- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
London’s murder rate has dropped to its lowest in more than a decade with police in the capital and the mayor saying it is now one of the safest cities in the western world.
I was talking about the sentence that I quoted.
In general I agree with you and I agree with the trend. However, my opinion is that the AfD and other parties wouldn’t be successful if the established parties had acknowledged the outliers.
The sentence you quoted basically says that crime rates are not the reason for the rise of right wing parties. Nothing about fearmongering, that was my point.
And how do you think those outliers should have been acknowledged? Outliers are a regular occurence in statistics. Any acknowledgment that goes beyond “Yeah, that’s strange, however this is just an outlier at the moment, nothing to worry about yet” at the first sight of such an outlier is an overreaction. The far right overreacts (and I accuse them of doing so knowingly) by erecting bogeymen and accusing others of not acknowledging a statistic outlier by not overreacting. Combine that with conservative and neoliberal politics that did not appropriately react to actual crises, continue to exacerbate the living conditions for working class citizens, amplify precarious situations and play the same bogeymen as the far right and you have a nice boost in popularity for the far right. A media landscape that on one hand supports far right narratives and on the other hand fails to contextualize news and politicians’ outputs also helps a lot.
Which implies that there is no reason for their rise but fearmongering.
It is but I would still take it serious and increase the police force. It doesn’t hurt immigrants to have more police and it removes an argument for the right wing parties.
I agree. So why keep falling into that trap?
But what if 2023 is no outlier? Look at chapter 6.2, development of violent crimes, page 41.
https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/downloads/DE/publikationen/themen/sicherheit/BMI25028_pks-2024.pdf
There seems to be a decline until 2021, after which violent crime is rising.
No, really not so. Only if you think this is supposed to be a comprehensive discussion about the rise of the far right and not a look on specific details.
Hell no. German police has systemic issues with racism, racial profiling, right wing bias, etc. Thinking more police wouldn’t hurt is a very priviledged perspective. Also, more police costs a lot of money that would be better invested in prevention (which would also be cheaper in the long run).
Who’s falling?
Again, then you should first look into the developement of known factors that influence the decision for criminal behavior, like poverty rates, rising cost of living, crises, existential fears etc. And what happened in 2022?
But also, the fearmongering of far right populists and parties began many years earlier than 2022.
Plus we should look at what kind of crimes are happening. A large portion of the rise in violent crimes is attributed to neonazis attacking left wing people, queers, migrants, politicians, etc.
And then you are specifically talking about violent crimes while the comment you answered to was talking about crime rates in general, so you slightly shifted the goalpost.
You can’t have it both ways. Above you are arguing for nuances but now focussing on the most relevant crime is wrong? “All crimes” includes crimes against immigration laws and shop lifting on one side and tax evasion on the other. I doubt that those are relevant to the discussion.
I don’t understand this.
Then that has to be changed. Otherwise the left reduces itself to a tool for the creation of the appearance of democracy.
Who is not winning?
That’s the point where the AfD is winning. The default reaction can’t be to start with talking it away.
Should be its own category. If not that would be a huge manipulation.
I mean, again, it’s abiut how to handle statistics and formulate arguments based on them. When a statement is made that “crime rates are [generally] going down”, you cannot refute that by cherrypicking one statistic with a specific context.
What doyou not understand about that?
Obviosly.
How so? How is a political movement with comparatively little influence that actually demands said change not only becoming a fig leaf for democracy but making itself one when their demand is not fulfilled? That’s not how societal change works.
What? Are you trolling now?
No, AfD is not winning at that because examining an event’s root cause is not “talking it away”. This (your) rhetoric (which is very close to AfD talking points) and it being adopted by main stream media and influential figures is what benefits the AfD. Acting for action’s sake is not helping anything.
Again, that’s why context and breakdowns of data is important. The german PKS (which is a very imperfect but unfortunately our only accessible statistic in Germany about crime (AFAIK)) lists politically motivated crimes and breaks it down into left/right, propaganda offenses, violent offenses, etc. Feel free to subtract right wing motivated violent offenses (and left wing motivated crimes against right wing persons (aka confrontational violence) as that is mostly motivated by a rise of violence from the right) and then compare the statistics of violent crimes over the years again. A quick web search brought up a rise of 17.2 percent rise in right wing motivated violence in 2024.
And yes, a twisted and out-of-context representation of statistics is bread and butter for right wing populists. They tell you that violence is growing again and that migrants are zo nlame and you should be scared of darker-skinned people. They tell you that migrants are overrepresented in crime statistics. But they don’t tell you that right wing motivated violence is growing fastest and that most of migrant crimes are crimes against immigration laws and that a lot of migrant violence is directed against other migrants.
That is why we need to look into the details and why “let’s look into the details and find out root causes” is fucking not “talking it away”.
Btw, you want to act on rising crime rates? Build youth centres. Help the poor. Raise social security. Fight worker exploitation. Invest in education. Etc pp.
I go to bed.