So I am actually from Edina, I don’t currently live there but my parents do. The context of this is a string of robberies and crimes not normally seen in this suburb. Edina is generally seen as a safe suburb, and all of the recent crime came on very sudden.
I don’t agree with the program, but since I have some context around it, I thought I’d add to the conversation.
My family had a friend who was eating a restaurant with his wife at lunchtime. In broad daylight someone swiped their catalytic converter while they were eating.
The suburbs are not nearly as safe as they were. My county has reported an explosion in carjackings and is considering boosting the police budget, and has referred to it as crime spillover.
I'll take it with grace, but I feel like "cake eater" should at least include EP and/or Minnetonka. Edina, as a whole, has become much more diverse and varied in income in recent years. Granted there are some hold out areas of affluent-bubbles, but as a whole, Edina isn't an outlier anymore.
I don't agree with the close ties between private residential camera systems and the police. This program, allows police to ask for footage from any camera without a warrant. Granted, its voluntary, there need to be checks within the program that prevent police from mass requesting camera footage without a legitimate reason. And I don't want that check to be individual private citizens who, given the least amount of pressure will need to comply.
I think what is novel, is the proliferation of residential cameras.
I don't think the police started requesting camera footage of crimes from private citizens recently. It's just that they turned to businesses with security cameras.
I think realistically many people who own property cooperate with the police out of a definite sense of self-interest with no coercion required.
Many police investigations center around video evidence as is it objective and easy to admit.
Police build little databases of where cameras are located and will use them to build timelines, etc. I served in a jury where the police were able to identify a hit and run driver who killed a teenager by knitting together surveillance footage from a bunch of cameras and establishing what cars were in an area in a given 5-minute window.
Except in this particular case there appears to be a near-zero risk of anyone being "complicit" in bad police outcomes, given that it's opt-in, can only be used on a case-by-case basis, and it's the citizen who searches their own cam footage, voluntarily, and only in response to a specific police request about a specific case.
So, while at first glance at a headline, this might seem problematic, after reading the details, I'd probably be willing to participate. This can't really be abused to create any George Floyd-type situations.
I was in Minneapolis a few months ago and grabbed a Lyft. I started talking with the driver about crime surges, mainly the dramatic car jackings increase. He said 22 people he personally knew have been victims of car jacking in 2021.
They are organized and setup drop off points to box the cars in. The 'passanger' then holds them at gun point and another person gets in the driver seat.
Stolen phones and credit cards are also being used for this.
> I started talking with the driver about crime surges, mainly the dramatic car jackings increase. He said 22 people he personally knew have been victims of car jacking in 2021.
This sounds like a typical made-up crime panic narrative, honestly. The linked story being about a car left running with an infant in it being stolen doesn't help. Terrible, but not at all some boxed-in high octane car theft.
Sibling posts chimed in about actually living there and this not being a thing. I don't live there, so can only search the news, but any stories about car thefts I'm seeing include warnings from the police for people to stop leaving their cars heating up with the keys in them.
We should endeavor to not buy into moral panics but act on data. We've seen from history that good reactions basically never come from decisive responses to crime waves that are actually constructed narratives from a data point or two.
In some localities and for some time periods, you are more likely to be a victim of homicide as a taxi driver than as a police officer or security guard (in other localities and time periods, policing is usually more deadly). In terms of non-fatal assaults, taxi drivers are right up there with police officers and security guards. The NIOSH and the US Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Labor, have studies of this going back to the 1990s (https://www.taxi-library.org/oshataxi.pdf ).
Taxi drivers make easy crime targets for a number of reasons. They carry cash, they can be lured to virtually any remote (or easy to escape) location, they are working alone, they are working late at night.
Between 1992 and 1997, at least 50 cab drivers were murdered each year while at work. There may or may not be a recent surge in a specific location, but it has been a dangerous profession for a long time.
I'm perfectly willing to believe the parent that this driver really did tell him this. But 22 people you personally know in a single year doesn't pass a basic smell test. I lived in South Bay LA in the early 90s when there was legitimately a statistical wave of carjacking when it was first invented and crime in general was huge multiples of what it is now, and I never knew a single person it happened to personally, over my lifetime so far, let alone a single year.
