this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Lefty Memes
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Society has objectively gotten less violent. Morality and ethics are subjective, so I'm not going to touch on those. Every violent crime metric is, year over year, decreasing, and it's not because of the boot on our collective necks.
We'd all be better off without armed thugs whose only job is to protect the property of the ruling class. State-sanctioned violence just waiting to be dispensed by the waiting batons of the blue mafia.
That is the only bullet point I really agree with, to be honest. Perhaps because I'm not American.
I don't know where you get your violence crime metric from but it differs from my sources, which all over the board indicate an increase of crime in the last 5 years: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/country_result.jsp?country=France
This looks like survey results? Lines like "Worries being mugged or robbed" indicate to me these data points are for what people FEEL, not what actually exists. If I'm mistaken my bad.
If not - frankly I don't care what people FEEL. I care about actual incidents of violent crime occurring. Not gonna lie, it's 3am, I've got a stomach bug, and I work in 3 hours - I'm not gonna find you a source, but if you find another one showing a marked uptick in ACTUAL INCIDENTS OF VIOLENT CRIME, please feel free to share.
I was referring to the line "Crime increasing in the past 5 years" which reads to me not being felt. I don't know if you just overlooked it.
Even if it's only FELT, a society living in constant terror is functional and desirable because... why?
How would you restore faith to a shaken society full of fears ("high fears" in above sources) of becoming a victim of crime?
Below the results, on the page:
These data are based on perceptions of visitors of this website in the past 5 years.
If the value is 0, it means it is perceived as very low, and if the value is 100, it means it is perceived as very high.
Our data for each country are based on all entries from all cities in that country.
I do not see anything indicating that those are only for the *safety" category - it seems like " safety" is intended as an aggregate of the above opinions.
Either way, without any information on how these numbers are collected and how exactly the bars are to be interpreted, I HAVE to assume it's a collection of opinions.
Edit: assumptions cleared up. Clicking the information button on the page confirms it's a survey result, and not based on reported incidents.
Thanks for digging, so it's probably objectively skewed but subjectively correct.
No problem on the digging.
Define what exactly you mean.
Are you saying that it's subjectively correct in that it's reporting a subjective belief, and thus tautologically correct? Or are you saying that if people feel crime must be higher, crime must be higher? One of these I'm okay with, the other not hah.
Hm, it also depends on the need to fill out a survey. Usually, I assume, if everything is alright, people would be less inclined to fill out a survey than when they feel the impulse to vocalize their needs. So when things do not run well, I assume one would get more negative reviews. This also skews statistics...
Nevertheless it seems to me people feel less safe and thus are inclined to voice this, which results in a more negative outcome. So, yes, I assume things feel worse, backed by the survey results and the need to attend a survey at all.
If the feeling is detached from the objective statistics is a more difficult question because also how crime statistics are created. For example the situation of no justicial force at all, therefore no one there to handle crime situations and reports, therefore officially no crime, because none can be and none have been measured.
And like I said in another post, if society feels unsafe this is probably equally bad or even worse than the actual crime levels. A terrified society with no actual crimes is more disfunctional than a society which is wholesome and happy but everyday some people get robbed or stabbed. In the latter case society still "works" and is functional, in the former everything gets "tainted" with serious effects on mental health, expenses and productivity, alongside with social interactions and the overall feeling of cohesion.
The simplest explanation for society feeling more unsafe despite objectively being safer now than any other time period is information. Throughout humanitys development, we basically only knew of the bad things that happened in our little slices of the world. Our village, maybe a community in a city, maybe your nation going to war.
You don't see all the other daily violence. Three villages over? Murder. The other way? Rape. But to you, they don't exist, and so you don't feel more unsafe.
Compare to today. We know exactly how many people are victimized daily. We are all of the wars, all of the killings. Of COURSE the world feels more dangerous now than it ever has. This is why we HAVE statistics. Feelings aren't a good metric for reality. We don't need more policing because we feel less safe. We need to critically examine why we actually feel unsafe.
Feeling unsafe is definitely not worse than being unsafe. I'm not going to go down that route, it's frankly asinine. I would, every time, take a situation where I feel unsafe but am, in fact, perfectly okay, compared to living in some kind of blissful ignorance with a gun to my head.
https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/ocindex-2023/
This study from 2023 states:
They also offer a 246 page PDF detailing their findings.
More on the issuer on Wikipedia.
So, I don't want to be accused of moving goal posts. That's not my intention here in the slightest.
This article and organization specifically look at organized crime - things like terrorist cells, cartels, mafia, etc. - no doubt a big concern, but also not the bulk of the crime that happens. That number going up isn't a good thing, but it's also entirely possible for that number to be going up for one reason, while the general crime levels are going down, faster, for other reasons.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/us-crime-rates-and-trends-analysis-fbi-crime-statistics
Looking at this article (first thing I found searching 'violent crimes trend over years') we can see a much different picture thatln we'd expect looking just at organized crime. The trend is MARKEDLY down from 1990 to today. The only period there even shows an increase, really, was during that little global pandemic we had.
THIS is the number that matters when someone says that the world is objectively safer today than it was in any other period of history. That, per 100k people, the number of them having violent things done to them is going down, steadily, and regularly.
TFW you don't vet your sources before claiming they support your point.
Look at crime over the last 30 years.
Be grateful there is no downvote button because I would use it to hell on you. The reality is that outside of a few countries cops aren't really as bad as tankies etc paint them. Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and more have very few policing issues.
I got a down vote button. I'm not sure why I'd be afraid to have it used on me though? Oh no, someone online thinks I'm WRONG?
Anyway, enjoy the downvote. Or don't I guess.
Have fun whinging about ACAB and then going to the police supported community event lmao.
Mate the community events I frequent tend to run contrary to the police. ACAB, and I will continue to have fun.
Mate what the fuck are you talking about? Cops only shut down parties. They never support them unless its a white robe party.
Finn here. this is & always has been straight up misinformation. all cops are, in fact, bastards, so our cops too are committing heinous acts, albeit on a smaller scale than in the US. the system isn't magically not rotten elsewhere.
also, lol.
I don't think you can have an institution whose purpose is violently policing your peers, either directly or implicitly, without attracting the least desirable of your population. Hell, describing them like that, they really do sound more like a gang.
we literally had a high-ranking cop running a criminal empire on the side.