Lunch Money Surrendered
The Council of the District of Columbia approved legislation Tuesday that would pay residents in the nation’s capital for not committing crimes.
First reported by the Associated Press, the bill penned by Democratic Council-member Kenyan McDuffie gained unanimous approval from the D.C. Council. The legislation, called the “Neighbourhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 (NEAR Act),” would establish an office to identify as many as 200 residents annually who are at risk of committing violent crimes or becoming a victim of such crimes. The individuals would be instructed to participate in life planning, trauma informed therapy, and other programmes; if they comply and do not commit crimes, the individuals would receive a stipend. The legislation was based on a Richmond, California, programme that pays individuals who participate as much as $9,000 annually.
Mr McDuffie describes his bill as “bold and innovative,” “a step in the right direction,” and “working to prevent crime by treating its root causes.”
Update, via the comments:
The experiment in Richmond, on which the above is based, involved “sifting through police records to determine the 50 [or so] residents most likely to shoot someone.” And then “approaching them and [offering] a stipend [of up to $1000 a month] to turn their lives around, and a mentor to help.” After four years of being subsidised for not being caught committing any further violent crimes, 65 of the 68 “fellows” enrolled in the programme were “still alive,” although “one had survived a shooting and three had died.” This was deemed “promising.”
The city’s murder rate did in fact fall while the programme was running, though other, more obvious factors – from a new police chief’s dramatic overhaul of policing methods to the local housing crisis and the consequent relocation of many known criminals – may have been more relevant. Comparable experiments in other cities haven’t exactly been conclusive either, with many supporters losing their initial interest and withdrawing funding, both private and public. A scheme in Pittsburgh initially coincided with an increase in the murder rate; one in Chicago has been “overshadowed by escalating homicide numbers,” and a similar project in Boston is described as “ending disastrously.”
@Trevor
WWHCD
What would Harry Callsghan do?
“So you’ve claimed. But repeating an error tends not to make it so. It generally just sinks the hook. The apparent impenetrability of the matrix whose structural principles you can’t or won’t grasp hasn’t stopped you from creating loopholes through them for your own opinions. And it hasn’t stopped you firewalling others from, in more detail and with more supportable principle than yourself, identifying serious faults.”
I’m a big fan of clear, concise speech, because I love the English language.
People are often very sorry when they are caught following a crime, though it is usually sorrow that they were caught.
Speaking of the reality series Cops, one of the more telling episodes featured a protracted car chase during which the felon endangered any number of lives, drove several innocent people off the road and caused at least two serious traffic accidents. When finally apprehended, after a great deal of effort and considerable expense, the felon showed no concern whatsoever for the people whose lives he’d just impacted. They, the people he’d seriously injured and who were now on their way to hospital, were of no consequence to him, they simply didn’t feature in his moral universe. And this is by no means an uncommon attitude.
While the series may be a bit trashy and a guilty pleasure, it does offer an insight into the demographics and psychology of criminal behaviour. I can’t help thinking that watching a few episodes might shake the airy conceits of one or two leftists.
I’m pretty sure it’s not Minnow. Minnow’s posts were more like barbed hooks being drawn through foul waters; they would catch one word in your post and twist it dishonestly. This is more like a rain of tribbles falling on you head; vague and fluffy and never-ending – but if you try to examine them, you find that half of them are dead.
I like police reality shows, and though I am sure the cops who feature are picked for being reasonable people in front of the camera the fun is in watching the perps and joy-riders and general scum who aren’t so bothered about being reasonable, or even intelligent.
But here’s a true story of how justice as some would have it, goes wrong and the wrong-doing is the work of lawyers.
I knew a guy who worked for a lawyer and they had a client who was due to go to court on a series of charges of stealing cars. His fingerprints were all over each car, but the defence team cleverly got each charge tried separately rather than the obviously damning list of thefts. In each case, the different juries heard that the defendant had been given lifts in each of the cars and thus had left his fingerprints on places like the steering wheel and driver’s door. In each case, the jury bought the ‘one-off’ story and eventually the man was freed.
The lawyers were delighted they had ‘won’ and justice was, in their view, served.