But politically Dems are getting beaten up on the issue, that's my point. They are losing winnable voters who are uncomfortable with disorder. Facts aren't breaking through - they need to improve the rhetoric.
FOX News and their smaller imitators are largely responsible for this, pumping out an endless stream of mis-/dis-information; or at best half-truths. Which (wrongly) portrays Dems as soft on crime, GOP tough on crime.
Last month's Ipsos poll found that 85% of conservatives get all/some/most of their news from FOX News...and that 80% of these implicitly believe the GOP "alternative facts" drivel about, crime, unemployment, forced pediatric sex-changes, eaten pets, etc. regularly pushed by GOP elites/influencers.
Liberal media mostly tells the truth--or at least adheres to journalistic practices, like using multiple verifiable sources. While RW media largely just makes stuff up. How can our democracy survive if 40% of Americans are living in a media-created fantasy land divorced from reality?
It's not just disinformation. As this post notes, while America's "liberal" cities aren't super dangerous (though they are much more dangerous than Europe and Japan's equivalents), they are quite disorderly. Like I live in Seattle-- I certainly roll my eyes hard at all of the pearl clutching white people who declare that downtown is a Mad Max-ian nightmare where everyone is getting stabbed. But I walk a quarter mile or so to a coffee shop for mid-morning coffee every day. I pass at least 3 and often more like 10 people with psychosis every day. I've never seen or been subject to violence, but at least once a week one of them will be yelling aggressively. A couple of months ago, I saw someone overdose a half block ahead of me on the sidewalk. I've walked by people motionless on the sidewalk who I'm not certain weren't dead.
It's not wrong for people to want to clean up the downtown area. The way to do that is to get these people help, whether they claim to want it or not. That likely means a lot more involuntary commitment. That's expensive, but it's probably the least bad alternative. And while I'm wary of handing over lots of power to SPD, which notably had a number of its officers participate in January 6, a reformed police department probably is an important part of any real fix.
Yeah when I lived in SF Fox News really ruined my impression of it. They hired thousands of crisis actors to camp in the streets, shoot heroin, and commit petty crime. They rigged the local elections to elect school board members that dumbed down the public schools too. Really a very effective psy op they were running.
To an extent I agree. But a really bad response politically is to say "no you are wrong - everything is fine."
You need to say you agree safety is important, and tell people what you are doing about it. (Or, try to get people more interested in other issues - but that's hard)
I always like how FOX News and the NY Post rails about sex trafficking and street prostitution while there sister publications in Australia carry ads for brothels.
Comparative murder rates may not cause the chaotic and dangerous public spaces that Noah refers to. He also mentions lots of other crimes like fare jumping, auto theft and so on are erratic and random, that's where fear comes from.
Blue state spending on cops is a direct result of entrenched police unions in blue cities and not a measure of safety.
You mean *superior* Blue state funding *and* staffing. That has produced pronounced decreases in Blue state crime. Well, perhaps there are *other* reasons why Red state crime rates are 33% higher.
Your conclusions comparing public safety to murder is itself fallacious. Almost all murder victims know their perps - family or friends/acquaintances. Public safety issues may involve murder at the margins, but mostly it's about the matters Smith describes - disorder and menace in public space.
Mr. Laver’s point is exactly the opposite of how you somehow interpreted it. He described the perps as “friends and acquaintances”; that is his polite way of saying that the hoods and gang members who commit the murders know their victims.
I wouldn't expect military personnel to personally know any of the enemy soldiers they were killing, so why would criminal gang members personally know any of the members of other hostile gangs?
They know each other, or at least know who each other is, because they live in the same neighborhoods. They frequently shoot each other over an incident of perceived “disrespect”. Usually a trivial thing by any reasonable measure, but, in the climate that exists in these places, sufficient reason to kill someone. Other times, it’s over economics — encroaching on drug-dealing territory.
How much are higher Red state murder rates down to more guns, as well as to the fact that the Red states are mainly made up of the Midwest (which bore the brunt of post-1970 deindustrialization) plus the South (which has the highest African-American population)?
You are exactly correct. Yet, virtually every article about crime in the legacy media focuses on murder. This is either a) incompetence, b) an intentional effort to minimize the importance of property crimes and disorder, in an attempt to to deflect blame from the allegedly “marginalized groups” who commit those crimes, or c) both.
The idea is that murder is generally pretty accurately reported, and is correlated with other violent crime, and at least to some extent, other crime in general.
My partner's fear of moving back to Philly is abstractly about the ~300x increase in the chance of actually getting murdered, but more concretely about not wanting to get occasionally assaulted and robbed, and regularly harassed and stalked, and constantly being in situations that might escalate into something more dangerous.
It's at least driven in part by her experience in Philly being growing up car free in a bad part of town. There are obviously nicer parts of Philly. However, just the idea of a bad part of town needing to be avoided or driven through without stopping, is just ludicrous and unacceptable from a global perspective.
We live in a bad part of town in Tokyo, and it's the bad part of town because unlocked bikes might be stolen and wallets might be returned without the cash that was in them, not because people walk around with defensive mindset and small women are afraid of walking around alone.
Unfortunately fear of getting attacked has low correlation with the chances of getting attacked (if it bleeds, it leads). Yes, if I wander into a tough run-down neighborhood, I am at a higher risk. But that isn't where most of the fearful folks live.
There's a way that stories really matter in city life -- they don't call them 'urban legends' for nothing. The horrible murder story of tossing a match on a sleeping woman will be repeated as "it's not even safe to fall asleep," you can't count on the kindness of strangers. The stories are about horrors, not kindnesses. I went into Manhattan (from the suburbs) on Saturday by car (not train, because weekend schedules are so limited) and had dinner with a friend who said he was thinking of moving back from London but not after seeing so much vomit (midday!) on the subway. Bottom line -- when the stories are all moving in the same direction of broken social fabric (as they have been in SF for over a decade now) an authority presence is needed that actively shows a mending of the social fabric (one hesitates to say in a Norman Rockwell kind of way). Also take care of your thumb!
This is a good post. I do think the "Make US cops the best trained in the world! USA! USA!" is the way to square the circle with the right wing people. And "Make US cops more like Norwegian cops" is the way to do it with Left people.
Yes! And require all prospective firearm puchasers to undergo a 300-hour State Police-approved firearms handling course as a prerequisite to ownership. And then passing a licensing exam, and purchasing liability insurance. Much like the requirements to own and operate a motor vehicle.
We need to honor our 2nd Amendment constitutional right to bear arms, by making *well-regulated* not just a bunch of empty words.
Yes, getting rid of police unions is a huge piece of the puzzle – their entire purpose is making police unaccountable, which dramatically reduces trust and makes policing a bitter partisan issue instead of something we can all agree on (safety is good!).
