30 years of cuts to social safety nets, and life becoming affordable will do that. When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this. The fact that people act surprised is mind boggling. People have been warning about this for decades.
I fear that this is only the start of a worsening trend.
Honest question here: How does poverty imply violent crime? I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example. I don’t see how when someone is struggling with poverty that will increase their probability of engaging in violence.
> I don’t see how when someone is struggling with poverty that will increase their probability of engaging in violence.
Relationships between poverty and violent crime, specifically children growing up in poor households, have been well known for a very long time and the relationship continues to be shown repeatedly. See e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS2468-2...
> I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said "I saw something once, so the entire history of collected statistics must be wrong" I'd be very rich. It happens in China too. See for instance https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The only real questions are about specific actionable causes and why crime can still go up even when overall average poverty goes down.
>Relationships between poverty and violent crime, specifically children growing up in poor households, have been well known for a very long time and the relationship continues to be shown repeatedly.
It’s more related to poverty adjacent to wealth. If everyone is poor, nobody feels poor. If poor people are next to rich people, you often get crime and eventually violence.
Honduras is a good example. It was once poor and relatively peaceful. With a few social incidents, like removing farmers from their land and the rise of the drug trade, you have violence. The drug trade displays wealthy narcos to young men whose other choice is to be a poor laborer. The men see that those with money get the girls, can support their families, have status.
Perhaps the price for committing crime is very high. Or poverty in a given place is not actually a life of misery.
In my experience, especially in South America, the twin forces of poverty and civic dysfunction produce desperation - and that seems the driving force behind the sorts of “crime in the streets” that gets headlines.
Of course in other places on the same continent corruption (narco, mining, logging, etc) produce violent crime that plays out quite differently.
>I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example.
I've read of accounts by two different Western women who hitchhiked alone across China in perfect safety. One cannot imagine this happening in any other BRICS country except maybe parts of pre-Ukraine War Russia.
I would not want to compare people's minds in "impoverished areas of China" to those in Canada. I think we have different composition and behavior patterns.
In that case, wouldn’t that imply that we should figure out how to change people’s “behavior patterns” as the root cause of violence instead of blaming poor people for violence just by virtue of them being poor?
>> When as a country we prefer funding more policing, and less on affordable housing, healthcare, and education, we end up with a crisis like this.
That's interesting, any data to back it up? The article suggests the problem is due to a 2018 change in the law that prevents arresting and jailing people for bail and parole violations.
You're probably not wrong, I believe all of these things are likely to be factors.
This is demonstrably not true. Look at new york. They bring in broken window policing and do it passably well and things turn around in a decade. They then stop enforcing the law and move to a more laid back, defund the police style and things turn back towards trending to crap again. The other stuff you mentioned matters but the biggest thing is effective policing of all crime.
I fear that this is only the start of a worsening trend.