I can accept professional drivers are at much greater risk compared to the average daily driver, but do rideshare drivers actually know each other? This sounds very much like a 2020s Polly Klaas situation where one or two spectacular stories actually happen and the legislature starts responding and we end up with decades of three-strikes law doing thousands of times as much harm as ever happened from girls being kidnapped out of their bedrooms.
I lived in South Africa and personally know 3 people who were car-jacked. One was shot in the chest (and since recovered). One the car was broken down so they just lost their wallets and phones.
I also know 5 other people who have had their cars stolen (while they weren't in them). This includes 2 direct family members.
If you're a taxi driver, and all your friends are taxi drivers, I can easily imagine knowing 5x more.
I live in Minneapolis proper and my car was stolen last month. Not a carjacking, I was one of the idiots that left it running to warm up. The car jacking numbers are mostly legit, I do not know if it’s “organized” though. Catalytic converters getting stolen is a much bigger deal out here right now.
There is an uptick in carjackings in my city. The data for Philadelphia is >700 in 2021 which is nearly double or more of previous years. As you say, do not buy into moral panic, but do not minimize the very real damage this is doing to cities. Getting held up in your car with a gun is not warming up your car.
This is not as many newcomers like to say "just life in the city", it is a big change from the 2010s.
Many people are getting cameras at their houses because it makes insurance payouts easier when something goes wrong. Otherwise you end up on the legal treadmill to get back to where you were.
Here's my anecdata: neighbor from my block got his car stolen, joy ride until suspension broke, thieves totaled the inside by cooking drugs inside it. Neighbor gets 8k for his car from insurance (Honda CRV 2010sish). Now has to deal with current market on cars, ends up going new getting Mazda CX off a boat because no cars on the lot. These guys are a professor and nurse, so this put a good dent in their income.
One other fun data point, is now carjackings are turning into shootings as people in the city don't expect police to do anything so there is an uptick in concealed carry for ride share drivers and delivery people.
The box in tactic has only been seen in a couple instances here in Philadelphia. The case I saw (in the neighborhood next to mine) they rear ended the guy, and when they got out to talk/exchange info passenger popped out and pulled a gun on the driver. The driver was armed, as they got into his car he shot the dude driving and then shot the other car's driver. Total mayhem. Cops thought he was the carjacker until witnesses told the story and showed camera evidence.
I'm not advocating for any particular solution or outcome, but that is the weather pattern in Philadelphia.
I agree with you. Facts should govern our responses, but what I said wasn't "made-up crime panic." Unless my Lyft driver was doing so. The driver was genuine and I believe nothing he said was based in creating panic or a false narrative. You can believe me or not, but I have nothing to gain. As this was an experience in the words of another person I meet going from MSP to a friends house. He seemed sincerely fearful and despondent talking about it.
It is not, based on the number of reported carjackings/thefts, 1% of the population of Minneapolis has either been carjacked or had their car stolen. That's just Minneapolis.
That's WILD.
I live here, it's happening in broad daylight, and becoming more violent.
Last week we had an amber alert because someone stole a car with a 1 year old in it.
This doesn’t include car thefts, which there have been an additional 3387. Between car thefts and carjackings (robbery with car theft), there have been a total of 3879 cars taken, almost 1% of the population of Minneapolis have had their car taken in 2021, and 4035 car thefts/carjackings in 2020.
As of 2019 the population of Minneapolis was 420,324. So 1% of that is ~4,200.
Now not all 420k residents own a car, so considering the % of car owners is a smaller number the percentage is probably higher.
> for people to stop leaving their cars heating up with the keys in them
Yes. Letting your car warm up or idling unattended with the keys inside even if you lock the doors is specifically illegal in Minneapolis. It was made illegal specifically to curb car theft opportunities.
1. There is a clear causal link between leaving your keys in the ignition and having your car stolen. There is not a even a clearly established correlation between dress and rape, much less causal evidence.
2. There is an obvious difference between a law telling you not to leave your keys in an unlocked car and a law telling you how to dress.
Minnesota (especially the northern part) gets REALLY cold in the winter. People with remote starters will start their car remotely if it's been parked outside more than an hour. People without those may want go outside, start the car, then go wait inside to avoid freezing your butt off for 5 minutes while the car gets to a driveable and habitable temperature.
