Aella estimates (in rather noisy fashion) that 3.2% of active, in-person sex workers in America are actively being sex trafficked.
From the linked post (emphasis in original):
So: given my estimated sex trafficking prevalence, I estimate about 3.2% of active, in-person sex workers in the US are currently being sex trafficked. This is higher than I anticipated. But I didn’t thoroughly check definitions of trafficking, and criticisms of sex trafficking concern often point out that ‘trafficking’ is a loose term with some reports including “anyone who crosses a border in order to do sex work, even if voluntary,” so who actually knows.
And indeed there is, in the sources cited in the post, very little in the way of consistent (or any!) clarification of just what the heck “sex trafficked” (or, for that matter, “sex workers”) is supposed to mean, thus no basis for assuming that the sources mean the same thing by the term, or even mean anything coherent by it…
In short, the only conclusion that can be drawn from Aella’s post is “how many sex workers are actively being sex trafficked? idk, what even are words and what do they mean”.
Maybe define them to be people who do not want to be a sex worker, even if they take into account the fact they might have no money otherwise.
“How should we operationalize the concept ‘sex worker who is actively being sex trafficked’ for the purpose of determining how many such people there are, taking care that our operationalization successfully captures our moral intuitions related to this subject” is certainly an interesting question, and your answer is not prima facie unreasonable (although we would surely want to consider it carefully and with a critical eye, before applying it).
But I want to note that it is an almost wholly irrelevant question unless we intend to do our own data collection from scratch. For the purpose of determining the answer to our question by looking at existing data, what use is an operationalization like this if the data we would need to answer that operationalized question is not in our data sets?
In other words—it’s not like the existing studies that Aella cites involved the subjects being asked the question you propose, or anything like it. Or maybe some of them did! But we don’t know, because in many cases the data is from sources like this:
They cite a 2006 GAO report which says depressing things like “the U.S. government’s estimate was developed by one person who did not document all his work” and “There is also a considerable discrepancy between the numbers of observed and estimated victims of human trafficking”
… probably not, though.
Admittedly this is not my expertise, I don't know how it works, all I know is that it's considered a real problem that affects a lot of people.
Don't take my definition too seriously, I think I omitted the part where they're trafficked far from their homes.
Maybe just like hospitals have inpatients and outpatients, prisons can have outprisoners who wear a device which monitors them all the time, and might even restrain them if needed.
It may actually work, but of course, it's just a lil bit too tech dystopian to be politically viable.
Credit cards are kind of an alternative to small claims court, and there are various reputational and other reasons that allow ordinary business to continue even if it is not in practice enforced by law.
True, but FWIW this essentially puts unintelligible enforcement in the hands of banks instead of the police. Which is probably a net improvement, especially under current conditions. But it does have its own costs. My wife is on the board of a nonprofit that last year got a donation, then the donor's spouse didn't recognize the charge and disputed it. The donor confirmed verbally and in writing, both to the nonprofit and to the credit card company, that the charge was valid. The nonprofit provided all requested documentation and another copy of the donor's written confirmation. The credit card company refused both to reinstate the charge and to reverse the fee.
I walked around the neighborhood and took some photos.
As far as I'm concerned, this is almost literally zero evidence of anything, in any inhabited area, except to confirm or deny very specific, narrow claims. To assume otherwise you'd have to look my own photos from my last few years of traveling and believe no one ever goes to national parks and the visitation numbers and reports people write of crowding and bad behavior are all lies.
This is not what the article says. It says that BC is re-criminalizing hard drugs.
I am in BC, and have not heard anything about decriminalizing marijuana. I get the sense that it being legal is generally popular. Complaints about drug users are common here, but they are usually not talking about weed.
Story of a mostly homeless guy who scammed Isaac King out of $300. Isaac sued in small claims court on principle, did all the things, and none of it mattered.
This link goes to Sarah's tweet, not to Isaac's story.
I wonder whether legalizing and reducing penalties for drug use is causal for property crime - drug addicts famously do theft to get substances.
It happens right in front of my house. Addicts steal things at shops, sell them at a pawn shop, buy drugs from a dealer waiting right in front of the pawn shop (difficult not to notice: the only guy who wears a black hoodie in the middle of a hot day), then inject the drugs behind the pawn shop.
When the shops are closed, or the addicts draw too much attention from the security, they try breaking into our houses and cellars instead. Every door in the neighborhood has signs of an attempt to pry it open.
What can we do about this?
Make shop theft impossible? Unlikely to happen, they would need to have the security literally everywhere.
Prevent the pawn shop from buying stolen stuff? I don't understand the details, but I was told that if they make the seller sign a paper saying "I totally swear I didn't steal this", they are legally ok. The pawn shop owner definitely knows that he deals with stolen stuff; that's why he moves everything between the shops, so that when they rob your house, you won't find your stuff in the shop window on your street the next day.
