The Raven
Veteran
Inner city crime is driven by poverty and lack of opportunity. Lessen income inequality, promote more mixed-income communities, and lessen poverty, and I can just about guarantee crime will go down.
-
Welcome to PurpleFlock! Sign up here so that you can chat with your fellow Ravens fans.
The Well-Mannered Politics Thread
- Thread starter usmccharles
- Start date
- Status
cobrajet
Hall of Famer
I can’t say I agree with that. I would say it is driven more by the drug trade and lack of morality. You don’t rob the corner store because you are in poverty, the state will provide for your needs in the way of independence cards, welfare, and low income housing. I am not buying a drug dealer gunning down another dealer for selling on his turf, is because of a lack of opportunity to better himself. I have seen people that made similar excuses for that type of behavior and eventually started condoning it. Correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me by your statement, you may believe socialism may be the answer to stopping crime and violence.
The Raven
Veteran
The notion that crime is driven by immorality relies on the assumption that some people are inherently less moral than others, that those people are born immoral, and that those people live in inner cities. Crime is indeed driven by poverty, and social science bears this out to be true. More here.
This is even supported by hard, local data. Crime rates are lower in Maryland's richer counties like Montgomery and Howard than in our poorer jurisdictions like Baltimore City and Cecil County. Even within Baltimore County, you can see the trends. Perry Hall is clearly more affluent than Dundalk. Dundalk has higher crime rates and higher poverty. Perry Hall is affluent and isn't filled with crime. In fact, you can probably trace the rise in crime in Dundalk and Edgemere directly to the downfall of the steel mill. When those good middle class jobs died, poverty went up, and crime followed.
I don't believe pure socialism is the answer. Rather, I believe the problem could be solved by democratic socialism, an ideology this country arguably practiced from 1932 to 1968. Whereas socialism gives everyone the same ends, democratic socialism gives everyone the same means, so to speak. Socialism is about equality in results. Democratic socialism is about equality in opportunity.
Willbacker
Ravens Ring of Honor
Kinda changing the subject here but in your opinion do you believe gun laws are properly enforced and the proper punishment distributed. It just seems like too many wrists get slapped until something major actually happens. Could it be burdensome paperwork,lenient judges or maybe just overcrowding in our prisons. Just wanted to hear your opinion since there seems to be so many repeat offenders with long rap sheets that many times show one or more previous gun offenses.
Tank
Hall of Famer
I think you hit the nail on the head. It would seem that much of inner city crime, and the increase in certain types of crime everywhere is more of a social function, specifically the absence of a supportive family unit. In many cases there’s no concept of right/wrong or basic rules of society shared between parents(or parent) and children. A lack of morality as you put it.
Interesting read I came across..........
http://www.un.org/popin/icpd/prepcomm/official/rap/RAP4.html
Last edited:
Willbacker
Ravens Ring of Honor
The war on poverty is a big part of the poverty and crime rates. A big part of it is also the lack of a true family led by 2 parents.
https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/the-war-poverty-after-50-years
Tank
Hall of Famer
Yep, very true.
Ask Cobra about the uptick in drug sales on “mother’s day“ when the welfare checks are received in the mail.
Howabout imposing a regulation on who has children. Now that would solve the problem from the get go.
The Raven
Veteran
So how do you determine who can procreate?
I didn’t say I knew how to proceed with this. Lol
Inqui
Pro Bowler
I can think of a few things that have been done before.
Well, Lorena Bobbitt had the best solutionI can think of a few things that have been done before.
