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0 pointsjakelazaroff2y ago0 comments

The most costly form of theft — by far — is not burglary or robbery but wage theft. That is a crime overwhelmingly committed by rich professionals and rarely enforced. So if we really want to get serious about stopping theft, we should allocate much more resources to investigating businesses than putting beat cops on the street.

There’s not actually a well known link between poverty and crime in the way you imply. We’ve just decided that we only care about some people committing some crime some of the time.

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resolutebat2y ago

Ah, so this is what you were so keen to steer the conversation to. Alas, despite the name, wage theft is not considered a criminal act (misdemeanor/felony) in most US states, so enforcement is left to the Department of Labor and the IRS, not police.

Now I'd agree with you that society should be putting more resources into combating this, but I'm still going to ask you to respond to my earlier question: for the hypothetical city with high-crime and low-crime halves, which should the police focus on?

jakelazaroffOP2y ago

I’m not really steering the conversation anywhere. Wage theft is a felony in many states. Which is the point I’m making: crime is socially constructed, and two big reasons that some areas are “low crime” and some are “high crime” is that we’ve decided to A) selectively criminalize things and B) selectively enforce those laws.

As to your question: if you are playing SimCity and you have a little number in your omniscient UI that reads “crime rate” and police are your one lever to address that, by all means add more police to the area. But in the real world that’s not how things work.

splintercell2y ago

Everything you say, is an attempt to make people look elsewhere, but at the obvious place.

Your point is that crime is spread in a manner, unrelated to where society think crime happens, that there is no correlation between crime and poverty of a neighborhood, and that most likely an inverse relationship between race and crime?

Oh, and according to you, one important way to arrive at your conclusion is to change our definition of crime.

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