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by bklosky 34 days ago
Poverty alleviation is not a silver bullet (or anywhere close) for crime reduction, as nice as it would be if that were true.
2 comments

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.

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.

Over generations that will probably help, sure. In the mean time...
We've got nothing but time. What's the rush?
Dunno about you, but I would prefer to live out the rest of my life without a gun pointed at my face. Again.