I agree with the Texas Hispanic people mostly. I opposed Trump's wall because he wouldn't take a deal with Democrats for money to build it and because he was trying to operate with deliberate cruelty.
One weird difference is that from the rest of the country you think about the whole border. And the Mexican border is really long, and a wall along the whole thing is insane. But you really could build a wall in just the lower Rio Grande Valley.
CBP is a huge employer there, which also makes expanding CBP popular.
I don't have much to say about specifics, but I think analyses of Republican performance among American Hispanics should take as a starting point that many conservative parties do well across Latin America. Boslanaro is well-known here, but also look at Colombia and El Salvador.
I'm working on a post extending the 11 mini-nations of the US to the rest of Central and South America.
Be sure to count Belize with the Yankees.
Belize is the Snowdens of yesteryear of Yankeedom.
AIHMHAdNauseum, high crime societies are corrosive and bring out the worst in everyone.
Yeah, that why I don't shoplft even though the stores have no employees now.
Belize is midlands, because they both have lots of Amish.
the article in the OP is good (and, as a note, when I see articles from Texas Monthly they are often good)
The fear of kidnapping looms large. Many fronterizos I talked to mourned the era when Tamaulipas was a place they could travel to freely--a place to visit family, play in the mountain pines, explore the coast. This has resulted in a sort of persistent, low-grade grief.
Ryan Cantu, a 36-year-old who grew up in Laredo, has fond memories of clubbing in Nuevo Laredo with his high school friends. The drinking age in Mexico, eighteen, wasn't strictly enforced, and teenagers in Laredo would cross in the evenings to visit a onetime youth mecca: Señor Frog's, a club right across the international bridge. But as cartel turf wars gripped Nuevo Laredo, "we all just stopped going," Cantu says. "Part of it was all these clubs and restaurants shut down. But also, of the few friends who still went for family or business, most had a horror story of something crazy that had happened there."
Today Cantu laments that younger generations won't have the same experience. For some, Mexico has become more of an idea than an actual place. And it's easy to start conjuring fears in that dark, opaque space.
...
One evening I met up with a young business owner who was born in Brownsville and grew up crossing back and forth into Matamoros. Today he drives almost daily into the Mexican city, where his company is based. He was aware of the risks--in fact, he requested anonymity so we could talk freely without causing his enterprise any headaches--yet he insisted that fears are overblown. "It's fine, man, really," he told me.
Even in the massive factory city of Reynosa, where multiple factions are once again vying for supremacy, life carries on. When I traveled there a few days later, I walked through Aquiles--the notorious northern neighborhood controlled by the shady organizations locals refer to vaguely as "the groups"--and most seemed at ease. At a shelter for asylum seekers within sight of the Rio Grande, one lifelong Reynosa resident was coaching soccer for a group of migrant children. "People in the U.S. don't need to be afraid," he told me. "If they were here in Reynosa, they'd know it's fine."
AIHMHAdNauseum, high crime societies are corrosive and bring out the worst in everyone.
Yes, but they also aren't polite.
8: This is why I find "the REAL crime is wage theft" incredibly frustrating. It's a stupid gotcha that doesn't convince anyone outside your bubble, partly because it's just apposite to the shoplifting issue. Shoplifting isn't a thing where workers are blaming shoplifters for low wages, nor are retailers claiming that shoplifting raises their cost of employment. It's utterly irrelevant and makes super-clear that lefties DGAF about low level crime, just literally refuse to accept that it could possibly be real in any sense that anyone who doesn't watch Fox could care about.
Meanwhile, what's happening with the cartels is so completely out of control that I can't imagine how it gets back on track. And Republicans saying "invade Mexico" strikes me as one of those things that's utterly insane, but they'll keep saying it to each other until drone strikes in Mexico get read as the sensible centrist position.
Shoplifting is a direct consequence of not paying staff to be in the store. Retailers are trying to get the police to solve the problem caused by them not being willing to pay for as much staff as they had even five years ago. It's subsidized automation for corporations.
And it's a huge negative externality for society. People who can support themselves by shoplifting from stores that make it stupid easy are able to learn skills and form groups to carry the crime elsewhere.
a sort of persistent, low-grade grief
I love looking at the moon. I could stare at a full moon for hours. But then we started locking the doors at night, so I had to unlock the door. And then gates, that rattle and bang and freak people out. And then alarms with motion sensors outside. So, no moon.
