(2025-04-21) Zvim Crime And Punishment1

Zvi Mowshowitz: Crime and Punishment #1. This seemed like a good next topic to spin off from monthlies and make into its own occasional series. There’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding crime. What I don’t include here, the same way I excluded it from the monthly, are the various crimes and other related activities that may or may not be taking place by the Trump administration or its allies. As I’ve said elsewhere, all of that is important, but I’ve made a decision not to cover it. This is about Ordinary Decent Crime.

Table of Contents

• Perception Versus Reality.
• The Case Violent Crime is Up Actually.
• Threats of Punishment.
• Property Crime Enforcement is Broken.
• The Problem of Disorder.
• Extreme Speeding as Disorder.
• The Fall of Extralegal and Illegible Enforcement.
• In America You Can Usually Just Keep Their Money.
• Police.
• Probation.
• Genetic Databases.
• Marijuana.
• The Economics of Fentanyl.
• Enforcement and the Lack Thereof.
• Jails.
• Criminals.
• Causes of Crime.
• Causes of Violence.
• Homelessness.
• Yay Trivial Inconveniences.
• San Francisco.
• Closing Down San Francisco.
• A San Francisco Dispute.
• Cleaning Up San Francisco.
• Portland.
• Those Who Do Not Help Themselves.
• Solving for the Equilibrium (1).
• Solving for the Equilibrium (2).
• Lead.
• Law & Order.
• Look Out.

Perception Versus Reality

A lot of the impact of crime is based on the perception of crime.

The perception of crime is what drives personal and political reactions.

When people believe crime is high and they are in danger, they dramatically adjust how they live and perceive their lives. They also demand a political response.

Thus, it is important to notice, and fix, when impressions of crime are distorted.

And also to notice when people’s impressions are distorted. They have a mental idea that ‘crime is up’ and react in narrow non-sensible ways to that, but fail to react in other ways.

One thing that it turns out has very little to do with perceptions of crime is the murder rate, which in most places has gone dramatically down.

If you go purely by state, if it counts then Washington DC is at the top, but 9 of the next 10 are red states. And of the 100 biggest cities, 5 of the 6 safest are in California.

Of course, there is a lot more to being safe than not being murdered. San Francisco has a very low murder rate, but what worries people are other crimes, especially property crime

The thing is, property crime and other Ordinary Decent Crime went dramatically down too, in many ways, especially in these very blue areas.

The Case Violent Crime is Up Actually

As Dennis Leary used to put it, have you ever played ‘good block, bad block’?

Aporia magazine makes the case that crime rates are much higher than in the past, because health care improvements have greatly reduced the number of murders, and once you correct for that murder is sky high. It is an interesting argument, and certainly some adjustment is needed, but in terms of magnitude I flat out do not buy it

The other half of the post is that our criminal justice system is no longer effective, due to rules that now prohibit us from locking the real and obvious repeat criminals up, and those criminals do most of the crime and are the reason the system is overloaded. The obvious response is, we have this huge prison population, we sure are locking up someone

Threats of Punishment

Our legal system depends on threatening people with big punishments, because standard procedure is severely downgrading all punishments

Obviously it would be better to actually enforce laws and punishments, but while we’re not doing that, we need to understand how laws work in practice.

We used to basically be okay with using this to give police and prosecutors leverage and discretion, and to allow enforcement in cases like ‘we know this person keeps stealing stuff’ without having to prove each incident. Now, we’re not, but we don’t know what the replacement would be.

Property Crime Enforcement is Broken

I see two central highly related reasons.
Our enforcement system is broken. That’s this section.
We increasingly tolerate disorder. That’s the following section.

As noted in an earlier section, this makes one wonder, who are all the criminals we are locking up, in that case?

The Problem of Disorder

Charles Lehman convincingly generalizes what is happening as a problem with disorder. We have successfully kept violent crime down, but we have seen a steady rise in disorder and in public tolerance for disorder, which people correctly dislike and then interpret as a rise in crime.

Our academics have essentially delegitimatized disliking antisocial disorder and especially using authority to enforce against it, including against things like outright theft, and we’ve broken many of the social systems that enforced the relevant norms.