<Both these unions, as well as teachers, and whose members salaries are paid with taxpayer money, but whose pay and job rules are made by politicians in bed with the unions.>
As opposed to billionaire political donors, who get no favors from the politicians they bankroll and donate out of the kindness of their heart! Abolishing public-sector unions would make a lot more sense if we got private money out of politics first, though I'd argue it's still unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
First, virtually all of the problems you mentioned are not unique to public-sector unions: they apply to various organizations in various situations, including regulatory capture and the infamous "iron triangle" of military procurement. The fact that conservatives tend to ignore the latter and obsess over government unions is because they happen to donate to Democrats, but instead of trying to recalibrate their political platform to appeal to middle-of-the-road government employees (as Noah is doing in his article), the Right's preferred tactic is to eliminate the opposition altogether.
Second, did you copy and paste this from ChatGPT? Normally, I wouldn't raise the issue because I'm personally thrilled by the productivity-enhancing potential of AI for writers, but that last paragraph doesn't grammatically fit with the rest of the post.
Another fantastic piece. Promoting on Bluesky and elsewhere.
I have been to England, Japan and France this year with family. It doesn't feel anything like American cities, even wealthy enclaves like Santa Barbara. It feels safe, clean and vibrant. Compared to American cities there is a MUCH lower level of general public disorder, and it's not because Europe and Japan don't have racism or poverty. It is a public policy and culture choice.
Progressives need to take a careful read of this piece and internalize it. If we want urbanism, transit, social welfare, universal healthcare, and lower inequality rich like other social democracies, we must excise failed left anarchist thinking.
Yup! My partner grew up in Philly and never learned to drive, and after learning what generally being safe felt like after moving to Tokyo, she is terrified of the thought of moving back to the US.
That is likely an overreaction, however, fear isn't always rational. And for the typical American, the experience of subjective safety they are unwilling to let go of isn't Tokyo, it's car centric suburbia.
I think the professionalism point here is underrated as a matter of politics. One of the reasons that a lot of American liberals--including many city dwellers, and occasionally myself--turned against the police isn't because of Marxist philosophy or whatever, but because our urban police forces suffer from a profound lack of discipline that makes the people they interact with on a regular basis resent and dislike them.
I live in NYC, and here the most spectacular version of that was clearly the Eric Garner case, which was a bigger deal than I think people outside the city realize. Not so much the actual incident, which was of course very bad bad, but the fact that the full police force backed the officer that *everyone agreed did not follow department rules* and demanded that he face no sanction. The reason a good many people people don't want the police to arrest the guy smoking on the subway platform is because it has been conclusively established that the police themselves will not act with discipline when engaging in enforcement and will also face no sanction for their rule breaking conduct.
And this doesn't just happen with the big, spectacular incidents. The "police simply believe themselves to be above the law" vibe is reinforced daily by the way that they do a million little things in the city right down to the fact that they park their cars on the sidewalks around police stations despite the fact that (1) everyone agrees its against the rules and (2) people complain about it all the time. Its just very difficult to build a society that prioritizes rule following when the police themselves thumb their noses at the very notion of following the rules.
I often think of the way the police act in contrast to the high level of discipline maintained by the military, where people seem to understand better that if you're going to give people guns and let them walk around carrying out state sanctioned violence you need to demand a high degree of discipline. No one parks wherever they want on a military base. No one turns their back on the President at West Point as the NYPD did to one of our mayors. In fact, the military runs its own prisons just for soldiers that break the rules and I think most people get that we're more likely to meet aliens next week than for the NYPD to build their own Leavenworth for bad officers.
Anyway, residents of NYC didn't wake up one day and decide that we didn't like cops, we have been living for decades with cops who very clearly don't like us and don't think they should be subject to any restraint or accountability. At some point that frays the public trust to the point where it's simply broken and we have to understand that this is a two way street if that trust is ever going to be restored.
In Louisville several years ago, the “elite” crime group was throwing cold drinks (e.g. Diet Cooke with ice) at pedestrians and filming it to post on social media. Those particular officers were eventually disciplined, but the attitude of impunity still exists within the city police force. It’s hard to know where to start, but increasing police training from 90 day to 1 year at least is a place to start. Requiring a two-year criminal justice degree wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
This is a big difference between the NYPD and the Tokyo/London Metropolitan Police among others which in both Japan and the UK where they don't have an FBI or Secret Service type organization both services perform these roles in addition to there municipal policing responsibilities. The thing Noah doesn't get is the NYPD and it's supporters in the outer boroughs have no desire to re-make the NYPD into a version of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police or the London Metropolitan Police(Scotland Yards)
Can I second this and third it and ....... Professionalism really matters and is sadly lacking in almost every encounter I have had with police in my long life.
In general huge agree here. I’m a bit perplexed by the antipathy for surveillance technology.
It’s as if us liberals and progressives are rooting for people to be able to get away with something if you’re not dumb enough to get caught. It’s
Private spaces are broadly surveilled but instead of limiting what you can do with camera footage they attack the cameras in public . Despite the fact that these are definitionally not private.
I think a slightly (but not much) more charitable take is that most people want fairly draconian laws on the books so they can be applied to "other people" (undesirables, homeless, drug dealers, small time criminals, etc) but expect their (probably white, middle class) privilege to exempt them from them or get off with just a warning at worst.
They don't want 65mph enforced because I'm just going 70 on my way to work every morning and I'm a good citizen but those kids driving at night are a different story!
The increasing existence of automated surveillance and enforcement is causing a lot of angst because that soft separation of enforcement is no longer gone.
I think this is true for traffic and very little else.
Like loads of habitual speeders would be shocked if their friend spoke of casually shoplifting or turnstile jumping on their vacation. On the roads we’ve just decided laws, especially speeding are for suckers.
I think this is true because of who usually breaks those laws. And it’s not just speeding. Paying under the table is another example not to mention all the lying that goes on in sales and other forms of white collar crimes.
This is true, IME. People speed all the time like it’s nothing. But nobody I know - middle class AND working class - approves of shoplifting or gate jumping. Bluntly, people don’t want to hang around others who think stealing is tee-hee funny.
I live in Europe (Paris specifically) and have lived in the U.S. in the past. I think a big part of this is the guns, but in a sort of roundabout way. One reason why we can have so many police per capita in Europe is because they show relative restraint. The French police are not perfect by any means but are in my experience more professional and courteous, and less intrusive, than in the U.S. This is even the case in the UK where, unlike France, most police don’t carry firearms.
Part of it is I think the training thing, which you identified. But a big part is not being surrounded by people who have, or might have, guns. It makes police work far less dangerous. I think it also feeds in with the training by (1) making it a more attractive career options and (2) allowing for specialised forces like the Gendarmerie, who are actually military and not civilian police.
Police work is not actually THAT dangerous. 15 fatal injuries per 100,000 workers. About the same as taxi drivers. And much safer than garbage men who have 32 fatal injuries per 100,000 workers.
But (some) police in America definitely THINK they have a uniquely dangerous job and adopt a siege mentality as a result.
