> “3-5% of rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults- and less than 1% of property crimes- lead to jail time.”
Gotta be careful with stats like that. The causes are different.
The low rate of property crime clearance is indeed very sad and reflective of the priorities of the police, I think, perhaps also that robbers got better at robbing over time. I recall my parents house was broken into (in the UK) once when I was a kid and the police were useless. They don't usually have much to go on unless they find where the goods are sold.
The low rate of rape clearance is mostly related to the fact that the rate of false accusations and rescinded allegations is so high. I looked into this once some years ago and the average cop will estimate in anonymous interviews that ~50% of all allegations are false. Many of these never make it to court because the accuser admits it before it gets that far. Additionally, "stranger rape" is quite rare. It's far more common that the two people know each other and may well have been in a consensual relationship. So it's trying to litigate what happened between closed doors to the level of "beyond all reasonable doubt", which is inherently difficult for the legal system to handle.
Unfortunately feminist politicians, activists and civil servants usually don't care about any of that. In their minds women never lie, ever, so the rape jail rate should be 100%. These people have a nasty habit of making their own delusional beliefs come true by changing the law any time men find ways to defend themselves against false accusations, for example, in the UK recently there was a run of false accusations that were revealed via phone evidence. The response of the political class was not "wow, men have a serious problem with false rape accusations against them, we'd better fix that", it was, "let's change the law so phone evidence isn't admissible". It's this sort of thing that reveals the lie of feminism - it's a woman's world actually. Women are willing to organize to take control of men in ways modern men would never even dream of doing in return.
I agree, most crime stats are a complete mess, and honestly it is a little hard to believe it is entirely by accident. If you don't want people judging your performance, best case is no one collects statistics, but second best is probably really badly collected statistics that are complicated and inconsistent.
Still, even if we assume 50% of rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults are false reports, that still leaves the clearance rate at 6-10%. Rape cases are definitely an awkward legal area all things considered, but robberies and aggravated assaults need not have that low of a clearance rate.
Worse are things like shoplifting which are almost entirely ignored, yet would be super easy to enforce if we wanted to. I have seen other shoppers get upset and try to stop shoplifters while employees tell them not to, and the perp just walks out of the store. Walmart and other stores know roughly how much stuff is getting stolen where and often when, so it wouldn't be hard to have a cop or two parked out in the lot to grab suspected shoplifters. There are already video cameras all around the place so it wouldn't be difficult to get convictions. Yet, strangely, it is completely ignored. Worse, since COVID many US cities have essentially made shoplifting legal by saying they won't go after people who steal under 1000$ or so. Which frankly boggles my mind.
With robberies, I have often wondered if the cops just don't look for fingerprints any more. Maybe they just don't hold up in court, but considering how few people actually break into houses and cars etc., you'd think the same sets of prints would start showing up a lot.
The US and the UK definitely have some serious problems with justice, both recognizing it and enforcing it. In the US, I think the drug war back in the 70's-90's really broke things, with too much time and money spent on high profile vice instead of humdrum every day crimes. We made zero real impact on drug use but let other crimes become normalized.
I suspect you're under-estimating the sophistication of the average home robber. They've known to use gloves for a very long time!
This is often how it works out. It was the same when I worked on anti-spam/abuse in the tech world - bad and good guys end up in some sort of equilibrium where it looks like crime controls don't work because the only people who try are those who have figured out how to beat the system. But if you get rid of the controls then it suddenly grows by a huge amount, because it was actually doing something.
Car crime was largely wiped out over time by the use of immobilizers and better encryption on the keyfobs, from what I understand. You can't hotwire cars for a very long time now. But occasionally someone figures out how to hack the keyfobs for a particular brand of car and car crime immediately explodes, only for that model. So I think car thefts are pretty much under control and what's left is the noise that is hard to eliminate completely, because the people who do it aren't doing it at scale.