15: This is similar to why Chicago is suing Kia and Hyundai. You can learn how to Hotwire one with a screwdriver and a USB cable off of a YouTube video or a TikTok; by saving the cost of installing an immobilizer (about $100) unlike all other major car manufacturers, their cars are by far the easiest to steal. Half of all car thefts in Chicago this year are Kias or Hyundais, which feeds into them being an easy on-ramp to doing a carjacking or a drive-by.
I'm a little confused on how shoplifting became a major part of a conversation on violent crime. Is there an actual connection or are we being goofy?
I am annoyed at Kia and Hyundai (I have the latter), but I don't get the point of suing them, or crafting some sort of regulatory fines as Farhad Manjoo recently proposed. Surely this is straightforwardly bad for them - their customers who lose cars are unlikely to go back to them; their reputation suffers and they get fewer new customers either. The incentives are not exactly misaligned as is, they just messed up.
Also aren't most American cars built before 2000-ish ridiculously easy to steal too? If not as attractive to steal, obviously.
Aren't Kia and Hyundai same company anyway?
Some VWs were famously easy to steal in the 1990s.
I have no idea. I've only stolen an American car.
Different companies with interlocking ownership. Hyundai owns 1/3 of Kia and Kia owns chunks of a number of Hyundai subsidiaries. Much chaebol.
I was looking at a Kia, but I stopped looking at them after the whole theft thing. Even though they fixed it in later models, I figured I didn't want to get my window smashed by someone who wasn't good a recognizing a 2022 from a 2019 (or whatever). Then Musk turned obviously evil and we decided to redo the bathroom instead of getting a car.
There's a problem in the Bay Area that there's a lot of good criminal resale infrastructure. This leads to both shoplifting and more violent stuff like smash and grab (which happened to me when I ran a 5-minute errand at Whole Foods at 5:30pm and didn't bring my bag in with me) and people walking into coffee shops and grabbing a laptop and running, or showing up at a coffee shop with guns and taking all the laptops. (All of these are real things from Berkeley news, though only one of them happened to me directly.) They all feel related to me and most likely rely on overlapping criminal infrastructure, even though there's different levels of violence.
There was some funny thing where NZ had a similar problem because they're a small drive-on-the-left country and lots of people end up buying cars designed for the domestic Japanese market (the other option is stuff for the Australian market) and cars for the domestic Japanese market don't have anti-theft devices because there's no theft in Japan.
Fortunately, Australia was populated with people known to steal.
My impression is that 14 misunderstands the shoplifting problem. I thought the big problem nowadays was people just brazenly walking in filling up bags and leaving. There's employees there, but what are they supposed to do, punch the thieves? You can call the police but the police won't be there until too late and don't care about shoplifting anyway. You can hire a security guard, but that's not foolproof either:
Okay, but every drugstore isn't dealing with packs of 50 people with bear spray. I don't know what's going on with drugstores and locking all the products on closed shelves, but I just don't believe shoplifting has increased that much, or become that different, in the last few years. Mostly, if an employee says "Hey, drop that", someone trying to shoplift is still going to drop whatever it is and run.
I'm sure that happens, but many stores I'm in now have no one even in sight of the door. Like CVS has one person not in the pharmacy and they are always stocking.
Right. Normal levels of having staff would still deter shoplifting.
Rite Aid employees are there to greet you and then at the checkout counter they give you 1-question survey "did an employee greet you when you came in?" which is weird and Orwellian but maybe they have less shoplifting than CVS?
Also aren't most American cars built before 2000-ish ridiculously easy to steal too?
Not at all comparable AIUI. Hot wiring was never as simple as it appears in the movies, and it was harder in the electronic car era than in the mechanical car era. The Hyundai/Kia situation is like an ATM that allows you to use 1234 as the PIN for any card you enter: the barrier is so low it barely exists.
smash and grab (which happened to me when I ran a 5-minute errand at Whole Foods at 5:30pm and didn't bring my bag in with me)
Boy, they're getting really aggressive about the whole reusable bag thing, huh?
6 Belize es Guatemala
32: The mostly don't involve bear spray, but it's not the same kind of crime as shoplifting in the past. It's organized crime for resale and not people stealing stuff for personal use.
One big change here is Amazon, which essentially means you can resale unopened stolen products at retail prices.
Presumably, if you're going to do that, you find an employee and cut them in.
