Are any of these stats actual stats or part of a study or anything other than a watermarked, compressed meme format that someone can cite? Almost election time and getting stats and facts straight rn is pretty important
The EPI seems to have credible sources in that article and seems to cite them appropriately. The larceny et al. crime stats seem to come from an FBI data set from 2012. The EPI article itself is from 2014, so that eases one potential concern of cherry picking old data compared to current inflation numbers. But it's also worth noting that ten year-old data isn't great. That said, is it hard to believe that not much has changed in ten years? The figures seem reasonably trustworthy given this brief (BRIEF) assessment.
It's not about when to want things, it's about when to look out for things. Yes, you should always be aware of tornadoes, but you should pay extra attention during tornado season.
There’s no way that the stats here are legit stats because they’d account for the most glaring issue: you’re comparing groups of people that follow the laws of economics and individuals who commit a crime.
It’s like comparing an apple to the root system of an orange tree
Like sure we can compare them, but what’s the fucking point when one is so much different…
Stealing “wages” also shouldn’t be treated the same as stealing everything out of someone’s pocket - are we talking a dollar per day? Are we talking about reports of robbery (common for insurance fraud so there’s noise in that data) or confirmed and sentenced theft? Etc etc
The big red supermarket I work for in Aus is being investigated by the government over their record profits during a cost of living crisis and all of a sudden they decided, for no reason, to check to see if they had been paying us right for the last decade and suprise, suprise, they've underpayed workers and are now paying it back as a "sorry", yeah sorry you got caught.
In Norway people are adviced to get fucked for pointing out the record profits of the grocery cartel. We have 3 chains running the same wares for similar prices. The main fruit importer is owned by two of the chains.
The chains are NorgesGruppen, Reitan-gruppen and Coop. That's it. Custom barriers are preventing any competition from establishing.
Our worst wares are of decent quality, but our best wares are of poor quality compared to other European states.
We are now the worst country on the happiness index in Scandinavia.
Please add sources to this infographic, maybe in the lower section, and this can be used as an actual, tactical weapon in everyday interactions.
And no, this comment is not an attempted underhanded attack against this infographic. People are taught in modern global world to trust researched sources. It's an rhetorical weapon, even if based on truth (which I hope this infographic is based on).
And no, I'm not a fucking LLM. Im just finnish and a little bit drunk.
I had an employer who would tell us that we were committing "Time Theft" any time we were on the clock and not actively working on something at any moment of the day. When California DoL started cracking down on my city, my employer started complaining about government overreach and "State Sanctioned Time Theft" when he was required to give us 2x 15 min breaks on the clock on top of a whopping 30 minutes off the clock for lunch.
I had an employer who tried to make us clock out if we were at work and there was no actual work for us to do.
Thankfully, he was the sort of employer you could literally say "go fuck yourself" to and not get fired. Which every one of the handful of employees at his small business did. So he went back on that.
Because the gov gets it's cut. That's why. It's easier to keep 1 big corp happy so long as they shuffle over that 15% or less.
Plus, no one in gov wants to be the one that forced a large corp to shutdown costing a bunch of normal people jobs.
Why do you think military contractors setup factories in all 50 states to make 1 type of aircraft..... Senators that don't want more fighter jets? Well the factory that employs 2000 of it's citizens might just have to close down then .... Oh I see you changes your mind ..here's a campaign contribution instead
If the government was motivated by getting a cut we'd still have correct tax rates for billionaires. Unfortunately, everything in government is done by corrupt individuals whose signatures can be purchased for laughably small amounts. It's exactly as you point out, one campaign contribution and they will sign whatever legislation you want.
Same with SCOTUS but they don't have campaigns so you have to straight-up bribe them with RVs or luxury fishing trips.
Though they refer indirectly to the 1982 SCOTUS case of Harlow V Fitzgerald, this law applies to politicians and judges as well as police. They just haven't upheld it in over 150 years, because someone illegally changed the law in 1874, and it wasn't noticed until last year.
Ulysses S Grant referenced section 1983 of the federal code when he was pulled over, for the third time in his life, in 1872, while sitting as president, for "speeding on a horse in the city limits of Washington DC." The officer tried to let him go, and he said that Congress had just passed a law about that, and no one, not even a sitting president, is above the law. He paid the ticket. The other two times he was pulled over he was only a general, and it was in the early 1860s while a minor bit of treason and insurrection was going on.
That's only from wages, it's not counting all the other forms of crimes that companies do, like speculation with physical stock, false marketing, investor fraud, inventory destruction, monopoly, intelectual theft, etc etc
This isn't even countin the theft of the surplus labor value the parasites steal away from the working class. That same money is then used to purchase the government over time.
I understand that argument, but this is clean cut "by law" of literally law breaking theft. Our social contract "allows" exploitation of the working class. :(
Oh as if the government wasnt ways their creature. Before they were ceos and landlords inheriting daddy's class ring and property deeds, they were barons and lords inheriting daddy's title.
Also not represented here is asset forfeiture by law enforcement which is now routine. In 2015-ish, it was about $5 billion a year, nationwide.