(And a big chunk of those are police crashing their cars). The odds of a police officer actually being killed by a criminal in the line of duty are quite low.
this is completely true, and we see this in a recent example of NYPD chasing down a turnstyle jumper literally with guns blazing and four people were shot. Police in the US of course have to be heavily armed because *any American* has the constitutional right to be heavily armed themselves. So until we have a constitutional convention where we can amend the 2nd amendment, US policing is going to be a much more lethal affair than what we have in Europe.
I think a big problem with more policing is that the culture of policing in America is fundamentally broken. I'm less familiar with Europe's policing culture, but I imagine it's far less bad there.
If you read the DoJ's report on Ferguson's police department in the wake of the Mike Brown killing, for instance, you see a department crawling with open and casual racism. And it's not confined to red states and cities either-- the NYPD Union openly endorsed Donald Trump, and a number of Seattle Police Department officers stormed the Capitol on January 6. These aren't really people that the communities they police (which are largely non-white) trust, with good reason, and progressives aren't wrong to be exceptionally wary of putting public safety into their hands.
But I think that just adds another prong-- if we go down the route of more policing and involuntary commitment (and this post makes a compelling case that we should!), it needs to be coupled with an equally aggressive push to professionalize police departments and aggressively remove unsavory officers from the departments.
Isn't another problem that policing in many parts of America is extremely fragmented organizationally, which meant that several tiny forces (like Ferguson's IIRC) were reliant on traffic ticket revenue to make ends meet?
Probably. And the way that’s inevitably enforced is… against poor non-white people. But all of those are part and parcel of the same problem— that many of our police departments have cultures of racism and corruption that make them unfit to police communities.
So then you really can’t have one without the other— to get a police force that establishes order, you need a police force that communities have a good deal of confidence is there to protect and serve people rather than to collect revenue or enforce de facto racial segregation.
It’s completely rational for people to choose driving instead of walking or transit in many of these cities (sadly). The bar shouldn’t be risk of death or physical violence; I expect people to do what is convenient and pleasant, and unfortunately that is often being isolated in the safety of one’s own car. The stats on crime do not capture the common experience which often includes being accosted, trash, or witnessing drug use, things which people living in these cities are all too familiar with in public spaces including on transit. This post is a great summary and I hope these ideas become more common among advocates of urbanism. A necessary condition for viable public goods is they need to work for the general public, and physical safety is a bare minimum. Without this, it’s reasonable to expect low public support (again, sadly).
In the case of the San Francisco Bay Area--where I've been a driving/mass-transit-using/bicycling resident for 30 years--mass transit by bus or subway (BART) is problematic at best; but often less costly than driving into the city centers when parking is factored in. BART & MUNI have gotten increasingly more crowded--not less--during this period (partly due to insufficient capitalization); which significantly detracts from their desirability when driving is an option. The exception to this are the luxurious commuter buses to/from the Financial District from the suburbs, which are exceptionally nice indeed.
BART and MUNI are much less crowded today than 2019. I have been riding both systems continuously through that time frame. I don’t dismiss the issues Noah raises here but as a 30+ year resident of San Francisco, I feel like the quality of life is better than it was 5 years ago (less crowded, slightly less expensive.) But we still need way more housing! I am outer-borough but not one of the outer-borough NIMBY’s Noah references (though my neighborhood has its share of them!)
Increases in population density would have to be matched by corresponding increases in efficiency/capacity of BART & MUNI. Like perhaps it's time for a 2nd transbay tube.
My frame of reference was commuting to SF Japantown and later Potrero Hill, from Berkeley and then later from Marin. The Pandemic really cut down on physical congestion on the 101 corridor...but now it's closer to pre-Pandemic levels; even as mass transit options from/inside Marin have slightly diminished.
I, along with my family, are examples of those so called "middle class that has retreated to their car centric suburbs" after living in NYC, in three different boroughs, for over 20 years. We live in a distant exurb though I make frequent trips back for various reasons. While there are many reasons we would benefit by continuing to live in a dense urban environment, there's a lot more reasons why we benefit by not living there. Every paragraph of this story has me bursting with ideas and observations such that it's too overwhelming for me to try to respond. So much about policing, after having many interactions with NYC's "finest", glued to their cellphones all day and who can barely be bothered to be of actual help when you have an actual policing problem. So much about "walking", where it's assumed that everyone is physically able to just walk multiple miles per day lugging around groceries and bags that you can never take your eyes off of lest they will vanish instantly.
Overall I just have this question, if the "middle class and the wealthy can retreat to their car-centric suburbs." we can with some certainty say that if the poorer classes could also retreat to car-centric suburbs, they would too. In fact I think the vast majority of people living in cities, if you gave them the ability to have a house and a car in a low density town and could work out whatever details of their continued economic survival for that, they'd do it. Not having to lug 30 pounds of groceries or whatever down multiple blocks, up and down staircases and trains becomes a lot more valuable as one gets older and "walking multiple miles per day" is not the effortless breeze it was when they were in their 20s. Do we just ignore that and all continue to pretend that dense urban living is the ideal for everyone?
Isn't that a great point: that even if American cities could fix their public order problem it is likely that suburban car culture would continue to dominate, supported by a keystone called "the weekly grocery shop"?
I really dont know. I've lived out of the city for about eight years now and am still trying to understand what it means to be in "car culture", why people live here, why so many are like "the CITY? what?!" and how to reconcile that with all the public transportation / dense living advocates we have across the intellectual center/left. Like am I a bad person, or not living up to my potential because I'm too lazy to deal with walking and public transit? How would the people here with handicapped permits in the cars who can barely walk 30 feet fare in Manhattan walking up and down subway steps all day?
The biggest difference between Manhattanites and tourists is the tourists are much larger. In terms of relatives and friends relatives everyone who is even mildly overweight ends up disabled. In some cases joint replacement can help but in some cases not. The reality is a lot of those people who can’t walk wouldn’t be disabled if they hadn’t been so overweight and gotten more exercise.
You'd need to have some pretty elaborate statistical studies to show that the primary reason urban folks have lower obesity / greater physical walking capability is because the nature of city living itself grants them a healthy enough lifestyle for that to be the case. On it's face, it's a take that seems to imply that obesity and health issues that affect walking are mostly preventable through lifestyle and are therefore the fault of the person; folks with multiple sclerosis or ALS, or even less severe issues like the chronic congenital tendonitis I have in my arches, might take issue with that.
In the absence of such statistical studies, you really have no knowledge what proportion of city people are less obese / more able bodied *because* of the urban lifestyle itself, or if it's because the urban lifestyle is *self-selecting* for younger, healthier people who are able and willing to tolerate the increased physical demands of the lifestyle. Anecdotally it seems pretty clear that it's the latter if you look at the general pattern of young professionals regularly leaving cities in droves as they age into their 40s and 50s, like NY residents moving to Westchester, Hudson Valley, Jersey and Long Island. Poorer residents without the ability to move have a more bleak calculus here but tend to live in outer regions of cities anyway where they tend to use more cars or just reduce travel/ commuting greatly. All a lot of handwaving but importantly I think it's particularly pernicious to blame people with walking difficulties due to obesity or disability to blame them for their disabilities across the board.
