> The [Scottish programme] is run by the police force, with support from the Scottish government ... [The American founder], a purist on the public health model of violence, says it is “horrible” for police to administer it, since police are often part of the problem.
As far from perfect as police in the UK are, I get the impression that the Brits have a very different relationship from the police than most Americans do.
What do you think "most Americans" relationship with the police is? Speaking for myself, I don't really have one, but all my encounters with the police have been professional and respectful.
Even with family as law enforcement, I've never trusted police. As a vet I'm disgusted by their lack of training and quickness to shoot first and ask questions later. Last I checked the average is 32 dogs shot by US cops a day. I don't even need to delve into the refusal to wear body cams, race issues, etc. etc. American police have not given Americans any reason to assume they are ever on the same side.
Eighteen year old infantrymen, who have an infinitely greater chance of danger, have more resolve and professionalism than American cops. I'd trust that 18 year old ground pounder over a cop any day over any thing.
I get the idea that people who join the police in the US do it for the authority, where police in the UK are well aware that 95% of the authority they have is "by consent" of those they have authority over.
The vast, vast majority of police officer aren't shooting blacks under super fishy circumstances but it still happens.
You tell me how many dogs, blacks, children, wtf-ever. is required before it's OK to 1) Earnestly hold police and the system accountable and 2) To have a healthy wariness, if not outright distrust, of cops and LEOs in general.
Seems to me like we've passed those thresholds and then-some a while ago.
There are some really great programmes in the UK that follow police and their interactions with the public. For someone who lives in the US, this can be eye opening compared to our process.
A few shows I’d recommend are:
999 What’s Your Emergency
24 Hours in Police Custody
The Met
I fully acknowledge the risk that these shows are positively edited to present police in the best light, but I get a sense the British police followed in these programmes have a much heavier focus on deescalation in their training than many of the police forces in the US.
I'm not quite sure I fully buy into it. Crime has been steadily declining all over the Western world since the '90s, with a few notable exceptions like Baltimore post-BLM, and so the entire VRU concept may be specious. New York has seen its murder rate plunge 75% since its height in 1990 despite not employing this technique, which is a larger drop than Glasgow experienced. Perhaps doing nothing would have been just as effective? Or perhaps this:
>This meant ramping up traditional penal measures – increased stop-and-search and stricter sentencing for knife possession – alongside preventive measures in line with the public health approach.
Resulted in all of the most recalcitrant offenders being put behind bars right at the onset of the program, leaving behind only those people more amenable to non-violence.
Or put another way, when the doctor mentions seeing constant repeated faces in her ER:
>Often, the same people would come back through the accident and emergency departments again and again, repeated victims and perpetrators of violent attacks.
Would simply locking up every one of those people have produced a similar or greater drop in violent crime compared to the VRU approach? Is the "violent interceptor" and community outreach and counselors and all that simply gilding a lily?
Also:
>The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become.
Well that or it's 1890s Germany. The Junkers loved to scar each other on the face with their dueling swords, as a way to prove their manhood and as a mark of inclusion in the aristocratic orders.
Some cultures get barbed wire tattoos around their arm, others a superficial slashing wound to the face. Tomato tomato ....that expression really doesn't work in text.
You mention New York had a drop in murder rate of 75% since 1990. Fine. The article mentions a 67% drop in the West Garfield neighbourhood of Chicago WITHIN THE FIRST YEAR. While the violent crime rate may be going down in general over time, it is hard to dismiss such a result out of hand.
Extrapolating from a single neighbourhood to an entire city is not valid reasoning.
Perhaps the neighbourhood was especially amenable to the program, perhaps the crime rate failed to stay low, perhaps some extra-judicial phenomena struck that particular area (say a new factory opening up that boosted the local economy significantly). Or coming at it from the other angle, who's to say New York hasn't had one or two of its neighbourhoods experience extreme marked drops in crime year-over-year too? The 75% over a decade figure is an aggregate for the entire city, and surely it's going to have happened faster in some areas and slower in others.
Only by comparing apples to apples, or in this case cities to cities, and not just for a single year but over many years can we reach valid conclusions. And in that case we find the VRU approach in Glasgow failed to out perform the null hypothesis.
