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The murder of Iryna Zarutska

The problem with this attitude is that the criminal element only grows. As the "good people" move away it strands the less fortunate and the cancer spreads. Cities have operated this way for DECADES and you can see how it eats the heart right out.

You can actually squash most crime pretty quickly if you just set boundaries, enforce them, and LOCK UP THE CRIMINALS. Like, it's not hard, it's a relatively small population of ridiculous repeat offenders over and over. Just imprison those fools and throw away the key.
Yup.

And that's why most downtowns have a lot of grubby people. The congregate there since it'll probably have a lot of drug clinics, rehab centres and homeless shelters. And since downtowns always have lots of people roaming around, they need to be there no matter what for sake of begging for money from all the walkers. A nice suburb might have zero walkers and just cars that blow by them. And when you got troubled folks, in comes the crime and drug dealers making it worse. So instead of a street with normal people who got evicted last night, it becomes a street of said people who are also now high and passed out all day.

And then when the problem festers big, what band of beat cops or city officials wants to tackle that giant mob? It might be a tent city now. So it gets to a point, they just dont bother.
 
Her death kind of gave me flashes of riding the metro into downtown Atlanta this summer. I was the only white guy on the train pretty much every time or in the carriages I went in.

One time a homeless guy asking me for money. Don't get me wrong I didn't care and people seemed friendly. It was very obvious I was a tourist.

I've been the only black guy in a subway car in Atlanta, before. Not uncommon to be once in a while (definitely rare to be the only one every time, tho).

I've only seen 2 acts of violence on the train in the 17 years I lived in Atlanta... Once, me and others in the car protected a girl from being hit by an older man who was yelling at her... The other, I was the only one who came to a young man's aide when he was being beaten by two dudes. I've also seen some crazy AF things like a woman (so unattractive) getting naked at a bus stop and someone (not homeless) crapping at the bus stop. I was so grossed out!
 
Yup.

And that's why most downtowns have a lot of grubby people. The congregate there since it'll probably have a lot of drug clinics, rehab centres and homeless shelters. And since downtowns always have lots of people roaming around, they need to be there no matter what for sake of begging for money from all the walkers. A nice suburb might have zero walkers and just cars that blow by them. And when you got troubled folks, in comes the crime and drug dealers making it worse. So instead of a street with normal people who got evicted last night, it becomes a street of said people who are also now high and passed out all day.

And then when the problem festers big, what band of beat cops or city officials wants to tackle that giant mob? It might be a tent city now. So it gets to a point, they just dont bother.
We get panhandlers out in the burbs where I live. They are dropped off by car or take the bus, have their backpacks of supplies, that obligatory ripped cardboard sign written in black sharpie (always with a "God Bless" at the end), and set up shop on the same corner for YEARS. I've seen the EXACT SAME GUY at the exact same corner, for 3+ YEARS, at least when the weather is tolerable. It's so obviously a (semi) organized racket, I'm not sure why anyone gives anything to these folks nor why the police tolerate it at all. What happened to all the anti-vagrant laws we used to have? Some how we just accepted that folks can sleep on the streets, shit and shoot up anywhere, beg for money no matter what, all that crap.
 
I've been the only black guy in a subway car in Atlanta, before. Not uncommon to be once in a while (definitely rare to be the only one every time, tho).

I've only seen 2 acts of violence on the train in the 17 years I lived in Atlanta... Once, me and others in the car protected a girl from being hit by an older man who was yelling at her... The other, I was the only one who came to a young man's aide when he was being beaten by two dudes. I've also seen some crazy AF things like a woman (so unattractive) getting naked at a bus stop and someone (not homeless) crapping at the bus stop. I was so grossed out!
Yeah, never had an issue on the Atlanta MARTA, though I only used it during the day.

Had a crazy guy muttering to himself and walking up and down the car in Portland though, not sure how he even go on to the train. I like rail as a transportation option, but it does need to be more policed because they seem to attract crazy folks.
 
Yeah, never had an issue on the Atlanta MARTA, though I only used it during the day.