cobrajet
Hall of Famer
I know that strict law enforcement in high violent crime areas work to bring down crime. If you have strict court systems and enough prison space you can bring crime down including murders, shootings, robbery, and seize a lot of guns. We did it. The problem is liberals hate strict law enforcement and crime punishment and I don’t think it will go back to that anytime soon and IMHO crime is going to get worse. Since police are no longer able to be strict, the public is less safe from criminal violence. If the public is less safe from criminal violence, and there is not enough law enforcement to protect them, then they need to be able to protect themselves. If the public needs to be able to protect itself from criminal violence - is this the time to ban firearms? If you live and work in areas that are pretty safe, is it fair to take protection away from those who don’t have that luxury? I don’t know if that is fair. I don’t want citizens abusing their rights or being vigilantes. I don’t want people carrying guns that are not properly trained on gun safety and usage and the rule of law for self defense. I just have not heard any liberal ideas that I think are any good in curbing criminal violence and keeping people safe in dangerous areas. Mass shootings are bad and we need to do something to curb them, but not at the expense of people on the other end of the spectrum - those needing protection themselves from robbery and home invasion. Please don’t respond to this post about police harassment or abuse, I get that there is a lot of anger over that and I know those days are ending (see consent decree). I am only talking public safety from violence and where we go from here.
Last edited:
The Raven
Veteran
This argument is not supported by data. At all.
First of all, there's no evidence at all that the "broken windows" method of strict, aggressive policing brings down crime. Case in point: New York City's crime rate actually went down when they went away from the "broken windows" strategy and embraced community policing. Violent crime is at an all time low in NYC, and they aren't focused anymore on broken windows. Many researchers actually attribute the decrease in crime to an improving economy, in addition to an increase in law enforcement officers.
Second of all, crime rates, especially violent crime rates, are down nationally and in the state of Maryland. There is no evidence whatsoever to support your notion that crime is worse than it's been and getting worse.
Third of all, the notion that police aren't allowed to be strict is just subjective as hell and probably inaccurate. A police officer friend of mine says the issue is the courts are lenient, not police.
Fourth, liberals don't "hate strict law enforcement." We're actually just fucking tired of 18 year olds getting multiple years for smoking weed because right wing, reefer madness nut jobs think it's the devil's lettuce. Wanna know why are prisons are so packed? Because people go to jail for weed. That's the sort of "crime" we liberals don't like. It wastes space and time.
cobrajet
Hall of Famer
Yes, I agree that New York City is doing well. That came from strict law enforcement and when that reduced crime they were able to have ecomonic growth. Their police force is gigantic! The same thing happened in Baltimore City. I know you are too young to remember what things were like in Baltimore in the early 90’s but areas like Canton were pretty bad and you could pay next to nothing for a row home. The areas around the high rise public housing were no man’s land. Cherry Hill and Westbrook looked like a boarded up abandoned wasteland. We brought in a police commissioner from California and started doing community policing. We set up after school programs, reimplemented the Police Athletic League, opened community centers, and set up community policing satelite offices. Crime did not go down, murders were seriously high. Mayor O’Malley came in and brought in New York commanders to run the police department. He implemented zero tolerance and strict policing and crime came down. They tore down the high rise public housing and moved those folks to the county (remember the “move to opportunity movement”). When crime went down they had huge revitalization in Baltimore in the 2000’s. Harbor East was built because Flag House Courts and LaFayette courts were gone and Little Italy was now safe to go to. Crime in Canton in Fells Point went down and those areas took off, all those row homes were bought up and renovated. The old abandoned brewery and can company warehouses where turned into luxury condos. When crime went down in the eastern district, Johns Hopkins bought up all the property and bulldozers leveled street after street of abandoned row homes and doctors and nurses moved in. The city was thriving.
Then the backlash happened with the riots and civil unrest. The police were ordered to stand down and strict enforcement came to a halt. Officers are afraid to do anything for fear of being hung out to dry and procecuted if they made a mistake. Good young officers got the hell out and lateraled to other agencies and the hiring standards were lowered because no one wants join. Crime is back on the rise and it has become seriously dangerous in areas again. People and businesses are leaving and no companies or growth is moving in.
To combat how bad things are now, crime statistics are fudged like crazy. Crimes like robbery are downgraded to larceny or simple assault. Home invasions are downgraded to burglary. Homicides are now suspicious deaths. Shootings with multiple victims are only listed as one incident. If someone was shot at and missed, it is just discharging a firearm. We are not allowed to classify crimes against certain individuals or groups as “hate crime” even though they clearly are. Murders are up almost double.