Absolutely, id love to see how they can show causality for lower obesity in urban environments and I'd never include obesity in this argument again.
They sure aren't going to show immune or congenital issues nor can they say much about hip replacements, arthritis, asthma, etc being solely the fault of lifestyle. Age related decline is real and there is no universal prevention for that.
My point is that even dense cities (like inner London, for example) are losing their walkable commercial areas because their local councils are preferentially allocating scarce car parking spaces for residents (who vote) versus visitors (who don't), and said residents prefer to drive to suburban supermarkets with abundant free parking, depriving the local businesses of custom.
Perhaps dense walkable cities can only be sustainable if they impose restrictions on car _ownership_, not just car _usage_?
Thanks for this Noah. I am firmly on the left and progressive in nearly all ways, but this is one of those issues that has such a day to day impact on our lives, and makes our two party system drives me crazy. Most progressives agree that there is massive need for third spaces, public transit, etc., but we have this unfortunate anti-intellectual and common sense social justice wing that has taken hard stances viewing the homeless as justified and all cops as bastards (each mostly through a race lens).
The inevitable optics of white cops publicly involuntarily detaining a black man would never fly here (or at least not in blue spaces). And it’s destroying our cities in the process. I’m a fairly large guy and I get nervous walking around with them out and about. I can only imagine how women, child, etc. feel
I like your suggestion about getting police out of cars and having them walk around more. It's part of a broader review of police practices that all municipal governments should be having.
We spend a lot of money on our police. A LOT. But the results we get are not that great. Unfortunately, any time you question the way they do conduct their business, there's usually an army of folks demanding to know who you are to second guess the police. It's a handy way to avoid anyone evaluating your performance.
But it's hard not to notice the ineffective use of our resources. A great example is when I drive by a traffic stop in progress, and I see 3 police cars lined up behind one car pulled over. How many officers are standing around that one person for an hour, which means they're NOT policing anywhere else?
In my part of town there are four or five locations where I know I can reliably find a police car idling in the middle of the day. They're not in high crime areas - one of them is under some nice shade next to a power substation in the middle of an otherwise empty lot. Something tells me it isn't an exercise in excellent crime prevention to park in that spot... And don't get me started on the immense waste that is constantly on display when you see small town police departments decked out in high tech SWAT gear and armored vehicles...
But nobody on any city council or in any mayor's office puts any energy into critically examining how effective our police forces are. Nor do they ask any questions about the obvious waste and inefficiency. Instead, the entire discussion is about how to spend more money. What they ought to be asking is why we don't get better results for the large amount of money we already spend. We deserve better.
One problem with this is that if the city in question is not already dense and walkable, having police patrol on foot could be WILDLY inefficient. I can’t imagine widespread foot patrols in LA unless they are concentrated in malls and sports arenas.
To pick a small nit, those two armed policemen appear to belong to the Police Nationale, not the Gendarmerie Nationale. The former cover large towns and cities, the latter cover smaller towns and rural areas. (If you look carefully at the blurry shoulder patches, you can see the distinctive tricolor logo of the PN, rather than the three fleur de lis logo of the GN.)
Interesting contrast in the logos, given that historically the Tricouleur was the symbol of republican France while the three fleur-de-lis was the symbol of royal France!
It’s an interesting one - the Gendarmerie are a lot older than the Police Nationale, and date back directly to the French Revolution. Their predecessors, the maréchaussée, were even older, going back to the Middle Ages
The argument against walkable cities due to public disorder is such a chicken and egg straw man - walkable cities have better public order because there are more people walking around deterring a lot of that activity
When the people walking around are bought in to a moral system where disordered people are just as valid as anyone else, and have the same rights to express their whole natural selves in the commons, and the real crime is would be to stigmatize them in any way… does that deterrence actually work?
I think you need a reactionary streak among the crowd to a degree that is just not going to happen among the personalities that choose to live in American cities.
Ironic that Urbanism--or more specifically New Urbanism--which is trying to create dense, EU-style cities centred on mass-transit hubs is a predominantly Liberal thing in the US. Whereas Conservatives still prefer urban sprawl.
Agree. Which is why most conservatives including Trump supporting Asian immigrants in places like NYC do NOT want NYC to become anything more like Tokyo including in the policing practices of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police when push comes to shove. A lot of Asian immigrants in places like Eastern Queens want to get away from the likes of Tokyo and Seoul not have America turn into them.
Don't know but I have heard anecdotally from people more familiar with right wing Asian immigrants that they came to have come to the US to get away from Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, etc. Not sure why you would move to any part of NYC or SF give the wide range of other places to live in in the US but apparently this is true
But get away from what? That sounds like bullshit to be honest. Those cities are all small c conservative for the most part within larger conservative countries (just not in the loony conservativism of the US)
Noah, I have this sneaking suspicion that in the case of a city like SF, a lot of the "progressives" that end up voting or supporting these policies that enable public disorder are also transient tech workers living their few years in the city before moving to the burbs. Those people never actually feel the impact of their terrible ideological policies because they don't stick around, and when they are there, they insulate themselves from it. Eventually they move to Redwood City and are replaced by the next batch of woke dopes fresh from undergrad. Rinse and repeat!
This is an opportunity to showcase at least a few anti-Woke US cities, where Conservative policies have produced dense, walkable, low-crime environments with great public transit, good schools and generally high resident QOL.
And then maybe do the same with a few Blue cities. To highlight/reiterate what works, and what doesn't
Dems need to treat public safety as a basic human right. No one should have to be in fear of getting attacked.
Lots of fallacious partisan finger-pointing here. Especially considering that Red state murder rates are 33% higher than that of Blue States; and 20% higher when Red state Dem-run cities are removed from those averages https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-21st-century-red-state-murder-crisis This is probably because Blue states spend significant more per capita on policing than Red states: https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/do-red-or-blue-states-spend-more-on-policing
But politically Dems are getting beaten up on the issue, that's my point. They are losing winnable voters who are uncomfortable with disorder. Facts aren't breaking through - they need to improve the rhetoric.
FOX News and their smaller imitators are largely responsible for this, pumping out an endless stream of mis-/dis-information; or at best half-truths. Which (wrongly) portrays Dems as soft on crime, GOP tough on crime.
Last month's Ipsos poll found that 85% of conservatives get all/some/most of their news from FOX News...and that 80% of these implicitly believe the GOP "alternative facts" drivel about, crime, unemployment, forced pediatric sex-changes, eaten pets, etc. regularly pushed by GOP elites/influencers.
Liberal media mostly tells the truth--or at least adheres to journalistic practices, like using multiple verifiable sources. While RW media largely just makes stuff up. How can our democracy survive if 40% of Americans are living in a media-created fantasy land divorced from reality?
