Can we take a minute to re-direct this conversation away from just the politics of SF?
I want to draw attention to Bob Lee, a well-respected technologist and prototype hacker, always curious and sharing lots of interesting technical developments. He was a great role model for how Engineers should be respected in an executive capacity as he advanced his career from 'Software' to 'Product'. His efforts contributed to technology used by millions. What happened to him is tragic and wrong; he deserved better. Thank you, I'll miss you 'crazybob'.
Please share your stories featuring Bob Lee, who I'm sure would like to be remembered for his contributions rather than as a victim of this unfortunate awful event.
I agree and am going to partition these threads so that there's a place to remember Bob Lee that isn't an argument about current affairs.
To facilitate this, I've taken the liberty of converting your text here into a new submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35457341) and am going to move the relevant comments there. I hope that's ok with you (and if not, let me know and I'll rework this).
I wish some of the comments from below were merged into this comment for better visibility of those comments. There are things in those comments about what he did in his lifetime that are great to hear about.
"Surveillance footage reviewed by The Standard shows Lee, who had already been stabbed, walking up Main Street away from the Bay Bridge.....Lee crosses the intersection at Harrison Street and walks up to a parked white Camry with its hazard lights flashing.
Lee then lifts his shirt—as if to show the driver his wound and ask for help—and falls to the ground after the car drives away, the footage shows. He gets up and walks back toward the Bay Bridge before falling to the ground again ....
At some point, Lee dialed 911 and repeatedly screamed for help, saying he needed to go to the hospital....
Lee was unconscious when officers found him on the ground, police said."
So looks like he was stabbed and he was wandering around in the middle of San Fran trying to get someone to help him even lifting up his shirt to show people his wound and no one would help him..
The reason our large cities are hellscapes is because in part all institutions censor dissenting comments.. cough cough cough cough...
Good job completely ignoring the parent's request to not politicize it in this one thread. Do you think your outrage is helping anything here? Do you feel like you are being a benefit in this instance?
There are plenty of places you can be upset that aren't in this one specific thread.
I suggest next time you take the time to think for a seconds before hitting 'reply'.
There are a number of ways to deal with criminals before they harden and kill. Schools and sanitariums are among these tools. Currently SF schools are failing to teach large fractions of their students basic reading skills and people known to have serious mental health problems are left on the street. While it does make sense to be serious about crime it also makes sense to be serious about dealing with people who have not yet turned to crime since by then even strong efforts may be too little and too late.
San Francisco isn't anywhere close to most dangerous city in the United States. Do you have any data to support your argument that the 'catch and release' policy creates substantially more danger than traditional American judicial policies?
> San Francisco isn't anywhere close to most dangerous city in the United States.
See cheeseblubber's comment[1] which cites[2]: "With a crime rate of 54 per one thousand residents, San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 18." It goes on to compare with NY[3]: "The chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime in New York is 1 in 40."
Your comparing a safe big city to the safest big city. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. I didn't say SF was the safest city in the country.
“San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities.”
Does San Francisco have a lot of carjackings, break-ins, and burglaries? I've never heard of San Francisco having frequent carjackings or break-ins, or even burglaries. It's mostly petty theft like smashing a car window or stealing a bike.
You're trying to use the amount of petty theft, which does suck, to pretend that San Francisco is a dangerous city, which its not.
If you look at just violent crimes, San Francisco isn't in the conversation.
> Does San Francisco have a lot of carjackings, break-ins, and burglaries?
Vehicle thefts and carjackings spike in major US cities[1]: "The number of carjackings - defined as auto theft or attempted theft by force or threat - rose by 24% in seven cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Memphis, Norfolk and San Francisco."
Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says[2]
Perhaps most tellingly[3]:
"In September 2022, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a poll of 1,653 city residents found that over the past five years, 45% of San Francisco residents had been the victim of theft and 24% had been either been threatened with violence or had been the victim of a violent crime.[4]"
> If you look at just violent crimes
If we are shifting the conversation from "dangerous" to "violent", I would certainly agree with you. My concern is similar to that expressed by huevosabio[5] based on his experience in Mexico: "Every crime that goes unprosecuted is an invitation for a repeat crime. This is as true in Juarez as it is in San Francisco."
>"The number of carjackings - defined as auto theft or attempted theft by force or threat - rose by 24% in seven cities: Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Memphis, Norfolk and San Francisco."
Cool. If your town has one carjacking, and the next it has two, thats a big increase. So again, I'll repeat, does San Francisco have a lot of carjackings?
>Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says
Yes, petty theft is rampant there.
>If we are shifting the conversation from "dangerous" to "violent",
Just to clarify, we were always talking about violent crimes. Carjacking and break-ins are violent crimes. Petty theft is not. The conversation is not "shifting", you are just applying the word dangerous to situations where it doesn't apply.
>My concern is similar to that expressed by huevosabio[5] based on his experience in Mexico: "Every crime that goes unprosecuted is an invitation for a repeat crime. This is as true in Juarez as it is in San Francisco."
There's really no good stats on SF car jackings, unfortunately. The SFPD crime data is too coarse to discriminate carjackings from other car theft. I think the best you could do, unfortunately, is comb news stories and try to get a sense of the frequency. A quick google search turns these up:
Here are some statistics that might help the discussion:
"With a crime rate of 54 per one thousand residents, San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 18."
And here is New York for comparison
"The crime rate in New York is considerably higher than the national average across all communities in America from the largest to the smallest, although at 25 crimes per one thousand residents, it is not among the communities with the very highest crime rate. The chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime in New York is 1 in 40. Based on FBI crime data, New York is not one of the safest communities in America."
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ny/new-york/crime#descript...
Edit:
I know this neighborhoodscout's methodology is not perfect. I wanted to use this as a starting to add more data to the discussion. Would love to see more stats on this
I've lived in SF for almost 10 years, and it saddens me to live in such low trust community because of all the crime. It changes people.
I've had my car stolen once and broken into several times. I've had two bikes stolen, once out of an office building, and another time through an iron gate that blocks my doorway. My neighbor had his motorcycle stolen out of his garage. I've caught someone stealing packages from a building I lived in. Last time I moved, someone tried to break into my U-Haul. I've seen people walking out of several stores with bags stuffed full of stolen goods (going to Westfield mall feels surreal—even inside the mall, shops need to hire their own private security to protect themselves).
These are just a few incidents that come to mind—I could list many more. My point in listing all of these cases is to say—it's not enough to look at crime metrics. Not to say that we shouldn't look at metrics and try to improve them, but the current metrics are flawed to some degree. People in SF-proper (e.g. mid-market, SoMA, Mission, Haight) are living with a constant low-to-moderate anxiety that they will be robbed at any time.
In all cases that I've been close to, there have been no arrests or prosecution. You won't find that I had to chase away someone trying to break into my U-Haul in any crime statistic report. No one from SF is comfortable leaving anything in their car, leaving their garage open, parking their bike outside.
All I want is a candidate to run on the platform of simply enforcing the law—it's baffling to me how controversial that is. Perhaps we'll get the right catalyst for that to happen someday.
As for me I used to go to SF at every opportunity. Now I only go there if it is absolutely necessary for some short errand, and as soon as I'm done I leave ASAP before my car gets broken into.
In my view the main problem is not the politicians but the ineffective opaque police that does not have to produce any metrics and is not subject to any kind of oversight, not in SF and not anywhere else either.
For example, I had a car window smashed not in SF but in Fremont, and when I went to the police, they informed me that that is not even an arrestable offense. Window was smashed in front of a hotel with a prominent security camera overlooking the street. The police told me they left a voicemail with the hotel asking if their camera caught anything. The hotel never returned the police voicemail, the police never bothered to follow-up with the hotel, and told me they don't have authority to take the security footage of the public street without hotel's consent. Some time later I noticed that the hotel removed that street-facing security camera they had, leaving just an empty pole.
I wrote a letter to the Fremont city council regarding their police not wanting to work and lying to victims of crime. And that's when I got back some police action -- in the form of a mental Fremont PD police sergeant calling me in the morning to harass me and bitch about my letter.
So even if SF is bad, outside SF it is not much better. Another nugget to consider is that back in 2014, back when crime was nowhere as bad as today, CA voters, not liberal politicians, voted for Proposition 47 "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" which made potential felonies chargeable only as misdemeanors.
Vancouver is just as gorgeous as SF and much safer (downtown was kinda sketch years ago) but kinda tech hostile
All of the west coast suffers from high structural costs. People really only endure SF for the venture money and trips to GG bridge, otherwise it makes little sense as a founder to operate there. My dream tech scenario would combine Sand Hill or London VC with Eastern Europe operating costs and lifestyle. But SF is a hotbed of AI now and so ppl literally risk their lives to work there
If you could fund and run an AI startup on the Croatian coast, I imagine SF might empty out pretty quick
>All I want is a candidate to run the platform of simply enforcing the law—it's baffling to me how controversial that is. Perhaps we'll get the right catalyst for that to happen someday.
And this is what gives a chance for extremist to flourish. For some reasons, US politics has no centre, it’s always far away from the axis. I think it’s time to have a “Balance Party” in the US :)
It sounds like you might want to look into changing the voting system. The problem with this is that people who have most experience with other systems (immigrants) usually can't vote and have fairly easy exit to another, saner, place. I think Alaska and a few other states have experimented with other voting systems recently. I'm not sure where I've read about it, but there seems to be a subreddit about this: https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/
Unlike other solutions, this one takes years or decades, but, on the other hand, it might actually work.
So Wikipedia has a list of US Cities, sortable by crime rate, and has separate statistics for violent crime and property crime [1]. This list is based on FBI's data from 2019.
By that list, sorted by the total violent crime rate from highest to lowest, SF is 37th on the list of 100 cities, NYC is 59th, Austin is 73rd. In absolute numbers, SF is 715/100k, NYC is 539/100k, Austin is 415/100k.
Also, by that list, the top cities for violent crime with population over 1M are: Chicago #17, Houston #18, Philly #25, Tuscon #29, Dallas #31, LA #32, Phoenix #33.
Now if only we could get a graph of this data mapped over time, it would be interesting to see trends.
The problem with examining violent crime per city is that the majority of violent crime occurs in specific areas, typically poor areas that are known to be dangerous by most locals who avoid them unless they live there.
What the majority of people are concerned about is the chances of violent crime that is likely to affect them. Yes, there might be 80 gang murders a year in Atlanta but a $100k+ income working professional in downtown has a very different threat model than a gang member in some of the worst neighborhoods of the city.
I think the reason SF gets so much negative attention is because the threat to "average people" (realistically, above average income people) is anecdotally quite high in SF, even in "nice" areas of the city where affluent people frequent.
The event that sparked all this conversation is the homicide of Bob Lee. If we're talking about the problem of car break-ins, robberies, or vandalism, that's one thing. But on the matter of homicide, SF (6.35)¹ tracks closely to the national average (7.8)².
Property crime is what substantially contributes to the image that SF is an unsafe city.
You’re still missing the point. The fact that it was Bob Lee and not a drug dealer in a turf war is why the murder statistics don’t capture the issue. 50 random murders is much worse than 50 gang members killing each other from a “how safe is a non-violent person” perspective.
Right, but given that San Francisco has average levels of homicide and presumably drug turf wars are more common in urban areas, that means that SF is particularly safe for a non-violent person relative to baseline.
This argument makes no sense at all. San Francisco homicide count is close to the national average, however, unlike most cities, these homicides aren't confined to bad neighborhoods and criminals operating within them, but can affect anyone.
Which makes SF far more dangerous to law abiding professionals like ourselves, compared to cities that have the same homicide count, but where the victims are other demographics and not our own.
> Which makes SF far more dangerous to law abiding professionals like ourselves
If San Francisco has national average drug crime as well as above national average rates of "professionals" as well as organized crime, then it seems to follow that if SF homicide count is close to the national average, you are actually less likely to be a victim of a homicide than if all of those homicides were among a small population of "professionals."
There's been plenty of evidence posted to this thread showing that SF is more dangerous to law-abiding civilians than other cities. This in addition to the incident that started this thread in the first place: the homicide of a law-abiding professional in an upscale part of SF.
You keep trying to counter that with wild speculation that contradicts well-established facts. It simply won't do.
> because the threat to "average people" (realistically, above average income people) is anecdotally quite high in SF, even in "nice" areas of the city where affluent people frequent.
But is it actually quite high?
Anecdotally, I notice many more people going through psychotic episodes here, but generally less organized violent crime. The drug dealing/prostitution is mostly restricted to a few parts of the Mission and the TL.
The issue is you often find yourself there even when attempting to avoid. For instance, once I got a flat tire right as I went through a few mile stretch of bad town. The locals saw I got a flat tire and was distracted, took the opportunity to put a gun to my head. The chance of that happening while you have a working vehicle is 0% and few people plan to have a vehicle failure exactly at the wrong spot.
NOLA used to be quite terrifying. Yet downtown French Qtr is a different world now. You can walk Warehouse to Frenchmen Marigny 3am just fine. Canal St. is really the only dicey area
Both Manhattan and SF are now more dangerous than downtown NOLA imo, but NYC is tame compared to SF. SF is getting next level - almost comparable to Johannesburg ZA
Oakland and San Jose usually had more violent crime than SF but founders knew better than to put an office there, knowing ppl will be regularly working well past midnight
Property crime in SF is likely grossly under-reported. E.g. constant car break-ins is useless to report - the crimes are done openly and brazenly, and the police is doing nothing about it, which is understandable given they are in colossal staffing shortage - organized purposely by the city government for political and ideological reasons. In fact, a lot of things like shoplifting is not even counted as a "crime" anymore. And certainly quality of life issues - like tent cities on the street, open air drug markets, garbage everywhere - is not technically a "crime" either...
As for the violent crime, I expect post-2019 data to be much worse than 2019, 2019 was before the whole "defund the police" movement.
>As for the violent crime, I expect post-2019 data to be much worse than 2019, 2019 was before the whole "defund the police" movement.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that victims of violent crime are less likely to report it post-BLM/George Floyd? I know some people have been less likely to call certain things in, like someone having a mental health crisis, out of fear that police may escalate, but violent crime?
No, I'm saying there is likely significantly more violent crime in 2023 than there were in 2019, so basing on 2019 is no longer relevant. The reporting likely suffered too, at least for a relatively minor crime - you're less likely to report, say, a mugging if you know police is not going to do anything about it - but that's not the primary point. The primary point post-BLM the actual levels of crime rose significantly, so pre-BLM data is likely under-estimating the current level of crime significantly.
You don't have to speculate on that! San Francisco has a public crime dashboard for reported crime that generally runs just a few days behind real time. Violent crime is up a bit since pre-pandemic, yes, but still quite a ways from the late 90, and especially below the rise in violent crime in the mid 2000s.
Well we can have a discussion about Minneapolis then. No other large city actually defunded the police. A few other cities talked about it but ended up continuing to fund at pre-BLM rates or higher. The real problem is still accountability of the police. They quit doing their jobs and no one is doing a damn thing about it.
Even Minneapolis ended up reversing their "defund the police" effort:
> Dealing the final blow to the local "defund" movement last year was a city council vote to essentially refund a cut they'd made the prior year. Mayor Jacob Frey is proposing another budget bump for the next two fiscal years.
As far as I'm aware, every single city that defunded its police to any extent - ended up with a major crime surge and then reversed itself. You can see in the article that Minneapolis was no exception to that rule.
Whatever you want to tell yourself to make yourself happy. I have no horse in this race anymore, if you want to try to suppress violent crime by "taxing the rich" and firing the policeman and distributing money among PhD-led NGOs which would experiment with newest theories on your city - be my guest. The results will speak for itself, and if you like what you see in SF (or similar major cities) now - well, enjoy it, while I enjoy what I think to be much better quality of life and no chance of getting randomly stabbed while walking around my home. I have pretty much zero motivation in convincing you - I showed you where I got my facts, all this is readily available, and with that I am done.
I've been reading this entire thread and I'd like to point out that basically all sub threads have gone the way this conversation has.
In short, someone will attack a progressive spectre, such as BLM, police abolitionism, rehabilitative justice, or the fact that economic inequality is strongly correlated with crime, they will be asked to show data supporting their position or shown data that directly contradicts it, and the op will then respond in anger with a lot more strawmans of progressive positions.
Given that you don't have the data to support your position, and others do have data to support the position you clearly and vehemently oppose, I'm really curious why you still hold that position? Like, what are you feeling right now?
> they will be asked to show data supporting their position
I did.
> shown data that directly contradicts it
It wasn't.
> will then respond in anger with a lot more strawmans of progressive positions.
That didn't happen. Defunding the police is exactly the position of the prog-woke crowd, and until the disastrous results started showing up, they didn't hide it - they campaigned on it. Once the inevitable happened, they started screaming "we didn't mean that" and pretending it's all strawmen. Yes you did. You meant exactly that, and you got what you wanted, and now people who trusted you are suffering the consequences. Some - the lethal ones.
> Given that you don't have the data to support your position
Except I do.
> others do have data to support the position you clearly and vehemently oppose
Except they don't.
> I'm really curious why you still hold that position?
Because I not only dislike myself being stabbed, but also others being stabbed? And when these policies are followed, people get stabbed. Also shot, mugged, robbed, carjacked, and so on. If you think ideology is worth it - enjoy it. I do not.
> what are you feeling right now?
I am feeling sad that more people have to suffer in service of idiotic ideology that clearly does not work, and I am feeling glad I am no longer one of these people.
In the case of SFPD, they were not abolished or defunded, in fact their budget increased.
Results have been disastrous in the usa because economic inequality has been skyrocketing. This is what the "prog woke" crowd has been warning about, and, as the data shows, very little if any of the "prog woke" policies have been enacted, even in "prog woke" hub San Francisco.
It's getting worse because the predictable reactionary cycle and ratcheting continues. A region virtue signals progressive positions, maybe even does a half measure (like eliminating cash bail, a blatantly classist policy), then ratchets back into reactionary land by cherry picking events, even if overall data shows improvements as expected. Or, like in the case of SF, contrarian forces will mean you can have a situation like "socialist DA elected," then the cops will simply stop doing their jobs, so whether the new da tries progressive policy or not is moot - enforcement will plummet.
Reactionary systems are remarkably powerful in the USA and that's why things will probably keep getting worse there.
Let's conspire as a country to drive all the homeless, addicts, and mentally ill to a few concentrated urban areas. Keep them well away from our white wealthy enclaves (NIMBY!). Now let's preen about how those urban areas are suddenly crime-ridden hellholes, and we told you all along it was the fault of your liberal policies.
Not sure how much of these cuts were achieved by the time they reversed the course, in 18 months, but that certainly was the plan, it was announced as such, and had full support of the police chief. Not that by 2020 SF wasn't drowning in feces anyway, so the defund itself certainly wasn't the cause - just another brick in the wall.
Yes, if you get beat the fuck up, but are otherwise alive and uninjured, what’s the point of reporting the crime? Police aren’t going to find whoever did this to you. You will just write down some information on a police report and they’ll say some encouraging words and then nothing.
No, I’m not okay with it. I want them to do their job. Chase down every last mugger. Arrest every illegal tent squatter that has popped up. Arrest drug addicts and indecent exposers and shoplifters. SF police should be working around the clock, until the city is completely cleaned out. People thinking about doing any kind of crime should be complaining how difficult police are making life for them. People should be crying foul about how hard on crime the SF police have gotten.
But they won’t do it. Hell, if they did all the above I wouldn’t mind paying them double.
NYC in particular suffers from rampant under-reporting on crime stats. Most burglaries and petty property crimes in NYC that I have heard of went completely unreported - either they didn't bother to go into the station, or they went in to make a report and the police basically turned them away. They openly don't care about "small" property crimes, and demonstrate disdain for you if you are coming in to make a police report for anything short of an attempted murder. The alternative that happens in a some communities is vigilante justice.
In the second story, who knows what in the hell is even going on. It happened too recently for there to be any clarity on what actually happened there. That could easily have been an over-zealous person causing problems (like George Zimmerman) rather than self-defense. Time and the trial will tell.
You're right, we don't have the details yet, but from what we do have, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury willing to convict someone that shot an assailant with the assailants gun after being shot twice. Once you've been shot, you are on a clock for getting medical assistance. I could see how retaliatory shooting is valid self defense as it ensures that the person who just threatened your life is unable to continue threatening your life, even if you have possession of the gun(because you've just been shot) and it ensures that you have a scene where paramedics can actually attend to you. If you want to ensure your best odds of survival, making sure your assailant is dead also ensures that you aren't competing for medical resources...but I'm not sure taking it that far would qualify as self defense. Using deadly force though, seems entirely justified.
> You're right, we don't have the details yet, but from what we do have, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a jury willing to convict someone that shot an assailant with the assailants gun after being shot twice.
All of this is alleged, and based only on testimony of the person who did the shooting. We simply don't actually know what happened here yet (if we ever will). You're making assumptions based on the New York Post's reporting, which is a tabloid at best. It's entirely possible that the person who did the shooting was the one who had the gun all along.
Outside of NYC, the guy in the first story would never have been arrested, and the charges were dropped due to immense public pressure on the DA's office. The police stated that they intended to charge him with murder.
The second story is pretty clear the attendant witnessed a person looking in random cars confronted the person. The lowlife took out his gun and shot the attendant who wrestled away the gun and shot the criminal in turn.
Nobody looks into random cars in a lot without intent to steal and he was the only one to introduce a gun into the affair.
None of those facts are known in the second story. It's all based solely on the testimony of the person who did the shooting. That's why I emphasized it's way too soon after to actually know what happened. Also, you're putting way too much faith into the New York Post, which is a tabloid that lives by the motto 'if it bleeds, it leads'.
It’s Bolshevism, plain and simple. Criminals are “socially close” and therefore blameless except in the most blatant circumstances, whereas gainfully employed, law-abiding citizens are bourgeoisie or kulaks, and must be punished. This is not a new playbook.
No urban police department is going to care about your small time theft.
The primary difference I notice is that in SF, people seem to expect that the police will care about this? I am not sure why the expectations seem so different - perhaps it is the large number of people coming from more suburban parts of the country where the police do investigate these crimes?
Metrics-driven policing often gets the blame here: shifts in policing policy that hold individual precincts, officers, etc., directly responsible for crime statistics under their watch were initially successful in more efficiently allocating police resources, but have now created a set of perverse incentives that encourage officers to either not file reports or to down-classify reports into less-grave categories (reporting armed robbery as theft, etc.). These kinds of programs originated in NYC, as the "CompStat" program under Jack Maple and Bill Bratton, largely during the administration of Rudy Giuliani as mayor, but similar programs have since been adopted by (particularly urban) police departments across the country, to arguably similar both positive and negative effects. This kind of stats manipulation ("juking the stats") featured heavily in the TV show The Wire, for example, which is set in Baltimore.
So, to more directly answer your second question: other cities absolutely also suffer here, but New York has been at it the longest, and so is perhaps best known for this issue.
It's misleading to look at 2019 crime data for San Francisco when the biggest reason for crime going up there recently was Chesa Boudin, who was only DA from 2020 to 2022.
But there's no data after 2019 in any of the snapshots, up to 2023. I wonder what happened in 2020 that makes it impossible to collect any data since then...
The second paragraph for both your links tries to compare the cities in terms of apples-to-apples by population:
NYC:
"However, compared to other communities of similar population size, New York has a crime rate that is noticeably lower than the average. This means that for comparably sized cities all across America, New York is actually safer than most according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis of FBI crime data."
SF:
"Importantly, when you compare San Francisco to other communities of similar population, then San Francisco crime rate (violent and property crimes combined) is quite a bit higher than average. Regardless of how San Francisco does relative to all communities in America of all sizes, when NeighborhoodScout compared it to communities of similar population size, its crime rate per thousand residents stands out as higher than most."
Edit: having lived in both (currently in NYC) I also want to point out the two cities are incredibly different in almost every way. It's really tough to compare data across the whole "city" between the two because of the differences in geography, population density & distribution, types of crime, history & expectations, and overall city governance.
Crime in East Coast NYC/Boston/DC and West-coast-cities (SF/Seattle/Portland) is very different.
The remarkable thing about SF and Seattle, is that crime is highest in high desirability/high-foot-fall areas. Many folks I know all go to downtown SF/Oakland/Seattle for work, drinks, dinner, concerts and public events.
At the same time, it seems impossible to park your car on the street in any of these neighborhoods. I thought it was an exaggeration, but "every" person I know, who has parked their car for a week in one of these neighborhoods, has had their cars broken in. It's shocking.
On the other hand, the high-footfall / popular parts of east coast cities are fairly safe. (Pickpockets are an exception). For better or for worse, a person would never accidentally find themselves in a bad neighborhood in NYC, Boston or DC. (Bad neighborhoods aren't always correlated with race or poverty. Sometimes it's just a self fulfilling prophecy) This means that violent crime on the east-coast has very little spill-over outside the communities ravaged by it. IE. The average stranger is safe.
In that sense, west coast's 'open drug market in the most important parts of the city' policy is a uniquely west coast problem. It really doesn't affect other cities in the US or elsewhere in the same way. The unique incompetence of west coast politics is squarely to blame for the dilapidation of their cities. This is not endemic to cities at large, and cities around the world should actively distance themselves from the sort of accusations that get flung at 'all cities', when it is meant to be targeting west-coast cities in particular.
There is a lot of violent crime spillover in popular areas of East coast cities. Experiencing it is just a matter of time spent. It is also easy to accidentally be in a bad neighborhood in many. Which just depends on how close to the margins of good neighborhoods that you are willing to explore. A lot of desirable amenities tend to be near these edges, when they want to serve younger people. It is true that there aren't open air drug markets in the desirable parts of East Coast cities. There are, however, street robberies and murders.
This comment is written as if the one it replied to said something wrong. It didn't and this comment does nothing to add to the debate, instead it just obfuscates. Downvoted.
The solution to open air drug markets is legalization and regulation. Make opioids and stimulants available at a low price in dispensaries and the gangsters will leave, and people won’t have to steal to support their habits.
I mean it’s good that we have stopped throwing addicts in jail, but we’ve just exposed another layer of the problem.
I used to think this way. I’d happily get into legalization/decriminalization arguments, secure in my knowledge of statistics from other countries and the trump card of “muh Portugal” ready to be tossed out at a moment’s notice.
Then came this brave new world of “atomized social leftism” - this highly destructive political chimera that somehow successfully subverted leftist class consciousness into a twisted parody of individualist libertarianism, while still maintaining the absolute moral certitude and zealous fervor of a revolutionary.
This is not the same left-wing ideology responsible for building Euro-style social democracy (of which I long admired). This is a homegrown American political monster wearing the skin of a revolutionary leftist but designed to serve the interests of international elites. Compare modern Antifa with the Seattle anti-WTO riots in the 90s for an illustrative example.
I live in a West Coast American city that has decriminalized hard drugs nearly to the point of de facto legalization, while “soft” drugs like marijuana are fully legal and psilocybin is on the way.
The results have been disastrous. Property crime has skyrocketed, gang violence over hard drug profits has shot the murder rate up by xxxx%, human beings wander the downtown in broad daylight moaning with visible skin sloughing off their bodies like we’re in a zombie movie.
And the despairing response to this from most of my “lefty” acquaintances has been “well this is all because we haven’t fully legalized hard drugs” - as if that was a coherent argument for why we shouldn’t just abandon the decriminalization experiment and return to the former status quo that didn’t have these problems.
Even marijuana, an extremely mild drug (as far as such things go) that has been legalized, resulted in the literal cartels rolling into the southern half of my state and taking over production.
I find myself increasingly thinking that “American democracy” is a failed system and we just haven’t realized it yet. Wile E Coyote confidently running in mid-air over the abyss with a cloud of dust under his feet labeled “It’s the Wokes/Racists”.
If you want an Euro-style social democracy, you [Americans] need to understand its foundations. First and foremost, there is a society, and everyone is part of it. If your fellow citizen is hurting, then you are hurting. Hence a comprehensive social safety net, clean food, universal healthcare, well trained police, fair voting, access to justice (I could go on) are understood to be essential and inviolable, and available for all citizens.
An interesting thought experiment would be to see if any US state could (or even might one day) meet the criteria for joining the EU (the 'chapters' iirc).
I fundamentally agree with all this. Scandinavian style social democracy has been the apple of my eye since I first graduated high school straight into the War on Terra.
My concern (which I hesitate to fully express, lest my Hispanic ass be labeled a “white supremacist”) is that Euro-style social democracy is incapable of surviving waves of economic migration unseen on the continent for literal millennia.
Either the right wing is correct and the migration itself will be overburdening the social structure to the point where it collapses - or the right wing is wrong about full collapse, but the stress fractures from mass migration are enough to put the Prophets of Privatization in power and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Indeed. Immigration is the big test for European social democracy, though I'd argue that so long as the social contract is respected, and economic rewards are evenly and justly distributed, then we should be ok. If people have good jobs, affordable housing, and a future for their children then they are much more amenable to accommodating outsiders. Unfortunately this is not how things are working out right now - Europe has been badly affected by wealth concentration (driven by zero interest rates? Offshoring? Financial engineering?) just as the US. For example in Portugal house prices and rents have exploded in recent years, and who are they blaming? Digital Nomads, when in fact AirBnB is facilitating lucrative short term lets for those (often Portuguese) landlords able to take advantage.
Note that some places in Europe have already seen large scale immigration since WW2, usually from their former colonies - e.g. UK, France, and Portugal again.
The same arguments were made 100 years ago that the Irish, Italians and Chinese would never assimilate in the US. I was in Paris recently and saw multiple groups of young people of mixed races hanging out as friends. I asked around and confirmed that yes this is a new positive development in the last decade or so.
Kids don't care about race or ethnicity. It just takes a generation or two.
What if SF started a Thieves Guild, and only registered, properly trained members were allowed to steal from people? (and only after showing their Thieve's Guild registration card first, of course)
Every libertarian has been saying this and it is just not true. The gangsters switch to harder and more addictive stuff, and the libertarian escalation chain continues. "Just legalize it all, bro."
I'd rather not have downtown be monopolized by people consumed by addiction, which is what your solution would directly cause. The myopia libertarians have about the mean self control of the population in question seems to know no bounds. Not everyone can just "do some opioids" once in a while and be fine (I suspect the % of the population is that can actually do this is approximately zero).
At the end of the day, it really should be just that. Legalize, standardize and actually enforce it ( because as it turns out, legalization did fuck all to that with exception of medical grade stuff ). Then let people do what they have always done anyway. And the freedom still ends precisely where I and my property starts.
I suffer no illusions. People will die. But they are dying anyway. We might as well make them die in a predictable way ( and by their own choice ).
So yeah. Legalize and then enforce it bro. It is not rocket science.
I wish someone would meme the concept of Chesterton’s Fence into the public consciousness.
Whole lot of “I don’t know why this fence is here, but it’s gotta go” behavior ripping apart thousands of years of collective/cultural moral development - and the proffered alternative is an abysmal mashup of Alister Crowley and early 2000’s internet libertarianism.
Most remarkable is how “Do As Thou Wilt If It’s Consensual” has become the dominant ethos of even the left. Back in my Occupy days, we used to joke a lot about the goal being Star Trek style “gay luxury space communism” - I guess they figured “one outta four ain’t bad”.
The spirituality of libertarianism tends to be on the hollow side (as evidenced by other “just let them die, bro” comments elsewhere). I learned long ago to consider libertarianism to be little more than an attitude about trying to satisfy one’s own vices and not a serious attempt at any sort of governing philosophy for society.
It's misleading to lump violent crime and property crime together. SF is skewed very heavily towards property crime. This stabbing incident is a rare event, and broken auto glass is common. They're not the same.
From personal experience, people don’t even report property and violent crime anymore in SF. The rate of property crime is way more than those statistics say.
What sort of violent crime in SF do you suspect is going unreported? I get that there's some earnest frustration that reporting things like car break ins, shoplifting, etc. is futile and wasting your time but is the any reason to think people aren't reporting being assaulted or face-to-face robberies?
SFPD in the Mission is useless: they came to a property theft and told the residents to watch youtube videos about how thieves are opening garage doors, issued a perfunctory report for insurance, and left. No -- none, zilch -- attempt to find the perpetrators. Total time on site was less than 5 minutes. They were scared to be out of their cruiser and on the actual sidewalks!!!
SFPD's office is a a mere 3 blocks from the BART/16th street open-air drug market, there is very rarely a police officer on site. Another 3 blocks away, Capp street, just got closed to auto traffic by SF politicians because the police were so incompetent that it was becoming a fire risk (for SFFD vehicles on 19th). They cannot even police their immediate vicinity!
SFPD mostly are known for zooming around in their SUV cruisers in packs of two, blocking traffic, shooting at the unhoused, and ignoring traffic violations. This after arriving in caravans of police SUV cars (at least 3!) with lights blazing, streets on which mission residents walk every day unarmed.
Completely useless. I've seen one cop walking patrol on the central mission sidewalks in 11 years. SFPD mission station is so afraid of the people they are ostensibly there to protect that they barricaded themselves from the street for 3 years after the BML marches. Should be completely disbanded and rebuilt from the ground up to be a violent crime unit only, with traffic, property, unhoused, responses going to another entity entirely. Since the SF homeless outreach campaign went into effect I've felt much safter walking around the mission. More of that, less of SFPD. Is there even a vice squad? SFPD doesn't care about sex trafficking.
SFPD leadership should be publicly accountable and subject to recall. Looking at you William Scott.
I may be old fashioned, but I believe that when someone intentionally creates a situation with predictable bad outcomes, they should be fired--even if they didn't intend to produce the bad outcome. Chesa Boudin was one of many people in SF who did that - the saying "the fish rots from the head" is not wrong. His recall was a good start.
Right... but none of the things you are describing are violent crime.
Yes, it is obvious that SFPD doesn't give a shit about the sex work on Shotwell st, etc. in the Mission - but that is different from saying they would not follow up on a violent assault or murder.
My neighbor’s car was stolen, he knew where it was to within meters from the tracker, in Oakland. SF police and Oakland police bounced him back and forth until they eventually found the car on their own, totaled, after being used in a crime.
That has not been my experience at all. For one of my break ins, I had a license plate and footage, they never bothered to even come out to get it. The next few times, they responded in a way that basically meant “stop calling us for smashed car windows, just call your insurance and get it fixed”. I stopped reporting after that unless it’s something major.
When I had a break-in, they came within an hour or so and apologized for taking so long. It was a weird experience after hearing complaints like yours for so long.
There was no suspect or anything, I didn't have good evidence, I did not expect them to solve anything because that would be an unreasonable expectation. They gave me a report number to give to insurance.
I'd like to Echo the importance of reporting. It is an important part of holding police and City Hall accountable and creating change.
I had a half dozen car and home break-ins in San Francisco that I did not report. I now regret this as I should have done my part to at least make the statistics accurate, even if it wouldn't help me recover my goods. I see it as being part of the solution opposed to part of the problem
I also recommend getting renters insurance, which can help with the financial burden
Really? I sent this video to SFPD, they called me, told me that they knew the suspect, asked if I was willing to testify and never called me back.
https://youtu.be/xRjuii_jtgM
I don't believe this at all. I've participated in numerous debates with people who have a tough on crime position in regards to San Francisco, and you hear this one a lot. When the statistics show that crime is lower than 10 years ago, they say that there's some phantom crime going unreported and a conspiracy to conceal it. I literally do not have the energy to explain why this is nonsense anymore, because I've had this discussion too many times.
Prop 47 at the state level, plus local-level decisions to not go after misdemeanors, plus political influencers telling the public not to report crime because ACAB or whatever.
Plus the city cops are “quiet quitting”, which is a huge and rarely-discussed dysfunction that heavily contributes to demoralized citizenry failing to report crimes - maybe it’s uniquely a Portland thing? Are SF/Seattle people having this issue?
Yes, overwhelmingly. In 3 experiences asking SFPD for help with property crimes (1 stolen car and 2 car break-ins), they seemed highly annoyed that I was even asking or reporting. My car was stolen 2 blocks from an SFPD station with a GPS tag. So I walked over, showed the cops exactly where the car was on my phone, and asked if they could send a car to meet me there. The dude at the desk rolled his eyes and told me to go get my extra set of keys and retrieve the car myself. No regard for the fact that that might be dangerous if the thief were around. And in fact, the thief was around. I walked past the car on the street, saw a big dude eating in the front seat, and kept walking. So I called the cops again and told them the thief was with my stolen car. They begrudgingly said they'd send a car, but didn't give a time estimate. 2 hours later, after repeated calls to dispatch, I was still hiding around the corner, occasionally peeking at my car, and the cops finally arrived. I told them the thief had walked away but I didn't know if he was still in the vicinity. The cops were pissed at me and said I shouldn't have wasted their time. They explained they can't do anything unless they catch the guy red-handed with the actual car. I get that, but it's not my fault they didn't show up for 2 hours. At least I was lucky enough to get my car back.
It's hard to say without actually knowing the internal workings of the police departments, but one thing that's happened in Seattle is that although the police budget did go up, the SPD is having a really hard time hiring, and a lot of that money has gone to headcount that has remained vacant.
I've certainly read theories that it's a malicious strategy of the police union to make the city council look bad, and the SPOG president has made some pretty shocking political statements, so it honestly wouldn't be that surprising.
I'm guessing it's a mix of both, but I can't really prove anything.
Both from outside USA seem insane. Broken auto glasses are extremely rare here. Stabbings sometimes, but nearly always not in public but in homes between junkies drinking ethanol. Not on streets like this case.
It is just in cities, and specifically in SF/Oakland. Smashing a car window is not really going to be punished in any way in those cities, at most they will take you in and release you within 24 hours. Most likely police will not bother, even if they witness it occurring.
When I was younger and walked around at night me and my friends would get mugged fairly regularly (~6X over 4 years) and the police would maybe show up 24 hours later at a random time. One time I even had a clip from a gun the dudes dropped as they were running away (it was empty) and the police never came and took it. I probably still have it around somewhere.
I moved to the suburbs recently and it is amazing being able to park and walk around without being afraid of break ins or muggings.
It's important to note that violent crime in the United States has been at a low for about 29 years. I don't know how old you are, but for me, "feeling unsafe when you were younger" is a pretty meaningless observation with respect to present reality. Speaking personally, I feel totally safe in San Francisco parks with my children; we've got a lot of peaceful, blissful parks in this city, which in my understanding is substantially safer than it was in the 90s.
Risk is obviously much higher if you re-use the needles to inject drugs. Casual contact with the needle is low risk.
That's assuming lots of needles. I see needles sometimes. I use the 311 app when I see needles. But I don't see them in an area where my kids are going to play.
San Francisco isn't anywhere near the top of US cities by violent crime.
You've been taken in by a lot of false media narratives. Trump said his bit about "American Carnage in our cities" and set about this revival of the tough on crime rhetoric from the 80s and 90s, a time when violent crime was much higher than today.
This is a thread about violent crime. SF is not, by any means, one of the most dangerous cities in the US - but it does have a big problem with "bipping" ie. theft from autos.
Who even mentioned Trump? That man lives in peoples minds so blatantly, it's insane. Crime is crime, and when you let property crime grow and go unpunished, it's a guarantee violent crime will also rise.
Trump has a lot to do with the perception today that San Francisco and cities generally are unsafe. He did more than anyone else to further that perception. You would have to be foolish to deny it.
I can 100% assure you it's not crime rates driving this perception. There were pandemic related increases but the trend of the last 30 years runs counter to the narrative.
Trump gross but in 2007, 2008 and many other visits prior to him being president my visits to San Francisco were shocking/gross me out when compared to living life in Baltimore County and visiting Baltimore city MD frequently.
I don't think Trump has anything to do with that perception. I don't think I've ever made it through a full minute of listening to that clown talk.
I regularly stay in SF in SOMA, and the thing that gives the impression it is unsafe is all the violent, mentally ill addicts roaming around accosting people. The last time I was there, I couldn't go a single day of walking two blocks from hotel to office without encountering at least one.
You can deny that reality all you like, but it is a reality.
Do you make eye contact with them while they are shitting on your porch? Do you smile at them while they're shooting up outside your kids school bus stop, and talk to them as they stab you to death?
yes, yes i do -- just like i would make eye contact with a sick individual or disabled individual who has shit themselves, and could use some help cleaning up.
to address your immediate example(s), ignoring your obvious hyperbole which shouldn't need to be addressed in this discussion, as it's not related to the types of human interactions the OP clearly described (which you've lumped into your comment in bad-faith, anyway).
i am not sure why you've filled your head with so much fear, or why you've lumped a certain population into a category of subhuman, inferior, and not deserving of compassion, help, respect, kindness, integrity, and understanding -- if you are finding it difficult to make eye contact with people in general, and regularly, let alone sick individuals, this might distinctly be a personal issue, and perhaps one governed more by trauma, fear and sociopathy than basic decency and human kindness.
i mean christ, imagine leveraging children in order to promote a rather uncaring and indifferent treatment about people, who were once also children. obviously there's a discussion here about appropriate behavior and whether or not someone, say a junkie, is behaving appropriately in a given context, but to somehow suddenly subscribe to this notion that once a person behaves inappropriately, they are no longer deserving of basic decency (eye-contact) is appallingly inhuman to me, and privleged.
since you're leveraging children, am i safe in assuming that i imagine you are okay with children being around alchohol, or even participating in the attending of sporting events (american football for example)?
like, am i safe in assuming you have seen children come into contact or be exposed to effects of alcohol or alcholism, where people behave (in)appropriately -- let's be real, the behavior of a lot of drunk fans at sporting events_in_front_of_children_is laughably appropriate at best
or do you stop the buck short once the lifestyle is a couple of standard deviations away from what you find.. "acceptable"?
perhaps if you started viewing people as well, human beings, perhaps... just perhaps, you'll start asking yourself: "how would i as an individual wish to be treated, if i were sick? would i like to be screamed at, ignored, condescended, looked down upon, shamed, ostracized, ridiculed, ..., or would i like to be treated with at least basic dignity?"
i wonder what would happen if we as a society shifted our attitude as a whole a few standard deviations back to a more compassionate middle ground, instead of constantly enabling, perpetuating, and encouraging fear-based/fear-driven relationships and interpersonal interactions.
also as a total aside, i am really curious: just how much personal time have you spent being around addicts/junkies/or anyone living a deviant lifestyle?
Perhaps that's the disconnect. Your odds of being physically assaulted by an addict or mentally ill person in SF might be low, but your odds of being verbally accosted or having your personal space invaded are much higher, which contributes to the feeling of being unsafe. (And is itself a problem.)
Broken auto glass is pretty much the default in SF if you leave anything at all visible in a parked car. Pretty much anyone I’ve ever spoken to has had it happen to them, and it happened to me 3 times. This is because there is simply no law enforcement response.
On the other hand stabbings and murder are taken very seriously by law enforcement.
The most unthought response I see every time. “But what you expect cop gonna do”? There are millions things they could do if given insensitive. Imagine a startup that get paid for every busted criminal? Put a honey pot, install cameras, track license plates. It can be resolved in matters of weeks.
People breaking into cars in your area are driving to their thefts? In cities they just walk down the street looking for targets of opportunity.
You think that a few honey pots and cameras will slow them down? Imaginative but unrealistic thinking. Someone stole some wood from my yard, and I have them on camera. What am I supposed to do with their image? How do you suggest I find them? Is it worth my billing rate to walk around the neighborhood with their image asking people where they might be for $30 worth of wood? Say we have a database of petty criminals, if I find them do you think they have the assets to pay for the glass and items from an auto break-in?
The economic incentives are not aligned for a moonshot on stopping petty property crime.
> People breaking into cars in your area are driving to their thefts? In cities they just walk down the street looking for targets of opportunity.
I've lived in multiple cities and can say that this is wrong.
I find that generally most people imagine these thefts are being done by homeless people on the streets but it's usually actually organized gangs driving in from Oakland.
Same thing when I lived in DC, organized criminals driving in from SE DC to rob the rich neighborhoods.
Well let's flip this on its head. When I pass a car and see something of interest I don't smash the window and grab it. Why not? Sure, it seems wrong, but I also have a fear of being arrested and imprisoned. Is that an irrational fear? I'm confused you have video of someone robbing you and you're asking "what am I supposed to do?". Look, here's a website! https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/get-service/police-report...
> People breaking into cars in your area are driving to their thefts? In cities they just walk down the street looking for targets of opportunity.
I assumed the same but based on reporting I've seen on SF local news, at least some of them are doing it out of cars. Pull up next to a likely target, dude jumps out of the passenger seat and takes a quick look, smash & grab if there's anything good, drive off.
They suggested that the break-ins occur because there is no police response. Police response would not stop break-ins in any city.
Say I came to your car in the middle of the night and left a strange note on it and then walked away. Do you think there is any way that you could find me with no clues about who I am?
It depends on where you live, but the massive wealth inequality in the US coupled with the ripped social safety net means that not only are people pretty incentivized to steal what they need / want from those who have, but those who have can replace it quite quickly (often with just the inconvenience of some insurance wrangling).
So for the vast majority of property crime, the victim ultimately ends up being the insurance premium, and everybody involved kind of knows this, even if they don't say it outright.
The worst affected cities have the widest safety nets. These kinds of crimes are fairly low in towns in Mississippi ravaged by worse poverty and with their own (painkillers) drug problems.
The nature of the drugs (fentanyl), the manifestation (homelessness) and the enforcement (or lack there of) are central to the problem faced here.
It is not a US problem. It is not a west problem. It is not a city problem. It is an urban-US-west-coast-city problem.
It's primarily driven by wealth inequality, not poverty. Who is someone going to steal from in Mississippi? Their also-poor neighbor who's got nothing worth stealing? The median income is around $25k in that state.
Violent crime is through the roof in Mississippi however. Jackson is dangerous these days, a far cry from how it was in my youth when I was living nearby in Vicksburg (which...was in the higher crime late 80s).
The worst affected cities have the widest safety nets. These kinds of crimes are fairly low in towns in Mississippi ravaged by worse poverty and with their own (painkillers) drug problems.
The nature of the drugs (fentanyl), the manifestation (homelessness) and the enforcement (or lack there of) are central to the problem faced here.
It is not a US problem. It is not a west problem. It is not a city problem. It is an urban-west-coast-city problem.
I don't know if you've seen any videos of Kensington Ave in Philadelphia, but it's shocking. Chicago & St Louis also have major issues with murder. This is an urban east coast & urban mid-west problem as well.
Yea crazy. There definitely weren't 261 stabbing homicides in England last year. And my car wasn't broken into every other month in Rome. Nope. Just a USA thing. Everywhere else is a heaven.
which state, with lots of asterisks about why this comparison is difficult and likely not telling the complete story, that:
>For England and Wales, we added together three crime categories: "violence against the person, with injury," "most serious sexual crime," and "robbery." This produced a rate of 775 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
>For the United States, we used the FBI’s four standard categories for violent crime that Bier cited. We came up with a rate of 383 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
I see this a lot on the internet and comments like this are not as relevant as you might think.
Saying place X is better off than place Y is often an incongruent comparison followed by similar fallacies. Y'all, each place is unique and faces a long and considerable history as to how they got there and the type of people that have and currently do live there. I can't even begin to recall the number of times I heard this type of comparison during the Obama administration. America is not similar to Sweden, Finland, Germany, Japan or Canada.
Maybe I should expand more because it seems like the intent was lost.
The cultural diversity in America compared to the countries above far exceeds what most people give credit for. First and second generation immigrants with different cultural ideologies amplify the differences that you would experience in somewhere like that set of countries. These cultural differences create multitudes of challenges that are not experienced anywhere else to this scale. Again, America is different.
As long as what you learn complies with the regime idealogy. Europe is a nicer place to live for now, but that’s more in spite of Europeans’ politics than because of it. There’s no significant difference in thought between the typical American liberal progressive and his European counterpart. Now that Europeans have sufficiently Americanized they’ll soon discover that the problems america faces now are in fact universal to all diverse liberal democracies.
Note: (neo)liberal != left. Just because the Democrats are called "the left" (or even "the far left" on Fox News), doesn't mean they are. Look at the policies they support; are they pro-worker, pro-single payer, anti-war, anti-imperialist? No. So not "the left".
Regardless of what they themselves or anybody else calls them, what matters is what policies they concretely support.
Want to have your mind blown? The systems Americans call single payer are not all the same. And it's not a silver bullet either. The rest of your talking points is a little out of date -- the country most openly diplaying its imperialist mindset and also the one currently engaged in an offensive war is Russia.
The modern atomized “far left” are the new Bible thumpers, except far more useful to the elite as their religious texts are fluid and ever-changing.
They serve as arbiters of morality to keep the “normal” liberals in line and make certain the window of discussion never again approaches heretical talk of “nationalization” or “the 1%”.
There’s still old school leftists around that strongly support the policies you described, but they’ve been essentially banished from the political sphere at even the metro level. Even the DSA has been nearly entirely co-opted by this quasi-religious garbage.
> As long as what you learn complies with the regime idealogy
This seems completely unconnected to the discussion, but ok.
> Now that Europeans have sufficiently Americanized they’ll soon discover that the problems america faces now are in fact universal to all liberal democracies.
My point is that you’re correct, there are in fact things to be learned, but many of those lessons violate the basic principles of modern progressive liberal society, and the moment one might even begin to consider those possibilities out loud, he’ll be immediately shut down as racist, misogynist, Christian, right wing extremist, etc.
Contrary to what some Americans think, Europe is not culturally homogeneous. The countries themselves tend to be, with some exceptions, but they do differ from each other, sometimes in significant ways.
Crime and health statistics are mostly depending on economic situation of a country (money per person). US is an outlier in both (especially health spending vs average life expectency)
Just want to note that US life expectancy is all over the place; much like with nearly every other national comparison statistic, the US average is largely a useless thing to compare to other countries.
For example: here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re neck and neck with chart-topping Japan for life expectancy - while most of the Deep South has a life expectancy roughly in-line with the average Iraqi.
> The insanity is primarily contained in Democrat controlled cities.
Murder rates are higher in Republican-led states. And we have a dual-sovereignty model (federal/state), cities aren’t sovereign entities, and state governments can and do interfere without limit in their government.
> Many people are leaving California due to this insanity.
People are leaving California largely because (1) they’ve made out well from the economic success of the state and can live luxuriously elsewhere on their savings, or (2) they haven’t participated in the economic success, and are squeezed out by the effect that success has on in-state prices.
(1) is a non-problem, (2) is a real problem, but one that the state is finally taking significant action on (targeting housing, particularly), having generally left it to local governments who have failed to act (before about the last decade, that wasn’t as much an active state policy choice as the fact that the combination of Constitutional supermajority requirements for the state budget plus minority party obstructionism had made the state effectively ungovernable for decades, once that was swept away there were a lot of issues to address.)
> Murder rates are higher in Republican-led states
With the highest murder rates being in the Democrat controlled cities in the otherwise Republican State. Again, most of the country is wide open spaces with mostly friendly people.
The period of the Pandemic & lockdown also had a high increase in violence.
> People are leaving California largely because (1) they’ve made out well from the economic success of the state and can live luxuriously elsewhere on their savings, or (2) they haven’t participated in the economic success, and are squeezed out by the effect that success has on in-state prices.
So if you make money in California, the great weather, social networks, & the business opportunities are not enough to offset the downsides?
If you don't make enough money in California, the cost of living is higher than other states.
California is a large state. Why is the cost of living, including the rural areas, so high there?
How does the Purchasing Parity in California compare to other states?
"Rare" isn't a relevant descriptor when speaking of correlative crime. Non-violent and violent crime rates are correlated. More of one class means more of the other. Though, environments that are different than anywhere else, like NYC, will tend to show a differing correlative relationship.
> Non-violent and violent crime rates are correlated.
Show some evidence of this. I just gave you a counter example. Property crime is huge in SF and it never gets anywhere near the "most violent cities in America" lists, it's well below its weight in that regard.