Yeah, but then your car might as well have a "start" button, keys aren't necessarily.
Lots of cars let you take out the keys when the ignition is in "armed" state for this reason exactly. No need to leave the keys in the ignition while you aren't there.
The Star Tribune actually just released a breakdown of carjackings in Minneapolis by neighborhood (Edina won't show up here since its a suburb, this is just to illustrate that it is not just a handful of incidents in the city). Keep in mind that these are actual carjackings, not just auto theft (there were over 4,000 of those in the same timeframe).
I live in the heart of south Minneapolis. I really doubt the claim that this is for organized crime for some kind of financial gain. There was an organized ring last year targeting high value cars, but it got busted pretty easily. From the news I’ve seen, it’s almost always joyriding teenagers and stolen vehicles used to commit some other crime.
Uber/Lyft drivers are specifically targeted because they can be easily lured to a semi-remote location by the apps. But multiple criminals using that tactic doesn’t make it “organized crime.” It would make sense that an app driver knows other drivers who have been carjacked, but this M.O. isn’t exclusive to Minneapolis.
Crime is still really low here. I live at a dodgy intersection with major bus lines that brings a lot of characters—good and ‘bad’—around. I don’t worry about walking around even at night. I don’t worry about driving anywhere in this city, even in the areas where carjackings have been “up” (which I travel through frequently in order to reach the now infamous Lake Street Target).
Anyway, fear-mongering comments or anecdotes from people who visit here don’t really express the lived experience of people living in Minneapolis. :)
People & especially the media love to play up this stuff. I lived two blocks away from Seattle's CHAZ during the 2020 BLM protests. Watching media coverage of my area compared to the actual experience of walking around and living there was a ridiculous juxtaposition. Even people I know who disapproved of the protests commented on the difference uneasily. I had numerous people from the east side of Lake Washington refuse to come pick up things I was selling on craigslist because they thought they would be mobbed and their car torched or something. Fear sells and there are a lot of people who want to sell it.
Yes, and in the GP we saw there were actual instances of people having their car stolen. This does not mean it was some violent wasteland as the media painted.
I don’t know. On the one hand I get what you’re saying, that CHAZ was “peaceful” during the day in that it resembled a sort of low-tier art fair. On the other hand, it was an incredibly lawless hijacking of public property. Daily, thousands of people who use those roads or surrounding amenities (parks, businesses) were forced to find alternatives that took longer and were more crowded, right in the middle of the pandemic. This re-routing included public transit and emergency vehicles. This type of violent takeover can’t be justified by surface-level “peace” during the day in my opinion.
Not to mention, CHAZ set the tone for how the city has been governed and its politics thereafter. In 2020 there were near-daily blockades of roads and tunnels, none of which were legal, and yet there was little consequence for any of the rioting. For example, one article noted that out of 261 rioters, only 8 faced charges, and exactly zero those faced any real consequence subsequently (https://komonews.com/news/local/city-attorney-charges-brough...). Meanwhile the city police was forced to build a concrete barricade around their main police station because of the lawlessness and city leadership forcing them to not take necessary actions. It got to the point where BLM protesters were setting white people’s houses on fire when they were sleeping in it (https://thepostmillennial.com/seattle-blm-activist-arrested-...), and staged protests outside white neighbors’ homes demanding they leave the neighborhood (https://nypost.com/2020/08/14/seattle-blm-protesters-demand-...). All this, became normalized and accepted by city government, in part because of CHAZ.
Fast forward to the present day and we see how much worse things have become. Hundreds of police officers have quit because of defunding and bad policy. Most will never come back no matter what bonuses are paid. The city has roughly half the number of police officers the average city would have per capita. Crime is everywhere. Businesses are shutting down due to it - look at the International District for a taste, where ironically minority business owners are the ones suffering. Trash is everywhere. RV ranchers are everywhere. Tents can be found in numerous parks and green spaces, leaving behind trash and needles. Property crime, like bike thefts, car breakins, car thefts, burglaries, and so on are common to the point no one bothers to even report them, since there’s no one to investigate and insurance requires a deductible anyhow.