You see videos of people pushing a cart full of Tide or steak or whatever out of the Walmart, but it doesn't look like a good business model to me. You get put on Reddit, people make fun of the hapless Walmart employees, and the whole world knows what car you drive.
37: I remember talking to a cop who described a particular type of bicycle lock as "good enough to keep an honest person honest."
That was my dad's way of talking about most locks. It did not reassure my mother after my brother (barely a teen at the time) broke into our house in about thirty seconds.
I'm sure 42 happens a lot too!
41: So what do you think changed?
Bike locks that can resist currently available tools are difficult, since one the impressively cheap tools of the day is battery-powered grinders/circ saws with cutting discs. $100 for a tool and battery at Harbor Freight, say.
I had my bike stolen from my front porch that way. One of the ironies is that the bike lock was not even the weakest link; it was locked to basically a cabinet door pull screwed into the wall. But cutting the lock was still the easiest thing to do (and it enabled them riding away on it, as a neighbor's doorbell-cam captured).
13: It depends on how you measure crime. Are you measuring the number of incidents? Some composite measure of how the various sorts of crime are gateways to violent crime? Etc. The reason some "lefties" focus on wage theft, is that there's a lot of money at stake. But even that pales in comparison to accounting control fraud, which is the largest form of property theft by aggregate dollar value.
I'm not saying that shoplifting is OK.
45 et seq.: I don't even bother with secure bike locks. Partly, it's just a low crime/bike theft city, but mostly it's that basically the only time I'm locked up for any length of time is outside ballgames, where I figure there's way too many people/cops for even a cable to be cut (also, there's a hundred other bikes, and mine doesn't have regular pedals). But I'd never feel comfortable locked up outside overnight. If Iris has a friend on a bike sleep over, we just roll it into the front hall.
It's organized crime for resale and not people stealing stuff for personal use.
One big change here is Amazon, which essentially means you can resale unopened stolen products at retail prices.
Rotten in Denmark has really humiliated himself on this, with his everything-is-a-moral-panic hammer and snide dismissal of the possibility that any kind of retail theft could be a situation other than Les Mis. Utter certainty and refusal to engage in any way with evidence.
It's fine, I guess, to minimize it--"it's not a huge deal, it's something that ebbs and flows"--but he and a lot of others feel a real need to just deny that it could be an issue at all. TBH part of me suspects it's people who get all of their retail from Amazon and simply don't think it matters whether brick & mortar exists. If you care about cities, it matters that retail, both chain and local, can thrive.
I still haven't seen a good response to his question of what makes it "organized crime rings" as opposed to "selling to a local fence."
Why would shoplifting escalate but home break-ins still be so low? Homes don't have more cameras than stores. You can just as easily find a home that appears to have no one at home.
The only answer I'll accept is that crimes have trends, just like fashion, and currently home invasions are so 2000-and-late.
My paranoid suspicion is that owners of retail businesses find it politically convenient to inflate the amount of shoplifting out there -- they tend to be rightwing/law and order, and so being able to explain that cities are ungovernable hellscapes (in a way that doesn't show much in statistics because the police are so overwhelmed they can't even show up to record that a crime happened) suits them nicely. But I could be wrong about that.
51: Wage theft is a big issue, it's just unresponsive to concerns about shoplifting. If we were having a national discussion about, I dunno, paycheck withholding amounts, then wage theft would be super relevant and a good counter to forces of capital trying to get hourly wage workers on board with gutting taxes.
Just a reminder, 13 was a response to 8, which was about the incredibly corrosive effects of high crime environments, which was relevant because it helps explain reactionary voting trends. You can say that "law & order" is a dog whistle*, but when crime is high and the other guy says he has a solution while you say there's no problem, you'll lose every fucking time. So keep crime low so it doesn't have any salience and the dog whistle only attracts dogs.
*a reminder that the point of dog whistles, politically, is that it's a two-part message, supposed to be facially attractive to hoi polloi but also secretly attractive to smaller groups that you want to enthuse. But if it's not attractive to the broader public, it doesn't matter much.
56, 57: claims are surely inflated, but actual people who work retail are happy to confirm that this is happening. Frankly, this is exactly what RID does: "I think the people saying this are bad, so it must be false." There have been articles interviewing criminals who confirm the they do this, that it's more profitable (and much safer) than dealing drugs.
55: Because, as has been said upthread, reselling still-packaged items is easy and profitable now. Fencing stolen household goods gets you ~10% of the retail value; Amazon takes a few percent, plus shipping.