If you can sell drugs openly without restriction, or organize a theft ring at little risk, but opening a legitimate business takes years of struggle and expenses and occupational licensing issues and so on, guess what the non-rich aspiring businesspeople are increasingly going to do?

As I discussed in my post on sports gambling, we impose increasingly stringent regulations and restrictions on productive and ordered activity, while effectively tolerating destructive and disordered activity, including when we do and don’t enforce the relevant laws. ((2024-11-11) Zvim The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed)

We need to reverse this. We should apply the ‘let them cook’ and ‘don’t use force to stop people who aren’t harming others’ principles to productive and ordered activity, rather than to unproductive and disordered activity.

Extreme Speeding as Disorder

Rob Henderson: “Today, if you so choose, you can drive through red lights at high speed with impunity—police have almost completely stopped issuing traffic citations See graph

In the Before Times, if you were up to no good as they saw it, and especially if you were committing crimes or interfering with the good citizens of the land, the law might notice, and in various ways make it clear you should stop.

This often worked, and gave police leverage, but was illegal, and led to terrible abuses.

We cannot go back, nor do we want to. But over time everyone is adjusting to and solving for the new equilibrium, and norms, habits and skills are also adjusting

The Fall of Extralegal and Illegible Enforcement

now that we don’t have as much illegible enforcement, we need more legible enforcement, including for small offenses, for those things we want to actually prevent.

In America You Can Usually Just Keep Their Money

Calling the cops for anything small is also not worth the effort and carries risk of backfire.

Story of a mostly homeless guy who scammed Isaac King out of $300. Isaac sued in small claims court on principle, did all the things, and none of it mattered.
Sarah Constantin: It really seems like “individuals using the court system to redress ordinary grievances” is no longer a realistic thing?
…and it seems pretty intuitive that the idea of “the People have legal rights against arbitrary monarchical power” would only arise in a culture where lots of people had the real-world experience that going to court was a practical way to reverse injustices (and get your $ back).

Police

If you’re wondering why we can’t go back? We’re not okay with things like this:
Son reports dad missing, police think son killed father, they psychologically torture him for 17 hours and threaten to kill his dog until he confesses. Father then found alive, son settles lawsuit $900k in damages.

Here’s an actually great idea from a (now defeated) presidential candidate who is also a former prosecutor, you can guess why we haven’t done it already.
Idejder: HOLY SHIT.
Kamela Harris, on “Breakfast Club,” just said there should be a database for police officers so they cannot commit wrongdoing and get away with it by being transferred to other districts or departments to conceal it.
I have never heard a politician say that so clearly

A working paper says that police lower quantity of arrests but increase arrest quality near the end of their shifts, when arrests would require overtime work, and that this effect is stronger when the officer works a second job. File under ‘yes obviously but it is good that someone did the work to prove it, and to learn the magnitude of the effect.’ One could perhaps use this to figure out what makes arrests high quality?

Probation

According to several commentators, probation is essentially a trap, or a scam.

In theory, probation says that you get let go early, but if you screw up, you go back. Screwing up means violating basically any law, or being one minute late to a probation meeting, or losing your job (including because the probation officer changed your meeting to be when you had to work and got you fired), or any number of other rules.

One can imagine a few ways this could work, on a spectrum.

This is leverage, to be used for your own good and for police business, but everyone wants you to succeed

This is a test. The system is neither your friend nor your enemy, and actions have consequences

This is a backdoor and a trap, and the system will be actively attempting to send you back to prison as soon as possible.

The reports are that the point of probation is the third thing

My quick search said about 54% of those paroled fail and get sent back, but a commenter says parole is actually the first thing, they want you to succeed and not have to imprison you, whereas straight probation off a plea bargain is the third thing, where they want to avoid a trial then imprison you anyway.

Genetic Databases

When Denmark expanded its database of genetic information, crime rates fell dramatically

for every 1% increase in the number of criminals in the database, recidivist crime falls by 2.7%.

America saw similar results, although smaller.

Cremieux: Several American states have mandated that prisoners need to provide their DNA to the authorities, and after those programs came into place, there was a large reduction in the odds of recidivism for affected criminals.

This result is highly significant for violent offenders, but less so for property offenders,

There are obvious libertarian objections to a universal DNA database

Marijuana

The Joe Biden Administration attempted to move Marijuana to Schedule III. That would have helped somewhat with various legal and tax problems, but still have left everything a mess. It seems the clock will run out on them, instead, as per prediction markets.

