Deincarceration is mantra in law schools and in some public agencies. More and more of the judicial is embracing this idea. If we don’t turn this around the problem is going to get much worse.
Here are some facts:
1. A small number of people commit a wildly disproportionate amount of crime, about 1% commit most crime and 3 to 5 percent commit ALL crime.
2. Offenders who commit major crimes also commit constant public order infractions, so policing public order incapacitates serious criminals.
The guy who gropes women on the train or mugs people probably didn’t swipe his credit card to get through the turnstile.
3. Nearly all the people killed in controversial “Black Lives Matter” incidents belonged to the tiny subset of recidivist criminals. Jordan Neely and George Floyd are both examples of this kind of person, and both should have been in prison.
4. Depolicing public order crimes to protect habitual offenders from police interactions and incarceration costs a lot of lives, like that of Iryna Zarutska.
One of the things I've really changed my mind on is public order enforcement. I think a lot of liberals (like me) assumed people do things like turnstile-jumping were poor or just kids, but it seems like actually, a small number of people just do a lot of antisocial stuff.
Same thing is true for crime. I know can't find the article but I remember reading something (I think in the Washington Post) that basically found that some huge percentage of crime in Washington, DC was committed by like... 300 people. Just thousands and thousands of crimes by people who crimed over and over and over again.
And it's why I'm not on board for universal free buses in NYC. The city needs functional public services. Absolutely give unlimited subway / bus cards to people who are below a certain income threshold! But just "welcome aboard, you don't even need a metro card" is a bad plan.
It also seems to me like design that deters bad behavior (like taller subway gates that you can't jump over) is the best of all worlds: It doesn't require increased policing and all the abuses / risks that entails, while increasing the quality of the public service.
What also seems true is that there's a fairly narrow window in life in which the small number of people who commit crimes are committing crimes. This idea that all criminals are evil people who will never stop or be rehabilitated is just totally demonstrably false. Obviously this differs by crime type, but people who are shoplifting, burgling, robbing, assaulting strangers, etc are generally not doing so well into their 80s or even their 40s, they're mostly late teen and 20-something young men.
This has been pretty well understood by the law enforcement community for 40 years.
One of the blind spots of progressives is the data and reality of crime patterns.
A small group of people, including males of color, have been trained to believe that the world is against them and that they are not obligated to follow laws. They are responsible for a massive amount of violence, theft, drug crimes, and sex crimes.
Progressivism would work great if humans behaved the way Progressives imagine they do.
But they don’t.
wait this graph is crazy
BART installed anti-fare-hopping gates and the amount of station maintenance and cleanup they had to do went to basically zero
strong evidence that the poor condition of public transit is fairly easy to fix + caused by a very small group of people
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