To be fair, the entire chain of this thread is lacking any sources. Wikipedia at least contains sources, despite its relative inaccuracies and questionable authenticity of those sources. "in conflict with wikipedia" seems somewhat reasonable at this junction until someone rises above that bar.
Non-violent marijuana users haven't ever materialized as a large cohort of the prison population. Sorry, I too used to believe that prisons were overflowing with them
I mean if this was the 90s, yes it was true but you are also correct that it's very rare for anyone to be in prison for just marijuana alone in the US. Even in states where it's "illegal."
Not really? I mean, when you compare the number of people who have committed a "horrific violent" crime to the total number of people caught up in the US prison system, I expect it's not "often".
The numbers are fuzzy but they indicate that at least a simple majority of (and possibly up to an extreme majority) of prisoners have committed violent crimes.
That really depends on what you classify as “violent”. There are a lot of crimes labeled “violent” that don’t include direct physical harm to another person. Eg burglary is labeled as “violent” many places when the actual act was “smashed a window, grabbed a TV and ran away”. Drug manufacturing is also typically considered “violent” even without any kind of assault/murder/turf war/etc.
The numbers I saw said 47% of inmates had a violent crime under federal or state classifications.
You may be done with that idea but the idea is not done. We can choose to limit the franchise or we can have it imposed on us when a strongman takes advantage of the chaos.
It's weird that people think popular ideas flow from popular politicians instead of realizing that politicians picking up popular ideas is what makes the politician popular.
In other words: idea -> pol.
Everything else you said should get you flagged, but it is popular here so I'm not holding my breath.
Half of America reads at a 6th grade level or lower. Something like a quarter of the country is effectively illiterate.
I don't believe disenfranchising them is the best solution- I might take a Jeffersonian view that in being so illiterate, they are already effectively disenfranchised (someone else is "voting" for them - influencing their choice in a probably undue way).
A better solution would be to find effective ways to educate them
A civil war is needed. It’s clear that there are a handful of ideological blocs with inherently incompatible ideologies.
These people cannot all live in the same society and have peace exist. Logistically this problem can’t really be solved peacefully and will eventually boil up. We’re already seeing a sharp ramp up in terrorist attacks across the ideological spectrum
Sometimes, we should let nature play its course. Whoever comes out on top will subsequently canibalize themselves with infighting anyway.
That is highly unlikely precisely because of how powerful the military / surveillance state is. Terrorism only serves as a boogeyman to increase funding for said military / surveillance state. What is much more likely as an outcome is a fascist dictatorship and a sharp increase in the % of the population living in a prison.
The franchise is already restricted to citizens except for weird subsets like SF schools, right? I think any model of franchise restriction must have negative feedback effects:
- should not allow franchise holders to arrogate state function to themselves in a snowball manner
- should not allow franchise holders to enhance franchise power
Not in a direct “outlaw this”sense but in a dynamic systems sense. So something like net tax payer is good. If you use it to vote yourself more state benefits you lose the franchise and others can then remove that benefit from you.
It will be hard to handle delayed reward situations (I pay now to get benefit later) so I think the problem is we just don’t have the correct device for this yet.
But the restricted franchise is something I think is very useful. The model of having free riders vote for more free riding is rapidly approaching its limit.
I live in a usually safe and crime free area in Florida, we had someone going car by car stealing from any car left open. My neighbor opened his door and told him he had him on camera, guy ran away. I had him on camera too but sadly no spotlight to catch a better look. I cant help but imagine that Flock deters people doing this sort of thing. I hate surveillance nanny states but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
I wish there was a way to implement this sort of “surveilance” in such a way that it only impacts criminals or would be criminals and only them.
> we had someone going car by car stealing from any car left open.
We have that too here, the issue seems to be more that it's a catch and release crime. The police not only knew who was doing it on our street, they had caught them multiple times and released them immediately. I'm guessing if they're not caught with stolen guns on them here it's not enough of a charge to bother with. I really doubt Flock would matter.
Thanks for the response and I generally agree. Though I HATE HATE HATE the march towards the surveillance state, we need to stop crime.
I was specifically asking about the GP's focus on vehicles (larger plates, unregistered vehicle enforcement) and how they thought that would reduce crime so much.
