Before I switched majors to information systems and created a lucrative career in IT, I had wanted to work in law enforcement – specifically the FBI. Here is what my life plan was – as a kid.

  1. Go to West Point. Be an officer. I had been a chess player at the world level in my teens, so strategy and tactics were always fascinating to me regarding military victories over history.
  2. Get out, go to law school. Get a JD. Either prosecute criminals or join the FBI. I had always wanted to protect others from the time I was a child, and I never backed down to a bully. Ever.
  3. Work in the FBI.
  4. Run for congress so I could make policy changes.

So many flaws with this idea. I am aware. But what happened eventually was when I was in college, you hear about the “baby in a microwave” thing. That is, you hear anecdotal stories of an officer coming on scene and discovering a baby murdered by it benig put in the microwave. My gut instinct when hearing that was to draw my weapon and empty the magazine into the offender. I realized at the age of 19 or so that I did not have the ability to stop this form of rage. Law enforcement was perhaps not in the cards for me. I did have many scholarships to college, and one thing I had wanted to do was to take a semester off of college and go into the reserves. My mother basically said “no” – which I didn’t really give a shit about, but the main funding I had for college told me that I could not take a semester off without losing funding. So – my ideas of going into the military then were dashed, and my partying in college had me gain like 130 pounds, so I was not going into any military. Furthermore, my 20s were party central on the weekends, and I lost track of my count of suitors at that time in my life – which means that I had zero chance of ever running for office.

This is what my 20s looked like.

Instead, I went a path where I could use my investigative mindset. My need for protecting others. My need to understand the law – and apply this to IT. What I found then playing armchair QB with crime is that how the CJ system is highly inefficient. It is heavily reliant on personnel to physically be present, kick doors in, and haul people off. What I had found in my CJ classes were a ton of people who were dedicated and driven to help people – but the “smart” people tended to go to law school, be doctors, engineers, and chased professions that didn’t get you killed for almost no pay. This created a massive intelligence gap where the more intelligent criminals could “out smart” the police.

Often – you then have the “smart” people getting law degrees. But do you want to spend $300k for a law degree to work for $40k a year as a prosecutor for York, PA DA’s office? Or, perhaps it made more sense to charge $125 per hour as a family lawyer or $500 an hour for criminal defense? Unless your family was independently wealthy, most people who got law degrees put in minimal time in the DAs office and then went into private practice. This is perhaps why you have DAs that went to prestigious schools and then run for office. But most of them also may not understand law enforcement well – and hyper focus on elements of a crime and strong arming people into pleading out.

But in my 50s now I love to write about things in my head. Things I see as perhaps common sense – and other things that are well thought out and strategic ideas.

Let’s look at two sides of the coin.

  1. Crime prevention
  2. Enforcement once crimes are committed

Prevention

  1. morality Most common people in this country have very little understanding of the law. Big picture is this – you try and teach your kids right from wrong. The BIG things. Don’t hurt people. Don’t steal. What are the best ways to do this?
    • Lead your children and community by example
    • Teach them the bible. Do not “covet” in a sense is one of the biggest things I am seeing wrong with the more recent communist/socialist movement. They try to tear down those with wealth out of envy and greed.
    • Have two parent households, when possible
  2. Opportunity. Why would people steal? Maybe they need to steal to put food on the table. Most of us GET this. But all too often today, theft is committed by people who need a drug fix. Consider if inner cities had massive amounts of jobs available at good wages?
  3. Monitoring. Cameras around a lot. People don’t walk up to my door and doo bad shit because they would be on camera. If most city streets had small cameras monitoring, it could deter crime