When averaging results over a whole city, you've eliminated most sources of noise. But if you average neighborhood by neighborhood, then you have 20x smaller samples, and on top of that, 20x more chances to p-hack. So it's unsurprising to me that there exists some neighborhood where crime rates dropped significantly in one year.
I think GP's comment would be stronger if they had given absolute numbers instead of "67% decrease".
You should be quoting violent crime rates rather than murder rates. The articles premise is that violent crime is infectious but the infection does not spread if the patients all die.
David Simon (The Wire, Tremane) notes that murder stats are hard to game: there's a corpse, and the determination is made by the coroner, not chief of police or sherrif.
Othe crime stats can be easily and massively gamed.
The game just shifts to one of attribution rather than what the rates are. A lot of physical violence would have resulted in death not too long ago, but thanks to medical technology like washing wounds, getting looked at by a doctor, ambulances, surgery, drugs, etc. it's much harder to die. The lack of as many deaths is then attributed to whatever cause is expedient (democracy, authoritarian crackdown, etc.) when technology and access to it is probably the best explanatory factor.
You can control for that by looking at the rate of treatment for gunshot wounds and similar, which in some countries show a similar decrease as in the overall deadly violence.
The inverse can also be true:
the famous French paradox (The French drink more red wine, but are healthier than the rest of Europe) might be caused lazy French coroners.
Even if "patients" die, their friends and brothers don't, and the violence spreads.
When looking at trends, murder rate is a better metric than counting violent crimes, because statistics for other violence are quite easily impacted by changes in policies of how to record reports.
A dead person is a dead person, it's a very consistent metric. Of course, it is also a changing metric as emergency care improves - wounds that used to be deadly can now be treated. For instance, Swedish cities are reporting a vastly improved care for shooting wounds, as hospitals have gained experience and developed methods in treating them.
Also murder rates have a confounding factor in that they can go down simply due to better medical technology allowing more people to survive murder attempts.
In finance they use the terms Alpha and Beta which would be very applicable here. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Alpha is the improvement in excess of average market improvement. So if your investments are returning 8%, knowing that the S&P500 went up 7% over the same time period is critical information especially compared to the same 8% when the S&P500 went down 2% over that time period. I think beta is just that average of market returns.
Perhaps we could develop Alpha and Beta for violence as a better tool to understand what works and what doesn't.
Violent crime may be going down, but the human cost is real. There are almost 2.3 million people (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html) locked up in the United States alone. If the jails and prisons of the US were made a state, it would have a larger population than New Mexico!
The question can't just be, how do we reduce crime? We also have to think about how the system affects the people caught up in it.
Those massive numbers serve a social and political purpose: through disenfranchisement of convicted felons and large disparities in enforcement, prosecution, sentencing, and so on, the political power of minority voters is degraded.
Reducing the prison population means diminishing that political advantage, so there will be resistance from those who benefit from it.
Not to mention the massive amount of money you can make off of this disenfranchised population (by selling phone calls and commissary items, collecting bail fees, and even making the prisoners do work for you -- the 13th Amendment doesn't cover punishments for crimes!)
Just because prison policy can also serve a political purpose does not mean that its primary function is not what it is: to punish criminals, and to protect the public from them.
The discrimination narrative is very compelling on a large scale, but offers courts no alternatives when facing a specific instance of rape, assault or murder. What is the judge supposed to do, pat the criminal on the head and send him home?
That's the point. It has been correlated with same delay between tipping point of lead in air and tipping point of crime in each country, even though in each country the tipping points were at different time.
How is 1890s Germany an example of of a culture where everythig is right? They literally glorified violence and conquest which lead to colonialism, revolution and two world wars later on.
These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too.
There is just like 40 years difference. Aristocratic boys 20 years old in 1890 were men running things in 1914 (start of WWI). Kids born in 1890 were 40 years old in 1930 - the generation that started WWII.
Prussian militaristic culture had to do and influenced with both events.
----------------
1960 events like communist scare, cold war, civil rights fights and lynching are absolutely relevant to contemporary American culture and politics.