Also, homeowners are trigger-happy, you may have noticed. Security guards, not so much.
There's a difference between "does it happen at all, ever" and "is it a remarkable, significant new problem". I'm suspicious of impressionistic reports of crime waves that don't show up in data. Like "is this happening in a way that couldn't be adequately addressed by staffing stores better" seems like an excellent question to me.
All the way back in the 1980s, when I worked at a People's Drug Store in Bethesda, Maryland, I remember a co-worker telling me about seeing a couple of thieves leaving with the entire Timex watch display and thinking to himself, "This isn't my problem", and turning the other way.
I have no idea what is happening in California. It's just a place where weird news stories come from, like Florida with less meth. But I've been hearing stories that Pittsburgh is falling into some kind of horrible new problem caused by crime/youth/whatever the whole time I've been here. Not that bad things haven't happened, but I take a wait and see attitude. Lately, all I've noticed bad is more beggars and some phenomenally shitty driving.
I don't see any reason to doubt that shoplifting has gone up since stores have scaled back staffing (as they definitely have). Seems like a hard problem to fix, though.
You don't think scaling staffing back up could have an effect?
It's harder to undo problems than prevent them.
Scaling staff back up would likely fix it. That's on the employers, though, and they don't seem willing to do it. I don't think there's much anyone else can do.
You can buy a watch cheap if you know a guy.
I wonder how you can counterfeit Tide.
68: First, we must replace the Moon.
As a medium of exchange, stolen Tide makes more sense than Bitcoin, but it sounds like a suburban issue. You need space and a big car if you're buying something expensive.
The wall is very complicated.
Possibly it won't make a difference. People can either go over it or go under it.
And it has severe environmental and other impacts in some areas. In some places it divides tribal land. In other places, it destroys migration.
Also, it's not really possible to wall the entire border.
A majority of Arizonans did not want the border wall after Trump was elected.
It's mostly a psychological comfort object, not a way to reduce crime.
||
The first Section 3 lawsuit to disqualify Trump has been filed, by CREW in Colorado. Apparently they picked the state for (a) being able to challenge before the primary is over and (b) having some kind of process where they could go over the evidence in depth.
|>
Plus, it's got nice scenery and cliff houses.
This says the supreme court is hearing a 14th amendment case against Trump during the next session:
https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-decide-whether-kick-trump-off-ballot-1824577?amp=1
74: That looks like a weirder, more quixotic case - a law grad without a law license. Trying to leapfrog immediately the Supreme Court level seems especially odd/uncommon. (He seems to have another quick appeal to the Supreme Court asking them to tell a lower court he has standing.)
Why would shoplifting escalate but home break-ins still be so low? Homes don't have more cameras than stores.
I have heard that the local chain drugstore specifically tells employees to not intervene if someone is shoplifiting (I don't know what that means, exactly, but it definitely sounds like they wouldn't try to physically restrain anyone). I assume that's out of liability concerns, there was a recent story about someone at a 7-11 confronting a shoplifter and getting stabbed with a pair of scissors (no serious injuries, thankfully).
If I've heard that I'm sure potential shoplifters are also aware.
I don't know what the best solution is; the (chain) drugstore location that we've used for years is now closing.
It's like plane hijackings all over again!
77: So, we need to put Homeland Security at the entrance to every drug store?
all the retailers i work with (all v high end) are clear in telling their staff not to risk any confrontation, the physical danger isn't worth it. assuming drugstores do the same, that doesn't mean adequate staffing wouldn't be a deterrent. & locking up everything + inadequate staffing is absolutely a deterrent to in person shopping - its a pita to get your hands on something to pay for it.
the biggest drivers of crime in sf that is corrosive to the community are, in my view, a multi year police strike i.e. they refuse to do most of their job*, the mayor's persistent refusal to spend the funds available & dedicated to providing shelter & permanent housing or consistently implementing effective policies to address public drug consumption & dealing, & the state's past refusal to allow camera enforcement of the vehicle code (a pilot program recently permitted, if it isn't implemented then that's on the mayor).