Enforcement

  1. Pareto chart. The pareto chart is used in a lot of industries to solve problems. Consider the concept of “80% of the issues are from 20% of the causes”. When you understand this concept, it’s where the “3 strikes” stuff came in. I feel like all crimes need to have different sentencing guidelines. If you are a first time offender for most crimes, I understand probation. But that is your slap on the wrist. HERE – is where you try and understand how and why someone got into the criminal justice system in the first place. THIS is your ONE CHANCE to change. PERIOD. A second offense, no matter how minor, requires jail time. A third offense, jail time. But each crime can have a sentencing guideline as “newer offender” and “repeat offender” and the more you have in your jacket, the longer you are sentenced for. You end up removing the worst elements of society from society for very long periods of time. One kicker here is that you will also have violations removed from your record after so much time – depending on the type of crime. A fist fight in a bar at 21 should have it removed from your record a year later. A DUI where you killed someone may be 20 years. Murder? Forever. Child S&X cases? Forever. Most of this is determined by recidivism rate of the crimes. A bar fight could be a youthful indiscretion having one beer too many, and the recidivism rate is in the single digits. But the child issues could have a 90% recidivism rate and thus this needs to stay on your record forever.
  2. Independent commissions to review cases – I do not like how someone could be in the crosshairs of the government and be strong armed to plea out because they cannot afford a good defense. I believe cases should be reviewed by independent commissions. Those who have the most evidence for the prosecution are dismissed as “plausible”. For example, police caught them in the act of killing someone. Those where it’s highly circumstantial, the government is required to pay an elite defense attorney. All high end defense attorneys will be required to donate x amount of hours to this system if they are given a license to practice and are in the private sector. They aren’t working for free- but the government is required to spin the wheel and pay a private attorney on those cases that are the weakest. This keeps prosecutors from strong arming people to plea out weak cases.
  3. Law revisions. There are so many laws on the books now, it’s very hard for most ordinary people to understand they are committing crimes. Often, prosecutors will overcharge someone to scare them into plea deals. It makes sense for all laws to have an expiration date and need to be re-upped by the local towns/cities/states. This can remove ancient laws from 1795 that don’t apply today, but some prosecutor could dig it out of the closet and use for pressure.

Investment and crime is your biggest issue, overall

I have been someone who has been a savvy investor the last 15 years or so, and hope to retire at some point early. When you do investing in gold and silver mining stocks, your first question is “jurisdiction”. You have a high risk of loss of investment if you buy stocks in an area that a coup may happen. How is this different from this?

When you are an investor, you have to understand risk of loss. Where the dmeocrats and republicans may differ greatly on this is that democrats seem to come from an area of compassion. They may not like drug usage, but they should be able to shoot up in a safe place. Drug treatment facilities. Inner city programs. I was in support of a lot of this 25 years ago from a position of compassion.

In practicality, you never fix the problems, you enable them. And worse yet, this leads to capital flight. If crime is going up in the neighborhood, no one wants to have a store there due to graffiti, theft, violence, and vandalism. This is why most major cities in this country are overrun with scourge. A policy and position meant to try and be compassionate to those down on their luck has led to democrat cities mismanaging billions of dollars. Cronyism then has had massive amounts of “non-profits” bringing in billions of dollars with little to no oversight – which has led us to the “Learing Center” debacle. But, it’s a microcosm of what is wrong in every major city today.

Republican “policy” is to be hard on crime. If you can remove the criminal elements from neighborhoods and make them safer, investment comes back. With respect to DC, I am 50 years old with a wife and a 17 and 6 year old. There was zero chance I would take them to DC. The bums there. The carjackings. The robberies. The scourge. Zero chance. What Trump did I applaud from a policy perspective. Assisted police with the National Guard to reduce crime in the worst neighborhoods in America. Then, he directed the Secretary of the Interior to beautify the city.

Now I want to go visit!!!!

This attracts tourism. This invites restaurants and shops to open up to cater to tourists. This creates jobs. This increases your tax base. It provides higher paying jobs to residents.

Costs too damn high!

I am appalled at how high rents are in places. Most people just want to watch a CNN clip for 20 seconds and mindlessly blame Trump. Or Biden. Or Obama. Most do not grasp the overarching understanding of price. Price is a combination of supply and demand.

Where the bitcoin people get things wrong is they talk ONLY about a supply of 21 million bitcoin. This argument does not incorporate demand into this. “institutions are coming”. Why? Because someone told you? This is a fundamental misunderstanding of economics at the 101 level. I equated this to my kid’s finger painting is one of a kind. It’s low supply, so it must be worth $1m. I get yelled at. But it’s accurate. Now, imagine I was some world-known painter? And my son at 5 puts a painting out, his first finger painting. And – it’s objectively decent? I could see how someone may “speculate” that my son could be a world famous painter someday and his one of a kind first finger painting could be valuable! But – that insinuated a demand would occur based on a specific condition that is highly speculative. It doesn’t mean the bitcoin people are wrong about supply. It means they are wildly speculating on demand to come.