You might call it a ridiculous juxtaposition. But CHAZ was exactly the harbinger and enabler that those complaining about it thought it would be. Seattle was a very safe and very clean city less than 10 years ago. I don’t recognize the city as it is today.
Yes, this is the standard right-wing Seattleite bemoaning. Of course, what's always left unsaid is that the implied solution to the existence of homeless people is newly-hired & appropriately-worshipped cops kicking them out of their temporary shelter and trashing their meagre possessions. All so you don't have to look at and deal with the externalities of your nicely-appreciating property prices.
I have yet to hear a good answer to what people expect non federal governments to do, other than to keep people on the move and make it someone else’s problem.
For the same reason no single city, county, or state can offer taxpayer funded healthcare, they also cannot offer taxpayer funded mental healthcare and/or universal basic income (or whatever other welfare scheme), and still be part of a country that has freedom of movement.
The only reason the countries that do offer these things can continue to is because they have an immigration border with which they can limit the number of benefit recipients.
Canada implemented socialized healthcare regionally. Provincial hospitalization insurance was available in Saskatchewan many years before any federal program. So your assertions conflict with the historical fact of how successful social programs came into being.
With regard to homelessness, the solution is to build socialized housing with integrated health services. This will never happen at the federal level until some states (or counties, or cities) take the lead. In line with how a great many people believe federal politics should be.
My reasoning is from first principles of dividing x resources amongst y number of recipients.
I want everyone in the world to have everything they want, but that is not compatible with the constraints of nature.
I am also aware that I and almost everyone else in the developed world consume far more than our "fair" share of the world's resources.
I have not read that book, but the caveat that throws cold water on egalitarian solutions is that we all want to maintain our disproportionately high standard of living while also increasing the amount of resources others receive, which is not going to happen without redistribution.
The majority of homeless people in Seattle are not from Seattle. The point in time surveys aren’t real data because they rely on unverified self reported claims. The reality is that homeless are coached by activists to respond falsely on these surveys as former locals, to generate sympathy.
Personal responsibility is a thing still, and people can live anywhere in America instead of trying to do so in an expensive location. And yes I expect not to have to look at open drug dens or bike chops shops, not experience property crime, not have parking spaces occupied by trashy RVs, and not see taxpayer funded amenities like parks taken over.
It has nothing to do with appreciating property prices and nothing to do with right wing politics. That’s just your inaccurate editorialization. Most people have a common sense expectation that a city be clean, lawful, and operated for the benefits of its legitimate tax paying residents, not drug addicted vagrants or irresponsible nomads.
Your bullshit assertion that homeless people aren’t from here can’t even stand up to the data, not even from any right-wing news source you can find, so you come up with an idiotic story about activists coaching the homeless to respond inaccurately to surveys.
You have no solutions to the problem. Your only recourse is to push the problem somewhere else. Utterly pathetic. No vision whatsoever.
Reread what I said about point in time surveys before talking about data - bad, purposefully misleading data is worse than no data.
My “recourse”, which is to not let the homeless steal from legitimate residents, is the only reasonable solution. I certainly have no sympathy for the large number of drug addicted homeless taking advantage of the naivety of Seattle’s policies. But even for the rest - people need to figure out their own lives like the rest of us. No one is entitled to live in Seattle or New York City or Hawaii or other high demand, desirable, expensive location. Deterring the problem via enforcement and legal consequences doesn’t shift the problem - it addresses it by forcing people to be responsible, as long as other locations don’t try to accommodate them in the same broken ways.
Since you're so worried about this problem why not try learning the first thing about it? I'm sure you know people in your life who have become addicted to various substances, which is at this point widely recognized as an issue of mental health. Hopefully those people had enough of a safety net to avoid becoming homeless. If not, well, now they're caught in a vicious cycle. Kicking a drug addiction is hugely more difficult when you're facing housing insecurity, and when you're facing housing insecurity your likelihood of self-medicating with drugs and developing an addiction is also hugely more likely. Housing insecurity also makes it much more difficult to find & keep a job to get income and alleviate the insecurity, as does having a drug addiction. Of course, there are also expensive non-addiction-related health issues which make it more difficult to work - and it's more difficult to manage the condition while homeless. All of this is rendered much worse by high housing costs - you need to make more money to achieve housing security, and your likelihood of becoming homeless from financial stress is also much higher.