>How is 1890s Germany an example of of a culture where everythig is right?
I am only pointing out ritualistic marking of men as a sort of "manhood rite" is hardly unique to Glasgow, or the poor/rundown. It has historical precedent all over the world with all kinds of groups, from landed German aristocrats to ...well Violent Glaswegians (which I am surprised to learn is actually a tv trope!).
>These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too.
The Prussian junkers were really not too fond of the Nazis, and were behind several attempts to assassinate Hitler including the July 20 plot.
Quote: "The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become."
It does not says it is unique nor that is unique to poor/rundown. It says that it is bad sign. Landed German aristocrats, aka military of country with about to expand and with highly militarized culture is not an argument it is ok not that it is not bad sign.
The Prussian junkers were supporting monarchism, were anti-democratic, were largely racist. Some were against nazi, others joined being attracted to fight-eager culture and ideology of great Germany.
everyone was racist in 1890. A lot of people supported monarchy and opposed democracy - that was basically the right wing of the time. You really can't view people from 120 years ago through today's moral standards - you can only get a reasonable understanding of their position by viewing them relative to other groups from their era.
But I should be able to characterize their behavior for christ sake or talk about it. It is descriptor. Also, Germany 1890 was less racist then Germany 1933. The original argument was "it is ok because 1890 Germany boys did something similar". Given who those boys were, why they did the same and how country developed later, it is absolutely relevant.
Not everyone in 1890 Germany was racist. There were big political fights between anti-Jewish groups and those who wanted to keep Jewish emancipation and freedom alive. Seriously, in general, the worst person of period X is not typical representative of that period.
Also, parent said that: "The Prussian junkers were really not too fond of the Nazis, and were behind several attempts to assassinate Hitler including the July 20 plot."
Junkers description in around 1930, including racism, is absolutely relevant to that argument. In 1930, they were supporting monarchism, were anti-democratic, were largely racist even by contemporary standards. Manhood defined through eagerness to go to war, willingness to kill/hurt/be hurt and related manhood rites are not coincidental.
of course you can talk about it. But using it to characterise them as an immoral group is a fallacy because it was not immoral at the time. You can't hold up any group more than a few decades old to be moral if you take that stance.
The original argument was "male scarification is an old and well-recognised social phenomenon, that transcends social class". Not "those old German aristocrats sure were swell fellas".
1.) Some have seen it as immoral, some seen it as moral.
2.) My argument is that the ritual is related and caused by other cultural
factors. In case of Junkers, male scarification is absolutely related to their
military culture, overall violence, eagerness to go to war, authoritarianism
and so on and so forth. It is not independent factor.
Male scarification like that is what cultures about to turn violent do, like for example culture the parent has choosen as example.
1) is weasel wording. The vast majority of people now see racism as morally wrong. Back in 1890? I don't know, but I doubt it was as clear-cut as today. Morality is personal but the moral average/norm of an era is societal.
2) Sure. Traditional masculinity is closely tied to strength, violence, authoritarianism and such. I bet there's plenty of that in Glasgow street gangs, much as there is in many working class cultures.
3) More like, male scarification is what traditional masculine cultures do, and thus is likely associated with militarism, warfare, subjugation and other such pursuits.
As is murder, so how is that not weasel wording? The person quoted in the article doesn't make the point that "this is entirely new and unique", so to bring up that it's not is kind of a strawman in the first place.
If one wants to imply that something not being unique makes it okay, let them make the actual argument directly (and honestly instead of responding to something that nobody said), which I notice nobody even attempted.
> militarism, warfare, subjugation
Not to mention despair, nihilism, self-destruction, probably a whole metric ton of problems in bed, shitty music, and of course fried heroin.
I really hope that their work is effective and spreads. In Kazakhstan, we recently had a tragedy when our Olympic bronze medalist was killed when trying to stop thieves from stealing his car mirrors.
I'm curious, was this crime very unusual even for Almaty, that someone gets killed by strangers over something like a car mirror, or is it the fact that it was Ten that caused such attention?