Let’s now apply this to housing. Let’s assume your town has 1,000 apartments and they all rent for $1,000 each. There is a supply and demand homeostasis. Let’s now dump 1,000 more people into your town. When someone leaves an apartment, someone is willing to pay $1500 to get that apartment. Someone else is willing to pay $1800. If you are an apartment landlord (like myself) – you understand that the VALUE of the apartment is – whatever anyone is willing to pay. The more demand, with stagnant supply, the more price goes up.

To solve this issue, there’s only one of two legitimate ways to do this.

  1. Increase supply
  2. Decrease demand

However, the government of New York thinks that freezing rents at $1000 solves this problem. This is where the commies are wrong on 1,000 fronts. When you have more residents in an area, and demand for services goes up – this price action also goes into effect for everything else. Groceries. Bagels. Movies. Prices go higher, because people are willing to pay for it. This means the landlords prices go up. Maintenance. Taxes. Utilities -but the price of revenue is stagnant. This then means landlords cannot pay to maintain the places and be profitable. This is then more or less a forced liquidation. The place needs to be sold. However, it’s rent controlled, so any new buyer needs to make a profit. This drives down the value of this type of real estate, which then means less real estate taxes. So you have to jack up the RATES. This then ensures no one really wants to buy that place, and this is where Mamdani is talking about the government taking over this.

And this is where you run from this…

To this

In a place like NY, to solve these rents, you can build UP. Which is what they have done over the years. But in many smaller cities, they do not have subways, buses, etc and have stagnant housing.

This is why places like Springfield, OH were overrun by higher costs when Haitians overran them. The socialists and communists are pitched that higher prices are due to “greed”. Of course, greed is BAD! But in a capitalist society, investment has risk. You have upside risk (massive profit) and downside risk (massive losses).

Consider you live in Springfield, OH. You are a real estate developer, and realize that rents are $1500 and you can make massive amounts of money by renting to them at $1500. You put in millions of dollars, and suddenly the Haitians are all deported. Now, you are about to lose millions because no one wants to rent from you at $1500. You have to drop your price. To $1300. To $1200. To $1000. But remember, before, there was a balance at $1000 rent. But you just added 50% more units and there’s not enough renters to fill them. You are dropping your price to $700 a month just to get vacancies filled and are losing money every month now.

The RISK in capitalism is on the investor. Governments should not be involved in this, other than to set clear rules about how the system works. For example, we have immigration laws. We aren’t allowed to hire illegal immigrants. We aren’t allowed to rent to them.

All of this is now to say that people who are having problems making ends meet are trying to blame greedy people – at the same time they are voting to let millions of people in here, which are the root cause of prices rising.

The FLIP side of this is deflation. So, you can understand to an extent why you have immigration quotas. Maybe we let in 1 million people per year. Why? Because we want a small and steady inflation. Our birth rates are plummeting, and with that, the risk is in 20 years that there’s not enough renters. And when vacancies happen, rents plummet. Property values plummet. If you hold dollars, the deflation means your dollars go further. But tax money drops. And – cost of living drops. Your salaries plummet.

So there is a healthy balance between letting a million in per year legally – that we screened to be harmless to us, and helpful in specific job markets we were struggling to fill jobs with. We welcome this! But when you turn a blind eye to your borders for 4 years and let in estimates of 20 million people – well, you not only get much higher prices, but now, you also statistically have let in a lot of bad people. These bad people then increase the criminal element. Make the cities look like shit, make drugs more available, and drive down investment.

Democrats in cities continue to vote for the same things causing them the problems. The answer is not more tax money. The answer is to remove those who do not belong, get tough on crime, and clean up cities while eliminating the waste, fraud, and abuse that has occurred. Democrats cannot fight this – so they attack the character of their opponents only. Anyone who has taken criminal justice classes, invested, and taken economics would easily agree with me.

IT crimes, technology, and making a safer world

My minor in college was physical security and I worked a few thousand hours of industrial security during college. I had created security plans for buildings and companies. Later, I created security plans for server rooms and IT storage.