Maybe SF was skewed towards property crime, but attracting all types of criminals at this point. It's not hard to imagine SF being a great place to locate to for violant criminals as well.
Anecdata: My friend who lives around Alamo square has had her car windows smashed 3 times, all her tires stolen off her car once, and had someone come into her garage knock her down and steal her phone.
All property crime crosses the acceptable social contract and has the opportunity to become violent crime. I don’t see the issue with comparing them: if my property isn’t safe and I’ll be battered if I defend it, that’s the same signal.
um... suffering bodily damage is the same thing as losing some random thing worth a few hundred bucks? I'd really have to disagree on this one, although i guess this distinction might not be the same for everyone. Of course, I dream of the day when no one in SF is subjected to either.
All this is seems so alien, compared to european cities, even the acceptance standards to which citizens have been negotiated down too.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/in/Munich
Also, maybe for more direct comparison, Canadian cities.
SF has 4X the murder rate of Toronto, for example. (And Toronto has about the same murder rate as London, and less than Amsterdam — I can't find the comparative stat for Munich though)
Can you please stop posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines? We've had to ask you this more than once before. In fact you're well past the point at which we should probably ban you—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35090086 —but I appreciate that you posted good comments about Gravity's Rainbow just the other day.
We really need you to stop breaking HN's rules though. You've been doing it a ton.
Hmm, I'm pretty liberal but there's definitely some pretty large "slum" or "ghetto" areas outside certain major cities in Europe. Generally they're predominately unassimilated refugees as far as I can tell. There doesn't seem to be much attempt at integration really. I am unsure about whether the police will go to them or whether or not they are more or less violent than American cities.
There are certain things the US does well, I think assimilation of immigrants is a really strong point for our culture here. Maybe it's because our culture has never really been much more than a gigantic mixing pot and is a lot younger. And maybe it's cause the population is so much larger and discordant than any single European nation.
>Brice De Ruyver, who spent eight years as security adviser to then-Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, said Molenbeek suffers from a cocktail of problems. “Youths are poorly educated, attracted by petty crime, have run-ins with police, and then there is a vicious circle, which leads to recruitment by radical groups,” he said, adding that the problems are now so serious, that it is hard to find police willing to bother tackling them.
>“We don’t officially have no-go zones in Brussels, but in reality, there are, and they are in Molenbeek.”
The US has the likes of Detroit, Chicago ("Chiraq"), etc., and we're discussing San Francisco now. In none of those places, however—not during the worst of the "Fort Apache" years in the South Bronx in the 1970s, or South Central during the crack epidemic in the 1980s—did the police refuse to enter them, and thankfully they are all better than they used to be. That doesn't mean that these European neighborhoods are worse than the South Bronx c. 1975, but it does mean that the police in those places have overtly or implicitly made a decision regarding them and their own safety.
To illustrate how bad things are in the U.S. it should be noted that SF’s low murder rate is quite a bit higher than London’s murder rate. London had 124 homicides last year with a population of 8.7 million people. SF had 40 murders per 100,000 people and London had less than 40 murders per 2,000,000 people. We are a violent people.
According to the FBI webpage you linked to it was 40 murders and non negligent manslaughters per 100,000 people in SF. I don’t know the nuances of the definitions involved so maybe the non negligent manslaughter portion is what causes the disparity in the stats cited.
Still, the low murder rate, by American standards, in SF is almost 5 times higher than London’s.
I'd offer the alternative of we don't adequately punish our violent people. We disbanded asylums and pushed the needy onto the streets (I acknowledge the trope of horror/insane-asylum is a real thing and counter with there were good ones and bad ones, proper oversight is necessary), glorified violence, ignored re-offenders, and so on. There is no justice -- not in the real sense of the word -- and so there is effectively no law.
We have a very high incarceration rate and our penalties for convicted felons tend to be quite high in comparison to European countries. When you talk about not adequately punishing violent people are you talking about violent crimes in which police do not make an arrest?
This is an incredibly complex topic, and I apologize for speaking of it so simply in GP.
The justice system in the United States is broken in many, many places. And the issues that spawn from a broken justice system leak into every other facet of life.
I could talk about privately owned prisons that are incentivized to keep bodies in cells (that's how they get compensated). I could talk about the judges that are bribed to ensure these prisons get filled.
We could move on to things like jail-time for minor drug offenses. Is this a DA problem? Or a policing problem? I'm not sure.
Or, conversely, violent criminals who get their jail time commuted. This is a judge and DA problem.
Or, continuing, the definition of "felon" in the United States is a byzantine thing. See [0].
Our laws are too jumbled and onerous. Justice, the ideal, is not sought nor executed in many cases. I don't know how to fix this. A part of me wants to burn two centuries of case law and go back to a bare Constitution, with an emphasis on personal conduct and responsibility (those darn Puritans were on to something). But that's too simple. We're caught in a trap, and I honestly don't see a way out.
There's a quote that comes to mind "representative rule only works when the people are moral". Something like that. Are we moral?
These stats for NYC are heavily skewed, I don't see an easy link to the source data for neighborhoodscout, but I think their methodology is _very_ flawed for popular cities. They list the population of Manhattan as 1.6M, but there's probably closer to 3-4M people there during the average day.
That's people that live in Manhattan. That is not the day time (or night time) population of a large business and finance hub, commuter and tourist city.
I can't reply to your comment below, but that wasn't the point I was making. The stats are probably bad for both, and I don't think I trust anything that neighborhood scout is putting out for anywhere, was my point.
But to your suggestion, it _is_ measured by folks. It's called the Commuter Adjusted Day Time Population.
Sure but San francisco also have commuters and tourists. It is difficult to get those numbers vs residents. If you were to critique this statistic than you'd have to do the same for SF
SF has a very sizeable population commute out everyday though, or at least did pre-COVID. Commuter traffic was worse in the leaving SF direction when I was there. For NYC and especially Manhattan it's practically a joke to consider living there and commuting out everyday. So I'd guess average simultaneous foot traffic is way more underestimated for NYC than for SF.
In my brief time in SF the only tourists are on the Powell St team or at Fishermen's Wharf. It's really a contrast with many cities where the tourists tend to scatter more widely. The streets of San Francisco are really bare of people comparatively.
I’m in process of leaving SF. As someone who has lived all over the world, what a mismanaged town. That being said, I think SF ended up this way not only due to that, but also due to national issues. Lack of safety nets, lack of healthcare, lack of worker rights, etc.
Don't national issues affect everyone more or less equally ? And even if they didn't, why is it that the outcomes are so wildly different between SFO and comparable large cities that have huge net inflows of people ?
How can a city stand on its own when it doesn’t control its border? For example, how can you have effective gun control laws without passing them at the national level.
What are the comparable cities? In terms of weather, size, social aids, etc.
When someone says C = A + B, you begin to wonder how much A (violent crime) and B (property crime) are. Yes, SF has a lot of B, but it hasn't had a lot of A, so this stabbing is really shocking to me.
Murders in the U.S. are very high compared to other rich nations. San Francisco has a very high murder rate compared to cities in Japan, England, France, Sweden, etc.
You said SF hasn’t had a lot of A. I know you meant in relation to other U.S. cities but the fact that people think SF doesn’t have a lot of A is indicative of how shell shocked we are, so to speak, as a people when it comes to accepting violent crime.
I mean sure, ya, if you want to go down that route, SF doesn't even have a lot of B in relation to Caracas, Pretoria, Port Moresby, ...
"But the fact that people think SF has too much of B is indicative of how sheltered we are, so to speak, as a people when it comes to the rest of the world."
SF does not have many violent crimes. It’s mostly car break ins.
Regardless I’m waiting to hear if his wallet or phone was stolen. If it’s still on him I’m more suspicious this was just some random mugging gone wrong.
He was reportedly seen trying to wave down a car for help after being stabbed (on camera footage). I suspect if he could do that, then he could've easily called 911 instead, but couldn't. It's very likely he was mugged, stabbed in the process, and died due to excessive blood loss.
It's unfair to combine "violent" with "property" crime, considering property crime accounts for the vast majority of crime in SF, where lives are not in danger.
> Cities with a majority progressive government, when taken as a whole, have significantly more crime than non-progressive.
The article you link to does not argue or support this position, at all. Was this the wrong link?
I'll pull out what I've gotten from it. It's called "The Liberals Who Won’t Acknowledge the Crime Problem", and the author tries to argue that various liberals (which he conflates with progressives) are ignoring a crime problem. The author starts out by framing the piece against various crimes that occurred in various cities. And then says this:
Anecdata, of course, are not the same as data. And in cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, progressive district attorneys have insisted that their critics have gotten the facts wrong. As The New York Times recently reported, the now-recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin routinely “confront[ed] voters with data that shows overall crime has not increased meaningfully while he has been in office.” Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s cantankerous district attorney, has developed a habit of browbeating critics in town-hall meetings with appeals to “the science.” His in-house criminologist, Krasner has insisted, can give people the real numbers if they really want them. Ordinary residents are being told that what they perceive to be true is not, in fact, true.
The problem here is that humans understand and interact with the world based on perception and feeling. Politics is about policy, but it is also about human nature—which, however one wishes to characterize it, is a constant to contend with. You can try to transcend human nature by appealing to people’s better angels or through education and enlightenment—but only up to a point.
Okay, so there we have it. What does the word "acknowledge" mean in the title? It means they're not giving into the right wing narrative and instead are sticking by data, facts, and statistics. The author actually writes in so many words "feelings are more important than facts".
Of course the author tries to claim that the stats can be cherry picked, but they just step in it. They cite a NY Times article which tells:
There is no compelling evidence that Mr. Boudin’s policies have made crime significantly worse in San Francisco. Overall crime in San Francisco has changed little since Mr. Boudin took office in early 2020.
And the author quibbles that a YOY increase of burglaries from 7,217 to 7,575 qualifies as a crime wave. In trying to prove their point, the author got this extra information from the NYT which further serves to diminish their point, but they had to print it anyway as a professional matter:
“the pandemic and other broad societal factors seem to have influenced the patterns of property crime, rather than any causal link to policies within the purview of a district attorney.”
The author doesn't even attempt to rebut that. Yet, they don't skip a beat before continuing to call out liberals. The author tries to call liberals out for "motivated reasoning", but that seems actually to be what the author is doing: trying to find anything to support their position, facts and statistics be damned.
Crime that used to happen to tourists and commuters (who don't vote) happened to residents' homes instead. That's why Boudin was recalled. When crime victims talked about what was happening in their neighborhoods, he was extremely tone-deaf and tried to shove citywide statistics in their faces. It didn't work.
Have things gotten better since the new DA with a different tone started? Because judging by these comments here, it doesn't seem like the tone matters one way or the other.
I would argue it's an improvement. It's very violating to have your place be broken into. People should be safe at home.
But yes, it does mean businesses and tourists face the brunt of crime again (as they did earlier), and they no longer have enough revenue to be able to eat the losses.
I am a democrat for over 15 years and I think we need to have some self reflection. It's time to look inwards and not throw rocks at people who criticize us. Our party has fallen. Classical liberalism has been abandoned. Our policies have real effects, to the point where people are fleeing to better places.
The first step is to acknowledge the failures. And then rise up with greater understanding.
It's one thing to acknowledge failures and try to build based on what has failed in the past. But, on the other hand, a lot of people want us to return to policies that definitely didn't work. Stop and frisk, mass incarceration, drug wars, crackdowns, profiling, turning the police into a paramilitary force... these are not policies that have solved anything in the past, but they are all on the table right now.
As soon as the problem is framed in right-wing terms, then the "solutions" above get proposed. Crime problem? Arrest people. Still a crime problem? Arrest more people. Not enough room to hold all the people in prison? Build more prisons. Still a crime problem? Arrest more people. This is the reason USA has the highest per capita prison population in the world (I think it might be #2 now after China because we let some people out).
We don't want those solutions, so we refuse to frame the debate in right-wing terms.
So your proposal is to accept status-quo? Sounds defeated and pessimistic. Perhaps our understanding of those solutions is off because it seems to be working elsewhere. What I've seen is wherever progressive policies land, it tends to ruin cities. It is now undeniable and part of mainstream culture: "Don't bring your politics with you".
I won't be voting for democrats again. It's not the party that I stood for once.
That's a much better attitude. Check out new hampshire, one of the lowest homicide rates in the states while having the most relaxed gun laws in the states. Essentially, you can buy a gun in 15 mins. No questions asked. Libertarian ideas are gaining steam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
Most progressive ideas are flat out wrong but drummed incessantly through woke Academic madressas we call Universities. It's producing people at an alarming rate, almost 90% progressives right off the bat. Brainwashed.
A big difference between SF (and Portland for that matter) and other US cities seems to be that there is no clear line between "the good parts" of town and "the bad parts". You know the Bronx Concourse is bad, but in SF it's less clear which part isn't bad. Even 14 years ago I had friends visit from LA who walked 1 or 2 blocks in the wrong direction from Union Square and felt unsafe enough that they walked into a store and called a taxi to not have to walk "back to safety".
If you're in the Tenderloin, Civic Center area, parts of the Mission or SoMA, then sure, you know you're in a dodgy area. But I'm pretty sure that if you're in Forest Hills, West Portal, Lake Merced, or the Presidio, you'll feel pretty safe, and crime maps seem to bear that out. I'll take my preschoolers alone to visit friends in the city on public transportation - I drive to Forest Hills, park in the neighborhood, muni to the Castro. Never had a problem.
I think that what gets tourists to SF is that areas you'd expect would be safe are actually bad. Normally you'd expect that major shopping districts like Union Square, or the city government like Civic Center, would be safe. In SF they're right next to the Tenderloin, which is a cesspit of filth and addicts. And gentrified vs. dodgy areas in SF are very close together, like walking two blocks toward Valencia and Guerrero in the Mission is dramatically different from walking two blocks in the opposite direction to Van Ness and Folsom, or being on the north side of Potrero is dramatically different from wandering the south side.
In New York City, crime almost never spills out of the local "tenderloins" (projects, bad neighborhoods, etc.). For example, I recently lived about 5 blocks over from a housing project in Manhattan that had fairly high crime. At [x]th avenue and [y]th street, crime was very high because it was right next to the project. At [x]th avenue and [y + 1]th street, there was almost never a violent crime. When there was a murder on [x + 1]th avenue and [y + 4]th street, it was major local news. In SF, crime actually does spill out of the Tenderloin into areas that are major tourist centers, so it blurs the lines a lot if you are used to NYC.
There's some truth to this - I was talking to a friend about potentially moving to an apartment at [X] Street. They were aghast, hoping that I wasn't talking about [X] Street and [Y] Avenue, since its pretty bad at night. When I told them its [Y+3] Avenue, they were relieved and said that's a pretty nice area.
Eh I lived in tenderloin for a couple years and would often walk around alone past midnight to make a snack run or go to the gym. Definitely sketchy but never felt unsafe.
I have no delusions though, I would not consider any part of the city as truly safe, the metric being I'd be ok with my wife walking around alone.
I just said I don't consider any part of the city safe enough to let my wife walk around at night alone. Contrast that to any major city in say Japan, where I'd let my kids walk around alone at night.
Kara Swisher is a self-involved imbecile, please don't compare me to her.
Much of SFs homeless population and crime is concentrated around the Tenderloin and SOMA areas with downtown also being relevant. You can use something like the Citizen app to get a rough geographic understanding.
This is an important topic but so many clueless individuals (not OP, in general) decide to comment anyways.
this is definitely not true of SF...its very obvious for anyone walking around when you are in a good or bad part (parts of SOMA/Tenderloin/Civic Center/Western Addition). Most other parts of the, including where this crime happened, feel completely safe (and statistically are very safe).
I can hear a liberal right now "that is victim blaming".
If I say that everyone should have a means of self-defense in their own house, I get down voted. If I say I don't leave the house without a handgun, I'd probably get flagged.
Liberals made their bed, now its time to lie in it.
>Liberals made their bed, now its time to lie in it.
Crime being rampant in US in stark contrast with ANYWHERE in EU is a good hint that it is actually not because of "dem liberals", but rather a direct consequence of troubled people being left without any support in poverty. They find a way.
Social policies aren't only there to help people in need, they're there to make society as a whole safer.
I’m not going to pretend anything is a simple obvious cause/effect — but in the case of SF, you’d be hard pressed to find a city that bends over backwards more with social policies. So I’m curious why unlike the Europe comparison, SF and LA are some of the worst places here in terms of people still mired in poverty and also doing crime. I think plenty of people really are helped by those policies and move on in their lives, but also that plenty of others take advantage of the “liberal guilt” atmosphere, which makes administering punishment very uncomfortable, to do lots of crimes. I see it as an unintended consequence.
And officially, I guess I don’t mind it. I left SF, and if the current residents are happy with the current results, they’re free to continue.
Are you saying people breaking into cars and stabbing people are doing so because they can afford say, $1800 in rent but can’t find a place under $2900? Because if the city could drive rents down that far across the board by encouraging new home construction, I would consider that a wildly successful outcome. But even then I don’t think it would change almost anything about the crime and homelessness problems.
I think the criminals are mostly either desperate addicts who have no chance at turning it around unless they had serious help with their illnesses, or, just callous criminals who could change but prefer doing crime to working. And it doesn’t even take that many — especially of that second group — to make everybody miserable.
Edit: just want to clarify: I am absolutely in favor of a “build, build, build, build, build” housing policy. Despite everything I said, it would still make lots of things better including improving density, making transit make sense.
I would argue half a thousand of other comments blaming abstract "liberals" for known shortfalls of US policy is the more logical recipient of this remark.
Sure, it comes thick and fast from all sides - but it's also the case that everyone always feels like the other side started it and did worse; and that the mods are scolding the other side less than it deserves.
Its a real bummer with SF, but the problems are totally self inflicted. If the politics were of a different breed I could see it being one of the best cities to live in the US, let alone the world. Having worked there for close to a decade the stuff I have seen was really depressing. I visited my cousin who works at Ouster nearby for lunch one day and was wondering what all these white casings were littering the ground, he said they were from junkie's needles. While on our walk a man was screaming inside a car with all the windows smashed in, and there were huge piles of shit due to junkies "unloading" on the sidewalk.
I went to the local walgreens in SF and was trying to buy a tube of toothpaste, apparently the theft is so bad I had to have a person who works there open the case, and while I was waiting in line to buy it a homeless person ran out with merchandise.
There are thousands and thousands of similar stories from others but until residents in SF start voting different I see things getting even worse than they are now. I know that may be hard to believe but we have been experiencing a boom economy, once that changes and things go south expect crime to surge to levels unimaginable.
I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35454781 and moved it to the top level (just for technical reasons - the first page of the thread is currently too comment-heavy).
SF is the most progressive city in the US let alone the world and that breed of politics is 100% to blame for it being the poorest run and one of the most crime infested cities in the US. Do you even know how much SF is spending on homeless a year? $1.1B a year[1]!!. Your argument is like saying for a drug addict to get healthy they need more hard drugs.
SF might be the a progressive city for US standards but there are many cities in the rest of the western world with social democrat governments, sometimes even under social democrat national governments, which have much lower crime rates. If you're going to blame progressive politics in general, you need an explanation for that fact.
It seems to me that rising crime in the western world is a general pattern. The biggest port city in my (European) country (still pretty small compared to big US cities, granted) switched to a right-wing nationalist government about a decade ago, after literal decades of unbroken social democrat rule. And gang violence has only gone up since then.
I'm not blaming the current mayor for that, because other nearby cities are suffering from the same problem, including those run by social democrats. But the policies that the right wing have been shouting would definitely work to keep crime down haven't been working here, demonstrably.
I think you missed the point the person you're replying to was making. Democrats are not on the left, we have two right wing parties in the US which leaves people with no real choice
In San Francisco, the Democratic politicians are most certainly on the left, even the "moderate" wing. Look at candidate statements from any of the past decade of elections for any city-wide position, and find us anything that sounds right-wing from a top candidate, if you think otherwise.
I'm very aware of US politicians, what I'm saying is that people who think they're leftists are entirely wrong. There are no leftist US politicians, they are all right wing capitalists. All democrats, with the exception of maybe Bernie sanders, are center right or far right. If you think US politicians are leftists then you have too local of a perspective, in time and space. The spectrum is far bigger than you seem to comprehend
I used to consider myself a supporter of Sanders, and even thinking from that perspective ... no, you clearly have no clue about the state of political rhetoric in San Francisco over the last decade.
I recommend you look at each member of the SF board of supervisors (https://sfbos.org/, each member has a descriptive blurb if you click on their name), and if you can find their campaign websites as well, it will give you a view into what politics and policies the city politicians publicly support. I would certainly expect you might not find them far-left, as you seem steadfastly far-left yourself, but I guarantee you'll not find one right-of-center thing. They also all have twitter accounts if you _really_ need more of an idea of their rhetoric.
Most of those policies in their bios I would describe as neoliberal. There's one only who describes himself as a "democratic socialist" but as I've seen from the rest of american politics that actually doesn't mean a whole lot without action
The most recent Democratic Speaker of the House is a San Francisco politician.
The current Democratic Vice President of the United States is a San Francisco politician.
The Democrat who has been engaging in national political media battles with the second-ranked contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024 is a San Francisco politician (also, Governor of California.)
There may be some reason to see a connection between San Francisco politicians and the Democratic Party at the national level.
In part because the corporate media largely ignores non-duopoly parties (btw, note that both the Democrat and Republican Party are private corporations).
It's a liberal city, not a progressive one. That analogy is quite bad and I think you know that - there is no answer to the problem of homelessness that does not involve spending large amounts of money, and the implying that the answer doesn't is quite dark.
No, it's a progressive one. Their policies on drugs, policing, homelessness, enforcement, housing, zoning are all progressive. Why do you think it is "liberal" and what would a "real" progressive city look like, then?
I don't think I've seen a comment with so much wrong crammed into it.
> Take a breath from American politics for a second and it's abundantly clear that SF politicians, and policies, are peak Liberal America.
> For Americans, that looks like communism I guess. For the rest of us, it's milquetoast centrism and performative virtue signaling to further protect capital interests.
I'm not American. I've lived the majority of my life in Canada, and about 8 years in America now. It doesn't look like communism. Being "progressive" does mean enacting communism, though if that's your bar, yeah I agree San Francisco isn't communist. You're kind of all over the map here, but your general claim seems to be that because San Francisco is not successful at achieving the desirable outcomes of progressive policies (low incarceration, safety, material needs met, low income inequality), it's not progressive. And cause they have empty houses? That's just... bizarre. Everyone knows it's a failed city. That doesn't make it "milquetoast liberal". You know it's a city right? It has to operate within the constraints of the nation it's a part of. Comparing to to sovereign nations that have the full autonomy of the state to enact their policies (Norway, Singapore, Japan) makes no sense.
I'll try to zero in on a few well known progressive policies in San Francisco.
- open air drug markets have been allowed to operate with impunity, drug laws are generally not enforced
- they elected Chesa Boudin. the "cold feet" they got was cause people aren't safe in San Francisco. people prefer not to be robbed or killed, even progressive ones
The American Overton Window is irrelevant. San Francisco's policies are progressive on an international scale.
Then you want to "turn it to me" and actually put stuff in quotes I've never said lol. Who are you arguing with? I never said anything about restorative justice (I'm actually fairly sympathetic to it). I said San Francisco has enacted a significant number of progressive policies. It has. That's really it.
You are ignoring some obvious points that the other person made in your comment, and I literally made an account to respond because it is a bit annoying, because none of your points follow anything. I'll point these out (I'll also point out where I have no issues with your arguments to be fair):
> but your general claim seems to be that because San Francisco is not successful... it is not progressive
No, the person clearly said the measures were *half measures* and that's the problem with them. And they did give a *specific* example about someone stealing and not being prosecuted for it, but social services/etc. not following up to see why someone may be stealing. You might disagree and argue that not prosecuting people for non-violent crimes (so they don't get permanent records that might affect their employment, housing opportunities etc. forever) should be enough, but it's a bad faith argument to say that the previous commenter simply thinks SF is not progressive because their progressive policies aren't successful. Your logic doesn't follow.
> And cause they have empty houses?
No, because they have empty houses and skyrocketing housing/rent prices and have so much homelessness at the same time.
> Comparing to to sovereign nations that have the full autonomy of the state to enact their policies (Norway, Singapore, Japan) makes no sense.
If it doesn't (your assumption seems to be that a city doesn't have enough political power to enact certain legislation/measures), then you are proving the point you are replying to: that these measures SF has, no matter how progressive they look, can only be half-measures. It doesn't matter what the intentions of people enacting them are, by your reasons (if, again, we take your assumption that SF doesn't have enough political autonomy to do much) can only be milquetoast half measures.
> open air drug markets have been allowed to operate with impunity, drug laws are generally not enforced
ok sure, you kind of have a point. Obviously there are a ton of stuff to be said, but I'll let you have it.
> harm reduction programs for drug addicts, here's a list of needle exchange places in San Francisco for example
Obvious straw man. By definition, these programs try to reduce things like HIV among people who use drugs. If you provided data that showed incidence of HIV increasing among homeless and drug using populations after needle exchanges were introduced, that would be one thing. What does this program have anything to do with anything about the root issues behind homelessness/drug addiction?
> they do provide low cost, and even free, housing for homeless people, addicts etc. I'm not going to link this for you but it's easy to find
No they don't, and you can't link it because it doesn't exist! And no, shelters don't count. If you research a little bit, you will see that a lot of homeless don't like shelters because the communal living situation makes them vulnerable to many other sorts of threats. Long-term, affordable, adequate housing. Find me the link for that.
> they have long been a sanctuary city and do not aid in enforcement of the immigration policies of the federal government
Again, nothing to do with the main point, unless the perpetrator was an undocumented immigrant (and even then, N=1, so what is your point?).
Thank you for taking some of the burden there, the entire thread is infuriating because I simply can't get good, data-based positions from those that are here to cry for the blood of those they label criminals.
Regarding Healthy San Francisco, it's certainly an incredible program and a fantastic way for a city to try to address the clown show that is the American healthcare system, but it's not universal healthcare. It's missing the universal. You can be someone whose life would be dramatically improved by universal healthcare (aka a person one surgery away from bankruptcy aka the majority of Americans) and be ineligible for Healthy San Francisco.
I will however grant that it is likely the most progressive policy in the city. Even still it falls short of the most basic standards of human rights by other industrialized nations (that being access to healthcare).
You both did a much better job answering those points than I was prepared to do, that was really nice to see.
> I simply can't get good, data-based positions from those that are here to cry for the blood of those they label criminals.
That's the nature of it, unfortunately. The people who freak out the most about murder are the most excited to call for additional murder, and the mental gymnastics needed to resolve that cognitive dissonance means you're not going to get a good faith argument. They don't even necessarily believe what they're saying in many cases, it's just lashing out after getting riled up thinking they're being targeted somehow. There seems to be a lot of that here in this thread especially, since the victim was a techie.
I try to remind myself that it's not about convincing the person you're responding to, it's about reaching who else might be reading.
It's honestly a relief to see others share my feelings on the subject. Normally when I get deep in with conservative arguments like this, I can lie to myself that probably most of the people are bots, but here that's almost certainly not the case. So, I was getting super depressed at how much "work" there is to do for implementing evidence-based judicial processes (let alone in convincing people that homeless people aren't subhuman trash), because here we have a thread of thousands of likely rich techies, ostensibly relatively well educated people, all ignoring evidence and baying for blood while engaging in outright fallacy.
I mean, check out how much the comments calling for level heads, or simply linking to contradicting evidence, are getting downvoted. It's wild, and disappointing. These are supposed to be some pretty smart people on this forum.
Yeah, I disagree. It's basically the standard leftist argument that "no true leftist" goes far enough. Saying they are "half measures" doesn't mean they aren't progressive half-measures. I'm sure the OP would seize and the means of production and eat the rich or whatever but that's not what progressive means.
I dunno what your N=1 point is supposed to mean. Being a sanctuary city is a progressive policy. And calling needle exchange a straw man is odd. How is it a straw man? A straw man means I'm setting up a fake version of my opponent's argument and arguing with that. It's an example of a progressive policy that exists. You seem to be saying it's not progressive because it doesn't solve the root causes. So the only cities that get to be considered progressive have to SOLVE drug addiction? I don't buy into that definition of progressivism. A harm-reduction drug program is a hallmark of progressive cities all over the world.
They have 12,000 units. You as a resident will pay between $25 per month and up to 30% of your income (if you have one). I don't believe any of these are shelters. You confidently claim something doesn't exist that a two second google search brings up. Private residence, long-term, extremely subsidized housing does exist in San Francisco. I'm not saying it's adequate, perfect, or solves the homeless problem, but it exists.
My points follow a simple premise. I think SF has sufficient policies to be considered a "progressive" city, and I gave examples of progressive policies. I am not going to do the HN thing where you go back and forth snip-quoting each other's points, that misses the forest for the trees. But if SF is not progressive, then no city in North America is.
> You seem to be saying it's not progressive because it doesn't solve the root causes. So the only cities that get to be considered progressive have to SOLVE drug addiction?
No, I am not saying that policy is not progressive, I am saying that that particular policy is irrelevant to housing/homelessness itself. Electric car mandates can be considered progressive. It doesn't mean anything for homelessness. It is a strawman, because needle exchange programs don't claim to reduce addiction, not to mention homelessness. They claim to reduce harm from addiction. By your logic, why not list every single progressive policy that SF has? I am sure SF has a lot of bike lanes, which is also a hallmark of progressive cities. Why didn't you bring that up? There is a drag queen ban in Tennessee for example. By your definition, not banning drag queens is progressive, so that could be a policy you could list.
It is a strawman, because a) you brought it up because it is tangentially related to homelessness and addiction so it "feels" relevant b) it is something that you can use to construct your premise that SF can be considered a progressive city (which sure why not) and c) nobody is arguing with you about if SF is progressive by common definition or if a particular policy is progressive. The argument is that these policies don't try (not solve, not be successful, just try/address) the root causes of homelessness, and are thus half measures, so it doesn't matter what other progressive policies the city has. This is not an argument about semantics.
The broader argument that the person you were responding to (I don't want to speak for them, but just my interpretation) is that these policies are just there to give the appearance of progressiveness without doing anything to change the material conditions, on which I agree. And you don't need to go that far and seize anything, just give universal healthcare and a better social safety net like most EU member countries and that would suffice for now. It is not a binary choice here.
I stand corrected. You are right. But you do say yourself that it is not enough and solves the problem, just exists. And before you say "well does it have to be enough to be progressive", no, that's not what I am saying. This is a progressive policy. But it doesn't change the material reality that housing prices are skyrocketing and clearly there aren't enough of these units to house everyone that is on the streets. So let's assume there is a sudden change of heart and everyone in bay area starts voting conservative. These two policies being the progressive policies they are, are rolled back. Besides straight up throwing people in the jail for being homeless (which, coincidentally, Tennessee just passed a law for), how would the roll-back of these two policies change the situation in SF for the better? I'll tell you: it wouldn't. It would a) cause more harm by spreading blood-borne diseases among the addicted population b) increase the number of homeless people.
Your points don't follow a simple premise. Your flow of thought seems to be:
SF has progressive policies that are, while not enough, and some of which are not even related to the issue at hand, progressive -> SF is a progressive city -> SF has homelessness -> SF is a failed city because it is progressive -> Progressive cities = bad because SF is progressive and homelessness isn't solved, so progressive policies can't solve homelessness. -> progressive policies broadly = bad
But this is just playing with semantics. The OP's point is that these policies are there to give an appearance of being progressive. It is not the standard argument to anything. It just doesn't solve the problem, that's it. Let's assume the OP and I want to be considered a different category called progressive+, the policy definition of which is anything that fully tries to solve a given social problem like homelessness. If we think that progressive policies, which is a strict subset of progressive+ policies, don't try to solve the problem, then we are done. That's it. Notice that they are a subset of policies of progressive+, so they give a semblance of it, but they are not progressive+. If the OP believes that unless you try policies in progessive+, you are doomed to fail, then your argument doesn't make sense, because it doesn't matter what direction the half measures are, because they don't try to address the problem. Being half-measures, they try to give the appearance of a sincere effort.
On the other hand, let's do a thought experiment. If every big city in every red state where it is mandatory to drive the biggest most polluting cars possible and it is a crime to now own a gun or whatever, and using alcoholic mouthwash is considered drinking, and anybody that speaks Spanish needs to report for a daily check in with customs (for reasons longer than we should get into, cities don't tend to vote for conservatives usually) decide to provide permanent adequate housing and healthcare to every resident in their state. That's a great policy, and while I would have a lot of other issues with such a state/city, I would really like that policy. That policy would be in the subset of policies that progressive+ policies have that the progressive subset doesn't. You are playing with semantics, because I don't care if a particular city is considered progressive or not. A city's reputation is irrelevant. The other policies (while draconian in this example) are not relevant.
No, it's a demonstration of the mind virus that caused these changes in SF, Portland, Seattle, NYC, etc. If you shift left and things get worse, you should go further left. The problem must be worse than we thought. If things get even worse, you should go even further left. As non-leftists get fewer and things get worse, you blame more and more problems on whatever shrinking "cause" remains. Once you eliminate non-leftists entirely and things are collapsing, it's obviously because of the left---as in, the left who think maybe we've gone far enough to the left. Those people are redefined as right, the cause of all of our problems.
Sure, except I don't live in any of those places, and in fact live in a left wing country that has many of the "freedoms" people in the US like to talk about (legal access to firearms, personal responsibility/freedoms/privacy) yet some of the lowest homicide and crime statistics in the world. "Feeling safe" in a city isn't even part of any debate because everyone feels safe all the time. There aren't any homeless people left unsupported on the streets.
And here's the reason why. SF is arguably the most progressive city in the most progressive state in the nation (well, maybe Berkeley is more progressive but let's consider large cities). They have enjoyed Republican-free politics for decades now. Last Republican mayor of SF has left office in 1964. And on any trouble, what are we seeing? "Akshually, the real socialism has never been tried yet, let's try it more!". Well, I guess we can call it an experiment on how long it would take for people to recognize the pattern here. Unfortunately, so far the results are not encouraging.
SF is a city fully controlled by a wealthy elite who buy themselves a sense of moral superiority and/or clean conscience by dabbling in "progressive causes".
If you're insinuating that progressive politics per se somehow inevitably lead to crime and urban decay, have a look north of the border.
What passes for centrist politics up here in Canada's major cities would make Berkley look like a conservative stronghold (at least in terms of economic policy... maybe we lag behind in biodynamic freegan wine co-ops). Yet Toronto and Montreal are by far the safest large cities on the continent. We absolutely have the same kinds of problems — homelessness, poverty, inequality — but our "socialist" welfare safety net and public healthcare have so far kept us out of the dystopian mess that seems to be unfolding in the US.
> but our "socialist" welfare safety net and public healthcare have so far kept us out of the dystopian mess
I've been to Vancouver a while ago and that's the first time I've seen open drug market and homeless camp taking over a city block. SF didn't feature such sights by then yet, that came later. Haven't visited since then - maybe something changed, but certainly the same dystopian mess could be found in Canada back then.
Yes... in the same way that SF did: there were many calls for "defunding the police" in 2021/2022, but by 2023 the police budget in Toronto is higher than it was pre-pandemic. I understand that the same is true in SF.
One thing to note: Toronto's police annual budget is about the same as SFPD's, even though Toronto has more than 3X as many people. In other words, SF has much worse pre-capita crime than Toronto, even though they spend 3X as much on policing per capita.
Can you be specific? What is it about Scandinavian or German or Dutch politics do you think would avoid the situation in SF?
I ask because left-to-right isn't really a one-dimensional scale. California has legalized recreational weed, for instance, and that's not a thing in Germany or Scandinavia (or even the Netherlands, technically). Those countries have much nicer prison conditions, but there's also no way anyone there - from the voters to the police to the government - would tolerate the sort of crime that the justice system in SF tolerates.
In general, I suspect on many axes San Francisco/California politics are to the left of European social democracies, while being to the right on others. It'd be helpful to understand what specific ways it needs to move left to solve these problems, and why you believe that'd help. Of course you might just say "SF should be at or to the left of the Scandanavia on all axes", but I don't think that's a very substantive critique.
(I'll add, with the caveat that I suspect these are apples-to-oranges comparisons: some quick Googling suggests that the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg - which spends more than anywhere else in Berlin - puts around 2.5EUR per resident per year towards homeless programs, whereas apparently SF spends more like $600 per person per year. I don't know what the apple-to-apple numbers are and couldn't find them at a glance, but I do have a hunch that spending in SF vastly outstripes that of anywhere in the EU, another way SF would be further to the left.)
It's very simple - there is less inequality in the EU (or Canada). Inequality = crime, pretty much that is all there is to it. Give people a decent share in society, and mostly they will respect it.
Except that isn't true. Every Dutch person has access to healthcare, social security, justice, competent policing, clean food etc. Whereas in the US many many people don't have those basic things, as often they are only available to the rich. This is a more fundamental understanding of inequality.
San Franciscans, including the homeless, already have access to free healthcare[0]. California also has free, universal healthcare[1], and there are more people in California than all of Canada.
Not universal - you have to meet eligibility criteria (i.e. be rather poor) to use it - it is California's Medicade it appears.
My understanding is that the worst difficulties (bankruptcy, avoiding care, crippling premiums, large out of pocket) are in fact experienced by middle income people who don't qualify for Medicaid/Medicare. There is none of that in the Netherlands.
It is true. It is a fact that the Netherlands has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the world, including higher than that if the US.
The things you’ve listed aren’t income inequality, they are a social safety net. Having access to healthcare doesn’t put you much closer to a billionaire in terms of wealth. Perhaps a weak social safety net is to blame, but given that SF has some of the most extensive social services of any city in the US, that also seems unlikely.
As Europeans, each of us is born into so much real wealth - the things I've listed are just the beginning - that trinkets like cars and TVs and so forth really aren't significant. Some people drive Ferraris, some take the bus - but in terms of meaningful wealth we are all pretty much the same. We are all free in a way that Americans, though they talk much about freedom, can never really grasp. We are free from fear.
What a joke. I moved from europe (eastern europe but still eu) to the us after my parents died in a hospital because of the incredible quality of “free healthcare” which didn’t want to pay for their treatment and often forgot to feed the in the hospital.
If I had the money I made in the us then I could have maybe put them in a private hospital. You’re only as free as how much money you have in your pocket, nothing else matters.
Germany is on a path to legalize recreational weed afaik.
Solving crime is here in Europe generally the task of the land or state, not of the city. It's much more centralised than in the US.
It's hard to directly compare policies when the systems are so much different. But I gather a great deal of SF criminality is due to people that are not from California and do not reside there legally. Those would not be able to live in any European country like that, they would be forced to leave. That's one example.
I will fill in the vagueness of your "vote different" statement with specifics of my own: progressive, redistributive policies that radically reduce inequality and that gives a controlling portion of the influence that currently sits with capital owners to the general public. Tax rich people, use the money to steamroll their NIMBYism, and build dense housing and public infrastructure that supports a healthy and sustainable economy, in opposition to the status quo which incentivizes people to steal and behave antisocially because there is no hope of "making it." This does indeed involve kicking much of the moderate Democratic establishment out.
Again, this is your bubble talking. Look around you, and compare your life to any human 50 years ago, or anyone outside a first world country today. You are outrageously privileged entirely because of that very real value generated.
From any and every place where they gain or lose money. If Amazon gave 10% coupons on every single product and raised their minimum wage by $10, they wouldn't become negative profit and would arguably be creating more "real value" by paying workers more and allowing people to buy more. But the overall company profits would decrease.
> How much of that "real value" correlates with currently held value?
It might lag a bit, but almost exactly. That's the whole idea. Real household incomes in the US from 1950 to 2000 very nearly doubled, and purchasing power increased even more. The 'rich get richer' is irrelevant if everyone else is, too.
> By your metric Bell Labs should be worth more than any other company in existence.
The fact that they aren't means that no, they shouldn't be. It's the capitalism equivalent of "the guy with a great idea for an app". If you aren't actually delivering that value to people that need it, you aren't getting paid for it.
> Having loads of money isn't just about generating value. It's about extracting value.
Generating and extracting value are the same thing, ignoring the connotation.
If you create a device where, with one press of a big red button, you can cure cancer/world hunger/war/disease, but you never actually press that button? You haven't actually created any value. You haven't done anything.
The argument here feels like only tangible things are actually valuable. Without the transistor, none of these other increases in value would exist. How much would the world agree to pay if some genie came out of a lamp and someone could wish us back to 1946 and prevent the invention of the transistor forever?
> If you create a device where, with one press of a big red button, you can cure cancer/world hunger/war/disease, but you never actually press that button?
What if you create such a device and decide to publicly share the design, with no plans to monopolize it? You'd probably be the lose financially, but did you not create the most value?
Have Linux or Git created no real value except for the companies that can build service models around them?
The vast majority of the net value present in my life compared to a like individual from 50 years ago is attributable to 1) gay and black civil rights advocates, 2) university researchers, and 3) Japanese and Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers, in that order. I can also confirm that there are millions of Chinese and Indians living better than me, if only because their countries have a functional (if corrupt) college-placement-test-score-to-comfortable-employment pipeline.
As for bubbles, I would hazard that your accusation is a confession.
Your evaluation of yourself and your position in the world is apparently solely informed by what Twitter tells you to think and the availability of gadgets around you. And clearly not informed by ever actually having visited China or India, or having formed any significant friendships with people there.
To think the 3rd most significant source of value in your life is cheap microcontrollers is.. wild.
Indoor plumbing? Refrigeration? A health department that ensures you aren't eating food fried in gutter oil?
You are taking these entirely for granted, because everyone has those, right? This is a great example of what privilege actually is.
Let's make this simpler for you.
Your original proposal is that, of course, the wealthy (read: anyone that makes more than you) have too much, the homeless have too little. So, like a child faced with this problem, you surmise we should take things from the wealthy and give them to the poor.
SF spends $100,000 per year, per homeless resident, on 'fixing homelessness'. Exactly how much more should they be spending, and why would that change anything?
Good luck, this kind of logic doesn't seem to work too much with people who don't think too far ahead about the economics or don't want to think too much about it. Throwing more money at things usually doesn't solve it and taking it from others for reasons(?) doesn't either.
Had someone like this tell me Venezuelans should be supporting Democratic candidates...like what. A country whose people are so poor a lot of them wonder what they're going to eat next should be focusing on another country's politicians?
You asked me to compare my life to any human in 1973. I chose someone like me. Same identity, same geographic location, different time. Less than 5 years after the assassination of MLK and the Stonewall riots, that person would have been significantly more at risk than me of depression, destitution, or death from deficits in access to basic rights and resources - including, for all practical purposes, indoor plumbing (absent from my ancestral homestead in North Carolina), refrigeration (same), and a functional health department (same, particularly for gay men) - because of their race and sexuality. Nothing coming out of San Francisco office towers other than Harvey Milk was involved in changing those circumstances between then and now. I know this because I actually received an education in the humanities (which, informally, included working with Chinese and Indian legal professionals on a day-to-day basis). Did you?
As for the gadgets which you alluded to as contemporary society's savior just a few replies ago, I tend to attribute their existence to the basic research and, yes, cheap microcontrollers that made them possible, rather than the glorified middlemen who repackaged them as high-margin luxuries and sold them with spyware.
> So, like a child faced with this problem, you surmise we should take things from the wealthy and give them to the poor.
Also, like a concerned and informed adult, but yes.
>Exactly how much more should they be spending,
However much it would cost to house them permanently (and reduce housing insecurity in general), bounded by tax revenues, of course.
>and why would that change anything?
Well, generally-speaking, when a homeless person has housing, they cease to be homeless.
>Let's make this simpler for you.
I'd like you to stop projecting your own insecurities on me.
they should stop spending it on bullshit bandaid solutions and just give people permanent housing. there are a lot of countervailing forces that make that difficult, but conceptually the solution is pretty simple.
Ok, everyone gets permanent housing. You've now just fired 2 million people, just in the immediate vicinity of the real estate and mortgage markets. The US homeless population is only a quarter of that, but, let's not actually think about numbers or anything.
Next will be the inevitable fallout of destroying ~45 trillion in wealth. The consequences of which, bluntly, I can't even really fathom at the moment.
I'm assuming you'll be planning to tax more to give the effected some sort of UBI? Please confirm and I'll explain how that will also blow up in your face.
> conceptually the solution is pretty simple
It is if you don't actually think about it. At all.
You could say the same about the US healthcare industry as it currently exists. Or the illegal drug trade. Or slavery, as it used to. Perhaps the costs of allowing a deleterious institution to continue existing dwarf the costs of reforming them, on occasion. Family formation is down, bankruptcy is up, and somehow I imagine that you have not figured in the trillions in lost value from these and the like realities that are extant because the 3rd most basic human need is unaffordable in this country.
Perhaps you can explain why taxation is so anathema to you. Are you one of the nutcases who consider it theft?
> You could say the same about the US healthcare industry as it currently exists.
No, because despite the mixed-bag that a single payer system would bring, it is not actually destroying healthcare. Unless you intend to force them to provide their services for no pay.
> Perhaps the costs of allowing a deleterious institution to continue existing dwarf the costs of reforming them, on occasion.
Absolutely. Private property is not one of those institutions.
> Family formation is down, bankruptcy is up, and somehow I imagine that you have not figured in the trillions in lost value from these and the like realities that are extant because the 3rd most basic human need is unaffordable in this country.
It is substantially less than destroying the entire real market, unquestionably. That doesn't mean that it's not a problem that should be addressed. But free, permanent housing to everyone is not, in any way, a practical solution.
> Perhaps you can explain why taxation is so anathema to you. Are you one of the nutcases who consider it theft?
I'm not. I've got no problem at all paying my taxes. I have no interest in those taxes being wasted.
Welfare spending is the least of your concerns, then.
>it is not actually destroying healthcare.
I didn't say it would. "Healthcare" is not the same as "the healthcare industry as it currently exists".
>Absolutely. Private property is not one of those institutions.
Ironically: despite the mixed bag that crashing the value of real estate by implementing a housing guarantee (or even simply increasing construction velocity) would bring, it would not actually destroy the concept of "private property", legally or otherwise.
>But free, permanent housing to everyone is not, in any way, a practical solution.
Again, that's not what I said. You seem to have a problem with this. It would be interesting to see you actually argue against something other than a strawman. Are you capable of that?
EDIT: Going out on a limb here, but are you perchance a real estate agent? Because that would be the most hilarious of conflicts of interest.
> Again, that's not what I said. You seem to have a problem with this. It would be interesting to see you actually argue against something other than a strawman. Are you capable of that?
Yep. In fact, I specifically asked you for your proposal, and you chose to rant about identity politics instead of policy. Which is on brand, I guess.
> Going out on a limb here, but are you perchance a real estate agent? Because that would be the most hilarious of conflicts of interest.
Nope. The current system for performing real estate transactions is wildly inefficient, rent-seeking, insecure, and I'd love to see it destroyed.
unhoused people were never prospective clients of the real estate industry, but of course this is irrelevant when you can just twist and contort someone else's argument to make it easier to dismiss.
your arrogance is surpassed only by your foolishness.
Their point is that those landlords now have something they invested in where they aren't getting the returns they expected...but of course this is irrelevant when you can just twist and contort someone else's argument to make it easier to dismiss.
> Except, now I sell my house. And I come to you and tell you that I'm homeless. Are you going to give me permanent, free housing too?
yes. it probably won't be as nice as something you, a wealthy person, could afford to buy, and it probably won't be exactly where you want to live, but everyone could be guaranteed safe and stable housing without complicated means testing.
> you've just recreated Section 8.
Section 8 disqualifies people for all kinds of "character" issues associated with drug use, mental illness, etc. That's a big reason there are so many homeless on the street. I am against means testing, but even that system could be a lot better than it is now.
If there were no ads, people would judge based on the quality of products, instead of being manipulated to buy things.
I obviously block ads. I understand that lots of things would cost money that currently are free, but many things would still be free. The old internet consisted mainly of free things and was not infested with ads.
Please, tell me one positive effect that ads have on society as a whole. (So not for you personally, because I know they make money)
Law enforcement is underfunded (compared to the prevalence of crime) and mismanaged (low standards, low accountability, etc).
Even if you solve housing (NIMBYism, slow permitting process, low-density zoning) crime won't solve itself. (Because organized crime fits in its niche, and doesn't want to give it up. And it'd require changes of federal law to move it.)
>(Because organized crime fits in its niche, and doesn't want to give it up. And it'd require changes of federal law to move it.)
This is an interesting wrinkle. I would hope that addressing the corruption that enables NIMBYism would also affect the viability of organized crime.
I disagree that law enforcement is underfunded. Public services which would reduce the prevalence of crime are absolutely underfunded; law enforcement is not one of those services, as it currently receives enough funding (and more) to carry out its part in crime-lowering efforts. Fixing its mismanagement means funding separate institutions dedicated to oversight, for example.
Drug laws would need to change first before any dent in organized crime. And there's still sex work, and good old influence peddling, etc. And then still there's a long way to go with immigration reform. (Undocumented immigrants are a very vulnerable and lucrative victim group. From human trafficking to no-contract cash-only jobs, the classic sweatshop model, and more.)
At this point, I'm fairly certain that it's a pipe dream to assume that it's possible to "fix it" without serious sustained effort (which costs some money obviously) and without also drastically improving the adjacent systems (as you said also). Sure, we can call it social services, but the goal is to really reduce both crime and police brutality.
It's a complex problem, but very simply the funding issue is that militarization was cheap (because military handed off a lot of things for cheap/free), and any and all social service thing got more expensive simply due to big "external" factors like the Baumol effect (human labor is relatively getting more expensive compared to anything that benefits from capital investment, ie. industrialization, mass production, technological progress), the Southern Strategy culminated, War on Drugs revved up, social polarization increased, inequality shoot up, these all led to more crime, more tough-on-crime programs, more people in the criminal justice system, and that's a lot more expensive. And of course reintegration and related social programs got worse for the same reasons.
Acknowledging the sophistication of your argument, I just want to point out that it can be summarized as, "This is hard because we'd have to correct our mistakes and do the right thing." I suppose my holding wasn't necessarily that any of this would be easy, but that the path was clear and evident. And we seem to agree on that.
The author here confesses his disconnect with the majority of people in San Francisco. This assessment is correct - the author and his views are disconnected from those of the majority of working people in San Francisco.
The magnitude of the wealth disparity in San Francisco is almost hard to comprehend. Many in this thread have advocated militarizing the city, and cleaning it out of poor people so that it can be some kind of elite utopia for tech bros and VCs. The people of San Francisco do not share this view. That they do not share this view is not in my opinion (although it is) - but in the opinion of the parent poster. As those from more equitable European cities have said in this thread - Europeans don't have these kinds of problems where they live.
The magnitude of wealth disparity is high throughout the country... it is not just the Bay Area. High wealth disparity doesn't justify, nor should it explain violent crime, or any crime for that matter.
Umm... European cities do have high wealth disparity. Checkout an ethnic ghetto the next time you're in Manchester or Paris, for example... there are areas of these cities that get scary AF after dark.
Homelessness is not a crime... but the homeless and drug addicted commit a lot of crimes. And they (particularly the drug addicted) frequently have very little to lose and very severe motivators to rob, mug, etc. As others have said, not policing crime is recipe for disaster, chaos, and tragedy. And it is a human tragedy: for the people who are suffering homelessness, drug addiction; the people within those domains who are victims of violent crime, and for society at large.
A lot of homeless people in CA were not born in CA... and a lot of them didn't hit the street in CA... they migrated to the west coast. Drug addicted homeless people flock to SF and LA because (1) the weather is better than many places in the country, (2) the extremely lax policing, (3) availability of drugs, and (4) the social support system: food, shelter, clothes, money. Indulging depravity is not a solution.
