Well, theft can feel very violating and breaking, even if it’s not a theft that was violently done. Property crime like your house getting spray painted up with slogans you already personally agree with is violating and frustrating, too.
As far back as The Big Lebowski we, as a society, were cracking jokes about how useless cops were. When The Dude asks the officer who is helping him with his car if they have any leads on who stole and wrecked it, and the cop literally just starts laughing in his face and making fun of him.
I wonder if that’s where the disconnect lies, because women don’t feel protected by their abusers through restraining orders, and victims of theft don’t even have cops willing to make the bare minimum effort to look for their lost items. While the worst types of crime may not be increasing, the overall social coehesion continues to drop because people do not feel protected by those systems that only look to remediate after terrible things have already happened.
Whether crime is actually rising, regular people feeling like they are not protected by the systems in place means they fear those things nonetheless, because there is very little to prevent such events from happening. This also applies to mass violent crime like mass shootings. Perhaps the violence is going down, but that doesn’t make people feel any less fearful about how random it is to where you could be at school or going to a movie and suddenly be fighting for your life. Our police only deal in after-the-fact, they don’t prevent violence, and as we saw with Uvalde they often stand around with their thumbs up their asses to protect themselves.
Anyway, my two cents. When people feel like their lives can be turned upside down by crime because they can’t trust the police (up to and including thinking police are criminals themselves) they can’t really feel safe, secure, and like they can just turn off their defenses.
This goes double for those of us who see a two-tier justice system and are very fearful of how Trump is going to weaponize the DOJ against people he doesn’t like politically, even no-names like us. The fact that I have to fear my own government’s crimes against me as well as regular crime? Like, who is coming to save me? Fucking nobody.
Well, theft can feel very violating and breaking, even if it’s not a theft that was violently done. Property crime like your house getting spray painted up with slogans you already personally agree with is violating and frustrating, too.
As far back as The Big Lebowski we, as a society, were cracking jokes about how useless cops were. When The Dude asks the officer who is helping him with his car if they have any leads on who stole and wrecked it, and the cop literally just starts laughing in his face and making fun of him.
I wonder if that’s where the disconnect lies, because women don’t feel protected by their abusers through restraining orders, and victims of theft don’t even have cops willing to make the bare minimum effort to look for their lost items. While the worst types of crime may not be increasing, the overall social coehesion continues to drop because people do not feel protected by those systems that only look to remediate after terrible things have already happened.
Whether crime is actually rising, regular people feeling like they are not protected by the systems in place means they fear those things nonetheless, because there is very little to prevent such events from happening. This also applies to mass violent crime like mass shootings. Perhaps the violence is going down, but that doesn’t make people feel any less fearful about how random it is to where you could be at school or going to a movie and suddenly be fighting for your life. Our police only deal in after-the-fact, they don’t prevent violence, and as we saw with Uvalde they often stand around with their thumbs up their asses to protect themselves.
Anyway, my two cents. When people feel like their lives can be turned upside down by crime because they can’t trust the police (up to and including thinking police are criminals themselves) they can’t really feel safe, secure, and like they can just turn off their defenses.
This goes double for those of us who see a two-tier justice system and are very fearful of how Trump is going to weaponize the DOJ against people he doesn’t like politically, even no-names like us. The fact that I have to fear my own government’s crimes against me as well as regular crime? Like, who is coming to save me? Fucking nobody.