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erkt 42 minutes ago [-]
Failure to prosecute crime leads to crime stat drops.
jdlshore 27 minutes ago [-]
Are you claiming that’s what happening, or just engaging in ominous speculation?
hn_throwaway_99 6 minutes ago [-]
I think we know the answer to that one...
Besides, GP is flat out wrong - not prosecuting crime does not result in reduced crime stats. The crime decline is led be a relatively huge 15% reduction in homicides. Even if those homicides remain unsolved or are not prosecuted, they still end up in crime stats. And unlike other crimes where you may argue they go unreported, when someone ends up dead (by usually violent means in a homicide) it rarely goes unnoticed.
Just like abortions in the 70's stopped the super criminals from existing in the 90's. Not having unwanted kids goes a long way to prevent crime. Now we are in the place where people want kids, but can't afford them so they aren't.
searealist 14 minutes ago [-]
I thought we were pretending it was lead?
OutOfHere 34 minutes ago [-]
Crime will surely go back in red states in a couple of decades due to the current return of the abortion bans in those states.
manwe150 11 minutes ago [-]
I’m not sure if either of you are being honestly factual or snarky, but I seem to recall this hypothesis is actually quite highly contested in social circles, and not at all as strongly supported as the parent seems to state it as fact
beaned 52 minutes ago [-]
Children have never been more affordable than they are now. People's wants and expectations have changed.
chanakya 39 minutes ago [-]
Exactly. If you want to bring up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s, it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today. No one wants to bring up kids that way, though.
bdangubic 50 minutes ago [-]
might be craziest thing written here this month, I really hope you were being sarcastic
monideas 29 minutes ago [-]
In 2026 in the West, most correct ideas and understandings of things come across as crazy because the elite strata within Western societies promotes ideas and even entire epistemological frameworks which are abjectly and just simply wrong and often also insane
onemoresoop 48 minutes ago [-]
In the vein of ‘LLMs can now raise your children’
rayiner 45 minutes ago [-]
You should look at some actual statistics instead of vibes.
bdangubic 26 minutes ago [-]
that is asking too much for this crowd ;)
Der_Einzige 28 minutes ago [-]
They're downvoting you because you're right and they know it and they don't like that.
bm3719 20 minutes ago [-]
I think the effect is polycausal, but I think there's an important primary one that is often ignored: alienation crossing a threshold.
In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.
As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.
However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.
So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.
Besides, GP is flat out wrong - not prosecuting crime does not result in reduced crime stats. The crime decline is led be a relatively huge 15% reduction in homicides. Even if those homicides remain unsolved or are not prosecuted, they still end up in crime stats. And unlike other crimes where you may argue they go unreported, when someone ends up dead (by usually violent means in a homicide) it rarely goes unnoticed.
In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.
As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.
However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.
So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.