would line up fairly accurately with his actual criminal history? If so, are they morally obligated to register that prediction as purely prejudicial and push it to the back of their mind, internally insisting to themselves that it has no predictive value?
Even if it has predictive value I don't see what the point is. Either people causing disruptions that make the general public do so at their own risk of consequences up to and including death if anyone feels the least bit threatened or they don't. Even if someone can make an accurate predication about another person's criminal and mental health history we have to establish criteria under which he can operate. Do we really want to go down the road of defining how many arrests it takes before someone is legally considered scum and forfeits basic civil rights most of us enjoy? And what happens if someone's wrong? If Neely was really just a normal dude dealing with some personal problems that expressed themselves in an unfortunate way, do we then bring the hammer down on Penny for wrongfully assuming he was some homeless wino? If not, then do we just give everyone the benefit of the doubt and lose the distinction entirely? When dealing with matters involving human life I don't know if this is a road we want to go down.
YES. Is this actually supposed to be a difficult question?
I don't think you've really thought about it if you consider such a question to be obvious.
Alright, look, my totally-serious well-considered answer is something like this: every civilization in history, before the last century or so, had an understanding that there are irredeemably useless and/or dangerous people, and found a way to dispose of them. I am not suggesting that every society in history has employed an optimal and reasonable solution to the existence of these people, nor am I suggesting that all imaginable future societies will take approaches that I would consider acceptable.
The hypothetical dystopian panopticon that arrests or punished normal citizens hundreds of times a month for utterly innocuous behavior is not a society I’d want to live in. But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality? Isn’t it much more likely that a future society will find a middle ground somewhere in between the maximally-tolerant legal regime advocated by today’s progressive elite on the one hand, and the maximally-draconian fever dream which you may imagine the hard-right is capable of implementing?
Surely the answer to “how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable? If there were a guy who’d been arrested 4,000 times, and all of them were for things you and I would both agree are antisocial and destructive, that’s someone that it’s necessary to do something about… right?
Every civilization in history, before the last century or so, was also in many many ways a really bad place to live compared to the modern West. I do not think that these two things are completely unrelated.
I totally reject this reading of history, which is probably the main reason why you and I disagree so strongly. I accept the reality of technological/medical advancement, but reject the narrative of monotonic societal/cultural improvement. I don’t think that most societies before a century ago were “really bad places to live”, especially if you weren’t a lunatic or a criminal.
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Have you MET the "Karens"? They'd think the ticket machine in Demolition Man was the greatest thing ever. And there's a lot of them and many have nothing better to do than to go to city council meetings.
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Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."
I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).
No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.
Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.
I'm fairly certain it does, unless your entire conception of civil rights is purely procedural.
I think this is just a semantic quibble. The way the phrase "civil rights" is generally used is consistent with what I wrote. Obviously putting someone in prison requires restricting their rights at that point, but we can still respect the rights against unwarranted search and seizure, right to jury trial, right not to self-incriminate, etc.
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Like most things, criminality is partly heritable. Some people, when given freedom choose to defect against others.
Executing the most violent criminals before they reproduce over many thousands of years is artificial selection for civilisation.
You would expect it to increase the proportion of law abiding genes.
There are pretty big population difference is crime. Has anyone looked at historical time and percentage of executions for crime vs present day rates?
Ok, but it's partly not heritable. A majority non-heritable, if my google-fu isn't too bad. But also, heritability is kind of a tricky metric to interpret. If you reduce the effect of environment on criminality (e.g. raising the standard of living so that most people don't need crime to survive) then heritability of crime goes up, even if the relationship between genes and criminality hasn't really changed.
In any event, this seems like an extremely weak reason to start executing lots of people. High punishment and high crime are almost certainly positively correlated across time and space, because e.g. severe punishment is a natural-seeming response to high crime rates and low clearance rates, and because both reflect the level of violence in the society.
Do you have any numbers that would indicate how long it would take to see a substantial reduction in crime due to the effect of such a mass execution?
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Yes? The damage to society, the ‘tragedy’, is clearly greater if an upstanding citizen dies in the chokehold than a drug-addicted homeless criminal. If you drive drunk and kill somebody the punishment is far more severe than if you just drive drunk.
