I would say the trail was blazed by cities over-correcting from the war on drugs and basically making low-level crime completely unpunished or enforced.
I'm seeing the same thing in Seattle. Private security has become MUCH more common all over the city in the past few years. I even see apartment buildings hiring 24/7 private security that patrols the building and the street around the building as an amenity.
Overseas the end results if the police are totally defunded or weak is that you tend to end up with really strong differences / ghettos around places where there is and is not security.
It's like gated communities on steroids, but starts to include office, mfg and other items like retail (which totally leave places with no security). Can result in shocking differences on both sides of the fence that usually separates these areas. Ironically the police then tend to follow along and provide better security to what are not better areas (if they have any capacity).
This is how life is in basically every Central and South American city, in my experience.
As soon as a family has some relatively small amount of wealth they will spend it on ultra-secure apartment buildings, tall walls around their house, razor-wire walls and fences, full coverage security cameras and intruder detection, etc.
I saw jarring signs of that when I visited Mexico City in 2003
- I stayed with a business partner who lived in a walled community guarded by private guards openly carrying submachine guns. Can only imagine that the security has been dialed up a few notches by now.
(The source of my confusion: I interpreted "overseas" in a quite literal way - I'm from Europe.)
For the first time in my life I've seen private security in my neighborhood. We're in one of the poorer areas of the city (ie $1-2.5m houses), so perhaps people cannot afford to leave?
I've always thought security on demand was a great idea- the real killer app in my mind is having a map online of which houses the private security company protects, so as to create an incentive for people who aren't paying to get protection as the thieves know what's ripe for the picking.
This is American techbro poor, where rampant asset inflation has been occurring ever since the government has been more or less printing money, and now buying corporate bonds (BOJ of course is the ghost of economy future here, having done this since the late triassic).
Not really a purely American problem- everybody else has this too- which is why young people are so pissed everywhere that they have no future.
how wold a private security company protect your house? If they were there in the driveway 24x7 then maybe. Once your house is robbed or being robbed if you have to call someone it's already too late.
i was a victim of a home invasion and maybe 10 years later a violent crime. In both cases only after the real danger was over did a call for help happen.
In the home invasion it ended when the gunman was forcing my roommate to the garage, my roommate opened the door, the gunman walked out, he then slammed/locked the door behind him and we hit the deck calling 911
In the second case i was jumped from behind and knocked nearly unconscious before being robbed. It took me a full 15min to get the brain fog cleared to even think what to do next.
i don't see how an app is going to offer any protection at all. Maybe it speeds up reporting crime??
I have latin american heritage and that's pretty how much it is in the old country for anyone who can afford it. I won't be surprised if in a few years barbed wire and glass shard fencing becomes more common. The sad thing is America is doing this to itself very willfully through some obvious policy failures while blaming abstract intangible forces like "capitalism."
In my neighborhood in Seattle I've seen a tweaked-out individual literally just walking down the street spray-painting cars at around 6pm on a weekday.
I called the police and they told me all officers were busy on more urgent/violent calls and wouldn't be able to respond.
This was before COVID and the department is even more short-staffed now.
Ha, that's nothing. Two years ago, I walked up to a police officer in Seattle and pointed out an individual who was splayed face-first on the sidewalk a half-block away, in front of a food truck where a line of customers was patiently stepping over them.
The officer shrugged and walked off in the opposite direction. I think that was the moment that I decided it was time for a change of scenery.
>In my neighborhood in Seattle I've seen a tweaked-out individual literally just walking down the street spray-painting cars at around 6pm on a weekday.
Despite the damage to the cars, that sounds more like a mental health problem than a crime problem.
Which is one of the big problems we have with current policing models. We throw folks trained to use deadly force at issues that are better suited to mental health professionals trained in de-escalation.
I get it that many folks don't really care about their fellow humans except as threats/enemies/potential rivals for mates and resources.
And I also get that, as in your example, many folks don't care about the well-being of other people (as in your example, a 'tweaker'. How do you know that? Were they shooting meth as they spray-painted the cars?), especially if they engage in anti-social behaviors.
In fact, many folks would support it if we just killed/imprisoned anyone who makes them uncomfortable or unhappy.
The issues that we lump into a black box called "mental illness" are poorly understood and even more poorly addressed in our society.
Even worse, more often than not we dump the "mental illness" black box into a larger black box called "criminals".
As Hubert Humphrey put it[0]:
The moral test of government is how that
government treats those who are in the dawn of
life, the children; those who are in the twilight
of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows
of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
I posit that our current policies and practices fail that moral test. Those who are most distressed/needy/lost are usually abused, shunned and thrown away by our society, rather than nurtured, helped and hopefully brought into society as productive members.
Why is it generally the former rather than the latter? I'd say that it was a culture of selfishness, greed and a lack of empathy buried under several layers of soft-soaping like "personal responsibility", "pulling oneself up by the bootstraps", "poverty is a moral failing" and a bunch of other tropes.
Sentient life is precious. We should treat it that way, IMNSHO. But we don't. And more's the pity.
> Despite the damage to the cars, that sounds more like a mental health problem than a crime problem.
In the long term, I agree with you. In the short term, it would be nice if the people who we are forced to pay for the task of preventing antisocial behavior would stop the person who is causing tens of thousands of dollars in property damage, since broadly speaking nobody else has the right to do so.
To put it another way, how much more damage does this person need to do before you consider it a crime problem?
>In the long term, I agree with you. In the short term, it would be nice if the people who we are forced to pay for the task of preventing antisocial behavior would stop the person who is causing tens of thousands of dollars in property damage, since broadly speaking nobody else has the right to do so.