It's not just disinformation. As this post notes, while America's "liberal" cities aren't super dangerous (though they are much more dangerous than Europe and Japan's equivalents), they are quite disorderly. Like I live in Seattle-- I certainly roll my eyes hard at all of the pearl clutching white people who declare that downtown is a Mad Max-ian nightmare where everyone is getting stabbed. But I walk a quarter mile or so to a coffee shop for mid-morning coffee every day. I pass at least 3 and often more like 10 people with psychosis every day. I've never seen or been subject to violence, but at least once a week one of them will be yelling aggressively. A couple of months ago, I saw someone overdose a half block ahead of me on the sidewalk. I've walked by people motionless on the sidewalk who I'm not certain weren't dead.
It's not wrong for people to want to clean up the downtown area. The way to do that is to get these people help, whether they claim to want it or not. That likely means a lot more involuntary commitment. That's expensive, but it's probably the least bad alternative. And while I'm wary of handing over lots of power to SPD, which notably had a number of its officers participate in January 6, a reformed police department probably is an important part of any real fix.
Hit the sweet spot. This phenomenon is downstream of inadequate policing *and* substandard housing, welfare and other social services.
Yeah when I lived in SF Fox News really ruined my impression of it. They hired thousands of crisis actors to camp in the streets, shoot heroin, and commit petty crime. They rigged the local elections to elect school board members that dumbed down the public schools too. Really a very effective psy op they were running.
Just stay out of the Tenderloin; or keep to the suburbs. There's rough parts of *every* city. And regarding public schools, SFUSD is better than average https://sfparents.org/sfkidscantwait/#:~:text=The%20Good%20News&text=These%20are%20solid%20numbers%20for,reading%20and%2054th%20in%20math. Despite what FOX News tells you.
To an extent I agree. But a really bad response politically is to say "no you are wrong - everything is fine."
You need to say you agree safety is important, and tell people what you are doing about it. (Or, try to get people more interested in other issues - but that's hard)
I always like how FOX News and the NY Post rails about sex trafficking and street prostitution while there sister publications in Australia carry ads for brothels.
Your conviction is your moral superiority makes you a bad & ignorant person.
This is quintessential liberal bullshit - I love it.
Everyone who disagrees with you is divorced from reality? What deranged bubble do you live it?
They need to improve conditions on the ground.
Comparative murder rates may not cause the chaotic and dangerous public spaces that Noah refers to. He also mentions lots of other crimes like fare jumping, auto theft and so on are erratic and random, that's where fear comes from.
Blue state spending on cops is a direct result of entrenched police unions in blue cities and not a measure of safety.
You mean *superior* Blue state funding *and* staffing. That has produced pronounced decreases in Blue state crime. Well, perhaps there are *other* reasons why Red state crime rates are 33% higher.
Your conclusions comparing public safety to murder is itself fallacious. Almost all murder victims know their perps - family or friends/acquaintances. Public safety issues may involve murder at the margins, but mostly it's about the matters Smith describes - disorder and menace in public space.
So does that mean that "gang members killed by enemy gang" isn't actually a significant contributor to total murder rates?
Mr. Laver’s point is exactly the opposite of how you somehow interpreted it. He described the perps as “friends and acquaintances”; that is his polite way of saying that the hoods and gang members who commit the murders know their victims.
I wouldn't expect military personnel to personally know any of the enemy soldiers they were killing, so why would criminal gang members personally know any of the members of other hostile gangs?
They know each other, or at least know who each other is, because they live in the same neighborhoods. They frequently shoot each other over an incident of perceived “disrespect”. Usually a trivial thing by any reasonable measure, but, in the climate that exists in these places, sufficient reason to kill someone. Other times, it’s over economics — encroaching on drug-dealing territory.
How much are higher Red state murder rates down to more guns, as well as to the fact that the Red states are mainly made up of the Midwest (which bore the brunt of post-1970 deindustrialization) plus the South (which has the highest African-American population)?
Here are the per capita murder rates that 90% of residents of big cities face:
Chicago: basically 0
Philadelphia: basically 0
Phoenix: basically 0
Dallas: basically 0
San Antonio: basically 0
Houston: basically 0
NYC, LA, SD: basically 0
Why is is so hard to understand that the murder rate has basically 0 to do with the general public perception of crime and its political effects?
You are exactly correct. Yet, virtually every article about crime in the legacy media focuses on murder. This is either a) incompetence, b) an intentional effort to minimize the importance of property crimes and disorder, in an attempt to to deflect blame from the allegedly “marginalized groups” who commit those crimes, or c) both.
The idea is that murder is generally pretty accurately reported, and is correlated with other violent crime, and at least to some extent, other crime in general.
My partner's fear of moving back to Philly is abstractly about the ~300x increase in the chance of actually getting murdered, but more concretely about not wanting to get occasionally assaulted and robbed, and regularly harassed and stalked, and constantly being in situations that might escalate into something more dangerous.
It's at least driven in part by her experience in Philly being growing up car free in a bad part of town. There are obviously nicer parts of Philly. However, just the idea of a bad part of town needing to be avoided or driven through without stopping, is just ludicrous and unacceptable from a global perspective.
We live in a bad part of town in Tokyo, and it's the bad part of town because unlocked bikes might be stolen and wallets might be returned without the cash that was in them, not because people walk around with defensive mindset and small women are afraid of walking around alone.
Unfortunately fear of getting attacked has low correlation with the chances of getting attacked (if it bleeds, it leads). Yes, if I wander into a tough run-down neighborhood, I am at a higher risk. But that isn't where most of the fearful folks live.
There's a way that stories really matter in city life -- they don't call them 'urban legends' for nothing. The horrible murder story of tossing a match on a sleeping woman will be repeated as "it's not even safe to fall asleep," you can't count on the kindness of strangers. The stories are about horrors, not kindnesses. I went into Manhattan (from the suburbs) on Saturday by car (not train, because weekend schedules are so limited) and had dinner with a friend who said he was thinking of moving back from London but not after seeing so much vomit (midday!) on the subway. Bottom line -- when the stories are all moving in the same direction of broken social fabric (as they have been in SF for over a decade now) an authority presence is needed that actively shows a mending of the social fabric (one hesitates to say in a Norman Rockwell kind of way). Also take care of your thumb!
This is a good post. I do think the "Make US cops the best trained in the world! USA! USA!" is the way to square the circle with the right wing people. And "Make US cops more like Norwegian cops" is the way to do it with Left people.
Yes! And require all prospective firearm puchasers to undergo a 300-hour State Police-approved firearms handling course as a prerequisite to ownership. And then passing a licensing exam, and purchasing liability insurance. Much like the requirements to own and operate a motor vehicle.
We need to honor our 2nd Amendment constitutional right to bear arms, by making *well-regulated* not just a bunch of empty words.
Again, you miss the point, Smith's essay is about public order, not about permissive firearm access.
You believe violence, violent crime and school shootings committed with firearms have nothing to do with public order?
