re: Profound statement on the acceptable rate of crime

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People allow all sorts of content/variables to influence them and believe untrue things.

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Sure.

1) Do you think police stats are manipulated to give cities better stats?

One glaring example happened in St. Louis, where the police created “incident reports” that were never reported as crimes. Essentially creating off the books crimes. This included assaults and rapes that were filed as “incidents” and not included in crimes.

Your faith in data doesn’t make your point infallible.

Police chiefs rise and fall on the crime data. If you don’t think there’s huge incentives to doctor the numbers, I don’t know what to tell you.

My daughter lived in St. Louis for one month when her car was stolen from in front of her house. The police wouldn’t even come out to take a report. Or for the other person next door who had their car stolen the same night.

If you have some amazing confidence in that department’s ability and desire to keep accurate stats of crime in St. Louis, then you’re a very different person than I am.

2) Why do so many people who live in cities have the impression that crime is worse? Are they all just malleable people? Are they all wrong?

There were over 1,000,000 car thefts in 2023. Is that an all-time low?

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The answer to this is clearly we need to staff up and have a more heavy handed federal government crack down on crime.

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Amazing as it may seem, I have a point of agreement with you.

I agree that the federal government shouldn't be spending its time and resources on this.

State and local governments should be.

But in too many places they won't.

So yeah, I agree, this is an indicator that there is something broken in the system. But since we're talking about people's safety, if the people who should be responsible won't do it, someone does need to step in.

Plus, Trump's probably tired of riding around DC and seeing the effects of relative lawlessness. He's probably tired of foreign dignitaries and ambassadors seeing it when they come to town.

We could do so much better in this country. It's amazing that tribal populism has us in a spot in which half the country is actually angry that a president is trying to.

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Why do so many people who live in cities have the impression that crime is worse? Are they all just malleable people? Are they all wrong?

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Probably. Remember, you're not hearing from any majority of people. Just a few on social media or grabbed for an interview.

But so what?

I think it's pretty obvious that the "state of emergency" is just the loophole they're using to act. Which most all administrations have used at one time or another for some reason or another.

I really don't care what the real numbers are. Whatever they are, they could be much better.

Trump can't use the federal government to clean up every city in the country, of course, but if he cleans up DC he leaves behind a precedent and a model for success.

And no excuses. If DC could be cleaned up, so could your city.

If you vote for that.

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How does this even remotely make it ok?

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Im saying it's an impossible standard that's never been true. We can't magically do away with crime without losing freedoms.

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Generally though this responsibility flows down to the populace to protect themselves.

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I agree that that's what should happen, but again, you can go to prison for defending yourself or others in today's political climate. 'Specially if you are white.

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I'm not convinced we need or want what's happening in DC.

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Oh, we need it all right. Your point is well taken that it shouldn't be the federal government delivering what we need, but we sorely need it.

Again, people saying it's not so bad are using the wrong metric. The point of comparison shouldn't be, "Is this the worst it's ever gotten?" it should be, "We can do so much better than this."

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We can't magically do away with crime without losing freedoms.

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We can do a whole lot better than we're doing now and unless the freedoms you mentioned include the freedom to dook on the sidewalk or loot convenience stores without recrimination, then I think we have a little ways to go before that pendulum is going to swing too far in the other direction.

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Reading. It does you good. Try it.

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My baseline for an "acceptable" amount of crime is my 75 year old mother feeling safe walking around alone at 11PM.

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He literally (and I mean literally) uses "feeling" as his standard.

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Already posted direct definition for you.

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Nobody has argued there are 0 unsafe areas anywhere in the US at any time. Nobody.

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Im saying it's an impossible standard that's never been true. We can't magically do away with crime without losing freedoms

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I do get what you are saying. Truly I do. As someone who used to think Libertarians want too much government, I really want to agree.

At some point however, we have to ask ourselves what is best for the most people.

Now as much as I hate to admit it, SFP is correct. Crime is lower today than it was 30 years ago. But that doesn't say we can sit back and say "well we did good".

Look, I am working on dual citizenship with a certain European country. In doing so, I spend 6 months living there. In this country, there is no place anyone is unsafe to walk at any time. That opened my eyes. I am from a town of about 30000 in south Louisiana. We should think that small town America is as safe as it gets. That small town is extremely dangerous. There is one area they do not even deliver mail to. They keep boxes outside the little neighborhood. Pizza Hut will not even go there.That is not acceptable and I refuse to think that it is.

The truth is, since Obama, it's gotten progressively worse.

Blacks in particular get a hall pass to openly engage in unlawful acts of violent and non-violent nature without consequences.

We see videos here and elsewhere every day of people getting beaten by groups of thugs, and no one intervenes for fear it will happen to them, or worse, they can be sued by the perpetrators.

When consequences are real and law enforcement isn't handcuffed by this new fricked up social culture we have created, then some change could slowly move the needle back to at least "reasonably" normal.

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Nothing wrong with admitting you are wrong.

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Only your strawman is wrong.

I see you've pivoted on the "feelings" portion. Did you finally actually read the tweet in OP?