A Brief Review of the Radical Theory That Laws Should Apply to Everyone

One of the more exhausting developments of modern society is that we’re now expected to have serious public debates over concepts that previous generations managed to grasp before breakfast.

For example:

“If you use a service, you should pay for it.”

Apparently this is now controversial. Instead we’re told that enforcing transit fares is “criminalizing poverty.” No, it’s criminalizing fare evasion.

These are different things in much the same way that “being hungry” and “stealing my lawn mower” are different things. If I can’t afford a steak, I do not receive legal authorization to leave Outback carrying one under my skirt. If I can’t afford a brand new car, GM does not send me a sympathy card saying, “Go ahead, champ.”

Life contains many such disappointments.

What’s especially strange is that we now have actual evidence that enforcing fares works. When BART installed jump-resistant fare gates, robberies dropped dramatically. Violent crime declined. Vandalism fell. Maintenance crews spent far less time cleaning piss and shit, which I think we can all agree is not the career aspiration of America’s youth, yet somehow the conclusion drawn by many people is not, “Hey, that seems effective.” Instead it’s, “Yes, but have we considered the feelings of the people jumping the gates?”

This is what @GadSaad calls suicidal empathy: allowing sympathy for one individual circumstance to overwhelm concern for everyone else sharing the system. Don’t get me wrong, compassion is important. Reality is more important. Reality rarely cares about your feelings, and has a bad habit of showing up no matter how mean the situation might be.

Reality has an annoying tendency to ignore our preferred vocabulary. You can call fare evasion “transportation insecurity” if you want. The train’s accounting department will continue to insist that revenue is better than no revenue. The laws of economics are stubborn that way.

And before anyone says, “But many fare evaders are addicts...”

I was an addict.

The thing that finally got me sober was not society insulating me from every consequence of my decisions. Consequences, unpleasant as they are, have an astonishing ability to clarify one’s priorities.

That leads to another issue that dovetails into this one.

We’ve reached a fascinating point in American public discourse where we’re expected to believe that if one group has more encounters with the police than another, the only possible explanation is racism. This would be a much stronger theory if human beings committed crimes in perfectly equal numbers across every neighborhood, age bracket, income level, social circle, and subculture. In case you have not noticed: They don’t.

Police respond to crime.

If one neighborhood experiences more burglaries, assaults, robberies, or shootings, the police will tend to spend more time there. This is not an especially controversial observation. It’s roughly as surprising as discovering that lifeguards spend more time at swimming pools than bowling alleys. Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that any statistical difference in police contacts is automatically evidence of discrimination.

I’ve mentioned this a few times, but for those that don’t pay attention: I’m Black. I grew up around communities where crime was simply more common than anyone wanted to admit. That doesn’t mean everyone there was a criminal. (Far from it.) Most people were decent folks trying to live their lives. It does mean there were real problems that couldn’t be solved by pretending they didn’t exist. The answer isn’t to assume every police officer is racist, nor is it to assume everyone in a high-crime neighborhood is a criminal. Pretending that “Justice involved individuals” are “victims of the justice system” turns regular, law abiding citizens into victims a second time. In case I have to spell it out for you, this is bad. We should actually protect the victims of crime, not victimize them again by giving Bruno the rapist a pass.

The answer is much less dramatic and therefore much less popular:

Treat people as individuals.

If someone commits a crime, investigate that person. If an officer abuses their authority, hold that officer accountable. Don’t excuse criminal behavior because of someone’s race, and don’t presume guilt or bias because of someone else’s.

This used to be called equal treatment. Now it apparently requires a panel discussion. That’s the part I find amazing. We’ve become so determined to avoid unfairness at the group level that we’ve forgotten the oldest principle of justice: individuals are judged by what they do, not by what everyone else who happens to look like them does. Somehow, we’ve managed to reinvent prejudice as progress, and we’re surprised it isn’t working. We’re also surprised that people on the short end of the stick are getting angry. We’re banning angry movies about it instead of looking inward at why the angry movie is getting attention.

Pretending actions don’t have consequences is not helping people. Consequences need to apply, except maybe in extreme edge cases. Not general cases