You look at this problem in your community and your solution is to ignorantly push for it to be someone else's problem. I repeat, utterly pathetic. You are not a serious person.
It’s telling that at the end of your comments, all you have left is an ad hominem attack. Not getting addicted is itself an act of personal responsibility. You’re acting as if none of these people have ownership around their actions, when they do. If they weren’t enabled by the policies you support, they would act differently.
The “personal responsibility“ and carceral approach to addiction is, thankfully, hideously outdated and you should join the rest of us with the medical community in the 21st century. When you see someone destitute under a bridge, have humility and think “there but for the grace of god go I”. Anything else is vanity.
That isn't even ad hominem! Ad hominem would be like "your ideas are pathetic, therefore they are wrong" whereas what I said was "your ideas are wrong for these reasons, therefore they are pathetic". You are mixing up the premise and the conclusion! Come on!
I live in Minneapolis too, and while I absolutely agree with you that Minneapolis is still a very safe city, there's no doubt that crime has gone up in the last year--for example, the murder rate in the Twin Cities has definitely gone up: https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2021/12/09/st-paul-h...
I live in another city, but there has been significant changes in certain types of crime patterns. It’s not “organized” crime in The Godfather or gang sense, but it’s organized loosely on the internet and would be criminals basically have access to “best practices” that were only available in a truly organized crime org in the past.
Nothing like growing up in 80s NYC, but property crime in my city is way up, and police either aren’t taking reports or people don’t bother. The little league I’m on the board had the wall of a storage shed cut open and turf equipment stolen. The police took a report and the video and filed it away.
Shady people know what the police will arrest for, and what the DA will prosecute; they operate in the fringes. Basically if it’s a burglary at a house or assault the police respond and prosecute. Other thefts don’t even warrant a report unless there is an insurance angle. In general, the stupid crime done by drug addicts is basically not on the radar.
10 years ago, guys robbing sheds and plundering the little league would have prompted a mini-task force response. Today, the paperwork to book the guy would last longer that his time in custody.
I lived in Downtown Minneapolis about 10 years ago in an "upscale" loft building. This was on the outside ring of development and somewhat near a lower income neighborhood. I was there for 18 months and during that time there were multiple home invasions, break ins, and one I personally had several very disturbing encounters. Now, when I revisit that same area it has further gentrified and feels much safer.
However, I still have many friends in Minneapolis and without exception they are all very negative on the overall direction of the city. It's been particularity intersting to watch friends of mine in that area who I considered pretty far left start spouting more and more "conservative" talking points after the riots and as they view their quality of life deteriorating.
They were probably referring to the three alerts that came out for the single event last weekend. The first two were garbage, telling us to google it? Only the last had information people could actually use.
I went in to the bank for something. While I was there, I joked with the teller, asking if he'd been held up by someone wearing a mask. The joke fell very flat, because he had. He seemed to me to show some signs of trauma as he told me this.
How is it possible to do this professionally without getting shot or run over?
The first few victims I get. But after it becomes an identified pattern and makes the news people are gonna be on somewhat of a lookout or at least have it in the back of their mind that it's possible and the odds of your victim seeing the trap before you've got it complete go way up.
Sure you can try and profile people and avoid the car with five dudes in it and go for the middle aged lady in the car with a real estate agency sticker on the door but even then you can only point a gun at so many people before someone's knee-jerk reaction is to either hit the skinny pedal and GTFO or whip out their own piece. This seems like the kind of crime you can only commit 5-10x before you get unlucky and it goes off the rails.
They are giving the impression that this is an organized crime issue and that these cars are being stolen for financial gain, but I live in Minneapolis and everything I’m hearing is that it is joyriding teenagers with guns. Everything about it is reckless, dangerous and scary - but I don’t think anyone is doing it “professionally” (and I’m skeptical that any organized “boxing in” is taking place).
And I know this next bit is going to come off as defensive - but I think it provides some context. I’m native to the upper Midwest, but I’ve spent a lot of time living in other large cities around the country. Take a look at the FBI violent crime data below.
Minnesota is a very low crime state and is coming off historically low crime. The current uptick in violent crime is real, but still doesn’t come close to the 90’s and lags significantly behind US average.