SF needs to double/triple police presence, prosecute crime, and significantly increase drug and mental health services.
I was born in SF, lived there off and on for many years, and have family who still live in the Bay Area... parts of SF are just disgusting now (human feces and trash all over place)... parts of Oakland and Berkeley are no better. Parts of Oakland have so much broken safety glass on the street it's a glass/gravel road.
I used walk around SF late at night as little as 10 years ago; now, there are so many places in SF that I would not walk around in after dark unless I had no other choice. This is coming from a white dude who used to play basketball at playgrounds in South Central LA on saturday nights in the late 90's (because the pick-up basketball was that good).
Until you live somewhere else, you may not understand just how bad and crazy the situation in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles really is. Where I live now, I can leave thousands of dollars of stuff in my car in pain sight and nothing gets stolen... ever. My neighbors' kids leave their bikes on their front lawn overnight and they are still there days later.
I once saw a person break into a Telsa on Piedmont Ave. in Oakland at 2pm on Saturday in front of about 50 people to snatch a backpack. WTF?
Re Tesla, now that I think about it, I think I witnessed a very mean nasty dude stealing a bike near Mission & 3rd. He did it so leisurely that I assumed he was just taking his own bike.
European nations can be even more inequitable than the US without the same issues. The Netherlands have even more wealth disparity, and is much safer without these kinds of problems. I have no doubt wealth inequality can exacerbate the issue, but I don’t think it’s the cause. It’s ultimately one of culture, and American culture is violent and borderline sociopathic, certainly more so than that of many of the European and Asian nations people point to as examples to emulate. Those countries also don’t have issues prosecuting people who commit crime for fear of being prejudicial.
> Those countries also don’t have issues prosecuting people who commit crime for fear of being prejudicial.
The US already has one and a half million people incarcerated, which does not count all those on probation or parole. It has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, although I think Rwanda has more, no large or industrialized country has a higher incarceration rate. Not sure increasing the incarceration rate even more is the solution.
Indeed. A massive country open to everybody and with civil freedoms not even comprehensible in most other countries is going to be a magnet for bad people no matter what. 500k incarcerated is actually not that much in this scenario.
Name another country just as free and open with fewer incarcerated. Not Switzerland for sure.
I don't even know how to respond to someone talking about how the US has one of the highest rates of incarcerating its people by saying how it is one of the most free countries in the world.
Also the incarcerated population is 1500k not 500k.
By saying that US is one of the most free countries I meant in terms of freedom of expression and relatively better opportunities to pursue different careers and lifestyles, freedom to have almost any kind of hobby, freedom to not be bound by traditional cultural norms and freedom to go to and join any kind of party. Most prisoners in US are not in there for "insulting a government official", "insulting a royal subject", "blasphemy", "membership in an undesirable organization", being an Uighur, and so on.
You take those 1500k and put them into some other country and have them do the same thing they did that got them incarcerated in US prison, and unless they are friends with somebody important in the government there they'll get incarcerated there too. Furthermore, in lots of countries selling / smuggling drugs is an executable offense. Furthermore, many of these 1500k would not even be admitted to enter many Euro countries with the low incarceration rates that you envy.
There are enough comments on here that I am probably not adding much new, but I lived in SF for 10 years until recently. When I arrived (from New York City) I thought — hey, it's a bit sketchy but not so bad overall. I think it got progressively worse every year.
I have no idea what policy changes would help, but it's the only place I've ever been where I saw crime being committed in broad daylight. It's the only place where leaving anything within sight in a parked car results in a break-in. A fucking bag of potato chips once.
There are nice parts; the higher your physical elevation, the less chance of your being affected by crime. Literally people living their ivory towers watching their city burn.
At the end of the day, it's a democracy. The voters get what they deserve. Remote work is here — the tax base is on its way out, or retreating to high ground.
Having seen Toronto spiraling into the same mayhem of random vagrant street violence in the same moment when rents exploded, I'm firmly with the housing advocates on this:
People think mental health causes homelessness, but it looks increasingly like it's the other way around -- cities with bad housing crises and insufficient shelter systems (NYC is notable for having an excellent shelter system compared to its peers) end up with people who hit rock bottom and become destructive out on the street when they'd be trying to get their lives together if they had a place to live.
If people can't grapple with their demons in the privacy of their own homes, they will grapple with them on the subway and we'll all be collateral damage.
I think the problem is when people are incapable of grappling with their demons even in the privacy of their own homes. If given a place to stay, many people _choose_ to use it for non-productive things. Surely, exploding housing prices make things worse, but it's also easy enough to see why productive members of society want to distance themselves from this destructive behavior. After all, even the excellent shelter that you claim for NYC doesn't really seem to have resulted in paradise.
If you're talking about initiatives to house the homeless, I don't think it's just about "being given a place to stay". People who have gotten to the point where they lose their place in the first place are already traumatized, and likely to lose any sense of security from having another place.
Add to that, housing designed for recently-homeless people is not conducive to improving oneself, and the other resources they need in conjunction with that are often absent, or scarce.
> but it's also easy enough to see why productive members of society want to distance themselves from this destructive behavior.
Classic game theory: "fuck you, got mine". When everyone in a society just looks out for themselves instead of for their fellow citizens as well, you get precisely what happens in SF - although there are external factors making the issue worse, such as Republiqan mayors busing out the homeless to Democrat/progressive areas or harassing and demonizing them until they leave on their own.
Understood. I'm not arguing against providing housing for the homeless (although I'm also not sure I'd argue for it). My point is more that (as with everything else) one can look at "strongly rising rents" as either a cause or an effect. The left-wing point-of-view is that it's a cause, which then leads to homelessness and the problems associated with it. On the other hand, right-wing folks might be more inclined to think of it as an effect of some other problem (e.g., a populace in which an increasing percentage of people is unproductive). Both points-of-view strike me as having merit.
Agree with this 100%. If you agree, in theory, that there will always be an element of crime, why wouldn't criminals go to where they'd have it the easiest?
I agree, criminals are dumb. But to say they're not mobile is false: vagrants are mobile.
Scope of worldview? I don't know. I'm not sure but I don't think it matters, because it's like a market effect: they don't need to understand the dynamic to be subject to the dynamic.
I used to live near the top of Buena Vista. The way the chaos of Haight, Castro, Mission neighborhoods would fade away as I climbed the hill towards my place was always a poignant experience. Calm and serene at the top, carnage below.
>It's the only place where leaving anything within sight in a parked car results in a break-in. A fucking bag of potato chips once.
Another signal that tremendous wealth inequality in a confined region is a microcosm of what's at the root of similar outcomes around the US?
Many in the comments seem to blame local politics/policies when it's clear the major contributing factors are inflation, economic downturns, mass layoffs, etc... these have been a long time coming, were never evenly geographically distributed, and aren't created or solvable at the local political level.
The relatively minor recent attempts at criminal justice reform being used as the scapegoat for these outcomes is a distraction at best.
I come from Ciudad Juarez. Between 2008-2011, the city was the murder capital in the world and basically unlivable.
My brother and I were no longer living there because we were in college. My parents decided to send my sister, then starting highschool, to a city in central Mexico with friends of the family to avoid having her grow up in what was a life and death environment. My parents stayed.
Mexicans speak a lot about cartel wars and the violence it comes with. What is not often mentioned is that what _really_ kills the city and society is the unorganized crime that pops up when laws are not applied.
The cartel wars laid bare that the police was not going to prosecute anything in fear of retaliation. This opened the door to anyone to commit any sort of crime. Carjacking was increasingly common. My uncle fled one such attempt and miraculously escaped to the US unharmed but with his truck showered with bullets. My mother saw a guy getting shot in the streets just because of road rage. Friends had their parents killed or kidnapped.
Every crime that goes unprosecuted is an invitation for a repeat crime. This is as true in Juarez as it is in San Francisco.
The most basic definition and purpose of the state is to hold the monopoly of violence. It must jealously protect this. The alternative is unsustainable anarchy followed by someone else filling that void.
San Francisco has been ceding its monopoly of violence for years if not decades.
Thank you for sharing your personal perspective. As a fellow immigrant, have nothing to say except that I totally agree. Many of us come from countries with less than great rule of law, and the entire reason me and my parents came here is for a better life where laws are fairly and equally enforced. That means that if you work hard - you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
As an immigrant I also agree with this. I think it is mainly immigrants that appreciate how much better things are in the US. Sure they aren’t perfect but law enforcement had m worked extremely well here compared to many of the countries we’ve come From. And in chasing some form of utopian perfection we have thrown off the balance of something that worked quite well in favor of declining standards and opened the door to more crime, which affects the same people we were trying to protect in the first place.
The big peak in violent crime in the 1990s is the crack epidemic. I personally saw driveby shooting attacks and personal murders in broad daylight; 24th street (and the Mission in general) used to be considered a no-go area by folk in better-off neighborhoods.
It seems to me that the basic problem in SF is wealth disparity. The city is a great place to make money if you are in the finance or tech industries and have decent social skills. But the wealth that stays in SF tends to build upward rather than lift up less well off neighborhoods. Not only is housing expensive, community space for weird stores/art galleries/music events is also at a premium, which severely limits avenues for grey market enterprise and social mixing/mobility. The unorganized crime exists because regular jobs are not that profitable and there's a large and deliberately-created (at the federal level) underclass of undocumented people with no straightforward path to legal workforce participation.
SF was a remarkably different city prior to 9-11, which ushered in a securocratic mindset in many respects. A simple but telling example is that nearly BART stations used to have toilets, though as you might expect some of them were nasty. After 9-11, these were closed in the name of security, a 'temporary' situation which has persisted for over 20 years. Concession stands like news/candy/flower vendors gradually vanished too, along with buskers. Subway stations stopped being part of the city's social life in favor of pure transit functionality. Likewise bus stops now have all sorts of built-in tech to tell you when the next bus is arriving in 20 different languages, but the bus shelters are deliberately constructed not to provide any shelter from the elements, or even make it easy to sit down.
The state (qua city government) very much maintains its monopoly on violence; police budgets have gone up rather than down. It's just selectively enforced because the police are themselves a political constituency who compete with other agencies for funding.
I'd be careful with any crime stats other than like, murder stats. The problem is that people are less likely to report crimes if they don't think they're going to be prosecuted. There's many anecdotes of people asking for police help and they just tell them not to bother.
> In April [2022], [...] the dept issued 338 tickets for traffic violations. By comparison, in April 2014, the year Vision Zero began, the department issued 11,612 tickets.
Does that mean nobody violates traffic laws in SF anymore? Of course not. But if the tickets aren't issued they're not rolled up into stats. Same with all sorts of violent and property crime.
When I lived in the mid-mission a few years ago I had to call in a shooting that happened outside my bedroom window. There were a ton of violent altercations between pimps and prostitutes that were just straight-up ignored. And 24th St became an open-air Walgreens.
> The letter highlighted alarming data backing up many residents’ concerns that police have thrown up their hands. For example, last year the Department of Police Accountability opened 595 cases into alleged police wrongdoing; the largest share by far, 42.6%, related to “neglect of duty.” That percentage has ticked up steadily since 2016, when neglect of duty made up 32% of complaints. [1]
[edit] Your own source seems to back that up. Your source is for all of California, not SF. And one of the big sub-headings is "crime rates vary dramatically by region and category" and specifically calls out SF as having an outsized quantity of property crime.
> The state’s highest rate of violent crime was in the San Joaquin Valley, which had 640 violent incidents per 100,000 residents. The highest rate of property crime was in the San Francisco Bay Area, at 2,718 per 100,000 residents.
This is precisely why murder stats are used. Murder is a crime we don't see affected much by expectations for solution. That is, murder gets reported one way or another (far longer than petty crime does anyway.)
E.g, someone smashes window and I don't expect cops to do something. So I don't report it. But someone shows up dead on my doorstep, whether or not I expect to them to solve it, id report it because there's a dead person on my doorstep.
> The problem is that people are less likely to report crimes if they don't think they're going to be prosecuted. There's many anecdotes of people asking for police help and they just tell them not to bother.
That's 100% speculative. Do you have evidence of their effect on crime stats, and wouldn't that effect also take place when crime was higher in the 90s?
Is it? I know of two armed rape cases in SF proper where the police refused to even file a report. Anecdotal yes, but bottom line is officers are encouraged to not report things. Unless there's a body there's enough anecdotal evidence out there to suggest coverage might not be all that perfect.
They don’t really get to “refuse”. You just tell them “such and such happened” and you get a case number and (generally) nothing happens. I’ve done it several times, and nothing ever happened, but the case was indeed “filed”.
(They will happily and helpfully suggest that a report isn’t necessary and probably you don’t want to file one anyway. They are human, and lazy.)
The peak in violent crime was the 90s. The peak of property crime was 80s, and there were 40 years of crime decline at the exact same time wealth disparity was growing. What changed recently was the new lax attitude on crime, decarceration, and hated towards the police.
Truth is, San Francisco did not follow the pattern of the rest of CA and saw rising murders through the 2000's. It finally declined in 2009 after a huge federal and local crackdown on gangs and MS13 in San Francisco.
I'm not arguing that inequality explains all crime, I thought it was clear from the contrast I drew between previous decades and the present that I was talking about it being the main driver of present-day crime (whereas economic mobility and housing space availability was better a couple of decades ago). Sorry for not articulating that more clearly.
> It seems to me that the basic problem in SF is wealth disparity.
Really?
> police budgets have gone up rather than down.
And what do you think the police are supposed to do when the prosecutions by the DA fall off a cliff? Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, if the number of cops remains unchanged, but the percentage of criminals they detain being arraigned/charged/arrested drops, that maybe, just maybe, crime will go up?
The cognitive dissonance is just unbelievable here.
Maybe provide evidence rather than exaggerated statements and attacks (a signal of lack of evidence). Inform us:
What are the stats on DA prosecutions - I've heard that claim in other places about progressive DAs, and they turned out to be false.
Also, it's not clear to me that crime goes up if prosecutions go down; it's possible, but it's possible that looking at all arrests the same, for every alleged crime, is meaningless; it's possible that more arrests means worse cases; it's possible police are providing worse evidence, or the distribution of crime types has changed, or criminals have no idea of crime stats and have other motivations.
The stats on the previous DAs dramatic reduction in prosecutions are publicly available via Google search. If you actually cared about interrogating your own beliefs you would look this up yourself but you don't.
I don't waste time arguing with far left ideologues.
It's like talking to fundamentalist Christians about evolution: wasted time.
Your statement about it not being clear that crime goes up if less criminals are prosecuted is the most unintentionally hilarious thing I've seen in a long time. Do you even realize how utterly lacking in common sense the statement is?
I'll also ask you to consider how this whole thread could have gone differently if you and everyone else had bothered to constructively engage with the discussion, and done the research you so dismissively told others to do.
Did you not see the note at the bottom of the dashboard that says it excludes murder, rape, and domestic assault? Did you unthinkingly look at the aggregate, and not click on specific crimes like commercial burglary and see a massive drop in percentage of reports being prosecuted?
"Guys, you'll never believe it! According to the DA's office, the DA is doing great!"
This post is a great example of performative outrage and the use of rhetorical fallacies as a distraction from the underlying facts. A+, would nod unthinkingly again.
Except they mostly skip the detain step in favor of complaining that the latter steps totally would have been messed up had they actually tried to do their job.
I think people are realizing more and more that failure to build up is a failure to help less well-off neighborhoods. The bad part of gentrification is displacement, not that some buildings might look new and desirable. SF politicians still need to learn this lesson.
There's been a lot of tangible, tactical legislation that is just gearing up, so I'm optimistic. Look at the record of state senator Scott Wiener. He's proven there's political will in areas that seemed hopeless ten years ago.
> The big peak in violent crime in the 1990s is the crack epidemic. I personally saw driveby shooting attacks and personal murders in broad daylight; 24th street (and the Mission in general) used to be considered a no-go area by folk in better-off neighborhoods.
You have your dates and anecdotes off. The crack epidemic was in the 1980s, not the 1990s. There was, however, always a serious heroin trade in that area. After the gang truce in 1992, the Mission was incredibly safe and a great place to live. Going to the bars after work and spilling out into the streets after 2 am was a safe and peaceful affair. Further, a lot of the property crime that people are complaining about has nothing to do with locals; it was perpetrated by organized gangs from outside the city. This is still true today and several investigative news articles on this phenomenon have been published recently. The Mission was never a "no go" area by people who lived in the city. It was an incredibly vibrant place to live and work, with great bars, restaurants, stores, and culture. In many ways, the Mission is the heart of San Francisco given its centralized location and history. For anyone to describe it as a no go area reveals that they never lived there and know nothing about it. That all changed when the tech bros moved out from the Midwest and East coast and chased all the artists out of the city. These people who were forced out were the people who actually cared about their communities and helped each other out and were the spirit and life blood of what the city was in its heart and soul. Now the new blood doesn’t like the new city they helped create, but of course, it’s always someone else’s fault.
No I don't. The crack epidemic continued well into the 90s. I lived in the Mission at the time, loved it, and know the area like the back of my hand. It was a normal thing to get offered crack by 5 different people while walking down 24th from Mission to Harrison; I could BART over there and give you a walking tour of local crimes I personally witnessed. I grew up in a rough town so it didn't bother me much.
For anyone to describe it as a no go area reveals that they never lived there and know nothing about it.
...which was why I said it was considered that way 'by folk in better off neighborhoods.' People who lived in places like North Beach or the Marina were horrified by it.
You are right about the influx of tech people during the first boom (along with the finance bros, though those have shaped SF in various ways since the gold rush) pushing people out. By the 1990s Haight/Ashbury had already become an unaffordable tourist trap with most of the fancy victorian houses being super expensive. In contrast SoMa was a much more industrial than it is today, with enough turnover that there were always empty spaces that could be rented or borrowed for a rave.
> How does replacing artists with tech bros lead to more crime ?
Honestly, if that’s what you took away from my comment, I don’t think there’s anything I could say to explain it to you. From a systems POV, artists are the bellwether indicator for the health of a city. They function to maintain homeostasis and self-regulation of the community. When they are forced out of a city, the city goes into decline. It’s more complex than that, but that’s part of it.
Think about it for 30 seconds: if artists (the general class of writers, musicians, dancers, painters etc.) can afford to live in a city in a sustainable way, that means the economy has achieved a stability where inequality is low, wages meet cost of living, and there’s enough free time for people to create and invent and design without sacrificing their entire life at the altar of a 9-5 job.
And when that niche is disturbed and the artists are forced to leave, you then have a large influx of high earners who replace them and raise the level of inequality for everyone, except this time, there is no real interest in maintaining the community and culture that existed before, but rather a new focus on increasing and preserving wealth. That wealth is than targeted and preyed upon by predatory criminals who before would not have paid much attention to low income artists.
But to put your misinterpretation and misreading aside for the moment so as to focus on something more constructive, there is good evidence that as more money was pumped into the city from newcomers, a new predator/prey relationship arose from organized crime groups which focused on smash and grabs and home robberies.
The so-called South American Tourist Gang has targeted homes throughout California, for example. It’s also of note that organized criminal gangs engaging in smash and grabs are not unique to California.
The popular right wing talking point that blames progressive California laws and lax law enforcement for crime has almost zero support in the academic criminal justice community and is based mostly on fear and anger, not evidence. It makes for good political fodder for conservative candidates but isn’t based on reality.
They applied that in my suburb and media kept comparing it with racism. They stopped doing that from last year and car jacking and other violent crime is on the rise again. I could never understand how “Broken Window” is racist? And I am a minority.
Whatever the fix for institutional racism is need not be contradictory to Broken Window. They can work together.
If you're new to the debate, you might want to look up the term "stop and frisk". I think some people group that under the broader umbrella of "broken windows policing", but other people don't, and that difference in meaning can make things more confusing.
Because "broken window" is too often taken to mean "come down hard on loiterers, grafitti vandals, people who lack the money to maintain property standards, etc"... instead of focusing on violent crime.
Now obviously there's a real debate to be had about how severely petty theft and vandalism should be punished. I mean, George Floyd was killed over a counterfeit bill.
But once you get into violent crime everybody is on the same page.
But basically, in order to get all the violent crime under control, you need a hefty police force. And a hefty police force means a lot of cops roving around hassling poor people and people of color who are just trying to live their lives, which is what the left-wing activists get angry about.
Figuring out how to get effective policing without intrinsic racism/classism that always seems to come with that is a big challenge.
> Because "broken window" is too often taken to mean "come down hard on loiterers, grafitti vandals, people who lack the money to maintain property standards, etc"... instead of focusing on violent crime.
The broken windows theory isn’t about violent crime, it’s literally about property crime and offenses like vandalism. The idea is that when that kind of petty crime goes unchecked, the crime situation in the area spirals, both in terms of quantity and severity, eventually leading to more violent crime.
You can disagree with the theory all you want, but to assert that the issue is that it should only apply to violent crime is to fundamentally misunderstand the assertion the theory is making.
I thought the issue was that "broken windows" was used as a metaphor for all low-level infractions, and not literally interpreted as "fix the windows and clean up the graffiti" as the studies recommended. This then got implemented as quotas on police departments, leading to opportunistic, biased policing and the de facto criminalization of poverty.
As a result, the term "broken windows" now carries a ton of baggage, and is sometimes used as a racist dog whistle.
Pretty much every phrase carries a ton of baggage to someone, it’s impossible to speak without offending at least one person.
What some, or even a majority, go on to redefine it as does not change its original meaning. If a place looks like a dump people will treat it like a dump. You and wherever you read this from is conflating the issue with racism.
We will quickly end up with no words if we continue this language hijacking path. English is a very contextual language. If a phrase or word is racist then the entire sentence is racist. I can recall an instance where I used the phrase "you people" on the internet. Clearly impossible for me to know the peoples race I was speaking to, yet they claimed it racist because some racist people somewhere also speak English.
How about we listen to what people are actually saying instead of twisting meaning to fit a narrative to further control speech? For those that are offended by speech and are demanding, essentially, the removal of the first amendment, it is a learning opportunity that words don't actually harm, only actions.
The problem that US faces has been solved by other western countries. Australia has way more safer cities than USA. But the key is to not to politicise everything under the sun. Let the police do their job and whenever there is a misconduct it will be handled by the review board.
That goes without saying that nothing is perfect. Even Toyota cars breakdown too (see turbo issue in Land Cruisers) but the fact is that they breakdown less than the other brands. Life is imperfect. We have to pick the least imperfect system.
Might be a chicken and egg problem but countries with low crime rates typically have well educated police who apply deescalation, plus much higher social security and public service standards.
It’s very simple. People who are never looked after by their community, but only harassed, beaten and killed, will not see themselves as part of that community but as an enemy.
Violent criminals do not suddenly appear on the streets from out of a portal from another dimension. They start out as babies, then toddlers then children. Something goes very wrong, neglect and lack of guidance, developing a delusional reality of the world , and by the time they are adults are unable model how the world actually works and cope to sustain themselves. Desperation and short-term thinking sets in, and violent crime follows.
Social values really matter. Countries with low crime rates don't have them because the police are educated about deescalation. That is important too and I support that, but the police are largely irrelevant to the underlying issue. This is coming from someone who grew up thinking social conservative types and people going on about social values needed to relax. I was wrong and realized that when I had children. Children absolutely need stability, reassurance, love and guidance from their mother and father, it's absolutely critical.
A test was done (in the Netherlands I believe) where they'd put an envelope with cash in a letterbox (sticking out, still visible). In a street with lots of graffiti, more people stole the envelope than in streets without.
Don't remember where, but I saw an economic paper that said that, while Giuliani's theory of brutalizing vandals to prevent murders didnt have any evidence to support it, New York saw a reduction in murders when the cops started responding to murder calls.
Police are good for exactly one thing: responding to violence with violence
Is probably a fallacy of correlation being tied to causation.
> The policy targeted people in areas with a significant amount of physical disorder and there appeared to be a causal relationship between the adoption of broken windows policing and the decrease in crime rate. Sridhar, however, discusses other trends (such as New York City's economic boom in the late 1990s) that created a "perfect storm" that contributed to the decrease of crime rate much more significantly than the application of the broken windows policy. Sridhar also compares this decrease of crime rate with other major cities that adopted other various policies and determined that the broken windows policy is not as effective.
> In a 2007 study called "Reefer Madness" in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, Harcourt and Ludwig found further evidence confirming that mean reversion fully explained the changes in crime rates in the different precincts in New York in the 1990s.[38] Further alternative explanations that have been put forward include the waning of the crack epidemic,[39] unrelated growth in the prison population by the Rockefeller drug laws,[39] and that the number of males from 16 to 24 was dropping regardless of the shape of the US population pyramid.
I dunno man - to be honest, nowadays it seems you can find a study to back up any side of the debate, especially with highly politicized issues like this. I'm certain that there are studies out there showing that broken windows policing was
in fact the main contributor to the decrease in crime.
> to be honest, nowadays it seems you can find a study to back up any side of the debate, especially with highly politicized issues like this
Perhaps this is true, and perhaps this is a part of the issue the usa has with "different facts for both sides."
> I'm certain that there are studies out there showing that broken windows policing was in fact the main contributor to the decrease in crime.
I'm going to challenge you on this because I feel like this basically just contributes to the problem. Think about what you wrote, you're "certain," certain that studies exist showing our that broken windows policing works, and thus you believe it works.
You arrived at a conclusion of the world with, genuinely, no evidence. You don't even know if the evidence exists! In fact you arrived at two conclusions: that your conclusion is correct, and that a lot of other people proved this with good studies.
Now I challenge you to simply read the wikipedia article on the subject in its entirety and pay close attention to the "criticism" section. I've done this because I care deeply about the issue, and I've also read the various studies linked. For me, I found the "for broken policing" studies to be dubious and problematic, and the criticisms to be valid. As a result, my understanding of the world is that broken window policing doesn't work, the basic theory is a misunderstanding of actual mechanisms, and that the application of broken windows policing pulls resources from more effective solutions while also delivering inequitable justice to society. So, when you're read up as well, do you still disagree with me?
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. Now I can tell you that you're probably not going to like my reply much, based on what you have said previously. But I feel I should get it out there, I guess so we can exchange perspectives and see what someone "on the other side" of the issue thinks.
> You arrived at a conclusion of the world with, genuinely, no evidence. You don't even know if the evidence exists! In fact you arrived at two conclusions: that your conclusion is correct, and that a lot of other people proved this with good studies.
Here's the thing - I do have evidence. But it's the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, not something I've read in some paper or study. My evidence is (I see no other way to put it than to be frank) just common sense.
I've met plenty of people in my life. I've seen humans and I know how humans behave. When there is threat of punishment, legitimate actual punishment, people fall into line. You have to know this to be true - it's literally human nature. People will act out as much as they possibly can before things get serious. Go look at any school, for instance. There's a massive difference between the "harsh" teachers' classrooms and the teachers who are known to be pushovers.
Punishments work. Deterrence works. It's something I personally know, as someone who has faced punishments many times. Another thing I personally know is that you can't take any shit. If people start trying to test your shit, test your boundaries, you have to stamp that behavior out immediately, or it will intensify. Again, it's a human nature thing. There exists bullies and sociopaths out there, and they will keep raising the bar of abuse. So in my view, tolerating petty crimes only leads to people pushing boundaries and more and more violent crime. Just like troublemaker students pushing the teacher further and further in poorly run classrooms.
And also, quite frankly, I like clean spaces. I hate grafitti, and drug addicts bothering everyone, and drunks passed out in the subway cars. I feel that our society should not tolerate such disorderliness, and instead should actively shun and punish such behavior, in order to strongly incentivize people to become productive and contributing members of society. Tolerating that stuff is like handing these people the keys to their own destruction. Sometimes other people do indeed know better and society needs to help these people get control of their lives.
Have I seen studies or other acceptable documentation for my conclusion? Nothing that I can specifically remember, or at least nothing that I have at hand. But I don't feel I NEED documentation. It's just so obvious to me that punishing crime serves to deter crime, and the harsher the punishment, the stronger the deterrent. I personally don't commit any crimes, I'd guess that at least 90% of people don't either, and I feel that harshly punishing things like vandalism or burglary will only make society better for all law-abiding citizens.
I'm fascinated by your response. You admit outright that you don't care what studies say, yet you think your opinion on how society should be run is valid. Can we explore that? First, I need to point by point respond to your comment, I simply can't help myself. If you aren't interested, I'd be grateful if you could jump to my TLDR and explore with me my question.
> But it's the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, not something I've read in some paper or study
> "Anecdotal evidence is considered the least certain type of scientific information. Researchers may use anecdotal evidence for suggesting new hypotheses, but never as validating evidence."
> My evidence is (I see no other way to put it than to be frank) just common sense.
No, it isn't, because it isn't common to me and other people that are in favor of evidence-based judicial methods, nor in general, left-leaning people. I notice a tendency of conservative ideology to claim "common sense" for their principles, but this seems to have usually just meant "the traditional beliefs I hold, backed by anecdotal evidence, confirmation and selection bias, and arrived at by refusing to think past the very first principle conclusion of a subject." A good example is "build the wall." Immigrants are coming in and that's Bad, for whatever reason. Simple, build a wall, that'll keep them out. I've seen fences keep my dogs in the backyard. It all works! This example is unrelated to the current topic, more representation of the style of thinking I believe necessary to maintain positions that fly directly in the face of evidence and deeper analysis.
> I've met plenty of people in my life. I've seen humans and I know how humans behave. When there is threat of punishment, legitimate actual punishment, people fall into line.
It's another great example of why your self-assured "common sense" position fails. "If I threaten to beat my children, they stop stealing candy." No, they simply get better at stealing candy in a way that you don't notice, because you selected for avoiding traumatic punishment, not correcting behavior. Ample evidence holds this to be true and it is now the generally agreed upon medical consensus in child rearing, in short, it is "common sense" for those in the know.
> You have to know this to be true - it's literally human nature.
I don't know this to be true, it contradicts my experience, driven by a considered and researched approach to interpersonal relationships. Dale Carnegie is considered by many to be the foremost expert in interpersonal relationships and effective communication - where does he recommend "threat of punishment" in interpersonal relationships? Instead, he recommends empathy, treating others like equals, calmness, and clear communication. These are incompatible with harsh punishment.
Try this on for size: who gets better results, the asshole boss wielding the stick, or the boss that puts in the effort to get to know their team, communicate expectations, and shares and celebrates wins? Pick up any startup book recommended by all these ycombinator folks, see what type of boss they recommend you be.
Regarding your teacher example, I was once a teacher, and I come from a family of teachers. I'm not arguing for teachers to be pushovers, but the "harsh teachers" don't really get good results, at best they might get a quiet classroom. Is that what you want to measure and select for?
> Punishments work. Deterrence works.
Hammurabi code logic, and punishment + deterrence aren't as effective judicial strategies as restorative justice and rehabilitation of criminals. Example: Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway with the lowest recidivism rates in the world.
> Norway's prison system is renowned as one of the most effective and humane in the world.
Yet somehow this "least punitive" justice system on earth has the best results. This contradicts your "common sense."
> Another thing I personally know is that you can't take any shit. If people start trying to test your shit, test your boundaries, you have to stamp that behavior out immediately, or it will intensify.
Trying to apply your own interpersonal philosophy like this to a society's judicial strategy alone seems flawed. This is vague, which alone means we shouldn't be basing policy off of it. It also doesn't sound to me like a very developed personal philosophy. People have been writing about interpersonal philosophy for a while and I'm surprised this simplistic "smash those that give you shit" style didn't evaporate upon first reading of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
> There exists bullies and sociopaths out there, and they will keep raising the bar of abuse.
Ironically, those in my camp find the "retributive justice" arguments you're making to be sociopathic. You see a homeless drug addict and immediately jump to "throw this degenerate in prison," rather than the more empathetic take of wondering what caused the person's life to fall to such a wretched state. You'd rather spend the money keeping them behind bars, punishing them for their "personal failings," than spend (demonstrably less) money trying to help them. As a former conservative, I believe this is because empathy, especially for perceived degenerates, feels icky and feels like weakness, which is an intolerable personal feeling to have. Forgive me for reaching so far if this isn't how you feel, but this is what I perceive that other still-conservative people believe.
> So in my view, tolerating petty crimes only leads to people pushing boundaries and more and more violent crime.
There isn't evidence to support this, and also this ignores that the definition of "crime" can change. Example, there's no good reason for weed to be illegal, and yet alcohol to be legal, considering alcohol is the far more dangerous drug. We saw exactly what is to be expected when alcohol is made illegal: the formation of alcohol cartels (mafia) that took over the streets. When prohibition ended, their power (income) was cut into pieces and the era of the mafia ended. No, going to war with them in the streets didn't solve it, ending prohibition did. And yet by your logic every person smoking weed on a street in Texas is technically a criminal. By tolerating their action we "tolerate more violent crime." The logic doesn't hold.
> I feel that our society should not tolerate such disorderliness, and instead should actively shun and punish such behavior, in order to strongly incentivize people to become productive and contributing members of society.
We tried that, and it doesn't seem to work. It turns out the best solution to homelessness is simply housing the homeless. "Housing First" is what I'm describing, and evidence shows it works better than what you're suggesting: https://endhomelessness.org/resource/housing-first/
It's also gross that what you're arguing for is kicking a beaten dog.
> society needs to help these people get control of their lives.
It's super weird to me that to the extent you're willing to acknowledge society has responsibility to their fellow man (who happen to be homeless), it's only to argue that we must essentially brutalize them to make them feel even worse about being homeless / drug addicts / whatever.
> Have I seen studies or other acceptable documentation for my conclusion? Nothing that I can specifically remember, or at least nothing that I have at hand
That's because there are none. That's because your position is based on feelings, not facts.
> But I don't feel I NEED documentation.
As an engineer, if I said this in a meeting about considering which technology to choose for a given application, I would be fired. I don't know why you think this is an acceptable way to opine about social issues, literally willfully ignorantly.
> It's just so obvious to me that punishing crime serves to deter crime, and the harsher the punishment, the stronger the deterrent
You are partially correct, but then entirely incorrect, regarding harsher punishment being a stronger deterrent:
> "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more "powerful deterrent than the punishment.
> "Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime."
I don't believe you. Have you weighed every lobster you ever purchased? Ever picked up a feather without first checking it wasn't a bald eagle feather? Ever divert storm sewer water for fun?
There may be as many 300,000 federal regulations that carry criminal penalties. What's your bet you've never broken a single one? (hint: you basically can't possibly know, and this is why you should never talk to cops btw)
> and I feel that harshly punishing things like vandalism or burglary will only make society better for all law-abiding citizens.
This is reactionary rhetoric that just "others" undesirables and is why people like me push back so hard, btw. There's no such thing as a "law-abiding citizen" as I explained earlier. I don't want to get too much into the weeds of this, how cops are trained to see everyone as a potential enemy etc etc, but this is where this rhetoric from my position comes from.
TLDR Though you're self admittedly willfully ignorant, as in, by your own admission uninterested in reading into effective judicial strategies (or even really effective interpersonal relationship strategies), you hold strong opinion on how society should be run and believe you know enough that the rest of us should adopt your strategies. Why should we do that?
OK, I've posted and deleted a reply to this 3 times now. There's a lot in this post. Here goes the final draft.
First of all, I feel like your post emanates barely-contained anger. Your choice of words and tone kind of betrays your contempt for me and my opinion. You're "fascinated" by my response, my views are "sociopathic", I'm "ignorant," yada yada. I can't say it makes it an appealing prospect to continue the discussion, because we fundamentally disagree, and I have a feeling that more insults will be flung my way. But against my instincts, I'll continue.
The first few segments of your response have to do with rejection of my principle of "common sense" as a guiding principle in my opinions about some of these issues. You go through point by point, rebutting each example I listed with a detailed refutation and a link to some study. There are quite a few strawmans and a lot of insinuations that I'm a conservative. I'll just start this discussion by telling you I voted for Biden, I don't ascribe some umbrella label to myself, so let's just cut this name calling out right now.
Here's the problem. I tell you, "my entire life experience tells me that X means Y. I know this to be a fundamental truth of the universe. I am CERTAIN of this." You reply: "That's totally incorrect. Here's a study or example where X does not equal Y. Here's my explanation of why X does not equal Y. Therefore you are wrong and willfully ignorant for still believing X equals Y." But what you don't understand is that it is very hard to change someone's mind when they are CERTAIN of something. It's like if you told me 2 + 2 equals 5, and linked to some study proving it, and wrote an essay on why it is the case, it still wouldn't change my mind. Because it directly contradicts my reality. My lived experience. My "common sense" position of, for instance, punishments being effective to deter crime is based on literally every experience I've ever had in my entire life. Are they perfect deterrents? Of course not. But I've changed my own behavior to avoid punishment, I've seen a million other people do the same, and there's no possible universe in which I could just read some study online and go "wow, I guess punishments don't work to deter crime!" That's not me being willfully ignorant, that's me not wasting my time with obvious falsehoods. Forgive my being harsh, but the "don't punish crimes" movement is the same as the flat earther movement in my view - so stupid, so obviously incorrect, that it isn't even worth a second of my time. Studies are not the arbiters of truth.
Now onto the next point I want to make. I think it should be perfectly clear to you that when I talk about punishing crimes, I'm talking about SERIOUS crimes. We're on a thread about the stabbing of Bob Lee, after all. For you to suggest my opinion is dumb because I speed or don't correctly weigh my lobster and therefore technically everyone is a criminal... that's YOU being willfully ignorant, dude. Everybody speeds but practically nobody stabs, vandalizes, robs, rapes, etc. THESE are the crimes that I want harshly punished. It's literally common sense, a theme that seems to keep popping up here. I'm honestly just dumbfounded that you seriously think me saying "I don't commit any crimes" is tantamount to me saying "I have literally never sped or broken any law in my entire life." Like god damn. When I talk about law abiding citizens I'm talking about people who don't commit crimes that make life drastically shittier for everyone else. And the vast majority of people on the planet fall into this category.
I could continue on, and go over the Norway thing and how I believe it's a completely different situation than the US, or go over the housing the homeless thing and talk about how expensive that would be in SF, or any of the other points, but I feel this would be a waste of time. Because I would guess it directly contradicts your lived experience. That's the thing. I don't comment to change people's minds. I don't comment to dunk on my political oppponents. I don't comment to show everyone what an idiot the other side is via angry point-by-point takedowns that are dripping with contempt. I literally just comment on HN because I like the discussion, I like hearing how people think and what their insights are. Hence what I originally commented: I wanted to comment "so we can exchange perspectives and see what someone 'on the other side' of the issue thinks." I really think there's no need for the clear contempt of the tone of your reply. We disagree, dude. It's no reason to get emotional. There are a lot of people out there and you'll likely find yourself disagreeing with many of them.
If my tone was insulting I apologize. I am angry though, you're right. I'm watching the predictable cycle. A similar anger after 9/11 because of the tragedy but also because I knew it would be exploited to erode our freedoms, and lo, I was right (I'm not special, lots were warning this would happen).
Same here. People are ignoring the research that highly punitive retributive justice systems don't work, and reformative justice systems do, because of some combination of yellow journalism and cognitive / rhetorical fallacy.
> Studies are not the arbiters of truth.
Certainly not all truths, and I agree with you that we can't expect people to fact check literally every aspect of their lives. However, your flat earth example is fantastic, here's why: the earth being flat is common sense. If you don't fly (many people) and have never seen the ocean (many people), don't think much about orbits or astronomy, why would you think the earth is round? There's a reason flat earthism is so popular, it really does "make good horse sense."
Grant me for a moment that to believe the earth is flat in 2023 requires believing in a massive global conspiracy, maybe instead let's consider a detached farmer in 1920. How about this guy: https://youtu.be/RS27u6IqWt0 . Consider what's necessary to know with certainty that the earth is a globe, and consider how they disagree with "common sense."
A flat earth would allow for seeing all the way to the end of it, right, so since you can't see all the way to new York city from here, the earth must be a globe, right? "No, fog prevents that, and tall trees, and mountains." Ok, the shadow cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse is always round, and the only shape that can do that is a sphere. "Well, that's nice, but I've never seen a lunar eclipse, and I don't really care to sit around moving shapes in front of a candle to see if that's true." Ok, time zones! If the earth was flat it would be the same time in new York and San Francisco, instead it's different. "Is it different? I didn't know, I don't have a telephone."
Without resorting to things completely outside the realm of "common sense," and basically coming up with good explanations for someone's daily experiences, i don't see how you could explain to someone (pre space age) how the earth is a globe. Can you think of a way?
I wish there was a more polite way to say "willful ignorant" but my point is basically, you've had the explanations, with evidence, for why your common sense doesn't align with reality, set before you, and you said "I don't want to read that, I'm good with my view of reality." I'm not trying to sell you essential oils here, this is just something outside your domain and to do it well takes some research and perhaps I guess something that disagrees with the "common sense" of some people. What else can I call that?
And anyway, surely you agree that when it comes to setting up our laws, infrastructure, we want to make sure to be doing so correctly? Before we build a bridge, don't we want some studies done on concrete before choosing the right kind? And isn't it best to have the domain experts doing that? And doesn't it make sense that even though every time you tried to use consumer concrete to build something with a gap, it crumbled, that's ok because we use a different kind for building in industrial applications with techniques involving rebar?
And I still hold the position that the retributive model isn't common sense, I've found great success with never wielding a stick as a leader in various spheres: teacher, social worker, sales leader, engineering lead, scout leader, burning man camp leader. It just seems common sense and agreed with my every day experience that punishment drives shit results. A story from "How to Win Friends": a tech fails to fuel a stunt pilot's plane well, he nearly crashes and perishes. Tech is apoplectic, apologizing profusely, offering to resign, pilot says "why would I fire the tech least likely to make a fuel calculation mistake in the future?" I only use this example to demonstrate that even in the domain you chose, that being business / school / interpersonal relationships, the "retributive " model isn't common sense or effective, though again I don't think it's a great idea to try to draw too many conclusions between handling a fuel calculation error and a premeditated crime or crime of passion.
> "I don't commit any crimes" is tantamount to me saying "I have literally never sped or broken any law in my entire life."
Well, do you see why maybe your common sense is maladjusted? For me I'm genuinely surprised at your surprise. What else is a criminal but someone who breaks the law? That's why I pushed back so hard! Your definition is vague! "Someone that does these crimes I think are really bad." Well the USA doesn't care if you murdered someone or committed certain kinds of white collar fraud, or even something more mundane, all are felonies and you don't get to vote after. You're a criminal in all circumstances. Hence my point that your common sense doesn't map well onto an actual society, or at least not this one.
> We disagree, dude. It's no reason to get emotional.
This is the extraordinary privilege you live with. Imagine the conversation is discussing sodomy laws in Texas. "who cares, doesn't affect me, and anyway isn't that kinda gross?" You have the privilege to not worry about it, other people are literally fighting for their right to exist.
If you're finding anger in response to your position, why is your response to hand wave it? "Damn bro, calm down." Are you not at all curious why someone would be so passionate about this issue? Because what we're talking about is America's bloodthirsty retributive justice system that's resulted in one of the highest incarceration rates on earth and essentially a continuation of slavery (prison labor, for profit privatized prisons), and you're dispassionately making "common sense" arguments for not only how that's great, but we should do more of it, and by the way you don't care about whatever evidence I show you demonstrating that you're wrong, you just want to continue believing it or whatever. No shit that's infuriating lol.
> When I talk about law abiding citizens I'm talking about people who don't commit crimes that make life drastically shittier for everyone else.
There's plenty of things people do that make life drastically shittier for everyone else, that isn't illegal. Banks making bad investments and crashing the economy in 2008. Sending soldiers to die in foreign countries. Locking up refugees. Lobbying to keep minimum wage low. Torpedoing welfare budgets. Driving gas guzzling vehicles. Operating a fossil fuel company. Rejecting health insurance claims. Addicting someone to alert bubble dopamine hits. Harvesting user data.
Seems common sense to me that destroying the Gulf coast through blatant malpractice is just as bad as punching someone in the face, but nobody went to jail after the BP oil spill.
> Are they perfect deterrents? Of course not. But I've changed my own behavior to avoid punishment, I've seen a million other people do the same, and there's no possible universe in which I could just read some study online and go "wow, I guess punishments don't work to deter crime!"
It's worth pointing out by the way that this is basically a strawman, no study I linked said "we should stop punishing crime," the basic argument is that the best deterrent is certainty of being punished, whereas degree of punishment holds basically no effect. In this context that means the SFPD quiet quitting is having a much larger effect on increase in crime than, say, eliminating cash bail. In any case the other arguments are about actually solving what drives crime more than anything else which is economic disparity: improving that doesn't require halting the punishment of crime, my point is that the call to arms are a distraction towards ineffective solutions.
Btw I forget that some Americans consider "conservative" an insult, I didn't mean that in a name calling way, I meant that in an attempt to accurately describe the political leanings of the position you hold. I maintain that retributive justice is a conservative policy position, and indeed is a favorite of your Republican party. Note also though that Biden is also a conservative by most international perspectives, and sf politicians are mostly centrists or at best liberals (a term which here means "moderate centrist," not "progressive"). So I didn't mean to name call you, sorry.
> I could continue on, and go over the Norway thing and how I believe it's a completely different situation than the US
Norway is different but I don't see why that means the usa can't apply the basic restorative justice principles
> or go over the housing the homeless thing and talk about how expensive that would be in SF
First, housing first advocates seem to be demonstrating that housing the homeless would be cheaper than the current solution of cycling them in and out of jail while wasting police resources on tearing down their shelters. Second, so what it's expensive? We're talking about humans living on the street. Society is only as good as it is for those living in the worse condition it offers.
I admire you for having a clearer understanding of why you post here. I enjoy the discussions as well I think, and maybe I'm driven by a desire to seek truth? I guess throughout this thread I've been hoping people had SOME evidence to justify the retributive justice model they're all touting and seeking further implementation of, because otherwise to me it just seems like people are seeking further cruelty, but I haven't gotten that, just people saying "doesn't it just make sense? Cut off the hands of thieves, that'll teach them!" So maybe that's why I'm so frustrated.
So we have two dudes with common sense disagreements. We need to decide whether we punish thieves by cutting off their hands or by making them make society whole through labor or otherwise while investigating why they felt the need to steal at all. How do we resolve that other than by seeking the truest effective method through study, experimentation, publishing results? "We disagreed so we did research and found the right answer." Well that's basically what I'm saying we as a society should do and it sounds like you're basically saying "despite that effort I still prefer to just believe I'm right."
And a final thing I don't think I'm communicating well is so many things that turn out to be good policy violate "common sense," because we humans are bug ridden. Our cognitive fallacies cause all sorts of incorrect observation and behavior. This is so common in judicial theory. Zero tolerance policies at school: let's come down hard on crime in school! Result: huge expulsion rates, and incentives choosing the worse of bad behaviors, because they're all punished the same. Or, three strike laws. Repeat criminals aren't gonna change, let's just lock them up forever! Result: high rates of recidivism, overcrowded prisons. Criminalizing drugs. Drugs bad, lead to crime, ban them. Result: cartels, mafia. Result of decriminalization: drop in crime AND drug usage, drop in diseases like HIV. Rent control: lock prices, protect low income families. Result: high income families lock down low income rates, market overcorrects when housing comes available, etc.
Basically when I find myself thinking "seems like common sense," I have the opposite reaction to you: I believe our rational facilities have documented flaws and so my first instinct is to apply rigid logic and evidence to check my understanding.
I had another thought, because you've got me chewing on this now. You said, oh well, someone disagrees with you. Why get angry? This assumes all that's at stake is a disagreement. "we can agree not to agree" mentality. But that's not what's at stake. What I have to deal with is the fact that there's you, and presumably people like you, who will vote per their understanding of the world, and who, as you say, won't be convinced by study or anything else, because your common sense is "just right" or whatever.
But, I've demonstrated, it's wrong. You're going to vote for things, and build society in such a way, that makes it worse for all of us.
That's probably the most obnoxious thing anybody's said to you in a while but I can't see any way around that fact: my point of view is absolutely correct so far as I have the ability to confirm this. You haven't been able to convince me otherwise (nor are you interested in trying) so I'm safe to assume my point of view is closer to the truth, and my idea (not mine rather but the one I support) of restorative justice is the correct way to build a better society.
You disagree, won't be convinced, won't read evidence contrary to your experience, and want to make the world more like what you think it should be, which will, as per the evidence presented, make it worse. Furthermore since you're not interested in investigative reasoning for certain subjects about which you're convinced you know the truth (my attempt at your words), when the world gets worse as we step further down the path of retributive justice, you won't acknowledge that your ideology is bad, because you've determined for yourself it's correct and won't be convinced otherwise, and will try to implement it even further. With this ideology locked as such I'd say it's not slippery slope fallacy to suggest you may one day find yourself arguing to literally cut off the hands of thieves.
Given these stakes, how could I not be angry? What a frustrating ideology to encounter!
But people don't respond well to anger so I'll say truthfully and earnestly, if you ignore the subject of the conversation and focus only on the logical and ideological framework I think you're applying here, can you see how refusing to consider studies or arguments that challenge your core beliefs can sometimes be problematic? How it can be a recursive and self feeding problem?
I see your point, and I appreciate the replies. You make some very good points and honestly after thinking about it, you're right. When it comes to issues like this the importance is elevated above standard matters of common sense. Further digging is required when the consequence is human lives. I still do trust my intuition, but I'll look into some of the research nonetheless. I get that it is frustrating to encounter this line of thinking because it's very resistant to change, and I apologize.
But of course, things do go both ways. Part of the reason people like me adopt such dug-in positions is because there's just so much stupid shit and terrible ideas in society that some kind of filter becomes necessary, and it's not always easy to tune. For every legitimate, good-intentioned proposition out there that may contradict common sense, there are another 10 idiotic propositions, and it can become very laborious to look through them all to try to find the good ones. And you have to understand that I don't have my position out of malice, it's moreso a greater concern for the welfare of what I'd call "law abiding citizens" than what I'd call "criminals" (now that we have clarified the definitions). You may disagree with this, but I don't think it makes me evil or malicious.
Now I do want to say one thing. It is not IMPOSSIBLE to convince me of something when my common sense tells me otherwise. If I could see an example of a major US city, very similar to the ones I've lived in, that has successfully been lenient on crime and had a crime decrease, then I would certainly be open to reconsidering my positions. But throughout my life it seems like the opposite has happened. It seems to me in fact that the "compassion not conviction" policies directly caused the increase in crime. SF is a city that seems to agree with me, given the Chesa Boudin recall. NYC is another example, where that city was actually quite safe in the 2000s and only seemingly with De Blasio's compassion-focused administration did it start to deteriorate again. Chicago is another example.
Basically what I'm trying to say is that I don't feel I'm entirely "refusing to consider" arguments. But when it comes to things that I feel increasingly certain about, it requires an increasingly salient level of proof to convince me otherwise. Like for this particular issue, given that I've been to SF and seen with my own eyes what it's like on the streets there, it would require more than a study to convince me of this, I'd want to go and see the successful policy in action with my own eyes. Because right now my own eyes have seen that the policy was not really that successful, and news stories like the one in the OP reinforce my perception here.
This is kind of off topic, but if I could build my ideal world, I'd begin to do away with cops entirely. Modern technology could enable total, pervasive surveillance of an entire city's public areas. AI could enable automatic monitoring and enforcement. You could build a system of perfect justice, where nobody could get away with anything because it would all be seen. I'd still prefer privacy in the home so that it wouldn't be some hellish dystopia, but otherwise, hell, let's go full Minority Report. The tech is ready and I truly think it would make for a better and safer society, and eliminate lots of problems with human-centric law enforcement such as profiling, brutality, etc. In fact, I'm actually really hopeful that SF tries something like this out. Given the city's impending budget cliff and dwindling police force numbers, they may be faced with a choice between just tolerating increasing lawlessness or starting to use cheap tech to try and keep people safe in other ways.
