July 13, 2005
Racism to Stop Terrorism
Yesteray, the NYTimes (among others) reported that:
A companion of the black youth severely beaten last month in Howard Beach, Queens, in what the authorities called a hate-crime attack by whites, was arrested on Sunday night and charged with participating in a gunpoint robbery aboard a subway train in Brooklyn, the police said yesterday.
The context here is that there were multiple reports that the Howard Beach victims were wandering around in that area because they intended to steal a car, but by the time they were attacked, had decided no to do so.
All of this begs the question, if they had stolen a car what are the chances that they would have been caught. Would the car have been recovered? Who would restore the time and energy of the owner lost while the car was missing?
The bigger version of this question is how do we deal with people who are not deterred by the criminal justince system or crime that the system cannot prevent. The solution of the Howard Beach attackers was to look at these folks, GUESS that they were there to commit a crime (why were they wandering in a very white residential neighborhood at 3AM?), and respond by preemptively attacking the potential criminals.
Absent a truly pervasive big brother style police state, there will always be such crime. The damage of this sort of crime can be extensive if it is e.g. terrorists intent on doing harm.
One could argue that the Howard Beach attackers were "racist" but they were correct in their assesment of these individuals. As a society we actually want more people to act preemptively to stop crime. The problem we face is that such action will also result in innocent people being misidentified as criminals.
Perhaps the solution is to reward correct assesment [see update below]. Make sentencing much more lenient if the behavior to thwart a crime was reasonable or if the defense can present ex-post-facto "preponderance of the evidence" that there was a reasonable likelihood/risk that the victim intended to commit a crime.
Note: I think there was a Tom Cruise/Spielberg movie about this but I can't remember the name.
Update: Lonne reports that the movie I was trying to recall is Minority Report. Also, clarification: When I said we should reward correct assesments, I did not mean in an absolute sense. I just meant that we should have a reduced sentencing category for assaults on prospective criminals in the same way we have reduced sentences for murder in self-defense. Alternatively, we can rely on jury nullification to get the same result, but I am intuitively less comfortable with that model.
Posted by Alex at 06:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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You're thinking about "Minority Report." That said, rewarding people in any way for beating up other people, when they correctly determine that the people they beat up were going to commit a crime, seems like an incredibly questionable idea.
Posted by: Lonne at July 14, 2005 12:06 PM
Again, my skepticism of social science forms a lot of my take here. Criminologists will publish a paper that says, “crime is likely to be produced by this person from this environment who acts under these circumstances”. He’s black, from the inner city, and had a broken home. Crime is a social behavior we don’t like, and wish to control. But only 50% of crime gets reported. Of that 50%, only about 10% to 20% yields an arrest. Of those arrested, about 50% will have the charges dropped on a plea. Of the remaining 50%, about 50% will be convicted, and of those convicted, about 60% actually wind up in prison.
Criminologists have learned that they can’t really expect reliable data in self-reportage on serious crime, so they have to draw conclusions from looking at prison populations. They do this, and send the results to the police academy.
Because the judicial system is so overtaxed, the police officer has to use his discretion when some kid throws a rock through a window. Clearly a crime, but how much worse is this kid likely to get? The white kid from a good home probably just screwed up once, but, according to the criminologists, the black kid from the broken home is more likely to become a violent criminal. Better send him to juvie as a precaution. Then, the black kid has a record, and if the white kid shoplifts something and the black kid shoplifts something, they both wind up arrested and facing a magistrate who will use his or her discretion in judging the outcome of the white kid with no record and the black kid from a broken home who went to juvie. And so on, up each step of the justice system, until you have a prison population representing a tiny fraction of all crime, being studied by criminologists who send their results on recidivism to the police academy...
Whether or not the social order that coalesces around this represents justice I don’t know. But, the act of systematically describing it also tends to generate it’s perpetuation in a way that falsely seems outside of social opinion. I’m leery of anything that systematizes race into that context, as your official leniency towards “correct” vigilantes suggests.
I am also, incidentally, opposed to the legislation of more severe punishments for “hate crimes” by that same token.
Posted by: ooghe at July 15, 2005 11:23 AM
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