*they refuse to do anything about almost all property crime, except for when they are the ones confiscating & destroying the property. even were the police adept at cracking down on public consumption of drugs & drug dealing (big old if), the mayor's bizarre dedication to refusing to do her job** would undermine any police efforts to make lasting headway bc of the complete lack of any effective infrastructure of places & services to get drug consumption off the streets & get people housed so that the street drug trade's core consumer base declines. & the political leadership has discouraged police enforcement of the vehicle code bc the police only were capable of egregiously racial biased enforcement, hence the necessity of camera enforcement. what our cops are really really great at is raking in the sweet sweet overtime, e.g., https://missionlocal.org/2023/08/overtime-dolores-hill-bomb-sfpd-civil-rights-lawsuit/
**plus constant complaining about anyone expecting her to do her job, blaming everyone else when we have one of if not the strongest mayors among comparable u.s. cities, months & months of bitching & moaning about the city in every media outlet she could waylay, & then a shameless turn to complaining about everyone thinking sf is a hell hole. just a disaster as a politician.
Thanks for sharing the OP article, Heebie, it's good writing, thoughtful description.
Crime and quality-of-life issues affect poor people more than rich I think. Maybe 20% of the chain pharmacies around me closed, and one big box chain. Local bodegas and bigger ethnic groceries have a security guard most days, and post screengrabs of problem customers/visitors-- they're not unruly teenagers. I agree that part of what's happening is a response to Amazon-- our brave new future means hardly any stores because anyone with an address can order from a touchscreen, which means that the remaining places with open doors are less fancy. I also agree that denying that retail theft is changing things for the worse is politically unwise.
We do have unruly teenagers. One kid was throwing pebbles at other kids in front of the Starbucks/dentist/karate/state rep building. I yelled at him to stop. He looked at me like he was trying to decide if he could throw a pebble at me, but left.
74 It doesn't say they're going to hear the case, it says that the petition was circulated for conference. This happens to every case. I really don't think there are going to be four votes to take this case before the 11th Circuit has even ruled.
The case was dismissed by Judge Cannon for lack of standing. She'd already denied his motion to recuse, so his appeal is both that and standing. Trump's 11the Circuit brief isn't even due yet.
I went to a Walgreens not too far from me to try to get allergy medication and almost everything was locked up. Part of that is because many types of allergy stuff is locked for drug supply reasons, but even the weaker stuff that's over the counter in many stores was locked, plus lots of non-allergy stuff was locked. There was one employee at the register who seemed to be chatting with a friend. It was about 8:30 at night.
The one thing the non-locked items had in common was that they were the Walgreens brand of products whose equivalents were locked up. I'm sure that was a coincidence and Walgreens is losing money on their own brand getting shoplifted. Surely they couldn't be making money on the convenience of not having to get someone to unlock the other brands.
I later bought what I wanted at a CVS near where my parents live where basically nothing was locked up.
On the border, I've appreciated the Texas Monthly articles I've read and will eventually read the link and not just what's quoted in the OP and the comments. It's one of those topics I find extremely frustrating when I watch mainstream news* because of how often the real problems get buried behind whatever the Republicans are yelling about.
*Which I've done more often in recent years because I see my parents much more often.
To the OP, this was a bombshell. I don't shock easily but I remember being shocked by this
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/world/americas/mexico-iguala-students-kidnapping.html
Also, the Borderland Beat blog is still going strong https://www.borderlandbeat.com/?m=1
"The Power of the Dog" and "The Cartel" are very well-researched roman a clef thrillers about the Mexican drug war. (The third in the series, "The Border", is not quite as good.)
Can't find the appropriate post but this one's for ajay https://x.com/xaniken/status/1699527974721073208?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
The escalating minor crime thing is definitely an issue where I live in London. In part, I think, because to all intents and purposes, the police don't exist. This was something Ajay (and I think Alex) mentioned a while ago, and I looked at the stats and it's basically true. If a murder happens, or there's some big public order thing happening, the police are right on it. For any kind of property crime, or minor public order / anti-social thing, they just won't turn up in any way shape or form. Although our area is generally fine, we have some somewhat shitty neighbourhood kids who persistently steal from their neighbours, and can be anti-social and harass people. My bike has been stolen, my wife's bike has been stolen, some stuff we had in the communal garage was stolen. A lot of our immediate neighbours have stories of theft, or feeling threatened.* The police aren't interested.
I called the police a few months back because the security door to our building was broken and a group of about 6 teenagers, who had been fucking with some of the cars in the street and just generally behaving threateningly, decided to come into the building armed with sticks and roam about. No police turned up. Eventually they left because they were bored. They came back a few times after that. Still no police response.