I would love to see something similar applied to Mexico. The scale would have to be a lot bigger, and I guess it would be a lot more dangerous since we are literally facing wars for territory over here, taking soldiers out of the battlefield wouldn't look appealing for the drug cartels.
No need for anything complicated. Just end drug prohibition in USA, and Mexico will change drastically within a year. Human beings respond to incentives.
Makes me wonder what the existing organizations will do instead. Removing drug money will make them much less powerful, but they sure won't go down without a pivot.
When the US pot market became saturated through legalization the cartels just shifted to other drugs. If you legalize those they will shift to something else. With the money, power and guns they have I don't think expecting them to take legal jobs is realistic.
If you legalize drugs in Mexico though and they can start legitimate companies that might end the violence, but would be a huge blow to the rule of law.
Right. The cartels shifted heavily to ecstasy and methamphetamine. Some heroin too, though they can't beat the Chinese on price per dose compared to fentanyl and carfentanil. Sure many members of these cartels will be loathe to take mundane jobs but what other choice will they have? The profit margin of legal recreational drugs will be driven down somewhere to the area of alcohol and tobacco.
I disagree with your perceived loss of justice should drug use be legalized. Laws exist to protect people. Drug laws have only served to hurt nearly every person on earth when considering supply chain and tangential effects. By opening up the law to allow people to self medicate we are actually reducing harm at every step from the companies producing raw materials to the end users. To only consider a solution that outlaws the existence of an addict is inhumane, immoral, impossible, and outright delusional. To learn more about these topics and hopefully gain some empathy for addicts I suggest reading Gabor Matès "In the realm of hungry ghosts."
I'd be afraid that they'd turn to other illegal activities like kidnapping and bribery before entertaining a legal job.
If the cartels are allowed to operate legally, I'm worried about them having committed crimes for decades and being rewarded with first moved advantage into the new market. I think that would be a slap in the face to the rule of law. I'm not worried about the consumer as typically people should be able to self medicate and experiment as you suggest.
They can't if they've commited crimes and are in search and capture, like most of the heads are. If you're a mid scale weed producer that didn't use violence, sure, you have a headstart.
If you're a meth producer that killed (suspected) competitors and snitches, you're in for a lot of problems if you want to make your business legal.
"Oh, hi. I'd like to register a new LLC, these are my papers..."
I’m not sure you’ve run the numbers on this. In 2016 there was 11k gun homicides in the US, and about 64k people died from opioid overdoses alone. I can’t really see an insentive here for the US.
You can make an argument that many of those opioid overdoses are due to the illegality of these drugs. People switching from pills to heroin, when they can't get pills. Heroin, or even non-opioid drugs being cut with fentanyl. People relapsing for various reasons.
You could, but it wouldn’t carry much weight without any evidence, and it does seem pretty preposterous. I remember when the legalize marijuana campaigns started to gain traction, and they were often parodied by people saying we should also legalize heroin/meth/coke... They were strawmans, but not any less absurd today than they were then.
Didn't much of the current opioid problem originate with legal prescription drugs?
Anyway I don't think people calling for legalisation are suggesting heroin should be handed out to school kids at break time. You can legalise it and setup strict regulations around it as well as redirect money spent on enforcement to health and prevention.
But even in Mexico really violent places (50+/100k/yr) are pretty highly concentrated in known areas. Not all Mexico is violent, like not all Maryland is violent, like not all Honduras is violent (it happens in pockets) often fueled by the drugs trade.
It would be interesting (and a welcome outcome) to see if this insight and method of fighting crime is accepted and used by locales high relative violence rates.
It's true. The Yucatan peninsula is quite safe and also gorgeous. I only lost $250 when the police robbed me [non violently] the last time I was there.
I only spent two hours driving through Honduras years ago (the part between El Salvador and Nicaragua is very skinny) but the police tried that three times. They got it right at the border, but the other times we got away with just acting dumb for an hour until they got tired of us (easy to do since we spoke no Spanish.) I'd never go back there, life is finite and there are less dangerous, nicer countries to visit.
Not sure that's true, I haven't read about it (live in AUS). A lot of the campaigns by the opposition in the upcoming state elections are heavily focused on being "tough on crime".
