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I’m not worried that much about random acts of violence from desperate or misguided strangers.

The crime I want eliminated is that of the elite.





I think you're going to find that working class people living in low and middle income neighborhoods do not agree with you about this. They're unhappy with how police response tends to traumatize the innocent in their neighborhoods, but they're even more unhappy with how police response appears only to halfheartedly address crime, which falls heavier (both in frequency and impact) on lower-income people than it does on the wealthy.

You can read meeting minutes from neighborhood and beat meetings to confirm this (there's probably lots of things you can read to confirm it, but the nerdiest way to do it is to get the raw data.)

A shorter way to say all of this: you're expressing a luxury belief.


How it is "luxury" to want to address large scale crimes such as wage theft, price collusion, corruption, unequal access, and institutional racism/classism that are major underlying factors in street crime, including the lack of enforcement you mention here? From a nerd perspective, it's seems obvious that addressing underlying causes is beneficial to all of us. In fact, it seems likely that it's the only thing that will work in the long run. Policing might also be necessary in some cases, but it's not going to fix our long-standing social issues.

It's luxury to suggest that street and property crime should take a backburner to whatever your issues are, because you are (demographically speaking; I have no idea who you are personally) (1) much less likely to experience street and property crime than someone in a low-income neighborhood and (2) much more able to metabolize the impacts of those crimes.

The whole thing is silly; it isn't the job of municipal police to investigate price collusion and corruption in the first place. You might just as meaningfully say that the trash collection service should be prioritizing institutional racism.


You’re right. It’s a luxury to have the space away from the problem to think about it systemically. Certainly, part of the work is to learn from each other.

Will surveillance cameras in low-income areas (if that’s where they’ll put them) mean that the police will be more responsive to crime in those areas? If the police are already not responsive in supposedly high-crime areas, what’s the underlying cause? Would the Black Panthers have felt the need to have armed patrols in their neighborhoods if the police could’ve put up a surveillance system?


You live in a upper class city. Your example is great albeit not quite applicable to the first paragraph.

Tell me more about the upper class west side of Chicago.

Yeah the real issue that most Americans (and probably other countries) is that 0.1% of the populace is wagging the rest of the 99.9% around based on how much they're willing to pay to politicians.



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