Had a crazy guy muttering to himself and walking up and down the car in Portland though, not sure how he even go on to the train. I like rail as a transportation option, but it does need to be more policed because they seem to attract crazy folks.

I used it day and night. Pretty much every day. I felt safer in Atlanta than I do here in Mississippi and that's due to no sidewalks in my area (some folks think less traffic is a sign to drive like NASCAR).

I miss the train and bus to get around on my own. Nothing like that here.
 
I used it day and night. Pretty much every day. I felt safer in Atlanta than I do here in Mississippi and that's due to no sidewalks in my area (some folks think less traffic is a sign to drive like NASCAR).

I miss the train and bus to get around on my own. Nothing like that here.
Worst thing about Atlanta were those damned electric scooter things EVERYWHERE. Dammit, just get on the train!

I'll be curious if robotaxis eventually kill off most public transportation, especially busses. I like trains as they have dedicated lines and over time the infrastructure supports them, but busses are annoying if the streets don't have spots for them to stop without impeding traffic flow. In suburban areas there are rarely more than a few folks at each stop so a smaller robot vehicle would probably be more efficient.

My niece lives in DC and she won't use the subway after dark. Don't blame her one bit but I'm not sure taking an uber as a single female is statistically much safer, really. I wish she could carry a .38 to center punch any bad guys but she's stuck with pepper spray there.
 
We get panhandlers out in the burbs where I live. They are dropped off by car or take the bus, have their backpacks of supplies, that obligatory ripped cardboard sign written in black sharpie (always with a "God Bless" at the end), and set up shop on the same corner for YEARS. I've seen the EXACT SAME GUY at the exact same corner, for 3+ YEARS, at least when the weather is tolerable. It's so obviously a (semi) organized racket, I'm not sure why anyone gives anything to these folks nor why the police tolerate it at all. What happened to all the anti-vagrant laws we used to have? Some how we just accepted that folks can sleep on the streets, shit and shoot up anywhere, beg for money no matter what, all that crap.
I blame Christians. Seriously, whenever I check Nextdoor where I live there is someone complaining about beggars (usually they park themselves in the median at lights with a left hand turn) and there are always a bunch of self identified Christians who say they give them money.
Worst was some woman waxing lyrical about a violin player in the target parking lot and how she was happy to donate to help nurture his talent. Someone had to point out that it was all a scam and they were pretending to play along to a recording.
 
I blame Christians. Seriously, whenever I check Nextdoor where I live there is someone complaining about beggars (usually they park themselves in the median at lights with a left hand turn) and there are always a bunch of self identified Christians who say they give them money.
Worst was some woman waxing lyrical about a violin player in the target parking lot and how she was happy to donate to help nurture his talent. Someone had to point out that it was all a scam and they were pretending to play along to a recording.
The musicians I'm kinda ok with. Or hot girls advertising car washes. A certain type of solicitation :P

It's not common where I live, but getting approached for the "I need gas money" at gas stations used to be super common. I think the general transition away from using cash for stuff has hurt these types of scams. Helps I try to shop at places where they have security to usher out folks begging for money INSIDE the store.
 
We get panhandlers out in the burbs where I live. They are dropped off by car or take the bus, have their backpacks of supplies, that obligatory ripped cardboard sign written in black sharpie (always with a "God Bless" at the end), and set up shop on the same corner for YEARS. I've seen the EXACT SAME GUY at the exact same corner, for 3+ YEARS, at least when the weather is tolerable. It's so obviously a (semi) organized racket, I'm not sure why anyone gives anything to these folks nor why the police tolerate it at all. What happened to all the anti-vagrant laws we used to have? Some how we just accepted that folks can sleep on the streets, shit and shoot up anywhere, beg for money no matter what, all that crap.
Even with anti-vagrant laws, I dont see how it's possible to solve it long term unless the city wants to literally lock them up in homeless shelters and cant leave. Even if the gov offered all of them jobs and built tons of shelters, many cant or wont do it anyway. They prefer being vagrants stumbling about outside where busy streets for begging and park benches for drugs are fav spots.