Has Mexico thought about legalizing all drugs yet? Do you think this violence would exist if drugs were legal? It's hard for me to imagine such violence when people are just going to their boring jobs in the legal drug trade. Yeah the US might not like it, but who cares now with the current administration's hate for Mexico and Mexicans. Imagine what it could do for Mexico. Becoming the top economy in the western hemisphere would be trivial while eliminating violence, corruption, and crime.
There are many aspects to violence but I think it comes down to opportunity cost.
Until the police/military are strong and law abiding enough, cartels will continue to see violence as a risk worth taking even if their main business becomes legal.
> “The idea that’s wrong is that these people are ‘bad’ and we know what to do with them, which is punish them,” says Slutkin. “That’s fundamentally a misunderstanding of the human. Behaviour is formed by modelling and copying. When you’re in a health lens, you don’t blame. You try to understand, and you aim for solutions.”
Analyzing our current justice system from this perspective shows just how absurd it is. Sending people to jail for committing minor crimes is like sending people to a smallpox quarantine camp for coughing.
Not only that, but we intern coughing people with other people of various illnesses, and then we send those infected back to society based on time criteria, instead of health criteria.
This sounds great until we realize that the vast majority of crimes, even minor ones, have someone on the other side of them.
Simple assault, theft, fraud, reckless driving. Hey, someone came up and beat the crap out of you for the $20 in your wallet? Well sorry, we can't do anything but talk about how they might of come to this point. Someone who gets the flu, unless they're acting to intentionally infect others, has no "victim".
That doesn't mean justice should be based on retribution, but removal of the offender from society is something which society typically requires.
Violence is an output, a symptom of something else. Punishing a violent offender with violence (imprisonment etc) is just a form of reifying that behavior.
Alternative treatment of violence is not the same as saying there are "no consequences" - it's acknowledging that to actually "cure" violent behavior requires other methods.
Removing people from society has historically not stopped violence (see Gulags, mass prison, etc). What it does do is instill a sense of fear in the populace that the governing power can use as a form of control. A sense of fear brought on by, you guessed it, a threat of violence!
If “the most violent country in the developed world” has the some of the worlds strictest gun control laws, something tells me there’s not much of a connection between gun ownership and violent crime.
Mind elaborating on why it's not science? Also, if you can provide better science, that would really add to the discussion instead of an empty comment like that.
Note how it is a meta-analysis of 130 actual studies conducted by researchers at actual institutions aimed at establishing causal relationships and not a bunch of unrelated crime statistics pulled off of wikipedia and scattered sources and dropped into an excel spreadsheet.
That “point” is that a special interest group is justified in preventing scientific study into a area because he feels that his entirely non encompassing and non-scientific observation would invalidate any results he does not agree with. It is wrong on so many levels. That is why it is being downvoted.
The policy came about because a particular CDC head in the 1980s specifically said he intended to show firearms as the root cause of violence, nevermind what any actual stats said. The CDC to this day still has problems with doing a study, not liking the result, and then deciding it would rather not publish the study - https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulhsieh/2018/04/30/that-time-...
This has no effect on private research. It only prevents federal money from being used for a traditionally partisan cause.
Is your argument that one possibly questionable study invalidates the entire field from being eligible for federal funding? That would mean that the government shouldn't fund any research whatsoever!
No my argument is that the major organization pushing for this has repeatedly been caught on record, under oath, explicitly admitting to bias and consistently pushing biased research.
If even 5% of a research coming out of a publication was biased, nobody would let anything in the publication be cited. When that publication is funded exclusively by tax payer money paid to a government with a fiduciary duty...
"Where could a public health approach to violence be introduced next? One possibility is London, where in 2017 knife crime among under-25s reached a five-year high. In recent months, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Cressida Dick, and the mayor, Sadiq Khan, have been among those calling for a public health approach."
Just to add a few details, Cressida Dick is the person who ordered the execution of a brasilian electrician, down in the London Underground. It does not surprise me that aristocrats are in favour of a medical approach to crime: to help enforce the state monopoly on violence itself.
I love the idea of doing things to prevent more suffering.