Well for one I appreciate you sticking around for so long. For another, I admire almost nobody more in the world than a person willing to say "on second thought, you're right." My side, I'm grateful you pushed back on me when my tone was clearly insulting, because I think I'm also here to learn better how to communicate with people, and a big one for me is making sure to watch my tone. Though fwiw I really was and am fascinated by your reply, I didn't mean that condescendingly but you were right to assume so.
I think I don't want to line by line you and link bomb, though the temptation is there, but before we go our separate ways I want to somewhat address what you brought up.
I think you're probably right that the usa is a unique environment to apply the reformative justice principles, as you say and for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, such as difficulty of achieving true universal healthcare for example. I think a key reason though is the political divide in America and the outsized ability of various people and organizations to make or break a policy.
This is important in the SF case because my running theory, backed I believe by evidence (I won't link bomb) is that for example a relatively progressive politician like Chesa Boudin can be hamstrung by the cops not making as many arrests. For reasons I can't quite comprehend Boudin seems to be hated by a lot of people, but what I've found is that before he was elected the police union was already putting out hit pieces. In reality, Boudin's prosecution rates were the same or higher than his predecessor. In terms of actually putting people in jail, he was just as happy to do it as any other prosecutor, he just was brought less people to put in jail.
Now maybe he deserved to be recalled for his inability to work with the sfpd, I'm not sure, but that doesn't seem related to the two things in line with reformative justice that he did, eliminating cash bail and pretrial detention. Here's the key: there were iirc one or two high profile instances of a person out of pretrial detention that then committed a heinous crime. This is fodder for yellow journalism and confirmation bias. "See, it doesn't work, and furthermore this is an indictment of reformative justice and progressive politics!"
What is never mentioned is that certain forms of crime, particularly violent forms, did drop during his tenure, and in fact rose again after his recall.
The situation with him also seems fodder for misattribution. How much affect can one DA over the course of, what, two years, really have, in the face of record inflation and a historic pandemic? Property crime rose during his tenure but it rose across America (murder rates did too). I have lots of evidence showing that crime rates correlate more strongly with economic disparity than anything else, so if crime is going up in SF, it's probably because of that, rather than a single polarizing politician.
Basically my point is, yeah, your eyes are seeing things, no way I can deny that, but the news never reports the mundane, and the truth of it is San Francisco is a relatively boring place. There are far more violent cities in America, but for whatever reason the media loves to paste a sensationalist story of every single murder in SF, every single robbery. Your eyes can only see what's put in front of them, and crime stats aren't being put in front of them. Little Rock had 119 murders last year, twice San Francisco's, but the media doesn't tout every single one as either the personal failure of a socialist DA or the collective failure of progressive politics in general, so nobody talks about it.
So that's why I argue so strongly in favor of the boring: awareness of cognitive biases and rhetorical fallacies, research, and statistics, because I don't think the more exciting way of being aware of the world will give you an accurate picture. Maybe the job of people like me is to find ways to get this information in front of people that doesn't involve insulting them on internet forums lol
In any case having previously lived in SF I feel like what you're seeing on the streets there is less to do with murderers and more to do with the outsized homeless population and lack of public restrooms. I suppose the car break-ins thing is bad but from what I've read the sfpd is neither defunded nor under staffed (compared to cities with worse or more crime), so I'm not sure what's preventing them from making arrests? My pet theory is they're just kinda shit at their jobs, maybe on purpose. Plenty of stories on here of people showing them GPS tracking for a stolen bike and them shrugging their shoulders.
As for your ideal world, that certainly agrees with the evidence that certainty of punishment is the best deterrent (though deterrence is not necessarily the best way to reduce crime). Having though lived in a pervasive surveillance police state (the PRC) I hesitate to throw my weight behind it. Then again Taiwan has somewhat pervasive surveillance and I haven't found any privacy issues as a result, perhaps because the digital minister is an advocate for privacy, or maybe because much of the surveillance is from private businesses on their stores. There's other considerations with the AI thing such as AI can fail to face recognize on black people more frequently than white depending on the model which could deepen inequalities of the application of justice in the USA. Also such a tool, if built with good intentions, could be abused upon the election of some kind of fascist, and used to target political enemies. In general I'm on board with ideas that reduce brutality and profiling.
Anyway my final question I think is: if you were willing to grant there might be something to my idea that the truth may be more hidden away in statistics and studies, is there a way to bring that truth "before the eyes" of a million people all who have their own things they're worrying about?
> When there is threat of punishment, legitimate actual punishment, people fall into line
Yet there's so many more people incarcerated in the US for such long periods of time than in most other countries. "Life without parole" basically doesn't really exist in Europe.
> Here's the thing - I do have evidence. But it's the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, not something I've read in some paper or study. My evidence is (I see no other way to put it than to be frank) just common sense. I've met plenty of people in my life. I've seen humans and I know how humans behave
I'm American born, but grew up in a high crime area. Something that most Americans who grew up in very safe environments don't understand is that once order begins to decay, it accelerates exponentially. Growing up in highly orderly, safe environments, they completely take order for granted. This leads to them supporting policies that prioritize other things far above order, which basically describes San Francisco's childish, utopian politics for the last 20 years. The SF City Council sounds like a bunch of stoners in Che Guevara t-shirts hanging out in a dorm-room, instead of thoughtful policy makers.
I lived in SF for a year (in Nob Hill) in my early 20s living with my then GF, back in 2002-2003. It was a beautiful, safe, just chill place then. It's disgusting now. I was there in 2019, and one of the things that jumped out at me was how I constantly smelled piss and a big portion of the city looked the way only the Tenderloin used to. And yes, it's the fault of the SF politicians.
What boggled my mind about Mexico is how some states are EXCEPTIONALLY safe, while others are EXCEPTIONALLY dangerous. Most folks tend to presume all of Mexico is dangerous.
For me it's weird you think that the origin of crime is lack of order. I mean that's the last step in a deteriorating society, but the actual reason comes much before.
It's an unfairness a lack of common narrative of well being. And most of all it's from education being neglected and families being broken.
The order part you get at the end, after the rot festers.
A person can reasonably disagree with the comment you are replying to, but is not weird: it is a very common opinion that you've probably seen or heard many times.
So what would you say to the argument that the police are already too violent, and that too many people already get put in jail, especially minorities? That is the motivation behind the progressive policies of not prosecuting criminals. Every person not prosecuted is one less crime statistic; bonus points if that person-kept-out-of-jail is a minority.
I want to be absolutely clear - I am in no way suggesting minorities are genetically inclined to be criminals or asking you to speak for all minorities or anything like that. I'm just curious, given your views and your background, what you think when you hear politicians claim that they are fighting inequality by not prosecuting criminals.
I would say that those are not reasons to embrace a lawless society.
If the laws are bad, fix them. If the police are too brutal, curtail them.
This is the only path towards with a healthy society. This isn't always easy, and sometimes it seems impossible. However, sanctioning lawlessness and giving up on reform is no solution. It is a race to the bottom, and hurts minorities even more. If you think building towards equality is hard, imagine how much harder it is when theft, rape, and murder is rampant in your community.
This is represented in the opinions and surveys of minority communities. People want less bias and police brutality, but they also want more police on the streets and more enforcement of laws.
I think the police is very violent in the US in big part because of training but also because how prevalent guns are. We certainly need better accountability and better training.
I still think we need more cops. We lag behind Europe in cops per capita, and have higher crime rates.
The idea that we should stop prosecuting crimes because it affects one type of citizen or another is ridiculous for a ton of reasons, but specially because of this: minorities are more likely to be in the receiving end of a crime.
We can do both invest in the social aspect to level the playing field and prosecute crime wherever it manifests.
>I think the police is very violent in the US in big part because of training but also because how prevalent guns are.
I've heard this excuse before and I don't put much into it. Most of the videos I've seen are bad cops terrorizing people who aren't armed. George Floyd was unarmed, as were countless victims. Karen Garner couldn't hurt anyone. There are many more examples. Also, we're currently a much less armed society than we were before we had this policing issue.
The videos you see are curated to showcase police brutality. In a country with 300 million people and as many guns, its not hard to come up with a video a day depicting things going wrong. That is not the norm though. No one is going to post videos of polite, professional interactions, even though those are, obviously, the vast majority of cases.
Sure, but the police unions and departments protect the bad police and the prosecutors refuse to prosecute them. If we had a video of a teacher groping a student a day and nobody did anything about it, we'd lose our minds.
It's because these cops are bad people and there is no accountability. I'm sure in some departments this sort of thing is encouraged, many it's excused. We can agree that bad police should be fired and charged right?
I don't get the gun angle, people have always had guns in the US. There are fewer households with guns now than there were since the 1990s.
Someone did a survey of 15K police officers and gun restrictions in 2013 here:
And when it comes to finding ways to reduce gun violence and large scale shootings, most cops say a federal ban on so-called “assault weapons” isn’t the answer.
More than 91 percent of respondents say it would either have no effect or a negative effect in reducing violent crime. This is an overwhelming response by those whose job it is to actually deal with this issue on the front lines.
More than 91 percent of respondents support the concealed carry of firearms by civilians who have not been convicted of a felony and/or not been deemed psychologically/medically incapable.
A full 86 percent feel that casualties would have been reduced or avoided in recent tragedies like Newtown and Aurora if a legally-armed citizen was present (casualties reduced: 80 percent; avoided altogether: 60 percent).
It's a biased sample. American police forces attract gun enthusiasts who want to carry and use guns on people. Go to a police forum and see how often they share and gush about weaponry and moan about what their jurisdiction won't give them. It's like kids in a playground. These are people who write "you're fucked" on a gun they use to kill an unarmed person.
There are 700,000 human police officers in the United States. This is a huge bell curve of behavior and interaction. The most reasonable suggestion I have heard is a federal database for police complaints and firings, to help identify patterns and bad actors.
> The videos you see are curated to showcase police brutality
What videos did this person see, that you are referring to? Are you saying there isn't evidence of a problem of police brutality? I recall a survey of Black NY city police; most of them had been harassed when off-duty.
Cops must be under incredible amounts of stress, operating in an environment where anybody could be (legally!) armed. Maybe they start out wanting to improve the world and throw that thought out the window once the first bullet goes flying pas their heads.
>> The most basic definition and purpose of the state is to hold the monopoly of violence. It must jealously protect this. The alternative is unsustainable anarchy followed by someone else filling that void.
Can we re-phrase "monopoly of violence" to maintaining the rule of law. The government has an obligation to maintain the rule of law. Monopoly on violence by itself does not provide real legitimacy.
One thing that I want to add, is how much harder it is to live in such environment. Every door needs to be reinforced, bars on windows are more common, expensive locks in residential buildings. Someone stranded on the side of the road, but you don’t want to take chances trying to help. Every transaction is much more difficult and expensive.
I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35454781 and moved it to the top level (just for technical reasons - the first page of the thread is currently too comment-heavy).
I have commented on SF threads before regarding the violent crime.
I don't think we have figured out if this was premeditated or not, but either way, SF is becoming incredibly dangerous. Progressive DA's and a neutered police force are to blame for the rise in violent crime.
Many of my friends have taken their remote gigs and left SF in the last 3 years. What's the point in rolling the dice every time you walk outside for some air and to potentially catch an attack or worse? I can't blame them at all for the move.
I work remote and hearing some of my coworkers try to defend SF is like hearing a battered woman defend their abusive husband, "it's not that bad really, you just need to do X, if you get robbed you probably deserved it for Y"
boggles my mind that people can rationalize things like not being able to leave bags in their car or they'll get their windows smashed and their stuff stolen. People in other places don't have to live like that
Safety is not synonymous with crime. Certainly not random street crime. I've lived in NYC for 25 years and never really felt threatened. You just need to keep your head up and look both ways before crossing the street. I let my kids walk themselves through downtown Brooklyn and don't really worry. The fact they are rarely riding in a car is huge bonus for safety.
>Progressive DA's and a neutered police force are to blame for the rise in violent
Interesting that you say this after our progressive DA was recalled & our mayor is trying to supplement the SFPD budget by $27.6M.
Also interesting, I have lived in SF since 1972 and only been mugged once, in my 1st yr there (I was 7 & mugged by kids across the street in the projects for my Mickey M watch and about $0.50). I will freely and safely walk anywhere in the City at any time of day or night. And I'm an older guy.. This ongoing discourse is tiring.
Having lived in SF for over 10 years (and never been mugged) there are multiple areas that are subjectively and objectively unsafe. I hope you continue to be so lucky.
Governments and the polities they govern are like container ships. It takes a long time to change course even after the decision is made. Sadly, in SF, the damage has already been done and it won't be undone by recalling a single DA or merely proposing to fund public safety.
Nice anecdote. Have you heard the one about the tech CTO that got stabbed to death? We have data about this too and it's very much trending in the wrong direction.
If you're tired of arguing with people who are begging you to care about their lives, you can always just remain silent.
It’s really simple and I don’t understand why progressives can’t grasp this. You need to snuff out crime. There’s a reasonable way to do it without swinging across to either extreme. If the police force won’t cooperate, clean house and hire again. It’s a relatively low skilled job that is easy to hire for. Get the homeless off the street, snuff out petty crime or you’re basically dooming the progressive mandate as something unworkable.
The police union plays a large role. They reject candidates that don’t toe the line and heavily favor nepotistic hires. It’s the only union that needs to be busted.
What agencies have you applied for? I’m in process with 4 right now and none have asked me for my personal beliefs. All my interviews focused on deescalation, using appropriate force etc.
Because cities have had high increases in living costs and haven't increased police salaries to match, making suburban and rural policing jobs more attractive.
This problem has been getting solved with overtime pay for more than a decade. Sergeants in notoriously corrupt and terrible Oakland PD make upwards of 500k/yr.
I lean rather leftist in how I think about addressing social issues so we may have differing opinions on correct solutions, but your general assessment on the city's problems and its root issue being a lack of strong conviction and follow through is spot on.
I agree the SFPD’s lack of cooperation and inaction is a central issue that needs addressing by cleaning house and rebuilding. The leftist proposal (often shorthanded to “abolish the police”) would say wipe away the current structure that answers to no one built for antagonism and punishment and replace it with a service bound to strong community oversight tasked with protection, aid, and rehabilitation.
That idea may be the literal scientifically perfect solution to crime or an impossibly impractical utopian fantasy but we’ll never know from SF’s vague motions. Appointing Boudin DA so he could reduce charges and lessen punishments without making corresponding changes in the police force to focus on community outreach and aid services was never a real attempt that could be judged, and was hamstrung from the beginning in a way that could only result in failure.
But even if you think real try at that proposal would never work and the correct solution for addressing crime in SF is something very different the same type of failure is guaranteed if the city doesn’t address the point you made. If the police refuse to act in accordance with the wishes of the community and aren’t replaced with people who will the city will never have a cohesively focused law enforcement strategy that any approach requires to have a chance at succeeded.
The homelessness issue is the exact same thing with SF continuing to be afraid to commit to anything more than half measures regardless of costs. The city has a homeless population of around 8-10 thousand and spends around $1.1b a year on services. Over $100k per person, a bit more than the average income in the city, how does that make any sense? Providing every homeless person an apartment, free food, healthcare, drug rehabilitation, and job search services would very likely cost less and actually solve the issue. Like yes that's a massive simplification and not actually workable in the current world, especially without the rest of the country providing similar services, but it approximates an actual plan with singular direction and the numbers involved highlight demonstrate the problem.
San Francisco really wants to be seen as progressive on homelessness so it keeps throwing large amounts of money at one-off half-baked projects like $5k a month per person on tent spaces in parking lots to prevent COVID spread in the homeless or $70k a year to fund new beds in shelters the homeless can only sleep in at night or $1.7m to build a single public toilet.
At the same time it really wants it to seem like its listening to its tax payers and taking action with visible effect so it also tosses however many millions on encampment sweeps, building hostile architecture, and having law enforcement harass or temporarily arrest the homeless all of which just results in the homeless moving somewhere else a few blocks away.
So it ends up wasting this extraordinary amount of money and effort doing a whole bunch of nothing instead of you know, actually getting the homeless off the street. Because that would require establishing a goal with measurable criteria, forming a comprehensive plan to accomplish it, and working as a cohesive public body to make it happen.
I really rambling here but I feel like pretty much every single issue in San Francisco stems from this same problem. The city and its government is terrified of doing anything that requires the integrity to build a concrete project that it could be judged by, in whichever political direction, and so it keeps creating a giant mismatch of conflicting partial measures it can parade around as progress to counter criticism and avoid quantifiable failure while never actually making any forward movement. See everything with the schools or the cost of living or public transit or other infrastructure or a million other things for even more examples of this.
As long as SF continues to half-ass everything and avoid commitment nothing is going to change.
Leadership is not fixing problems because it is not to their political benifit to fix them.
I have friends in London Breed's cabinent and most of her choices are made in the context of her political aspirations for her next office. This means bandaids and duct tape for the city if that doesn't rock the boat.
This political problem isn't unique and I don't know how to fix it. The public needs leaders who's number 1 priority is their current job, not building towards their next job.
> The city has a homeless population of around 8-10 thousand and spends around $1.1b a year on services
I don't trust these numbers, or at least how meaningful they are. Vancouver officially has a similar homeless population, but on a sunny day you can go to the downtown eastside and see 8000 people who you might assume are homeless. Maybe some of them are sleeping in cars, or SROs, or squats, and don't identify as homeless. Or they're currently in jail, incarcerated, a hospital, or a mental health facility, and also don't get counted towards the number. The number is entirely determined by groups that come up with them coordinating an effort to go out over a 24 hour period and ask people if they're homeless. Whoever says yes gets added to the count.
I think the number would be more meaningful if they instead asked people about their living conditions, and came up with a number of people who fall below some basic standard of housing (possibly a combination of: >100 sq ft per person, working stove, working bathroom, working utilities)
Yeah I agree. Off chance you stopped reading at that point (can’t blame you, it’s a unnecessarily long post) the immediately next sentence in my post is noting that: “not actually workable in the current world, especially without the rest of the country providing similar services”
The police are on strike and that's all there is to it. They haven't been "neutered". SF has an average number of sworn personnel for cities of its size, 23 per 10k residents.
No city has figured out how to attack the problem of police productivity, except arguably Camden NJ.
I’m guessing it’s a thinly veiled reference to the fictional idea that if you steal less then $1,000 worth of valuables in CA you won’t be prosecuted. It’s constantly brought up by people like Charlie Kirk (who tweeted it as early as three days ago.)
For the record, that isn’t true, it’s where they set the threshold for a crime being treated as a high class of misdemeanor or felony (I can’t remember which) and how stiff the sentence is. I live in AZ and our dollar amount threshold for the same types of crime are actually higher than California’s but no one tries to say that you can “walk out of a CVS with $X and there’s no penalty” because some people are just looking to tear down CA, not actually discuss policy and it’s impacts.
The difference is where you live in Arizona, misdemeanors will actually be prosecuted.
In most of CA misdemeanors are ignored, because of other laws and practices. So yes, it really does mean you can walk out with $950 and literally nothing will happen to you - unless you do it in front of a police officer or something. This is why Apple stores here pay police officers to hang out at the entrance.
The problem with clearance rates is that the denominator relies on larceny being reported. They don't get reported in SF. They do everywhere else. Percentages can make anything look good.
not that this is real "data" or anything, but I have lived in San Francisco (in various parts of the Mission and Soma) since 2018. My vehicles have been stolen 4 times, and recovered all four times. In all cases there was some kind of police report, but no person was ever charged with a crime. In 3 cases they actually had the person in custody and let them go (one time he ran away while being questioned in the stolen vehicle, so maybe that doesn't count, but they told me they couldn't have prosecuted anyway because he was just "in the vehicle, that doens't prove he stole it)
Separately, I have personally witnessed 3 instances of store shoplifting (like filling a whole bag with anything that you can and just walking out) where the police weren't even called because it was useless. They were just yelled at until they casually walked away.
I have watched a car window get smashed and a bag stolen from the car on Haight St. near Ameoba at 1PM on a Saturday. Everyone just watched, no one called the cops from what I could see (I didn't).
Last night I watched two guys use an angle grinder to cut a bike lock and steal a bike on Mission st. I didn't call the police.
I'm probably part of the problem now since I don't even call the cops anymore like I used to, but its hard to feel like you can do anything about it when I have seen them just let people go time and time again.
When the city is incentivized to hide it, the stats are hard to come by as they are the only ones able to keep stats.
Talk to literally anyone who lived there for more than a few years and you'll heard endless stories of crimes against them or their friends that go unreported. I can give you a handful of them myself, and seems like basically everyone I knew who lived there had their own.
Over the years I've read story after story of horrific crimes committed there by 10, 20, 30-time repeat offenders. You can look no further than Boudin's own words and actions.
To try and claim otherwise is basically politically motivated gaslighting. Walk down any number of streets, talk to locals, it's clear as day to anyone with a brain and eyes that there's something uniquely wrong with that city.
This is not a meaningful metric because the daytime population is a lot higher. Many of the crime victims are not SF residents, and most of the criminals are not SF residents either.
This is not the case in NYC, which has a lot of commuters between boroughs.
It’s of questionable taste to use someone’s death to advance your politics when the facts are known and can be fairly used as evidence that your tribe is right about something.
It’s in poor taste indeed to acknowledge that you don’t know the facts of a murder, and to still insist that the killing supports your politics.
Sure. I object equally when someone says “we don’t know the facts, but assuming the killer was Islamic, this is further proof of how bad Islam is” (substitute Christian or whatever).
It is always poor taste to project one’s politics into the uncertainty around a tragedy and then turn around and use the imagined facts to argue politics.
I’m less opposed to using established, non-imaginary facts.
> I’m less opposed to using established, non-imaginary facts.
This to me sounds like you like to talk politics when a tragedy strikes, but only if the politics is on your side.
For example, SF decaying can be argued as an established, non-imaginary fact.
It's easy to hide behind "facts", 'statistics", "science" to push your political point, thinking you are infallible. Even more so, a lot of people say "it's not even politics, it's basic science" - but these are all fallacies. In the end, almost everything can be traced back to politics.
I can't think of a stronger reason to start getting political, to start rallying for a change, than when brothers-in-arms, when innocents, are falling to the sword.
What change do you rally for when you don’t know if it was a targeted murder for personal motives or a stochastic result of a broken down political system?
This quote has been repeated for years and is completely misquoted as it literally splices together parts of the quote. The original quote was
"Part and parcel of living in a great global city is you’ve got to be prepared for these things, you’ve got to be vigilant, you’ve got to support the police doing an incredibly hard job, you got to support the security services."
I can see why people would think the second point is "poor taste" (although I'm not sure if I agree), but definitely don't see why the first would be "questionable".
SF is rich and unequal. So are dozens of places. Yet I don't know of any other major urban area in a developed country that has the kind of crime we see here.
Yes, let's create great safety nets. As a city with a $9 billion budget (for just 800,000 people; that's $11k for every person living here) they can afford better safety nets than anywhere.
So if it's not the inequality, and it's not lack of funding, what's the cause of all the crime and homelessness?
Why not both? The governance could be horrible because its serving the political philosophy of the resident unequally rich to assuage their guilt over their unequal position in society while keeping their unequal position.
That to me still sounds like inequality. Sure, it can arise because of horrible governance, which just means that money is not spent where it should be.
Money spent by the government is NEVER really spent “where it should be” it’s all mostly a grift and everyone has their hands in the cash drawer. Not much actually makes it to the cause. It goes to the administration, research and pontification that does nothing to help the people in need.
One side is adamantly agains _trickle down economics_ but if you look at their social safety net or programs it’s all trickle down with barely anything hitting the people in need.
Unfortunately, Portland is one. Been living here for the past 6 years and I've watched the city rapidly fall apart in the last couple of years. We've had the most violent years on record. Homelessness has skyrocketed.
I can't say that this is directly caused by reduced police budget (there are a ton of factors), but I can confidently say the city is horribly managed.
The most recent example is the city government's proposal to force homeless folks into designated camps that would cost a minimum of $4k per tent (this number comes from the city's own report). That's more than what many Portlanders live on, and they'd still be living in tents.
Crime in the USA is high compared to most developed nations, that is true, however, this helps your OP's argument, as many attribute this to the USA's stark income disparity, which correlates strongly with crime.
> As a city with a $9 billion budget (for just 800,000 people; that's $11k for every person living here) they can afford better safety nets than anywhere.
Just because the money is there, doesn't mean it's being spent correctly. This seems true for the entire nation: the richest country on earth for some reason still has homeless people. In my opinion this is because the most progressive politician that can managed to be elected in the USA at any level of government would be considered a conservative in most other countries. Therefore the kinds of "safety net" an American politician might try to introduce aren't actual, evidence-based effective solutions. For example, as linked prior, healthcare access likely causes reduced crime. The USA clearly has enough money to provide free healthcare for all citizens, since Americans pay more than anyone on earth for healthcare: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193322/ . So, it's a good idea for many reasons to simply provide free healthcare for all citizens. Yet we need not discuss here the myriad of reasons such propositions in ANY form are dead on arrival at any level of government in the USA.
This issue seems mirrored in SF. The SF government seems more interested in engaging in performative politics than actual progressivism.
> Chris Sacca tried to give SF free wifi 15 years ago, and they wouldn't accept it.
> During covid, the SF school board decided one of their highest priorities would be to spend 10s of millions to rename their schools
The first sentence of this article is: "The San Francisco Board of Education will ultimately keep the names of dozens of public schools in a case of high-stakes second thoughts."
They didn't end up changing the names so I'm not sure what you're talking about.
> SF made all shoplifting of goods valued less than $950 a misdemeanor.
Which means it's up to the cops whether they want to investigate, and the DA whether they want to prosecute. Not sure who you're trying to blame here, in my experience SF cops are notoriously lazy. Are you suggesting that if we dangle the "carrot" of nuking some kid's life with a felony charge for stealing an expensive bag, the cops will work harder at their job? Misdemeanor charges aren't a good enough motivator for cops? Anyway, not sure how this is dysfunctional, I don't want resources spent on protecting the interests of Balenciaga or whatever, I'd much rather cops focus on, you know, solving murders.
Also, apparently the governor and the mayor both kicked off concerted efforts to target crime rings involved in this kind of shoplifting?
So far every reply making blind jabs at a spectre of "progressive politics" has been like this. It saddens me that so many on this forum are thirsty for simple Hammurabi code style punitive justice systems despite the reams of evidence that it's ineffective.
I love this debate and I expect it will go on forever. It boils down to, A: "California's problems are because California is too California!" "B: Nooo, we have not yet begun to California! If we California harder we can solve all the problems!"
IMO this is what has been happening in virtually all US cities. The people that stay in them are increasingly in agreement with themselves politically simply because the others leave.
California would be "I got mine, but we can make things more fair for you by lowering your standards and giving you measly benefits so the feudal stratification is okay."
Right.... so, then why have progressive policies piled on top of progressive policies for DECADES in SF only served to turn it into a feces/needle ridden homeless encampment???
Not to worry though, because the SF government is now pushing $5 million reparation payouts and $1 housing for "black residents". According to you, this should fix everything right?
So SF is dangerous because it's so rich? Or because the US is poor? I don't really follow the logic here.
The wealth disparity in SF is huge and definitely part of the issue, but it's mostly created by very local problems, like allowing sidewalks to be campgrounds while housing goes insane.
No. I'm arguing that systemic rise of crime is generally a symptom. Sure, you can repress the symptom (temporarily and at large cost) by heavily policing. But IMO it's much better to treat the root cause of the issue, which is that for a very large and growing part of the society in US, there's no future.
The reason I bring wealth into the equation is because out of all the places in the US, SF and California has enough wealth to be able to afford to do well in this respect.
That's a problem of perception much more than fact, a perception that's created by people pushing it baselessly. Wealth inequality is real and a problem, but the "there is no future" garbage is ridiculous. Big blips in household income and prices happen every few decades. It's not the end of the world.
Most people aren't low income or in poverty because "there is no future". It's because they're injured, addicted, handicapped, or just made a few bad calls. Most crimes are passion or survival, not "there is no future".
As much as crime shot up during COVID, it's still down from when your parents were your age.
I love the line of thinking that police can "prevent" or "stop" crime as anything other than a deterrent. One of the "lies to children" we repeat over and over. Policing is entirely reactive, responding and arriving long after the crime has taken place. The solution is never adding beat cops, it's fixing the underlying issues in society.
A small percentage of people commit crimes over and over and over again. Usually when you learn the perpetrator of a stabbing like this, they have priors. And when someone has priors, odds are they have committed many other crimes for which they weren't caught.
So "reactive policing", as you say, can't stop every crime. But consistently catching and enforcing the law on repeat offenders can have a dramatic impact on overall crime rate.
Yep. It’s quite uncommon for a murderer here to be arrested without a history of multiple violent offenses. But they keep being released until they finally kill someone. Just a few days ago a young woman was randomly stabbed to death by a man with a long history of priors who had just been convicted of armed robbery and was awaiting sentencing. One judge said he was much too dangerous to be released, but was released anyway, and when he didn’t show up for sentencing no one went after him.
It’s hard to think anyone actually believes that there’s no difference between a society that gives violent criminals free rein and one that actually takes them off the street.
Unfortunately, a lot of elected officials have very strange priorities these days. A few months ago, a teenager was part of a group of criminals carjacking cars in the middle of the night, got into some confrontation with a resident, and ended up shot to death. There was a huge outrage among elected officials, community meetings, calls for justice, etc. When an innocent bystander gets randomly stabbed to death by a violent career criminal that was let free when they were supposed to be in prison? Absolutely zero mention from any of our elected officials so far.
> One of the "lies to children" we repeat over and over.
The (2nd) greatest deterrent of crime is the likelihood of being caught. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
Is that of their citizens, or their population. Because The citizens have become more equal at the expense of taxing an enormous permanent resident and migrant work force who do not get the full benefits. The US and most other countries can't hope to have such a deep reservoir of foreigners to bleed dry in the name of equality.
The largest cities in the US are politically in sync and have been for decades. It’s no surprise there’s not much diversity of outcome when everyone is calling the same plays from the same playbook.
Yes you need some prevention by fixing societal issues that underlie criminal activity, but you also need police and prosecution of crimes to deter them.
100% agreed. I don't think we should get rid of police. They are an important institution in modern society and when functioning well, they in fact can reinforce democracy.
If you expect to be caught for committing a crime then it is a deterrent. But that is hard to maintain, and once you hit a tipping point and it’s out of control, it is much harder to get it back under control. Then it’s a question of is the juice worth the squeeze? Because you need to squeeze hard. If you have no reason to commit a crime that is the better way to go (eliminate poverty, inequities), but way more complex and and way more political. It’s easy for people to say just add police.
That’s all true for premeditated crimes by someone mentally healthy enough to be processing likely outcomes and consequences, and making a very rational decision whether to crime or not.
Fact is, the vast majority of criminals are dumb, or mentally ill, or both. They aren’t doing an ROI analysis.
If you think speeding and murder are mere differences in degree, at that a mental model of a typical speeder also applies to a typical murderer, I guess I could see a “highway patrols deter speeding, therefore beat cops deter murder” argument.
It’s a little hard to keep a straight face though.
Except it has worked in almost every city that's done it. A strong police presence deters crime, there's no arguing that. Yes, you should also "fix underlying issues". Whether those issues have led to crime is debatable depending on what issue you're referring to.
Additionally, you need to fire every worthless DA cities like SF and NYC have. They deliberately go soft on crime and let criminals right back on the streets to commit more crimes. So, if you want a fix you can start there. Throwing money at homeless people and "minorities" is not a fix.
When they find the murderer who killed Bob Lee, it is a good bet that it will not be the first crime they've committed, nor the first crime for which they were arrested.
Almost all crime in San Francisco is committed by repeat criminals. You add beat cops to arrest those criminals, and you elect a DA who will prosecute those criminals when they are arrested, and you elect legislators who make sure there are laws that allow convicted criminals, especially repeat offenders, to be sentenced to long prison sentences.
That process is called "fixing the underlying issues in society".
California already has overflowing prisons. It's not like people aren't being arrested and put in jail.
Not saying that SFs approach to policing hasn't had an impact, but there are plenty of other cities with bigger or equivalent populations, similar per capita policing, and lower come rate.
It seems willfully ignorant to presume that there aren't other factors that have led to an increase in crime
How would you compare the law enforcement south of the border to California?
Do you think Mexico throws too many people in prison in Baja California or not enough?
Do you think California is more or less safe than Baja California?
That's a pretty weird comparison. SF is in Northern California, which is basically another state away by distance. Baja California is a 27k square mile piece of land with a widely distributed population. San Francisco is a densely populated city, and California is both huge and not what we're discussing.
I.e. I wouldn't compare SF to a rural part of California and use that as a metric for how good / bad SF's law enforcement policies are. I would compare it to other large, metropolitan cities throughout the US and the world.
Choosing such and out-of-left-field comparison makes it seem like you have a specific agenda that you'd like to make a point about.
Have you ever dealt with police in Tokyo or Seoul?
Criminals breaking car windows and stealing your bag/valuables aren't a problem in Japan or South Korea's biggest city
Exactly. There's nothing short of homeless concentration camps and AI pre-crime harassment that could have stopped this.
Cops can only show up after the fact.
Crime is a byproduct of poverty. If you give people something to live for, they're less anti-social. If they have mental health issues making those connections harder to make, we need social safety nets for them.
SF crime seems exaggerated. I spent a week walking around that city and the worst thing I saw was an opiate shit the size of a hoagie.
"Crime is a byproduct of poverty."
If that was true middle America would be full of crime and the coastal cities would be free of crime
That's the opposite of what is happening
This doesn't track. San Francisco has arguably the most generous social safety nets in the entire country. The city is spending upwards of $100k per homeless person. (https://www.hoover.org/research/only-san-francisco-61000-ten....) The more San Fran spends on social services, the worse their crime becomes. I don't think this has anything to do with social safety nets or disenfranchisement.
Just because you spend a lot of money, it doesn't mean you are doing something well. I could spend $10 million to have my front door changed, does that automatically mean I now have good security?
That's a fair argument. Current policies are clearly not working. What do think San Francisco could learn from much safer cities like Carmel, Meridian, Provo, Sugar Land, McAllen, and Pearland?
I think it's even worse than that: that whole system is benefitting from the situation, so has no incentive to actually do anything meaningful about the problem, just to pretend that they are. It's a variation on the Iron Law of Institutions.
Every year there's some new tax on the ballot to fix these problems. Every year they get worse. We pay more money here in SF, and the problems get worse.
Genuinely asking: How do you solve societal issues? Because we know for sure how to solve quality of life issues: See NYC in the 80s - More police enforcement and state prosecution.
I'd argue it's well-known that income inequality is an existential threat to America. That said, I'd also argue that people _do_ care, but the SF government bureaucracy has proven woefully inept at efficiently solving housing [1] and homelessness [2].
Please tell me where I said any of this justifies murder? Oh right - that won't allow you to post empty strawman responses. How about we allow for some good faith between each other?
I thought Benioff was solving the homelessness problem... /s
But yes, agreed, societal support for others has been strategically dismantled (federal and state-level) and abuses the marketing of the "American Dream" as mechanism for allowed greed and selfishness.
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Please engage in good faith here. It is objectively true that Mr. Soros, via NGOs, funds these DAs. It is also true that CNN/MSNBC/NPR/NYT/WaPo and most "blue" media don't report on this, but I don't know why that's the case (though I suspect that he also funds them to keep his name out of the headlines because national journalism is mostly broken these days).
It is absurd to conflate any criticism of a person's actions to a "dog whistle". I say this as an observant Jew who is excited for the first night of Passover and attending a seder tonight with one of the local Chabads. Is it still an anti-semitic dog whistling if I try to shed light on the misdeeds of one of our own? But regardless of my identity/religion, it shouldn't be off-the-table to discuss an individual's public behavior on our politics.
I don't know what your real motives are, but it's simply anti-intellectual to try to shut down discussion with this nonsense.
And so, by the non-logic of this nonsense, can I criticise George Bush, or is that an anti-white dog-whistle?
I dug into this and is totally true. Soros is the head of a crime/power syndicate that is so crazy connected that they control the media, tech, even AI.
We need a fund the police movement in SF desperately. When my bike was stolen last month the officer on the phone said they were something like 400 officers understaffed.
Obviously we have no idea about motive or the situation, but I think it's at least ironic that this guy helped start up CashApp which was recently exposed as being a platform heavily utilized by criminals with their tacit consent.
This doesn't get into any context or whether anyone died as a result, but from the available data, the highest number of incidents where someone was shot by police in SF was 11 in 2010, the lowest number was 2 in 2021.
I would imagine the number of homicides those years is much higher than 11 or 2 (although you would probably want to exclude homicides that are related to domestic violence).
Is the logical conclusion to this line of thought that any fewer deaths from police violence justifies a metropolitan area falling into socio-economic collapse?
Not really it's a question about outcomes. Deaths of innocent people are bad. Is it just for a system to kill one group of innocent people so that a different group of people feel safer?
Its hard to measure accurately but I would argue easy to observe and ascertain the following:
If a metro area becomes a literal Gotham City (ie drug and crime completely integrated into daily life) then the outcome is decades of lost human experience across hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people.
Addressing police brutality is one hard to solve problem, but cameras and other initiatives seem to be helping. But your city turning into a crime haven creates thousands of problems, and may not be able to solve.
> Progressive DA's and a neutered police force are to blame for the rise in violent crime.
Source?
...
Disappointed to see this purely emotional appeal to partisan politics as the top comment. Bring statistics next time, show that the city is actually more dangerous than other big cities (especially conservative big cities), and show that policy changes are to blame. Don't use HN as a dumping ground for your political opinions.
EDIT: Wow, I seem to have struck a nerve. To those of you who downvote my comment: I'm not saying what my parent comment claims is incorrect (though I have my doubts). I'm saying it's just a set of unsubstantiated opinions. Maybe those opinions reflect reality, but if they do, you should be able to show that using statistics. If this offends you, maybe consider whether your own stance on the issue is based in reality or if it's a result of emotional appeals such as my parent comment.
> I don't think we have figured out if this was premeditated or not, but either way, SF is becoming incredibly dangerous.
Jesus, the bubble the typical HN SV commenter must live in.
I'm sure it's frustrating to see crime rates increase, but "incredibly dangerous?" SF still has far less crime per capita than many of its peer cities. Where are all the displaced SV millionaires moving with dramatically lower crime rates where these people actually feel safe?
Please edit flamewar swipes out of your posts here. Sneering at the community and promoting regional flamewar are markers of bad threads.
Incidentally, only a small fraction of HN users (10% or so, last I checked) are anywhere near SV. HN is an international forum, which is why we get regional and nationalistic flamewars to begin with.
"With a crime rate of 54 per one thousand residents, San Francisco has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 18. Within California, more than 98% of the communities have a lower crime rate than San Francisco."
4th highest property crime rate in the entire nation. Middle of the pack for violent crime. Many have left for Austin, Texas which has half as much property crime and almost half as much violent crime per capita. So yeah significantly safer.
At least based on that data set (and it's easy to find disagreeing data sets), murders are actually below average.
But the problem is: There isn't a definitive data source. The FBIs UCR[1] is closest, but because they split by agency, it's hard to find relevant geographic data. For SF, you're looking at BART Alamenda, BART Contra Costa, SF County Highway Patrol, BART SF, SF Sheriff's office, SFPD, SF State University,Union Pacific Railroad, UCLA SF, San Mateo BART, South SF PD, Santa Clara BART. (If the US stopped encouraging everybody to play cops and robbers on their own, that'd be nice)
But even if you settle for one of them, data is only reported up to 2021, and that means graphs stop at 2020. It's almost as if there was profit in making current crime a matter of opinion instead of facts.But for the data set? Violent crime is down.
Turns out, homicide is pretty much stable over the last decade. Same for aggravated assault.Rape is down to 2010 levels again. Robbery is down. None of the numbers are significantly up.
This might be more dangerous than other cities, but it's at current levels for a long while now.
Note that whenever you are looking at homicide numbers over a period of decades, you have to factor in the advances in medical technology that have made huge improvements in the number of people who survive being shot.
When you look at the statistics you see that shootings have gone up markedly.
Apparently Murder is the only crime relevant to SF residents? The fact that SF is top 5 in Property crime per capita in the entire nation is irrelevant?
He died at Harrison and Main st. That area is tame compared to the mission, tenderloin, and other spots in SOMA. Of all places, I would never have guessed a stabbing would occur there but I haven't been in the area since 2020.
Just a give a sense of the place, the area has a lot of apartments and skyrises. A friend of mine lived two blocks away at the jasper building. We would walk around there at night with his dog and never really saw anybody else in the area past midnight.
My company's headquarters was also a few blocks away directly across the street from the Salesforce park. Several major tech companies and organizations had satellite offices and/or headquarters in the area.
While that area is usually pretty quiet, it is pretty close to the on-ramp to the Bay Bridge. This is purely speculation, but it is plausible that the crime was perpetrated by someone from the East Bay looking for a quick getaway.
Could someone please enlighten me on why we don't treat governing like we do software solutions?
When I'm given a task to complete, my first instinct is to find where other developers have done what I'm asked to do and then utilize their wisdom into my own solution which will likely look very similar to theirs.
Why do we see such drastically different approaches to solving issues in society and government?
Want better education? Step 1: Find a state/city that has great education and study what they did to achieve it
Want less crime? Step 1: Mimic a state/city that has successfully reduced crime
Seems so simple to me but yet I never hear politicians/people saying things like "Boston has successfully raised their level of education by doing XYZ so we're going to follow those steps here with minor tweaks to best suite our area"
> Could someone please enlighten me on why we don't treat governing like we do software solutions?
Because half the country doesn't like the answers that experience produces. Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime (broken windows policing). The formula works but because evenly applying the rules produces disparate outcomes among various groups it's evidently racist and it's preferable to just allow violent criminals to run unchecked on the streets.
> Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime
Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).
On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.
Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."
Exhibit A. It works, but it seems like it shouldn't work, so we should reject it and do something that keeps not working.
America is a more violent place; it has been for its entire history. Things that work in places with incredible cultural homogeneity don't work here, no matter how many happy images they conjure. What actually works here is policing, and SF is an example of people who believe your post following it off a cliff.
> working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place
The conditions that prevent violent crime are simple: consequences for violence.
Many jurisdictions let people that commit violent crime walk again and again.
From my neck of the woods? The perpetrator of the Waukesha parada massacre had a long history of violent behavior and was out on bail for trying to run someone over with his car a few days prior. Aliyah Perez, the niece of a Milwaukee alderman, was killed in a domestic situation by a man that had previously committed "a brutal domestic attack in which he stomped on, choked, and punched the victim, pulling out clumps of her hair and knocking out a tooth." He was given a minimum sentence only to return to his previous behavior and kill his next victim.
I don't care how our prison population compares to the rest of the world if clearly dangerous and violent people are walking free. The purpose of prison is to separate such people from the rest of society.
If all 2 million people in prison in the US are violent criminals, then there's a _really_ big problem.
Clearly it's better to stop people from becoming violent criminals, then to wait (or push them, e.g. by increasing income inequality, reducing respect for "unskilled" professions, etc.) for them to become violent criminals and then punish them.
Countries with globally low crimes rates are racially homogeneous. (For the liberals: This doesn't mean that racially homogeneity implies low crime rates, of course.)
Sometimes one of the "windows" to fix, though, is the community-government relationship. And when the only viable way to catch every graffiti artist is to stop-and-frisk every teen in the area for months or years on end - is that truly the right way to fix that relationship? Is that the decent thing to do?
You need to go one level lower. Your proposed solution works in countries that have a working social system. Current state and history of the US prevents your proposal to improve anything.
If everyone in a country feels valuable and equitable coming up with solutions that benefit everyone is very easy. As it stands in the US there will always be someone that sees themselves losing something and prevents any improvement.
> Could someone please enlighten me on why we don't treat governing like we do software solutions?
We do. It’s called “product-market fit” in software. It’s called “elections” in democratic government. The government provides the services and competence its leaders, and consequently its electorate, demands.
San Francisco’s electorate demanded what it’s getting. As you can see just from these comments, “the facts” are twisted, distorted, and obfuscated to confirm a preferred narrative. But the faith in the narrative, whichever narrative you hold, never wavers.
Elections don't decide which policies will work, only which will be implemented. It's quite simple to see what worked elsewhere and in the past if people would care to look.
Crime is a for profit business for the perpetrators, politicians, and law enforcement, and the only victims are, well, the victims. There isn't much profit in peace.
the point of having a bunch of different states and municipalities is you can test something in one place and see if it works. like weed legalization, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try. or constitutional carry, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try.
there's some poli sci theory that politics is actually about the majority's schadenfreude at fucking over the minority. which seems increasingly credible. but that means we've been pushing more and more stuff to the feds for years so this is now harder to do.
let states and counties do more stuff again. like this should be a party neutral issue, let the dems to more dem stuff and the reps to more rep stuff.
Politics has always had an emotional component because many people are led by emotions, but things are pretty bad right now. Question the emotional orthodoxy on either side and prepare for war.
The approach you suggest is very common in the public sector, almost to a rule.
Public services are just massive, costly, complicated, and cater to all sorts of vulnerable populations, and the public have pay for it. The time horizon on some complicated projects is so long that knowledge can change in the meantime and make the project/strategies look incoherent. E.g., some countries decommissioned public transport options over decades when cars became more widespread, and are undoing it now because cars became too widespread, and it'll take decades to rectify. Then there are world events that upend everything, such as Ukraine or COVID-19. It's just very complicated, far more complicated than anything in software development in my experience.
> The is primarily due to the conservative party's realization half a century ago that they could motivate their base with rage and grievance politics instead of with good policy, and win doing so
Democrats are mayors of 31 of the nation's 34 largest cities, most of which are places I certainly would not care to live. Is it "good policy" that lead to the reason for this article, or are all of San Francisco's 8 Republicans to blame for this tragedy?
> The GOP is all about anger and, honestly, hate.
Ahhh yes. Supporting school choice to get inner city kids out of crap schools is hate based. Not wanting children who aren't even able to consent to going on school field trips to make permanent, life altering decisions by destroying their bodies? Clearly an anger thing.
> It's easier to sell "hey, just get more cops" than to explain that crime is often driven by economics
Yep, people are stealing iPhones because they're starving. That's 100% a thing that is happening. And violent crime surely has economic advantage attached to it, right? The guy who killed Bob is now richer thanks to his actions?
You appear to be completely unable to engage on the issues in good faith while whining that "the other side" is doing exactly the same thing.
For comparison, the murder rate in two Republican cities: Nashville (100+/annually), Dallas (200+ annually, 1.3m pop) vs San Francisco (<60 annually, 800k pop).
On a per capita basis (i.e., per 100k pop), almost all of the 50 most dangerous metro areas for violent crime are Republican strongholds, the only exception being Detroit at #5.
> The is primarily due to the conservative party's realization half a century ago that they could motivate their base with rage and grievance politics instead of with good policy, and win doing so (google "southern strategy").
I've got no dog in this fight, and this comment is peak American. If you don't see that the other side is doing the EXACT same thing, you're part of the problem.
Please show me an example where in the same period of time the Democratic party has done anything as egregious as the Southern Strategy.
I'd also welcome any example of a policy initiative led by the GOP that addresses any of the myriad serious issues in American life, chiefly those addressing poverty, education, and health care.
> Please show me an example where in the same period of time the Democratic party has done anything as egregious as the Southern Strategy.
Democrats purposefully supporting far-right candidates in the 2022 primaries because they believed they would be easier to win against in the general election doesn't exactly speak towards their supposed self-righteous ideals.
I don't know about you, but amplifying the voices a party claims to be so dangerous purely because they believe it to be in their own short term self-interest is pretty damn egregious to me.
I wouldn't put that anywhere near the activities of the GOP, who have literally spent 5 decades emboldening racism, and who have in the last few cycles flirted with or openly embraced fascism.
The problem in the US is that one party is attempting governance in good faith, and the other is marching towards fascism with absurd levels of party discipline, which means there's very, very little ideological variance in GOP candidates.
I get what you're saying, each party has their flaws, the GOP more so than democrats. I think my point here is that politicians are politicians regardless of what party they are aligned with. But in general, in a country with 300M+ people, there are still many millions of average republicans who hold traditional conservative values. And while I may disagree with them, I can at least hold a respectful conversation with them as opposed to so many of the MAGA-nuts who just want to scream about conspiracy theories. But that's the type of nuance that's lost in comments painting everyone who identifies with the letter R as evil and fascist thus only leading to more division.
This is crazy, Bob is such an excellent engineer that has contributed so much to the engineering world. I have no words for this.
Sf needs to get their shits together, i still can’t believe that the majority of the high income earners stayed home because they’re afraid of the people on the street. I often asked my mates when I visited SF, how come a city so rich has such a basic security issue where people don’t feel safe walking around their own city??
Some parts of SoMa, this is true, like 4th Street+.
The area where this man died is known as Rincon Hill and is dominated by tech offices, Sweetgreens, and luxury highrise apartment buildings and is basically dead after 8pm every day of the week. I lived a block away from where this man was stabbed for a month and it felt safe and dead quiet once all the tech workers go home.
The fact that its dead in the evenings is part of the problem. Places like that tend to attract a kind of a crowd later in the evenings precisely because it is nice and quiet otherwise. A friend used to live in that area shortly before Covid and the quiet was too quiet -- sometimes it felt like those scenes from westerns where the whole town shutters up when the big bad gunslingers are having a showdown.
I am very spoiled by living in one of the European capitals. It's super safe here, and it's normal thing to see young females taking a dog out for a walk in 22-02h.
I visit SF at least once a year, and default to my learned habit of walking alone, and later at night.
I live in "one of the European capitals". It is super safe here, but there are still stabbings. The crime-rate is also enormously variable between European cities.
> No more.
Changing your habits based on a single event isn't particularly rational. If this were a comparative articles on SF crime-rates you might have a good point, but it isn't.
And I say this having had a shooting happen on the street outside my hotel room the last time I stayed in SF - one event isn't a pattern (though in fairness if you look at comparative firearm incidents between US & European cities you're a bit more likely to see obvious disparities).
>Changing your habits based on a single event isn't particularly rational.
It's doesn't need to be "a single event" that happened to the parent.
Many individual observations, talks with residents, learning what they consider "normal" and "acceptable" baseline are also very possible to scare someone used in a safer city off for life.
I was just addressing that their comment seemed to be reacting to "a single event", rather than to review of actual stats (which is, by contrast, a good & rational approach).
You could trip on a curb outside your home, hit your head on the ground, and die. But you leave your home based on a rational assessment that that series of events is reasonably unlikely. Avoiding doing anything because it might kill you is always a function of the likelihood of that outcome - if you're assuming the likelihood is high, based on a sample size of 1, then no, that is neither prudent nor rational.
I like Europe but you're exaggerating...I got robbed in Amsterdam and could have been stabbed to death in Frankfurt. London felt dicey in certain spots too (turns out it has 95\1000 rate which is 20% higher than the average in the UK)...To anybody traveling through Europe you've got to be aware of your surroundings because it's not always super safe and there can high risk of crime in tourist areas.
Lol yeah. The reality is that any metropolis will have dodgy areas. Tokyo is super-safe, but even there you don't really want to look funny at a yakuza bouncer in Ueno at 3am.
The question really is whether SF has more dodgy areas than average, and I guess the answer is yes. I've been a couple of times, and it was a long time ago, but some very central areas felt a bit too unsafe even during the day.
Part of the thing with SF is that it's somewhat unusual in that a business traveler attending an event at the Moscone is at more or less ground zero for some of the seedier parts of town: the Tenderloin, Civic Center, generally W/SW of the Moscone.
(This probably used to be somewhat true of the Javits in NYC but that whole area of the city has generally gentrified with the Hudson Yards project being the latest big change.)