Off topic; Noah's essay addressed urban public "street" disorder.
Yes, getting rid of police unions is a huge piece of the puzzle – their entire purpose is making police unaccountable, which dramatically reduces trust and makes policing a bitter partisan issue instead of something we can all agree on (safety is good!).
<Both these unions, as well as teachers, and whose members salaries are paid with taxpayer money, but whose pay and job rules are made by politicians in bed with the unions.>
As opposed to billionaire political donors, who get no favors from the politicians they bankroll and donate out of the kindness of their heart! Abolishing public-sector unions would make a lot more sense if we got private money out of politics first, though I'd argue it's still unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
First, virtually all of the problems you mentioned are not unique to public-sector unions: they apply to various organizations in various situations, including regulatory capture and the infamous "iron triangle" of military procurement. The fact that conservatives tend to ignore the latter and obsess over government unions is because they happen to donate to Democrats, but instead of trying to recalibrate their political platform to appeal to middle-of-the-road government employees (as Noah is doing in his article), the Right's preferred tactic is to eliminate the opposition altogether.
Second, did you copy and paste this from ChatGPT? Normally, I wouldn't raise the issue because I'm personally thrilled by the productivity-enhancing potential of AI for writers, but that last paragraph doesn't grammatically fit with the rest of the post.
Another fantastic piece. Promoting on Bluesky and elsewhere.
I have been to England, Japan and France this year with family. It doesn't feel anything like American cities, even wealthy enclaves like Santa Barbara. It feels safe, clean and vibrant. Compared to American cities there is a MUCH lower level of general public disorder, and it's not because Europe and Japan don't have racism or poverty. It is a public policy and culture choice.
Progressives need to take a careful read of this piece and internalize it. If we want urbanism, transit, social welfare, universal healthcare, and lower inequality rich like other social democracies, we must excise failed left anarchist thinking.
Yup! My partner grew up in Philly and never learned to drive, and after learning what generally being safe felt like after moving to Tokyo, she is terrified of the thought of moving back to the US.
That is likely an overreaction, however, fear isn't always rational. And for the typical American, the experience of subjective safety they are unwilling to let go of isn't Tokyo, it's car centric suburbia.
I think the professionalism point here is underrated as a matter of politics. One of the reasons that a lot of American liberals--including many city dwellers, and occasionally myself--turned against the police isn't because of Marxist philosophy or whatever, but because our urban police forces suffer from a profound lack of discipline that makes the people they interact with on a regular basis resent and dislike them.
I live in NYC, and here the most spectacular version of that was clearly the Eric Garner case, which was a bigger deal than I think people outside the city realize. Not so much the actual incident, which was of course very bad bad, but the fact that the full police force backed the officer that *everyone agreed did not follow department rules* and demanded that he face no sanction. The reason a good many people people don't want the police to arrest the guy smoking on the subway platform is because it has been conclusively established that the police themselves will not act with discipline when engaging in enforcement and will also face no sanction for their rule breaking conduct.
And this doesn't just happen with the big, spectacular incidents. The "police simply believe themselves to be above the law" vibe is reinforced daily by the way that they do a million little things in the city right down to the fact that they park their cars on the sidewalks around police stations despite the fact that (1) everyone agrees its against the rules and (2) people complain about it all the time. Its just very difficult to build a society that prioritizes rule following when the police themselves thumb their noses at the very notion of following the rules.
I often think of the way the police act in contrast to the high level of discipline maintained by the military, where people seem to understand better that if you're going to give people guns and let them walk around carrying out state sanctioned violence you need to demand a high degree of discipline. No one parks wherever they want on a military base. No one turns their back on the President at West Point as the NYPD did to one of our mayors. In fact, the military runs its own prisons just for soldiers that break the rules and I think most people get that we're more likely to meet aliens next week than for the NYPD to build their own Leavenworth for bad officers.
Anyway, residents of NYC didn't wake up one day and decide that we didn't like cops, we have been living for decades with cops who very clearly don't like us and don't think they should be subject to any restraint or accountability. At some point that frays the public trust to the point where it's simply broken and we have to understand that this is a two way street if that trust is ever going to be restored.
In Louisville several years ago, the “elite” crime group was throwing cold drinks (e.g. Diet Cooke with ice) at pedestrians and filming it to post on social media. Those particular officers were eventually disciplined, but the attitude of impunity still exists within the city police force. It’s hard to know where to start, but increasing police training from 90 day to 1 year at least is a place to start. Requiring a two-year criminal justice degree wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
This is a big difference between the NYPD and the Tokyo/London Metropolitan Police among others which in both Japan and the UK where they don't have an FBI or Secret Service type organization both services perform these roles in addition to there municipal policing responsibilities. The thing Noah doesn't get is the NYPD and it's supporters in the outer boroughs have no desire to re-make the NYPD into a version of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police or the London Metropolitan Police(Scotland Yards)
Answer this for me. How many years did you serve in the military?
Can I second this and third it and ....... Professionalism really matters and is sadly lacking in almost every encounter I have had with police in my long life.
In general huge agree here. I’m a bit perplexed by the antipathy for surveillance technology.
It’s as if us liberals and progressives are rooting for people to be able to get away with something if you’re not dumb enough to get caught. It’s
Private spaces are broadly surveilled but instead of limiting what you can do with camera footage they attack the cameras in public . Despite the fact that these are definitionally not private.
I think a slightly (but not much) more charitable take is that most people want fairly draconian laws on the books so they can be applied to "other people" (undesirables, homeless, drug dealers, small time criminals, etc) but expect their (probably white, middle class) privilege to exempt them from them or get off with just a warning at worst.
They don't want 65mph enforced because I'm just going 70 on my way to work every morning and I'm a good citizen but those kids driving at night are a different story!
The increasing existence of automated surveillance and enforcement is causing a lot of angst because that soft separation of enforcement is no longer gone.
I think this is true for traffic and very little else.
Like loads of habitual speeders would be shocked if their friend spoke of casually shoplifting or turnstile jumping on their vacation. On the roads we’ve just decided laws, especially speeding are for suckers.
I think this is true because of who usually breaks those laws. And it’s not just speeding. Paying under the table is another example not to mention all the lying that goes on in sales and other forms of white collar crimes.
This is true, IME. People speed all the time like it’s nothing. But nobody I know - middle class AND working class - approves of shoplifting or gate jumping. Bluntly, people don’t want to hang around others who think stealing is tee-hee funny.
Yoiu’re right, but you need to include red lights with the speeders. Another big issue and one where traffic cameras work.
I live in Europe (Paris specifically) and have lived in the U.S. in the past. I think a big part of this is the guns, but in a sort of roundabout way. One reason why we can have so many police per capita in Europe is because they show relative restraint. The French police are not perfect by any means but are in my experience more professional and courteous, and less intrusive, than in the U.S. This is even the case in the UK where, unlike France, most police don’t carry firearms.