I am libertarian on such matters, but also I am generally strongly anti-marijuana.

Matthew Yglesias: I like that “getting high a lot is probably a bad idea” has become a contrarian take.

Andrew Huberman: People have been experiencing the incredible benefits of reducing their alcohol intake & in some cases eliminating it altogether. I believe cannabis is next. For improving sleep and drive.

Similarly to what I concluded about sports gambling, I don’t think we should make it effectively criminal, but I believe that there needs to be some friction around marijuana use.

Another way to think about this is, you should ensure that your formerly illegal activities have at least as many regulatory barriers as your pro-social activities like selling food or building a house.

Steve Sailer points out that one important risk of legalizing vice is that legalization vastly increases the quality of marketing campaigns

If you go fully legal, you get what we’ve been seeing in New York City. There is massive overuse, and a huge percentage of new leases on New York City storefronts have been illegal cannabis shops getting busted. They don’t cause trouble, but that leaves less room for everything else, and often the city actively smells of the stuff

Brad Hargreaves: And so the process of shutting down all the unlicensed dispensaries in NYC begins. While they won’t be missed, it’s worth ruminating on the tremendous failure of governance that got us here.

Over the past ~three years, these weed shops were a big % of all retail leases in Chelsea.

This all started in 2021, when the State of NY legalized recreational marijuana. Per the law, weed could only be sold through state-licensed shops. A new regulatory agency was created.

the process of issuing these licenses was slow and the process onerous. It dragged on for years with no licenses issued.

In the meantime, cops stopped enforcing any laws around selling weed (among others). As enforcement waned, sneaky attempts to sell weed from bodegas transformed into full-blown unlicensed weed emporiums.

Of course, the entrepreneurs who had actually gone through the licensure process got hosed

Not only were they on the hook to pay 10x markups for retail build-outs to the state construction agency they were forced to use, they had huge, unfettered competitors.

So in the most recent (2024) state budget, the State finally gave New York City expanded enforcement powers and explicit instructions to shutter unlicensed dispensaries

Now there’s going to be a flood of new, vacant retail hitting the market in Manhattan, particularly in neighborhoods like Chelsea and the Village.

Here is a NYT article about New York’s disastrous legalization implementation. There is a tension between complaints about the botched implementation, of which there can be no doubt, versus worry that marijuana is too addictive and harmful to be fully legalized even if implemented well

The Economics of Fentanyl

Alex Tabarrok does the math on an otherwise excellent Reuters exploration of Fentanyl production, and is suspicious of the profit margins

One could model this as the cost of precursor goods being purely in risk of punishment during the process, with the dollar costs being essentially zero. Actually making the drug is dirt cheap, but the process of assembling and distributing it carries risks, and the street price (estimated at $0.50 per tablet) is almost entirely that risk plus time costs for distribution.

Enforcement and the Lack Thereof

Here is some good news and also some bad news.

Matt Parlmer: There was just a fare compliance check on my bus in SF, they kicked off ~half the passengers, wild shit.

So the punishment if you are caught riding without paying is you get off the bus?
That doesn’t work

New York City has the same problem with fare evasion. Suppose you get caught. What happens? Nothing

The norms are rapidly shifting, with respectable-seeming people often openly not paying, to the point where I feel like the pact is broken and if I pay then I’m the sucker.

John Arnold rides along with the LAPD and offers thoughts. He is impressed by officer quality and training, notes they are short on manpower and the tech is out of date. He suggests most calls involve mental illness or substance abuse, often in a vicious cycle, and often involving fentanyl which is very different from previous drug epidemics

One policy suggestion he makes is to devote more effort to solving non-fatal shootings, which he says are 50%+ less likely to get solved despite who survives being largely luck and shootings often leading to violence cycles of retaliation.

How bad can non-enforcement get? London police do not consider a snatched phone, whose location services indicate it is six minutes from the police station, which is being actively used to buy things, is worth following up on.

Sometimes I wonder how California still exists: after 6 years Scott Weiner finally ends the rule that to enforce the law against breaking into cars you have to ‘prove’ all the doors were locked.

