I'm am explicitly rejecting that analogy. Human behavior is not like weather at all. The expectations that we set for our community/society is important.
Bad weather is indifferent to the shaking fists. It won't get worse or more frequent if people fail to shake their fist. But human behavior is very much responsive to feedback from other humans. I'm arguing that we should all be shaking our fists when we see extortionists at work as well as tracking them down and punishing them. And we should also take care to protect ourselves from them. It isn't a binary choice.
The first words I wrote were 'of course they're culpable.' Human behavior is very much like the weather in that our actions today shape the environment of tomorrow, albeit by long and often obscure causal chains.
Nowhere id I assert that it's a binary choice, and that interpretation of ym words only make sense if you ignore chunks of what I'm saying. Over the near term, you're not going to eliminate crime by moral suasion so it's important to have a strategy to mitigate its predictable incidence while we also work on the problem of how to reduce crime through deterrence, reducing incentives, and so on.
Crime is a public health issue. It shares common causes with ill health, particularly poverty, and fear of violent crime is itself a major cause of anxiety. Community development in pre-school education, parental education, and among ethnic minorities, both reduces crime and promotes better health, for example in reducing the effects of alcohol and illicit drugs. Health workers should contribute in full to community development.
I note that I'm standing with my earlier characterisation of a public health domain rather than weather, but both carry very strong similarities, including a risk / forecast / mitigations approach.
Bad weather is indifferent to the shaking fists. It won't get worse or more frequent if people fail to shake their fist. But human behavior is very much responsive to feedback from other humans. I'm arguing that we should all be shaking our fists when we see extortionists at work as well as tracking them down and punishing them. And we should also take care to protect ourselves from them. It isn't a binary choice.