What has caused this increase in criminal behavior? Used to be you could leave your doors unlocked and never worry about a thing.
Two parents working, nobody home during the day.
Also, neighbors don’t interact anymore, people don’t look out for each other like they used to.
We seldom locked our doors over a 20-year span while our kids were growing up; the Chief of Police lived across the street and his kids spent time at our house.
“What has caused this increase in criminal behavior?”
Authoritarian societies are typically low trust and high crime societies. When the societal response to hard work and legitimate accumulation of wealth is to devise ways to steal it, to encourage the theft of private property, and to lionize the thieves (be they criminals or government agents) then criminal behavior increases.
Most urban police departments these days are not trustworthy. If you live in Baltimore or Albuquerque you’re better off not calling the police if you have a problem.
Interesting is the fact that these cities do not trust citizens to carry guns. The lack of trust ends up creating a self-feeding monster where there are simply fewer and fewer good guys.
But look at high trust areas where armed citizens openly carry and their police don’t think twice about it and you see less crime and less need for surveillance.
I go shopping with a .45 on my hip and no one cares. I can also leave my purse on the seat of my car with the keys in the ignition and know that all of it will be there when I return.
I live in Wyoming.
If I travel to Salt Lake City I can’t wear my gun, can’t leave my purse unattended, can’t leave my car unlocked, and can’t leave my kids alone. Denver is even worse. Much worse.
It all comes down to trust and whether or not we encourage it.
Michael Bloomberg, for instance, does not trust average citizens to be armed and instead thinks only the elites should be armed while the serfs are unarmed. And then he wonders why New York is such a cesspool of crime compared to Cody, Wyoming.
Trust.