Charging domestic abusers with crimes reduces likelihood of violent recidivism, whereas ‘the risk-assessment process’ had no discernable effect. It makes sense that criminal charges would be unusually effective here. Incentives and real punishments matter.

Jails

It has always been very bizarre to me the things we tolerate in prisons, including letting them be effectively run by criminal gangs, and normalizing rape, but also commercial exploitations like the claim that some jails are preventing inmates from having visitors so Securus Technologies can charge over a dollar a minute for video calls instead.

Even if prison isn’t purely rehabilitation, it shouldn’t be actively the opposite of that.

We evaluate the impact of free audio and video calls utilizing the staggered roll out of this technology across lowa’s nine state prisons between 2021 and 2022. We find evidence of a 30% reduction in in-prison misconduct, including a 45% decline in violent incidents and threats of violence.

If we want to do punishment for punishment’s sake, we have plenty of options for that. Cutting people off from the outside seems like one of the worst ones, especially since actual crime bosses can already get cell phones anyway

Whenever I hear about such abuses, two things stick in my mind: The absurdly high amount we pay to keep people in prison, and the absurdly low amounts of money over which we torture the inmates and their families

Criminals

Causes of Crime

A well-known result is that releasing a Grand Theft Auto game, or other popular entertainment product, short term lowers crime as criminals consume the entertainment rather than commit crime

Causes of Violence

From Vital City, the case that violence tends to be a crime of passion, and jobs and transfer programs and prosperity help with property crime but have little impact on violence, versus the cast that investments in things like summer jobs, neighborhood improvements and services reduces crime, including violent crime.

My instinct is to believe the second result directionally, while strongly doubting the magnitude of the intervention studies quoted

Violent crimes are typically crimes of passion, but even among those incidents, the circumstances that cause that, and the cultural conditions that cause that, are not randomly distributed. You can alter that.

Your periodic reminder that some particular laws and methods of enforcement can be anti-poor, but not only is enforcing the law not anti-poor, the poor need us to enforce the law.

Unfortunately anti-poverty programs as such do not seem to move the needle on that in the short term.

As for the first result, I can believe that the correlations and intervention effects are smaller, but I find the general claim of ‘prosperity and employment do not decrease violence’ as obviously absurd, especially when stated as ‘poverty and unemployment do not lead to increased violence.’

Homelessness

Most of those who are long term homeless, as I understand it, have severe problems, but that doesn’t mean the threat of this isn’t hanging over a lot of people’s heads all the time, especially with the decreasing ability to turn to family and friends. Also people correctly treat the nightmare as starting with the threat becoming real and close, that’s already bad enough

Yay Trivial Inconveniences

From Scott Alexander’s report on the Progress Studies conference, it turns out forcing people to pay the fare instantly transformed SF’s BART trains to be safe and clean? Although there is skepticism given how few stations even have the new gates yet. (gates that can't be jumped over)

San Francisco

Sam Padilla: Holy fucking shit.
I just walked from Soma to Hayes Valley through Market St and easily sketchiest walk of my life.
And dude I grew up in Brazil and Colombia. I’ve walked real sketchy shit before. Doesn’t even compare.
Felt like a scene straight out of the walking dead. Sad.
I walked by a corner where there were easily 100 people, many visibly high. Probably a shelter.

Noah Smith: It wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco that I realized that the reason rich people live on hills is only slightly about the views, and mostly about the fact that thieves don’t like to walk uphill

When calculating crime in San Francisco, you also have to adjust for dramatically lower foot traffic, which in downtown is still 70% below 2019 levels. What matters in practice is how much a given person would be at risk, so the denominator matters.

Meanwhile, the city does enforce the law against things like hot dog venders, or those who violate building codes, while (at least until recently?) not enforcing it against venders of illegal drugs

Many nonprofits in San Francisco seem increasingly inaccurately named.

SF District Attorney: The SF District Attorney’s Office announced today the arrest of Kyra Worthy, the former executive director of the nonprofit SF SAFE, on 34 felony charges related to misappropriation of public money, submitting fraudulent invoices to a City department, theft from SF SAFE, wage theft from its employees & failing to pay withheld employee taxes + writing checks w/ insufficient funds to defraud a bank.
Ms. Worthy is accused of illegally misusing over $700,000 during her tenure w/ SF SAFE.