You could have just asked for the story rather than make one up.
A homeless guy on a street full of druggies near Frankfurt hbh asked for a euro and I said no I can't help you. He walked directly to a spot nearby where he kept a knife, and brandishing the knife, he paced towards me. I put my back to the wall of a nearby building and watched as he approached. About 10 meters from me his friend intervened and talked him down. He walked away instead of assaulting me.
Shit happens in every city in the world. I was assaulted by a raving lunatic with a metal pipe while I was shopping… at a Christmas market in Oslo, Norway, probably one of the safest cities in the world. Had I not been aware or mobile enough to get out of the way of his swings at me, I could have been killed (he was a pretty big guy).
I still think Oslo is incredibly safe, but shit happens anywhere
Here's what happened...A crazy guy started screaming at me randomly and made a move to stab me with a knife but got handled by other bar patrons. (it seemed like some knew him). That sort of shit happens in Europe like it happens anywhere else in the world. What I should have done is research where not to go but I was 20 years old.
You might be the most unlucky person on Earth. European cities are almost universally safer than American cities. To which cities are you comparing Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London?
DC metro area has a 28 per 1K crime rate.
The london area has a 95 per 1K crime rate...
Amsterdam has a 33 per 1K crime rate.
Frankfurt has a crime index of 44 (which is higher than anywhere else in Germany).
Saying that Europe is super safe compared to the US isn't really accurate or nuanced enough. I'd agree with homicides but most of those involve gangs fighting over turf and not random victims.
Lots of comments about relative safety of US vs European cities.
Looking at the data, you need to scroll past 9 US cities (all big cities) until you find the first European city (relatively small city you never have a reason to go to) in this crime ranking: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp
The "problematic" parts of Copenhagen and many other European cities are often counted as being part of other smaller suburban municipalities/cities that are too small to appear on such lists.
Nation-wide statistics show that Europe is definitely much safer than the US. However I would rather compare metropolitan areas than cities.
Many years ago my dad worked for a british company. Some of his coworkers were traveling to DC for business and staying in a very nice hotel. They asked my dad if they should buy a gun to be safe in DC. He was floored.
No. Jesus Christ.
Violence exists. You can compare risk between places and activities. But decisions should be based on data, not headlines and hunches.
The ridiculous part of that story is the expectation that they could just buy a gun and walk around with it in DC. Concealed carrying is a viable option but not something you can do after you simply walk off a plane.
Also, walking around and taking care of yourself is just not in the realm of known data. You should consider the known data, sure, but don’t ignore your instincts on the ground. That is insane.
Obviously buying a gun wasn't the solution, but at least "many years ago" DC was pretty bad. I was at a company event and the wife of one of our dinner guests was cut and robbed right outside of a downtown business hotel. And absolutely no one thought this was a freak or particularly out-of-the-ordinary event.
I used to live in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, an area full of homeless people, drug dealers, and probably other things. I hosted a foreign woman via couchsurfing.org and she asked if my neighborhood was safe. I told her she should be fine as long as she didn't bother anyone and didn't stay out too late. She then corrected herself and said she wasn't worried about the criminals. She was worried about being shot by the police.
I never understand why people feel like they can make such generalizing statements as "One of the European capitals".
Europe is not a monolith.
Different areas also have different problems.
It's like the whole talk about "walkable cities" or healthcare.
Everything is frame from a US perspective and simplified to an absurd level so that no contextual criticism is possible without descending into weird political tribalism and an apples to oranges comparison between an entire continent and a country.
OK then make it apples to apples and compare crime rates in your preferred manner? It’s hard to make the US look good no matter what grouping or aggregation or whatever you choose. There’s a clear difference in policies and their downstream effects (eg poverty rate) between the US and a random European city you select by throwing a dart at a map. Not all, but do a few trials and pretend not to see a pattern.
e: Also, sorry, it's ridiculous to say the US looks to Europe too much when discussing policy. This almost never happens, and when it does it's from the left, who has 0 actual influence. Every policy discussion should begin by talking about prior art & what we've observed about the effectiveness of policies as implemented elsewhere. It'll never show causality, but it'll start the discussion off with some possible causal links to explore w/ our own policy experiments!
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but the overall US homicide rate is comparable to the UN casualty count for the Russo-Ukraine war (most of which will be in Donbas, not Kyiv). So I wouldn't be completely certain the rate in Kyiv is necessarily higher. I don't think there's good figures but I'd wager it's actually lower than some US cities.
Per Wikipedia, in 2019 there were 1428 murders across Ukraine (perhaps this includes the already-invaded Donbas and Luhansk regions, though I somewhat doubt it).
Let's assume all of those happened in Kiev, with a population of 2.8 million (since I can't find more specific data easily right now). That gives a wildly inflated homicide rate per 100,000 population of 51.
St Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham (AL) all had murder rates that year higher than this inflated figure.
I don't think it's in dispute that most European capitals of any size have areas where one could easily get murdered, though. I can personally easily think of areas of London and Paris where I'd not be surprised by news of it happening.
At about 1.4 it's still pretty low compared to American cities. It's also not really "getting up there" as it appears to be on a relative decline lately.
The stats you link to a meaningless. The city of London don't set the budget for their police. That is a matter handled by the British goverment and according to them they've been decreasing it for 8-years straight.
> When compared with the previous year, overall funding for policing (including any in-year adjustments) for the financial year ending March 2023 will increase by 2.8% in real terms. This will be the eighth consecutive year in which policing funding has increased in real terms
There's probably some examples, but the US has such an outsized per-capita murder rate that it's not particularly comparable even when trying to select the best examples. If you stretch the definition of "major" and "comparable" then it's possible to find examples where they're somewhat similar but it requires a lot of stretching and is no longer representative. There's hundreds of cities in America with a murder rate higher than that of London. The US has a homicide rate approaching something like an order of magnitude higher than the UK (8/100k vs. 1/100k last I read).
UK is part of the European continent in terms of culture and geology. Perhaps you mean the EU, which is only part of Europe, instead of the continent itself.
Yep. Us Europeans have a tendency to pretend that "America Bad - Europe Good". And sure, we don't have the gun violence and have healthcare, but we also have our own share of violent crime.
And of course it all depends on many factors, but I know for a fact that not all of Paris is safe, or all of Berlin. You have your bad apples everywhere.
Sure, all generalisations are wrong and it even depends by the neighbourhood but the highest homicide rate in Europe appears to be in Tallinn and it's on par with Seattle. The only very worst places in Europe overlap with the very best in US. San Francisco also appear to be on the better part, way worse than Tallinn still.
Even Istanbul, which is a 15M population city in a country with serious economic turmoil and and has huge number of refugees and illegal immigrants from war torn countries, is much batter than most of the US.
Europe is part of the Asian continent. I think the idea that it’s a continent is eurocentrism. Perhaps you could say it’s a subcontinent of Asia, like India.
No it's not, it's either two continents Europe and Asia or one continent Eurasia (or even more rarely Afro-Eurasia), but certainly not part of Asia, it's like saying North America is part of South America, it can be either North America or both are part of America, but North America is certainly not part of South America.
North America and South America are clearly different landmasses, whereas Europe is a section of a large land mass we call Asia with the exception of the section we call Europe. It’s just part of 1 end of Asia. If Europe is a separate continent, why isn’t the India? The Middle East?
Because it works in general? Even the worst country in Europe [1] (Latvia 4.9 murders/100k pop.) by murder rate is better than US average (6.6/100K) [2] with France 1.1, Germany 0.9, etc. So unless you choose extreme in Europe you are looking for sure at least at 3-5 times lower murder rates in Europe.
As we can see by comparing the county map of the USA that you linked with a demographic map, murder in the USA is overwhelmingly a demographic issue. We can debate the reasons why, but the data itself is readily available and incontrovertible. The changing demographics of Western Europe will prove an interesting new data point for that debate.
What are the arguments against your position that you think are strongest and why are they so weak that you think they can be considered ‘incontrovertible’?
Fair objection. I thought it was obvious that the map was just a visualization and not the incontrovertible data. That would be the data from various high quality reports such as those produced by the UCR[1], BJS[2], NACJD[3], and the MAP[4].
I don't know of any non-straw arguments against my position that demographics are a dominating factor in homicide rates because of the high quality of the homicide data. Note that I say factor and not cause. The causes for these observable patterns are very much under debate. Nevertheless, corpses are hard to ignore. The paperwork almost always gets filed, so the data quality is considerably higher than for underreported crimes such as rape.
Yes. However I assume you mean they do at a per capita rate higher than people who aren't in cities. That's not necessarily true. San Diego for example has an admirably low murder rate for a large US city and San Jose isn't too far behind.
The somatic marker hypothesis (Bechara and Damasio, 2005; Damasio et al., 1991) highlights the importance of emotions in decision making. The hypothesis postulates that reasoned decision making is influenced by biasing signals (somatic markers) arising from changes in the body periphery.
First triggered as a reaction to experienced feedback (e.g., increased heart rate or visceral responses), the somatic reactions are assumed to be reactivated in similar decision situations.
It is argued that there are primary and secondary inductions of emotional responses.
The primary induction can be understood as innate or learned affective responses arising from a confrontation with pleasurable or aversive stimuli.
Secondary inducers comprise affective responses induced by the recall of past events or anticipation of future states.
While there are obviously crime stats that give crime rates for whatever somewhat arbitrary political boundary defines a city, they can tell a misleading story. LA covers a lot of different types of areas. SF does to some degree as well (and a lot of visitors are most familiar with area around the Moscone which is at least near somewhat sketchy areas).
But this is really true in general. I consider Boston a pretty safe city. But there are absolutely areas that I wouldn't be walking around late at night.
> It's super safe here, and it's normal thing to see young females taking a dog out for a walk in 22-02h.
A small point about language, in case you or anyone else didn't know: In English, it sounds weird to use "female" as a noun to refer to people. If, in that sentence, you would replace "female"/"females" with a word like "man"/"men," then you probably want to be using "woman"/"women" instead of "females." Using "female" as a noun for people can come off as dehumanising since it's how we refer to ex. animals in various situations. This applies to men too! Use "men" or "boys" or similar instead of "males"! Dehumanising language affects everyone.
Not upset / telling you to change immediately / etc., just thought it might be useful to bring up in case (:
Edit: Done engaging with this, thanks for the comments all! Don't want to accidentally start a flame war any more than I may already might have. Sorry mods!
Saying males or females is putting emotional distance between you and the subject. One possible reason for creating that distance might be to dehumanise, but it's far from the only reason, as you presumably know quite well.
If you or anyone else didn't know, consider a police report or a research paper in which the language is deliberately distant to avoid biasing the reader: "The two female victims were struck by the SUV, and the male suspect fled on foot", "we observed higher rates of CVD for males in the treatment group, but in females the effect size was not significant", and equally bloodless language. This may be dehumanising in some sense, but it's done in a benign way to help the reader be objective.
It's easy for a non-native speaker to make a mistake in informal language after reading formal material like the aforementioned, and it might not be great to call out minor breaches of etiquette in such a targeted and public way.
> It's easy for a non-native speaker to make a mistake in informal language after reading formal material like the aforementioned, and it might not be great to call out minor breaches of etiquette in such a targeted and public way.
It seemed to be addressed in a respectful and understanding manner, what's wrong with helping someone (and apparently a bunch of bystanders) learn from their mistake?
English is my first (and only) language and I’ve never heard of this. I would say that it not only doesn’t sound weird, but is totally normal. Who told you this isn’t correct?
The last few years aside, I've always had an issue with it. In my personal experience, people who tend to call women/girls "females" never, ever use the word "males" to describe men/boys in similar context. It's about using language consistently imo.
This is a new wave thing pretty much only prominent in online spaces like Reddit. Read some fantasy by female author Robin Hobb and she will regularly use the word. Spend anytime immersed in minority culture and you will frequently hear females used with affection. At best this argument is right up there with “chicks”. Some groups in some places decided to be offended while other groups in other places proudly refer to themselves as Dixie Chicks. It likely stems from online incel communities using the word frequently when discussing…females.
It’s not entirely new. As late as the mid-20th century, the term “female” was considered vaguely dehumanizing when applied to women even as an adjective. Here’s a Google Ngram graph showing changes in usage over time:
Yes, it wasn't that long ago that making the OK sign was the most evil Nazi thing one could do, and it didn't matter how many times it was started that it was a 4chan troll that society fell for, people who weren't in the know about the outrage news of the week got harmed for doing an action that for most their lives was viewed as completely harmless. Unable to admit they were trolled, the message was "Well, now Nazis are actually using it", with zero evidence or even thought of pushback against the "Nazis" who allegedly were controlling everyone's actions through negative identity.
Now you can make the OK symbol again and it's OK. The outrage over it got replaced by a new outrage and the victims of outrage culture during that period are simply seen as an acceptable cost for keeping the outrage fire burning. No apologies. No admissions of guilt or harm. Just the monster leaving behind its path of righteous destruction.
I empathise with your thoughts on this. It occurs to me that the different words aren't consistent across cultures and sometimes the word man and woman don't feel equivalent. Sadly I didn't pay attention when being taught grammar so can't explain why I think that in detail.
What do you think of the word lady? Gentlemen doesn't seem to be the male equivalent anymore.
"female" and "male" are only used as nouns in technical contexts like biological studies of sex and police reports, where dehumanization or objectification is intentional because the human part is irrelevant (Biologists because their work isn't human-specific or even about humans at all, police because they are describing attributes of a suspect).
That's entirely wrong, just google anything with "female" in front and watch the results roll in. I started with "female athlete" and there are plenty of headlines that match exactly from big name publications like Forbes.
British by birth and upbringing. In my 50s. It sounds a bit weird to me too. It would sound fine in a scientific or official context but not in normal conversation or an internet post. Context matters - and some usages are fine.
I speak 4 languages to various degrees, and female/male is either dehumanizing or an overly biological term to use in a normal conversation in all of them, like "oh let me pick your cortex about an idea".
I assume that English speaking folks who don't notice this just got used to hearing 'female' and never paid much attention to the sensibilities around it.
I mean it's technically correct. But it is weird (to me) to use in conversational English, and I've been paying attention since before 2000. Speaking for New England region between and around the NYC/Boston metros.
Now that I think about it, you know where it is used a lot? In news reports/police reports. "A young male was injured.... a female was spotted leaving the scene..."
If one is derogatory then the other should be as well. Try it out with some more universally accepted derogatory nouns to see my point. Thinking about it, when applied as an adjective most terms sound even worse.
Also an English speaker, and nerd about this sort of semantics.
Just to keep the blood pressure low here: I want to be clear there are two sides to this issue. I'm not the sort of "enlightened centrist" who says that lightly: more often than not, there are not two sides to an issue, but this is one of the rare cases where there are two sides to this.
I'm going to explain this as briefly as I can, but it's complicated, so it's not actually going to be brief.
First, let's understand that communication is a two-person (or two-group) activity involving both communicator and audience. Effective communication of complex and charged topics requires that the communicator understand their audience and use language that their audience can understand without being distracted. Likewise, effective communication of complex and charged topics requires that the audience make a good-faith effort to understand the communicator by taking into account the communicator's background/motivations, and try to suss out the communicator's intended meaning, possibly by asking clarifying questions.
One of the important observations in David Foster Wallace's Tense Present[1] is that language doesn't just communicate its direct meaning, it also communicates membership in a group. As Wallace says:
> [M]ost of us are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in a large number of subdialects and are probably at least passable in countless others. Which dialect you choose to use depends, of course, on whom you're addressing. [... T]he dialect you use depends mostly on what sort of Group your listener is part of and whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that Group. [... U]sage-as-inclusion is about much more than class. Here's another thought experiment: A bunch of U.S. teenagers in clothes that look far too large for them are sitting together in the local mall's Food Court, and a 53-year-old man with a combover and clothes that fit comes over to them and says that he was scoping them and thinks they're totally rad and/or phat and is it cool if he just kicks it and does the hang here with them. The kids' reaction is going to be either scorn or embarrassment for the guy — most likely a mix of both. Q: Why? Or imagine that two hard-core urban black guys are standing there talking and I, who am resoundingly and in all ways white, come up and greet them with "Yo" and call them "Brothers" and ask "s'up, s'goin on," pronouncing on with that NYCish oo-o diphthong that Young Urban Black English deploys for a standard o. Either these guys are going to be offended or they are going to think I am simply out of my mind. No other reaction is remotely foreseeable. Q: Why?
> Why: A dialect of English is learned and used either because it's your native vernacular or because it's the dialect of a Group by which you wish (with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted.
I think what a lot of conversations about the word "females" versus "women" or "girls" get wrong is making universal statements about English as if it's a single coherent language. There are many dialects, such as biology English or medical English, where using "female" is absolutely appropriate and using "woman" or "girl" would be unequivocally wrong. Likewise, there are dialects, such as gender theory English, where "female" isn't dehumanizing if used properly: using "females" refers to people with XX chromosomes, while "women" refers to people who identify with a feminine gender (although usually one would say "female assigned at birth" or "FAB" rather than saying "females" by itself).
Audience is everything here. Using gender theory English to a biology audience drastically changes the meaning, placing you as an outsider to the group, and if your intention was to speak biology English, you'd have failed to communicate in that dialect. In fact, the above paragraph, which I, a cisgender man, wrote, is fine only because the audience is a mostly-male, slightly-socially-inept audience of Hacker News denizens. If my audience were a group of American women, that paragraph would be horribly offensive because it's someone who hasn't directly experienced the effects of this sort of language, explaining it to people who have directly experienced the effects of this sort of language. In other words, mansplaining.
The problem with saying "[I]t's normal thing to see young females taking a dog out for a walk[.]" is twofold:
1. It is perceived by some as dehumanizing women. Note that I didn't say "it's dehumanizing women", because that a) assumes the word has some sort of inherent meaning (it doesn't) and b) assumes a lot of intention coming from the communicator. But actually, whether it's dehumanizing isn't as important as the fact that it's perceived as such. Remember that communication is a two-person activity. Yes, that means that it's up to the audience to not assume the worst, and to assume you aren't intentionally dehumanizing women. But it also means that as the communicator, if you find out that your audience perceives the wording as dehumanizing, it's now up to you to change your language to communicate your actual intent more effectively. If you as a communicator find out that your audience perceives your wording as dehumanizing to women, and then insist on staying with your wording, that really starts to communicate that you don't care about communicating effectively, about your audience's perceptions, or about the fact that you might be misunderstood to be dehumanizing women. In the worst case, it communicates that you do, in fact, intend to dehumanize women, although I'm not willing to go that far in your case: I think it's much more likely that you're just feeling attacked and being defensive.
2. As noted before, language communicates membership in a group. In this case, we're clearly not demonstrating membership in medical, biology, or gender theory communities, and the remaining groups which use "female" aren't groups you probably want to associate yourself with. Unfortunately, the other groups which say "females" are generally groups like incels, neckbeards, self-described misogynists, self-described alpha/sigma males, etc. Likely, this is the underlying reason why "females" is viewed as dehumanizing women: these groups really do intend to dehumanize women, and by associating yourself with them, you're implying that you agree with some of their ideas. Again, I assume it isn't your intent to associate yourself with these groups, but effective communication of your identity would avoid associating yourself with these groups. It's up to you, as the communicator, to understand your audience and how they will perceive your use of words, and to choose the words that your audience will perceive as your intended meaning.
Just to highlight the complexity of this: there are also contextual problems with referring to adult women as "girls" as this might be perceived as infantilizing. But, in other contexts, referring to adult women as "women" is denigrating to their youthfulness/attractiveness (i.e. some women would often take offense to being called "that woman" rather than "that girl"). Louis C.K. was adept enough to riff on this phenomenon with his "Nobody wants to see 'women gone wild'" joke, but we all know what happened with Louis C.K. later... But this is partly why Global Citizen has a "Girls and Women" issue rather than a "Girls" or "Women" category (and certainly not a "Females" category)[2]. Either "Girls" or "Women" would not be inclusive of the entire group they're trying to help in the context of their audience's dialect.
Female is the word for any female sexed animal. Woman is the word for a female sexed human being. By using the more general term you are allowing the possibility that the individual in question is perhaps not fully human. Hence the term “dehumanizing.” Does that help?
That tells people considerably more about you than it does about other men and women.
Edit reply: Yes obviously you were talking about yourself and I used that to draw a conclusion about you. Why would that indicate I didn’t think it through? Your response however really does appear to have not been thought through since you failed to consider that point. That’s consistent with your apparent trend of denigrating yourself in attempts to denigrate others. If I were you I’d check my priors, but I expect you’ll continue to do you.
Not sure if you're male or female, but you certainly didn't think your reply through.
Edit Reply:
> Yes obviously you were talking about yourself and I used that to draw a conclusion about you. Why would that indicate I didn’t think it through?
Your conclusion about a post where I spoke about myself is that it speaks about myself more than it speaks about others.
Not the sharpest tool in the shed, I see.
> Your response however really does appear to have not been thought through since you failed to consider that point. That’s consistent with your apparent trend of denigrating yourself in attempts to denigrate others. If I were you I’d check my priors, but I expect you’ll continue to do you.
I see nothing wrong with the previous poster's use of "females". Males/females is sometimes used instead of men/women in a forensic context (e.g. a police report or an objective description: "female athlete," "single white female," etc).
>Using "female" as a noun for people can come off as dehumanising since it's how we refer to ex. animals in various situations.
Honestly, it's all about context and really the people say "oh he used female workers instead of women workers" what a pig are the people who are going to be mad no matter what they're literally just looking for an excuse.
And quite simply I find that demonisation of the word female to be rude and fundamentally sexist. We wouldn't have a problem saying "two males walking around" but in escence you would have a problem with "two females walking around". The fact being female is considered dehumanisng is a problem in itself and sexist. Being male is not dehumanising. See how that got turned around? You had good intentions then I got mad and used your words againist you.
Police are also fond of saying "individual" instead of "person," which is another way of dehumanizing the people they encounter. It's always a red flag to me when I hear someone say the word "individual."
Police and military do this specifically as a strategy at passive language. At least among those interested in linguistics, cops are famous for their usage of passive language to downplay violence they participate in: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...
Basically, they do it because the terms are in some way dehumanizing.
I also find the terms dehumanizing, but specifically because I've noticed that it's most frequently a term used by incels, self-identified or otherwise. It's common on certain subreddits or on twitter to see users aligned in gamergate / manosphere circles using "females" when talking about women. And yes, these same people will say "men" when talking about men.
No they do it because it’s the correct term. If you say “a man wearing a white T-shirt” and the actual suspect is a 14 year old boy. Many of the people searching with disregard them in the search because they got told to look for a man. When it goes to court the defence lawyer would use it as doubt since the description is for a man and not a boy.
Dehumainzing others is one of the main characteristics of the military in wartime, and often the police in peacetime. You maybe have a pretty cool life experience not to have experienced that.
It is very common to say "I saw two males doing x" when reporting what you saw. Just as common as saying you say two men. And this proves my point, you would have a problem no matter what. You're just wanting to be outraged.
Imagine thinking someone's gender dehumanising them. It makes no sense. The idea "You're not as human as them because you're male" is an asburd one.
> Imagine thinking someone's gender dehumanising them. It makes no sense. The idea "You're not as human as them because you're male" is an asburd one.
Absolutely not what I'm saying. My objection to it is specifically that referring to someone with "male"/"female" as a noun, in common contexts, can -- not will -- come off as dehumanising, particularly when some people tend to only use "male" or "female" for one gender and not the other.
> You're just wanting to be outraged.
I want people who both don't know that smth may make others uncomfortable and want to change in that case have the relevant information. If you don't want to change, then... good for you? That's not my problem. You do you, I guess?
As I said, its' all about context. And the context it was used it was perfectly fine, normal, etc. In fact it was perfect English, it's common to see 16 year old girls walking late at night just as common to see 40 year old women walking late at night. They're both female, one group are girls and the other group are women.
> I want people who both don't know that smth may make others uncomfortable and want to change in that case have the relevant information. If you don't want to change, then... good for you? That's not my problem. You do you, I guess?
Right back at you. It makes other people uncomfortable when others go around saying a gender is dehumanising. Especialy, when in English it's the correct word. Female/male is refers to gender, woman/man refers to gender and age. It makes people very uncomfortable when you imply they were some how rude when they weren't.
But as I said, people who would be outraged would always be outraged. It's the new trend, to show they're thinking of other people while disregarding others.
It is not outrage. It is demanding that women get respected in the ways that they want to be respected. Perhaps you have not noticed the tendency for some people to consistently refer to men as “men” and women as “female” or “girl”.
If you don’t like it, too bad. We will continue demanding respect. It takes exactly zero seconds to use the word “woman” over “female”.
You demand respect for women by saying their gender dehumanises them?
Perhaps you've not noticed but some of those people are women. You going to start correcting women when they say they're off on a girls night out and tell them it's a womens night out? You going to start correct them when they say they have an all female executive board and tell them it's an all women executive board?
The reality is, when you say that the word female is offensive, which you are, you're making their gender offensive. And that is not respectful.
I don't know about this either. It sounds fine to me and I hear both used interchangeably (from NYC area). I've also seen it written both ways. To the original comment, you're fine IMHO.
A small point about self-righteousness in case you or anyone else didn’t know: asserting your own beliefs as dogma is often counter-productive in a forum like HN.
Stating that you’ve got information that CLEARLY everyone else needs to be taught; that you’re just trying to be helpful; that nobody should feel pressured to conform “immediately”; all comes off as disingenuous at best and threatening at worst. Instead, try asking questions and engaging in conversation rather than lecturing.
As to the topic at hand: in what way is it dehumanizing to refer to a human as male or female? Being male or female is a fundamental part of being human, not something to be erased or ashamed of. I am a trans woman: a human male who identifies and lives socially as a woman. Should I hide the fact that I’m male? Why?
> In English, it sounds weird to use "female" as a noun to refer to people.
By "it sounds weird" you actually mean "in the past few years there's been a movement to hyperfocus on this small language quirk that nobody really cared about in the past". Just so we're clear.
No, it always sounded weird. Its certainly not a word my grandparents nor parents would've used in casual conversation.
In the last few years there's been a hyperfocus on restricting genders that has caused a minority of native-English speakers to start overusing the word "female" with extra emphasis: which may be leading to learners to consider it a normal word to use casually, but historically it has mainly been applied in formal medical/scientific settings.
I'll go further than "sounds weird". It's a shibboleth that associates the speaker with certain misogynistic red-pill internet subcultures. Anybody who doesn't want that association should probably just say "women" instead.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, they're non-english natives who speak English as a second (or third, fourth, etc) language and have no knowledge or interest in absurd internet-american-english witchhunts?
Yes incels are utterly annoying despicable broken records of tediously uncreative low quality mental illness, i also strongly dislike them - but for monolinguist americans to start to paint with such an absurdly wide brush is far worse. Choose your bloody battles.
I don't. I mean it genuinely sounds odd to me. Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way; what's wrong about wanting people to use language consistently? Don't push your biases onto me.
Do you have any evidence that "Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way". I think it's highly likely that you do not have enough (anecdotal) data to legitimately make a claim like that. At most you could make such a claim about "most people in my experience" but then, you wouldn't have monitored them for quite long either, just for an internet convo or so.
"To me" is the key bit here. I'm conscious of this particular issue since I've run into it on the internet a few times. Whenever I've mentioned it to a woman in a face to face conversation (in the UK) they've looked at me like I was barking mad. I even corrected my mother (she referred to "females" when talking about women) which resulted in a lengthy tirade. She is old though to be fair.
I blame the Ferengi.
>Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way
Conversely, I'm not sure many people are keeping track of this since no-one objects to be called male if they're a man.
- Assume why people care/don't care about a certain issue
- Tried to force my values onto people.
Saying "if you didn't know, wording things this way can come off weird. Maybe try X instead? No pressure (:" is very different from "yeah well obviously your intent here is X [because of the last few years]." I'm not here to force people to change. But if people didn't know something, and do want to change on their own, I'd rather the information be there for them if they want it.
I don't care about this issue, but you opened with stating "it sounds weird". An absolute statement. Not like you are wording it here. Way to derail a thread about someone loosing their life with semantics policing.
I didn't accuse you of doing any of the things in your bullets so I can't really respond to them.
What I did say is that you're pushing your biases onto others while simultaneously telling others not to do the same thing.
Your life experiences have led you to the point today where you object to a certain use of the word "female". That's fine.
But taking your personal objection, which is not a universially agreed upon truth, and using it to lecture someone else in a condescending "you must not know English" way is another matter and probably why you're catching heat right now.
it's pretty common in aave/ebonics, that's probably how it's become more common. lots of slang has mainstreamed from the black community in the past few yrs
stabbing is quite common in some big european cities
London is the European (well, kind of) city that most people cite as being bad for knife crime. It's still rare enough that a stabbing will make the national news though.
For a basic comparison, in 2022 there were 710 murders in the UK. 282 were stabbings. In the US there were 26,031 murders (a little more than 20,000 using guns), which is 36 times more, while the US has a population that's only 5 times that of the UK.
One would think that a comparison with the UK would be a smart one to make considering the media coverage stabbings in the UK receive, and the fact that homicides in the US tend to be conducted using firearms instead.
Turns out, shockingly to me at least, that the US also has a much higher deaths due to stabbing rate than the UK.
0.60/100k residents in the US vs 0.08/100k residents in the UK.
Well why don’t you find London and SF numbers then.
In the meanwhile, considering the U.S. has an order of magnitude higher rate of stabbing, it’s highly unlikely that London would have a higher, never mind a significantly higher, rate of stabbings than SF.
It's a people problem and we aren't allowed to and can't get rid of the people. People have poured in so much help and aid for years and it went nowhere.
Supporters of drug addiction and severe drug addicts for a start. Severe addicts need to be removed from society and treated medically in isolation to wean them off their addiction. The damage done to addicts by the common opioid and opioid mimicking drugs on the streets of SF is so severe there is nearly zero hope for them to consciously stop.
US governments need to scrap their existing operational model tackling drug users and adopt the Swiss National Strategy on Addiction and the four-pillar policy. There are no junkies in the streets unlike in the 1990s.
>In 2017-18 there were 145 homicides in London, of which approximately 80 were carried out using a knife. There were an additional 4,793 incidents of "knife crime with injury".
which sadly does seem to be more than daily. That said living in central London I don't see any of it.
That's pretty appalling but don't forget that London is a city of 9 million people. When you have that number of people in a place there will obviously be crime. It could be argued that 145 deaths and 4,793 incidents is quite low.
My condolences to Bob's family. I hope this finally gets SF city government to get it's shit together. Ik the VC commmunity is pretty closely knit here but always seemed to concentrate on national politics. Maybe they'll now pressure City govt to finally start maintaining quality of life
Edit: Jesus, this happened right in Rincon Hill. This is SF's equivalent of Murray Hill. Yea shit needs to be fixed.
No. Any leader or public figure who acknowledges the systemic problem will be torn apart (figuratively, I think) - mostly by people who don't live in SF. They will be ostracized by their peer group, even by people who privately feel the same way, so that those peers are not themselves torn apart.
1% of the people that are okay with the way SF handles crime are calling all the shots. They hold the cudgel of public scorn that keeps the other 99% in line.
It seems to me that SF city government has been openly hostile to tech this entire time. If they don’t care about impoverished minorities being murdered by violent criminals, what makes you think they would care any more about tech executives?
The tech hostility issue was surrounding tech workers moving to the Mission District (a formerly working class Latino neighborhood that had a bunch of white bohemian alternative types).
In city politics, a handful of major tech moguls have always been active. Ron Conway and Mark Benioff have both historically been massive players in SF politics and have been supporting more moderate Mayoral candidates for some time, but the SF Board of Supervisors tends to filled only with NIMBY activists and real estate owners (Dean Preston, Aaron Peskin, Hillary Ronen).
Now that someone who is Seacliff adjacent is dead, they'll finally do something. I used to live in a Tenderloin adjacent neighborhood and my street literally reverted to mob justice after the riots because it was filled with working class undocumented immigrants+asylum seekers who were targeted and Tenderloin PD's hiring basically collapsed (on that note - if you're trying to stick up someone, don't stick up someone who fought in the Yemen Civil War and the Afghan Civil War. A couple people learnt their lesson in that neighborhood from what I heard at the local
mosque).
While those riots went on, the police were guarding Seacliff, Russian Hill, and PacHeights. And it's those same people who's kids end up in SF progressive politics and setting up organizations that push these kinds of policies.
Btw, if anyone downvotes me thinking I'm some GOP nut - I'm not. My politics lean moderate Dem and I have worked in the moderate Dem space for years. That said, the SF Dems are entirely out of touch. It's a level of machine politics that makes Chicago look competent (and they've had actual Supes get arrested for arms trafficking, but then again so did we in 2012).
> In city politics, a handful of major tech moguls have always been active. Ron Conway and Mark Benioff have both historically been massive players in SF politics and have been supporting more moderate Mayoral candidates for some time, but the SF Board of Supervisors tends to filled only with NIMBY activists and real estate owners (Dean Preston, Aaron Peskin, Hillary Ronen). Now that someone who is Seacliff adjacent is dead, they'll finally do something.
OK. So let me see if I understand what you're saying here. Tech was always a force in SF politics, but it hasn't been powerful enough on its own because it was in conflict with middle class progressives. But now that people are getting stabbed to death in those middle class neighborhoods, the middle class progressives are going to take it seriously instead of butting heads with the tech moguls.
> I used to live in a Tenderloin adjacent neighborhood and my street literally reverted to mob justice after the riots because it was filled with working class undocumented immigrants+asylum seekers who were targeted and Tenderloin PD's hiring basically collapsed
Yikes.
> (on that note - if you're trying to stick up someone, don't stick up someone who fought in the Yemen Civil War and the Afghan Civil War. A couple people learnt their lesson in that neighborhood from what I heard at the local mosque).
Makes sense!
> Btw, if anyone downvotes me thinking I'm some GOP nut - I'm not. My politics lean moderate Dem and I have worked in the moderate Dem space for years. That said, the SF Dems are entirely out of touch. It's a level of machine politics that makes Chicago look competent (and they've had actual Supes get arrested for arms trafficking, but then again so did we in 2012).
Yeah, I think any single party system is going to end up pretty bad eventually. I definitely agree that there's room for moderate Dems to criticize SF politics. I lived in Seattle for almost a decade and the main political conflict seemed to be between moderate Dems and avowed Socialists.
> OK. So let me see if I understand what you're saying here. Tech was always a force in SF politics, but it hasn't been powerful enough on its own because it was in conflict with middle class progressives.
It's not that it's weak. It's more so that most of the big political donors who are from a tech background in SF (eg. David Sacks) don't touch local politics. They'll only really fundraise and hobnob with State and Congressional level politicians and maybe the Mayor on occasion (eg. Sacks has hosted fundraisers for both Ro Khanna and DeSantis within a week of each other).
SF local politics is extremely complex and time consuming, and most of the large donors aren't natives and are insulated from a number of the issues surrounding the city. That's why SF native billionaires like Conway and Benioff have been the only prominent techies in the SF local politics space (Though Manny Yekutiel is increasingly prominent too, but his family is also extremely prominent in LA politics). What ends up happening is local SF elections get taken over by local old money/real estate families, NGOs, and unions (including the police union) because those are the only groups and people that actually know who's who in SF politics and are impacted at a personal level. This is unlike other major cities in the US like Dallas, NYC, Chicago, oe even San Jose where prominent national level business leaders also enter the fray.
Now that one of them has actually been impacted, stuff will change - especially since this happened in Rincon Hill.
Is it more that new money can't just roll into SF local politics and make anything happen, or is it a question of not doing the work?
> eg. Sacks has hosted fundraisers for both Ro Khanna and DeSantis within a week of each other
That's an interesting contrast. But if Sacks' Overton window is roughly the area between Khanna and RDS, even though that's a pretty wide spread on the national level, I have the feeling that puts him well to the right of SF, to the point that he might have trouble finding anyone to support in local politics. It certainly would work out that way in Seattle, at least.
It's a LOT of work. There are 11 Board of Supervisor members, 7 SFUSD Board Members, and numerous additional local elected supervisory positions. On top of that, elections being elections, you need to make alliances with Interest Groups that will rally voters to your candidate. All this takes a lot of time and money which has little impact outside of this 49 square mile rock on the Pacific Coast. You could better use that time (the most expensive part) and money to have an actual impact at the State or Federal level, which can have an actual lasting impact. Also, people forget how insular and parochial SF is because it's a smaller city by US and California standards: within California, Los Angeles City is 3.8mil, San Diego City is 1.3mil, and San Jose is 1mil - while San Francisco is barely 800k, roughly comparble to the City of Seattle or City of Charlotte, NC. You almost never hear about Seattle or Charlotte city politics despite both being equally as dysfunctional and sharing similar issues.
> he might have trouble finding anyone to support in local politics
Money speaks.
Why else would Bernie Sander's protege and Donald Trump's former protege turned rival kiss the ring of the exact same billionare.
For example, all SF Progressive politicians de facto HAVE to stump at an (imo extremely overpriced) cafe called Manny's (they have OK hummus, but Oasis Grill across the street is way better and a fraction of the cost), owned by an ex-FB lobbyist and personal friend of Zuck named Manny Yekutiel. And SF city politicians are fine taking money from Marc Benioff even though Salesforce has massive contracts with ICE and the DoD. If the other local business tycoons who live in SF actually cared enough about SF, they'd be playing a role in the local politics as well.
But, as they don't due to time constraints, what ends up happening is Old Money Real Estate families in SF are able to have an oversized impact on electoral politics in the city.
> You almost never hear about Seattle or Charlotte city politics
I hear about Seattle politics (particularly policing) all the time, and its not something I live near or actively seek out.
Heck, outside of HN, which has kind of an obsessive focus on SF, I see that more than SF politics (HN seems to blend tech indusry focus which concnetrates on SF with the right-wing ideologic obsession with SF [0].)
[0] Not saying HN is universally, or predominantly, right-wing, just has a sizable enough vocal group that it enhances the focus that comes from HN’s industry focus.
> I hear about Seattle politics (particularly policing) all the time, and its not something I live near or actively seek out.
It might be a regional bias.
For example, I've had friends living in NYC and Boston who are nowhere near politics chat to me about SF local politics, but similar conversations don't occur about Seattle or Charlotte or Cincinnati local politics at the national level. A lot of this is probably also age+class dependent - a lot of the major players in SF city politics are in their 30s-40s and went to the same handful of elite high schools and universities as VCs, IBs, and top SWEs.
> sizable enough vocal group that it enhances the focus that comes from HN’s industry focus
I feel a lot of that is due to the lack of diversity on HN. Like I've seen A LOT of racially biased conversations on this board (and that has turned off other people in my age demographic from perusing HN).
The most interesting story in Seattle was probably CHAZ/CHOP, and that ended almost 3 years ago now, so there isn't really anything left to discuss. The mayor ended her career in disgrace, but then again, every Seattle mayor ends their career in disgrace. Meanwhile the most interesting story in SF politics was probably Chesa Boudin, and he only got recalled a year ago. So that's a much more recent and much more interesting controversy for people to talk about. Also, there's a direct New York connection because of his father's clemency case there.
> Why else would Bernie Sander's protege and Donald Trump's former protege turned rival kiss the ring of the exact same billionare.
Bernie had a pretty big tent back in the day though. Like, if you look at the people who supported Bernie in 2016, there's the AOC wing that's basically far left and have almost zero overlap with Trump supporters, but there's also a Tulsi Gabbard/Joe Rogan wing whom RDS could probably win over pretty easily. And a big part of the overlap here is the appeal of new ideas and new personalities overthrowing the political establishment, which sort of fits the Silicon Valley "disruption" mindset.
Thanks for the detailed explanations! It's very interesting and informative.
Ro was Sander's National Campaign Co-Chair, and is being positioned by the Sanders campaign for a presidential run either in 2024 or 2028 [0][1]. A lot of the messaging is being lifted out of the 2020 campaign
[2].
The "AOC Wing" which you're talking about was the ex-Stripe founding engineer Saikat Chakrabarti's SuperPAC - the Justice Democrats. He was pushed out from the Hill after a very nasty fight with Lacy Clay, Ro, and Pelosi in 2019 that almost veered kinda racial. He's still doing some activism but he's mostly a has been now that his largest protege AOC made the wise career move to align closer with the mainstream CPC and Biden's campaign co-opted the Green New Deal
> Thanks for the detailed explanations! It's very interesting and informative.
No prob. I got bored spilling the dirt only with Politicos, and I feel like HN has a horrid understanding of how shit actually works on the Hill. It's way less conspiracies and more like normal office politics.
In a democracy, you are the government. What we see today in SF is the consequence of decades of hostility to construction and growth from the residents of SF.
I can maybe understand the premise that fewer houses means more homelessness. Although I'm skeptical that it's a direct cause, and undoubtedly many homeless people in SF did not become homeless in SF, but migrated there after they lost their home or became addicted elsewhere.
It's a commonly promoted trope to blame all of SF's problems on wealth inequality and the housing market. But it could be an oversimplification that hand-waves a difficult discussion, which only ends up exacerbating the problem.
Can you articulate how housing policy leads to drug addiction, open air drug markets, high rates of property crime, and general non-enforcement of criminality?
You're skeptical housing shortages cause homelessness? How could it be otherwise?
To address your question, it's incredibly difficult to cope with mental illness or overcome addiction while homeless. It's also difficult to hold down a job. Drug use and joblessness lead to property crime and open air drug markets.
> You're skeptical housing shortages cause homelessness? How could it be otherwise?
Well, people could become homeless outside of San Francisco (possibly after becoming addicted to drugs), and then migrate to San Francisco. Even in the hypothetical scenario where houses cost nothing but are unavailable in San Francisco, it would seem misleading to blame that SF housing shortage for the homelessness of someone who migrated there after becoming homeless.
Is there data available for how many people currently homeless in San Francisco became homeless in San Francisco? That is, where did they last rent property? I'm not being snarky; I'm curious what the percentages are like. My guess is that a significant majority of homeless people in San Francisco were previously renting in another location, then got evicted, and then eventually moved to SF.
> it's incredibly difficult to cope with mental illness or overcome addiction while homeless. It's also difficult to hold down a job.
Yes, that's true, once you're homeless. My question is about how the housing shortage in San Francisco causes homelessness. That is, how does housing policy in a jurisdiction lead to people becoming homeless after they were previously living in a property within that jurisdiction?
Also, consider what might make a city an appealing destination for someone who becomes homeless while addicted to drugs. If your heroin addiction gets you kicked out of your apartment in Reno, and you're looking to score some smack, why not catch a $15 Greyhound to San Francisco? It's an easy place to buy drugs, and it's a city well known for its citizens and authorities tolerating people openly using drugs and sleeping on the street. And when you run out of money, you can smash a few car windows until you find some cash, then walk a few blocks to exchange it for drugs from your nearest heroin dealer.
A 2019 survey found that 70% of people homeless in San Francisco in 2019 reported most recently becoming homeless while living in San Francisco: 22% came from another county within California, and 8% came from another state[1].
Housing policy decreases supply which increases costs beyond the means of low-wage workers.
Interesting, thanks for the link. I have to admit, 70% is a lot higher than I would have guessed. Here's the cited survey (PDF) [0] which has a lot of well-presented data.
Some other interesting points I noticed:
> Nearly half (48%) of youth survey respondents reported living in San Francisco when they most recently became homeless. Thirty-nine percent (39%) reported living in another county in California and 14% reported living out of state.
So 53% of youth respondents became homeless outside of San Francisco, compared to only 30% of overall respondents. This skew possibly indicates a trend of younger people becoming homeless outside of San Francisco and moving there. That also implies the number of homeless people in San Francisco will continue to increase.
> Previous living arrangements: 30% Home Owned or Rented by Self or Partner, 33% With Friends or Family.
This implies there's a gradual transition to homelessness. Maybe there's a chance for early intervention when someone starts living with friends or family.
> Primary Cause of Homelessness (Self-reported): 25% Lost Job, 18% Alcohol or Drug Use, 13% Eviction
Unfortunately it's hard to separate these causes, since e.g. alcohol or drug use can lead to lost job. But again, 18% citing drug use is lower than I would have expected. I wonder how many non-addicts become addicts while homeless.
The logical consequence of this argument is for San Francisco to secede from the Union and build a wall around the city to stop foreign homeless people from coming in. And blowing up BART too.
Alternatively, the SFPD could start arresting people for committing crimes, the DA could start charging them for crimes, and the judges could start sentencing them for crimes. And the legislators can make sleeping on the street a crime. Make it impossible to get drugs without significant risk. Discourage drug addicts from immigrating to SF as if it's some kind of heroin haven where they can live, sleep, shit and do drugs on the street.
Or just let the inevitable earthquake take care of it.
The Supreme Court ruled that you can't criminalize sleeping on the street if there isn't shelter space available, so your dystopia in which people are jailed for existing in proximity to you without being rich isn't going to happen.
This is the simple and obvious solution that works but for some reason liberalism post-Clinton took a shift towards being not just less pro law and order, but actively anti.
Housing is certainly an ingredient in the soup. So is inequality. And corruption. A culture that is anti-family, consumerist, pro-drug, individualist.
What else? There's so many factors. A lack of cohesive identity. The American attitude of narcissism and the fuck-you mentality. A lack of willingness to call out ghetto behavior as bad. Neutered teachers and schools preaching that all things are equally good and gradually lowering standards. Entire generations of families that basically feed into gangs. A lack of government ability/will to break up gangs. Incessant, unmitigated advertising. Government controlled media serving white-washed bullshit. Liberalism gone off the rails, generally.
In the US, that's not entirely true. There's acts of voter suppression and gerrymandering that have been rampant for what feels like forever and persist today.
I agree. The GOP gerrymandering SF so that they have complete control of city council is obviously the problem here. /s
There are no GOP members in City government, and haven't been for a long, long time. This is the result of progressive policies. Accept that or this will continue.
Americans have a major fetish for blaming the GOP. In my city of Portland which has many similar problems to sf, I constantly hear the reasons things are so bad is the GOP. What causes this kind of analysis to become so widespread?
People don't like to believe that problems are of their own making. You legalize meth, then your city fills up with people using meth - that's not the problem of the GOP. There's approximately no Republicans in Seattle, SF, or Portland - the problem is progressivism.
>I agree. The GOP gerrymandering SF so that they have complete control of city council is obviously the problem here. /s
Hey now, I was addressing this part of the comment "In a democracy, you are the government"
I am speaking as someone who lives in a red state where our abortion laws have been rolled back and have seen the impact of the gerrymandering first hand. This is the result of conservative policies and will likely have a negative effect on our state; whether by an exodus of those who don't see the point in staying or by increasing poverty for forced birth for those who can't afford to skirt the laws
>This is the result of progressive policies. Accept that or this will continue.
I don't live in SF so I can't speak with any authority to how much worse it has become. I can say that my city's murder rate is almost 50% higher than SF while being much smaller. From what I've read, SF is at least trying something in terms of harm reduction instead of just outright criminalizing or ignoring, which is what we're do and isn't working.
I don't have the answers and it seems to be a difficult task to come up with plans without violating a person's autonomy.
I did not mention the GOP initially. You did in your reply and I replied to you. As mentioned earlier, I was addressing this part of the comment "In a democracy, you are the government"
No one forced you to interact with me and I think we're both worse off that you chose to do so.
Am I missing something? I live in the midwest, so I might be. From here, San Francisco seems so deeply liberal and Democratic, that even if you would change out the entire local government, you'd get similarly-minded people right back, and nothing would change. I'm also middle-aged, and seen this argument before. No matter how bad things get in, say, Chicago or Detroit, "citizens" have never flipped a deeply-Democratic city, nor implemented significant changes to the systemic policies that have led to their situations. For decades, I've watched from afar as people argue about SF's housing policies, which I think are ultimately responsible for almost all the problems there. Is there ANY hope that the local government would risk losing an iota of existing property value by making policies to significantly expand housing?
New York voted in Rudy Giuliani, a Republican, in 1994 because of out of control crime. When things get bad enough people take action. It's just that not enough people have died yet for voters to care. Also, party affiliation is much more like a religion in America now than it is a democratic institution. Party affiliation is a core identity now, and people don't like to acknowledge their religion's failings no matter the evidence.
As I wrote that, I actually thought about New York and the way they clawed their way out of the violence and crime in the 80's. I didn't know it was Giuliani; I didn't know he went back that far. It's interesting to contrast this exception to my generalization, because they implemented no-tolerance police policies that are utterly unconscionable today, especially in a place like San Fran.
It's even more interesting than that, really, because crime everywhere was bad in the very early 90s. Giuliani gets the credit for having cleaned up crime in NYC (and maybe he did) but we look to the early 90s as kind of the high water mark for crime, and particularly violent crime, everywhere.
At the same time as New York's crime was falling, the same thing was happening everywhere -- San Diego and Austin and San Jose had basically identical trajectories as NYC under Giuliani, but obviously did not have Giuliani (tho perhaps they had also brought in their own?
Just Googling now, and it seems San Diego brought in Susan Golding (R) in 1992 to replace Maureen O'Connor (D), and they didn't flip back until 2005.
Austin had Bruce Todd (which one article refers to as an "establishment Democrat") from 91-97, and Kirk Watson (D) from 97-01.
San Jose has had consecutively Democratic mayors from 1971 to now.
TLDR, I don't think party alignment is as indicative as we might hope it would be, however much policy preferences might tend to overlap with party. Perhaps that was different way back in the 90s, when polarization wasn't as high, and/or party marching orders weren't quite as unified nationally as they seem to be now -- or I'm just missing something obvious elsewhere
You don't necessarily have to flip control from D to R (or vice versa) to make a difference. Both major parties cover a WIDE swath of preferences.
For example, prior to going national, Kamala Harris was a relatively tough-on-crime prosecutor despite being a Democrat.
Citizens in SF can elect local reps who will fund things shown to help reduce crime (mental health care, cheaper housing, etc). Or whatever else.
Local to me, it's pretty much all Democrats as well. Within the party, I can pick candidates who want to build condos over both local golf courses. Or, I can pick candidates who want to keep that open green space. Granted, I have to vote in the primary here, as the general is almost guaranteed to go to a D.
A bad government breeds social inequality and this leads to desperation among citizens. You can't just blame citizens as if there's something in the air in SF.
People are desperate. Tbh the whole US system is so messed up, it's generations upon generations of PTSD among the working masses. I hate to get into these discussions but it makes my blood boil to see how people are left stranded with no safety net and just more and more money gouging corporations around them.
I don't disagree with anything you said. But governments, and the policies they enact, don't exist in a vacuum. And local government is the most direct/effective place to vote for change.
I don't understand why this lie keeps getting repeated. The US has a very generous social safety net, even compared to wealthy western-European countries. Most especially San Francisco, which has rent assistance, free healthcare, stipends, and countless other things.
Legneato blamed "the government" for the state of the city. I was only pointing out that the government is us. We elect them, they don't existing a vacuum.
I never directly blamed the citizens, but they are the ones who live there, work there, and elect the government, so at least indirectly, they are to blame. It's a wealthy city - there's no reason (beyond apathy or greed) that the government can't implement policies that make the city a better place.
I sure as hell don't know but the poster blamed the citizens as if there's something in the air in SF. And all the comments are about the general state of the city, rather than a targeted attack. So calm down, read the comments and you'll see that no one has any idea what happened and are just grasping.
The murder rate in SF is below what it was in the 1990s.
There are far more dangerous cities than SF, which isn’t even in the top 20 in terms of crime. SF does have problems but there’s been a kind of relentless right wing attack on SF and CA in general that simply is not objective and it’s a rea irony because many of the red states have the highest murder rates.
We’ve got a serious problem in this country in many areas but it’s never going to be fixed by getting hysterical over crime.