You can tell the gov has given up when they dont even enforce it on gov property. When I went to university downtown way back, there's all the panhandler guys on the busy streets roaming around or at the same spot. But, you'd also get them in subway stations. Always the busy downtown stations too. Never at the stations farther out where I'd get on/off at. And it's not even just a guy asking for change, sometimes you'd get people playing a musical instrument with his guitar case open for people to toss in coins you'd see every day. Transit workers never cared and never saw cops ever tell them to leave. Granted, they are different than a homeless guy whose passed out. But still beggars, just tidied up and not drunk. And gov never cared.

In some spots, they'd be clever too. They'd be in a spot that is not gov property. But it's a spot connected to the subway where I guess it's commercial/landlord property. So if perhaps the city cant do anything about, they picked that spot as I guess the property managers of the spot dont care.
 
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Even with anti-vagrant laws, I dont see how it's possible to solve it long term unless the city wants to literally lock them up in homeless shelters and cant leave. Even if the gov offered all of them jobs and built tons of shelters, many cant or wont do it anyway. They prefer being vagrants stumbling about outside where busy streets for begging and park benches for drugs are fav spots.
I think for most of human history you could just move them away from your area, exile them, so to speak. Or winter dealt with them.

Places like socal or hawaii, with perpetual nice weather and 'generous' social programs, breed them like crazy. I doubt North Dakota has much of a homeless vagrant problem.

I'm all for restarting the mental health asylums, that was a bad call on Reagans part, no doubt. Problem now is the scale, it's grown so much, there would be MILLIONS to contain.

You can tell the gov has given up when they dont even enforce it on gov property. When I went to university downtown way back, there's all the panhandler guys on the busy streets roaming around or at the same spot. But, you'd also get them in subway stations. Always the busy downtown stations too. Never at the stations farther out where I'd get on/off at. And it's not even just a guy asking for change, sometimes you'd get people playing a musical instrument with his guitar case open for people to toss in coins you'd see every day. Transit workers never cared and never saw cops ever tell them to leave. Granted, they are different than a homeless guy whose passed out. But still beggars, just tidied up and not drunk. And gov never cared.
There is a culture around begging, "street vending" (aka selling stolen, thrown out, or otherwise 'acquired' stuff), and panhandling. I don't mind the music folks so long as they are playing culturally acceptable music for the space, its a talent. The infamous "window squeegee" racket though, that's not a talent NOR a public service. What you see in Mexico or increasingly in Europe, folks running up to you from all over, trying to sell some china made trinket or doing the bracelet scam, that shit isn't in line with our culture here in the States and I don't see why it is permitted as it leads to aggression, pickpocketing, mugging, or as cover for drug deals.
 
I think for most of human history you could just move them away from your area, exile them, so to speak. Or winter dealt with them.

Places like socal or hawaii, with perpetual nice weather and 'generous' social programs, breed them like crazy. I doubt North Dakota has much of a homeless vagrant problem.

I'm all for restarting the mental health asylums, that was a bad call on Reagans part, no doubt. Problem now is the scale, it's grown so much, there would be MILLIONS to contain.


There is a culture around begging, "street vending" (aka selling stolen, thrown out, or otherwise 'acquired' stuff), and panhandling. I don't mind the music folks so long as they are playing culturally acceptable music for the space, its a talent. The infamous "window squeegee" racket though, that's not a talent NOR a public service. What you see in Mexico or increasingly in Europe, folks running up to you from all over, trying to sell some china made trinket or doing the bracelet scam, that shit isn't in line with our culture here in the States and I don't see why it is permitted as it leads to aggression, pickpocketing, mugging, or as cover for drug deals.
Toronto panhandling is different. Or at least "was" different as I'm barely downtown anymore. I'll assume Canada and US panhandling are similar. It was probably be 95% guys asking for change or sitting or passed out on the sidewalk with a cardboard tray, 4% musicians, and 1% random person trying to ask for money for something he wants to hand out like a bible thumper weirdo's scripture or some random dude giving out leaflets with some kind of propaganda.