All that said, talking with people - including family - in neighboring communities and across the border in Wisconsin, you’d think Minneapolis is a burning, crime ridden hellhole where you can’t even walk down the street safely. There’s clearly some kind of political hay being made by that narrative.
I agree as well with this partially. I have mainly heard the statements along the lines. 'It's teenagers' executing the theft. From the wide spread and increasing amounts it seems to follow, more organized members are involved with what would be required next.
I won't pretend to state what happens to a stolen car. I have nothing but speculation and the obviously known facts. I can guess that given the targets are newer models of cars with at least one form or another of lowjack style tech. This does assume the crime is not spontaneously carried out, generally.
What happens after the 'more risk prone' portion is some level of organized crime and people using 'minors' to help deliver on this is my understanding.
Sorry in advance if this parent post is off topic from the posted Edina story. Full disclosure I grew up in the Twin Cities and have many I know well there. It is a wonderful place and has unfortunately found itself at the center of political statements in the last few years and present.
A few of the comments here seem to have not read the article. This is an opt-in program that effectively creates a map with contact info of private citizens with cameras. When something nefarious happens in a particular area, the police can reach out to the people who put themselves on the map and ask if they have footage and are willing to share it. The police already and have always done this.
I have a friend who has done some paralegal work on criminal cases, which has included stitching together many videos from doorbell devices to see a traumatic event from 5+ angles, or reconstruct the path of a car through a neighborhood before or after an event. The surveillance machinery is already firmly in place, and is always just a subpoena away.
I was genuinely asking what you meant by "always" when the police have been around 180 years and the ability for individual homeowners to be recording footage of whatever they want in common usage has been around maybe 10 years.
Given that link, I would be very surprised if the Minnesota Police heard of Leo Theremin connecting a camera to a TV in the Kremlin in 1927 and immediately organised a map of citizens with cameras they could "ask if they have footage and are willing to share it"; the link says CCTV was a military thing until 1950, was expensive and uncommon until the 1960s because it needed someone always watching the feed, so ther ewouldn't have been any recordings for the police to view for over 40 years. Then "it wasn’t until the late 1990s that it started appearing in mainstream camera products like security cameras for the average business or home."
I'm guessing the time the police would routinely ask if anyone had footage of the crimes would be sometime after that, after CCTV recordings became popular enough in businesses that there was a good chance of a camera seeing a crime in enough cases to make it worth organising. Maybe mid to late 1990s for businesses? Then, individuals with things like Nest Doorbells ("homeowner surveillance camera program") wouldn't be a thing until maybe 2010s?
Which makes me think it's an odd thing to say the police "always did this".
> Which makes me think it's an odd thing to say the police "always did this".
That's fair. My statement of 'always' referred to what's typical and standard prior to the change. I.e., what is the actual net change as a result of this program?
So far as I can tell, nothing really. Other than citizens voluntarily deciding to fill out a spreadsheet vs police needing to drive around and do it.
In some countries (notably Germany) it is illegal for private citizens to point surveillance cameras at any property they do not own, including public property.
It can also be problematic in the US as peeping tom laws have not really caught up with surveillance cameras and drones yet.
I had a neighbor that was allegedly pointing cameras at his neighbor because he didn't want a black woman in the neighborhood. He was also an officer of the HOA. He was trying to intimidate her with cameras and staring at her all day. She sued and won. The judge ordered him to remove the cameras. I got out of that HOA in a hurry. They've since doubled the fees to compensate for the law suit, so they should have it paid off in 25-30 years.
> Minneapolis still encourages residents to register their cameras, but Merchant said that doesn't give police "blanket access. ... There has to be consent from the owner."
I'm glad a warrant-like system is the plan. Technology opens the door to many dystopias I hope we avoid.
A warrant-like system? No, it looks like the cops just have to ask your paranoid gun-nut neighbor before they can get the videos. That's a far cry from a judge and the judicial scrutiny, legal protections, etc. that a warrant entails.
The criminals are using social media and tech to organize. It's now an arms race where the police and non-criminal citizens need to figure out ways to out-coordinate the criminals.