This was an awful awful awful tragedy, but statistically, all of the people talking about how bad things have gotten apparently didn’t live through the 80s and 90s. We literally had vigilante groups like the Guardian Angels in the 80s because crime was so high. I’d like it if SF takes action to reduce crime of course but I’m skeptics of simplistic claims without knowing the core reasons crime dropped dramatically from 1980-2000.
[people voting it down but providing no rebuttal that the “gotten bad” claims are subjective and don’t map to actual violent crime stats. What has objectively gotten worse is property crime. If someone can provide stats that show violent crime has objectively gotten worse over the last decade or two, I’d be curious]
There is so much truth to the saying "The People Get The Government They Deserve". The government of SF only exists in it's current state because the majority of voters in SF chose them.
I have an issue with that sentiment because people do not directly vote for policies. They indirectly vote for a representative to enact policies, and the viable ones are backed by mass party apparatuses. Here, the Party's interests overrides the People's and dominate the political discussion. The Party is backed by a large network of corporate lobbyists. It's really that corporate personhood gets the government they deserve.
Well in the case of old time san Franciscans, they made quite a nice city and then people moved in, out numbered them, and voted exactly for that which they didn't want.
Rich people? Lol. At least people are transparently saying their hateful nonsense these days. Yes, it’s people with large incomes that are making people take fentanyl, shit on the streets and stab people to death. If only rent was 50% cheaper, that guy would be a productive member of society! Hey, I have a great idea. Let’s have the government step in, take that stupid rich guys money, and give it to the drug addict. That’s never been tried before and I’m sure will solve the problem completely…
Every elected legislator in San Francisco is rich (as is the populace - it’s one of the richest cities in the region and planet), so you’ve proposed a distinction without a difference.
Interpreting the question in good faith (since nobody else seems to want to)
I work in SF but don't live there, but over the past few years (especially under Chesa Boudin, the previous District Attorney) they've moved towards "soft on crime" policies that may have contributed to what friends who live there are referring to as 'lawlessness'
Some policies that likely have contributed include:
Bail Reform: They've prohibited cash bail, meaning most offenders who are arrested have no incentive to stand trial or prevent fleeing. No idea what the effect has been here, and as I understand it, offenders deemed violent are asked to forego bail. Again, no information on whether that's a voluntary ask or an imposed demand, but the impression is that people are arrested and back on the streets the same day to potentially reoffend.
Decriminalized theft up to $950: It is now quasi-legal to walk into a store in San Francisco, steal up to $949 in merchandise, and walk right back out. Allegedly, police won't respond to such incidents, and there's no deterrent from doing so. This has led to gangs who take turns, each walking in and snagging almost a thousand dollars worth of merchandise, then pooling the goods and reselling them. Pharmacies seem to have been particularly affected.
This was walked back somewhat, as shoplifting is now considered a felony again, especially if done as part of a ring, but police are apparently still extremely unlikely to respond.
Reduced sentences: Due to budgetary concerns, California as a whole is now imprisoning offenders for less time, issuing shorter sentences and early release as much as possible so that they do not have to bear the cost of imprisonment.
They defunded the police: Or, at least they pretended to? They promised to redirect $120 million of police funding away from law enforcement to support other social initiatives, and I remember a remark at the time that this was to fund reparation initiatives that they seem to be aiming to implement, but I have no idea as to the sincerity of that. That said, in the years since this promise, police budgets are up from where they were, so they seem to have either reversed course or possibly never gave it more than lip service. I'm not sure.
All together, if those are to be believed as causes (rather than say, wealth inequality, general social unrest, etc.) then it's worth looking into. Crime is up 110% in San Francisco relative to the American average, and is up 91% relative to the average in California.
Two additional notes: I'm just relaying what I think might have been OP's causes for attributing this to government action. I have no idea. I don't live there. Also, it seems that residents aren't particularly happy with it, as there was a (failed) attempt to recall Gavin Newsom, and a (successful) attempt to recall Chesa Boudin, and there are efforts underway to recall Mayor London Breed as well. No idea how that will fare.
Edit: It's probably worth remembering that someone can be stabbed anywhere, and if the fact that this happened in San Francisco confirms a bias you had, it's probably worth reframing it as somewhere else. Confirmation bias is our common enemy, and one that we don't have to succumb to just because our brains insist on it. Ask yourself if your tirade applies if you replace "San Francisco" with Zurich, Tokyo, Toronto, or Frisco Texas.
Worth pointing out that no European country has a cash bail system, yet many of them manage to have cities with much lower crime rates than SF.
Cash bail isn't "tough on crime" policy — it's a "keep penniless people in jail" policy, since non-violent crimes like petty larceny are more likely to be committed by poor people.
Worth pointing that there's no such thing as "police not responding" in many European countries either. Just a heated argument with your neighbor and someone calls the police? They're going to show up even if no crime is being committed, try to mediate and diffuse the situation - because their multi-year training covered that as well, not just the application of government-sanctioned violence.
I don't think long sentences work as a deterrent if there's just a low expectation of the chaps in uniforms even putting in any work.
"Life imprisonment" in e.g. Germany is an indefinite sentence with parole eligibility at 15 years, 18 years in France, 15 years in Belgium, etc. According to Wikipedia there are currently 550 inmates serving indefinite sentences in France, and 33000 inmates serving life sentences in California.
I think that's generally true in America as well. A "one-life" sentence in America generally amounts to 15-25 before parole eligibility.
I don't know the prevalence of back-to-back life sentences in Germany (or in America, really) but we have some oddities like the Green River Killer, who got a life sentence for every murder he pled guilty to committing, so he's serving 48 life sentences consecutively.
I am as impressed with France's low percentage of life (indefinite) sentences as I am shocked that California's 160+% life detention rate despite having almost half the population.
Chesa Boudin was a scapegoat for the cities problems and his recall almost a year ago now hasn't changed things significantly. It sounds like the talking points are to ask for recalls further up the chain of command; maybe we will eventually get a chance to recall Joe Biden. However, god forbid you say anything bad about the poor police department, who are somehow still unable to do their jobs because of Chesa.
I'm not sure what can be done to fix the more systemic issues in SF; I'm assuming this will continue until we magically get a republican mayor and once that mayor fails to realize they can't ship the homeless westward, nor melt them into biofuel we can start to take a look at some of the policies that has absolutely gutted the ability for anyone to afford to live in SF and a couple well off people living in houses and the mentally incapacitated living in the street.
This is just cut and pasted from some right wing talking points. Cash bail reform has not caused a decline in the number of people who flee. It also is not associated with re-arrest. It is associated with reduced harm for arrestees, which is important because many innocent people are arrested.
$950 is a completely reasonable threshold for felony theft. Before this state-wide, not city-specific, reform was introduced California had the lowest threshold in the nation. It is still fairly low. In Texas, the threshold for what you inaccurately call "quasi-legal" is $2500.
Shorter sentences is a solid reform because longer sentences are not associated with better outcomes and it costs $100k/yr to keep someone in prison, and that's money that could be spent on community policing instead.
> $950 is a completely reasonable threshold for felony theft. Before this state-wide, not city-specific, reform was introduced California had the lowest threshold in the nation. It is still fairly low. In Texas, the threshold for what you inaccurately call "quasi-legal" is $2500.
I believe the difference is that district attorneys in Texas will actually prosecute misdemeanor theft, while this isn't true in the Bay Area.
Not that you seem like you're likely to have your mind changed, but you can look at prosecuted misdemeanors on this website broken out by type. Misdemeanors prosecuted for burglary have been declining pretty quickly sine 2018. For theft, they only prosecuted 48 cases since 2011, I'm guessing there's been way more instances of theft beyond those 48 cases over 10+ years lol. Petty theft also has been on decline since 2018 for what it's worth.
I don't think I am being unclear about my request. Your dashboard in no way shows or implies that a district attorney in Texas is more likely to prosecute a misdemeanor theft than the SF district attorney.
All your dashboard says to me is that the DA presses charges in the majority of misdemeanor petty theft arrests, and the trend in the absolute decline of such cases is driven by the lack of arrests, which declined more than half from 2011 to 2022, which is consistent with my point that it doesn't have anything to do with the DA, it is caused by poor police productivity.
> This is just cut and pasted from some right wing talking points
Not that it matters, but these were the collected thoughts of my resident friends and colleagues who live there, none of which you could remotely consider anywhere close to "right wing."
The fact that these are memes promulgated by reactionary media outlets, and the fact that you heard them second-hand from people in San Francisco, are not really contrary.
The recall attempt on Newsom originated in the very conservative East County of San Diego (home to the convicted and Trump-pardoned former Rep Duncan Hunter, and current ultra-MAGA Rep Darrel Issa). Newsom hardly campaigned in the recall - only put some effort in the final month - and won by almost exactly the same margin he took office with originally.
My understanding from a European that doesn't follow the news very much is that they did defund the police and what everyone knew would happen happened.
It‘s not just the government. As SF controls ever larger part of the world, many power hungry people flock to SF. Prices go up and more people want a piece of the action.
> A friend who was planning to meet Lee in Miami this weekend told The Standard that Lee had been in San Francisco on business, had stayed an extra day and was killed on that day.
I am genuinely curious to know how SF residents feel about this.
This thread is 90%+ people denying the very existence of a problem.
Last time I was in SF, people were shocked that I felt less comfortable than I do in Detroit. Detroit doesn't tolerate half the shit SF does - no encampments, no wandering screamers, etc. Yes, violent and organized crime is much higher - but when you're QOL is lower than the symbol of urban decline........
Detroit is almost exactly the same size as SF. Detroit has cheap housing AND STILL BUILDS MORE. SF has decided that NIMBYism is the solution to homelessness, and it's obviously not working.
Size as in geographic area or population? Detroit has blocks and blocks where only a single house exists, thousands of empty lots and abandoned homes. Easier to build when there’s cheap empty lots.
If by "all-time low" you mean "the highest of the last 10 years" (we need to go to 2012 to find a higher value, with 2007/2008 being the peak of the last 20 years).
And also if we're willing to accept this pretty high bar...
For comparison the UK, not exactly the safest country in Europe, had 12x the homicides for 80x the population, which puts SF at 6 times more homicides per population.
Funny stat. Majority of murders happen in family. The recent FBI stat says that family members were responsible for 43% of them. Gangs are responsible for about 30%.
Now since large number of families moved out from SF, and there are more no big local gangs (since there are no families) you have about 40% more random homicides. And these random ones are the worse and the most scary ones.
When crime stats say "gangs" they're not just talking about a street gang with a name, list of members, defined territory and stuff like that.
They're also talking about people who engage in business that is not state sanctioned and therefore have to settle disputes with their own violence instead of getting a court to threaten state violence on their behalf. One part time drug dealer rounding up a couple buddies and putting a bullet in a guy who ripped him off will show up as and makes up a huge chunk of what's considered "gang violence" in these stats.
When comparing cities it's useful to differentiate between random crime and crime where the parties to know each other.
The scary part of SF homicides now that you can be walking around and some crazy guy just shoots you or stab you without any reason whatsoever. They are not professional criminals: they are just so drugged up or whatever.
I think that should be rephrased, I see what you mean but it sounds weird to call 43% a majority since the other 57% of murders are not family related.
> I am genuinely curious to know how SF residents feel about this.
Based on the subreddit, which is usually a trash fire, it's what you'd expect I guess? Everyone thinks murder is bad, so we start at that baseline, and from there it's a couple classes of people arguing with eachother: those that are happy to consider san francisco "a shithole" or whatever hot reactionary word of the day the rest of the country is using to label SF as enemy #1 of traditional american values and are essentially exuberant to have a new single point of data to sling around, and those that are overcorrecting against this and diminishing the real problems in SF in an attempt to whitewash while to be fair making things seem more true to reality, that is to say, portray SF as, statistically speaking, relatively safe and boring for a US metropolitan area.
As a former SF resident I think it's really sad that someone got murdered and I'm really angry about it. I'm mad at whoever did it, what a scumbag. I'm hopeful that there will be justice. I'm also afraid that this might give ammunition to reactionaries that want to overfund or overarm the SFPD, and that this will lend further political strength to politicians like bloodthirsty DAs that get their rocks off to throwing young POC in prison for minor drug offenses.
Cynically, part of me knows that finally some of the issues SF has been facing and the various leaders have been ignoring or handling poorly will probably be handled properly now that a rich person has been murdered. Well, no, cynical me again, probably this just means the cops will be cut loose a bit more and ineffective, punitive policies will be enacted / enforced / tightened.
It seems strange to me that when a person is murdered the first concern is how it will affect criminals. I mean I understand the concerns of an over active and under regulated police force, but my understanding is that San Francisco’s issues are largely the exact opposite: the police and the DA office have essentially legalized many forms of crime by refusing to prosecute people. It hasn’t seemed to make San Fransisco any better for it. At what point does the idea of punishing individuals for criminal activity stop being taboo?
> It seems strange to me that when a person is murdered the first concern is how it will affect criminals.
Funny, I have never seen the “first concern” being how it will affect criminals.
What I have seen, instead, is a weird fetish by most Americans, but most importantly, politicians, to increase punishment for criminals and expand police powers and protections, despite tons of evidence this doesn’t work and the US already having more punishment and more police powers than peer countries with far lower crime.
Some people respond by suggesting that we should try changes that actually help reduce crime and homicides as opposed to those that just help satisfy a knee jerk animalistic desire for punishment.
I think people who overestimate how threatened by violent crime they are outnumber the people who underestimate how threatened by violent crime they are at least 100:1 if not 1000:1
I know that "better safe than sorry" makes for great low effort virtue points but at the end of the day there is a point at which the broad and diffuse harm that we incur combating crime is greater than the marginal reduction in said crime.
I don't want to live in a world where walking down the street of a neighborhood one looks too low class for invites a police response because of someone else's poor risk assessment.
It's not legalized by the legislature. It's just not enforced by default by the prosecutor. There's a big difference. The prosecutor can still choose to enforce as they see fit or in "special" circumstances. On one hand I can respect the check and balance against an out of touch state legislature that prosecutor discretion provides. But a state policy to not prosecute certain classes of property crimes that have a victim(!!!) because of demographic make up of the people who engage in them hearkens back not to a prohibition era sheriff saying "alcohol isn't my job" but to a Jim crow era sheriff enforcing inequality under the law.
My first concern is how it will affect people the police historically over-target. That means black people and LGBT people. I'm re-reading my comment and I think I alluded to that, so I'm a little concerned that you said "how it will affect criminals".
> the police and the DA office have essentially legalized many forms of crime by refusing to prosecute people
This is a broad oversimplification of the situation in SF. I keep hearing this myth from people that don't live in SF that the police have been, like, abolished or something, but in reality no politician comes anywhere close to touching police abolitionist rhetoric.
In reality the cops absolutely hated the last DA and it seems they started sucking at their jobs on purpose as a result. The new DA they seem to like a lot more. Regardless, blame always seems to deflect off the cops and onto the nearest politician when it comes to basically anything in SF.
Replies to you are discussing how "crime is legal" in SF and I really have no idea what this could mean. It sounds like fox news gobblygook to me.
No, your false dichotomy was supposing that we must have some arrangement of people (historically in the usa this means black people) feel unsafe around police in order for the rest of us to feel safe in society.
It's not just a false dichotomy, it's illogical. If a given set of people doesn't feel safe around the police, they don't feel safe in society. They are us, unless you're willing to dehumanize them, so therefore a world where we don't feel safe around the police is actually your second case, where we don't feel safe at all.
I click through this thread desperate for a conservative position that isn't teetering on a stack of rhetorical fallacies or cognitive biases. Are you able to provide one?
I thought I was providing one, in the form of the utilitarian argument that it's better for some people to be scared of police than for everyone to be scared of each other. You can disagree with utilitarian ethics, but it's not a rhetorical fallacy to promote them, and certainly not when presenting them as "the least bad option."
I'm just so tired that this position is still held by people. It's just so easy to see the issue one can't help but wonder why you're preferring to believe the inherently racist take.
No, certain races do not commit more crimes than other ones; certain races get convicted and arrested more than other ones.
The evidence bears this out in reality. The racist interpretation is strongly incorrect. The data supports my position, not yours. Why do you hold the racist position anyway?
In random stops and searches, contraband is found more often on white people, than black people. Why do more black people go to jail? Easy, systemic racism. What possible other conclusion could you reasonably arrive at?
Regarding Ronen, handwaving vague fear mongering about police abolitionism isn't good enough. I'm forced to throw buckets of analysis into a comment for the millionth time to counter a racist interpretation of crime statistics, but you get to drop a tweet and say you saw someone steal food once and thus argue that progressive solutions to reducing crime are all naive and stupid? Nah. Do your footwork. See if your position has any actual strength.
Anyway, the budget for sfpd is already high, and has only gone up year on year. The police haven't been defunded.
Lol at the comment about public camping. Dare I even ask what you prefer the city does with homeless people?
Most criminal justice reform is implemented at the state level so hopefully you are assured that punitive sentences for petty crimes is not actually possible anymore in California.
In any case, even the most pro-incarceration DA electable in San Francisco would be a reform candidate in almost every jurisdiction of the country.
I see a lot of comments about how it’s gotten terrible recently etc.
I’m not from the US, but I’ve been to SF a number on times (>5). The first time was in 2006 for apple WWDC, as a student, and back then I already witnessed a number of people wandering in the streets, mostly passed out or wandering, but I also saw peopoe shouting at the air, and defecating and throwing stuff.
At the time I was told this was a legacy from the post-Vietnam era, where many veterans flocked there due to the dem leaning of the city which provided an expectation of help, and also mostly the nice weather, but ultimately they did not get support.
From that point on things developed. Veterans from other wars, and then generally any people with life issues, were attracted to that location which fits their unfortunate, crazy situation - drugs, a barebones support network that provides food (?), and the fact no one bothers them anymore..
At least that’s what I was told.
In recent years I’ve noticed more of the situation, but tbh nothing that surprises me from the earlier observations. I didn’t see ANY numbers so that may or may not be the case.
I am interested in someone validating or correcting my perception
Half of the problem is that San Francisco- and the bay area as a whole- ignores their drug and homeless problem. Ironically the drug rate in San Francisco matches that of most large cities, but you don't see the problem in other cities because most of the drug users do it in the homes rather than on the street.
The bay area has the lowest rate of homeless shelters per capita of any major metro in the united states. Whether you're talking Atlanta, Miami, or Boston (regardless of weather), every other city has more homeless shelters and programs to house people. This gets people off of the streets and, at a minimum, gets them in a place where they can take advantage of other programs to deal with health and addiction problems.
In the bay area these people stay on the streets while hundreds of charities get small amounts of money to help, but with no real central coordination or group that's in charge of spending that money effectively. As a result you've got a ton of people on the streets, as well as all the consequences of that.
I suspect a reason for the lack of homeless shelters is a lack of urgency- elsewhere in the country, it is dangerous to be outside for extended periods due to either heat or cold, depending on where you are and the time of year.
People- both on the streets and in control politically, don't have much urgency in providing shelters as a result.
I do agree there's a lack of urgency, but I don't think that's related to the weather. I think it's more than weather, as even other cities in good weather areas manage to do better than the bay area.
Yeah I think this is a huge part of it. I'm in Chicago now and there's construction everywhere all the time. The Bay Area won't build housing, which drives up the cost of land and housing everywhere else in the area. This makes it harder to build shelters.
It's a great location on the coast, with public transit, interesting architecture and culture. So people want to be there. The weather is great and the housing is incredibly expensive, so living on the street, in a tent, or out of a car is more appealing comparatively speaking than most places.
San Francisco has tended to view aggressive law enforcement against poor or homeless people as immoral (they don't want to criminalize being poor) which has had an unintended affect of making it a good place to be a homeless person or criminal.
It's interesting to see California really embrace socially progressive policies
while simultaneously staying heavily invested in economics that nobody but some quiet, far off yacht owner seems to be happy about
As someone from the general northeast US, it's amazing how local views of california have changed as they continue to kind of...drag their feet along and keep up this "highly based" outward appearance.
The uncomfortable answer which no one wants to speak about is that an overtly liberal policy doesn't translate to the best possible society, or necessarily even an acceptable one, regardless of how well off the city or state is.
Compare San Francisco to somewhere like Singapore, and ask yourself where would you rather live - and if the freedoms available in SF are worth the trade offs. BTW I'm not taking a stance here as I live in neither location.
The SFPD just refuse to do work because they know refusal will cause people to blame it on "overtly liberal policy" and give them even more funding to do no work.
(In the 70s they also once bombed the mayor's house when they didn't like him.)
I don't own a gun, but honestly, if I lived in a place like this, I would try to get a concealed carry license, and frankly if that didn't work I'd probably carry anyway.
In civilized society, you make a pact with the state. They have a 'monopoly on violence' and in exchange, you and your property are protected. That pact seems to be broken in SF, and to a lesser extent in CA at large. People should do what they need to in order to keep themselves safe. If that means a gun? So be it.
The county is notorious for not giving out concealed carry licenses. Only a local business owner who has been robbed multiple times before would qualify essentially.
While I agree with your sentiment, the problem with gun ownership in a place like SF is the risk of manslaughter charges. Shooting someone committing a property crime may be seen as justifiable from the eyes of the property owner, but not in the eyes of the law. Unfortunately you’re best off just letting yourself get robbed, or moving away if you don’t want to accept the risks of living with an ineffectual local government.
Your probably right, it's probably better just to move. The only time I could ever see myself shooting someone is if my life is in danger, though where I'm from a shotgun loaded with rock salt used to be a common deterant against theft
perverse how the places where you probably need a gun most, it's hardest to get.
i pray i never need it but i'm glad to live in a place that's not without its problems, but where i can at least defend myself and my property.
also @JumpCriscross since his comment is dead: that's silly, you shouldn't make a threat you aren't willing to follow up on. more importantly "warning shots" are a really good way to cause collateral damage. might be you shoot through a wall. plus your eye is on the threat so it's irresponsible to shoot elsewhere bc you aren't actually evaluating what's there and what's behind it.
> shooting someone committing a property crime may be seen as justifiable from the eyes of the property owner, but not in the eyes of the law
One can fire non-lethal rounds, and aim around a person (or into the ground), instead of at them. I'm not a believer in urban gun ownership. But there are ways to responsibly be one and benefit from it without putting others' lives or your own freedom at risk. (Counterfactual: pulling a gun on a criminal is a good way to have a criminal pull a gun on you.)
Is this actually true? I remember seeing SFPD post stuff on twitter like, "13th time this perp has been brought in, still no charges". They were getting the same guy over and over. It could have been a one-off, but I suppose they were using their platform to show that they _were_ working, and it was a policy of no teeth that let the perpetrators get off easy.
No one is being honest in this debate. I would not take either sides word. I don't live in SF, but a similar city and the police use the same rhetoric while they refuse to do anything except sit in their car all day. No one trusts the police to accomplish anything here because they've been silent striking since covid began and I would not be surprised if the same was happening in SF. The DA is also a shit show though, it's not like you can point to any one person or action and in good faith say "here's the problem"
Here another fun example of the sf police refusing to work — only this one has a happy ending - they actually face consequences.
An la times article said: “ San Francisco police officers Kevin Lyons and Kevin Sien have been temporarily suspended after they were arrested last year in connection with the destruction of evidence. They’re accused of destroying credit cards, identification records and suspected methamphetamine discovered in the luggage of a person staying in a hotel.
Lyons and Sien allegedly told staff that cataloging the evidence would take too long and instead disposed of the credit cards and IDs in a shred bin and flushed the drugs down a hotel toilet, according to state court criminal complaints.”
This is not true from my experience. I’ve been the victim of a crime in SF and while they are severely understaffed they were very cooperative and willing to help.
The number of police departments that actually got defunded after "defund the police" can probably be counted on 0 hands. SF certainly did no such thing[1].
According to the article, that's a 4.4% increase during a 3 year period with 14.5% cumulative inflation. Which would be a large cut in real dollar terms, no?
The police aren't defunded in San Francisco. They have consistently gotten budget increases. It's just that instead of hiring more, they spend it on overtime pay (1.5X normal rate) for people driving around and doing nothing. https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/sfpd-pay-millions-mo...
The article doesn't really support the post, though:
"
SF’s police department has 335 fewer full-duty police officers than it did in 2017, with a total of 1,537 officers as of January, according to Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former police communications staffer.
A police staffing analysis indicated that the department needs upward of 2,100 sworn officers to satisfy city demands. As fewer officers are available to patrol streets or respond to incidents, the department says it has been forced to ask staff to work longer hours or pick up extra shifts.
"
When the force is at 75% capacity, officers are overworked and deprioritizing non-emergency responses. It's a recipe for more George Floyds, not less.
It is crazy to me how many people just straight up lie on here.
The article the poster linked to does not show the overall department budget, rather that was spent on employees' wages. I don't see you or the other poster mentioning this at all though. Here is an article you can see the overall budget of numerous police departments including SF
I believe I see one increase and two decreases. Between 18-19 to 19-20 the departments funding increased. While the department had funding decreased from 19-20 to 20-21 and again from 20-21 to 21-22. Now whether or not this defunding (funding decrease) was due to "defund the police" or some other factor I cannot say. However I can say for a fact that the narrative police were NOT defunded is wrong. I have provided 2 overall budgets that show they were defunded for two separate time periods.
Its also worth noting we are not adjusting for inflation or cost of living increases.
Your numbers don't include supplemental $27.5 million to fund police overtime in 21-22 or the increase to $761.9 million in 22-23. By my count, that's 3 increases and one decrease.
So just be clear you are claiming there is 0 defunding but then admit by your count there is one decrease which is also known as defunding?
Also based on the timeline for 21-22 they defunded, then recognized the need more money because you know they defunded from the previous year so then allocated more funding.
And just to be clear, you're agreeing with somebody who claimed that SFPD is defunded and is only acting differently because they are currently defunded.
You're also saying that 3 out of 4 isn't consistent. Fine. Does that make me a liar, or are you picking nits?
>>And just to be clear, you're agreeing with somebody who claimed that SFPD is defunded and is only acting differently because they are currently defunded.
I responded to you, you responded to someone claiming "The police aren't defunded in San Francisco. They have consistently gotten budget increases."
I pointed out the police have been defunded depending on the time span you look at. I also pointed both of you misrepresenting the data pretending it was the overall budget when it was in fact the employees wages.
>>You're also saying that 3 out of 4 isn't consistent.
I disagree with you. You claimed a link said there was a "$27.5 million to fund police overtime in 21-22". Could you point specifically to where that is?
One does reference a 27.5 million proposal and says "The Budget and Appropriations Committee of the Board of Supervisors approved a $25 million budget supplemental Wednesday to fund police overtime in San Francisco. It next goes to the full Board of Supervisors on March 21st." No where does this say that this is being added to last years budget. In fact the article is from March 2023.
Even if it was for 21-22, if original budget allocated less money than the previous year, they defunded the police that year. Rushing to add in extra funding AFTER the budget was done so people can pretend it never happened does not erase the original budget that defunded them.
So I still see it as 2-2 even with your added 22-23 data which is not consistent in my eyes.
What about prosecution? I agree the police aren't defunded, but aren't prosecutors and judges becoming more lenient? This has to be demoralizing for police. Combined with housing costs and you have a vicious cycle of a recruitment issue. I would expect overtime pay to be up if hiring is difficult.
Why should it be demoralizing? After they make the arrest and submit the case report, their job is done. If the DA decides to prosecute and the defendant requests a jury trial, they have to go to court and submit testimony. Whether the DA decides to divert a drug offender to rehab or tries to put them in prison is not SFPD's problem. Whichever one results in higher recidivism will make their job of finding a new person to arrest easier. The problem is they're not making arrests, even when the evidence is handed to them on a silver platter, and they haven't been making arrests for decades.
Well I guess it doesn't matter if code ships either. Work hard coding it, and if it gets thrown out and never used despite your hard work, that's the way it goes.
As for not making arrests, isn't that self reinforcing? Of course police will slow down arrests if the other end is not completing the process.
They get paid to do a job. I find your view that it's reasonable for them not to do a job because they would do somebody else's job differently utterly incomprehensible.
Well it's nice to know that organizations such as the Trump Presidential Campaign and Exxon-Mobil will never have any difficulty recruiting any task-bots, I mean, employees.
If I want to get paid for working for the Trump Presidential Campaign, I should do the work that is required. I don't want to work for the Trump Presidential Campaign, so I should not collect a paycheck from it.
If these people don't want to do policing, they should not collect a police officer salary.
I’m guessing it could be because every time they go out in public with the uniform on they risk their life, even more so when they engage a criminal. It’s a sacrifice they’re probably not willing to make if they don’t believe it’s for a good reason.
Then they should stop collecting a salary for the work they aren't doing, and taxpayers should criticize them for not doing the work they are paying them to do. Each of the DAs has been doing pretty much exactly what they told voters they would do. I really don't understand why this is so complicated.
Not everyone voted for or agrees with the current DA’s opinion. As a taxpayer, I don’t mind keeping cops doing nothing on the payroll as I know when the backlash begins and we get a new DA they’re ready to start work again with no delay. Doesn’t seem complicated to me personally.
And yet they haven't. Who'd have thunk that being fine with people not doing their job encourages bad behavior instead of what you were hoping to encourage?
Eh. A lot of people are ignoring that most cities did move in the defund police direction in 2020 and 2021, and then tried to reverse course and pretend it didn’t happen. For instance, this is from 2021[1]: “San Francisco Mayor London Breed announces cuts to police in new city budget”. The problem is you can’t suddenly reverse course, and cuts can have an impact for years to come, especially with the long lead time for things like recruitment and training.
According to your article, the police department budget for 2019-20 was $692, and the proposal for 2021-22 was $661. Which would definitely be less. But even worse when you adjust for inflation - the 2019-20 budget would be $733 million in 2021 dollars, compared to the $661 for the 2021-22 budget.
Also worth quoting this section of the article you linked to:
> That means over the two year budget period, the city reduced law enforcement spending to the tune of $110 million. As the budget process continues, supervisors will have the opportunity to propose further cuts that could get closer to $120 million, like they did last year.
I'd use Japan (Tokyo), Taiwan (Tai Pei) or Hong Kong (prior to 2014 and the CCP becoming increasingly authoritarian) as examples instead of Singapore. Singapore is extreme and I think other cities that are less extreme are actually nicer to live in (having either lived or spent time in all 4)
There's too much focus here (the discussion) on the law itself.
The cities you mention have a different culture. It's ingrained into you as a kid. It's "less liberal" in the sense that the wider society doesn't accept these values. The media, your family and friends and other parts of the environment are a lot more effective than the law.
That's a good point, I think group pressure is definitely a factor there. Just as an example, it would be inconceivable for someone who knows he's sick not to wear a mask when going to work because of the social pressure and opprobrium around those actions.
On the other hand, I also know that in general in any of those countries, the consequences for something like shoplifting are a lot stronger than they would be in most western countries.
In Taiwan the homeless rate is very low because having a homeless relative is shameful. Affluent people do whatever it takes to ensure that no one in their extended family is out on the street in order to save face, even if they don't particularly like those relatives. No such culture of family responsibility exists in the US.
As an island nation, Taiwan also has a somewhat easier time preventing narcotics smuggling. Whereas the mainland Chinese Communist Party has covertly targeted the USA for "Opium War 2" by tacitly allowing the smuggling of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels.
What's there on the other side(the US)? Mexico does not have a fentanyl problem here, maybe there are some American cartels over there in the US which are not being put on the spotlight because... who knows.
An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law. Look at major cities across the country. Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad. This isn't 'liberal policies', this is corruption and ineptitude.
> Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad.
Your impressions are, bluntly, wrong.
LA and San Francisco have the 32nd and 37th highest violent crime rates out of the top 100 largest cities in the US, and the 72nd and 7th in overall crime rates. Homelessness, driven by lack of development combined with the the attraction and generation of concentrated wealth is a real California statewide problem (though there are plenty of non-California cities with serious problems, NYC is nearly as bad as LA, and far worse than San Francisco, in terms of population share that is homeless.)
There is a high degree of "blueness". I live in Austin, which is very blue, but not so blue that we didn't criminalize public tent living and enforce it. Dallas and Houston are "blue", but far less than Austin.
The West Coast cities, LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle are much more liberal than most "blue" cities.
Dallas and Houston are two cities with higher violent crime rates than San Francisco, so some array of reasons has Austin better off than both.
Regardless, I live in SF, and love it here, for way more reasons than the tech scene (it's actually a coincidence I live here as far as my job goes). I really hope we can improve this situation, regardless of the relative scale compared to other cities. It seems like part of a national problem.
> An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law.
But hasn't the hue and cry been "defund the police"? We heard it as far back as the mostly peaceful protests that ravaged major US cities across the US in 2020-21. And it's been the chant of mostly left-leaning politicians and organizations.
1. Police have never been defunded. San Francisco PD budget is up 5% from 2019. This is similar to every other city in the US (LAPD has $250M more in funding after George Floyd).
2. "Defund the Police" usually means diverting money away from reactive policies (policing) to proactive policies (community initiatives that prevent people from falling into abject poverty to begin with). You can claim that "defund the police" is bad optics, but honestly the US is such a far gone police state that "liberals" could have picked any rallying cry and it would have been weaponized.
3. The reason you see police forces doing less even though they have more funding is because they are using the narrative that they were "defunded" (recall this never happened) as a bargaining chip for police unions to negotiate with lawmakers for less oversight and more funding.
4. There is no correlation between police funding and crime rates. Police only show up AFTER a crime has been committed, and anyone who has dealt with police firsthand knows how much they love to drag their feet:
5. This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state. While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.
If your goal is to simply remove "undesirables" from the view of the public then police are a great tool, but if our conception of justice is that crude then we might as well return to the code of Hammurabi.
If the goal is to reduce violence and crime overall, then police are not the best tool for the job. Preventative measures must be taken to keep people from getting to the mental state that causes them to commit crimes.
> While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.
Well, quite frankly, they deserve that outcome a lot more than guys like Bob Lee. I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes
> I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm.
This is some Hammurabi thinking. It's not about protecting "Osama Bin Laden" (although justice should be blind and not paywalled), it's about ensuring that our system produces fewer Osama Bin Ladens.
To steelman your point, let's say that police are 100% necessary in society and the more police the better. In this universe the police never cause collateral damage and are always 100% in the right.
In this world, even if you lock up every "Osama Bin Laden" you are still putting the police officers in harm's way. They are using their bodies to ensure that the Bob Lee's of the world can keep on innovating.
To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means. If society is a machine that produces Osama Bin Laden's as a byproduct, isn't it in everyone's best interest to reduce the rate at which we produce Osama Bin Laden's? Especially the police who put themselves in harms way?
> To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means.
Conversely, increase the number of officers. This will cause the incidence per officer to fall.
There are places in the world that have done this. For example [0], where the populous has been deputized in order to quell violent crime.
I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line. You see this in places like Singapore that are extremely safe yet have much lower incarceration rates. As for the police obviously it’s unfortunate that they get put in harms way, but it is kinda what they signed up for, to an extent. An over focus on cop safety leads to situations like Uvalde.
If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.
> I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line.
See my point #5 in the parent comment:
> This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state.
When you give the police overwhelming power to punish dangerous people, you have created a new class of very dangerous people. In my theoretical universe where cops are infallible this is not a problem, in the real world if you give an institution that much power what do you think would happen when they "solve crime". Would they willingly relinquish that power? Or would they aim to extend their influence onto larger swaths of the population with more draconian laws?
> If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.
I think you're missing the point. I am not saying there should be zero accountability for criminals and zero police. I am saying we should also attack the root causes of criminality instead of just using punitive measures. Right now we are treating the symptom and not the cause.
Singapore has perhaps the world's most robust and citizen-accessible public housing system, which enforces not only class but also racial diversity in placement.
>I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes.
Controversial take incoming, brace yourself. Bin Laden was the son of a construction magnate who was radicalized in a war where he fought for the US by proxy, only to be abandoned (except where Western meddling was advantageous for Western interests) when it was over. His picture is the illustration for the proverb, "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."
Bob Lee sounds like a great guy. He is among a class who benefited enormously from federal and state policy that subsidized suburban communities at the expense of cities, arguably in a way that shifted, rather than eliminated, the social ills that are endemic to most human societies above a certain population threshold. The policies that gave Bob Lee et al. their advantageous start created the dangerous, crazy people, when different policies might have diluted the circumstances which shaped them to the point where they might have been treatable, without necessarily cramping Mr. Lee's style.
There but for the grace of housing/economic policy advantageous to my intersectional identity go I.
(Note that we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.)
The countries with the most severe punishment tend to be the most dangerous countries. Singapore is a bit of an outlier. Most safe countries like Korea, Japan and Norway are not known for brutal punishments.
'defund the police' has literally only been uttered seriously within the blm movement. Even the most progressive of politicians knew it was dead on arrival.
Sure, they may have known that "defund the police" couldn't last, but during the summer of 2020, progressive politicians took it seriously enough in public (much of it due to BLM). We got CHAZ in Seattle, Antifa trying to burn down federal buildings and police stations, and progressive DAs (e.g., Chesa Boudin) at the time decided to severely reduce the penalties that they would pursue for even serious crime. A few cities even got around to attempting to redirect funding from police to social workers and the like. Progressive politicians continued to take "defund the police" seriously until the fall, when it was clear that the issue had turned an easy election for Biden into a close election that he was at significant risk of losing. All of this indicated to criminals that law enforcement would be much lighter, which is why crime skyrocketed during that time and has continued to stay elevated until this day
Sometimes it helps to read more than just a slogan before commenting on issues. "defund the police" does not mean that there shouldn't be policing, it means that more attention needs to be brought into preventive measures and community building, so that you don't NEED the excessive police force that helps stirring the violence.
Selective non-prosecution and non-enforcement of the law is a liberal policy. You see it with Soros-sponsored DAs and you see it with immigration. What is a “sanctuary”? Somewhere you don’t have to worry about the consequences of breaking federal immigration law.
You can have 'overtly liberal policy' without becoming like San Francisco, and you can have conservative policy without becoming Singapore. Those are outliers.
SF's problem isn't liberal policies. It's the lack of them. The homeless problem is a prime example. Gentrification, NIMBYism, and a lack of affordable housing aren't "liberal."
> Since I moved [to SF], I have seen people break into cars (numerous times), fill suitcases with products from Target and Walgreens and leave without paying, casually smoke meth in a crowded bus, empty their bladder and bowels in the middle of the sidewalk, etc. all of this brazenly and in broad daylight.
I'm not aware of any major European city where this kind of behaviour is tolerated, much less common.
I can confidently say that pretty much nothing I've heard about SF (haven't spent much time there myself other than passing through) would be tolerated in Moscow. It's unthinkable. The worst thing you run into here would be a drunk guy at night or something like that. Moscow isn't exactly an example of a liberal-leaning city though :)
As for smaller cities in Europe like London or Berlin, they're also still reasonably safe (I didn't like night buses in London but that's about it) and the crazy stuff is mostly contained.
I guess a huge part of this is that most countries over here at least have something resembling a working social system.
Hamburg just started enforcing that pan-handlers mustn't sit down. They haven't outlawed it, but they're pretty actively trying to not make it a common occurrence in the city center. Tent cities, completely open drug consumption, ignoring theft < 1000€, ignoring car break-ins etc would absolutely not fly here. You might get some of that on a local level in a very progressive district of Berlin, but not in other major German cities. So at least for Germany: yeah, I think it is.
Statements like this seem to be exactly why people are frustrated with SF's policies. What is the "help they need" that will be sufficient to keep them from being a problem? I've known addicts and schizophrenics, and it's near impossible to fix them, even with an affluent and caring family to support them the whole way. What will an incompetent state actor possibly do that is better, other than just lock them up to keep them from harming others?
basically the help they need is not becoming homeless in the first place. because the stress of that would make most people insane. once you go a few days without sleep, anyone is going to become psychotic. and then once you’ve been psychotic it just gets worse. so basically they just need basic housing and a place to wash their clothes. if you don’t want to give them that just kill them or stop complaining
> That's not liberalism at all, that's just dumbness.
I don't know, I'm not the judge of that, but it sounds a bit like a very mobile goal post. Usually, "liberal policies" are removing or weakening penalties and enforcement. A liberal drug policy will decriminalize drug use. liberal = tolerant, so liberal policies tolerate a lot more things.
And SF is in many regards more liberal than European cities. Whether it's your preferred kind of liberal politics, or whether it's combined with other effective policies etc, is a different question.
Would it be considered a liberal policy to tolerate someone walking into a store, conspicuously stealing ~$500 worth of goods, yelling, punching, and throwing furniture at anyone who confronts them and then returning the next day to do it again?
To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.
From where I'm sitting: yes, that would be considered liberal policy. It rejects the individual's responsibility and claims society is at fault for individual delinquency and should tolerate deviance.
> To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.
It does to me, too, that's one of the reasons I moved to the suburbs, and it wasn't anywhere as bad as in SF and other US cities. But I felt that the priorities were backwards and I understood that the majority of people wanted them pushed further in the direction I considered wrong. So I moved, because why stay and suffer if you don't believe in those policies but most of your neighbors do?
It’s hard to fathom a society where the majority will not defend themselves against literal violence.
In a sense it’s closer to the original Christian ideal than most, but I don’t see how that can lead to peace, joy and prosperity long-term in a society where a minority abuses it.
I don't know that it really falls under the normal definition of liberal. But it's certainly the epitome of American neo-liberal ideals. This isn't really the same as liberalism in Europe (yet). The bulk of the general problems in SF and the US can be correlated to the number of mental health beds available. In Europe most countries have a rate of around 120 per 100k. In Asia it's upwards of 300. In the US. It's around 12.
Liberalism in the US heavily resists the usage of asylums and actually helping people in general. In Europe that's not really the case.
Coming from an ex-Seattle resident, which has much the same issue.
The full, uncomfortable answer, is people who wear liberalism/equality as a fashion accessory - instead of really caring about it. The "don't criminalize homelessness" line is towed to the degree of mandating homelessness. There is a culture of blocking solutions, while offering no alternative solutions. This makes it almost impossible for the homeless who want to be uplifted (by far the majority) to make progress. Even something as simple as having a mailing address and a shower can make a huge difference (especially for finding employment and government aid), but such progress is blocked by faux-liberalism.
As a liberal who lived there for a while -- I honestly think this is one of the few cases where liberals are less correct.
I think initially it started as "being poor is not a crime" with the good thought that you can't arrest people for not having a house. I think this escalated toward a lax attitude toward drugs and many "petty" crimes (e.g. public urination, stealing a case of beer).
The interesting thing was that when I lived there sometimes I'd ask or joke about it (bicycle theft was a huge problem, car windows being smashed, etc). People would mostly pretend they didn't see it and have no idea what to say to my joke for fear that somebody around them had a very strong opinion and they would offend.
Also, I remember once my improv class was chatting outside the theater and a homeless man asked for a cigarette and then started berating my classmates when they ignored him, and they actually felt bad. I know their sympathy came from a good place. Many of these people are damaged mentally and jail will only get them out of your face. But in my opinion something more proactive needed to be done.
I don't even think it needs to be traditional jail. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these people would be happier/healthier working outside in the sun getting some exercise instead of being in a cell. I think that's not boolean enough for most people though.
There's a huge faction of the country that wants to limit funding for all government services. Hell, they are so cheap that they want those imprisoned to pay for their own prison time!
Jail alternatives are more expensive in the short term, and that is all that matters to this faction.
This is literally what asylums used to be. They were largely farms and work operations. With thousands of patients per facility. There was a place between the streets and jail / the military. This has been completely destroyed, generally to the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry.
Really? I heard all these bad things about asylums, how they were basically worse than jails and some psychologists pretended to be sick to get admitted to see how long it would take them to realize they weren't insane. The staff never recognized, and when they eventually admitted the ruese the staff refused to believe it and only let them go as "Schizophrenic in remission"
If startups were really worried about avoiding crime, they would be in high rent Mill Valley Sausalito etc
In startup world, you tolerate the crime to get cheap office space
Salesforce went downtown for the cheap rent. Otherwise it was always foggy chilly and a commute mess. Amazon's original offices in Seattle were near some really spooky stuff too. In startup grind you do what you do
From what I have read, what's happening in SF is reflective of what's happening right across US. Encampments of drug addicted homeless people with authorities at a loss of what to do. From what I understand, this isn't just a SF problem but a nationwide epidemic of drug dependency. But as a non SF resident, of course defer to local knowledge
he failed and refused to prosecute to catastrophic levels, comparing him to the previous who was also leaning in this direction is no consolation. his racist insensitive comments are only the cherry on top.
Chesa Boudin, the previous DA, was ousted in large part due to his prosecuting rogue police officers. His progressive policies and interest in restorative justice made him an extra easy target. The issues of crime and homelessness in San Francisco predate Boudin, and while current DA has a much more cozy relationship with the police (she disbanded the group investigating/prosecuting police misconduct) the crime trajectory hasn't changed.
Some criminals happen to be police officers. And they have a lot more power to harm people than the average street criminal. So I disagree. Criminality from police officers also broadly undermines faith in the rule of law. The entire summer of BLM protests can be viewed as an expression of that.
It's difficult to determine the precise policies that have led San Francisco to its current state. Having lived there a decade ago, I can attest that certain areas, such as the Loin, were unlike anything I had seen in other cities. When I returned a few years ago, I observed that those areas had deteriorated even further and were spreading like a cancer.
Since then, I have relocated to Austin, where homelessness has always been more prevalent than in other southern cities but never to the same extent as in LA or SF. However, a few years ago, our mayor chose not to penalize public camping, and as a result, homeless camps began to spring up throughout the city, including a tent city beneath a highway near my home. This led to a host of issues, including campfires, public defecation, and needles, necessitating constant intervention by EMS.
Fortunately, a proposition to make public camping illegal again passed with ease. While the city council was initially slow to enforce the ban, they eventually did so, and one by one, the tent cities disappeared. Occasionally, a tent pile of belongings still appears, but these are also cleared out promptly.
It's unclear where the former residents of these tent cities have gone. Some may have relocated to the creeks or woods out of sight, while others may have taken a bus to SF or LA. Alternatively, perhaps the change in policy inspired some of them to reach out to family members or other support networks to try and get back on their feet.
Ultimately, all I know is that enforcing basic laws had a positive impact on the non-homeless population, and I hope that those experiencing homelessness can find a way to improve their situation without making the city worse for everyone else.
The truth is we are letting antisocial criminal trash walk freely around downtown and terrorize the local population. I think a lot of people live in their nice neighborhood bubble and have never stepped foot in FiDi or SOMA.
Since I moved here, I have sen people break into cars (numerous times), fill suitcases with products from Target and Walgreens and leave without paying, casually smoke meth in a crowded bus, empty their bladder and bowels in the middle of the sidewalk, etc. all of this brazenly and in broad daylight. In other cities, this type of behavior usually earns you at least a good beating and a night in jail. The negative feedback is very important for conditioning antisocial people to behave in a civilized community, but for some reason, SF has decided to not bother with it.
Some other comments conflate this with the "homeless problem". This is not a "homeless problem". Homeless people living in a shelter or pitching a tent under a bridge are not the problem in SF. Criminal antisocial nutcases getting no consequences for their actions are the problem.
Crime was pretty crazy during dot com days, just tolerated more. Maritime Park next to the Hyatt / Embarcadero was always hip deep in homeless people at night. Very scary. Even worse when the freeway was still there. Market always had overly bright lights at night and looked like a sci fi dystopia. Absolutely no one wanted to be in SOMA at night which is a real problem for a startup working late hours. Hence small startups preferred renting private homes in Menlo Park etc. (Silicon Valley HBO)
I remember about 20 years ago going to a conference at the Moscone Center and as I was busy I let someone book my hotel for me.
Got to the airport and the taxi driver said "Do you really want to go there?" - which was a bad sign and things just got worse when I got to the hotel and noticed that my room had 3 huge sliding bolts on the door.... I was told by the receptionist NOT to walk directly along Geary (I think) to get to the hotel but go two blocks north first and then cut back down.
Being an idiot I ignored this advice one night and got the fright of my life!
This was in a hotel that was a fairly short walk from Union Square.
In 2006, for my first visit to SF, I booked a room in a hotel near Union Square.
I was awakened around 2 a.m. by a group of crazed homeless people screaming like sopranos. The concert went on for 2 hours.
Coming from a European country, the very cowardly (by governments and much of the public) accepted "culture" of homelessness surprised me in no small measure.
SF caused new housing to be built there precisely because those areas are dangerous neighborhoods where few NIMBY neighbors protest housing. Even then housing still get blocked all the time.
I worked in FiDi, I worked in SOMA, and I worked in the Western Addition for many years. I saw a lot of shit (literally), addicts shooting up on the Civic Center station steps, my coworker got punched in the arm by a homeless person on the way home. I've walked through the Tenderloin at night numerous times (some of the best food in the city). Yeah, there's some nasty stuff going on. But the comments here make it seem like SF is a lawless hellhole, a failed city. This is just not true. I never felt too unsafe, and I explored the city on foot by night constantly. Of course everyone takes a chance walking around at night in a US city. I love SF and I intend to visit again someday soon.
Nice qualifier about 'biological' there, was totally necessary to make your point, really. Because, you know, if you're a trans woman you totally won't get harassed in the Tenderloin. So insightful, you must have a deep understanding of both presenting as a woman and living near the Tenderloin.
I think you might get harassed as a trans woman in the Tenderloin, but the reasons would be different from the reasons you would get harassed as a cis woman.
I think there is a large intersection between the sets "homeless people" and "antisocial nutcases" though. I've been to SF once, and the amount of crazy shit I've seen in just two days was staggering.
Define large. By a percentage, it's not large. What is closer to reality is one is often a neccessary condition for the other, which is anti-social nutcases are generally homeless, while homeless people are not by fraction largely anti-social.
Very few rich cities, formally speaking. I know Singapore uses formal physical punishment. In worldwide practice, however, police will often be a bit rougher than they perhaps have to (or have the right to) be when arresting if they feel someone deserves it. Many judges also silently tolerate this.
> Very few rich cities, formally speaking. I know Singapore uses formal physical punishment.
For extremely serious crimes, not his list of public indecency. For instance:
* Under the Environmental Public Health Act, it is an offence to urinate or defecate "in or upon any street, arcade, vacant land, river, canal, ditch, drain or watercourse or in any place to which the public has access except in any sanitary convenience provided for such purpose." The penalty is a fine of up to $1,000 for a first offence, and up to $2,000 and $5,000 for the second and third offence respectively. [1] [2]
There is a presence of street beggars that doesn't exist back in Australia / New Zealand that are quite noticable here (although less than in other european cities). Knowing how die Bayerische Polizei operate I am surprised they aren't surpressed as well. I just wonder why that is?
You’re right. The peaceful homeless camp at the Kolumbusplaz vanished from one day to the next but the accordion beggar near the Viktualienmarkt remains. No clue.
I'd consider the usual process for a street arrest to be a beating by itself. That's not even to say it isn't "reasonable force" to protect the officers, just that it often looks like it must hurt like hell.
I mean, they aren’t wrong, per se. I think if that’s the price we pay to not have people doing the things GP described then it seems like an acceptable price.
I would prefer that criminals were not beaten and that we find a better solution. I don’t think we have to choose between police brutality and crime.
Agreed. But once convicted they should never be allowed back on the force. That kind of stupidity is one of the driving forces behind the whole defund the police movement and one of the side effects of that is that you end up with less police rather than with more disciplined police which would have been a far better solution.
Without a police force dense societies usually can not function.
I swear the same pattern happens to every political movement. As soon as they get the limelight, the dumbest ideas take over. It's probably related to the bikeshed phenomenon.
Defund the police does have a certain legitimate point in the US, where police are basically the catch all for dealing with any kind of social problem. In fact I think if it were phrased differently, most cops would rather there be another type of department that responded to sticky social situations.