Then the principle is wholly untenable. You may have edge cases like this where someone acts and you "get lucky" in a manner of speaking, but you're not going to encourage this kind of vigilantism if it requires holding the vigilante strictly liable for knowing the personal history of his target.
I am only holding people liable for the consequences of their actions. If there was minimal or no damage to society, there should not be punishment.
I guess it comes down to a preferrence: which is more important, guilty mind or guilty act?
To stretch our positions to the extreme, in total Guiltmind, a thoughtcrime would be sufficient for prison, while in total Guiltact, the sentence for accidental discharging of a firearm resulting in death would be the same as for a premeditated murder. In Guiltmind, both drunk drivers are equally guilty, and in Guiltact, one is innocent and the other guilty. Guiltact cares if the guy you just choked on the subway was an honors student or literally Hitler. Guiltmind just wants to know what you thought at the time.
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As I understand OP, his/her answer is no, which is why efforts to justify Penny's behavior by appealing to Neeley's record are misguided. If Penny's actions were justified -- and I don't have enough details to say one way or the other -- they can only be justified based on what he knew at the time. Hence,
People v. Minifie, 13 Cal. 4th 1055, 1068 (1996) (emphasis in original)
Edit: Note, btw, that that legal rule is based on the premise that one who kills an innocent "good" person in those circumstances lacks a criminal state of mind, ie, is not morally culpable.
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The easiest solution here, as far as I can tell, is to have different legal regimes for rural life vs. urban life. Let urban life be for the bug-man law-and-order types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense legal regime, and for the rowdy teenagers and drunkards who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the rural areas where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle. (I don’t mean barbarian in a negative way, but simply to draw a contrast between that ethos and the cosmopolitan lifestyle I prefer.)
Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in my life that would have resulted in me being killed or severely punished under the type of legal regime I’m advocating. I’ve been drunk and stupid before, but never in a way that would cause strangers to feel threatened by me; maybe that’s just because I’m small and not physically-imposing, so my drunk behavior doesn’t present as menacing even if I’m performing the same actions as you and your friends did.
I do have the “privilege” of being white and middle-class-presenting, meaning that people are far less likely to assume the worst of me than they are of someone who looks and acts like Jordan Neely; fortunately, that disparity in perception is justified by statistical reality. People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
Considering the preferences repeatedly expressed by urban and rural residents in elections and informal communication, wouldn't it make more sense to keep rural life for "bug-man law-and-order types", and setting aside the cities for the people who are willing to tolerate the occasional subway screamer in return for having atomicity and interesting ethnic shops and occasionally getting to pat themselves on the shoulder for being enlightened and compassionate? Why do you want to live in a city to begin with? If you move to a city and want to impose a lifestyle on it that the majority of existing dwellers reject, doesn't that put you in the same category as the Islamic refugees that move to a country like Germany or France for economic reasons and then fly off the handle demanding that the locals cease their haram behaviours like having lightly clothed women waltz around in public?
("Let first-world life be for the pious Muslim types like me, with a concomitant no-nonsense moral police, and for the kaffirs and lascivious dogs who are concerned about their mischief falling afoul of that regime, let them go mess around in the desert where the legal regime is designed to provide an outlet for the barbarian lifestyle.")
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On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
This assumes that people are in one of two states: behaving in a deranged and menacing way in public, or minding their own business. That's not really the case though, there is a pretty smooth spectrum of menacing behavior people can exhibit in public.
If observers are being good basians, they will factor in the observed behavior in addition to more contextual information about a person. A well dressed white man drunkenly throwing a single strike at someone and not following it up would seem like a much bigger deal than a similarly attired 5'0" white woman doing the same to me, partially because the woman is much less physically imposing, but also because of what I know about rates of sexed violence and my guess about the likelihood of escalation to a point I couldn't easily control.
At the same time, waving a gun around is a red-alert pretty much no matter the identity of the person doing the waving.
Based on the descriptions I've seen, Jordan Neely was not actually behaving in any sort of violent way. That's why Hoffmeister has to resort to "statistical reality" about black people, to claim that agitated, annoying behavior can be construed as violent. This is not allowed as part of a legal argument for self-defense, with good reason, just like a woman walking alone can't turn around and shoot a man for following her on the public sidewalk and then make an argument about "statistical reality." A "good bayesian" can conclude anything they would like, given limited evidence, if their priors are sufficiently bad. This is why the law does not tell everyone to act like bayesians.