Closing Down San Francisco

One option is to arrest people who commit crimes. Another is to close stores?

SFist: Convenience stores in a 20-block area of the Tenderloin will not be allowed to stay open between midnight and 5 a.m. for the next two years, as City Hall says those corner stores “attract significant nighttime drug activity.”

Eoghan McCabe: Closing local family-owned businesses and reducing their income instead of policing the streets like a first-world city

This is the pure version of enforcing the law against pro-social legible activity because you refuse to do so against anti-social activity, and thinking you’re helping

A San Francisco Dispute

There was a dispute a while ago about cleaning up a particular street that happens to be were Twitter lives. Very confident people were saying it was safe and nice, others were very confident it is a cesspool. Both would know. What was up with that?

Cleaning Up San Francisco

The good news is that this was ages ago. By ages I mean months. Everything escalates quickly now.

At this point, I’ve seen several claims that in a matter of months they’ve managed to clean up San Francisco. This includes that reported property crimes dropped by 45%, which of course has two potential causes that imply very different conclusions.

Auto glass repair companies in San Francisco are apparently seeing a drastic decline in business

This also can make us confident that other crime statistics are moving due to reduced actual crime, rather than due to reduced reporting of crime.

Michelle Tandler: Crime is down 46% in San Francisco compared to 2020

Kelsey Piper: Notably SF produced a huge drop in crime and increase in city safety just by electing moderate Democrats focused on that, they did not have to resort to the extreme Trumpist measures I’m constantly told are our only choice.

Portland

Those Who Do Not Help Themselves

Jim Cooper (Sheriff of Sacramento) (Nov. 2023): I can’t make this up. Recently, we tried to help Target. Our property crimes detectives and a sergeant were contacted numerous times by Target to assist with shoplifters, mostly known transients. We coordinated with them and set up an operation with detectives and our North POP team.
At the briefing, their regional security head told us we could not contact suspects inside the store; we could not handcuff suspects in the store; and if we arrested someone, they wanted us to process them outside, behind the store, in the rain.
We were told they did not want to create a scene inside the store and have people film it and post it on social media. They did not want negative press. Unbelievable.

Solving for the Equilibrium (1)

This is an interesting gambit, fine the shoplifters directly or else.
Bryan Caplan: From a reader:
Spotted this in Olive Young (a cosmetics store in Seoul
this only works if calling the police is worse than paying the fine. If the police wouldn’t do anything, then the threat is empty.*

The other equilibrium is that shoplifters are essentially not prosecuted at all because there are too many of them, and this seems to be a case of many jurisdictions f**ing around and finding out.*

Lawrence Newport (talking about UK): Shoplifting is up in 97% of constituencies [since 2022]. Some have almost doubled in a year.
Reality is worse as most go unreported

Then there’s the statistics on bike theft, which are even more dismal, and a rather clear test example.
Lawrence Newport: We left a bike with GPS trackers somewhere we assumed would be safe.
Right outside Scotland Yard.
It was quickly stolen.
Police did not check security camera footage, could not follow a “moving” GPS signal or one at an address.
The government has given up, and police cannot focus on the rampant theft.

Crush Crime: CSEW estimates 207,000 bikes were stolen last year.
Only 2 percent of cases resulted in a suspect being charged.
Theft is legal in Britain

Solving for the Equilibrium (2)

Lead

New meta-analysis finds (draft, final study) publication bias in studies that measure the effect of lead on crime, leading to large overstatement of effect sizes. Note that even if new result is true, lead is still a really big deal and a large part of the story

Our main estimates of the mean effect sizes are a partial correlation of 0.16, and an elasticity of 0.09. Our estimates suggest the abatement of lead pollution may be responsible for 7–28% of the fall in homicide in the US. Given the historically higher urban lead levels, reduced lead pollution accounted for 6–20% of the convergence in US urban and rural crime rates. Lead increases crime, but does not explain the majority of the fall in crime observed in some countries in the 20th century. Additional explanations are needed.

Law & Order

Do I feel this pain? Oh yes I feel this pain.
Jane Coaston: Law & Order when you actually know something about the legal subject at hand is a uniquely horrifying form of torture.
The entire premise of this episode would be moot because of Section 230, as I told both the television and my dog.