Here are some basic ideas of security, without getting too much into the weeds:

  1. Borders/fences establish a perimeter. You hear GGG a lot. Gates, guns, and guards. This allows you to protect your borders. You do this with a fence in your back yard. You lock your doors. The same applies to border security for the country.
  2. Identification. If you go somewhere, you must identify yourself to establish if you are welcome there. This makes sense with passports. It makes sense at border crossings. Hell, one of the biggest dems out there Taylor Swift had photo ID needed, walls around her event, and police to patrol and enforce the guest list.
  3. Lighting. Often, many people do “security by obscurity”. If they don’t know it’s there, they won’t steal it. But what you want to do is to put lighting around the perimeter of your home. Motion sensors. Attackers cannot use darkness to then obscure themselves from you. I use motion detector around houses, and the US border patrol can do this.
  4. Cameras. Not only do they record to see what happened, but they are important to thwart crime in progress. But the biggest thing is “deterrence”. If you are a home robber and you are casing neighborhoods, you want to avoid places with cameras. Why? “The juice isn’t worth the squeeze”. Most home robbers want soft targets. You hear a dog barking? Not good.
  5. Guns. Anyone in my life, I tell them to get guns. Talk about guns. Some in my life don’t want me to advertise that I own guns. While I get that, I also make it a policy that if someone breaks into my home, they are leaving in a body bag. What they do with that information is up to them. This is not only meant as a deterrent, it’s also because I do not want to kill someone. But if you come into my home and threaten me and my family, and you are apprehended and get out in 6 months, I now am looking over my shoulder the rest of my life that you are coming back for me. This is not happening. I very much believe in the second amendment as a means of deterring crime. All of the anti-gun people out there are simply drinking kool-aid. If every home was an armed home, and they knew how to use it, and there was a policy that killing intruders could never be prosecuted, ever, then there would no longer be home invasions in this country. One of my homes is in the mountains. You have to honk at someone’s mailbox before approaching so you aren’t shot for trespassing. Property rights are a BIG deal in rural America, yet the commies here want our people in inner cities to be defenseless.
  6. Police. While patrol helps to be a deterrent in some respects, it can make others feel uneasy that police are just looking to find a reason to crack skulls and ruin lives that night. When I worked security, I did “rounds” to patrol and make sure things weren’t broken into, safety items were adhered to, and things weren’t walking out of the back of factories. I have some good stories about this time in my life. “Defund the police” was the dumbest thing yet. While some would back pedal and say, “that’s not what we meant” – the truth is, they are on the side of criminals and do not want people punished or held accountable for hurting others. Police have to always be worried someone is out to kill them. But guess what? If the pareto chart works and the most violent people are no longer on the streets. If cameras are preventing crime. Street lights are lit up. Everyone has guns to protect themselves – this is a much safer world for police to navigate.

When I was going through my MS in cyber security, I wrote some papers I wrote about today on X and wanted to discuss the implications of these papers.

The first had to do with having a digital ID in order to use the internet. The second had to do with license plate cameras everywhere. Both of these have severe implications to modern crime.

Digital ID

35 years ago, you would see how a local crew robbed a bank. Today, banks counter this with not having a ton of cash on hand. But the robbers went a bit more on the sophisticated side and began cyber theft. The thing is with a lot of this, is that attribution can be extremely difficult. Just think of that time on Facebook 10 years ago when SilentBob25 decided to tell you a lot of profanities and threatened you and your family. No one know who that is.

My idea was imagining the cyber realm like a series of major highways and smaller roads. They all connected. Imagine in the US, how you have license plates to operate a vehicle, and a license you use that is given after you passed traffic tests and safety tests. The same could be enforced for the major highways of the internet. Imagine you want to go to your bank. Or shopping. You drive there and use your debit card. So sites of consequence – like shopping, banks, etc may require this cyber ID to get on this highway. More or less, like a VPN where you are authorized to be on it. If you fail to sign into this, then your bank won’t be accessible. You can’t shop at Amazon. This has the promise of significantly reducing cyber crime.

But on the flip side, how many of you want to just go blogging. Or lookup some weird itch you have. Or bitch about the president and policy. Or – go to adult sites. You should be able to go onto the wild west of the internet to do all of this, without government infringing upon your privacy.