Prevent the dealer from selling drugs? That's quite tricky, legally, because owning a small amount of drug "for your own use" is not illegal here. Of course the dealer only brings one small bag of powder each time. Also, you pay to one guy, and get the powder from another guy, so it is legally tricky to determine at which moment exactly the drug was sold. (The first guy didn't give you any drug, and the second guy didn't take any money from you. If you only catch one of them, he will probably claim it was just a misunderstanding.)
So our only remaining option is to form a vigilante squad, and... well, I am not going to write down anything that may or may not happen afterwards. Didn't expect this to happen to me, and yet, here I am.
Reducing penalties for drug use is a well-sounding idiocy. In theory, you reduce the penalties for drug use, but in practice, you reduce the penalties for drug distribution, because most of the time when you catch a dealer, he can argue that this was all for his own use. And he only takes with him one bag of powder at a time. Yes, in theory it is possible to find the store full of bags, but you just made it needlessly complicated. When drug possession is a crime, you can catch the dealer, he says it was for his own use, you arrest him anyway. (Ideally, you would give him exponentially increasing sentences, starting with community service.)
This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime.
What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may not be taking place by the Trump administration or its allies. As I’ve said elsewhere, all of that is important, but I’ve made a decision not to cover it. This is about Ordinary Decent Crime.
Table of Contents
Perception Versus Reality
A lot of the impact of crime is based on the perception of crime.
The perception of crime is what drives personal and political reactions.
When people believe crime is high and they are in danger, they dramatically adjust how they live and perceive their lives. They also demand a political response.
Thus, it is important to notice, and fix, when impressions of crime are distorted.
And also to notice when people’s impressions are distorted. They have a mental idea that ‘crime is up’ and react in narrow non-sensible ways to that, but fail to react in other ways.
One thing that it turns out has very little to do with perceptions of crime is the murder rate, which in most places has gone dramatically down.
If you go purely by state, if it counts then Washington DC is at the top, but 9 of the next 10 are red states. And of the 100 biggest cities, 5 of the 6 safest are in California.
Of course, there is a lot more to being safe than not being murdered. San Francisco has a very low murder rate, but what worries people are other crimes, especially property crime – things are bad enough there, and enough people in my circles pay attention to it, that it gets its own section. It’s definitely not ‘down at 6’ on the chart.
The thing is, property crime and other Ordinary Decent Crime went dramatically down too, in many ways, especially in these very blue areas. Crime used to be a huge portion of our cognitive focus in major cities.
You who carry a $1k iPhone around in your hand do not remember how insane that would have been when I was growing up in New York City. As Dennis Leary used to put it, have you ever played ‘good block, bad block’? And we took levels of risk, and perception of risk, unimaginable today, both for children and adults. I was warned not to have a hundred bucks in my wallet, and not to walk along Amsterdam Avenue, and I took the ‘safer’ last two block route back to our apartment on the Upper West Side.
Here’s some English data to go with the USA data.
Violent crime and physical assault has gone from being like car crashes, which are an actual danger you have to constantly worry about and that happens all the time (although with a lot fewer fatalities than they used to!), to something halfway to airplane crashes. A violent crime is often now news. Thefts can be news.
That’s not to say that in particular places property crime hasn’t been allowed to spiral out of control, especially in particular ways.
We forget how blessed we are. And it is very important to hold onto that. Trust is fraying in other ways, but that feeling of living in Batman’s Gotham, with violence around every corner even if you didn’t choose to get involved? Yeah, that’s gone. The whole trope of ‘vigilante hero fights crime in the streets’ feels like an anachronism.
The Case Violent Crime is Up Actually
Aporia magazine makes the case that crime rates are much higher than in the past, because health care improvements have greatly reduced the number of murders, and once you correct for that murder is sky high. It is an interesting argument, and certainly some adjustment is needed, but in terms of magnitude I flat out do not buy it in light of my lived experience, as discussed elsewhere.
The other half of the post is that our criminal justice system is no longer effective, due to rules that now prohibit us from locking the real and obvious repeat criminals up, and those criminals do most of the crime and are the reason the system is overloaded. The obvious response is, we have this huge prison population, we sure are locking up someone. And yet, yes, we do seem capable of identifying who is doing all the crime, including the repeated petty crime, yet incapable of then locking them up. That does seem eminently fixable.
George Carlin had a routine where everyone would get 12 chances to clean up their drug habits before being exiled (to Colorado, of course) and it seems like we could figure something out here, even if we think three strikes are insufficient?
Threats of Punishment
Our legal system depends on threatening people with big punishments, because standard procedure is severely downgrading all punishments.
