If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If nothing else, high crime rates rapidly crush property values as everyone wants to leave those areas.
The positions are entirely inconsistent, but that's because anything is being said in an effort to remove enforcement. This was stated pretty explicitly a few years back with "Defund The Police", and now that it's lost popularity it's being pushed covertly.
Ironically, for all the talk about needing to remove police to help the poor, it's the poor who have suffered the most from the massive increase in crime these policies have caused. Here's a community meeting from a poorer area a few months back, where the residents are complaining that people who live in safer areas are running an experiment in their areas that's leading to a massive spike in crime and death[1].
[1] https://wjla.com/news/local/gun-violence-shootings-crime-you...
From the point of view of someone who can roll into a poor area, say they are "overpoliced", and roll out again...yes, it probably does that seem way. That is because they aren't likely to get shot so the police are the problem, not the bullets.
For the person who can get shot, the bullets are the issue (this isn't limited to this area, you are seeing in multiple policy areas that wealthy people enthusiastically advocate for the state to be rolled back like some kind of giga-Milton Friedman...as with libertarians, they aren't the ones that have to deal with the consequences of this).
Crime and poor schools are usually what make "bad neighborhoods" bad. It's why many of the people there will save and downsize to move to nicer neighborhoods. Whenever I've talked to people living in those areas, they always want more enforcement and to have their neighborhoods cleaned up.
A lot of people want to speak for the residents there, without ever actually speaking to the residents there.
This is in fact the crux of the problem. By significantly increasing monitoring of areas with higher crime rates, you inadvertently create a vicious cycle feedback loop: The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats (because your sampling is no longer uniform). Then these stats are used to justify more monitoring and policing in the area, further biasing your data.
So by monitoring an area with high crime rate, you catch more crime, which results in more policing for the area with a confirmed high crime rate?
And that's a bad thing?
> Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not.
Even in cases where they're not used at trial, they're still used to generate suspicion. I don't know if you've ever had cops on your ass, but it's super stressful, and can impact your job (because they start harassing you at work and you get fired). Depending on how much of a dick the cop is, he may just arrest you for shit and giggles, and now you have an arrest record that fucks up all sorts of things in your life (he's got qualified immunity so what does he care).
This basically amounts to pervasive harassment of a community, and the more surveillance there is, the worse it gets, the less the locals will trust or cooperate with police, the more "us vs them" it gets between citizens and police, the more heavy-handed police response becomes, the less likely people are to solve their differences using the police, the more chaotic a community becomes. This is what oppression looks like.
The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.
The notion that poverty causes crime rather than crime causes poverty is a great disservice to the poor.
it's a nitpick, but I think it's the reverse... property values don't appreciate as quickly in these areas, in this current market if you told millennials that gun violence lowered house values they'd probably fire off a few shots themselves
If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there — it could also mean the residents are overpoliced relative to other neighborhoods.
With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?
Because there are nicer neighborhoods and less than nice neighborhoods? In so far as I can tell this is true to various degrees in every place I've ever lived or visited. Colloquially, some neighborhoods have manicured lawns, other neighborhoods have cars on blocks - it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing.
[0]The truth of it is arguable, perhaps, but it is very obvious.
Is it? I don't see it as at all obvious. It seems utterly ridiculous to me to increase policing in sync with socioeconomic deprivation. The blindingly obvious thing is to invest in solving the problems that cause the disparity, not to criminalize people who are living in poverty.
