[ToValueFunfetti]

That's a surprising claim to me. I live in a fairly poor area and people seem very willing to throw litter out of their cars, blast bass so loud it shakes my house, do drugs in public view, or commit flagrant traffic/parking violations (no value judgments here, just being objective) compared to other places I've lived.

It is also trivially true that poor people are more likely to commit crimes (source[1] if needed, though). Of course, that is likely biased by the selective enforcement you call out.

Perhaps the two can be rectified as a bimodal distribution: Poor people are either dramatically more or dramatically less likely to commit crimes based on how they respond to their environment. Say poor people are more likely to be exposed to crime and thus presented with the choice, and you can respond to high scrutiny by treading carefully or just giving up on it and doing whatever ("They'll punish me regardless, may as well get something out of it.").

Because getting convicted of a given crime is relatively unlikely to begin with, the low crime group doesn't substantively reduce the conviction rate but the high crime group drives it up dramatically. And I am more able to notice the guy blasting bass at 80 mph than the hundreds who quietly pass by.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4180846/

[TeaDrunk]

> I live in a fairly poor area and people seem very willing to throw litter out of their cars, blast bass so loud it shakes my house, do drugs in public view, or commit flagrant traffic/parking violations (no value judgments here, just being objective) compared to other places I've lived.

I used to live in wealthy frathouse neighborhoods and they do the same shit there too. They just have the money to hire cleaners after they trash houses, or collectively buy summer vacation trips to other countries to do it.

[ToValueFunfetti]

My previous apartments were mostly very near a campus, so that's more or less my point of comparison. I definitely was more upset at entitled college kids than I am about my neighbors today (who I mostly can excuse), but I do think there was a lot less of it.

The bass issue for example has gone from 1-2 times a week to 2-3 times a day, and this is a much lower traffic area. A lot fewer loud parties here, but I think that's mostly a function of age. And yeah, they'd trash their own houses/lawns, but I'm not sure that's even illegal. Here I pick up a small bag of trash from my own property whenever I mow the lawn; nobody once littered in my lawn by campus (I do have about 4x the space where that could happen now).

This is all anecdotal, my experience certainly doesn't override yours. I'd love to see some data, but I can't seem to find anything.