But yes, the fundamental issue is really a lack of law and order for law enforcement itself, which decreases the public trust and increases adversarialism. The average person seeing a cop and reflexively thinking how to avoid getting their attention and avoid getting hassled for some bullshit is an indicator of a deep set problem. The cancer was fueled by drug criminalization and other crushing nanny statism (eg the draconian ways that traffic laws are enforced), but it would take a lot more than simply rolling those back to regain the public trust.
Quite. It's really a pity because as things are they will have to get much worse before they can get better again. And the ones who stand the most to lose are the ones that are the least likely to have any appreciation for the complexity of this all. Simplistic solutions only get you worse problems.
> Because you need me, Springfield. Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside, you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalise criminals and rule you like a king!
First, that addressing the core causes behind most crime (poverty, drugs, mental health, etc.) implies not enforcing the laws. We could address the root causes while also enforcing laws.
Second, that enforcing the laws requires extreme punishment like beatings.
> I think a lot of people live in their nice neighborhood bubble and have never stepped foot in FiDi or SOMA.
We have similar problems here in the UK. A lot of people are disconnected by class which leads to misunderstands and bad politics. I personally think this class disconnect contributed far more to events like Brexit and Trump in recent years than social media.
Most of family are working class and things like mass 3rd world migration, homelessness, drug use, etc has caused huge problems in working class communities here in the UK. But when you try to raise these issues (as a working class person) you always get accused by some progressive middle-class person of racism, intolerance, or being anti-progress, etc.
You basically have to wait for things to get so bad that middle class people are also impacted, then they'll stop slandering you and let you have an opinion.
As an outsider it would seem San Francisco is reaching that tipping point now – it's not just poor people being impacted by these bad political decisions, but also the wealthy progressives responsible for them.
Although from what I've seen in the case of SF it seems the progressives who caused the issues rather just flee than fix the problems they created.
> try to raise these issues (as a working class person) you always get accused by some progressive middle-class person of racism, intolerance, or being anti-progress, etc.
The problem is that almost no one tries to "raise these issues". Instead you get:
> Migrants take ALL new jobs in Britain
> The swarm on our streets
> Migrants swarm to Britain
> 3.8Million EU migrants allowed to stay here
> Send in army to halt migrant invasion
> 4,000 foreign murderers and rapists we can't through out
> Illegals have landed
That's after it's been sanitised for front page news. The fact is that those ideas were seeded by a right wing press, fire-hosing propaganda about how subhuman migrants are raping your daughters. The result was open racism and bigotry, not an expression of concern for job stability or integration.
I can't imagine that anyone is taking you to task for saying that homelessness and drug use are a blight on any community.
So let's take a look at the other list item...
Poland and Romania are not the third world, nor are Spain, Italy or Ireland.
India is borderline third world, but Indians are one of the most successful migrant groups in the UK.
Nigerians, too, are seeing success in education, business, politics and sport. My partner works for a YC-funded startup founded by two Nigerian Londoners.
So, by process of elimination, are you are saying that Pakistanis and Bengalis are a major source of problems? Hardly surprising that people accuse you of intolerance in that case.
Would you like to be more specific?
(And before you start up about class again: my dad drove a van for a living)
It's not that Pakistanis, Albanians, Somalians, Iraqis and so on are more inclined to crime, but that many of those who chose to immigrate to the UK are from parts of those societies who are inclined to crime. No one is worried about educated professionals from those cultures coming here; but many are worried about uneducated young men in particular and the types of people who tend to be settled in working class communities. I know many Nigerian and Indian immigrants who work hard, pay their taxes, and don't make a problem. I also experience what it's like when a small town has a large number of uneducated, criminally-inclined Albanians settled in their midst—it's not pretty.
> but that many of those who chose to immigrate to the UK are from parts of those societies who are inclined to crime
This doesn't get acknowledged in the West too much, that is that we (meaning countries that used to be East of the Wall) have outsourced many of our social problems to the West (which had created many of them in the first place in the '90s by ideologically imposing the Shock Doctrine therapies on us, but that's another discussion).
The thing is that this situation also affects people from those countries/societies who are not inclined to crime, such as a close friend of mine who's now having to go through lots of procedures and loops before being allowed to sign for a rental contract (she's Romanian, her SO is Polish, they've just moved from London to Manchester). All those procedures and loops are applied by the real estate agency, so not by the British State itself, I presume because the people from agency have to financially secure their back based on previous negative (from a financial pov) interactions with people from Romania and Poland (I'm also from Romania, if it matters).
Not sure what the best route going forward might be, because when you try to put yourself in each person's shoes you can understand why and how things are done in a certain way, no need to resort to "he/she is doing that because of racism/xenophobia".
Again, this is because your definition of racism is "personal bigotry." What you are experiencing though is discrimination, whether justified or not, it is discrimination.
I didn't base my definition of racism/xenophobia on the personal bigotry of those involved, to the contrary, I explicitly mentioned that most probably some of the measures now in place that look like bigotry from the outside have been probably put in place for material (i.e. money/financial) reasons.
In the case I mentioned, most probably that real estate agency lost money by dealing with Romanians and Poles in the past in a different way than it's used to lose money by dealing with local British people, that's why it put in place more complicated procedures for Romanians/Poles than it has for the locals. Yes, it is discrimination, but, again, in many cases it is based on pure material reasons, i.e. people not wanting to lose more money than they have to.
Is there a distinct form, application, and process for Romanians/Poles? Or is it just "a lot of tenants have caused issues in the past, so we have a bunch of checks we perform before we hand over the keys to a £250K piece of property?
I feel like that's an open-and-shut case if "Oh, you need application form A1234-v-Romanian/Polish" is the case.
As far as I could understand from my friend, as a non-British resident she has to be present in person at the agency for a specific step of the rental process, and as far as I understood from her that “being there in person on a set day” step isn’t applied to British citizens. If true (it is possible that she might have gone things wrong, who knows) that could be seen as a “visual vetting for non-citizens” process.
Again, that seems to be specific to that big agency, she also told me that in the past when she and her SO had found rental arrangements through smaller agencies things were a lot more straight-forward.
"Third world" is really not a great term for these kind of discussions, it's a cold war relic. In the 'true' sense of this term, Ireland, India, Nigeria (and Sweden!) were third world countries, because they were aligned with neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact, while Spain, Italy, Poland and Romania were not.
Somewhere along the line this term was misunderstood and repurposed into a euphemism for "underdeveloped" or worse, with racial undertones. Best to just drop the term from your vocabulary unless you're talking about the cold war.
Towns all over England have seen thousands of young girls be systematically raped while the police, councils and MPs have almost all turned a deliberate blind eye. Spurred on by the same misplaced sense of righteousness and/or guilt that presumably led you to write your comment full of obfuscation and finger-pointing, rather than sitting down like grownups and having a discussion that acknowledges the serious problems that have been caused by the UK's immigration policy that has resulted in whole parts of towns and cities being replaced by a foreign culture, instead of dispersing and integrating people carefully into the country. This is to say nothing of terrorist attacks, widespread intimidation against non-muslim practices, ethnic ghettos, parallel court systems, hymen inspection clinics, massive over-representation of genetic disorders due to traditions of inbreeding, etc.
> I can't imagine that anyone is taking you to task for saying that homelessness and drug use are a blight on any community.
I suppose the issue is more that it's hard to agree on what the problem is or how to solve it. Eg, is it drug use that's the issue or mental health? And how do you fix that?
For example, a lot of people in my family abuse drugs – cocaine, ketamine, NO2, etc... But I also know a lot of middle class people who use these same drugs "responsibly". If you use a little cocaine every now then and you have the money for it then understandably you might see it as harmless. But then I also see the other side of this coin because I have family who spend all of their benefits money on drugs like cocaine and abuse it daily.
This makes it really difficult to take a zero tolerance approach to things like drug use because you end up pissing off all the middle class liberals who like using drugs on the weekend and see banning drugs and regressive. They also simply don't understand the problem either. They commonly think bizarre things like people who failed school and who are probably < 80 IQ just need a bit of mental health support and they'll stop abusing drugs and get their lives on track...
Similar things are true with homelessness. Everyone agrees people being homeless isn't good, but then what do you do about it? If you think people agree on this then why don't you try arguing for a zero tolerance approach to homelessness and see what people say? My guess is that people will start accusing you of not caring and arguing that it's not something that should be treated as a crime because these people really just need mental health support. But the truth is you're not going to fix homelessness by giving people mental health support. And again, this is so hard to explain to middle class people because they won't accept that not everyone is like them and that some people will just end up back on the street no matter what you do.
And I think this is really the core of problem. Middle class people assume (perhaps reasonably) that everyone is like them and their middle class friends and that they will make good decisions with a bit of support. In my experience this just isn't true.
As for 3rd world migration it's hard to know where to start... There are so many issues and this is such a complicated topic. To summerise:
- Cultural incapability issues. Again, middle class people struggle to understand that not every muslim is like their friend Mo from university. And as you brought it up, yes, Pakistanis are obviously one of groups which are less culturally compatible with British communities.
- Economic issues. I'm happy to expand on this if you like, but 3rd world migration in the UK has just been bad economic policy which disproportionately impacts the working class.
- Crime. Again, very hard to talk about this because people don't like the statistics here... There are groups which are significantly over represented in certain crimes and calling working class people in communities which have to deal with these crimes intolerant doesn't solve the issue.
To your point though, I think Indian migration has been great for the country – this is basically indisputable if you look at the statistics. I also agree that there are lots of great migrants from the 3rd world, which is what's even more frustrating about this... Instead of bringing over people that would have a net-positive impact on working class communities, we instead have an immigration system which selects for stupid stuff like being fit enough survive crossing the channel on inflatable raft, or lying about your country origin.
Opinions like these involving the use of corporal punishment and ad hominem (antisocial criminal trash) are part of the reason why the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction and the bay now lives in a liberal dystopia
Sometimes it can be helpful to think about why people are doing this, put yourself in their shoes. Many times homeless people are forbidden from using bathrooms in businesses, and often cities do not provide outhouses or enough public restrooms for the amount of homeless the city has. I promise you many of these people using the street as a restroom would prefer an actual toilet. I wouldn't jump to calling someone trash because they don't have access to the basic amenities that others do.
Sometimes it can be helpful to not try to treat the systemic issue and just treat the immediate issue.
For example, it’s not possible for me to solve the systemic issue of drugs and mental health in order to stop public defecating. It is possible for me to arrest the person for pooping in the street.
I think we should do both at the same time. But we certainly shouldn’t arrest people for pooping because they have a systemic issue invisible handsing them toward public pooping.
People can be trash for different reasons. And if a systemic issue makes someone do trashy behavior, then they are still trashy.
It seems to be missing the point to point out lack of empathy for arresting poopers.
Calling someone "trash" is not helpful to the discussion. It dehumanizes them, and dehumanization is the first step down the road that historically has often lead to atrocities. We're talking about real people, not trash. People who are down on their luck, or homeless, or struggling with mental health or addiction. Even if they're out there assaulting people, they are humans that require fair justice, not "trash" that requires disposal.
The least they could do, I mean the absolute least is find a storm drain to shit down or a bush to shit behind. Anything is better than deliberately shitting in the middle of the sidewalk to fuck with as many people as possible. Make no mistake, the people who do this have antisocial intent.
Fair enough, I was trying to be charitable to OP but I agree, it's just a plain insult and I myself use have used this argument when insulting people ;)
> > > Since I moved here, I have sen people break into cars (numerous times), fill suitcases with products from Target and Walgreens and leave without paying, casually smoke meth in a crowded bus, empty their bladder and bowels in the middle of the sidewalk, etc. all of this brazenly and in broad daylight.
> 15 years in and no one in my family has been a victim to any crime.
The reason provided above is as anecdotal as the one provided by GGP, and cannot be solely used to build any arguments/conclusions from.
There's also an axiomatic conflict between this & GP: The general neighborhoods that glerk and random314 live in may not be the same neighborhoods, resulting in the conflicting self-reports written above. It is possible that random314 lives in one of the nicer neighborhoods that glerk mentions offhandedly, and unless shown otherwise, has not been to FiDi or SOMA:
> > > I think a lot of people live in their nice neighborhood bubble and have never stepped foot in FiDi or SOMA.
I currently live in Sacramento. It's undeniable that the bay has gotten much worse even if it was "already bad" decades ago. I actually had a nice week in the bay two weeks ago, but I was in a rental in a nice neighborhood. And don't get me wrong; I've walked through SoMa at night even recently and while it was pretty sketchy I didn't feel unsafe. That doesn't mean I couldn't have gotten mugged.
Just went to SF for the first time in 5 years. So much worse. Wasn’t great in 18, but back then I walked across Golden Gate Park alone during the day and it was beautiful. I cannot imagine now. Market st is hell.
The societal dysfunctions are because tech ppl, the ones who ask the laypeople of the world to allow them to fix all their problems, have built a literal dystopia of social problems in the place where they have the most actual wealth and power to build something else. There is no greater argument for the myopia of VC-tainted tech solutionism than SF itself.
> The negative feedback is very important for conditioning antisocial people to behave in a civilized community, but for some reason, SF has decided to not bother with it.
If we go with this, let's apply it equally. SBF should get 50 lashes in a town square and any employer stealing wages or landlord failing to maintain their property gets a beating and thrown in jail for a night. Why limit this punishment to petty crimes like pooping in the street?
I'm from Europe too, but I've following what's been happening, so here's a very detached account of what happened.
First, it's not a single reason but several going hand in hand. The main one, as far as I understand, is the sky-rocketing price of housing, coupled with little social safety net for which the US is well-known, produced a lot of homelessness that has not been addressed and ballooned. With that also came crime and drug abuse (that's not new: I've been there 10 years ago and was shocked by the amount of homeless people in the streets, and I live in Paris, which has its fair share of homeless people, so that's saying something)
The second main one is that racism, which has always been a thing, especially in the police force, produced some very high profile events (George Floyd) and high backlash against the police, perceived as racist and not being on the side of "the people".
There has been a big "defund the police", which resulted in less policing, police force demoralization, a lot of officers quitting. Coupled with the previous issue, a lot of small crimes happened, mainly perpetuated by poor people. It's important to note that due to the US history, being poor correlate strongly with skin color.
I don't really know if it's the fact that the people appearing the court were black and it was deemed racist or if the court were overloaded (probably an unhealthy mix of both), but at some point, shoplifting under a certain amount (was it $950? Somewhere in the $1000 ballpark) was changed from a felony to a misdemeanor. In practice, that means you could do that without fear of retribution, which predictably had awful results, and might be the disturbing videos you are talking about.
There you go, hopefully I didn't misrepresent the situation and didn't forget any other important factor, though I'm sure someone will correct me if I did.
Homelessness in the US is not a housing issue. Simply walk through a typical homeless encampment or walk through the Financial District of San Francisco and it will be clear as day: it is a drugs and mental illness issue, and ultimately, a family issue. Good families will take care of their mentally ill members and get them the care that they need. If you don't have a family, it's easy to end up out in the street on drugs. Nobody wants to talk about families, though.
I travel to many off the beaten path neighborhoods (mostly) all over the west coast and the homeless encampments I see in places like LA and the Bay Area are just people who can’t afford housing but have cars and RVs to live in.
Kind of annoying because the places where 20 years ago you could park a truck are full of urban campers. Last week I was driving around in Fremont, a couple miles from where I grew up, and every square foot of road around the place I was delivering to was occupied by people living on the streets. When I last lived there in the 80s Fremont was just your average boring suburban hell where there’s no way they wouldn’t have cleared out these encampments. Pretty sure that’s where they had a bunch of signs basically saying “no camping” which they obviously don’t bother enforcing.
So you're saying that if there were homes available to purchase in San Francisco for 200k, that the drug addicts and mentally ill people wandering the street would all be gone?
Until very recently, there were condos and houses available in that exact price range in downtown Austin. Yet ask anyone who lives there, there are and were tons of homeless everywhere you went in the city.
There are other cities that are way more affordable than SF, with the same homelessness problem. The thing they share in common with SF are the "compassionate" policing policies.
No, I'm saying it's a complicated confluence of factors, it's not just a San Francisco problem and we need to address our affordable housing deficit nationwide if we really want a few key areas inundated with homeless "crazies" to be able to successfully wrangle their problems at the local level and stop being held responsible for the failures of decades-long and nationwide policies.
Being homeless can cause mental illness and addiction, as they are illnesses that occur to vulnerable people in tenuous living circumstances such as homelessness.
It's an all of the above issue, but housing prices surely have a role. Why do cities in the midwest and South have lower rates of homelessness? I don't think of Detroit as a paragon of "good families" but they have relatively lower rates of homelessness. Not to say I disagree with you overall, I think the U.S. often lacks strong family and community networks, but even with family there is a stronger push for independence here than I've seen in Europe where I lived for a few years. It's often quite positive -- people go and build startups, they move to new cities for work, older people stay active and remain in their houses... but it flips in the same way that you also have those same independent elderly people who end up in nursing homes far from family and family with kids away from parents who could be built in babysitters/childcare.
There is some truth to weather. But also those areas are less likely to get queasy about cracking down on vagabonds. Police will hassle beggars in nice areas to keep respectable folks safe.
On the coasts that is now considered horrible tyranny. So you gotta deal with the downsides of that.
That feels logical but I'm not sure it's true. Ex. freezing to death in winter - anecdotal but I visit my folks often and there are plenty of homeless people in Reno NV where you could absolutely freeze if you're exposed to the elements for too long.
My spouse told me a story once about when she was living in her car in North Dakota and there was a winter storm and all she had was a blanket someone gave her. Long story short if you don’t have anything you can easily freeze to death in your sleep there.
You're 100% wrong about this. My mother is a mentally ill drug addict who has been homeless. We forced her into care when it was clear that she could no longer take care of herself. It took help from Adult Protective Services and lots of attempts before they were finally able to make it happen. She would hide from them when they showed up. Finally, she got kicked out of the place she was living and APS saw the conditions and committed her.
What you describe is technically possible, but extremely rare. Even when someone is involuntarily admitted, the stay is typically capped.
Generally, as long as an individual isn't harming other people, "the system" doesn't have a reason to pursue a judgement. Many of these people are isolated from family/support systems or have nobody to actually care or advocate for them.
Further, many of them have complex cases. While treatment may be effective temporarily, it's hard to sustain the level of care after an admission.
You're over thinking SF. SF is landlocked so there's always going to be steep housing costs...The real problem, as far as I can tell, is that homeless drug addicts are given free money by CAAP and have ample access to hard drugs. Anybody who's seen what hard-drugs do to a person or a family can attest that this is NOT good. You have probably seen something similar in Germany (I have) but the difference is in Germany they actively enforce the criminal code. You can't walk into an Aldi in Koln with a trash bag and make off with a hundred dollars in random goods...In SF this is happening. Which requires another conversation on America's far-left and their response to crime and their views of an unjust system. That being said there's a toxic environment in SF and it's not changing anytime soon.
Urban sprawl is hardly the only solution to increasing density.
You could easily massively increase density by simply building more 4-8 story apartment complexes in the style of several cities around the world like Paris.
SF isn't an island. It's not landlocked. Just build up.
How is it land locked? There are lots of single family homes. If you replace them all with apartments there will be 10-40x the amount of homes available.
Land is usually not the issue unless you're at Tokyo, Hong Kong or Singapore levels of dense.
Way to absolve tech of any blame and blame those dirty poor homeless addicts. Clearly there's absolutely no reason for these people to exist! They just do!
The dirty poor homeless addicts aside, what exactly did tech do? Tech didn't come up with the truly brain-dead housing policy that makes it so difficult to build new housing, so that supply can catch up with demand. Tech isn't handing out drugs on the street.
I'm not a tech worker in SF so I'm not taking anything personally. But I struggle to establish a causal relationship between tech and what's happening in SF. Usually, it's a good thing for a community when there's a local high-income cash cow.
You're right that it's nothing inherent to tech, it's about the money coming in and displacing the existing communities. It just so happens that that money came from tech.
People are talking as if this is the city's problem, but it's our industry that caused the problem. We have to acknowledge that so we don't keep causing problems.
And as the cash cow, our industry has the ability to influence policy to prevent these issues from happening.
Part of the reason rents are high in SF is BECAUSE of rent control (regulating rents). You're just creating scarcity. Developers aren't going to want to take massive losses and haircuts (and neither would you) to build in rent-control areas. It drives up prices all around because there's less real-estate. They've studied this to death. It's a terrible idea
Rent control regulation is great for tenants, which means it's great for keeping people housed.
If that means being a landlord isn't lucrative enough, that's fine, the government can absorb that capacity and build social housing instead. There's no reason the private market should be allowed to monopolize rental housing.
I don't really know if it's the fact that the people appearing the court
were black and it was deemed racist or if the court were overloaded (probably
an unhealthy mix of both), but at some point, shoplifting under a certain
amount (was it $950? Somewhere in the $1000 ballpark) was changed from a felony
to a misdemeanor. In practice, that means you could do that without fear of
retribution, which predictably had awful results, and might be the disturbing
videos you are talking about.
In most states the felony threshold gets adjusted periodically if for no other reason than to keep up with inflation. Texas bumped theirs to $2,500 and Alabama to $1,500 back in 2015.
It's okay for states that actually bother to prosecute misdemeanors to have really high felony thresholds. The problem with California is that they have a high felony threshold but basically don't prosecute misdemeanors, so in practice shoplifting up to $950 is legal there now.
In the past decade, US cities enjoyed a renaissance / gentrification in otherwise formerly decaying downtown urban areas, mostly led by tech companies tired of car culture and suburbia
Now that money flows are slowing, these areas are reverting back unfortunately
IMO most US tech startups would kill to be in a cheap sunny European city say along the Adriatic coast but are hampered by funding regs etc
Uhhhh... This comment is a minefield, but the problem is specific individuals in the police community who disproportionately are engaging in racist tactics, and an institution which protects these people. You should learn about the original slave patrols which modern US police have their roots in.
> "At least three to four nights a week they would have us riding through the neighborhoods," Ardoin said. "If you saw a random black person walking around the street and hasn't done anything, they would tell us just to jump out the vehicle, grab them and pat them down without probable cause. I voiced my opinions several times, and I didn't agree with that."
Many of my black friends used to call the local police the "jump out boys". My friends had to grow up worried that they would be randomly planted with drugs. Unfortunately of all the people I know, I'm the one who actually ended up getting planted with drugs by a deranged cop, despite being white.
Can you elaborate on getting planted with drugs by a deranged cop? what happened? How did you get out of that situation? Were you able to prove your innocence?
It happened 11 years ago when I was a minor living in a small, extraordinarily corrupt town. The officer had been stalking my friends and I for some time. She is a known meth manufacturer and distributor. She planted drugs on me at the scene of an accident and conspired with the local prosecutor, judge and my public defender in order to give me a mistrial and snuff out any attempts at an appeal. I got the maximum allowed sentence despite no prior criminal history. Unfortunately I was 17 and homeless at the time just trying to graduate high school, unable to fight back.
The full story is much longer and so insane that I don't even want to open the full can of worms here at the moment, but I should do a write-up and talk to a lawyer now that I have the time/money, despite the statute of limitations which probably protects them.
I mean I've literally watched this officer with my own eyes procure meth ingredients, I have footage of her distributing, some people I know murdered her brother and there was a giant meth lab found at his house, it's just a total unbelievable shit show from start to finish. But I was the one who got railed. The FBI refuses to get involved despite numerous tips.
> She planted drugs on me at the scene of an accident and conspired with the local prosecutor, judge and my public defender in order to give me a mistrial and snuff out any attempts at an appeal.
mistrial, in law, a trial that has been terminated and declared void before the tribunal can hand down a decision or render a verdict. The termination of a trial prematurely nullifies the preceding proceedings as if they had not taken place.
Other than that it’s a totally credible story about a meth-cooking police officer…
I have no need to convince you, a random person on hacker news. It's a small enough town that next to everyone knows her story. There has been more than one investigation but she's protected. She was stalking my friends and I due to disagreements between her son and some of my friends at school.
As for the mistrial, it's only in spirit because my public defender flat out refused to take my case seriously and refused to appeal on grounds that it would make her life difficult.
It's hard to make people believe or understand what small town corruption is like unless they've seen it for themselves. The mayor himself showed up at the place I was crashing at after I got arrested just to further make things more difficult for me... what kind of psychotic town allows for such behavior?
It's nuts. With my own two eyes I once watched this cop in question pull up to a grocery store in her patrol car in broad daylight with a near-toothless old woman in the passenger seat. That old woman proceeded to go into the store and buy a stack of Sudafed, got back in the patrol car and they rolled out. I guessed that she was having supplier issues and needed a fix, so she found a smurf.
I thought about calling the police and getting them to review the footage, but it was a crapshoot who showed up and if I would only get into more trouble.
Tangential to the above comment, you have to also remember that in the U.S. many police forces are also revenue drivers. For many small towns on highways, they have "speed traps" set up not really to keep roadways safe but to ticket people and get revenue for their municipality, ditto with other legal actions against people. There's a significant amount of civil forfeiture too that amounts to cops seizing assets with little to no cause. I mention this just because corruption isn't always as straightforward as what that absolutely insane situation sounds like, but the incentives in many U.S. jurisdictions are pretty misaligned and so can create pretty negative situations for the average American interacting with a cop.
Yes, our town was off a major highway and getting in and out of town is a blitz through multiple factions of police including the Sheriff's Office, town police, state troopers and extra enforcement from the nearby capitol city. They are especially active during what is known as Taskforce Thursdays. It's a racket from top to bottom. You feel like a criminal just going to get groceries, like a lamb watching for wolves.
My arresting officer has been kicked off of the local force before and reinstated. Until a few years ago, the father of the local district attorney was the the town's mayor. The same mayor was the town bail bondsman. When I was processed, the town's mayor himself visited the parents of the friend I was staying with at the time in a play to get me kicked out and back on the street.
It's an insane town and it's ruled by a few wealthy families. The corruption in that town was unimaginable and I myself was subject to an abusive power figure as my guardian while growing up, that same man is great friends with the same prosecutor who conspired to press charges and conduct a mistrial. I can't get away from it.
What do you mean by mistrial here? How did you get any sentence if there was a mistrial? Why would they conspire to commit one unless they were on trial and not you?
My first public defender was removed from me because he was trying to assist me.
My second lawyer didn't know my name after two years, prepared no defense and refused to file a motion to quash (the town dragged on proceedings for years and it turned out they'd never sent the "evidence" to the lab).
I had half a dozen cops approach the stand, sequestered, and each of them told a totally different story. My only witness then got slapped with a charge for "lying to the police", whatever that was in legalese, and the judge ignored all of the inconsistencies. I should also mention that my right to a trial by jury was taken away from me in an act of deceit, where I, a minor without a lawyer or guardian present, was made to sign a document upon bail which gave up that right. I was told at the time that they would not release me on bail unless I signed the document.
My lawyer then refused to file an appeal because it would, and I quote, "make [her] job miserable", because her de facto boss was the judge, who happened to be the only presiding judge across two parishes.
My original public defender, who had been removed from my case, was so upset by the outcome that he came to visit me in jail, promised me he'd fight for me... he had a private screaming match with the judge in his office, but the best he could do was get me a reduced sentence on good behavior. I still had to pay thousands in fees and endure all of the other issues that come with the state having a vice grip around you.
> Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. We take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research.
On top of this, police shootings are just one aspect of policing. You can find various research that supports, for example, that you're way more likely to be pulled over while driving if you are black than if you are white. And that relative proportion drops at night because it's harder for them to see. They're then more likely to be searched after the stop, and more likely to be handcuffed.
And police brutality is much more than just shooting - I don't think we keep track of how often police officers use _any_ kind of force, but that's another thing that would also need to be evaluated.
There are just... so, so many things you'd need to consider and refute in order to make that statement.
My June 3 Journal op-ed quoted the PNAS article’s conclusion verbatim. It set off a firestorm at Michigan State. The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.
"As we estimated Pr(race|shot, X), this sentence should read: ‘As the proportion of White officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ This is consistent with our framing of the results in the abstract and main text."
In other words, the thing being fought over was the wording of a single sentence that didn't change their actual conclusions, which are consistent with the other evidence. But then later:
"Despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general."
Yes, because their correction in their own words "is consistent with our framing of the results".
This whole incident is just proof of what I'm saying - the American left systematically attacks anyone who tries to point out the actual data here, which is why people don't hear about it. This particular paper led to a Twitter mob and someone got fired, but it wasn't due to bad methods, it was because student activists were upset about the "harm" it caused:
> the American left systematically attacks anyone who tries to point out the actual data here
And you're systematically ignoring literally everything else I've said, including an article pointing out the multitude of errors included in the study, references to other unexplained disparities, and I might also just add:
> Cesario and Johnson write that their "decision had nothing to do with political considerations, ‘mob’ pressure, threats to the authors, or distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly."
Even if police shootings aren't evidence of racial disparities in policing, there are a _lot_ of other disparities.. which are certainly worth considering if you actually care about the data.
But if your evidence consists entirely of vacuously parroting Oped pieces by a right wing political commentator who "claimed that 95% of outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles were for undocumented immigrants and that 75% of L.A.'s most wanted list comprised undocumented immigrants", then.. I don't know what to tell you.
You believe the retraction was done for legitimate scientific reasons instead of for political ones just because the people who did the retraction said so?
1. Cesario et al [1] received some criticism [2], but they stood by their findings [3]
2. A student union / twitter mob was not happy with the findings of the study [4]
3. The resulting political pressure led to the ousting of Stephen Hsu from MSU, who had approved the funding for the study [5]
4. Only then retracted Cesario et al their study, while still standing by their findings [6]
______
There is a similar study done by economist Roland Fryer [7], while at Harvard.
Summarized, the two studies find the following:
Cesario et al:
Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being killed by police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.
Fryer:
- Per interaction with the police, civilians have roughly the same risk of being the target of police gunfire, regardless of their ethnicity.
- Per interaction with the police, a black civilian is 1.5x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 1)
- Per interaction with the police, a perfectly compliant black civilian is 1.2x more at risk to receive slight use of force by the police than a perfectly compliant white civilian. This disparity gets smaller at higher levels of force. (See [7], Figure 5)
There's 100s of different hypothesis for the cause, but it's all just a different flavor of wealth inequality. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. This promotes all types of corruption.
The rich can usually avoid the stench and filth of the poor so they don't invest their money in solving it. Now the poorness is festering.
This is a problem that will not get solved without taxes, and it probably won't get solved without taxes at the federal level. Americans will not let themselves be taxed more and so the consequences are more of this for the foreseeable future.
>There's 100s of different hypothesis for the cause, but it's all just a different flavor of wealth inequality
This is simply untrue. There are cities with more wealth inequality (Singapore, Shanghai, Dubai..) that have no such crime or filth, because the police deal with it aggressively.
I think Singapore has a very notable affordable housing system (There's some short docus on youtube that should be easy to find) which probably holds back a lot of such problems.
In Dubai I believe the locals are also pretty damn well off whilst an insane amount of the population is expatriates which I'd imagine get kicked out the moment they're seen as a problem or lose their job, etc.
No clue about Shangai. I know Chinas police in other cities can be rather heavy handed (beating people out of bars with batons where words could have probably done the trick for example)
Plenty of other factors can play a role tho. From Chinas political patronage system leading to leaders having their jobs/prospects tied to not letting such issues go too far to a less individualistic culture or simply lots of low bar employment options and housing. Better a run down cramped place shared with too many people (You can find some shocking images of this from shangai) than the street.
I will do my best, but it's important for people to know that I mean this as respectfully as I can. It's my honest assessment, and I will try to make few-to-no normative claims.
I tend to refer to what's happening in SF as SF-Stockholm syndrome (I do not mean this as disrespectful, only that I don't know any other way to describe the normalization of what happens here). I grew up in Texas, spent time on the East Coast, with a reasonable stint in NYC, and spent just over a year Scotland. I really have never seen the openness and acceptance of severe substance abuse like I have on the West Coast of the United States (not just in SF).
Portland, SF, LA, Oakland, Berkeley, pretty much every major city here, there are areas of the city where serious drug use, and some crime, is effectively just tolerated. SF is particularly unique, because, by a wide margin, it's the smallest in area and most walkable. Other cities tend to be automobile-centric, so non-organized crime tends to stay in small areas of the city (though, from my understanding, this is changing in Portland for the worse).
This is combine with a fairly strong anti-police culture. I don't know the veracity or history, but people here, even perfectly law abiding people, tend to think the police forces are generally corrupt-and-racist, or have a history of corruption and racism. I'm regularly shock that everyone here seems to be disgusted with the police, but nearly nobody has any intention or desire to reform, normalize, or even overhaul the institution. Many seem to see very idea of police as just a bad thing.
Combine this with the out-of-control opiate epidemic, and what this seems to have created is a pretty nuts, but not actually abnormally dangerous, environment in San Francisco in particular. There is little enforcement of any laws, except parking enforcement. When my friends from Germany visited, they were very curious about this "opiate and crime thing" after reading about book about Fentanyl, so as part of their visit, I showed them the open drug markets around midnight at UN Plaza, at Civic Center BART station. They were horrified. It's hard to describe the scene of crowds of people, many just shuffling around, obviously high, often with pretty obvious other complications from living in squalor.
I call it Stockholm Syndrome because people have genuinely convinced themselves that this is normal. People here legitimately believe that leaving anything at all in your car, even small things, in any major city in America, will likely lead to a break in. Obviously this is incredibly untrue, and SF is an outlier in theft (to the point that the stats are laughably inaccurate because nobody even reports car break-ins to the police anymore), but people have acclimated to the culture, and just assume it's normal, if they don't leave the region on a regular basis.
Ironically, the city is actually fairly safe with regards to violent crime. Not especially safe, but the homicide figures show that things aren't "out of control" in the violent crime aspect.
The thing that's shocking is how in-your-face it all is. The signs of severe substance abuse, are ever-present in a shockingly large amount of the commercial districts of the city (though most of the city is perfectly safe, quite and residential). The city does absolutely nothing about it. They do not mandate addiction treatment, because, for the most part, the people with substance abuse issues never see a court room. Primarily, because the court system cannot handle the case load. My roommate is a Public Defender, so I'm acutely aware of the backlog of cases that are genuinely violent crime. Not that it matters, because in election-after-election, the candidates tend to be pretty much on the same page that nothing really will be done. Again, much of the populous has a very strong distaste for any policing action. I honestly believe that most people here legitimately don't like the idea of forcing people into treatment if they don't want it.
It is incredibly complex, and I've only just scratched the surface of the nuance in what's happening here. There are housing issues, inequality issues, nativist issues, agency issues, and even a bizarre idealization poverty and squalor. To cover everything would be more appropriate as an hour-long discussion over drinks at a bar where you can see what's actually happening with your own eyes, because I think most Europeans would be quite speechless at it all.
This tragedy did not happen in a bad part of town, and I honestly walk through worse areas at similar hours regularly, and it's generally fine.
One thing I’ve noticed in SF bay forums is there’s strong support for more enforcement and generally cleaning up the city. For comparison, Seattle forums are literally more split: Seattle’s subreddits are split to r/Seattle (leans left) and r/SeattleWA (leans right).
All this to say that based on my reads of online forums, I think SF is ahead of the curve of Seattle in terms of near universal frustration with homelessness/drugs/etc (even if it’s not confirmed whether they are related to this case), but somehow no progress or change in elected officials have been made.
I’m watching this to see if there’s hope for some of the problems in Seattle, since online forums here aren’t pissed off to the same degree yet.
- SF has policies that encourages homeless to emigrate there, one of which is being pretty lenient to anyone who sets up camp on the streets
- SF allows open drug markets that has become a hotbed of criminal activity
- Police aren't fully empowered, and many people because of their ideology tend to hate police
- Lots of catch and release going on, both anecdotally and on news
- They offer drug kits (think needles, pipes, and other tools). The kit looked to be worth around $100
- They gave free alcohol/marijuana to homeless during lockdown
- A large subset of the population seem to give no shits about the city or other people: public urination, defecation, harassment, drug use, property theft, vandalism is common. The lack of enforcement has allowed these activities to increase
1. Rent has become insanely expensive such that a lot of people end up no the streets. This is the cause of the tent cities popping up, and really are a small part of what people have a problem with. The "invisible" homeless.
2. We do not have any resources for people who are too mentally ill or too sick to be of any "use" to society. A lot of those people end up on the street, where they are vulnerable to manipulation to start using heroin. A lot of them have mental disabilities. No, we do not have mental hospitals, and the ones that do exist are full, and they are not hurrying to build more.
3. We have a massive heroin addiction epidemic. These are the people who are crawling all over the place trying to get their fix, mugging people in the fugue states between scraping enough money together to get their next fix. The "highly visible" homeless.
So. Something like 0.17% of our population is homeless. That is like 600k people.
Imagine what it will take get these people off the streets and reintegrated into society, if that is even possible.
They need:
1. Shelter.
2. Food.
3. Medical professionals to help them come down from the high, and help them get on a better path to stop using drugs.
4. Security to prevent re-victimization.
5. Legal authority to detain them without their consent ( a lot of homeless people have schizophrenia and are extremely paranoid and do not trust anyone ).
Imagine how much that will cost.
The US government is extremely austere around funding this stuff, so it has been left up to the cities and states, which do not have the resources to tackle the problem.
So that is really it. It's too expensive, and all the money is pooled into the top .1% of the population, and we don't tax them, and they are busy building rocket ships, so we don't have any money to fix the issue.
Some people want the cops to arrest them but that is actually MORE expensive and MORE prone to failure, other ethical issues aside. ( of which there are many )
> It's too expensive, and all the money is pooled into the top .1% of the population, and we don't tax them, and they are busy building rocket ships, so we don't have any money to fix the issue.
There may be more impactful things for the likes of Bezos to invest in than rocketships, but the idea that more wealth redistribution via taxation here would help things needs evidence to back it up.
In 2021, when the stock market was at its peak and therefore the net worths of billionaires were the most inflated (for which you can blame government policy, anyway), the wealth of all billionaires in the US were around $4T. Even if you confiscated it all and were magically able to sell all of their interests in various holdings without affecting the price, it would pay for two, maybe three years of Social Security and Medicare; forget the rest of the federal government, let alone all the other levels of government.
It's been pointed out elsewhere that San Francisco already spends over a billion dollars a year on programs related to homelessness, or around $57k per homeless person. To put it in context, if the whole country spent the same amount on welfare per capita, it would be $19T, which is 3x the current federal budget and over 80% of the GDP. It's a mind-boggling amount of money which would be completely untenable to sustain over time.
You would have to rely on a lot of faith to think that lack of money is what is preventing these problems from being fixed.
1. Due to the temperate weather, California has largely become the dumping ground for America's chronic homeless. This is rooted in longstanding housing policies causing a shortfall of affordable housing nationwide.
2. On top of that, California has additional broken tax policies and other policies that deepen the shortage of affordable housing.
3. Big cities are where the services are, such as soup kitchens. If you are homeless in the US and have nothing, going to the nearest big city is your best bet for trying to eat regularly.
4. California and big cities are both expensive. Once you go to California as a homeless person or the big city as a homeless person, it's quite hard to get off the street because housing is so expensive.
5. Being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless due to homophobia. San Francisco has a reputation for being more LGBTQ-friendly than average even for a big city.
So you have desperate people hearing high-minded nonsense that lures them into a bad situation and we aren't really dealing effectively with such issues generally, so we aren't giving people real solutions. Desperate, hopeless people with no options is not a good population type to foster the growth of if you value a civilized social climate.
The narrative that most homeless people in SF come there from other places is contradicted by data. In annual surveys, ~70+% of people who are homeless in SF lived in SF when they became homeless.
there's a lot of issues with the methodology in this cluster of surveys. for one it's entirely self-reported, and furthermore it only asks where they were staying immediately prior to becoming homeless. digging further into cases you see people who come here and live in an rv for a month or crash in their friend's garage, before ending up on the streets and counted here as a local resident. studies which take into account longer history and context tell the same story.
I've gone back and forth on how I feel about self-reported data like that.
If you're homeless and moved to a particular city because you believe you'll have a better time there, then you might feel incentivized to claim that you originally lived there before becoming homeless.
Unfortunately there's no good way to confirm or refute this data.
There are also lots of reasons to question exactly how such numbers are determined and what they really mean, which is a long discussion I don't care to have.
Due to the temperate weather, California has largely become the dumping ground for America's chronic homeless.
Not all homeless are chronic homeless.
You don't need all your homeless to be chronic homeless to dramatically and negatively impact the scale of the issue for one state that has, iirc, 12 percent of the US population and 25 percent of the US homeless population.
> Being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless due to homophobia.
The statistics might bear out that being LGBTQ puts one at high risk of being homeless, but homelessness being due to homophobia is an unclear and unproven assertion.
No, we can know because we have data on homeless teens who aren't runaways but are, in fact, throwaways.
There was also a recent article on HN about the Catholic church -- which expects all priests to be celibate -- investigating gay dating but not straight dating priests to get rid of them.
The point is that people go from places where they were kicked out of home for being gay to LGBTQ friendly places like San Fransisco. So though you're entirely wrong about homophobia in the coastal US, this is largely irrelevant in any case.
Also, you yourself are expressing a number of homophobic ideas in this thread. Could you please stop? It sucks that every HN thread that mentions LGBTQ people even in passing seems always to have to attract homophobic comments.
Finally, you should read the comment that DoreenMichele linked to to see what she was getting at.
You seem to have missed the flow of events here. I mentioned homophobia before you commented, not as some kind of characterization of you in specific.
Other people chiming in to suggest you are homophobic or your comments are homophobic is not something I have control over. Acting like I am playing the victim card based on that is ridiculous.
I'm mentioning homophobia because you've suggested that being LGBTQ is often caused by an underlying mental illness (doubling down on this claim here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=4gotunameagain), and because you've suggested that anyone who claims that homophobia is prevalent (in the 'coastal US', at least) is acting in bad faith and 'deliberately victimizing' themselves. Now you seem to be playing semantic games regarding the meaning of 'homophobia'. I won't try to change your mind here, but I think the majority of HNers will easily be able to see what I'm referring to.
On top of all that, this whole discussion resulted from one bullet point in a comment on an article that literally has nothing to do with LGBTQ people or homophobia. And yet you feel the need to argue all of these points here.
I disagree on this point. The idea that being gay or trans is a form of (or consequence of) mental illness is inherently homophobic. So is the idea that LGBTQ people 'deliberately victimize' themselves.
There is no bad faith here. Remember that you my also be exposed to points of view that you don't like – such as the one I just expressed.
Edit: I'd ask one question in response to your comment. You say that due to limitations of current scientific knowledge, 'one cannot claim without any certainty that LGBTQ is not caused by mental illness'. Ok, then can we be certain that being straight is not caused by mental illness? Which scientific studies could one cite to support or refute that claim?
I spent nine months being supportive to a trans youth. She had been horribly, horribly abused by her parents her entire life and the abuse ramped up when she came out as trans.
I'm quite confident her mental health issues were due to the extreme abuse she suffered and not due to being trans per se.
Ah so your n=1 of an already mentally ill person who came out as trans can be extrapolated to prove that transexualism and mental illness are not correlated, contrary to any published research.
Makes perfect sense.
You n=1 could also very well be interpreted as the extreme abuse being the source for the transexualism as well. Anyway with all the respect I will stop replying now.
Ah so your n=1 of an already mentally ill person who came out as trans can be extrapolated to prove that transexualism and mental illness are not correlated, contrary to any published research.
No, that isn't my position at all.
You want to cite some research so I can look at it, feel free. So far, you have not cited anything, just made general assertions and shared your opinion.
My opinion differs from yours and I'm telling you part of why -- but only part of why.
The correlation between GID and depression was modest, but significant (r = .20; P < .05), whereas the correlation between GID and separation anxiety was nonsignificant (P > .05).
10.1111/j.1440-1819.2010.02118.x
Comparison with previous reports on the psychiatric comorbidity among GID patients revealed that the majority of GID patients had no psychiatric comorbidity. GID is a diagnostic entity in its own right, not necessarily associated with severe comorbid psychological findings.
10.1155/2014/463757
Clinical evidence suggests that schizophrenia occurs in patients with GID at rates higher than in the general population and that patients with GID may have schizophrenia-like personality traits. Conversely, patients with schizophrenia may experience alterations in gender identity and gender role perception.
10.1111/j.1600-0447.1993.tb03467.x
Personality disorders, mainly within cluster B, were identified among 5 of 19 transsexuals, and a majority had multiple personality disorders. Among controls, no personality disorder was identified. Personality traits as measured by the SCID screen revealed significantly more subthreshold pathology among transsexuals than controls in 8 of 12 personality categories.
I will note that there were only 19 trans individuals in the above study.
10.1023/A:1024517302481
(One quarter had had problems with substance abuse prior to entering treatment, but less than 10% evidenced problems associated with mental illness, genital mutilation, or suicide attempts. Those completing the MMPI (93 female and 44 male) demonstrated profiles that were notably free of psychopathology (e.g., Axis I or Axis II criteria).
This last study supports what I and other people are saying here: That when allowed to be themselves, their psychological issues largely disappear.
Your second study also asserts "no comorbodity" of GID and major psychiatric issues. Your first study shows only a small effect of increased depression and separation anxiety, issues not usually viewed as "crazy" like "crazy homeless people committing violence" levels of crazy.
The only study you cited that seems to meaningfully support your position is the correlation with increased rates of schizophrenia. Someone taking master's level classes in psychology once said to me something like "Schizophrenia is known to get worse due to social factors. You put schizophrenics in residential treatment, they get better. You send them home to their crazy-making families, they get worse again."
Thank you for commenting these in. I find this quote "That when allowed to be themselves, their psychological issues largely disappear." interesting and hopeful -- and the way it's phrased suggests some causation.
Is there a study that proves this? I did a brief literature scan and it seems to me that researchers are unclear about the causation direction of things like trauma, psychological disorders, and GID/gender dissatisfaction. I think this is a pretty important part of the ongoing debate.
I don't want to be the "citations needed" guy, but I do have a tremendous respect for science and I don't want to just have to go with my gut on something like this.
> Someone taking master's level classes in psychology once said to me something like "Schizophrenia is known to get worse due to social factors. You put schizophrenics in residential treatment, they get better. You send them home to their crazy-making families, they get worse again."
How does this accord with outcomes being better for them in less developed countries? I had a friend with paranoid schizophrenia and he spent the last few months of his life mostly getting outpatient treatment at home.
Maybe families trend less crazy-making in less developed countries?
It isn't an assertion that schizophrenia is solely due to the family being crazy-making, just that such people are vulnerable to negative social influences. Such vulnerability does not mean that all families of all schizophrenics are equally crazy-making.
No, we can know. We know that being LGBTQ doesn’t cause mental illness without first suffering from rejection of their identity. The vast majority of homeless youth are homeless because their families abandoned them for being LGBTQ. But, if an LGBTQ youth is raised in an accepting household, the chances of mental illness go way way down to about normal. We can even observe the suicide rate of transgender people, which is wildly high, become about the same as the normal populace if they are allowed to go through with transition without threats or violence.
> We can even observe the suicide rate of transgender people, which is wildly high, become about the same as the normal populace if they are allowed to go through with transition without threats or violence.
Do you have a source for this? Because I’ve seen other conflicting claims that transitioning and trans acceptance doesn’t show much effect on suicide outcomes.
There’s conflicting claims because there’s a lot of SEO spam about it. Some recent studies:
(2022) “ In this prospective cohort of 104 TNB youths aged 13 to 20 years, receipt of gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones, was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over a 12-month follow-up.” https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
(2021) “ Data were collected as part of a 2020 survey of 34,759 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth aged 13–24, including 11,914 transgender or nonbinary youth… Use of GAHT was associated with lower odds of recent depression (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] = .73, p < .001) and seriously considering suicide (aOR = .74, p < .001) compared to those who wanted GAHT but did not receive it. For youth under age 18, GAHT was associated with lower odds of recent depression (aOR = .61, p < .01) and of a past-year suicide attempt (aOR = .62, p < .05).” https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(21)00568-1/full...
6. Treatment/care for mental illnesses is pretty much non-existent if you can't afford it. And if you're a violent homeless person, there's a pretty good chance you have some underlying psychological condition.
It's not that anything specific has changed in SF - it's more a case of, the political machine has been running very smoothly in a way that does little to help anyone in particular, and occasionally it manifests as an "oopsie we let someone die".
The designated narrative role of SF since the 70's, as a Democratic Party stronghold, is to be praised from the left for progressive policies, and pilloried from the right for being a failing dystopia. And the narrative has simply intensified both ways over time, while the actual ground level conditions are way more varied. There used to be more overt violence, gang shootings and the like. Now it's mostly drug use and property crime. Mostly. After all, someone did just get stabbed. But in any case, the existence of the narrative allows every concrete fact to be shouted over by paid advocates for some cause.
To get at the truth you have to dig into the details neighborhood by neighborhood, department by department, year by year. The problems are not something that manifests from electing one wrong leader or voting yes on one wrong ballot proposition, but from the city openly allowing itself to court a menagerie of institutions that do no good other than to allow money to be shuffled between bank accounts. There are nice neighborhoods, mostly on the west side of the city, where if anything bad is happening, it's kept tucked out of sight. But go downtown and you get the apocalyptic scenes, which are supported by this "NGO industrial complex".
For one example, I present Urban Alchemy. Urban Alchemy describes itself like this:
We’re a social enterprise that engages with situations where extreme poverty meets homelessness, mental illness and addiction.
When a neighborhood, street or intersection earns a reputation as a place to avoid, we turn it around. Urban Alchemy is a peaceful and supportive presence, inviting communities to rebuild and restore a sense of pride and respect in urban spaces.
UA has a logo that looks like a cult symbol, and they hire former prisoners as "ambassadors"(i.e. they beat up and harass people, mostly homeless). This does nothing to fix the visible drug use problem next door to their building, of course. It would not surprise me to learn that UA itself has drug addicts in its ranks.
In essence, they seem to be doing the kind of thing you would expect the police to be doing, but the police aren't doing it, so they're going to do it very badly and say it is helping. What are the police doing? Not a whole lot, it seems. They were very happy to say it was the progressive district attorney making things unsafe. But even if that were the case, they just haven't been enforcing, not even traffic. They weren't defunded at all. After Covid, people started speeding around the empty streets and they didn't stop even after traffic picked up again. They need to fire the department and start over, like what happened in Georgia in 2004.
Tech actually did a measure of good for the city, at the expense of making it a really expensive place to live and bringing in a highly transient population of tech workers who "put in a few years" for a career launchpad. The tech companies threw their weight around and got some things built. However, a lot of the surplus funds that went into the government went into "programs" of the Urban Alchemy sort, and tech workers weren't in it for the long term and voted with the national narratives, not for direct investment in the neighborhoods. So, mostly, measures that favored landowners under progressive guises passed.
And that brings us to today, where it might actually come to pass that the city has to cut something for once. But they've made so many things in the budget earmarked that it'll probably be the wrong things that get cut first.
This is a great comment that comes from someone who is knowledgeable about local government. Same thing happens here In Baltimore. They call it poverty pimping, or poverty industrial complex
- Sf closed schools for one year and half during the COVID causing large number of families to move out. And these are people who are contrablance to ultra liberals.
- Housing crisis: Corruption within the city's permit process has resulted in the need to hire "accelerators," which exacerbates the housing crisis.
- Public education: The public school system is facing significant difficulties and is in desperate need of improvement.
- Drug policy: The implementation of safe drug consumption sites has inadvertently worsened the city's drug problem.
- Street closures: Restricting vehicle access on certain streets has negatively impacted businesses and inadvertently facilitated the spread of homeless encampments.
- Small business challenges: Overly stringent regulations, often driven by the "virtue signaling" of the super wealthy, have created a hostile environment for small businesses.
- Progressive District Attorney: The DA's policies have led to policing issues, resulting in a surge of crimes such as robberies.