I never saw young kids asking for money, at minimum older teens or college age. And never saw aggressive sales tactics selling junky trinkets. There was a wave of squeegee kids long time ago. Get off at a downtown highway ramp and you might get one. Never had an issue. They disappeared fast though. Last one I saw was probably 15 or 20 years ago.
 
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The musicians I'm kinda ok with. Or hot girls advertising car washes. A certain type of solicitation :P

It's not common where I live, but getting approached for the "I need gas money" at gas stations used to be super common. I think the general transition away from using cash for stuff has hurt these types of scams. Helps I try to shop at places where they have security to usher out folks begging for money INSIDE the store.
I used to live in Oxford (UK) and so have heard and seen them all before, often multiple times from the same person day after day - they must really have trouble keeping hold of their bus tickets, money for gas, or car keys. There are some variations - the 'I just got out of jail and need gas money to get to a job interview' one has been pretty much unique to the US.
I remember one in Oxford - a girl pushing a pram (baby carriage) had 'lost her bus ticket' and needed to get her baby home. Felt mildly bad about not helping out just in case she was legit. Didn't last long as she lost her bus ticket again the very next day - and also this time I looked in the pram and it was just a bunch of cans in there.
 
I never understood this American fetish of death sentence and public executions, instead of first of all prevention by educating communities ; drug education and treatment, and also rehabilitiation. Where does this Hammurabi shit comes from? I assume it's the same Puritan logic that that resulted in Salem trials, but I don't understand what was the origin of that. Long shot: people that emigrated to America were all pretty hardcore on life, so then all of those people ended up in one country.

Support for the death penalty in the US has been dropping over time, and younger generations are majority against it. We know it doesn't serve as a deterrent for crime, so it's just people's desire for vengeance.

As for fixing the problem with education and rehab, that's just not a realistic possibility. We already have a government budget that we can't pay for, which is why our debt is growing out of control. We know we're not going to give up our military, or social security, or Medicare/Medicaid. Those four things (plus the interest on our debt) are the vast majority of the federal budget. State and county taxes aren't anywhere near enough to pay for these sort of programs.

The number that sticks out in my head for all time is from a book called The Corner where the author did the math and counted 3 junkies for every local, state, and federal bed in all the hospitals, jails and treatment centers in the state of Maryland. The scale of the problem is a compounding problem on top of the problem.
 
Heavy work in a mine or something until they are too old to physically pick up a tool would be a much better use for some of these cunts.

Let them repay their debt to society instead of weighting on tax payers.

You renounce to your human rights when you decide to become a monster, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Death is a liberation for some of these people.
 
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We trained a multinomial logistic regression model (k = 18, n = 1.5 million) using racial probability classes extracted from DeepFace's racial classifier and first and last name racial summary statistics from the US census and Rosenman et al. (2023), achieving 92.76% accuracy in three-race classification (Black, White, Hispanic).

29% of individuals predicted to be Hispanic were officially classified as White by Department of Corrections authorities.

Correcting for misclassification increases Hispanic criminal record rates by 31%, decreases White rates by 6%, and decreases Black rates by 1%.

If You Say So Shrug GIF
 

Certainly is a problem when these metrics are used for other purposes and to paint agendas, but I for one am not surprised by this too much. When I've filled out all sorts of official forms, even government stuff, plenty of times I've seen options like "Caucasian (Non-Hispanic)", and sometimes it's just "Caucasian" or "White." They make it needlessly particular and inconsistent, so it's probably the same for some prison systems, which leads to a lot of these discrepancies.
 
Hispanic/latino isn't a race. All these are latinos.

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In the United States, we always distinguish between Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites on most demogaphic forms and inquires, including the Census. So Hispanic is treated as a race here both casually and professionally.
 
In the United States, we always distinguish between Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites on most demogaphic forms and inquires, including the Census. So Hispanic is treated as a race here both casually and professionally.
No, that's ethnicity. The issue is obviously that US federal agencies have limited and sometimes inconsistent ways to categorize race. The federal bureau of prisons only seems to acknowledge four different races, for example:
 
Hispanic/latino isn't a race. All these are latinos.