So when you try to make shoplifting a felony punishable by three years in jail, what you’re actually doing is allowing that to be bargained down, and ensuring the punishment is ‘anything at all’ rather than cops arresting you on a misdemeanor only to have you released with a stern talking to, which means cops won’t even bother.
Obviously it would be better to actually enforce laws and punishments, but while we’re not doing that, we need to understand how laws work in practice.
We used to basically be okay with using this to give police and prosecutors leverage and discretion, and to allow enforcement in cases like ‘we know this person keeps stealing stuff’ without having to prove each incident. Now, we’re not, but we don’t know what the replacement would be.
Property Crime Enforcement is Broken
The most obvious types of crime that are up are organized property crimes.
Why?
I see two central highly related reasons.
Problem one is largely caused by problem two, but let’s talk effects first, then causes.
Essentially, in terms of my four categories of legality, we have moved much of property crime from its rightful place in Category 3 – where it is actively illegal and risks real consequences but we don’t move mountains to catch you – into at least Category 2, where it is annoying and discouraged but super doable with no real consequences. And in many cases, it is now effectively Category 1, where it might as well be thought of as fully legal without frictions.
If you are an upstanding citizen and then decide to do a little property crime, as a treat, you risk your reputation, various unpleasant reactions, and getting an arrest record and dealing with the courts, and you don’t know how likely those outcomes are. Security can and will sometimes catch you, you have things to lose, and so on. So the deterrence works okay there.
If you do a lot of property crime, however, you quickly learn that most of the risks and costs are kind of fixed, and often non-existent. Security guards and employees mostly won’t take any risk to interfere, police usually won’t be called.
Even when police catch you, even repeatedly, they mostly let you go, often even after being caught an absurd number of times. The old ‘quietly use or threaten violence or to otherwise mess you up’ solution has also been taken largely off the table, for better and for worse.
In each individual case, this is wise in terms of outcomes. But if you do it too often, eventually the criminal element or those considering such actions notices, and the problem snowballs.
If even reported burglaries only result in a suspect at all 17.6% of the time, and only have a charge 3.2% of the time let alone a plea or conviction, and presumably most burglaries don’t even get reported, and you don’t even make a point to arrest someone when they leave behind their literal bail notice, then you’re saying burglary is de facto legal. You can just take stuff. That will only get worse over time.
The same goes for things closer to fraud, such as organized cargo theft. Ryan Peterson reports that cargo theft has grown by more than 10% each month YoY since Q4 2021. This will continue until people start actually getting punished.
The latest incidents are in the Chicago area, where organized crime has run or taken control of motor carriers and uses them to enable cargo theft and demand de facto ransom payments. Ryan reports that Flexport has used a machine learning based fraud prevention technology (nicknamed ‘CURVE’) to spot and avoid such pitfalls. Essentially the criminals have learned to spoof commonly used indicators of trust, so the arms race is ongoing there same as everywhere else, and like many other places trust is declining.
The costs of property crime, in terms of countermeasures, can get very high. Putting products behind locked display cases is a rather large cost, given two in three shoppers mostly won’t buy such products. I will still buy medications or other urgently needed items through a display case in an emergency, but yeah if it’s not an emergency I’m going to pull out my phone and use Amazon, and next time try a different store. The whole procedure is too annoying and feels terrible.
Eventually, we’ll have to react to all this.
We’ll need to figure out how to enforce the law sufficiently that crime no longer pays, and it is at least somewhat obvious to the criminals that it no longer pays.
At minimum, we should track when we arrest or otherwise identify criminals, or there are otherwise clearly related incidents, and do escalating enforcement against repeat offenders. The stories of ‘this person got arrested 35 times for [X] and was released each time’ should never, ever happen, nor should the ‘50 people are doing a huge percentage of the crime in [NYC/SF/etc].’
As noted in an earlier section, this makes one wonder, who are all the criminals we are locking up, in that case?
The Problem of Disorder
Charles Lehman convincingly generalizes what is happening as a problem with disorder. We have successfully kept violent crime down, but we have seen a steady rise in disorder and in public tolerance for disorder, which people correctly dislike and then interpret as a rise in crime. Some of it very much is a rise in crime, such as retail theft forcing stores to lock up merchandise, while other disorderly actions are anti-social but not strictly criminal.
I would draw a distinction between disorder in the sense of ‘not ordered’ versus antisocial disorder that degrades the overall sense of order or harms non-participants in the activity. All hail Discordia, hail Eris, but hands off my stuff, you know?
Our academics have essentially delegitimatized disliking antisocial disorder and especially using authority to enforce against it, including against things like outright theft, and we’ve broken many of the social systems that enforced the relevant norms.
If you do not enforce rules against antisocial disorder, especially laws against outright theft, while enforcing rules against insufficiently obedient and rigid order, you are not doing people any favors. People realize these rules against disorder are not enforced, norms erode, and you get increasing amounts of disorder.
