We deserve better cities

I would like to submit my own definition of what it means to be "plagued by crime." Crime has fallen... from "insanely high" to "very high." St. Louis has a long way to go until it's no longer "plagued by crime."

this is how I felt today reading Reddit comments accusing the developer of Subway Builder of being a “Zionist” didn’t realize I need to be politically aligned with the people who make the video games I play

This type of crime frankly deserves something closer to life in prison than probation. Engaging in a drive-by shooting and killing a pedestrian in a popular Downtown district is an offense that both robs the life of a totally innocent bystander and stains the reputation of the entire city. But as always, St. Louis prioritizes the wellbeing of degenerate criminals over the residents and visitors who actually contribute something to the city.

This is how the system that’s supposed to have a monopoly on violence handles the criminal scum who are destroying our cities: they do nothing at all.

Never ceases to amaze me how many leftists are just gigantic losers who never figured out basic shit. If you’re a 45 year old barista dreaming of government apartment blocks, you’ve got bigger issues than capitalism.

Redditors will invent new slurs to describe literal children but would never, ever refer to the mentally ill homeless or other favored groups with the same vitriol. (Yes I am treating Redditors as a monolith because they are)

Hardly anyone stands up to these people because we all know they’re willing to escalate to deadly force and we’re not. The Victorians would have put him in jail. We think we’re more enlightened than our ancestors, but our mercy to social terrorists is cruelty to everyone else.

Property crime hurts people. Related datapoint: My auto insurance premium declined *25%* after moving from St. Louis to Durham NC (no change in coverage).

This is a challenge for St. Louis because even as the city gets wealthier and more educated on average, quality of life in the "nice" parts of the city will continue to be affected by the behavior of antisocial people from nearby neighborhoods. Reckless driving is one of the most visible manifestations of this problem, but you can extend the idea to all sorts of other issues (e.g., teen takeovers, littering, dog attacks, street racing).

I still think there's a correlation between the affluence/educatedness of a region and the quality of its drivers, but the bigger determinant of whether you encounter reckless drivers day-to-day is proximity to poor neighborhoods. There's a set of individual traits that is correlated with both having a low income and reckless driving (e.g., high time preference, impulsivity, emotional dysregulation). Reckless drivers are concentrated in poor neighborhoods because many of the characteristics that lead them to drive recklessly also make them poor. In St. Louis, I lived only a couple of miles from extremely poor neighborhoods, and the roads I used directly linked those neighborhoods to mine. I encountered reckless drivers every day. Raleigh–Durham doesn't have nearly the same intensity of concentrated poverty. I now live in an area that is not particularly close to or directly linked to poor urban neighborhoods, so the drivers seem tamer and more responsible. And more generally, Raleigh–Durham is more affluent and educated than metro St. Louis, which limits the overall population of reckless drivers.

This isn't even to say Kemper is an upstanding guy. He could be an asshole. We don't know anything about him outside this incident. But it's extremely unlikely the guy who (presumably) has a job, a car, no criminal history, and lives in a safe neighborhood is a bigger drain on society than the 19-year-olds rummaging through cars in the middle of the night.

Breaking into cars is an activity that should carry a significant risk of death. St. Louis would be a better place if more residents were like Timothy Kemper and fewer were like the criminals he shot. A city full of Timothy Kempers would probably be a safer place to live.

Our cities expect you to stand idly by while “teens” break into your car. You can call the cops, who may take hours to arrive. If they do arrive in time and catch the “teens” in the act, they’ll probably arrest them - but you know that the norm in St. Louis is for juvenile criminals to be quickly released to their parents and ultimately get a slap on the wrist. There is no real-time defense against being victimized by criminals in St. Louis. You are expected to let it happen to you and let the system fail to rectify it after the fact.

There should be more of this everywhere. This is what civilization is made of.

(I suppose 19-year-olds wouldn’t be treated as juveniles and released to their parents, but any petty criminal in St. Louis is likely to be quickly released and unlikely to suffer long-term consequences.)

Evergreen

@atlanticesque Our most ambitious people shouldn’t feel like second class citizens in Americas largest cities and they are right that our largest cities shouldn’t be dumps

Horrifying: new apartments go to productive, decent people rather than unemployed violent crackheads