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This. I work American retail, and this entire policy is insanely funny because it’s so obviously stupid.
Why would anyone engage with “RESTORE” to avoid jail time when it’s already pretty rare to be caught, and even if you are, you won’t be prosecuted, let alone go to jail. Why would they try to get into these programs (which seems like an admission of guilt) when you could do nothing? At best those sorts of programs will basically move theft from the customer facing parts of the store to the back room and teach thieves how stores work so they’re able to steal better. Nobody with a brain is going to let thieves into this program at their store.
"Your Honour, my client is a single mother of three children and if she is sent to jail, there will be nobody to take care of them. Yes, she has 140 previous convictions, but she only went out robbing expensive goods because she fell under the influence of her boyfriend who persuaded her to do so. The fact that when arrested she was walking around with a Gucci handbag which is one of the items she stole should mean nothing. We ask the court to consider a remedial sentence since there is now a programme to teach people "it's not your fault you went out robbing, it is down to structural poverty and systemic racism and in fact you should be getting reparations" and she has a place on it".
Oh, that will be a beautiful thing to see in operation, the grift.
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Part of this entire tragedy is that there are decent, lower middle-class/working-class black people who are tired of this shit, think it's bad, hate that their neighbourhoods are turning to shit, hate that being black is automatically associated with crime, think the pond scum who behave like this should be punished - and white liberals will flat-out ignore them and talk over them in favour of showing off how good allies they are in regards to "anti-white fragility, anti-white supremacy, against anti-blackness, etc."
The question is, of course, how many of them change their voting behavior based on this?
Because if those votes reliably end up in the same hands every time, it doesn't really matter what their more nuanced opinions are.
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I agree completely. One of the biggest tragedies is that White virus signaling is creating racism and destroying Black communities.
Because of all the crime and theft, a lot of people are less likely to assume that a black person in their vicinity is “safe”, at least until they know for sure. People are more likely to assume trouble from even innocent things (I could see the bike incident as a misunderstanding, but why would anyone in that situation assume it’s not a scam or an attempt at a crime?). You might think twice about hiring blacks as well. This doesn’t help black# move up.
At the same time, nobody who can afford the rents outside of the hood wants to open a business there. Even before this crime wave, most businesses in that area have bars on the window and guns behind the counter. Even that’s no longer enough, as it’s basically forbidden to try and stop crime in progress and calling the cops is as waste of time. So it’s basically no business zone. Which means no goods nearby available to those people and no jobs (making building a resume very difficult).
I think honestly a tough on crime approach is what helps minorities.
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Yeah. As Chris Rock put it decades ago: "a black man that got two jobs, going to work every day, hates a nigga on welfare". Nobody hates the trashy black underclass so much as decent black people who are busting their asses to get by and have to tolerate these other people's bullshit.
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