Part of it is I think the training thing, which you identified. But a big part is not being surrounded by people who have, or might have, guns. It makes police work far less dangerous. I think it also feeds in with the training by (1) making it a more attractive career options and (2) allowing for specialised forces like the Gendarmerie, who are actually military and not civilian police.
Police work is not actually THAT dangerous. 15 fatal injuries per 100,000 workers. About the same as taxi drivers. And much safer than garbage men who have 32 fatal injuries per 100,000 workers.
But (some) police in America definitely THINK they have a uniquely dangerous job and adopt a siege mentality as a result.
(And a big chunk of those are police crashing their cars). The odds of a police officer actually being killed by a criminal in the line of duty are quite low.
Absolutely.
this is completely true, and we see this in a recent example of NYPD chasing down a turnstyle jumper literally with guns blazing and four people were shot. Police in the US of course have to be heavily armed because *any American* has the constitutional right to be heavily armed themselves. So until we have a constitutional convention where we can amend the 2nd amendment, US policing is going to be a much more lethal affair than what we have in Europe.
I think a big problem with more policing is that the culture of policing in America is fundamentally broken. I'm less familiar with Europe's policing culture, but I imagine it's far less bad there.
If you read the DoJ's report on Ferguson's police department in the wake of the Mike Brown killing, for instance, you see a department crawling with open and casual racism. And it's not confined to red states and cities either-- the NYPD Union openly endorsed Donald Trump, and a number of Seattle Police Department officers stormed the Capitol on January 6. These aren't really people that the communities they police (which are largely non-white) trust, with good reason, and progressives aren't wrong to be exceptionally wary of putting public safety into their hands.
But I think that just adds another prong-- if we go down the route of more policing and involuntary commitment (and this post makes a compelling case that we should!), it needs to be coupled with an equally aggressive push to professionalize police departments and aggressively remove unsavory officers from the departments.
Isn't another problem that policing in many parts of America is extremely fragmented organizationally, which meant that several tiny forces (like Ferguson's IIRC) were reliant on traffic ticket revenue to make ends meet?
Probably. And the way that’s inevitably enforced is… against poor non-white people. But all of those are part and parcel of the same problem— that many of our police departments have cultures of racism and corruption that make them unfit to police communities.
So then you really can’t have one without the other— to get a police force that establishes order, you need a police force that communities have a good deal of confidence is there to protect and serve people rather than to collect revenue or enforce de facto racial segregation.
It’s completely rational for people to choose driving instead of walking or transit in many of these cities (sadly). The bar shouldn’t be risk of death or physical violence; I expect people to do what is convenient and pleasant, and unfortunately that is often being isolated in the safety of one’s own car. The stats on crime do not capture the common experience which often includes being accosted, trash, or witnessing drug use, things which people living in these cities are all too familiar with in public spaces including on transit. This post is a great summary and I hope these ideas become more common among advocates of urbanism. A necessary condition for viable public goods is they need to work for the general public, and physical safety is a bare minimum. Without this, it’s reasonable to expect low public support (again, sadly).
In the case of the San Francisco Bay Area--where I've been a driving/mass-transit-using/bicycling resident for 30 years--mass transit by bus or subway (BART) is problematic at best; but often less costly than driving into the city centers when parking is factored in. BART & MUNI have gotten increasingly more crowded--not less--during this period (partly due to insufficient capitalization); which significantly detracts from their desirability when driving is an option. The exception to this are the luxurious commuter buses to/from the Financial District from the suburbs, which are exceptionally nice indeed.
BART and MUNI are much less crowded today than 2019. I have been riding both systems continuously through that time frame. I don’t dismiss the issues Noah raises here but as a 30+ year resident of San Francisco, I feel like the quality of life is better than it was 5 years ago (less crowded, slightly less expensive.) But we still need way more housing! I am outer-borough but not one of the outer-borough NIMBY’s Noah references (though my neighborhood has its share of them!)
Increases in population density would have to be matched by corresponding increases in efficiency/capacity of BART & MUNI. Like perhaps it's time for a 2nd transbay tube.
My frame of reference was commuting to SF Japantown and later Potrero Hill, from Berkeley and then later from Marin. The Pandemic really cut down on physical congestion on the 101 corridor...but now it's closer to pre-Pandemic levels; even as mass transit options from/inside Marin have slightly diminished.
I, along with my family, are examples of those so called "middle class that has retreated to their car centric suburbs" after living in NYC, in three different boroughs, for over 20 years. We live in a distant exurb though I make frequent trips back for various reasons. While there are many reasons we would benefit by continuing to live in a dense urban environment, there's a lot more reasons why we benefit by not living there. Every paragraph of this story has me bursting with ideas and observations such that it's too overwhelming for me to try to respond. So much about policing, after having many interactions with NYC's "finest", glued to their cellphones all day and who can barely be bothered to be of actual help when you have an actual policing problem. So much about "walking", where it's assumed that everyone is physically able to just walk multiple miles per day lugging around groceries and bags that you can never take your eyes off of lest they will vanish instantly.
Overall I just have this question, if the "middle class and the wealthy can retreat to their car-centric suburbs." we can with some certainty say that if the poorer classes could also retreat to car-centric suburbs, they would too. In fact I think the vast majority of people living in cities, if you gave them the ability to have a house and a car in a low density town and could work out whatever details of their continued economic survival for that, they'd do it. Not having to lug 30 pounds of groceries or whatever down multiple blocks, up and down staircases and trains becomes a lot more valuable as one gets older and "walking multiple miles per day" is not the effortless breeze it was when they were in their 20s. Do we just ignore that and all continue to pretend that dense urban living is the ideal for everyone?
Isn't that a great point: that even if American cities could fix their public order problem it is likely that suburban car culture would continue to dominate, supported by a keystone called "the weekly grocery shop"?
I really dont know. I've lived out of the city for about eight years now and am still trying to understand what it means to be in "car culture", why people live here, why so many are like "the CITY? what?!" and how to reconcile that with all the public transportation / dense living advocates we have across the intellectual center/left. Like am I a bad person, or not living up to my potential because I'm too lazy to deal with walking and public transit? How would the people here with handicapped permits in the cars who can barely walk 30 feet fare in Manhattan walking up and down subway steps all day?
The biggest difference between Manhattanites and tourists is the tourists are much larger. In terms of relatives and friends relatives everyone who is even mildly overweight ends up disabled. In some cases joint replacement can help but in some cases not. The reality is a lot of those people who can’t walk wouldn’t be disabled if they hadn’t been so overweight and gotten more exercise.
You'd need to have some pretty elaborate statistical studies to show that the primary reason urban folks have lower obesity / greater physical walking capability is because the nature of city living itself grants them a healthy enough lifestyle for that to be the case. On it's face, it's a take that seems to imply that obesity and health issues that affect walking are mostly preventable through lifestyle and are therefore the fault of the person; folks with multiple sclerosis or ALS, or even less severe issues like the chronic congenital tendonitis I have in my arches, might take issue with that.