* not everyone who feels threatened actually has been threatened. Some people are just pearl-clutching types who find the presence of teenagers to be threatening in general. But a lot of people have been on the receiving end of shit.
There's a real "the chicken or the egg?" issue with defund the police sentiment. That is, what got it started was police violence, but something that I think let it take hold was a widespread belief that the police weren't usefully performing their functions in terms of preventing and protecting the public from crimes, so there wasn't much of a loss if they were less around and less active. From the police side, I think they would argue that "defund the police" sentiment, as well as consequences for police violence and restraints on warrantless harassment of the public, make it impossible for them to prevent crime.
Obviously, I think the second position is stupid, but I think everyone agrees that there's no longer an expectation that police are going to be terribly useful in preventing property crime.
And of course I'm talking about the US, but ttaM sounds like things aren't that different in the UK.
Sadly the discourse about both the crime and immigration--like so many other issues (climate change, Covid response, the economy, something else we were discussing here recently...) are almost irrevocably poisoned by the volume of bad faith injected into the debate by prominent politicians, media and "influencers." Maybe thus was it always, but it is crippling societies' abilities to even attempt rational solutions.
I do not have a solution. Brandolini's law in action: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
But even more perversely it leads to to some really bad argumentation by otherwise good actors. There is just a metric shit-ton of copganda, manufactured hysteria, and bad faith corporate responses that get play even in the mainstream media that one gets jaded, but none of that obviates the need to adress people's valid (or even invalid concerns).
Yeah. The valid concerns thing makes more sense to me talking about thefts from cars or grabbing people's laptops in cafes, both of which seem like they'd make life feel really out of control and disorderly, than about shoplifting, which seems as if retail corporations have decided that tolerating it is more cost-effective than preventing it.
The feeling of being stared at by deer is making me uneasy.
88: sounds about right (obvs I'm not in London any more but that fits what I hear from people there). The wealthier areas of London have street guards, hired from private security companies. Existing geography and planning laws prevent the widespread establishment of gated communities.
We don't have a "defund the police" movement in the UK as far as I know. (There might be something tiny, imported from the US?) I think that's because a) our police aren't nearly as well paid as US police and b) most people are well aware that they've been partly defunded over the last decade, like every other public service, and it hasn't really helped.
The Big Issue takes a left-leaning view of the state of the Met here - https://www.bigissue.com/news/activism/break-up-the-met-defund-the-police-uk/
It mentions defunding, only to dismiss it completely.
I think everyone agrees that there's no longer an expectation that police are going to be terribly useful in preventing property crime.
To be honest I don't think many people expect the Met to be terribly useful in preventing violent crime either, with the exception of the most serious offences. Certainly they're crap at investigating and prosecuting violent crime. About eight per cent of violent crimes in London lead to an actual prosecution.
defund the police sentiment[...]take hold
Is this even remotely true? Does any survey show any meaningful support for defunding? Is it supported by any serious actor?
Not border-specific, but a well-done article about Mexican trafficking: https://www.crashoutmedia.com/p/the-dark-truth-of-mexicos-pimp-city?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
96. At least Minneapolis instituted real cuts, then reversed them (I think, not following details really).
It was part of the platform of Philly mayoral candidate Helen Gym, she split the vote away from a better candidate, now Philly has a mayor who doesn't think ahead at all.
96: There's a real movement to move some police functions to other responders, when there's no need for someone armed. But it was buried in a sea of bullshit.
94: From over here, the impression I have is that your cops aren't as scary as ours, so there's not the same motivation for it as a reaction to police violence.
96: Oh, I'm not saying there's majority support for abolishing the police or anything, but talking about reducing police funding and as Moby says moving some functions to other responders is at least part of the political conversation.
At least they want to get bow hunters to kill the deer, instead of just letting the cops do it.
Funny how whenever there's a police slowdown because they're upset that they're not getting their asses kissed enough crime rates drop (and not on account of cops not reporting them).
I don't think that describes Pittsburgh now. That is, I think there's a police slowdown leading to more crimes.
It's also possible there just aren't enough experienced officers.
Here's a 2016 article on one Wal-Mart generating 600 calls a year to the cops:
"By our studies, Walmart has almost 400,000 fewer hourly workers in its U.S. stores today than it did 10 years ago," Flickinger said. "To clean up crime in the Walmart stores and for the store managers to be 'crime stoppers,' it's going to take years."
