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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29463 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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The Metropolitan Police has one of the highest homicide solve rates of any major western urban police force.

Is that because they have better police, or because they have killers who are worse at hiding their kills?

I could imagine that, for instance, lone killers might find coverups harder than gang killers.

Or many fewer killings between gangs / in cultures where the victims don't cooperate with the police?

The majority of homicides are gang-related, gangs are often along ethnic lines (typically Caribbean, West African, Somali, Bangladeshi, sometimes mixed (eg. there are gangs with black and white members)). But I have heard that London has a uniquely comprehensive gang database compared to other cities, a lot of members are tracked from early teenagerhood, family groups are tracked etc.. I don't know how true that is. I do know that stop and frisk seems pretty common in London though, I see teens in groups getting searched almost every week. There are large-scale orders that allow the police to search everyone they want in an area for periods of time without cause.

There's also option C- the same lack of civil liberties that results in autistic 16 year old girls getting hauled off for saying a cop "looks lesbian" gives the police the ability to solve murders far more efficiently and thoroughly than in a country which protects individual rights to do weird or suspicious things.

I've found an article by "the Graham Factor" where he mentions another difference that isn't directly related to the police powers: the courts don't have to dismiss illegally obtained evidence if it's otherwise reliable. If someone was found to have a tactical assault butter knife on their person, then the charge sticks, even if the cop did something wrong: wasn't allowed to frisk the person, made a mistake when filling out the report, etc.

How does stop-and-frisk help solve murders? By harvesting fingerprints?

I mean to start with stop-and-frisk worked well in NYC until the NYPD stopped it as a civil rights violation. It’s reasonable to assume that it works in London too.

But more to the point, I’d expect that it’s coupled with a lot of additional measures. Upthread there’s a discussion of a gang database- in the US the use of gang databases in serious crime prevention gets floated every once in a while and shot down for civil liberties reasons, because having bad friends and suspicious habits is not illegal. In the UK it presumably isn’t either, but looser probable cause rules related to such things plausibly make evidence collection much easier. And that’s just one example.

Stop and frisk is a tiny part of the puzzle, the UK has vast surveillance powers over its populace and a huge amount of infrastructure to support it.

Watch any UK crime drama and they basically have to invent unrealistic reasons for their multiple layers of CCTV, Internet snooping, etc. have all fallen through the cracks for a particular case. It's kind of hilarious.

Watch any UK crime drama and they basically have to invent unrealistic reasons for their multiple layers of CCTV, Internet snooping, etc. have all fallen through the cracks for a particular case. It's kind of hilarious.

I think you could make an incredibly good show revolving around some evil Ed Snowden equivalent who knows all about the CCTV/surveillance system and uses it to construct incredibly tight alibis etc in order to commit a series of murders. You get to have the conflict between the hardened old detective with a distrust for the new high-tech methods, arrogant political appointees claiming the Panopticon is infallible, etc.

I think it’s also somewhat a preventative measure. It puts potential criminals on notice that the cops are present and active in a given area, thus it’s more dangerous to carry drugs or a weapon in that area. This would naturally lower the rate of drug related crimes and murders.

I think that even with “potential abuses” stop and frisk and broken windows work well enough to be well worth the trade offs. The entire community benefits when ordinary people can walk in their city without fear of street crime or gunfire.

I think that even with “potential abuses” stop and frisk and broken windows work well enough to be well worth the trade offs. The entire community benefits when ordinary people can walk in their city without fear of street crime or gunfire.

I don't think it is particularly useful to combine stop and frisk with broken windows. The latter is simply the enforcement of law, while the former is, often, the violation of law. (eg: In NYC "[b]etween January 2004 and June 2012, the NYPD conducted over 4.4 million Terry stops. . . .52% of all stops were followed by a protective frisk for weapons. A weapon was found after 1.5% of these frisks. In other words, in 98.5% of the 2.3 million frisks, no weapon was found.". Given that police are permitted to frisk only when they have reasonable suspicion that a detained person is armed,* the police were clearly engaging in widespread Fourth Amendment violations.

And, while it is perfectly true that "[t]he entire community benefits when ordinary people can walk in their city without fear of street crime or gunfire[,]" one can say that of most civil liberties. "It is OK to violate the civil liberties of a small number of people if the community benefits" is a recipe for the complete evisceration of civil liberties.** It is certainly the rationale that has been given in the past for the evisceration of civil liberties.

*Though if Justice Scalia had had his way, they would not be able to frisk without probable cause, a higher bar. See Minnesota v. Dickerson, 508 U.S. 366 (1993) (concurring opinion)

**Obviously Including, given this particular rationale, Second Amendment rights.

I think there’s a faulty assumption here in the sense that I don’t think the actual discovery of weapons in a stop and frisk is nearly as important as the show of force S&F represents. There are more efficient ways to find contraband. However the show of force, the fact that cops are making a point to stop people likely known to police as troublesome serves as a strong deterrent to carrying weapons or contraband around.

Yes, I understood that to be your point. It is obvious that a show of illegal force will result in fewer people carrying weapons, and hence less crime.

I mentioned the low percentage of frisks that resulted in the discovery of weapons merely to demonstrate that the NYPD was conducting illegal frisks. If they had been only frisking when they had a reasonable suspicion that the detained person was armed, they would have found weapons more frequently.

But I don’t see that you have addressed the central objection that I raised, which is that your argument that it is ok to ignore the civil liberties of individuals if doing so will benefit the broader society is a recipe for having no civil liberties at all.

Yes, and DNA if the frisk leads to an arrest on a lesser crime. That is a big part of why police do stop and frisks. See the oral argument in Maryland v. King, which okayed taking DNA from arrestees, where the Maryland AG said, "Since 2009, when Maryland began to collect DNA samples from arrestees charged with violent crimes and burglary, there had been 225 matches, 75 prosecutions and 42 convictions, including that of Respondent King." King's crime was rape FWIW.

PS: Note that this not meant to be an argument in favor of stop and frisk, which is far too subject to abuse.

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