In particular, antisocial disorder becomes The Way to Do Things and get resources.
If you can sell drugs openly without restriction, or organize a theft ring at little risk, but opening a legitimate business takes years of struggle and expenses and occupational licensing issues and so on, guess what the non-rich aspiring businesspeople are increasingly going to do?
As I discussed in my post on sports gambling, we impose increasingly stringent regulations and restrictions on productive and ordered activity, while effectively tolerating destructive and disordered activity, including when we do and don’t enforce the relevant laws.
We need to reverse this. We should apply the ‘let them cook’ and ‘don’t use force to stop people who aren’t harming others’ principles to productive and ordered activity, rather than to unproductive and disordered activity. At minimum, we should beware and track the balance of inconveniences, and ensure that we are throwing up more and more expensive barriers to antisocial disordered activities, versus pro-social or ordered activities.
YIMBY for housing construction and doing business and working. NIMBY for noise complaints and shoplifting and cargo theft.
Extreme Speeding as Disorder
Is this causal in the sense of broken windows theory, or is it merely a symptom?
My presumption is it is both symptom and cause when it gets this extreme.
The Fall of Extralegal and Illegible Enforcement
In the Before Times, if you were up to no good as they saw it, and especially if you were committing crimes or interfering with the good citizens of the land, the law might notice, and in various ways make it clear you should stop.
This often worked, and gave police leverage, but was illegal, and led to terrible abuses.
So we decided that this was bad, actually, and moved progressively to cut off this sort of behavior.
The problem is that this puts the system in a tricky position. It has only so many resources, and it is expensive and time consuming to actually enforce laws by the book, and often you don’t have the proof or there are technicalities so you can’t do it.
We cannot go back, nor do we want to. But over time everyone is adjusting to and solving for the new equilibrium, and norms, habits and skills are also adjusting. The system was designed for one way and now it is the other way. A lot of what has been protecting us is inertia, and the instinct that there are forces waiting to keep things in line, and various norms that grew up over time.
That will, over time, continue to fade, if don’t give it good reason not to. I worry about this. It is all the more reason that, now that we don’t have as much illegible enforcement, we need more legible enforcement, including for small offenses, for those things we want to actually prevent.
In America You Can Usually Just Keep Their Money
Story of a mostly homeless guy who scammed Isaac King out of $300. Isaac sued in small claims court on principle, did all the things, and none of it mattered.
My understanding is exactly Sarah’s. If someone simply keeps your money, or otherwise cheats you, what are you going to do about it? Even if you can prove it, it is definitely not worth going to court. Lawsuits are effectively nuclear weapons, the threat is far stronger than the execution unless scale is truly massive. Calling the cops for anything small is also not worth the effort and carries risk of backfire.
Personal example: Someone rich (or at least spending as if they were rich, could be broke, who knows) promised, in writing, as part of resolving the situation at a company, to pay me six figures. Then they didn’t pay, then once again in person affirmed this and promised to pay, then didn’t pay. What am I going to do, sue them? When they have a history of vindictive behavior? Money gone.
Mostly it works out fine. Credit cards are kind of an alternative to small claims court, and there are various reputational and other reasons that allow ordinary business to continue even if it is not in practice enforced by law. But also we all choose to avoid transactions that would depend on the threat of a small-stakes lawsuit.
Police
If you’re wondering why we can’t go back? We’re not okay with things like this:
Son reports dad missing, police think son killed father, they psychologically torture him for 17 hours and threaten to kill his dog until he confesses. Father then found alive, son settles lawsuit $900k in damages.
I wonder how much of this is ‘we can’t do other things we’d prefer to do so instead we do other things that are even worse.’
Here’s an actually great idea from a (now defeated) presidential candidate who is also a former prosecutor, you can guess why we haven’t done it already.
Police training in alternative cognitive explanations of various phenomena and behaviors reduced use of force, discretionary arrests and arrests of Black civilians in the field, and reduced injuries, while ‘activity’ was unchanged. Odd to say activity did not decrease if discretionary arrests decreased. That is at the core of police activity. If you are making less arrests, then it stands to reason you would also use less force. We would like to think the training made police make better decisions, but we cannot differentiate that from the possibility that police got the message to find reasons to make fewer arrests.
A working paper says that police lower quantity of arrests but increase arrest quality near the end of their shifts, when arrests would require overtime work, and that this effect is stronger when the officer works a second job. File under ‘yes obviously but it is good that someone did the work to prove it, and to learn the magnitude of the effect.’ One could perhaps use this to figure out what makes arrests high quality?