In the absence of such statistical studies, you really have no knowledge what proportion of city people are less obese / more able bodied *because* of the urban lifestyle itself, or if it's because the urban lifestyle is *self-selecting* for younger, healthier people who are able and willing to tolerate the increased physical demands of the lifestyle. Anecdotally it seems pretty clear that it's the latter if you look at the general pattern of young professionals regularly leaving cities in droves as they age into their 40s and 50s, like NY residents moving to Westchester, Hudson Valley, Jersey and Long Island. Poorer residents without the ability to move have a more bleak calculus here but tend to live in outer regions of cities anyway where they tend to use more cars or just reduce travel/ commuting greatly. All a lot of handwaving but importantly I think it's particularly pernicious to blame people with walking difficulties due to obesity or disability to blame them for their disabilities across the board.
I doesn’t sound like your open to being convinced otherwise so providing those studies would have no effect on your position, right?
ALS is a very rare disease 2:100,000 it’s not why you’re seeing so many disabled.
Absolutely, id love to see how they can show causality for lower obesity in urban environments and I'd never include obesity in this argument again.
They sure aren't going to show immune or congenital issues nor can they say much about hip replacements, arthritis, asthma, etc being solely the fault of lifestyle. Age related decline is real and there is no universal prevention for that.
My point is that even dense cities (like inner London, for example) are losing their walkable commercial areas because their local councils are preferentially allocating scarce car parking spaces for residents (who vote) versus visitors (who don't), and said residents prefer to drive to suburban supermarkets with abundant free parking, depriving the local businesses of custom.
Perhaps dense walkable cities can only be sustainable if they impose restrictions on car _ownership_, not just car _usage_?
Thanks for this Noah. I am firmly on the left and progressive in nearly all ways, but this is one of those issues that has such a day to day impact on our lives, and makes our two party system drives me crazy. Most progressives agree that there is massive need for third spaces, public transit, etc., but we have this unfortunate anti-intellectual and common sense social justice wing that has taken hard stances viewing the homeless as justified and all cops as bastards (each mostly through a race lens).
The inevitable optics of white cops publicly involuntarily detaining a black man would never fly here (or at least not in blue spaces). And it’s destroying our cities in the process. I’m a fairly large guy and I get nervous walking around with them out and about. I can only imagine how women, child, etc. feel
I like your suggestion about getting police out of cars and having them walk around more. It's part of a broader review of police practices that all municipal governments should be having.
We spend a lot of money on our police. A LOT. But the results we get are not that great. Unfortunately, any time you question the way they do conduct their business, there's usually an army of folks demanding to know who you are to second guess the police. It's a handy way to avoid anyone evaluating your performance.
But it's hard not to notice the ineffective use of our resources. A great example is when I drive by a traffic stop in progress, and I see 3 police cars lined up behind one car pulled over. How many officers are standing around that one person for an hour, which means they're NOT policing anywhere else?
In my part of town there are four or five locations where I know I can reliably find a police car idling in the middle of the day. They're not in high crime areas - one of them is under some nice shade next to a power substation in the middle of an otherwise empty lot. Something tells me it isn't an exercise in excellent crime prevention to park in that spot... And don't get me started on the immense waste that is constantly on display when you see small town police departments decked out in high tech SWAT gear and armored vehicles...
But nobody on any city council or in any mayor's office puts any energy into critically examining how effective our police forces are. Nor do they ask any questions about the obvious waste and inefficiency. Instead, the entire discussion is about how to spend more money. What they ought to be asking is why we don't get better results for the large amount of money we already spend. We deserve better.
One problem with this is that if the city in question is not already dense and walkable, having police patrol on foot could be WILDLY inefficient. I can’t imagine widespread foot patrols in LA unless they are concentrated in malls and sports arenas.
To pick a small nit, those two armed policemen appear to belong to the Police Nationale, not the Gendarmerie Nationale. The former cover large towns and cities, the latter cover smaller towns and rural areas. (If you look carefully at the blurry shoulder patches, you can see the distinctive tricolor logo of the PN, rather than the three fleur de lis logo of the GN.)
I had the same thought - if you see the Gendarmerie out and about and you’re not in the countryside it’s usually a sign that something is up
Interesting contrast in the logos, given that historically the Tricouleur was the symbol of republican France while the three fleur-de-lis was the symbol of royal France!
It’s an interesting one - the Gendarmerie are a lot older than the Police Nationale, and date back directly to the French Revolution. Their predecessors, the maréchaussée, were even older, going back to the Middle Ages
The argument against walkable cities due to public disorder is such a chicken and egg straw man - walkable cities have better public order because there are more people walking around deterring a lot of that activity
When the people walking around are bought in to a moral system where disordered people are just as valid as anyone else, and have the same rights to express their whole natural selves in the commons, and the real crime is would be to stigmatize them in any way… does that deterrence actually work?
I think you need a reactionary streak among the crowd to a degree that is just not going to happen among the personalities that choose to live in American cities.
Ironic that Urbanism--or more specifically New Urbanism--which is trying to create dense, EU-style cities centred on mass-transit hubs is a predominantly Liberal thing in the US. Whereas Conservatives still prefer urban sprawl.
Everything is culture wars there. Pick a side or die... apparently.
Agree. Which is why most conservatives including Trump supporting Asian immigrants in places like NYC do NOT want NYC to become anything more like Tokyo including in the policing practices of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police when push comes to shove. A lot of Asian immigrants in places like Eastern Queens want to get away from the likes of Tokyo and Seoul not have America turn into them.
Why?
Don't know but I have heard anecdotally from people more familiar with right wing Asian immigrants that they came to have come to the US to get away from Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, etc. Not sure why you would move to any part of NYC or SF give the wide range of other places to live in in the US but apparently this is true
But get away from what? That sounds like bullshit to be honest. Those cities are all small c conservative for the most part within larger conservative countries (just not in the loony conservativism of the US)
Noah, I have this sneaking suspicion that in the case of a city like SF, a lot of the "progressives" that end up voting or supporting these policies that enable public disorder are also transient tech workers living their few years in the city before moving to the burbs. Those people never actually feel the impact of their terrible ideological policies because they don't stick around, and when they are there, they insulate themselves from it. Eventually they move to Redwood City and are replaced by the next batch of woke dopes fresh from undergrad. Rinse and repeat!
Unfortunately I think most of them are long term residents who aren't in tech...
This is an opportunity to showcase at least a few anti-Woke US cities, where Conservative policies have produced dense, walkable, low-crime environments with great public transit, good schools and generally high resident QOL.
And then maybe do the same with a few Blue cities. To highlight/reiterate what works, and what doesn't
The big problem with that is that American conservatives still strongly prefer car-centric sprawl over urbanism of any kind.
There used to be conservatives who loved walkable, close-knit communities (notably Walt Disney).
What happened to them?
I suspect they faded away once it was no longer legal for US residential communities to have explicit racist restrictions on who could live there.