“Despite the fact that violence has always been present, the world does not have to accept it as an inevitable part of the human condition,” says the WHO guidance on violence prevention.
But this is bullshit. Humans are a violent species. Always have been, always will be. The only question that's relevant is: when is it acceptable that violence be used? Ideally it would be a bare minimum, and by people who have nothing to benefit from it. If there's a crack house with a kid that needs rescuing, or a bank robbery gone bad with a hostage, I want somebody somewhere to be using violence.
Public health approaches to social problems are interesting, both because they have some statistically significant benefit -- and because they tend to over-generalize what the problems are and leave out many important edge cases. You can't say they're bad because there is progress to be shown. But you always wonder how many edge cases were overlooked and if overall we aren't institutionalizing a hardcore subset that will never be solved at the expense of making the problem simple enough to mentally engage with.
Humans are not a violent species by any measure. Humans have evolved to produce social structures that mitigate the need for violence in all circumstances.
When you talk about violence being a positivie in solving a bank robberies, you should be talking about how to prevent bank robberies in the first place, rather than designing a solution that presumes the robbery is going to happen no matter what.
Violence has no place in human society, and we have appropriate solutions in place if a human wants to express similar emotions to violence (eg by playing sport, video games etc) that have net positive effects on society.
>Humans have evolved to produce social structures that mitigate the need for violence in all circumstances.
It doesn't contradict the notion "humans are violent". Social structures are often used to prevail collectively in conflicts, often violent, and one may say that's why they evolved.
> When you talk about violence being a positivie in solving a bank robberies, you should be talking about how to prevent bank robberies in the first place, rather than designing a solution that presumes the robbery is going to happen no matter what.
That's easy to say when you're not the one being held hostage in the bank robbery!
We shouldn't learn to debug code or mitigate downtime either, we should just write code without bugs...
But this is bullshit. Humans are a violent species
I would frame it as: Life is challenging and the world is not a nice place. If you succeeded in completely removing all aggression from the species, we would soon go extinct.
So managing such tendencies and channeling them constructively is a necessity. Our very survival depends on not being completely rid of such traits.
We want to be civilized, not "domesticated" like sheep waiting for slaughter.
I don't disagree with that framing. I think it's probably much better than mine.
We want the maximum amount of peaceful diversity we can have both as individuals and as small social groups. It's a prerequisite for survival, as you point out.
I am concerned that we tend to look at problems top-down, in simplistic language and jargon. This almost always leads to a call for more homogenization of the species. That's a survival risk for us.
> If you succeeded in completely removing all aggression from the species, we would soon go extinct.
Why? Because sabre tooth tigers would eat us?
What does aggression even mean, in this context? When someone kicks a homeless person to death, that's aggression. If you step in, and become violent if necessary, is that aggression too in your mind? That's the first time I hear that. From Merriam-Webster:
> 1. a forceful action or procedure (such as an unprovoked attack) especially when intended to dominate or master
> 2. the practice of making attacks or encroachments; especially: unprovoked violation by one country of the territorial integrity of another
> 3. hostile, injurious, or destructive behavior or outlook especially when caused by frustration
What is that good for? You don't even need any of that to defend against any of it. Call it aggression or violence, saying it is needed because only it can defend against itself makes no sense. Just as the claim that we have these dark urges we need to somehow "channel" never really held water IMO, it just gets repeated because it comforts people in their complacency or even guilt.
If this were true, then how come daycare centers and nurseries don't have to deal with violent toddlers all day long? By your premise, our violence is genetic, so infants must be taught to control their violence in order to become succesful adults. At what stage of development does that happen?
Umm, most toddlers must be taught that hitting is wrong. As someone with more than 40 younger cousins, it’s kind of the only thing they all had in common.
Oh they do. Talk to kindergarten staff or school teachers.. And teaching them to deal with their violence and solve their issues in a cooperative way is their job #1
Source: GF used to work in kindergarten and now works in school
Kids can independently rediscover violence as soon as they're old enough to control their limbs. It's something that does need to be trained out of people, and resurfaces when people are in impaired states.
As far from perfect as police in the UK are, I get the impression that the Brits have a very different relationship from the police than most Americans do.