In an ACX comments highlight post linked earlier, Performative Bafflement suggests more than 80% of American police hours are wasted not solving any crime at all, because most hours are spent writing traffic tickets. Which would explain why the police are so bad at solving crimes. I mention it because Scott finds this plausible. But that number seems absurd, and for example Free Think here puts the number directly spent on stops at 15%, even with additional paperwork that doesn’t get anything like 80%.
One should also note that the three hours a day on paperwork is quite a lot – that’s a huge tax on the ability to actually Do Things. Can AI plus body cameras help here? Seems like you should be able to cut that down a lot.
Here is the one and only Amanda Knox giving advice on how to deal with police.
If anything this seems advice rather willing to cooperate with the police?
One can summarize that as ‘be respectful and comply with their physical demands, but if they treat you like a witness (and you didn’t do anything illegal) tell the truth, but if they ever accuse you of anything, try to get you to change your story or ask you to repeat yourself or act like you are a suspect get a lawyer and never ever confess to anything even speeding and of course never sign away Miranda.’
That seems like the bare minimum amount of wariness?
Probation
This section of ACX’s comments post on prisons discussed probation.
According to several commentators, probation is essentially a trap, or a scam.
In theory, probation says that you get let go early, but if you screw up, you go back. Screwing up means violating basically any law, or being one minute late to a probation meeting, or losing your job (including because the probation officer changed your meeting to be when you had to work and got you fired), or any number of other rules.
One can imagine a few ways this could work, on a spectrum.
The reports are that the point of probation is the third thing, that probation officers will actively seek to violate people and send them back to prison even if they’re not doing anything wrong. Thus probation is a substantial portion as bad as being in prison, and then you probably fail and go to prison anyway.
In this model, the entire system is in bad faith here, and they’re offering you probation to avoid a trial knowing they’ll then be able to screw you over later.
And that this is true to the extent that realistic criminals often turn down probation if the alternative is a shorter overall sentence.
My quick search said about 54% of those paroled fail and get sent back, but a commenter says parole is actually the first thing, they want you to succeed and not have to imprison you, whereas straight probation off a plea bargain is the third thing, where they want to avoid a trial then imprison you anyway.
This is offered as the reason people don’t accept GPS monitoring. If you have a GPS monitor, then it is easy to notice you’ve technically violated the terms, and since everyone involved wants to violate you, that means you’re doomed.
Scott Alexander interprets ‘someone on probation got two years for driving the speed limit because it was technically a violation in context’ as a outrageous strictness. Which it is, but the two years was really for the original crime the guy got probation for, not for the technical violation. So it’s more like the system lying and being evil, rather than it being too strict per se.
Genetic Databases
When Denmark expanded its database of genetic information, crime rates fell dramatically.
This is insanely strong evidence that the prediction of being caught is a huge driver of recidivism rates. A 42% drop in 1-year recidivism is crazy. The rate of being caught went up, but it didn’t go up that dramatically.
America saw similar results, although smaller.
What we need to do is a study of criminals perceptions of likelihood of being caught with and without the DNA database, and in general, and how those perceptions predict their actions, so we can better establish the effect size here and what else impacts it.
There are obvious libertarian objections to a universal DNA database. But if the upside was a 42% overall drop in crime, potentially a lot more since this would then change norms and free up police for other cases? It is very hard for me to make the case for not doing it.
Marijuana
The Biden Administration attempted to move Marijuana to Schedule III. That would have helped somewhat with various legal and tax problems, but still have left everything a mess. It seems the clock will run out on them, instead, as per prediction markets.
I am libertarian on such matters, but also I am generally strongly anti-marijuana.
I don’t think marijuana is typically good for those that use it, especially for those that use it a lot. I believe you are probably better off using it never (or hardly ever but for humans never is easier) than trying to figure out the right times when you can get net benefits. There are of course exceptions, especially certain types of creatives, and also medical reasons to use it.
Similarly to what I concluded about sports gambling, I don’t think we should make it effectively criminal, but I believe that there needs to be some friction around marijuana use.
Another way to think about this is, you should ensure that your formerly illegal activities have at least as many regulatory barriers as your pro-social activities like selling food or building a house.
Steve Sailer points out that one important risk of legalizing vice is that legalization vastly increases the quality of marketing campaigns, the way that legalizing sports gambling made ads for it ubiquitous. In addition, it increases the reach and options available, grows the market and shifts norms.
So yes, I think some form of ‘soft illegal’ or semi-legal is the way to go here.
If you go fully legal, you get what we’ve been seeing in New York City. There is massive overuse, and a huge percentage of new leases on New York City storefronts have been illegal cannabis shops getting busted. They don’t cause trouble, but that leaves less room for everything else, and often the city actively smells of the stuff.
Seriously, it was totally nuts. Still is, although I report things are improving, and Eric Adams did indeed shut down a lot of the illegal places, eventually. Nature is healing.
