[tfourb]

How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty) instead of suppressing the symptoms by pushing crime out of politically powerful areas into politically marginalized areas?

I'm not a fan of vandalism and luckily I'm living in a country where I have the law on my side when demanding that public space is not surveilled indiscriminately, but I totally understand the urge to simply take a stick to a camera that records my every movement.

[energy123]

El Salvador solved crime without solving poverty. It can be done. You may not want to do it.

Crime is also a direct cause of poverty. There is reverse causality. For example, it depresses housing prices and it deters shops from opening in poor areas.

[bklosky]

Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction, as nice as it would be if that were true.

[pessimizer]

It is when it comes to petty street robbery. Nobody with anything would find what the average person is carrying these days worth the risk. People don't even carry cash, just phones that you're going to get pennies on the dollar for, and that take an effort to get rid of.

Also, it's important to say that Oakland is probably the safest it's been in half a century. People pretending that some emergency is occurring right now that has to be reacted to is annoying. It's sad that your bike got stolen once. I'm not giving up a single right to make sure it never happens to anyone again.

A lot of wealthy people from sparsely populated suburbs moved into cities, raised the rents, and turned the former residents desperate. Their first exposure to crime is an exposure to an elevated rate of urban crime (in their quickly gentrified neighborhoods) and worse, people know the reason that they can't afford to live is because of that dweeb with the $1K phone living in the house they grew up in.

Those new residents have a distorted sense of reality, and a distorted set of expectations. They should be paid attention to less, yet they demand attention, drive up property values, and deepen the tax base, so they aren't.

> Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction

It's also important to say that we have never tried this, and the reason we say that it doesn't work (despite all historical evidence) is because we don't want to try this. We don't care about the bottom 80% of the population, except when as servants they do not live up to our expectations, or when they live in the neighborhoods that we want.

[new_account_100]

Seems like it would help a lot, even if it wouldn't solve the issue.

I think we should forge ahead on trying reduce poverty, and I suspect that doing so would correlate with reductions in crime.

[stickfigure]

Over generations that will probably help, sure. In the mean time...

[hackable_sand]

We've got nothing but time. What's the rush?

[stickfigure]

Dunno about you, but I would prefer to live out the rest of my life without a gun pointed at my face. Again.

[ergocoder]

> How about addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty)

Ok, let's get on it!

What do we do while we wait for the root causes to be addressed? It has been more than 20-30 years at least.

Can we use short-term solutions while waiting? no?

[peab]

Poverty is not the root cause of crime

[tfourb]

Obviously there is no single cause for any social dynamic (hence my "i.e.") but there is wide scientific consensus that poverty (especially when combined with inequality) contributes greatly to crime, bot directly (people steal if it is the only way to get something to eat) and indirectly (poor people are much more likely to live in the social conditions that correlate with incidence of crime).

[peab]

I believe "i.g" would be more appropriate then, since "i.e" means "that is", while "e.g" means "for example"

[tfourb]

thanks!

[new_account_100]

What is?

[SoftTalker]

Lack of family structure and good role models for young people.

[TurboTveit]

Seems correlated with poverty

[new_account_100]

I see your point, you could be born to a wealthy deadbeat father and end up chasing a life of crime because you haven't seen anything better modeled for you.

It seems to me that poverty is more likely than anything else to cause those factors though.