Private equity snaps up disability services, challenging regulators

Crime rates have fallen. Rather than giving anyone credit, people seem more anxious and angry than ever.

Just this week about a dozen contractor vans in the neighborhood were broken into (windows smashed) by a professional crew caught on camera looking for valuables to steal. Zero of those contractors reported it since they know it’s a pointless waste of time with the local police department. Not even worth reporting to insurance since rates will more than make up for the claim in a short period of time and they expect it to happen a few times a year. The stats will report a perfect week of zero property crime.

This is a neighborhood where the cheapest property is over seven figures.

Shoplifting is effectively legalized these days. No one is enabled to stop it like we did 30 years ago when I worked a retail job. And no one wants to talk about the corrosive effect this has on society via second and third order effects. Just the liability fairy and “don’t get paid enough to deal with that”. Again, only a small percentage of such theft is ever reported these days when before it was a policy to detain and call the police for booking every single time you caught someone in the act.

So sure, violent crime is down. Misdemeanors are effectively legal where I’m at. Traffic laws more or less no longer exist on top of it all. Armed carjackings went from basically unheard of to a weekly occurrence in my neighborhood.

But all the stats state otherwise, other than perhaps the carjacking one.

It’s also a large reason folks are losing faith with institutions and experts. When the stats and “studies” match absolutely no one’s lived experience people eventually start to question things for good reason. Only so many times you can be told by wealthy suburbanites that crime is down until you tune them out.

We are rapidly moving from a high trust society to a low trust one and I think many people are being caught flat footed in the new reality.

That said, I don’t believe it’s really a government problem. It’s societal one.

Hell, I’d wager that low trust societies are more free. That’s why you see the lowest trust and the stuff you describe in the hippy liberal PNW. Highest trust society on earth, Singapore, has no real freedom of speech, of protest, of consumption, etc

I’ll take homeless, needles, and poorly reported property crime so I can have legal weed and mushrooms, and the best outdoors/weather in the world, plenty of tech jobs, and clean air and water, and almost zero fear of the cops, and low violent crime (very few homeless are armed).

Republicans used to love the word “federalism”. Don't tread on our liberal utopia, unironically.

Some murder rates have presumably fallen. But I would be wary of even that b/c I've seen the lengths that bureaucrats(police) and politicians(civilians) will go to alter statistics.

"Trust but verify." - Russian proverb.