Solving crimes with cams in times when every one is wearing a mask, specially those who do crimes will wear a mask, a hat or something else more. But how to fix this - put there even more cams :) Genious, really.
People, please don't do any crimes, cause you gonna weight on the police system now. Please, if you do commit a crime, just during that time, for short, remove your mask and look at the camera. hahaha
As a heads up, all of the "Crime Watch" for Minnesota and Minneapolis are run by a verifiable racist. Please ensure you review that source with awareness of the bias that is implicitly in every update from them.
Even if that account doesn't have perfect coverage of all crimes committed, the incidents that are being report by that account DID actually happen, right?
As an aside, I've been very happy to see the strategy of calling everything you don't like "racism" lose its effectiveness over the past year.
I'm not making this about race. I'm making this about whether it's okay to accept the views of racists. Completely different.
> Even if that account doesn't have perfect coverage of all crimes committed, the incidents that are being report by that account DID actually happen, right?
Nope. Per the source, not all of them happened, and the accuracy of the reports is questionable.
Well, I guess I (and many others) will continue to rely on a source that pretty accurately represents reality vs completely discounting it because someone doesn’t like hearing uncomfortable truth, hand waves and screeches “racism”.
The source you posted is not well researched, balanced, and does not at all appear credible. Indeed, if you would like a glimpse into the author's political world view, you can check the below link to his podcast where he states: "...actual Nazis are increasingly hard to differentiate from mainstream conservatives." So...yea.
Human behavior that tends to self-imprison on a large scale is fascinating to me.
In the west we see communities opting in to self surveillance 100% of the time, in China it can be literally having your door welded shut so you stay at home.
It all stems from the desire to control other people’s behavior to varying degrees. This desire is probably tied to a survival trait, but more often it is to satisfy something else.
Who in this program is surveilling or imprisoning themselves?
Having a camera on your house, pointed into the street, is the opposite of self-surveillance. It's a way to surveil people in a public thoroughfare. Some of those people happen to be thieves who steal things from homes and cars, and if they get caught by video surveillance, that's great.
What exactly do the neighborhood residents lose by participating in this surveillance? It's only an upside for them -- they might be able to catch the thieves, with no loss of privacy for themselves.
... So nobody should put up security cameras outside their house? That's what these are, that's it. In such a situation most people would consider security cameras a pretty good investment.
I think it's also worth considering what can happen if there aren't cameras - eye witnesses suck. What if someone (or more than one person) claims to have seen you walking by a house that got robbed, and there's no video to prove your innocence? If people are hyper-aware that crime is happening they're going to be paying extra attention, while probably still doing a very bad job of determining what's actually going on.
Or it could be that humans don't respond well to uncontrolled crime. Unless you have experienced crime directed to you, it is easy to judge other's reactions.
If you let privacy rights be preserved by democracy, they will not be preserved, as the vast majority of people have:
a) not much to lose from secret information being divulged
b) not much secret information in the first place
It is really only a tiny minority that actually practically need privacy rights: prominent people, public figures, the wealthy, highly attractive people, alternative lifestyles, political or labor organizers, those speaking truth to power, et c.
We are a very small segment of the population by real numbers. Most people dgaf about privacy because they don't have to, so they never will.
>...It is really only a tiny minority that actually practically need privacy rights
Just about everyone needs privacy rights and most care about those rights for themselves. Unfortunately many are very willing to sacrifice other people's rights if they are told it will make them safer or protect the children, etc. (If someone does claim they don't care about privacy since 'they have nothing to hide', ask them for their medical records and tax returns - all of a sudden they do care.)
> Just about everyone needs privacy rights and most care about those rights for themselves.
I don't think that's true in practice, no. Most people take the "I have nothing to hide" approach, and, sadly, the lives of most people are so uneventful that that's actually true.
> the lives of most people are so uneventful that that's actually true.
That's probably true. The issue is that people with something to hide, need the other people to hide their mundane stuff so that the people with things to hide, don't stand out.
Based on more than a handful of videos I have seen, the reason for having security cameras could be just as much about protecting you from police/the legal system as it is about protecting you for insurance purposes and for dissuading criminals.
I don’t agree with the program, but since I have some context around it, I thought I’d add to the conversation.
[0]: https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2021/12/11/edina-pd-offers-5k...