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I'm not talking about normal city living, Brian. I'm talking about living in a ghetto where there is gunfire on a regular basis.
Most of these neighborhoods don't literally have bullets flying around on a daily basis. Even in relatively high crime areas, the risk of an innocent person being victimized by violent crime in a given year is low--again, quite comparable to the risk of being injured or killed in a car accident in many driving areas that people tend to consider desirable places to live.
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People can be near family without living in the same neighborhood. And I know many people who have moved from the Hill but still attend the Baptist church there.
Even supposing all that applied to every person, that could be much less convenient, and convenience counts--convenience is in fact part of why people are willing to subject themselves and their children to a much higher risk of car accidents. Of course, some people do indeed move out of high crime areas, just as some people live without driving much in cars.
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You're losing this aspect of the argument. People are different if they chose to live where there's gunfire.
It is nice of you to appoint yourself judge of a debate in which you are participating.
Anyway, I think it is easy for many people to judge other people harshly for the tradeoffs they make, while ignoring the tradeoffs they themselves have made. People really are exposing themselves and their children to an elevated risk of injury or death in car accidents by living in driving areas--but that is indeed what a lot of people do, and children are no less dead if they are killed by a car as opposed to a bullet.
But to you the people who risk gunfire are different, but people who risk car accidents are normal. There is no real objective basis for that assessment, but instead you are really just saying that people like you are normal, and people not like you are different.
Oh well. Along with the political balkanization, this refusal to acknowledge the common needs and concerns of our fellow citizens also helps explain why our society does a relatively terrible job policing crime--it is way too easy for many people to rationalize away the victims of crime as somehow bringing it upon themselves. I don't expect I can break through that attitude here, but it is really unfortunate because we really do know how to do better, and so a very large part of the solution would be just getting people to care enough about each other to actually do better.
It is nice of you to appoint yourself judge of a debate in which you are participating.
I had edited that out of my post.
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Originally Posted by BrianTH
Anyway, I think it is easy for many people to judge other people harshly for the tradeoffs they make, while ignoring the tradeoffs they themselves have made. People really are exposing themselves and their children to an elevated risk of injury or death in car accidents by living in driving areas--but that is indeed what a lot of people do, and children are no less dead if they are killed by a car as opposed to a bullet.
But to you the people who risk gunfire are different, but people who risk car accidents are normal. There is no real objective basis for that assessment, but instead you are really just saying that people like you are normal, and people not like you are different.
There are plenty of safer neighborhoods that don't require more car driving than the ghetto neighborhoods. That's where your argument completely falls apart.
Furthermore, there are safer, affordable neighborhoods within a few mere miles of these ghetto neighborhoods.
People who have a choice don't have to give up convenience to be safe. They don't have to trade risks either.
And there's not much convenient about a neighborhood that's so dangerous there aren't any businesses, like grocery stores.
Brian, how would you "minimize" crime? How would you change the ingrained culture of violence amongst young black males who kill each other at eight times the rate that young white males do? How would you get said black males to take their academics more seriously so that they did not score so abysmally on standardized testing? How would you get the white kids who stayed in my dying little hometown up north to stop living with their parents and snorting OxyContin?
I like thinking about and debating these sociological topics. However, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that little old me isn't going to change anything. So, I let the poor have their neighborhoods and I live in mine. They don't care or worry about me so why should I worry about them? I have fulfilled any obligation to them by the mere fact that I pay my taxes and their copious children are being fed with my money.
Last edited by Renaldo5000; 12-23-2009 at 03:21 PM..
There are plenty of safer neighborhoods that don't require more car driving than the ghetto neighborhoods. That's where your argument completely falls apart.
My point isn't that everyone should minimize driving. My point is that many people increase the risk to themselves and their families by living in driving neighborhoods, and no one argues that those people are "different", have chosen to accept the risk of driving, and therefore we should not provide them with adequate emergency services if they get into an accident.
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And there's not much convenient about a neighborhood that's so dangerous there aren't any businesses, like grocery stores.
Convenience to family and church, just wanting to stay in a home you have come to love . . . it is not "different" for people to value these things as much or more as a convenient grocery store.
First, many studies have shown that if you add more well-trained cops to a high crime area, you will reduce crime, and if you add a lot more cops, you reduce crime a lot. And if you do that immediately whenever there is the beginning of an increase in crime in an area, it will never take off in the first place. This really is a case where the obvious conclusion is true: a lot more cops means a lot less crime.