I am convinced that the following are simultaneously true in Heebieville:
1. the cops are highly problematic and racist
2. the decision to stop sending cops out for non-injury car accidents or for any property investigation is strictly due to budget woes, because it's an open department blanket policy, and not just slow-playing due to being whiny babies. They're hiring civilians to do a lot of the data collection in those situations - send someone out to collect basic data on the missing property or on the car crash, so that an officer can deal with it remotely. That said, I have not seen or heard of any of these civilians yet showing up either, but maybe we're still in hiring and training.
If you drive into some poor guy in Lawrenceville, they send a ton of cops.
108.2 And here I've been thinking that the one thing the police are definitely good for is writing up a report on what was stolen, so you can submit it to your insurance company.
Efficiency opportunities abound.
Walmart is now planning to reopen the Vine City location - with a major upgrade.
While the Howell Mill Road Walmart will remain permanently closed, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said the former Vine City Supercenter will reopen with a pharmacy, grocery store, and police station to help combat crime and better serve the neighborhood.
...
Having a police substation in a Walmart is a first, but officials believe an increased police presence will help to prevent in-store crime and make shoppers feel safer. The substation will provide a place for police to charge their phones and body cameras, as well as have meetings and file documents.
Although it may be an appropriate response, the idiocracification of the country continues apace.
My car was broken into in SF something like 15 years ago and the universal sentiment seemed to be that the police wouldn't do anything and they didn't. The stuff that was stolen was my sister's* and when she went to the precinct to file a report so she could try to go through insurance and get something back the officer basically said, "oh, you're near the ocean? Cars always get broken into over there," and basically shrugged.
On the other hand, when my sister's car was stolen in Emeryville a few years before that, the police did identify it in a parking lot in Richmond a few days later and she got the car back. The thieves were never caught but they did leave some stuff in the car. The police didn't seem to want to deal with the property left behind so they gave it to my sister, so she got a couple tennis rackets and a car adapter for charging electronics for free. So maybe the police were funded at just the right level?
*I was going to drive it down to southern California, where she was moving.
"oh, you're near the ocean? Cars always get broken into over there,"
Seals are aggressive.
re: 100.1
Yeah. There have been some dubious deaths in custody, and a very small number of dodgy shootings* but generally speaking, police violence is a much lower salience issue here because the numbers of deaths are so much lower.
* UK cops shoot something like a total of 2 -3 people a year in total, so the number of dodgy shootings is low, but it's not zero.
On the other hand, when my sister's car was stolen in Emeryville a few years before that, the police did identify it in a parking lot in Richmond a few days later and she got the car back. The thieves were never caught but they did leave some stuff in the car. The police didn't seem to want to deal with the property left behind so they gave it to my sister, so she got a couple tennis rackets and a car adapter for charging electronics for free. So maybe the police were funded at just the right level?
We had a bunch of cars get stolen from the high school parking lot - my own included - when I was in high school. (Mine was recovered within a week or so.)
When my friend got his car back, the thief left his gigantic Michigan puffer coat in the car, which we all recognized, and my friend then wore it around school to taunt the thief.
One guy I knew moved a cop car, which I think would count as theft if the cops knew who he was. Another guy went to jail for stealing the lights from a police car.
The one guy I knew who successfully evaded the cops on a car (I was a passenger) is dead now. Not sure of what. He died in Arizona, but I don't think that was the cause of death.
How can you wear a puffer in Florida?
My car was broken into in SF something like 15 years ago and the universal sentiment seemed to be that the police wouldn't do anything and they didn't.
There was a thread of someone whose bike had a tracker on it. He found it being held somewhere out in the open, possibly a market or something, asked the cops multiple times to pick it up with exact location, no response. Then he watched it on the map move down to San Jose, called SJPD, they picked it up right away.
108/110: For certain categories of petty crime, the Oakland cops now just tell you "Report it on the website." Hopefully their form creates a report sufficient for insurance.
119: Yeah, there's a real problem talking about "the police" in the US, because there are literally thousands of completely administratively independent police forces, so generalizations are difficult. There are broad cultural commonalities among most of them, but any specific police force can be different from any other.
To be clear, the PD that did not pick the bike up was SFPD.
I did shoot someone who was probably the thief.
Folks will recall that two police officers came to my house in 2021 to investigate a crime in progress, tipped off by a concerned citizen.
The crime: conducting a monthly zoom meeting of the officers of the county democratic party without giving the zoom information to the troll who called it in. It is a crime to conduct a public meeting without complying with the open meetings laws.