When I worked in the DoD for 15 years, we used RMF as a means of securing our IT. When you go to Bob’s discount grocery online, how the hell is your information being protected? You think Steve in IT is smarter than the Chinese? You have nation states that can infiltrate all of this. Imagine if Bob’s discount grocery store then applied to be on this secure highway. They would have IT regulatory items to do, and then they would be massively de-risked. Sites like this that want your business would WANT to be connected to the secure highway.

Ramifications are that cyber crime as a whole could drop 95% or more. In the DoD, we used “smart cards” which could be issued to everyone like driver’s licenses. Children would have one as well to access children’s sites. Sites like adult sites would still require an ID, but that would be only to verify it wasn’t a child accessing and there’s no log of this.

License plate cameras

Maybe 2009 or so I pitched an idea to my company. They declined to pursue it due to possible privacy concerns. Spineless for not trying. The idea was this: have every police car and traffic camera in the country tied into a central system where every license plate is logged. At first glance, you say, “not cool, I don’t want my government tracking me”. You would be correct, sort of.

As a citizen, if you are walking down the street, you have no expectation of privacy. Anyone is permitted to take a picture of you. The difference is, this isn’t the government “tracking” you. My system, however, used a Chinese wall of sorts. It had separation of duties. Today, if police want to search your home, they must get a warrant and sufficient evidence must be presented. Judges act as gate keepers so the government is not infringing upon your rights of privacy without merit. My idea was to have a 3 party system here.

  • Police could request information from a Judge
  • A Judge grants the request, but the request is fulfilled by a separate team. Perhaps a division like IA that is separate from “normal” policing. Those who fulfilled these requests were then granted a “Top Secret” clearance like SCI and they were bound to secrecy. They would fulfill the judge’s order and give the result back to the judge.
  • The judge would review the results and give back to law enforcement.

At face value, this can appear slow, but what you would do is have dedicated people for this, and this is their only jobs. The promise of this system is to solve major violent crimes in minutes rather than days or months – if not ever.

I did this because I was worried about child abduction. Having a new child, you constantly worry about the bad elements of society out there. Imagine today you have an amber alert. This gets sent out on phones and on billboards. But if you have the license plate of the person, imagine that over the last 5 years, that car has had perhaps 25 million pictures taken of the license plate of the car. You work two elements:

  1. Where does this person go a lot? It can perhaps give you 5-8 locations the person may be, and within minutes of an Amber alert happening, you can have officers at all 5-8 of those locations.
  2. Look back time. When issued, you may have had the plate scanned 2 minutes ago by an officer on I95 going southbound 3 states away. Literally within 30 seconds you would have an approximate location with new camera snapshots coming in real time.

Now imagine this for a murder. Or a drive by. Or anything like that where you can understand where a crime committed, and then piece together evidence. You may know of the 25 license plates captured within a block of the crime scene within 5 minutes of the crime, then cross that with the phone records in that area, and compare them to the victim – and you may have a good suspect list to start from. Now consider the bank robbers – and the bank parking lots and ATMs have cameras that feed into this system. Now the bank robbers steal, and their getaway car is tracked in near real time. You would need stolen vehicles to do this, and perhaps many of them may have GPS tracking. This could almost eliminate bank robberies.

The net effect of this is that when a crime is committed, movement is almost impossible. Getting away with a crime is near impossible.

Privacy concerns can ALWAYS be mitigated by 3rd parties. “Fruits of the poisonous tree” can be removed by the 3rd party as a violation of the 4th amendment. If crimes are caught on camera, in public, they can be prosecuted. People don’t want to be surveilled. However, if the system is setup so that only reported crimes can then be reviewed on camera, this may give residents more assurance.

While you always have to balance safety and security, most people aren’t aware of nuance. Federated systems can help reduce privacy violations.

When I first started working in the real world, we would do “scrapes”, and this has a very valuable lesson with it. Assume you are doing any task. You need to count 100 widgets. Your first attempt gets 85 of these on the first “scrape”. You then make efforts to locate the next batch, and you get 10 on your next “scrape”. On the third attempt, 2 more. Each and every scrape requires more resources. More effort. More hands on. These are then labeled “exceptions” you try and work to zero.

While you cannot eliminate crime as a whole, what you want to ideally do is setup systems where your first “scrape” gets maximum results. While each additional scrape follows the laws of diminishing returns, the idea is to work this as a process that repeats.