Some states have made laws against it. Some states don't enforce those laws while others do. (Police often will take that chance.) I don't know how the figure has shifted since.
According to the reports to Congress from the DOJ, they are seeing a steady increase of sized assets, however these reports clearly don't cover the majority of asset forfeiture cases as the balance sheet is in the low millions, rather than billions.
Funny story. (Funny as in peculiar, not as in laughable.) So in the 1970s during the cocaine trafficking wars, congress ordered the FBI to gather all the officer-involved homicides across the nation and report them to the BJS for analysis for sake of transparency. It was an order the FBI ignored. In the meantime there were enough mismatches between known forensic police reports, known forensic data and witness accounts to start some volunteer projects to track officer-involved killing. Since FOIA information was resistant to release, and sometimes came over-redacted, they relied on tracking incidents through news, obituaries and coroner reports to link dead bodies to police bullets, or police brutality.
It was a thing and a concern, and like our obscenely terrible prisons, no-one cared much.
...Until 2014 and the killing of Michael Brown leading to the Ferguson unrest of 2014, and a public story as problematic as the Warren Commission statement. Witness accounts still conflict with the police report which was revised several times post hoc to match the ballistics, eventually leading to an accounting suggesting Brown acted very strangely (rather than getting shot while his hands were up, consistent with the witness accounts.) Two things really put in sharp bas relief the problematic nature of the incident:
One was that Brown (dead or alive) was allowed to sit and bake in the sun for hours, and Wilson was in no hurry to get medical care to a bleeding Brown, which ran contrary to the image of law enforcement presented for years in Law & Order and dozens of other pro-police TV shows. And secondly, the police response to the protest was to send in officers by the hundreds in their MRAPs, show poor fire discipline brandishing their weapons at the protestors, and then, at the minute of Curfew, roll around in the MRAP, wrecking lawns parks and streets and lobbing CS Gas grenades willy-nilly into backyards and homes. The police looked like children on sugar and caffeine playing with NERF weapons, whooping like drunken Texans. And half the nation thought this was acceptable, possibly coinciding with the Ferguson affair taking place in a black-majority neighborhood.
That week, several news agencies started their own projects to catalogue deaths cause by law enforcement. It was a bad time for it, since phone cameras were becoming ubiquitous. Police started trying to confiscate phones (they still do, even in states with laws to protect the recording of police in action). The volunteer services tracking police violence traded notes. In 2014, the Washington Post tracked about a thousand deaths by law enforcement. Around 2015, meta analysis averaged it about four a day, noting that a lot of them fall through the cracks. A report in 2017 showed that precinct coroners routinely cover for their brethren in blue to erase questionable action. A lot of people had strokes or heart attacks or some other fatal outcome just before police bullets punched through them. So the total officer-involved death-toll could be under reported by as much as 75%, much like sexual assault.
After George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020 (during the COVID-19 lockdown) and the whole nation erupted in protests and unrest, the FBI decided it might be a good idea to start tracking and reporting officer-involved homicide, as they were asked to do decades previously. This is not to necessarily get an accurate report, but to publish an official report that people can point to when they want to say it's not really that bad. After all precincts self-report, and we know how honest they are inclined to be, right?
Well it turns out they're not even willing to report. It turns out police generally are crap at filing incident reports, unlike Nicholas Angel of the MPS. Even if the FBI wanted to just seize precinct reports and sift through them, they're not there, or often miss critical details. And our precincts internal affairs subdivisions are more interested in keeping incidents low rather than running a clean precinct. These all inform the current ACAB assumption today: It is just plum impossible to be a good cop on account that everyone is expected to cover for the bad ones. And they do, even when they lose sleep about it, go full alcoholic and eventually quit. Andy Taylor, Barney Miller and even James Gordon would have no place in law enforcement in the US.
So, BJS stats are official but we can expect that incidents that make the justice system look bad (at any level) are under-reported.
Anyhow, you can check out Tim Cushing's beat on Techdirt as asset forfeiture news often flashes across there, including the rare happy moments when someone gets their money back, or an officer gets rightly dressed down for abusing his power to take stuff.
I don't know how to read the balance sheets but all the numbers are reported in thousands, so it looks like billions to me. (I'm not sure which numbers refer to assets actually seized)
Honestly how does somebody even figure a job is worth doing for less than $7.25? The only way that job even pays for the food needed to replace the calories is if they live off of homemade bread and multivitamins, without home heating or running water.
Probably something like seasonal farm workers living in a temporary housing complex and eating from the harvest.
They didn't take that amount. That was the amount fined. You notice how they worded all that shit ambiguously?
Even if it were a dollar for dollar comparison you are taking .04% of the economy of just the states. That's a very low percentage of the overall economy.
As if the logic of "Oh you think stealing is bad? Try stealing an entire nation's GDP then we'll talk" wasn't troll enough, seeing someone say "topkek" is the easiest way to know it's fine to block them. Worst case scenario you're not actually a troll you just had a really, really stupid moment which could be forgiven but alas not by me not this time