I don't disagree with you. At all. This is a complicated set of issues that will require complex solutions (note the plural).
It would be great if we could stop such folks from causing property damage.
Our society is governed by laws and, more importantly, respect for those laws by the vast majority of us.
Unless we kill or imprison everyone who might engage in such activities, I'd say that we'll likely always have some of that sort of activity.
Reducing the number of folks without strong ties to society/the community seems the best way to address these issues over both the medium and long term.
As for short term solutions, that's much more difficult, as we've spent centuries demonizing the mentally ill, the poor and others society has deemed as "lesser."
>To put it another way, how much more damage does this person need to do before you consider it a crime problem?
A valid question. Without a lot of reflection I'd say that it's less important to determine whether or not some act (or collection of acts) is "criminal" than it is to identify the appropriate mechanism(s) to minimize the likelihood of such behavior from that individual in the future.
And there are many mechanisms to choose from. That incarceration has been the default for a long time doesn't always (or even most of the time) make it the right mechanism.
A broad and complex set of issues underlie this discussion and I haven't done it justice here. That said, I urge people to look beyond the display and use of force as the only mechanism to address these issues.
Short-staffed? SPD has one of the largest police presences, per-capita, of any American metro area, (while Seattle has middling crime statistics).
They aren't short-staffed, as much as they are deliberately avoiding doing any work. They were also engaged in a lot of overtime grift over the past decade, which the city started to crack down on in 2019.
The problem with police today is that there is no single problem with them. They are near-useless for solving crime. They are useless for preventing it. They are bad at dealing with situations that don't require a thug with a gun. Sometimes, they can't follow the law, while trying to enforce it. Other times, they enforce something that is not the law. Sometimes, they ignore dangerous, illegal behaviour. Sometimes, they employ incredibly excessive force to deal with not-dangerous, maybe-illegal behaviour. When they screw up, regardless of how badly they screwed up, it's nearly impossible to hold them accountable for it.
Yes, you can cherry-pick one of those problems, and claim that uber-for-mob-justice will solve it. Will it make any of these other problems worse? Better? Worse for people who can't pay, better for people who can?
I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but I am not particularly impressed by this.
> Oh? They are going to figure out who stole my catalytic converter, and arrest the fence who bought it?
I think the idea is to try to catch it in the act. The LAPD is notorious for being slow. I was in a hit and run accident where my car was completely totaled and I was in a daze and it took them an hour to come and I'm pretty sure the only reason they actually came was because a bystander was mad and claimed there was injuries after waiting with me for a while. If they wont' come to an accident in a good time, I doubt they come to a break in. lol
The NYC counts are bloated because they include a whole bunch of 'police' that have nothing to do with boots-on-the-street policing. Financial regulators and port inspectors, for instance, are included in those counts.
One thing that comes to mind here is that on-demand private security with fast response times are common-place in high crime countries and cities (such as Brazil and South Africa). I'm honestly not surprised that people in LA are turning to this and I wouldn't be surprised if this catches on pretty quickly where I live (Seattle).
From what I can tell it seem like almost complete open season on property theft and damage in Seattle.
In short, I don't really blame Citizen for doing this, I blame the politicians for not providing an adequately safe or lawful city.
It would be scary to see a country like the US fail to point where public police services are abandoned in favor of private forces.
I think it could happen too because private police forces benefit the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. Why pay for police in the poor neighborhoods if you have walls and private police for your gated community?
What we’re seeing in western countries worries me. The progressive tax system is being attacked IMO because breaking it benefits the wealthy. It’s much cheaper for the richest 20% to fund private police forces for themselves than funding a public police force for everyone.
And IMO the reason the police can’t keep up is because we’ve had 40 years of underfunding public institutions so the wealthy can hoard more and more money. It’s not shocking to see increased levels of drug abuse and crime because those correlate with poverty.
We need to force the rich to pay there fair share of taxes. The resources being used for yachts and private jets needs to be getting put into education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc..
This is a great example of a misallocation of capital. Instead of funding an app for a private police force we’d be better off if that money had been collected via taxes and allocated to building schools.
South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud. As the USA edges closer to that reality, our problems will begin to mirror theirs.
> South Africa and Brazil have a common root cause of their crime problem: a tiny but grossly engorged upper class holds the majority of the wealth and income while everyone else eats mud.
Studies correlating wealth inequality with criminality are less than convincing [1].
A 2016 study, controlling for different factors than previous
studies, challenges the aforementioned findings. The study finds
"little evidence of a significant empirical link between overall
inequality and crime", and that "the previously reported positive
correlation between violent crime and economic inequality is largely
driven by economic segregation across neighborhoods instead of
within-neighborhood inequality". A 2020 study found that in Europe,
the inequality-crime correlation was present but weak (0.10),
explaining less than 3% of the variance in crime with a similar
finding occurring for the United States, while another 2019 study
argued that the effect of inequality on property crime was nearly
zero.
From that same article, Alaska has the lowest wealth inequality in the US and also the highest homicide rate.
Impoverishment doesn’t cause criminality, see e.g. post-internment Japanese-American and early 20th century E.European Jewish American immigrant populations. Rather, the root causes of systemic poverty are strongly correlated with criminality [2]. Which isn’t to say extreme wealth inequality isn’t bad: the French Revolution readily disproves that notion. But the French Revolution is in a different league from property crime.
The popularity of such security services in Brazil and South Africa is the first thing I thought about when I heard "defund the police" last summer. I then told everyone that people will start spending a lot more money on increasing their security, be it fencing or private security forces. It's not a complicated concept.
Private security patrolling exclusive neighborhoods in LA has been a thing since the 70s. Even the scientology properties all over town have a private security force riding on those mall cop segways.
