Do you think the US needs to get tougher in crime in light of the spikes of crime happening?

30 comments

1. I am in favor of sensible policing. The general ACAB type stuff has really messed up policing for the large majority of people because of a few shitty hotspots or shitty individual cops.

   The weird “no pursuit” and “cut all funding” tropes are stupid. If you want good cops pay them well and attract competent people while also spending money on training.

   I am much more against the “tough on crime” stuff in the judicial system like three strikes, mandatory minimums, some bail issues, and restrictions on judicial discretion.

   But the actually leather on sidewalk type policing should be pretty robust.

2. No I don’t think tough on crime measures work

3. If you think toughness deters crime I have some nebraska beachfront property to sell you.

   https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/652230

4. As of 2017, there are 120 guns per 100 people in the US (98% of these are owned by private citizens). We have to get that number to over 200 (one for every HAND in the US).

5. What “spikes” are you referring to? White collar politicians taking home security documents? Yeah I see that.

6. Yes. But it also depends what you mean by “tougher on crime.”

7. No. This spike in crime is pracitcally nationwide across communities who have many different approaches to law enforcement. Some tough on crime community is getting the same results as those perceived to be doing less.

   It isn’t something politicans or law enforcement want to admit, but often a lot of these things are beyond anyone’s real direct control.

8. I would also like to know what spikes of crime you are referring to.

9. I think we need to go back to being as tough on crime as we were a few years ago. You don’t need draconian measures to reverse the recent uptrend. This tends to be a local issue, though, and if people elect DAs who don’t believe in bail, prosecuting property crimes, prosecuting violent crimes that don’t rise to the level of murder, etc, then they’re getting what they voted for.

10. What does “tougher on crime” mean to you? Is it something related to the legislature, the police, or the courts? If it’s the courts, is it the prosecutors or the judges?

    Most of the crime is happening at the state level, so that’s where any changes would also have to occur. Those changes would have to happen individually in each state.

    There is no amount of legislation or policing that will ever have any impact on crime. I’ve got 50 years of being alive with more and more laws and more and more police every year to back that up. I’m pretty sure that every candidate in every election I’ve voted in since the 1980s has campaigned on the exact same issues over and over again with crime bing one of them. If you can’t get the job done in 40 years, that’s because it’s not something you have control over.

    What needs to be done? Find out what makes someone think it’s ok to rob or kill another person and change that learning process. The age they learn that seems to be getting younger and younger.

11. I think we should be tough on inequality which I imagine contributes to crime.

12. What “spikes” might you be referring to? The national crime rate in 2022 wasn’t too different from 2021, and the statistics aren’t in yet for 2023 so far.

13. It’s not that the laws changed, it’s that major cities have essentially placed activists in district attorney roles and this is what happens. If you ask them, crime isn’t even a problem, it’s going down ( when you place the right controls on the stats, like excluding gang or property crime)

14. I’m pretty sure that the increase in crime was just criminals trying to catch up on their quotas after being stuck at home with no crime to do during covid.

15. No, equity is the issue. You can throw money and tools at police but when the root problem is that you can’t make it on a normal salary it’s futile.

16. Yes.

    I live in Illinois, and it’s common for 7-time felons to be arrested on more violent charges, often when out on bail.

    7 time felons shouldn’t exist. After a certain point we need to decide that repeat offenders, especially violent repeat offenders, should be permanently removed from polite society. The chaos needs to stop.

17. I think we should get rid of the unreasonable fear of cameras being everywhere in the name of privacy.

18. Boston had a progressive as DOJ. She did things like make things that were felonies misdemeanors, and all that other jazz.

    We were the only major city to not have a pandemic spike of crime.

    Tough on Crime — yeah- tough on crime is stopping the things that cause crime. I think Massachusetts might have such low rates of property crime and robberies because we have some pretty good social programs.

    Two of the states with the longest sentences for crimes against a person are Texas and Minnesota. Houston has a higher murder rate than Chicago, LA, or NYC.

    Minneapolis has a higher crime rate than Chicago, Boston, or LA.

19. If any other developed country had this level of crime and public disorder, the military would be out patrolling the streets.

20. Crime is mainly economic in nature. Be tough on crime by creating opportunities for advancement. We could get really crazy and make corporations use full-time employees for 80% of their permanent positions so that companies like Walmart can’t prey on poverty.

21. No law or legislation is going to fix it I don’t think. We need to get some more economic equity across the board and make mental health care more easily accessible across the socioeconomic spectrum.

22. No I don’t, personally I think we’re too harsh as is and I don’t agree with things like the death penalty or forced prison labor. I’m still salty as fuck about Chesa Boudin being recalled because he really represented what I wanted in a DA and the direction I want the justice system to go in.

23. Being “tough on crime” is like a doctor treating your tremors by casting your arm in concrete. “Doesn’t shake anymore, does it?”

24. no. you can’t punish your way out of a problem that threats don’t prevent. criminals don’t care about consequences until after they happen.

25. No, if by “tough on crime” you mean making punishments ever more draconian. Beyond just straight up *not working* and guaranteeing your inmates will never reintegrate back into a society they will forever after feel is rigged against them, it is unbefitting of a civilized society to purposely treat anyone, convict or not, as cruelly as it can technically get away with.

    If you want to decrease crime, increase the *capacity* of the “justice” system (larger police presence, more courts to deal with the backlog of cases, etc.) and give convicts a proper *incentive* to reform.

26. “tough on crime” has never worked. Lets work towards enforcing the laws we already have before doing anything drastic.

27. Crime isn’t even that high. All this panicking is completely unwarranted.

28. I think we need to get smarter with crime, stop wasting police time and money on minor drug crimes like marijuana, and instead focusing on alleviating the primary causes of crime (primarily poverty and lack of ability to advance in society), as well as having the prison systems primary goal be rehabilitation, not punishment, so that we can have a much lower recidivism rate like what is seen in many Scandinavian countries

29. The US needs to get together for a variety of reasons.

30. Yes, this can be done not just from increased policing (which must have more training done to avoid bad situations) but also from an increased amount of surveillance in some urban areas which can capture crimes in progress. The psychological effect of being watched in every public area may help reduce crime in problem spots in urban cities which might also reduce the need of rapidly increasing law enforcement personnel (as it is indeed harder to get more personnel these days).

    In parallel we should also fund mental health programs to take care of people on the brink. But I do feel that enforcement is necessary as even poor marginalized communities deserve responsive law enforcement to make them feel a bit safer (however trust must also be built)