Then I read posts like yours....stop looking at fake statistics and go into the northeastern district (a sinking ship where street and commercial robbery is off the chart) and speak with people and ask them if crime is not worse. Ask people in the suburbs of Baltimore’s surrounding counties if crime is down. You go out and find the truth, and stop believing the statistics. Come on now, we go from under 200 murders to over 330 murders and you say I have no evidence to support what I am saying. Lord have mercy!
Willbacker
Ravens Ring of Honor
I personally don't believe left wing academics know what the hell they are talking about.
cobrajet
Hall of Famer
@The Raven.....do you really think 18 year olds go to jail for multiple years for smoking weed? That does not happen.....EVER!!!!! I know a lot of liberals and young people like their weed and worry about this and call conservatives “right wing nut jobs.” You worry about strict law enforcement because you are afraid of getting caught and having a record. That is a simple fix, don’t break any law that is on the books, even if you don’t want those laws to be on the books, until they are no longer on the books anymore. Law enforcement cannot enforce laws that no longer exist. If they do, you wind up with a big payday. See how I solved your dilemma...just joking.
On a serious note.....I am sure you are a smart guy, but I want to look out for you. If you argue on social media with conservatives, just be careful what you say. And I am not saying that you are saying anything wrong. Just don’t let anyone bait you into saying anything you may regret later with an employer or such. When you are old, like me, you won’t have to worry as much. Save your frustration for us, it seems safe over here on this site. Also, remember that debate in writing sometimes does not always come off as friendly as it would in person. I know typing back and forth can come off very cold at times. It is easier to lighten the mood if you are talking then if you are writing.
Stay passionate, but make sure you find time to enjoy life!
On a serious note.....I am sure you are a smart guy, but I want to look out for you. If you argue on social media with conservatives, just be careful what you say. And I am not saying that you are saying anything wrong. Just don’t let anyone bait you into saying anything you may regret later with an employer or such. When you are old, like me, you won’t have to worry as much. Save your frustration for us, it seems safe over here on this site. Also, remember that debate in writing sometimes does not always come off as friendly as it would in person. I know typing back and forth can come off very cold at times. It is easier to lighten the mood if you are talking then if you are writing.
Stay passionate, but make sure you find time to enjoy life!
Last edited:
K-Dog
MVP
Step one in solving the problem would be responsible journalism....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...b6cf72-1264-11e8-8ea1-c1d91fcec3fe_story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...b6cf72-1264-11e8-8ea1-c1d91fcec3fe_story.html
Inqui
Pro Bowler
You're not wrong in principle but this is a hugely broad and multifaceted issue. I'll try to cover a few different points in cliff note form.
*The group the WaPo's criticising (and rightly so) is an advocacy group. You get these on all sides of the aisle and to be fair they don't (usually) claim to be journalists. When the media reports stats from groups like that they need to be careful what the organisational bias is and be transparent with it. The other problem is that groups like that tend to be better resourced than a lot of people so that gives them a disproportionately loud voice in the public discourse. Those groups are different to journalist organisations though, and with the rise of internet platforms it's getting tougher to draw a distinction.
*The broader issue is that social media is a petrie dish for misinformation or details out of context. In that particular case it's easy for someone to see the "18 school shootings this year" headline stat and are more likely to share it (and more importantly trust it) if they already have the "guns are bad" idea in their head. Any jackass with an opinion now has an outlet that can easily reach millions with pretty much zero oversight for what's true and whether an appropriate context is provided. And interestingly enough the Russians essentially weaponised that in the 2016 election. A lot of the charges Robert Mueller laid out a few days ago were for people involved in troll farms who'd go out of their way to spread deliberate misinformation (ie, actual fake news and not some nebulous term used for someone presenting facts you disagree with) that would resonate among certain social media bubbles. The single most shared article during the election was the one about the Pope endorsing Trump (an outright lie) and an article correcting that rumour got half as many shares, which demonstrates how much faster a lie can grow in that environment when people WANT to believe it. I wish I had an answer to that, and to their credit Facebook and Twitter seem to be trying to find fixes but I'm not holding my breath any time soon.