Here is a NYT article about New York’s disastrous legalization implementation. There is a tension between complaints about the botched implementation, of which there can be no doubt, versus worry that marijuana is too addictive and harmful to be fully legalized even if implemented well.
Similarly British Columbia is recriminalizing marijuana after a three year trial run amid growing reports of public drug use.
The Economics of Fentanyl
Alex Tabarrok does the math on an otherwise excellent Reuters exploration of Fentanyl production, and is suspicious of the profit margins. A gram of cocaine he says costs about $160 on the street and $13-$70 trafficked into the USA to sell, whereas Reuters claimed to have gotten precursors for 3 million tablets of Fentanyl for only $3607.18, which Alex estimates sells for $1.5 million. That’s crazy, although there are other costs of production, even if you assume they missed some ingredients.
One could model this as the cost of precursor goods being purely in risk of punishment during the process, with the dollar costs being essentially zero. Actually making the drug is dirt cheap, but the process of assembling and distributing it carries risks, and the street price (estimated at $0.50 per tablet) is almost entirely that risk plus time costs for distribution.
If you fully legalized Fentanyl, putting it into Category 1, the price would go to almost zero, which would not be pretty.
Enforcement and the Lack Thereof
Here is some good news and also some bad news.
So the punishment if you are caught riding without paying is you get off the bus?
That doesn’t work. If I knew for sure that this is all that happens when you don’t pay, either you’re checking a huge portion of buses or I see no reason to pay the fare, given you’re not going to take this seriously.
New York City has the same problem with fare evasion. Suppose you get caught. What happens? Nothing. Their offer is nothing. All you get is a warning. Then the second time you are caught you owe $100 fine with a $50 OMNY credit, so a $50 fine if you then go back to paying. This gives you a very clear incentive to evade the fare until you’re caught at least twice. Most people will never get caught even once. The norms are rapidly shifting, with respectable-seeming people often openly not paying, to the point where I feel like the pact is broken and if I pay then I’m the sucker.
John Arnold rides along with the LAPD and offers thoughts. He is impressed by officer quality and training, notes they are short on manpower and the tech is out of date. He suggests most calls involve mental illness or substance abuse, often in a vicious cycle, and often involving fentanyl which is very different from previous drug epidemics.
One policy suggestion he makes is to devote more effort to solving non-fatal shootings, which he says are 50%+ less likely to get solved despite who survives being largely luck and shootings often leading to violence cycles of retaliation. Compared to what we pay for trials and prisons, the costs of investigation seem low, and the deterrence value of catching more suspects seems high. More strong evidence we are underinvesting in detective work.
If you believe you can hire more police and then they will spend their days solving capital-C crimes like shootings, then it’s hard to imagine failing a cost-benefit test.
How bad can non-enforcement get? London police do not consider a snatched phone, whose location services indicate it is six minutes from the police station, which is being actively used to buy things, is worth following up on.
I understand why the police in practice mostly ignore burglaries when they don’t have good leads, but when the case has essentially been pre-solved I find this rather baffling. It is impressive how long it is taking for criminals to solve for the equilibrium.
Your periodic reminder that some particular laws and methods of enforcement can be anti-poor, but not only is enforcing the law not anti-poor, the poor need us to enforce the law.
Sometimes I wonder how California still exists, after 6 years Scott Weiner finally ends the rule that to enforce the law against breaking into cars you have to ‘prove’ all the doors were locked. If the doors might not have been locked how does that make it okay? With crime this legal in so many ways we are fortunate that there are not (vastly more) organized bands going around taking all the things all the time.
Charging domestic abusers with crimes reduces likelihood of violent recidivism, whereas ‘the risk-assessment process’ had no discernable effect. It makes sense that criminal charges would be unusually effective here. Incentives and real punishments matter. They make future criminal threats credible. They weaken the abuser’s bargaining power. They give an opportunity to make changes, perhaps even end the relationship. There is also a distinction between most crimes, where putting someone in jail with other criminals leads to them networking on how to do more crime and forming obligations to do more crime, and domestic abuse, where that doesn’t make much sense.
Jails
It has always been very bizarre to me the things we tolerate in prisons, including letting them be effectively run by criminal gangs, and normalizing rape, but also commercial exploitations like the claim that some jails are preventing inmates from having visitors so Securus Technologies can charge over a dollar a minute for video calls instead.
Perhaps we should not have our prisons not be incubators of criminality, where inmates are isolated from any outside influences and left to largely govern themselves?
Even if prison isn’t purely rehabilitation, it shouldn’t be actively the opposite of that.
As in, if you give prisoners free audio and video calls, which costs you approximately nothing, you see dramatic improvements in prisoner behavior, and a far less toxic environment. The direction makes sense, the magnitude of the change is stunning. I don’t want to trust a single study, but also there is little downside here – introduce this in a bunch more places, and take advantage of the natural experiment, then go from there.
