Driving Crime

So it goes, basically, like this:

A small group of young men, two to four usually, steal two cars. They use the first stolen car to force their way into a retail establishment, using it as a battering ram to break through the doors and security gates at the entrance. They then take advantage of the breach they've created to loot the place of (and I'm not kidding) Pokémon cards, Gundam models or camera-equipped drones. Or whatever else the store sells that can be resold to people looking for lower than retail prices who won't ask questions. The thieves then pile the stuff into the second stolen car and make their getaway. The store owner(s), on the other hand, are left to clean up, file insurance claims, and have the entryway to their business replaced.

It turns out that the bollards in front of the store to prevent just this sort of thing were just a bit too widely spaced, and with the right angling...

The owner of the first car finds out that their vehicle is a) wrecked and b) evidence. The owner of the second car may be luckier, it may simply be found abandoned somewhere. Emphasis on the "may."

It's becoming a more and more common modus operandi in the greater Puget Sound area, because, for all its destructiveness, it's a con-violent crime; it happens in the middle of the night, when the stores are empty. And the value of the thefts tend the kept low by the fact that the thieves seem to have specific products in mind, and they leave the rest (which can often be much more valuable).

Still, it's a problem that's going to have to be dealt with. While none of the employees of the businesses hit that spoke with could be remotely described as "Trumpists," they were all frustrated at what they saw as lenient responses to the problem. One went so far as to describe being caught as "an invitation to a free dinner." Punishments tend to last only as long as it takes to cut off an ankle monitor and join up with the gang again.

For my more overtly Progressive acquaintances, this is simply another circumstance in which the middle class is too busy "being distracted" by "punching down" to see the "real problem," which is, of course, "billionaires." One need not be a Reactionary to roll one's eyes at the idea that the "99%" (Remember them?) realizing that they have common cause against everyone wealthier than themselves and forcibly redistributing the United States' wealth and resources will fix things. Still, there's something to be said for the idea that rising poverty and poor employment prospects for the lower-skilled is driving this, and any proposed solution to crime that relies on (or attempts to force) the destitute simply accepting their lot with equanimity and hope is doomed to fail. The perverse incentives are piling up too quickly.

Were it up to me, I'd start looking into ways to make the American economy less labor efficient. A culture that, generally speaking, leans into "every person for themselves" and therefore tends towards resource hoarding, is never going to get to a point where sharing overall prosperity with people who didn't (or couldn't) directly contribute to bringing it about will meet with broad social acceptance. Likewise, having more people put in less time individually is going to be a hard sell; the old predictions that people would eventually support themselves on 10 or 20 hours of work a week are likely never coming to pass. So breaking large enterprises down into smaller ones, with all of the duplication of efforts (HR departments, suppliers et cetera) that this entails strikes me as the best way to increase the demand for labor. I get that this seems like the fetishization of toil; it's about creating busy work that doesn't need to be done, just so that people can receive grudging paychecks. I also get that it's unlikely to ever happen... people have to share their slice of the pie, and so leans into zero-sum thinking, which is a big part of the problem.

But when a large-scale economic system is both highly-efficient and winner-take-most (of not all), it's going to leave people without the means to support themselves. Starting small businesses is not impossible, but it's a high-risk strategy with a low success rate: "Never bet the rent money" still applies, and so if rent money is all that people have, it's an unwise move. No one raindrop, it's said, ever accepts responsibility for the flood, but the deluge happens nonetheless, so a solution needs to be implemented. One that doesn't impose high costs would be ideal, but rejecting solutions out of a sense of poverty is what brought King County, and the United States more broadly, so this situation in the first place.