That is the easier part. The harder part is addressing the underlying causes of systemic crime. The two biggest in our society are concentrated poverty and a large black market for recreational drugs. The large black market for recreational drugs is the easiest problem to address: remove the blanket prohibition on the sale of these recreational drugs and swap in a regulated legal market, and you will eliminate the black market. We've done this before (ending alcohol prohibition), and we know it works to largely end the related crime.
Combatting concentrated poverty is much harder, and likely will take a great deal of time. We have taken some steps to dispersing poverty by ending the projects approach to public housing, but fundamentally we need to do more to create financial stability for the working poor and allow upward mobility. There is a long list of things that would help: decoupling health care from employment; wage insurance; decoupling the quality of public education from parental income; a return to a more equitable distribution of income across the labor spectrum; and so on. Again, this is a long-term project, on the scale of generations, but the sooner we get started the better.
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However, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that little old me isn't going to change anything. So, I let the poor have their neighborhoods and I live in mine.
None of us as individuals can do anything. But seriously, we know some things that immediately would help--even forgetting all the longer-term stuff involving poverty, if we changed the way we allocate police resources and ended the "war on drugs", we could dramatically lower violent crime rates immediately.
The obstacle to doing those things is political, not practical, and with all due respect, a large part of the political hangup is the "I got mine, and they deserve whatever they get" attitude of people who live in lower-crime areas. I understand the fear, and I understand that many people don't believe we can do any better anyway. But they are wrong about our ability to do better, which means they should get over the fear.
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They don't care or worry about me so why should I worry about them?
First, you should care about them because they are your fellow citizens and fellow human beings.
Second, the "I got mine" attitude is ultimately short-sighted. Our unnecessarily high violent crime rates are a drag on our economy and a burden for our health care system, they distort our political processes, undermine our civil liberties, have an undue influence on our choices about where to live, and on and on. These more indirect effects are less obvious to people living in lower-crime areas, but all of us would ultimately be better off if our society did a better job dealing with crime.
First, many studies have shown that if you add more well-trained cops to a high crime area, you will reduce crime, and if you add a lot more cops, you reduce crime a lot. And if you do that immediately whenever there is the beginning of an increase in crime in an area, it will never take off in the first place. This really is a case where the obvious conclusion is true: a lot more cops means a lot less crime.
I totally agree with you... but I would like to add to this. When you add a lot more cops you reduce crime in that area when you put more police. It's not like the criminal element gives up and goes straight.
They move.
And police have to keep in mind when the PD in the district next to them cracks down on crime, they need to keep their eyes wide open for it to start hitting there.
I totally agree with you... but I would like to add to this. When you add a lot more cops you reduce crime in that area when you put more police. It's not like the criminal element gives up and goes straight.
They move.
And police have to keep in mind when the PD in the district next to them cracks down on crime, they need to keep their eyes wide open for it to start hitting there.
Indeed, this is what I described as criminal whack-a-mole above. But as long as you keep moving your police resources around to swiftly target the beginning of the crime cycle wherever it shows up, you will get less crime overall. I'm not sure that means the criminal element has "gone straight", but they will in fact stop committing as many crimes if they can't find any exploitable gaps in the enforcement system.
I totally agree with you... but I would like to add to this. When you add a lot more cops you reduce crime in that area when you put more police. It's not like the criminal element gives up and goes straight.
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Bingo! A good friend of mine works for the Penn Hills police, anytime the PGh PD cranks it up in Homewood, they know an increase of crime is coming to their area.
There is also an element of acceptance to this. I've done janitorial for 12 years, and I've learned that no matter how clean I make my buildings there is level of mess people are perfectly happy to live with. Now -- there are some people for whom I can't do enough -- it's never clean enough, just like there are total pigs who simply don't care, tossing trash where ever, spittingt gum on the carpet and stubbing cigarettes out on the hallway walls.
But for the most part, people are happy with the appearance of clean. Which is why so much janitorial stuff smells lemony, or the new fragrance of the day -- lavendar...
And I think people who live in places like where I live understand there will be crime. It's a part of our lives. We do our best to mitigate it. We lock our doors and windows, we don't flash money or even expensive jewelry, we don't dress expensively and we don't buy flashy cars. And we do not keep cash in the house.
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