If we want to do punishment for punishment’s sake, we have plenty of options for that. Cutting people off from the outside seems like one of the worst ones, especially since actual crime bosses can already get cell phones anyway. It also gives you powerful leverage – you default to calls for free, and have the power to take them away.
Instead, we do the exact opposite. Not only are calls not free, we actively limit contact with the outside, especially the influences that would be most positive, in the name of extracting tiny amounts of money.
Whenever I hear about such abuses, two things stick in my mind: The absurdly high amount we pay to keep people in prison, and the absurdly low amounts of money over which we torture the inmates and their families. I don’t ‘have a study’ but it seems obvious that allowing more outside communication would be good for rehabilitation, as well as being the right thing to do.
On a related note: Almost all prison rape jokes are pretty terrible. We have come a long way on so many related questions, yet somehow this is still considered acceptable by many who otherwise claim to champion exactly the reasons this is not okay. If we are going to ruin comedy, let’s do it where it is maximally justified.
Criminals
Would criminals largely be unable to handle hypotheticals? If they were, asks River Tam, then how is it they can handle sports hypotheticals with no trouble, as you can demonstrate by asking them if LeBron would beat Jordan one-on-one. This seems entirely compatible with the same people being unable, in practice, to follow other hypotheticals that don’t match their own experiences. They have learned that such tactics are in practice often a trap In Their Culture, so they are having none of it. That doesn’t mean they can’t or don’t think about hypotheticals.
Causes of Crime
A well-known result is that releasing a Grand Theft Auto game, or other popular entertainment product, short term lowers crime as criminals consume the entertainment rather than commit crime (paper). Whereas Pokemon Go was deadly, since it encouraged people to go outside. This is of course a deep confusion of short run versus long run effects. What matters are the long run impacts, which this fails to measure. Presumably we all agree that ‘go for a walk’ is a healthy thing, not a deadly thing, even though today it would be ‘safer’ to stay home on a given day.
Causes of Violence
From Vital City, the case that violence tends to be a crime of passion, and jobs and transfer programs and prosperity help with property crime but have little impact on violence, versus the cast that investments in things like summer jobs, neighborhood improvements and services reduces crime, including violent crime.
My instinct is to believe the second result directionally, while strongly doubting the magnitude of the intervention studies quoted. There is not as big a contradiction here as one might think. Violent crimes are typically crimes of passion, but even among those incidents, the circumstances that cause that, and the cultural conditions that cause that, are not randomly distributed. You can alter that.
Unfortunately anti-poverty programs as such do not seem to move the needle on that in the short term. In the short term, my guess is that if you want to act at scale you must shift the social conditions more directly linked to violence triggers, or teach people various variations on CBT and help them alter their behavior.
As for the first result, I can believe that the correlations and intervention effects are smaller, but I find the general claim of ‘prosperity and employment do not decrease violence’ as obviously absurd, especially when stated as ‘poverty and unemployment do not lead to increased violence.’
Homelessness
How should we think about homelessness, and the fear of becoming homeless? Most of those who are long term homeless, as I understand it, have severe problems, but that doesn’t mean the threat of this isn’t hanging over a lot of people’s heads all the time, especially with the decreasing ability to turn to family and friends. Also people correctly treat the nightmare as starting with the threat becoming real and close, that’s already bad enough. I think this is part of why a lot of people are under the impression that a huge percentage of Americans live ‘paycheck to paycheck’ in ways that put them ‘one paycheck away’ from homelessness and total collapse, in a way that seems clearly untrue – a lot of people are one paycheck away from being too close to the edge and starting to panic, or having to tap resources and options they’d rather not tap, which sucks, but that’s different from actually falling over that edge.
Yay Trivial Inconveniences
From Scott Alexander’s report on the Progress Studies conference, it turns out forcing people to pay the fare instantly transformed SF’s BART trains to be safe and clean? Although there is skepticism given how few stations even have the new gates yet.
San Francisco
The government of San Francisco has historically been the epitome of the pattern of putting up (Category 2) barriers to productive and pro-social activities like doing business and building housing, but giving de facto (Category 1) carte blanche to a variety of activities we would like to see happen less often.
Thus, San Francisco has some issues with drugs and homelessness, an ongoing series.
It’s not only crime. What if it’s me, too?
When calculating crime in San Francisco, you also have to adjust for dramatically lower foot traffic, which in downtown is still 70% below 2019 levels. What matters in practice is how much a given person would be at risk, so the denominator matters.
Meanwhile, the city does enforce the law against things like hot dog venders, or those who violate building codes, while (at least until recently?) not enforcing it against venders of illegal drugs. The only businesses you can reasonably open are the illegal harmful ones. That does not seem likely to go well over time.