All but literally every crime in my city (in the categories of, say, burglary, robbery, assault, etc) are committed by people who drive into town in stolen cars with no plates. It's totally ridiculous. If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
> If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
Then the question is, why don't they do that? Why do we need a surveillance state to enable police to do what residents might consider the bare minimum?
A large part of the deal is that ALPRs flag on hotlists and cannot be accused of racism. There's no way to argue a vehicle stop is the result of profiling when it's a machine recognizing a plate on a list and issuing an alert. The stats don't go in the same bucket.
At the end of the day, avoiding accusations of racism is behind much of modern policing's foibles (like the near-total relaxation of traffic law enforcement in some cities).
I think the broad thrust of your argument is right on the money. Officers' perception of heightened (or unfair) accountability has turned every police interaction into a risk for the officers and department, too. However, I think the problem actually goes even deeper. The incentives are all aligned to launder responsibility through automated systems, and we'll end up sleepwalking into AI tyranny if we're not careful.
Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs.
The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do?
Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything!
While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army.
But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.
I am concerned about the lack of follow through after police intervention. Lack of prosecution and convictions, light sentences, repeat offenders being released, etc.
If judges would simply keep someone with 3+ felonies in jail, crime would drop 80%.
That got labeled "mass incarceration" and even Joe Biden (a 'law and order Democrat' to the core) had to walk back support of what he viewed as one of his greatest achievements, championing the 1994 Crime Bill.
> "If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, [...]
...they'd get called racist. Let's be real. The tint thing in particular gets filed as "bullshit excuse for racial profiling", never mind that illegal tint can be empirically measured.
> but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like.
Might feel that way, but objectively, violent and property crime are on the decline in the USA.
I've also heard many stories where a person gets high def footage of someone committing a crime (usually burglary, smash and grab, or porch snatching) and the cops are basically like "eh we'll get to it when we get to it"
Two weeks ago, my parked car, along with two other parked cars, was rear-ended at 3:15am by a drunk driver (the car interior smelled like alcohol), in an unregistered car that was not his. He then fled the scene.
All of this was caught on high definition video.
However, he also left his phone and State ID (he was also unlicensed) in the car.
Did the cops drive the 2 blocks to the address listed on his ID to arrest him for leaving the scene of the accident, or to give him any kind of blood alcohol test? No, no they did not.
Did the cops follow up in any way whatsoever? No, no they did not. How do I know this? Because a few days later, I walked the two blocks to the house to inquire whether the car was insured. It was not.
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What is objectionable about your comment is the same thing that eventually plagues every social media that has downvoting/flagging: you violated someone's strongly-held priors.
I don’t think it’s so much as critical but has potential to help close the loop on crime. Big box stores love this service. The can easily identify the car type and license and out out a bolo with the police. Police put this into flock and track movement. You don’t have to pursue chases as aggressively. You can just track the car next time it pops up. I think flock is a net positive in this sense.
In those statistical roundups homicide is treated as a proxy for crime in general, so the best we can rigorously say is that homicide rates have decreased - which is, obviously, great. Researchers treat homicide as a proxy because they know not all crimes are reported.
Anecdotally, living in [big city] between 2014 and 2021 my street-parked car was broken into ~10 times, and stolen once (though I got it back). I never reported the break-ins, because [city PD] doesn't care. In [current suburb] a drive by shooting at the other end of our block received no police response at all, and won't be in the crime stats.
Are those types of crimes increasing? I don't know! I'd had my car broken into before 2014, and I witnessed (fortunately only aurally - I was just around the corner) a drive-by in the nineties. But... That's the point: no one knows! These incidents aren't captured in the statistics.
Personally, I think the proxies are broadly accurate, and crime in general is lower, and I shouldn't trust my anecdotal experiences. However, I think the general lack of trust in the quality of American police-work (much of it for good reason, sadly) biases most people towards trusting anecdotal experience and media-driven narratives.
I am more skeptical of homicide rate stats than you are, given the garbage data I see for crime in general, but even I am willing to admit they're much more robust than the rest.
I work with stats. I think even very honest people with high incentive to tell an accurate story and good data have trouble with stats. Now add politicians and police and bad data into that mix with winner-takes-all politics at stake and the stats get gamed.