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The legal system was perfectly fine with letting Neely (and many similarly situated) continue his one man reign of terror. Fix that, and then maybe it'll have the legitimacy to judge the Marine.
A "reign of terror"? Are you deliberately taking the piss? He's not Jack the Ripper (the marine, however, did kill someone).
Yeah, "public nuisance crimes" are not what I would call a "reign of terror." No one knew who this guy was until he was killed. An open container of alcohol in public? Turnstile hopping? This forum will get incensed over the fact the FBI uses loopholes and process crimes to punish politicians and rich celebrities who lied to said FBI, and then turn around and seriously claim that these are very legitimate crimes that prove Neely was dangerous and it was a massive failure of law and order for him to still be on the streets. I haven't found any reference to kidnapping; the only serious or violent crimes I've seen reference to are 4 assaults (over 8 years) and without knowing more about those cases, it's wildly irresponsible to jump straight from "arrested" to "definitely guilty." Like, it's entirely possible that he did commit those crimes, and others, and the DA just let him go out of misplaced sympathy. It's also possible he got into altercations with other mentally ill homeless but it's unclear who was at fault. Or that he was misidentified, or was the victim of a false accusation for being weird and noisy in public (it's totally impossible that someone could overreact to him dancing and being loud on the subway, right? that would definitely never happen?).
I think it's highly unlikely he's never committed any legitimate crime, but spouting a number like "42 arrests" is actively misleading and "reign of terror" is a frankly embarrassing level of unsupported, pearl-clutching propaganda.
And it's even possible the veteran had mind-reading powers to get any of this information!
You're engaged in mockery, but when the veteran put him in that chokehold, he didn't even know any of this. Literally the only information he had was what he observed, Neely walking back and forth and angrily ranting. This was apparently sufficient to put him in a chokehold for, what, 10 minutes? 15? You can see some of the video here; Neely is barely responsive and the restraint continues. Like, sure, be skeptical of claims that he was as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. But also be skeptical of claims that he spent all his time terrorizing the populace and execution was the only solution.
There's a lot of subway weirdos. I suspect the crime rate would be much higher than it actually is if every subway weirdo regularly committed crimes.
What a sad and boring society it would be if we executed all weirdos.
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This just seems like a way for the Blues to visit violence on the Reds, harrying the Helots style.
The same thought occurred to me, but in this case I’m assuming that the Blues remain as averse to interpersonal violence as they currently are, and that Blues’ violent pets - people like Jordan Neely - are dealt with comprehensively and violently, rather than allowed (let alone encouraged) to run free and wreak havoc on hapless Reds. And I’m also assuming that in this scenario Reds are permitted to be armed to the teeth in order to guard against incursions from undesirables who push their luck.
This is not a term that conforms to our engagement rules. Its antagonistic in its assumptions, and doesn't even seem necessary within the context.
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How does arming rural citizens to the teeth help here? You already said that people in rural areas should be given special treatment (for what reason, I don't know, since rural meth heads are just as obnoxious as urban ones in my experience), so you have to give them special treatment. A guy with a shotgun willing to shoot anyone who enters onto his property has even less opportunity to evaluate if the person he's shooting fits into one of the special categories you seem willing to create wherein people are given a free pass to violate laws that ostensibly apply to everybody. If it becomes clear that antisocial behavior is tolerated beyond a certain line then ne'er do wells will have an incentive to go there and urban leaders will have an incentive to make sure they go there, especially progressive ones who don't want to put them in jail.
It wouldn't even be a progressive thing, necessarily. Exiling your ne'er do wells is just good sense- it solves the problem more semi-permanently and is much cheaper than jailing them. Apartheid SA and the USSR both tended to deal with petty criminals by dropping them off in rural areas and not caring very much what happened.
If the best examples you can come up with are the USSR and apartheid-era SA you may want to rethink your argument.
They were extremely different regimes that independently arrived at the same conclusion.
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To disprove hydro's examples you must show the bad aspects of those regimes are necessary requirements for their low petty crime rate OR that their petty crime rate wasn't actually low.
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