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Louis CK is another good example of this. While there are Hispanic people where you can be fairly sure of their heritage by looking at them, there are others where you can't tell. I don't think anyone is looking at Danny Trejo thinking "maybe he's Hispanic, but maybe he isn't," but Louis CK is Hispanic, and people generally didn't realize that until he talked about it.
 
Louis CK is another good example of this. While there are Hispanic people where you can be fairly sure of their heritage by looking at them, there are others where you can't tell. I don't think anyone is looking at Danny Trejo thinking "maybe he's Hispanic, but maybe he isn't," but Louis CK is Hispanic, and people generally didn't realize that until he talked about it.

Linda Carter, too.

A lot of Americans still don't know that Gina Torres and Zoe Saldana are both Latina despite their surnames
 
Killing criminals through the justice system will result in innocents dying sooner or later and it's not worth it.
We just need to not let free this kind of people.
If it's clear cut like this then the death penalty should be a no brainer. No innocents would ever die.
 
Killing criminals through the justice system will result in innocents dying sooner or later and it's not worth it.
We just need to not let free this kind of people.
Gross, you want to imprison people? Permanently? Doing that through the justice system will results in innocents dying in prison sooner or later and it's not worth it.

Crime is a social construct. No justice no peace!
 
If it's clear cut like this then the death penalty should be a no brainer. No innocents would ever die.
It's a slippery slope.

Gross, you want to imprison people? Permanently? Doing that through the justice system will results in innocents dying in prison sooner or later and it's not worth it.

Crime is a social construct. No justice no peace!
An innocent imprisoned can always be free again. A dead one will never return to life.

You don't have to kill them, you only have to keep them locked.
 
I am not sure about that, but i know for certain that some people could never be functional in our society. There is no punishment that would make them behave.
What do you do with those people?
Send them to Australia.

New Australia, I guess. Or do like the Russians and put them into a front line meat grinder war. Or hang 'em.

Lots of solutions really, and pretty easily implemented with a little more nutsac and a bit less (misplaced) empathy.
 
An innocent imprisoned can always be free again. A dead one will never return to life.

You don't have to kill them, you only have to keep them locked.
Death row inmates have an appeals process and can be freed. And innocents have surely died in prison while serving life sentences, and even shorter sentences where they had fully expected to get out. But of course we're talking about a guy with 72 priors... what are the odds of him being innocent of all those things? 1 in the number of atoms in the universe? Probably worse?
 
These fraudulent judges that are bought and paid for, need to be held accountable like a bartender.

Same for dereliction of duty "lawmakers" and DAs.

Only then will this change.
 
About death penalty, there is a cost to not doing anything. How many victims are you willing to sacrifice to take the moral high ground in protecting monsters? I also don't think lifelong prison sentences (torture) is necessarily more moral than death penalty. If I am wrongly accused, I'd rather just die than being sent to prison for 25 years+.
 
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About death penalty, there is a cost to not doing anything. How many victims are you willing to sacrifice to take the moral high ground in protecting monsters? I also don't think lifelong prison sentences (torture) is necessarily more moral than death penalty. If I am wrongly accused, I'd rather just die than being sent to prison for 25 years+.

That's the most backwards thinking on this subject I've seen in a long time.

It's like you don't know what justice actually is.
 
I clearly explained the caveats of no death penalty and you came back with nothing. "backwards" and "don't know what justice is". I know this is not the place for a debate, but if you are going to criticize, bring some meat next time.
 
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I clearly explained the caveats of no death penalty and you came back with nothing. "backwards" and "don't know what justice is". I know this is not the place for a debate, but if you are going to criticize, bring some meat next time.

If you're wrongly accused and prosecuted (which has happened many times now), instead of actually eventually proving your innocence, you wouldn't want justice to be done and free you? Innocent people have been executed in the US, often found that way after death, sometimes found that way before execution (because the governor was "tough on crime"). That's not justice.

And a long prison sentence isn't torture. I'm not sure where you thought that up (though it is a type of slavery, per the Constitution). At least with a long sentence, you're alive and can (if you're innocent) eventually gain your freedom. Even if you're there until you die, you can pass on the lessons of your life to others.

That's why I said what I said.
 
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