Imagine now we wish to setup cameras everywhere and do the license plate stuff. We flip it on, and in the first month, there are 3,000 crimes we solve at 93%. We find that of those 3,000 crimes, 2700 of them are repeat offenders and with this but are actually only committed by 500 people, and are pulled off the streets in mandated jail sentences. 300 of them are first time offenders and on probation.

Now, the next month, do you see 3,000 more crimes and 93% solving rates? Not likely. The next month, word may get out that we mean business. And, most of the crimes were done by a small number of people who are now in jail. The next month, it’s 700 crimes committed by 300 people and a solve rate of 94%. On this “second scrape” we now have removed 300 more criminals – and quite possible that some of these people were ones who got away with crimes from the first month.

By the third month, most criminals are now in jail. There are 100 crimes, by 75 people. Most of these are first time offenders and go on probation. The 25 repeat offenders are in jail now.

The concept is, that over time, crime can be driven down by removing the worst of the worst offenders and actually ensuring they go to jail and not probation. Streets are more safe. Investment starts coming back in. And people can now get jobs. No need for crime, for the most part.

This is how these types of systems can rapidly solve cases, reduce massive amounts of violent crime, and quickly turn around cities.

As these crimes are being solves and people are going to jail – it makes sense here to then also use those on probation to do community service to clean up the graffiti and scourge.

If you are a drug addict, you are picked up for public intoxication and sentenced to 90 days in a rehab. This is a jail-like situation so those who are put there cannot leave. The first month or so is getting them clean, second month is about therapy, and third month is about re-integration. If they relapse, back they go. Next time it’s 120 days. Relapse again? 180 days.

Drug dealers get 20 year sentences. I do not care about flipping them for a bigger bust up the food chain. If you deal heroin or meth, 20 years. Labor camps. Beautification details. Not axes and rocks, but pick up trash at parks. We need to send a clear and convincing message to the country that if you deal, you are going to jail and we are throwing away the key. While this SOUNDS like cruel and unusual punishment – one can argue on the flip side that if you are dealing someone fentanyl or heroin that it is perhaps assisted suicide or even attempted murder. If you look at it through that lens, you are massively reducing the overdoses.

We should not have doctors giving away opiods like candy. This is where many get hooked. There should be legal alternatives in the CBD world that can help with pain management and not mean you are addicted to a life-taking drug.

Summary

In my world, this is what happens:

  1. Only those who are legally to be here, would be here.
  2. People can protect themselves against violence in their homes.
  3. Those who commit crimes will indeed serve long prison times
  4. Those who sell class 1 drugs go to prison for 20 years
  5. Those on probation must do community service to clean up cities
  6. Cities that are cleaned up get more tourism and investment capital
  7. More jobs means less people turning to crime
  8. Drug addicts on the street are removed off of the street and sentenced to rehab.
  9. Robbing banks, doing drive bys, and kidnapping are “legacy” crimes that can no longer be gotten away with
  10. Online crimes are cut by 95%. Children are protected from adult content
  11. Police have better tools and are patrolling safer neighborhoods. Less police needed organically over time
  12. CJ system cannot railroad people with weak evidence anymore – as tax payers will pay high prices to defend those with weak evidence against them
  13. Criminal offenders get crimes removed from their public background checks over time, based on the type of crime. Allows people who made a mistake at 18 to then have a “normal” life, after taking accountability for their crime.
  14. Technology needs Chinese walls, federated systems, and privacy controls to prevent federal government from surveilling you without probable cause and warrants.
  15. Investment into major cities would POUR IN like a fire hose at the massive opportunities caused by low real estate values and high crime. The elimination of crime in areas significantly reduces risk and can cause upside risks to be tremendous.
  16. Cities will attract massive populations back to them for tourism, entertainment, and shopping.

However, do to the skeletons, there’s no way in hell I can affect this change other than giving other people the ideas through my keyboard. At 18, I thought the glory and importance of being a congressman was something I wanted. As a 50 year old father of 2, I just want safe neighborhoods and our country to be better than today. I don’t care who gets the credit. I feel I have the answers, and if anyone wants to take this and give me a shout out, cool. If not, I don’t care.

I love this country. Instead of bitching about things that are abstract claims, I provide concrete solutions to improve this country – a little at a time.