However this is just my perception. I can believe it's more extreme in the USA. The shoplifting-is-now-legal nonsense is something else entirely. I think that's pretty much a US problem. I can't remember the last time I saw shoplifting where I live.
That's a good question on gloves. A little background: my dad worked for years in a youth detention center. He had a very education centered program, and I went in a fair bit to do little lectures on economics type topics. Most of the criminals I have met were young, and amazingly ignorant. Not stupid, although some were also amazingly stupid, but just didn't have much knowledge. My father agreed, and I have met a few of his former (students? I don't know what is the best word) as adults and some are obviously bright and have jobs and others are daft if pleasant enough.
I bring that up because I think when it comes to physical crimes, robbery and the like, the barrier to entry is really low compared to e.g. the tech world. In tech you have to be clever enough to understand things, whereas to commit robbery you merely need to be impulsive. (Come to think of it, I would imagine impulsivity is a much less common trait among tech criminals than the usual teenagers that commit crimes.) That makes me wonder how many robberies and the like are committed by people who do lots of careful planning and are prepared, or impulsive types who wouldn't remember to bring gloves, or at least wouldn't call off a robbery attempt if their glove ripped or something.
Anyway, all that to say that yea, criminals can be clever too, but the average criminal is probably always going to be a dumb kid who steals a bike, beats up someone to steal their money, breaks into neighborhood houses, etc. My father often pointed out that most criminals that got caught seemed to be so stupid they pretty much caught themselves, which might suggest that most are too smart to get caught, but then again with rates as low as they are it kind of suggests that cops just aren't trying hard. Why they are not trying is probably a complicated public choice theory sort of situation, but I am pretty sure they are not trying hard.
To be fair, it might well be that cops are catching lots of criminals and then the district attorney doesn't bother to prosecute them. That also seems to be a big problem in the US. Still, it supports the notion that we could improve that probability of being punished quite a bit if we just tried, and if we did that, we could probably lower prison time and still get good deterrence.
(Edited because I forgot the bit about the gloves ripping.)
> “3-5% of rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults- and less than 1% of property crimes- lead to jail time.”
Gotta be careful with stats like that. The causes are different.
The low rate of property crime clearance is indeed very sad and reflective of the priorities of the police, I think, perhaps also that robbers got better at robbing over time. I recall my parents house was broken into (in the UK) once when I was a kid and the police were useless. They don't usually have much to go on unless they find where the goods are sold.
The low rate of rape clearance is mostly related to the fact that the rate of false accusations and rescinded allegations is so high. I looked into this once some years ago and the average cop will estimate in anonymous interviews that ~50% of all allegations are false. Many of these never make it to court because the accuser admits it before it gets that far. Additionally, "stranger rape" is quite rare. It's far more common that the two people know each other and may well have been in a consensual relationship. So it's trying to litigate what happened between closed doors to the level of "beyond all reasonable doubt", which is inherently difficult for the legal system to handle.
Unfortunately feminist politicians, activists and civil servants usually don't care about any of that. In their minds women never lie, ever, so the rape jail rate should be 100%. These people have a nasty habit of making their own delusional beliefs come true by changing the law any time men find ways to defend themselves against false accusations, for example, in the UK recently there was a run of false accusations that were revealed via phone evidence. The response of the political class was not "wow, men have a serious problem with false rape accusations against them, we'd better fix that", it was, "let's change the law so phone evidence isn't admissible". It's this sort of thing that reveals the lie of feminism - it's a woman's world actually. Women are willing to organize to take control of men in ways modern men would never even dream of doing in return.
I agree, most crime stats are a complete mess, and honestly it is a little hard to believe it is entirely by accident. If you don't want people judging your performance, best case is no one collects statistics, but second best is probably really badly collected statistics that are complicated and inconsistent.
Still, even if we assume 50% of rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults are false reports, that still leaves the clearance rate at 6-10%. Rape cases are definitely an awkward legal area all things considered, but robberies and aggravated assaults need not have that low of a clearance rate.