Also I believe my eyes and when I see crimes happening in my neighborhood I don't rush to "the stats" to ask them what I saw.
But "what you saw" isn't necessarily representative of the state of things, either. Arlington, VA is (was?) one of the nicer places in VA; generally expensive, etc. When I drove through there, the van in front of me at a light was car-jacked, and the person in it chased down. I'm uncomfortable driving through Arlington because of that; even though it's not representative of the area. Admittedly, this was years ago... but the point stands. My experience is not representative of the actual facts.
Stats are also "not necessarily representative of the state of things". At the very best they are a single factoid about a very complex human existence.
Stats only get worse from there: at neutral they contain no information, at worst they are dis-info.
So we have stats, that's the closest we have to objective, but I guess we can't trust those. You say your anecdote contradicts "the stats", and I genuinely believe you. Sincerely, what's the alternative? Vibes? We gotta steer this ship (society) based on something.
How else do you condense down myriad and often conflicting datapoints of this complex human existence in order to get trends you can make decisions on?
Longer answer: this is a fundamental problem across many domains. I don't think anyone has solved it.
I think of a story of Bezos being told by his Amazon execs that customer support wait times were meeting X service levels. In the meeting room with his execs, Bezos dials up customer service, gets some wait time of >>>X and makes the point that service levels are not up to his expectations.
I don't think that story is a great analogy for running society but is interesting nonetheless.
> Some drivers can apply for Low-Income Discount or Low-Income Tax Credit for Residents.
> A 50% discount is available for low-income vehicle owners enrolled in the Low-Income Discount Plan (LIDP). This discount begins after the first 10 trips in a calendar month and applies to all peak period trips after that for the remainder of the calendar month.
The revenue also goes towards public transit, and the congestion charge applies mainly to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest borough.
I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all, even if the policy effects are incredibly income-progressive overall. This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy, the populace justifying turnstile hopping, lack of traffic enforcement by police, opposition to speed and red light cameras, opposition to rezoning unless it's built by free-range grass-fed vegan union labour and 100% below market, etc.
I mean, if we're gonna pick a group to impact, the ones who aren't already deeply struggling seem like the place to do it. Given the parent poster's commenting history here, though, I don't think they have a genuine concern in "disparate impact" at all.
>I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all
This "Distinctly American idea" you cite does not at all exist.
Tens of millions watch a news channel that openly stated we should euthanize homeless people. Millions more moved to a crazier channel because that one wasn't lying enough
They vote against free school lunch programs that cost very little.
They hate "welfare queens" with a passion, despite that being a lie, and still being a lie decades later.
Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
>This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy
No, the reason we get so many special interest carve outs in the US is that special interest groups fund election campaigns. Fix campaign funding (IE, make it publicly funded and extremely time limited) and you make it significantly easier for people who eschew bribery to be and stay politicians.
Sure, HN has a strong "Not perfect should never be done" bias, because HN is full of turbonerds that crave validation for how smart they are and always need to pipe up with a nitpick to be heard. 95% of the time, the exact "complaint" someone on HN makes up was already noted and covered in the very article. We aren't allowed to sass people for not reading the article.
This is not the case off of HN and in reality. Conservatives are perfectly happy doing "Obvious and common sense" measures that actually have insane second order effects. They insist tariffs are a good policy the way they are being implemented. Democrats want all sorts of things that are not at all perfect and would be happy to have slightly fewer new problems than the same problems our grandparents had to fight about.
> Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
this seems awfully coy. Why not just say who cheerled the bill and who went on the TV circuit to explain how great it was because of "super predators" - nice euphemism.
"Democrats" isn't some amorphous thing we can't tag to individual people. The last president of the USA and his sponsor (Bill Clinton) were adamant to get that bill passed. Biden spearheaded the legislation. This isn't just some "he voted yea on it!" sort of thing.
No, just one of the 99% of universities in this world where people aren't en masse claiming to have disabilities for selfish gain. Neither long ago - this is as of 2025 - nor particularly far away.
"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home).
So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
I went to a mediocre undergrad, and a top 5 school for grad. The difference in morals was quite notable, and cheating was much more prevalent in the latter (not just in classes, but for things like this as well).
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