Crime, policing, and public safety
Walkability is punchability: without public safety, people will flee to the suburbs
Post-Covid, anti-social behavior is more common
All kinds of bad behavior is on the rise. Matthew Yglesias, January 2022:
We seem to be living through a pretty broad rise in aggressive and anti-social behavior.
Shooting someone is an extreme behavior, even in a country as violent and gun-soaked at the United States of America. But everyone has some margin along which they can get a bit more reckless, a bit more hostile, a bit more indifferent to the people around them. And as far as I can tell, a much larger swathe of the population is moving in that direction than the tiny number of people who are doing murders. You’re seeing more killing, which is a subset of the increase in shooting, which in turn is a subset of the large increase in gun-carrying. But traffic deaths are also up. Unruly passenger incidents on airplanes have surged. Schools report more discipline and student safety issues.
As a Redditor who works in event planning puts it: after Covid, it’s like people forgot how to behave in public.
If I had to guess, I’d say that reduced social pressure is one factor. We don't just rely on police to maintain order (“legal norms”), we also rely on self-restraint (“moral norms”) and social pressure (“social norms”) to keep people from engaging in bad behaviour. In each case, the effectiveness of the norm depends on the sanction that comes from breaking it: guilt, shame, or arrest.
When Covid hit five years ago, suddenly a lot of people were working remotely instead of commuting to downtown offices. There were far fewer people around to exert social pressure against bad behaviour; fewer eyes on the street.
Covid is in the rear-view mirror now, but people are still spending much more time at home, so the reduction in social pressure hasn’t gone away.
Repeat offenders and public safety
After $10M losses in 15 years, London Drugs weighs leaving Woodward’s development. Kristen Robinson, Global News. Reddit thread.
Shattered glass is still visible at the front entrance to the store at Abbott and East Hastings Streets, where Clint Mahlman said a man used a pipe to try and attack staff earlier this month before threatening to kill them.
The suspect was released from custody by the courts after being charged with mischief, uttering death threats and assault with a weapon in connection with the Jan. 9 incident.
“There’s no worse feeling in the world in management when you can’t protect your employees,” said Mahlman.
As a layperson, I think if we want to fix this, we need to tighten things up in multiple domains. From downstream (symptoms) to upstream (causes):
Policing - more police presence
Justice system - more willingness to detain repeat offenders before trial, more capacity in the justice system, maybe use technology to speed up review of video evidence
Social supports - already exists, could be strengthened further
Drug addiction - more drug treatment (like methadone or buprenorphine), not just harm reduction; provide drug treatment in the corrections system; province is now considering involuntary treatment
Prevention of drug addiction - in the healthcare system, restrict opioids for outpatient use (not common in Europe), so people don't get addicted in the first place; drop the public-health emphasis on destigmatization
Mental illness - treatment tends to be focused on people in crisis, preventive treatment would probably be helpful
We need to build a lot more housing. Everything helps, including market housing: when there's a housing shortage, it's worst for people at the bottom of the housing ladder. When housing is so scarce and expensive, people don't have the spare bedrooms for family and friends that serve as a kind of private social safety net, the last rung before homelessness.
This means more money for policing, the justice system, social supports, drug treatment, mental health, and social housing; my guess is that people are willing to pay higher taxes for greater public safety.
Adding a lot more market housing would help with the housing shortage, and wouldn't require public funding.
Report on repeat offenders by Butler and LePard.
What’s going on with the justice system?
The provincial court on Main Street handles a lot of the cases from the Downtown Eastside. I went down to a couple of the hearings in December to see how the decision-making process works. Some observations, as a layperson:
A fair amount of it is basically administrative, moving cases through the process. If someone has failed to appear, issuing a bench warrant. Setting a trial date. Specifying pre-trial release conditions and communicating them to the defendant (“Do you understand?”). The defendant says surprisingly little: almost all of the talking is done by their lawyer (a public defender). Failure to appear seems pretty common - defendants don't necessarily stay in contact with their lawyer, and the lawyer may not have a good way to reach them.
I didn't see much evidence of bleeding-heart tendencies on the part of the judge. The decision whether to keep someone in custody before a trial appeared to be based on questions like, do they have stable housing? Are they taking their psychiatric medication? Do they have support from a social agency? The cases that were considered while I was there seemed relatively minor (e.g. someone breaching a condition to stay away from every Home Depot in the Lower Mainland).
My overall impression is that there's people bouncing back and forth between the street (not necessarily homeless, they may have supportive housing) and being arrested. It seems like the system is already set up to connect people with supports. But it's not working that well in terms of getting individuals to a point where they're actually going to cooperate with society and society's rules - not “get a job,” just things like, don't go to Home Depot and steal stuff. Add in poor impulse control and you can see how threats and violent interactions can happen.
How do you get people to stop behaving badly?
Norms (like "don't steal stuff") have two parts: the rule, and the sanction if you break the rule. The sanction may be moral (guilt), social (shame), or legal (arrest and punishment). If people don't feel guilt or shame, that leaves arrest and punishment.
More
Some related comments that I’ve posted on Reddit: Public safety, June 2022. Opioid addiction, April 2023. Random stabbings and dangerous offender designation, September 2024. Deadlines set by the Supreme Court in the 2016 Jordan decision, November 2024.
“I love walkability, but I'm pretty sure that public safety is a requirement before it gains broad support. Walkability is punchability.” Noah Smith on Twitter, September 2022. Smith lives in San Francisco, and he has female friends who have been randomly punched.
Liberalism and public order. “Maintaining functional public systems and spaces is progressive.” Matthew Yglesias, November 2024.
Good cities can’t exist without public order. Noah Smith, December 2024. (A critique by Alon Levy with some interesting data, noting that people in the US left urban areas for the suburbs before crime rates increased.)
In defense of sociology. Joseph Heath, Ottawa Citizen, April 2013. Observes that sociologists have found policing to be more effective in deterring crime than long prison sentences. A summary of the research for the Minnesota House of Representatives: Do Criminal Laws Deter Crime? Deterrence Theory in Criminal Justice Policy - A Primer. Ben Johnson, January 2019.
Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature. Aaron Chalfin and Justin McCrary, Journal of Economic Literature, March 2017. (Chalfin is a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania with a number of interesting papers available online.) Chalfin and McCrary discuss the effectiveness with respect to deterrence of particular approaches to policing, including focusing on hot spots (effective), problem-oriented policing with police communicating directly with gangs (promising but not yet definitive), and disorder policing (Chalfin and McCrary are skeptical). Increasing the severity of punishment and incarceration doesn't increase deterrence much. Improved labor-market conditions - specifically, higher wages - reduce crime.
The Challenge of Policing Minorities in a Liberal Society, Joseph Heath, October 2023. State neutrality with respect to culture is a key liberal principle, but “effective policing is inherently communitarian. The result is that minority groups who are unable to implement a self-policing regime find themselves subject to coercive enforcement of social norms and standards of respectability that reflect parochial aspects of the majority culture.”