Worse are things like shoplifting which are almost entirely ignored, yet would be super easy to enforce if we wanted to. I have seen other shoppers get upset and try to stop shoplifters while employees tell them not to, and the perp just walks out of the store. Walmart and other stores know roughly how much stuff is getting stolen where and often when, so it wouldn't be hard to have a cop or two parked out in the lot to grab suspected shoplifters. There are already video cameras all around the place so it wouldn't be difficult to get convictions. Yet, strangely, it is completely ignored. Worse, since COVID many US cities have essentially made shoplifting legal by saying they won't go after people who steal under 1000$ or so. Which frankly boggles my mind.
With robberies, I have often wondered if the cops just don't look for fingerprints any more. Maybe they just don't hold up in court, but considering how few people actually break into houses and cars etc., you'd think the same sets of prints would start showing up a lot.
The US and the UK definitely have some serious problems with justice, both recognizing it and enforcing it. In the US, I think the drug war back in the 70's-90's really broke things, with too much time and money spent on high profile vice instead of humdrum every day crimes. We made zero real impact on drug use but let other crimes become normalized.
I suspect you're under-estimating the sophistication of the average home robber. They've known to use gloves for a very long time!
This is often how it works out. It was the same when I worked on anti-spam/abuse in the tech world - bad and good guys end up in some sort of equilibrium where it looks like crime controls don't work because the only people who try are those who have figured out how to beat the system. But if you get rid of the controls then it suddenly grows by a huge amount, because it was actually doing something.
Car crime was largely wiped out over time by the use of immobilizers and better encryption on the keyfobs, from what I understand. You can't hotwire cars for a very long time now. But occasionally someone figures out how to hack the keyfobs for a particular brand of car and car crime immediately explodes, only for that model. So I think car thefts are pretty much under control and what's left is the noise that is hard to eliminate completely, because the people who do it aren't doing it at scale.
However this is just my perception. I can believe it's more extreme in the USA. The shoplifting-is-now-legal nonsense is something else entirely. I think that's pretty much a US problem. I can't remember the last time I saw shoplifting where I live.
That's a good question on gloves. A little background: my dad worked for years in a youth detention center. He had a very education centered program, and I went in a fair bit to do little lectures on economics type topics. Most of the criminals I have met were young, and amazingly ignorant. Not stupid, although some were also amazingly stupid, but just didn't have much knowledge. My father agreed, and I have met a few of his former (students? I don't know what is the best word) as adults and some are obviously bright and have jobs and others are daft if pleasant enough.
I bring that up because I think when it comes to physical crimes, robbery and the like, the barrier to entry is really low compared to e.g. the tech world. In tech you have to be clever enough to understand things, whereas to commit robbery you merely need to be impulsive. (Come to think of it, I would imagine impulsivity is a much less common trait among tech criminals than the usual teenagers that commit crimes.) That makes me wonder how many robberies and the like are committed by people who do lots of careful planning and are prepared, or impulsive types who wouldn't remember to bring gloves, or at least wouldn't call off a robbery attempt if their glove ripped or something.
Anyway, all that to say that yea, criminals can be clever too, but the average criminal is probably always going to be a dumb kid who steals a bike, beats up someone to steal their money, breaks into neighborhood houses, etc. My father often pointed out that most criminals that got caught seemed to be so stupid they pretty much caught themselves, which might suggest that most are too smart to get caught, but then again with rates as low as they are it kind of suggests that cops just aren't trying hard. Why they are not trying is probably a complicated public choice theory sort of situation, but I am pretty sure they are not trying hard.
To be fair, it might well be that cops are catching lots of criminals and then the district attorney doesn't bother to prosecute them. That also seems to be a big problem in the US. Still, it supports the notion that we could improve that probability of being punished quite a bit if we just tried, and if we did that, we could probably lower prison time and still get good deterrence.
(Edited because I forgot the bit about the gloves ripping.)