Many nonprofits in San Francisco seem increasingly inaccurately named.
I constantly hear that various nonprofit organizations working with the city of San Francisco are, rather than trying to help with social problems, very much criminal for-profit enterprises working to warp public policy to increase profits.
Is the underlying situation quite bad? Periodically I see people say yes.
My experiences have not been this, but I haven’t been in the areas people claim this is happening. So yes, most of the city blocks were never like this, but that’s not good enough. The good news is things seem to be improving now.
Closing Down San Francisco
One option is to arrest people who commit crimes. Another is to close stores?
This is the pure version of enforcing the law against pro-social legible activity because you refuse to do so against anti-social activity, and thinking you’re helping.
A San Francisco Dispute
There was a dispute a while ago about cleaning up a particular street that happens to be were Twitter lives. Very confident people were saying it was safe and nice, others were very confident it is a cesspool. Both would know. What was up with that?
Cleaning Up San Francisco
The good news is that this was ages ago. By ages I mean months. Everything escalates quickly now.
At this point, I’ve seen several claims that in a matter of months they’ve managed to clean up San Francisco. This includes that reported property crimes dropped by 45%, which of course has two potential causes that imply very different conclusions.
Here’s some actually hard evidence that the San Francisco cleanup is working, presented in the absolute funniest way possible.
Perfect. We now have a highly reliable car theft index. We used to get 70 calls a day, now we get about 20. Combining this with other sources from both auto shops and other crime stats, we are likely looking at about a 65% drop in car break-ins, although only a 12% decline in whole-car thefts.
This also can make us confident that other crime statistics are moving due to reduced actual crime, rather than due to reduced reporting of crime.
Portland
Vanquez runs for Portland District Attorney on Law & Order. He won 54-46.
Those Who Do Not Help Themselves
Sacramento warns Target it would face fines if it kept reporting thefts. That sounds absurd, but Jim Cooper, Sacramento County Sheriff, actually has a good response.
That response is: If you are not allowing the police to enforce the law, the least you can do is stop whining about it.
This is so insane. How are you going to deter crime if you literally are afraid to have anyone spreading the word that those who rob your stores might face punishment?
I hope we have now reached the point where ‘shoplifters arrested in your store by police’ is seen as a good thing?
Solving for the Equilibrium (1)
This is an interesting gambit, fine the shoplifters directly or else.
Indeed, this only works if calling the police is worse than paying the fine. If the police wouldn’t do anything, then the threat is empty.
The bigger issue is that if the chance of being caught is under 20%, or people think it is, then all you are doing is minimizing their risk. And indeed, it is widely believed that 5% or less of shoplifting attempts are caught. One can even see people treating this as an invitation as noted above – shoplifting is now a game, win one or lose five, not a hard line.
Of course, they are not quite promising to make this offer to everyone, merely to do one action or the other.
The obvious ethical objection is that those who can pay and really should therefore have the police called will pay, and those who cannot pay and thus have some real need get the police called. And the worries about where does it end.
Where I do think this is good is as a way to use limited police resources to get full deterrence. You can’t call the police every time, it’s too expensive for everyone. But you can credibly threaten to call the police if the conditional means you rarely have to actually call them. The threat is stronger than its execution, but to make that work the threat needs to be credible.
The other equilibrium is that shoplifters are essentially not prosecuted at all because there are too many of them, and this seems to be a case of many jurisdictions f***ing around and finding out.
Then there’s the statistics on bike theft, which are even more dismal, and a rather clear test example.
A simple heuristic needs to be ‘if you provide me with video evidence of the crime I will at least then actually look into it.’ If not, well, we should be thankful it’s taking so long to solve for the other equilibrium.
Whereas this is your reminder that it seems in the UK the police claim they are actively not allowed to act on location data even for a stolen phone that is still on, let alone CCTV footage? Even with everything else I know, I can’t even at this point. It is perhaps amazing that London isn’t Batman’s Gotham.
Solving for the Equilibrium (2)
Another solution to the equilibrium, San Francisco edition, since the previous solution clearly wouldn’t work:
Here’s another, via MR: staging armed robberies so the ‘victims’ can get immigration visas.
Lead
New meta-analysis finds (draft, final study) publication bias in studies that measure the effect of lead on crime, leading to large overstatement of effect sizes. Note that even if new result is true, lead is still a really big deal and a large part of the story.
Law & Order
Do I feel this pain? Oh yes I feel this pain.
Look Out
Aella estimates (in rather noisy fashion) that 3.2% of active, in-person sex workers in America are actively being sex trafficked. As she notes, that is a lot. That probably would then translate to a lot more than 3.2% of encounters.
This seems like a strong argument that you have an ethical obligation, as a potential client, to ensure that this isn’t happening.
Story of a very well-executed scam about claiming you failed to appear for jury duty.