Turned out we didn't have a quorum, so even if we were the government -- we're not! This isn't the Soviet Union! -- there still was no meeting.
. There have been some dubious deaths in custody,
In this context it is worth noting that the accepted UK definition (or at least that used by the charity Inquest, which tracks and publicises such things) of "death in police custody" is not the common-sense one of "person dies while they are physically in custody in a police station" but the rather broader one "person dies for any reason within 48 hours of any interaction with a police officer, with the exception of suicides or deaths due to domestic violence".
Entertainingly, this almost certainly means that Queen Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh and Margaret Thatcher would all be counted as deaths in police custody.
They should have made Camilla be the Duke of Edinburgh.
125: Pretty sure the IOPC tracks on that definition too, or they did when I read their full reports several years ago (when they were the IPCC).
Specifically, the IPOC current definition includes deaths in custody and "deaths that follow contact with the police, either directly or indirectly, that did not involve arrest or detention under the Mental Health Act 1983 and were subject to an independent investigation" - their examples include but people avoiding arrests, police doing welfare checks, etc. So they seem to implicitly leave out protective contacts, or just talking.
Inquest, for its part, divides all deaths it's tracked since 1990 into custody, shootings, pursuit, and road traffic incidents, so they're probably not painting with much broader a brush, besides not requiring an independent investigation to trigger inclusion.
In other public safety news, the police chased someone through my neighborhood last night for a couple hours. There was a helicopter with a spotlight, a voice coming over a megaphone declaring that they can't get away and should surrender, and eventually some sirens. I don't know if they caught anyone, the helicopter stayed up for maybe an hour after they told whomever to surrender.
A couple of nights ago there were sounds that might have been gunfire, but I'm not sure I'd recognize gunfire at a distance. The pattern wasn't fireworks and was spread out over about 15-20 minutes. You could imagine two people shooting, chasing, and missing. But I never heard sirens or saw anything in the news.
Anyway, I'm coincidentally moving today.
Further to US vs UK police forces: St. Louis County in Missouri has 88 municipalities, many of them with their own police forces. With traffic tickets and civil forfeiture, I'm sure some number of those forces would be more accurately called tax farmers.
It's customary in these discussions for me to note that in the early 2000s the Republic of Georgia fired its entire highway patrol because of corruption and a culture of impunity, and created a new force from scratch.
California finally has the (US-standard) commission with responsibility to evaluate police misconduct and decide if someone should stay a cop at all, rather than just jumping ship to another town when they kill someone. They're crying it's a lot of work.
The cop who killed Tamir Rice got a job in Pennsylvania, before public outcry forced them to withdraw the offer.
134: Interestingly, in a town of 611 which has at most one police officer, appointed directly by the council. In their last available financial report, 2019, expenditures on policing were $47,345 total, and total expenditures $545,426.
(Tioga Borough in Tioga County, PA; not to be confused with Tioga Township in Tioga County, PA, population 941.)
A borough is just a township where you can use a septic pit.
Mostly just struck by how much the description of the Mexican side of the Rio Grande Valley sounds like contemporary Johannesburg and much of the rest of South Africa. And yes, it's a huge factor in people's politics and often motivates support for reactionary policies even in people with generally progressive instincts.
On subject of cops, Baltimore cops pretty blatantly just refuse to do their jobs. An investigation into the police response to a recent shooting at a block party was damning: https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/brooklyn-day-shooting-report-police-7NMKVHSFPJHZNDP3WLY3M6AXSM/. "At several points in the hours prior to the mass shooting, high-ranking supervisors and patrol officers alike took a hands-off approach to the crowd, choosing not to intervene or request more units, even as 911 calls from citizens grew more frequent and more desperate."
Also, there is basically zero traffic or parking enforcement beyond speed cameras, which are themselves mostly useless because there's an epidemic of fake VA plates. I am pretty staunchly on team defund-the-police (maybe not 100% but we could clearly get better public safety by reallocating at least 50% of their budget to social services), but there is definitely a faux-progressive faction in city politics that is helping to block things like towing/booting cars that have dozens of outstanding speeding tickets.
Nick Mosby voters, basically.
That was a big feature of We Own This City - Wayne Jenkins and his task force were just going around robbing everyone they could find with money, not just people they pulled over but full-on home invasions based on knowledge of cash in the house, and the higher-ups were happy just because he was actually going out and making arrests.