*The readers already have the "guns are bad" idea in their mind and they're more receptive to that fact. Not only are they less likely to take a critical view of those facts, but they also go out of their way to look for facts they agree with. This is a human nature thing (essentially using brain power takes energy so learning to take shortcuts is an evolutionary trait that worked fairly well way back when) and is EXTREMELY well documented. It's called "confirmation bias" by the people @Willbacker looks down his nose on. But people do need to learn to take every fact they come across with a pinch of salt, ESPECIALLY the ones that have a conclusion they agree with.
*Journalists in mainstream organisations are doing it a lot tougher than people think. It's not a secret the kind of structural headwinds print media in particular is facing, and speaking from experience a journalist's "agenda" usually doesn't involve much more than rushing around trying to get a story filed under deadline. There are certain things that they should do (and some people and some organisations are better at this than others) such as asking for a response where appropriate (though that's another complex issue in itself because anti-vaxxers for example don't deserve to have every media outlet asking for their opinion just because they have one) and being as transparent with their sources as possible. But people do get things wrong, and I'd say more often than not it's just an honest screw-up (especially for a complicated story) and in my experience the really egregious ones come where a massive story gets sent to the production desk minutes before its deadline. I remember recently having to cut about 30 lines in a 1200-word story and write up captions, a headline and a write-off and having about seven minutes to do all that. I've never actually asked my boss what happens if one of these papers I work on atm misses a deadline, but I've worked at places where the paper gets fined $10,000 by the printing press for missing their deadline. Time pressures are real, and it's not a coincidence that more often than not an organisation that's first with a breaking story ends up issuing a correction not long after.
*Most importantly, when dealing with the media people tend to ask about an organisation's bias. This is the wrong way to go about it. Point blank. The key aspect to a good organisation is detachment. Not going out of your way to look for certain stories, not burying others that you don't like, not making yourself part of the story. This is why I have quite literally zero respect for Breitbart or the Huffington Post - they're not journalists, they're demagogues. This is why I think the obsession against the NYT, WaPo and WSJ is misplaced, because they tend to cover stories that aren't great for their "side" (the Al Franken allegations were very prominent in the NYT, for example, and it's never shied away from covering Benghazi developments where there are actually developments to report) - feel free to ignore the editorials though. All three cable channels are absolutely godawful although all for different reasons, and all three have their exceptions, which complicates things further. But I've made my views clear about 24-hour news channels of all broadcasting persuasions and how they're incentivised to simply be a torrent of similar opinions that are designed to make people feel angry without any actual substantial facts (I can point out a few examples in this thread). That constitutes a market failure in my books - Fox News being the first to strike it big with its business model was one of the worst things that could happen to democracy, and the rise of social media bubbles has poisoned the well to a similar extent. Again I'm not sure what the answer is because sensationalism and partisan hype clearly sell (and Donald Trump's relationship with the media is way more complex than anyone gives it credit for but all he's done is do a masterful job of hijacking that very process) and humans are preternaturally lazy when it comes to dealing with facts. It's interesting though that a lot of respected news brands around the world seem to operate off a hybrid model where they get state funding but editorial independence.
Trust is one of the most underrated currencies in all sectors of the digital economy and sadly I think that's being lost for good in the media and politics as it drowns in a muddy puddle of perceived bias, organisational bias, general media headwinds, sensationalism and a lot of toxic players poisoning the well for everyone else and that leading to even more poisoned wells.
Anyway, rant over. Feel free to ignore all of that, and all I'm sure nearly everyone will. But it's an issue where I have experience in both sides of the coalface and it's an extremely broad issue I've watched play out with a lot of interest especially over the past couple of years. And despite all the thoughts I have on the issue it's one I've generally kept quiet on because I knew I'd end up with a post like that and that's only scratching the surface of several prongs of the same issue. Anyway, I'm about to hit the road and go on holiday so I'm not sure why I spent all this time on that post - I've probably kept myself bottled up too long.
- Status