- Homelessness: Despite significant spending on homelessness, inefficiencies and corruption have hindered progress. Furthermore, "virtue signaling" has taken precedence over effective solutions.
- BART safety: Following a police shooting on BART several years ago, a reduction in policing has made the transit system less safe, deterring people from using it to visit San Francisco.
These issues may be interrelated or independent, but each contributes to the city's current struggles.
- Drug Crisis: Fentanyl crisis which is a US-made drug, widely accessible, and is affecting all America, exacerbating the homeless problem.
- SFO subsidizing addiction: On average $336 in grants given to homeless [2], many of whom are addicts, plus policies that allow crime for retail goods that are then fenced to support addiction. County Adult Assistance Programs (CAAP): Eligible San Franciscans can receive up to $687 a month from CAAP as well as a wide range of additional services and assistance. CalFresh (Food Stamps): All individuals who meet certain income requirements can receive up to $250 monthly for food assistance.
[2] According to the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, as of 2021, the average amount of General Assistance (GA) provided to individuals experiencing homelessness in San Francisco was $336 per month.
> The implementation of safe drug consumption sites has inadvertently worsened the city's drug problem.
"Inadvertently." Nice one.
> These issues may be interrelated or independent, but each contributes to the city's current struggles.
I don't see how any reasonable person could not see that these things are all closely related. The inequality, due to the unaffordable housing, leading to rampant homelessness, drug use, and crime, to an almost-complete abdication of prosecution for these crimes, in an effort to be "equitable," and now... considering paying reparations for slavery!? You really don't see a thread here? Really!?
I was trying to be politically correct here on HN. Even though I really tried to tone down my anger (yes anger) and be political my post is still downvoted to hell.
There are some really really strong forces preventing change in SF.
That strikes me as a cherry-picked statistic. San Francisco is one of the most crime-ridden cities in America.
> San Franciscans face about a 1-in-16 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime, which makes the city more dangerous than 98 percent of US cities, both small and large.
SF's homicide rate is low, lower in fact than Miami.
But, its non-violent crime and property crime numbers are through the roof which makes it feel incredibly unsafe.
Miami, on the other hand, actually has a higher homicide rate than SF but because the streets are clean and property crime is much much lower it feels far safer than SF. Also, to be honest, for people reading hacker news, homicides are an incredibly rare black swan event, unlike property crime which you experience almost daily in SF. So, it makes sense for this crowd to have a place higher utility on low property crime than on low homicides. And I'm not judging, I moved to Miami and couldn't be happier with that decision.
It also matters a lot how the parties in the homicide are related, no? If it is people not knowing each other it is much more scary (and worse I would argue) than if it is something like iside circles of organized crime.
Exactly. I suspect (without much evidence) that most murders in Miami are gang related, so even less likely to affect HN readers whereas in SF it feels more random.
Dunno if that's true - the murders that happen in SoBe during Black Beach Week aren't usually gang related, it's usually some drunk idiot with a gun and a fancy rental car trying to flex or show off, and someone willing to take the bait. Sad, but that's the reality.
The murders that happen in my part of town are usually drug-related, like an OD or, in the case of my neighbor, a drunk and jealous girlfriend with access to a firearm.
Also a Miami resident (of 7 years), I lived in Oakland in 2014 and spent a lot of time in SF.
Parts of Miami are definitely cleaner, and some parts of Miami are pretty bad too, if not worse (parts of Wynwood, particularly south of the Wynwood Arcade used to be filled with homeless tents; and that's to say nothing of Liberty City, Little Haiti, etc.. ). However, Miami looks nicer but in many aspects there's some real trash beyond the facade. My building is under 5 years old, in a great (and growing) part of town, yet has had multiple murders in it. I used to live at Icon Bay, which had a literal drug lord living in one of the penthouses until there was a large-scale raid that forced him out. The FBI literally has a unit in my complex because they are here all the time - drug rings, prostitution rings, kidnapping, etc... are all happening right under your nose, but since the perps drive a Benz and walk around in a $250 pair of sneakers, it's less in-your-face (and more socially accepted) than some homeless dude in the Tenderloin shooting up heroin and taking a shit on the sidewalk. One guy in my elevator line was moving weed by the pound on a regular basis like it was nothing, and I had no idea until the property manager pointed out that they had recently been arrested on felony drug charges. Another in my building wears an ankle monitor yet owns a fleet of exotic cars. It's so much harder to tell here than anywhere else I've lived....until you know what to look for.
And that's to say nothing of the outrageous amount of scams here, particularly medicare/medicaid fraud. I'd take the homeless guy who shits on the sidewalk any day over the guy who stole millions from medicare and drives around in a Ferrari.
At least in SF/Bay Area, you can tell who the trashy folks are, and who the mentally ill people are. In Florida, they are allowed to scam the government, drive around in flashy cars, and better yet - they can buy guns and carry them around, loaded, without a permit.
This is 100% consistent with my experience in Miami.
But, personally, I'd rather have the medicare-fraud-guy than the shits-on-the-street guy in my neighborhood. The former hurts me a little no matter where they live, the latter hurts me a lot but only if they are nearby.
> 7.1 per 100,000.[1] This is a large increase in recent years.
There were 10 more in 2022 than in 2014[0], which was the low point for homicide rates nationally[1]. The absolute number is fairly flat and per-capita rates are well down on 2000s levels[2].
I visited LA in the early '00s. I was driving somewhere and when my friend gave me directions there was an exit where he basically said 'don't get off there, even just to turn around - that's how bad it is'.
To be fair though, I've lived in areas that were next door to top 5 murder/capita rates throughout the 90s-00s and they were all heavy drug and gang areas you knew to avoid. Most of those have also been cleaned up as property values have sky rocketed triggering development.
> SF homicide rate is close to the national average.
That is in of itself not alarming. An average city would have an average homicide rate: That's what averages are. It's only alarming if the city has (a) one of the lowest homicide rates nationally, or (b) one of the highest homicide rates nationally. Being average just means that it's the middle of the pack.
- If it's genuine: There's nothing to worry about. Extreme paranoia about (a) is in this case a false positive.
- If it's fraudulent: They're moving the sources of homicide out of their jurisdiction and onto somewhere else. Or they're increasing enforcement, in which case there may be increased false positives as a consequence.
Many of the other comments are missing the point. It's ultimately because there are a lot of desperate people in SF. The bay area has the highest homelessness incidence in the country. Mental health services are poor to non-existent. The city is full of people with no options, no healthcare, and no support system. We could criminalize homelessness even more, and brutalize the desperate with more police interventions, but that's a lazy and unsympathetic explanation for why this is happening. Society has failed the poor and SF is exhibit A.
This. In europe we treat sick people, in the US they leave them on the streets, and then task the police with beating them regularly.
I live in europe, in a nice house. We don't have any guns in our house, and we don't fear random weirdos trying to break into our house, because our society takes care of and treats sick people. Because we are not scaring and harrassing them all over the place, they aren't running rampant around areas of our city.
I don't care about having health insurance, because I already have it as a citizen, paid for with my taxes. If I'm fired from my job, I still have health insurance.
Surely resources for people living in poverty are no longer necessary for someone once those resources have the desired effect and they stop living in poverty?
Looks to me that the logical alternatives to means-tested aid are either no resources for anybody, which seems undesirable, or resources for everybody, no matter how well-off they are already, which seems wasteful. What do you suggest instead?
Are all those homeless originally from SF, or do they migrate there?
If it's the latter then I assume that social services are just overwhelmed?
I'm pretty sure that if I was made homeless tomorrow, and knew I had no prospect of pulling myself out of that situation, I'd migrate to somewhere with a climate like that of SF.
The overwhelmingly vast majority migrate. Some of them might have had a sublet apartment or lived at a friend's couch for a while before becoming homeless.
So the statistics say "most homeless lived in SF prior to becoming homeless", but if you actually check local school records you know they didn't grow up here.
In addition to the year-round mild climate, SF's local laws (and enforcement or lack thereof, e.g. legalizing theft of less than $1000 or intentionally spreading HIV) attracts desperate people, as well as people who simply enjoy the lifestyle, from all over the US, by rewarding them for doing what they do.
Basic "supply and demand" also applies to crime, playground needles and sidewalk turds: if you lower the "price" (punishment) at constant demand (people who want to steal or shoot up in public), the supply increases.
You’re putting a lot of stock into SF’s failures, but keep in mind that other cities ship their homeless to SF, and as a result, SF gets a disproportionate share of homeless.
Perspective of an SF homeowner and resident for 20 years. I also raise young kids here.
In 2000, there was observably more crime everywhere, but rents were cheap and as a young person I enjoyed the relative lawlessness. Market St used to be nothing but adult theaters and shady import shops. Things are 1000% NICER in ALL areas of the city. The transformation of China Basin has been incredible.
But you have to put all the down-and-out people somewhere. We squeezed them out of many central refuge areas (Tenderloin, 6th St., Fillmore, Mission) and then expected instant gentrification.
TL;DR... SF: far from perfect, but definitely not on a downward slope.
Mark Rober has a series where he builds fake packages with cameras, stink bombs, etc. Goal is to get vengeance against car thieves in SF since police do nothing.
part of the problem is the city is refusing to arrest Honduran fentanyl dealers due to sanctuary city laws
the other part of the problem is there's a certain minority demographic who are responsible for 80% of the violent crime. Yes, it is racist to point this out but reality is racist. Europe doesn't have much of this demographic.
There's no good solution to this. 3-strikes laws from the 90s kept this in check but they all got rolled back as racist. Current progressive thinking is be lenient on violent crime and treat the perpetrator better than the victim. This is proving disastrous
Either American cities go back to harsh enforcement or they will continue to descend into Mogadishu-like chaos
California is only about a hundred and fifty years old. It was like Siberia, but with an awesome climate. Gold was discovered and a hundreds of thousands of 49ers flooded the state and San Francisco became a major port city overnight. For the next hundred and fifty years, right up until about 2001, the city has served as the "drain" for the rest of the country. San Francisco is and always has been an open-air lunatic asylum (e.g. His Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I.) The Tenderloin is bedlam, a little slice of hell raised to the surface of the Earth and allowed to fester in broad daylight.
In short, nothing happened to make SF this way, it's always been this way. The idea that SF is some left-wing exemplar is just as foolish as the idea that is was a good place to start start-ups. It's all hype. SF is kinda nasty. (Go check out what was going down here a few decades ago. But be warned, it's pretty fucked up. It's a story that culminates in the events at Jonestown. If you don't already know what that is, then you probably should not look it up.)
This will receive howls of disapproval. It's so obvious, like climate change being fake and Trump secretly battling a cabal of pedo vaccine-peddling warmongers. How could you possibly believe something different?
But I've heard similar about Chicago, Paris and Bradford.
> Conservative media for decades have painted America’s third-largest city as a national hub of gun violence and gang activity, crippled by what they see as political correctness thwarting real solutions.
> Emerson stated, “In Britain, it’s not just no-go zones, there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go… In parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to religious Muslim attire.”
>These segments were widely mocked across social media and the station eventually issued an apology, stating that there was “no credible information to support the assertion”.
As a European you just have to look at all the claims of how "communist" California is to get an idea how detached from reality these people are.
> Can someone very briefly wrap this whole "SF is broken"-situation up for somebody from Europe?
Id be really careful of taking anything people here say seriously. Its a politically divisive topic and the stuff ive seen in the comments are people getting riled up. The right wing loves to hate san francisco, the media loves to hate it too. Please consider there are multiple sides, people are being manipulated by media and outrage
Arresting people doesn't address the reason they committing crimes in the first place. The issue is poverty and wealth inequality.
The truth is tech ruined the city. SF used to be a city of misfits, who don't usually have high income. Tech workers started flooding the city, drove up rents, and these misfits ended up homeless. Once you're homeless it's a struggle, some get back on their feet but some start abusing drugs. Government support programs are terribly run, so nobody uses them. Let the situation go on for a few years and you get SF.
It's not just SF though, it's any city in North America that has had booming rents the past couple decades. Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, SF.
If you look at Tokyo, rents are low and jobs are plentiful. The biggest city in the world has less than 4000 homeless people living in it.
It’s just simply false. Crimes in SF were bad even before the dot com era. Remember the roof top Koreans?
I’d give police & drug policies more credit for this
but still, it does not prove much of a bias in my point of view. SF was known for homelessness & crime & drug crisis back before the tech boom. it used to be the veterans with mental illness and nowadays teens or common people with such.
I'm imagining running through a WW2 field doing triage and telling the battle wounded that the doctors are behind you but you are making sure that no one offends them verbally. If you take the issue seriously it is more offensive to waste energy on what we decide is an appropriate label for other people.
1) Various US policies have driven up rates of destructive drug use (i.e. it's easier to get truly toxic drugs like Meth and Fent than it is to get lower harm, but equally potent drugs)
2) Various US policies have made life miserable for people who fall victim to that drug use
3) SF has nice weather and is generally more tolerant of people on drugs (California is the capital of working professionals with hard-drug habits)
4) Given the above, if you're down on your luck and drug addicted in the US, SF, Seattle, and LA are the only logical places to live in
5) For political reasons (SF is the home of leading progressives like Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Kamala, etc.), there is a well-funded cultural apparatus trying to label SF as a failed state due to its own policies
Only millionaires can afford to live in SF now due to the tech money. This displaces the middle class and poor, and leads to homelessness and increased crime.
It may lead to homelessness but certainly not the only thing that does. In Austin you don't need to be a millionaire and the city takes 1 step forward 2 steps back with our homelessness problem.
“After reaching a peak of 1,115 per 100,000 residents in 1992, California’s violent crime rate steadily fell, reaching a 50-year low of 392 in 2014.”
“While the violent crime rate has fluctuated year-over-year, it has remained relatively stable this past decade—between 428 and 466, hovering near its 2010 level (440), when California embarked on major criminal justice reforms.”
“While violent and property crime rates increased in 2021, both remain relatively low”
The prevailing world view of SF and that part of California in general states that the root cause of crime is society at large, and not so much the individual criminal. In this world view a criminal is to be pitied and improved or perhaps just left alone rather than victimized by the state, not locked up.
Due to the absolute dominance of voters with this mentality, and the practice of electing prosecutorial positions that in other parts of the world would be professional appointees, they have repeatedly ended up with prosecutors that ran on a campaign of refusing to prosecute. This isn't specific to SF, it can also be seen in LA and New York. In fact one of the criticisms levelled at the Trump inditement is that the prosecutor in question campaigned specifically on prosecuting Trump (for whatever) and has now upgraded what would normally be a misdemeanor, whilst simultaneously downgrading many other types of crime.
In other words: politics, ideology, the usual suspects.
In general, the US has a major crime/homlessness problem due to the lack of a social safety net, poor drug & mental health policy, and homophobia.
California has much nicer weather than much of the US so homeless people move their or are just able to survive there. In some cases, right wing states purposely relocate their homeless to California.
America is currently experiencing a backlash against a broken justice system that tolerates police brutality, favors the rich, and is often racist. Unfortunately, this has probably resulted in an overcorrection in many places.
The previous point is exasperated by the fact that the Republican party, which in recent decades has been more oriented around "law and order", has become a far right party. Therefore, even if someone agrees with their candidate on crime, they may disagree with them on economics, LGBTQ rights, etc.
I don't know if this is true, but I've been told that unlike most other cities, much of SF's resources for helping homeless people is located in their downtown. That then results in the homeless problem being much more visible there.
In fairness, downtown SF SJ and Oakland were always a tad dicey even back in dot com days so most startups preferred to be in more expensive PA MV
Even East PA was the hood. Oakland was famous for riots
SF governance has always been terrible. Real estate has gotten so expensive that startups anxious to conserve runway are pushing deeper into bad neighborhoods that were once unthinkable
The nice thing about Bay Area is that everyone is on the "same page" (call it an echo chamber maybe)
You can go into any meeting and mention some technical thing like LangChain and everyone knows what u are talking about. No need to waste 15 minutes getting ppl up 2 speed. Outside the Bay Area, Europe etc. you'd mostly get blank stares, even in an accelerator or hub
Cities in California are artificial concepts that mainly exist because the people there decided they didn't want to share property taxes with the poorer people next door. EPA is the worst example, but also see Piedmont which is literally inside Oakland, and then see every single SoCal city that outsiders think are parts of Los Angeles.
a) They cut officers and drive them away. They had 2,160 officers and needed them. They are down to 1,651 officers (Sept 2022) Source: abc7news.com
b) The San Francisco DA allows many arrested to allowed to go free. They elected a special DA to allow people to go free. Not for all crimes, but many. This emboldens people because they see so many people released without trial or sentencing for their crimes, so they are emboldened to commit crimes.
The number of murders is very sad to see increased to such high levels.
Nothing will change. I was attacked in Christmas ‘21 in the Tenderloin, right after walking out of the KFC/Taco Bell on Eddy. Two cop cars drove by me and did nothing. It was only due to an ambulance finishing a run at Sutter and spotting me that I didn’t bleed out on the suitcase.
I have video, proof of damages physical and financial, eyewitnesses and the info of the men who attacked me. SFPD will not arrest them because Boudin refused to prosecute. New DA has not gotten back to me despite repeated attempts.
I wanted to build a life and have my family in SF, to contribute and make it the city I believe it to be, but I refuse to put people I love in that situation. I’ve left for Estonia and couldn’t be happier.
I don’t know your case, but it’s also possible that the police won’t make an arrest because police in America tend to go on low-key strike when a liberal prosecutor is elected, and then loudly proclaim that the DA is undermining the rule of law.
That articles raises all sorts of "selectively including information to push a narrative" red flags.
Eg, one police officer interviewed says:
> “I made two arrests two days in a row one week, and both turned into paperwork clusterfucks,” the former officer said. “When you’ve accumulated two or three use-of-force complaints in a week, you’ll say: ‘I just need to stop. I need to stop doing this.’”
The article later interprets it as "police officers opposed to the consent decree that McGinn negotiated [engaged] in underpolicing".
Which is technically accurate, but also... The article implies this is political retaliation, as in "we'll let people commit crimes, that will teach you", while the interviewed officer's reported experience is "when you get reprimanded and asked to fill time-consuming paperwork every time you do X, at some point you stop doing X". (Or you keep filling the paperwork, and therefore spend less time patrolling and responding to calls.)
Don't get me wrong, police brutality is a thorny problem and police often actively resists solving it. But when there's a tradeoff, if you act like the tradeoff only has one side and the other is that the people whose jobs you're trying to regulate are lazy corrupt assholes, you're not going to make a lot of progress on solving the problem.
They are not being forced to fill out that paperwork on their own time, it is part of their work shift for which they are compensated. I can think of no other occupation where an employee can refuse to fill out paperwork or refuse to do some other tedious task just because they don't like it and not get fired.
I always do my required paperwork but I admit I must have lost some money because I "forgot" some of my expense reports.
I also admit that a large part of why I often just walk during lunch breaks at clients instead of eating sometimes ridiculously good lunches might be because I hate collecting those papers/digital notes and have to force them into the accounting system at work.
Don't underestimate the dread of certain kinds of paperwork for certain kinds of people.
These "use-of-force complaints" didn't file themselves you know. Citizens actually spent their own time filing them (in addition perhaps to being subjected to the use of force), so you can't just dismiss them as an one-sided/asymmetric nuisance.
And while the officer's stance is not an outright "we'll let people commit crimes, that will teach you", it certainly comes close to "policing our style, or none at all".
This has happened in Minneapolis. Since George Floyd police in Minneapolis have effectively stopped doing their job. When one of their own is treated by the law like anyone else would be they retaliate by refusing to work. Police feel entitled to be free of genuine consequence for their actions. For example, police commit more domestic violence on average than non-police and rarely get arrested for it.
Seem that such corruption starts very innocuously. I remember police officer acquaintances saying being a cop means you can always use that fact to never get a speeding ticket. I never felt that they were shady people I think they are likely decent people with a difficult job, but something about that fact did sort of bothered me. I would like to think that a police officer driving very dangerously or even drunk would not being to get away with it that easily.
This would probably be a lot more rare if the Camden NJ option of "fire and replace the whole department" were invoked for underperformance and/or corruption.
Also politicians pass laws that citizens need to abide —they have specific carve outs for themselves allowing them to skirt laws (such as trading on insider information for members of Congress).
When they are treated like anyone else i.e. people who do not enforce the law they act like anyone else i.e. don't enforce the law, why would you expect anything else?
Ah yes, "I had an expectation that I could beat the hell out of people with no consequence when there was no call for violence." defense.
No one is complaining when a cop uses force, they are complaining when a cop goes out of their way to murder, torture, and beat the shit out of normal citizenry who often put up little to no fight.
Obviously it was hyperbole. Instead of addressing the essence of the point made you counter with this. Your response says much about how strong the argument you responded to is.
One should expect to live in a society in which police are not immune from breaking the law. When they mete out non judicial punishment then they should be held accountable for it in the same way I would be held accountable.
Depends on one's definition of punishment. I for one don't consider any use of force to be a punishment. The police's use of force to apprehend a suspect in crime or to prevent a crime in progress is not a punishment, IMHO. I'd rather live in a society that agrees with this so I don't live in SF or Minneapolis.
Obviously no one is saying force should never be utilized by the police. Are you unable to understand or imagine a police force functioning in such a way that they use reasonable force to apprehend suspects and don’t beat with impunity those that are already in custody? Police in Minneapolis murdered a suspect and the response to the offending officers being convicted by a jury was to stop doing their job and you appear think this is a reasonable response.
It is disheartening that you appear to be so willing to go along with with whatever police do all in the name of safety. Do you really view the world in such a way that you can’t comprehend having a police force that does it’s job without beating suspects who are already in custody?
Obviously we are listening to different people because people say just that in this very same thread. Also I don't see Escadrones de la Muerte being a problem in Minneapolis or anywhere in the US for that matter, so what extrajudicial punishment you are taking about if you don't mind my asking?
It appears to be you, who claimed that the police actions should be judged just like everyone else's here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35452473
Everyone else cannot really use force to arrest suspects and using force to prevent crime in progress is a very complicated matter for regular citizens too.
You do have a capacity for missing the point and context. The “this” in my first sentence referred to what someone said. Specifically police pulling back when challenged. No reasonable person thinks police should never use force and no one is declaring otherwise. Police doing illegal things with impunity is what people are decrying. Are you deliberately being obtuse?
> Everyone else cannot really use force to arrest suspects and using force to prevent crime in progress is a very complicated matter for regular citizens too.
In most states, anybody can use force to arrest criminals,
Of course the devil is in the details. I wouldn't risk my own neck by attempting a citizens arrest in a place like SF, because I think the prosecutors/etc there would be more interested in making an example out of me for daring to care, than punishing the actual criminal. Evidently the police of SF feel similar.
"suspects" != "criminals".
And we had just recently seen what happened to a gentleman who merely filmed such an arrest[1] of such a suspect, have not we? So yes, technically you can use force and do a citizen arrest if you don't care about consequences.
Actually, one should expect to live in a society where you do not get randomly stabbed and die in the street. This means that the spirit of law should reflect the necessity that arresting criminals gets higher priority than prosecuting cops.
In fact, by treating the two as the same, you commit a deep injustice, because a violent action does not get judged the same as its violent reaction.
This means that the spirit of law should reflect the necessity that arresting criminals gets higher priority than prosecuting cops.
I don’t think you understand the implications of what you just wrote. I thank you for stating this because it means we are in complete agreement. When a cop breaks the law they are in fact a criminal and, as you just stated, prosecuting criminals gets a high priority.
We agree. Criminals ought to be prosecuted. I’m glad you are in favor of prosecuting police who break the law.
So there's a tradeoff. Are you saying you would rather live in a high crime state, with tech founders being stabbed to death, than let them have their way?
It should be expected to have a police force that enforces the laws while not allowing police to mete out non judicial punishment. It’s possible for police to do their job without needing to beat whomever they want, whenever they want, without fear of prosecution.
> It should be expected to have a police force that enforces the laws while not allowing police to mete out non judicial punishment.
This is, actually, completely impossible. A very simple example: an active shooter situation requires an immediate non judicial punishment. Therefore, the laws need explicit carve-outs for cops.
Good, I agree. Then you may also agree that your original statement
> When one of their own is treated by the law like anyone else would be they retaliate by refusing to work
was incorrect: if you were going to be arrested for killing an active shooter, then you would not do it. And it would be wrong to charaterize this as a retaliation, as it is a rational decision.
You are good at missing the point. Clearly what is being talked about are things like beating suspects after they are in custody. We are not talking about justified use of force that police are legally allowed to do. If I was filed beating a handcuffed person I’d be arrested and prosecuted. The same does not usually apply to police.
Please read what is written in the context it is written in.
> Clearly what is being talked about are things like beating suspects after they are in custody.
Pure invention, if you want to restrain your context then use precise language not a large variety of hyperboles like "It’s possible for police to do their job without needing to beat whomever they want, whenever they want."
In the end, I will sum up this discussion from my POV: you view cops broadly as criminals waiting to get caught (they are domestic abusers after all!) and if I were one I would never want to police your neighborhood.
I suspect this all comes from you living a sheltered life, and because your view of police and, especially, of criminals is informed by TV shows. And yes, "gotcha!", those aren't the same, no matter how many screenwriters enjoy subverting expectations.
It's quite clear to me that the application of your ideas has given this headline, so I'm comfortable ending this discussion on this note: I hope that your anti-cop views are eliminated ASAP through the voting booth.
The Supreme Court agreed that police departments can go out of their way to only hire stupid people, and refuse to hire people who are smart enough to do the job well.
This isn't just limited to intelligence. Police departments will not hire people who will do the job properly, and they'll force out the people who maintain high ethics. That's why people say there's a systemic issue with policing in this country.
That is plain wrong. From your article the rationale for the police department was the following:
> New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
This is visibly not about "refusing to hire people who are smart enough to do the job well", but
> a rational way to reduce job turnover
Furthermore, since they interviewed only people who score higher than 20, where 21 is said to be equivalent to an IQ of 104, then those aren't stupid people.
Finally, I will say that the conspiracy theory that police departments are pro-crime and try do their best to do their job the wrong way seems out of touch with reality.
A great many police are not anti-crime when it comes to one of their own. For instance, police engage in domestic violence at a higher rate than the general population and are rarely arrested for it. Police violence, and we are talking about excessive violence, is well documented and so is the fact that they rarely go to jail for it. We are talking about police committing crimes and not violence committed lawfully while doing their job.
In case you aren’t aware, people can only hold a couple of jobs and one time and it’s ok for them to critique policies and actions of people in jobs they don’t have or ever intend to have. I can criticize a politician’s performance even though I don’t ever intend to become one. There is nothing illogical or hypocritical about this.
in a democracy, if you point the finger at something and come to a bad conclusion, and then demand a ridiculous, unworkable solution, it is my duty as a fellow citizen to inform you and other voters that you are extremely wrong! That's what I'm trying to do. There's actually no super policeman hiding out there that can do what you say, and guarantee that across a population of over 300 million people there will never be violent interactions between the police and the citizenry. It is insane to suggest that.
Clearly you are incapable of a reasoned, nuanced discussion on this topic. You should try reading what has been written dispassionately. No is suggesting that there should never be a violent interaction between police and suspects. Clearly the discussion at had deals with police doing things like torturing suspects (read about Chicago police and death penalty cases there), and beating apprehended and subdued suspects.
You are taking what is written and applying an interpretation that clearly is not intended or made. You act as if those wanting reform seek out the most extreme, nonsensical standards. You are unreasonable in your responses. I hope for you that you may one day learn and understand logic and nuance.
They did that in Camden I believe. You got less crime ("I was right!" you say) and more complaints about police violence, more altercations ("Oh no! I wasted 10 years!" says you if you tried it). It turns out that freshman police are really gung ho and more likely to chase criminals down and beat them up, while veterans are more likely to sit back and wait for backup. If your problem was the police acting violent with impunity, then this doesn't solve the problem. You can punish them, and then you are at square one again.
“A tradeoff” is certainly a strange way of phrasing it. It could also be said that they’re holding hostage the safety of the public in order to get their way.
I'm not going to be gaslit into thinking that desiring to live in a community without human excrement on the streets or random stabbings, via increased policing is 'licking the boot' or 'smoking crack'.
I think it would be better to simply replace those cops, return to community policing, make the police department a 4 year degree program, and ban all that silly "warrior" training and displays of things like Punisher logos.
I don't think "let them hold us hostage by refusing to work" is the right answer.
Even when police make arrests, they are back on the streets. Any rational police officer is bound to wonder, why make the arrest in the first place that only puts them at risk if nothing after them will actually be done.
"Why am I putting out this wildfire? A new one is just going to start later. It's pointless to fight these fires when year after year they just keep coming back".
It's the job they chose and trained to do. If they don't like it, they can get a new job.
Someone is starting these fires. The police go in and take care of it, the DAs literally release them with zero or nearly zero consequences to the offender and the next day (often literally) they are starting "fires" again.
We are human, not machines, we are not idealized automatons.
"year after year"? People have gotten arrested and then released to commit more crimes with a turnaround of less than a day. It'd be fantastic if they all got even 1 year in prison. A better analogy would be that there's no sense wasting a small handheld fire extinguisher on a large wildfire.
What kind of alternative do you imagine? A world where the police arrest every criminal once and they're done?
There are few jobs on Earth where you fix everything once and it stays fixed forever. Almost everyone is working to keep a type of entropy at bay. Doctors help people get healthy who get sick again, I fix outages that will get caused again, and police need to arrest people who do crimes and will get released again.
I expect there to be a consequence given for breaking the law. That's the "radical" alternative I imagine. Instead we get a release directly after offense.
If you go see a doctor to help you get healthy, and you feel better right after, but the very next day you're sick with the same condition, do you think the doctor really helped?
> police in America tend to go on low-key strike when a liberal prosecutor is elected
It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with demoralization. Most cops simply want to do their job and not consistently be undermined or called liars.
If you're suggesting that there's a bit of militarization in modern policing I'm not going to argue with you. At some point police departments went from being keepers of the peace to aggressive enforcement units. Many departments even have and utilize surplus military equipment. Personally I'd rather have more Andy Griffith and less Stacey Koon.
However that's not what I meant in terms of undermining. If a DA undermines the work of the police force they are supposed to support that has negative consequences on the actions of the policing body. This would happen regardless of whether or not the policing body were true peace keepers or aggressors. I would argue that in fact the DAs actions affect the PD-types-we-like more than the bully types.
The job of the DA isn't to support the police department.
A DA needs to allocate resources towards cases that are significant to the community, aligned with the desires of the people who voted the DA into office.
I have a boss who doesn't always "support" what I think should be done. And that's fine, because he has different goals that he tries to communicate to my team, but in the end, he answers to his boss. I don't have the full picture on why he makes decisions, how he allocates budgets etc. I just have insights from what he tells me and what I see.
But I'm a professional, and I don't get my feelings hurt when my boss tells me to do something different, or to do something I don't agree with. Yet cops are just different. In the US they get kid glove treatment when they break the law, either from fellow cops or the courts. They get idolized by TV shows as the only thing keeping people safe when they do little to actually prevent crime. And they continue to claim being underfunded, overworked, under appreciated and under constant threat of death at the hands of "civilians", since they tend to break communities into three categories (perps, civilians, and cops).
It’s hilarious that progressives refuse to blame homeless people or addicts for any kind of personal failings (it’s the system!) while simultaneously blaming police personally, saying they’re “quiet quitting”. Is it about systems or not?
Prevention is deservedly mentioned first. Prosecution is not mentioned at all, though the last point could be read as a veiled rebuke of those who believe it's a primary goal.
"The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it."
There's plenty for police to do in preventing, protecting, and investigating, even if no prosecution occurs. The problem with US policing (and the associated justice/prison systems) is that these original principles have been completely replaced by a punitive and largely anti-community attitude or approach. And it doesn't work. Just as higher medical costs don't correlate very well with better health outcomes, intensive policing and imprisonment as they're practiced here do not lead to better public safety. Sometimes it's not enough to do more of what you're already doing, and a paradigm shift - by it's nature something that can feel very scary and might even produce worse results in the short term - is necessary.
Knowledge of prosecution is part of the prevention though - some would say it is the most important part, since police can’t physically be everywhere preventing crime.
If you just remove prosecution from the equation of policing, without making any other changes, you won’t be left with a better system but a worse one.
> Knowledge of prosecution is part of the prevention though
Agreed. To be clear, I think a blanket refusal to prosecute is a terrible idea. I was responding to a specific question - "why bother arresting" - in a context where arrest would have been easy and at least locally beneficial.
> If you just remove prosecution from the equation
Nowhere close to anything I suggested or implied. I was merely pointing out that successful prosecution is not the only or even primary purpose of policing. My interlocutor's implication that we can only continue policing with a focus on prosecution or give up on policing at all is a pernicious false dichotomy. We can police differently. Prosecution is a part of that, but only when alternatives have been tried and failed.
>Prosecution is a part of that, but only when alternatives have been tried and failed.
We don’t disagree, but so far humanity as a whole has been unable to find as efficient prevention method as prosecution. Indeed it would be a better society which could abandon the measure without negative repercussions.
When most people don’t do their jobs, they get disciplined, I don’t understand why cops get a pass. SFPD has a hard job but « passed in front of someone who got stabbed and did nothing » should get your pay auto-docked.
Given that in SF the liberal prosecutor was, in fact, undermining the rule of law and de facto legalized stealing, I'm inclined to side with the cops here. Cops don't prevent crime, they only catch criminals after the fact. If the DA doesn't charge them, then all arresting does is give them a day off. I wouldn't arrest people either if I knew they wouldn't be charged.
The DA, Chesa Boudin, prosecuted various crimes at the same or higher rate than his predecessor.
Over the last 7 years, arrests by sfpd have gone down. This includes before the election of the prosecutor that "legalized stealing" (how?).
Chesa specifically complained about this a few times, trying to work with sfpd on why they were simply bringing less criminals to his office.
The common argument is that the police were doing as they promised: the union came out hard against Boudin during his election, and then held public safety hostage until the public finally recalled Boudin.
I know you were contrasting arrest with prosecution, but "only arrest" is still an idea that shouldn't be put forward even in that context. A cop's job is to preserve public safety. Sometimes that does and should mean arrest, whether or not that arrest leads to prosecution. More often it should mean prevention. That might just mean being visible as a deterrent. It might mean intervening to arbitrate or de-escalate a situation before it leads to a criminal act. It might mean investigating suspicious activity. It might mean helping a desperate person find the aid they need before their desperation turns into criminality. The possibilities are almost endless. If police did their job according to Peel's original principles, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind that the DA's actions are irrelevant.
You are stuck in the normal paradigm of cop arrests criminal -> criminal goes away for several years. But there is a middle step, DA prosecutes criminal, that went missing in SF. So instead, it's, cop arrests criminal -> DA refuses to prosecute -> criminal back on streets tomorrow. So really it is the DA that is responsible for 99% of the crime prevention effect of arresting criminals. Would you do your job if you knew that no one else on your team was doing theirs? That's what you are asking the cops to do.
> A cops job is only to arrest criminals, if they are prosecuted should not be their concern.
Police departments don't have enough resources to arrest every criminal, so they should try to maximize their effectiveness and avoid wasting what resources they do have by deprioritizing arrests of criminals who they know won't be prosecuted.
"A cop should risk his life to effect an arrest, even if that act will be immediately undermined by the prosecutor and will have no measurable difference on society."
Are you saying they shouldn't value their own lives, but instead behave as instruction-following robots.
Cops aren’t really risking their lives. Statistically they’re more likely to die of Covid than they are of trying to arrest someone. They have armor in their uniforms, carry multiple manners of debilitating a person from multiple ranges. This puts them at a massive advantage compared to your average homeless person or impoverished criminal, who likely can’t even afford a gun.
I don’t know what you mean here. I’m not trying to be stupid, I just have no idea what you’re trying to get at. I don’t see what either point has to do with my statement.
The idea that police officers are in constant danger of coming home in a body bag is copaganda. Police work is one of the safer occupations. We don't idolize the guys/gals who pick up our trash, but they have higher death rates.
As a developer, I would get pretty upset and demoralized if someone came and periodically reverted all my commits. Imagine if I actually had to risk my life to make those "commits"?
It's not hard to see why they stay in the car and keep driving if the arrests don't even lead to prosections.
Frankly, if your commits were being loudly criticized as harming/killing people then you have no right to sulk off and stop doing your job because they were reverted. And it also doesn’t excuse you to feel entitled to remain employed while you stopped doing your job. If you felt that way, quit so someone who is willing to do the work can get hired.
Additionally, being a cop is a pretty safe job! It’s not even top 10 most dangerous jobs. Most injuries are because of the cops own traffic violations or, more recently, Covid.
> Frankly, if your commits were being loudly criticized as harming/killing people then you have no right
No, my commits are perfectly fine, as are the vast majority of my peers' code. Only an extremely small number of complaints are generated, across a number of commits many magnitudes larger -- and not all of those complaints are of equal merit.
> If you felt that way, quit so someone who is willing to do the work can get hired.
Unfortunately, recruiting is down across most (maybe all) major cities. Maybe the would-be recruits see it differently than you -- with nothing to stake -- do?
Unfortunately, your commits aren’t fine, very likely you are covering for your murdering peer and deserve equal criticism for doing so. It’s well known that cops that fight corruption in the police force end up forced out, institutionalized under false pretenses, or straight up executed by other cops. This leaves the only police remaining the corrupt ones, either perpetuating corruption first hand or second handedly watching it go down and not doing anything.
Unfortunately, the matter of fact is, the police force decide to stop enforcing laws when they’re criticized for problems the police force caused. It’s childish. Police steal more money than actual amounts of theft in the country through civil forfeiture. Police are more likely to commit domestic violence. Police hired defense to argue that they don’t have any obligation to protect individuals or intervene in crime, instead of punishing cops who shirk their work. And then when any cops are critiqued the entire force stops doing their jobs and blames the critics for it.
I'm going to steer this conversation back on track, and not chase down these non-facts you're asserting.
The question is: why aren't police making as many arrests (commits). And the answer I'm proposing is: because DAs are reverting their work.
They are not reverting their work only in the cases of supposed police misconduct, so your counterpoint about bad commits is a diversion from the point. The DAs are not doing their job because they believe, frankly, that criminal justice as constructed cannot work. They don't believe a lot of crimes should be prosecuted even. For example, in DC something like 60% of gun possession cases are dropped. In Chicago and Philly it's higher than 90%. That has nothing to do with police brutality (bad commits) [0]
(And btw, these are the same people who think guns should be banned flat out)
What that means is the PM (district attorney) has the developers working on a product they have no intention of shipping (actual justice). Police are people too, and nobody is going to do purposeless work. You wouldn't at your job, and neither would they at their much more dangerous and stressful job. Nor is anyone in a great rush to sign up for this job, despite offered salaries being very high right now.
Police misconduct is a distraction from this point, unless you think 90% of gun possession charges were generated abusively -- which would be a completely innumerate claim.
If we're going with the developer metaphor, it's more like you're making a bunch of low quality PRs that aren't adding any value to the product and the maintainer is choosing not to merge some of them.
It's more like you're a pre-2012 glibc contributor who's making a bunch of high quality PRs that would add significant value to the product but Ulrich Drepper is choosing not to merge most of them for no good reason.
That's a extremely naive way to look at police. But if you think the police do "high quality" anything then you're probably not the kind of person who could be persuaded otherwise.
Is there even a single cop working in SF right now that was hired when there wasn't a liberal prosecutor? I want to say no. This is not some recent development that caught a force full of good ol' boys off guard.
Yep same here. Estonia is a dream compared to Bay Area even with the cold winters and old Soviet buildings (which means lots of cheap rent btw). San Francisco has a powerful marketing and promotion engine - and yes it really is a gorgeous city in the late summer - but the weather otherwise is pretty miserable - almost as cold and rainy as Seattle
I'm sure - given the option - any US west coast tech startup would much prefer to operate in some quaint old town in Eastern Europe with the cafes etc. and no need to hassle with a car. Unfortunately the venture community infrastructure / legal etc. is stuck on west coast - and AI is only reinforcing that
I'm sure Eastern Europe is great, but if you want to remain in the US there are many other great places to live in the Midwest and American South. You do need a car, which is fine or even desirable for many people (like me).
I agree. There's dozens of fantastic little cities in the USA, so many to explore. SF sucks, to be sure. Which is sad, because it didn't used to~~and has potential :( ! LA is great (unless you like to complain about traffic). But there's so so many options, and with remote work you should be fine. If your company has to be based in Silicon Valley tho for the Imperial Credits, then--whaddayagonnado? I guess.
I could only give places that pique my interest and seem good to me. But I don't know what you need specifically. I recommend you get on wikipedia and search a bunch of little places across multiple states, and also search google for things like, "Best towns to live in USA", or "greenest cities to live in USA", or "most outdoorsy cities to live in USA" to start getting lists and knowing more. That's how I started learning about it.
I also really enjoyed learning about all the little places, and it's a bonafide research rabbit hole if that's your sort of thing: weather, taxes, sports, politics, culture, economy, transport, food, history, lifestyle, geography. There's such variety and distinctness! I mean, you can cut the pie anyway you like and I bet there's somewhere in the US to suit you.
You’re getting downvoted but this is a real thing: for instance, in Belfast, almost everybody is white, so if you’re not white, you’re probably gonna feel a little bit uncomfortable in some places. Just like if you’re white and you go live in the suburbs in Abu Dhabi maybe you’re gonna feel a little bit uncomfortable because you know you’re not part of the dominant race. This is just the unfortunate reality of humans as we are stupidly tribal and racist inherently.
People moving into Forsyth over the last decade are transplants from up north and other parts of Atlanta are part of the “professional class” as the population has grown. They are the “college educated white suburban” group that have completely different attitudes than the people who have been in Forsyth forever.
Yeah, I mean there’s definitely crazy people in LA but they’re not all crazy homeless mentally ill vagrant criminals on the streets late at night sometimes the crazy people are the people you meet in a bar: the crazy Asian girl who you happen to a few seats from, who is drunk, starts slurring at you then when you ignore her slaps you out of nowhere, and has to be taken away by her friends. The bartender apologizes… but that would be assault If a guy did it…girls get away with that shit, with a shrug: “she’s drunk” as if it makes it okay, when it doesn’t. Not a good lesson for people. Or the crazy white who starts chatting to you while you’re playing pool, who’s trying to pretend he knows you but has no clue and starts rambling saying he’s spreading rumors to ruin peoples reputations in China, in Thailand, in Australia.
But even with such nutcases, who you can safely ignore, because they’re just out of their heads clearly, I really like LA.
I find the street people in LA are not as dirty or aggressive as the worst street people in San Francisco. It’s like a Street people in LA still see you is kind of kin. But the street people in San Francisco: you guys are on two sides of divide like you’re from different worlds.
I remember Street people from both cities but I can’t remember like the specific places. I just recall that during the day, San Francisco is a lot worse than LA. More street people more aggressive, more dirty.
This was pre-pandemic, though, so maybe things have changed a lot. Hopefully for the better in all aspects!
Much more likely to die or be seriously injured in a car accident. People get shot and stabbed in Midwestern cities too.
Not to say there aren’t great places to live in the rest of the US. Aside from the sometimes idiotic politics at the statehouse I’ve been fine living in Ohio, for example.
Well let's not trivialize accidents either. They're still unnecessary and they can be intentional. Off the top of my head the number of road rage incidents involving violence is around 100/200 per year and stabbings are around 1,000. Road rage numbers are increasing as well.
In terms of probability of getting hurt, car crashes dwarf being stabbed so a flight to safety that requires more driving is almost surely increasing your odds of being harmed. Likely the numbers are underreported as well. But headlines get attention. Family of four t-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver just doesn't get the clicks that CTO stabbed in San Francisco does.
Not saying this is wrong, but it's kind of misleading the same way electoral college maps are misleading. People moving to the south working in tech aren't moving to the vast areas that are plagued with issues. They're moving to metros like Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, etc., which are on par with life expectancy in California in that map.
fair enough ... or Miami ... you're still talking about states where there's lively debate about banning books, banning abortion, putting the 10 commandments and creationism in every classroom (and guns), making it effectively legal to shoot certain people or run them down with your car ... places with not-great schools and health care and culture, with cops and 'community orgs' dedicated to keeping certain people in their place. if you're a tech company and want to attract the best and brightest without regard for color or creed, women, lgbtq, people who think and look different, it's an issue, even if it's in a comparative island of receptivity.
> making it effectively legal to shoot certain people or run them down with your car
> cops and 'community orgs' dedicated to keeping certain people in their place
Come now, that's as exaggerated as saying coastal states have no law enforcement anymore and have taxpayer-funded abortion factories. If there is such a thing as drinking Fox News koolaid, what you're saying is the MSNBC equivalent.
Do you spend a lot of time in the South? I live in a Deep South state as an immigrant and visible ethnic minority. People of different races get along very well here. I used to live in a major coastal metropolis that had BLM signs on every other lawn but effectively zero black people actually living in those neighborhoods. Here? Effectively zero BLM signs, but black and white and other races rubbing shoulders as neighbors every day.
For the past few decades, if you asked black professional athletes what city they were most likely to face overt racism in, it was Boston, not a Southern city.
I hear you, I don't live in South but I know people who do, and I see a lot of the mentality of, shoot first, ask questions later, and it goes exponential where someone who looks different is involved
I don't disagree that people should keep cooler heads all around. Perhaps it's the miserable humid heat that drives all that behavior (and it's been observed all around the world that hot weather is correlated with more murders).
Your two anecdotes, by the way, show no evidence that the people involved were of different races.
point taken, there's definitely racism, anti-Asian violence, militias and Proud Boys and idiots in the North. The totality of circumstances and history and socioeconomics and state-sponsored nonsense and fundamentalist nonsense and gun culture just hits a little different in the South.
Why Estonia of all the places? I'm assuming you guys were in the situation to choose whenever you wanted to move. Western Europe, Signapore, Australia, Switzerland? Why Estonia?
Most of those places you mention are relatively hostile to (foreign) startups, Estonia in comparison tries to encourage foreigners to open companies there.
How open is it to foreign workers on, say, 12-month contracts? Not that it's something I'm looking for right now but knowing it might be a possibility in a few year's time would be encouraging.
They have a specific digital nomad visa in addition to other visa types. I came on an ordinary visa some years ago (American citizen working in tech) and found it quite easy to get visa and bank stuff sorted, that said I was employed by their government.
Very easy to get a short term employment residency for 12 months. You can always convert to the more traditional D Visa if you decide you’d like to stay.
Low taxes, efficient administration, easy visa, high personal safety (except in case of war), a good marketing as well, and almost all services are now natively in English (living in Estonia for 10+ years, and it wasn't the case before).
Article 5 says that in case of an armed-attack of a member of NATO, that other countries have to provide help. Each member of the alliance then decide, about how much help, when and how at their own discretion.
It doesn't necessarily mean that Washington would attack Moscow, and vice-versa or that they would be war outside "disputed" territories.
If tomorrow they have to choose between saving Tallinn or San Francisco, they'll make some choices, but not irrational ones.
The main TV channel in Russia openly threatens of an hybrid-scenario like in 2014 in Ukraine where they sent soldiers without bearing insignias or flags (so officially it was not an attack).
Let's say Estonia is in a situation in some way similar to North Korea vs South Korea.
Very peaceful and nice country inside but with a risk of getting into a dangerous military situation and some support guaranteed by the US and other allies if things goes bad.
The ambassadors of both countries kicked out each other in harsh ways, the customs don't collaborate together anymore, etc.
No panic, but still good to keep in mind, just in case.
If you listen to someone like Stoltenberg speak, you will find that he is very clear about NATO's commitments. No "each country would decide how much help", that kind of thing comes mostly from the German speaking circles.
No recent U.S. President wanted to pull out of NATO. The Clinton campaign falsely claimed that Trump did, but he just wanted other countries to pay the agreed upon 2% commitment. And it looks like it worked.
Technicalities don't mean much, Russia will make its move not based on technicalities but on the perceptions of other countries' response. Currently the front runners for the next US admin from the GOP side are openly from the "we'll give Russia anything, Putin good" camp so yes, Estonians and other Eastern Europeans are rightly concerned.
The Russians aren't gonna necessarily come across the border militarily. The Russians are gonna do what they did in Ukraine.
I'm not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg"
Unless I misunderstand, I already see the speech: "we saved millions of Americans thanks to my mastermind diplomacy, we send our prayers to all our allies, good luck!"
At least in Tallinn, most people speak some English. I met a surprising number of Estonians that were fluent too. There seemed to be a love affair with New York City, I saw New York pizza and clothes advertised everywhere in Tallinn.
Very far, you don't need to speak Estonian unless you plan to work as a local job position that requires doing customer support (such as shop-keeper). In such case (or policeman, lawyers, doctors, etc), it's mandatory to learn the language, and there is a special police that checks if you can speak and write in Estonian (Keele Inspektsioon).
This is done for a good reason, it's to make sure that everybody can get a good service and to protect Estonian heritage and culture (otherwise imagine older people, if their doctor can't speak with them).
You can fully live and work without speaking a single word in Estonian.
It's totally normal here to speak English.
Even at the cinema, movies are in English, subtitled in Estonian and Russian.
When you go to shop, many products actually have labels in English (or in German).
Estonian is a difficult language, Estonians know about it.
A bit generalising, but to get the idea:
Estonians don't want to speak Russian, Russians can't speak Estonian well.
So you have this society fragmented in half.
So overall, everybody settles for the easiest language that doesn't upset anyone: English (and German as a fallback).
It's easy to find schools in English too.
Even the tax board speaks to you in English, all the website for public services ( https://www.eesti.ee/ ) is all in English, even all the laws are officially translated in English ( https://www.riigiteataja.ee/ )
To IT foreigners, the country is very welcoming and very very easy-to-settle in my opinion.
To other foreigners, it's not true, because it's considered stealing jobs, bringing criminality, etc (basically same stuff that you have to prove when applying for an H1-B in the US)
To get a flat, real estate agents all speak English.
They won't get offended if you speak only English, it's normal for them.
Telecom companies speak English.
All apps (taxi, food delivery) are in English, because most startups and apps are not made for the local market as its too tiny.
From a political perspective, the country is now pushing more and more English; they'd prefer that you learn English than Russian.
So some shops are even removing Russian, and some administration now addresses you in 3 languages: [Estonian, then in English, and then Russian] (whereas before it was [Estonian, then Russian, and then English]).
The country is very well managed and organised, main issue with the country is:
- Darkness (coldness is fine, but half of the year you essentially live in the dark, almost like if it is always night). Summer is awesome though because you get day and sun almost all the time.
- A really unstable neighbour country on the East (it's not totally impossible that a war could break-out, though unlikely at the moment).
- Taxes may raise in order to fund the current war in Ukraine and balance the government budget.
but otherwise it's a really good place to live and raise a family.
I used to live in Tallinn as well (American expat) and echo basically everything rvnx says here. Some of the older people from the Russian community speak only Russian, but you're much more likely to encounter this in Narva (east) than in Tallinn. Estonians are also well aware that they are a tiny country with a difficult language so if you're not permanently settling, there is little expectation of learning more than a few words of Estonian. Super easy to navigate the bureaucracy (if you can even call it that), file taxes, etc.
One thing of note, with the caveat it's been a few years since I lived there (although I stay closely in touch with friends and visit often... actually I am typing this from my airbnb in Tallinn) -- you might get some looks if you're brown or black. From my experience this is mainly from older people and it's pretty benign, but it's not the most cosmopolitan place and most people of color you see are "students" for visa purposes who have been there for many years and work for gig startups delivering food or driving Bolt (Uber equivalent). I never felt unsafe or anything, but there were a few uncomfortable moments during my time there as a person of color.
Estonia is on a short list of places I'd consider moving to to found a company if the US weren't an option. My top three would probably be Singapore, Israel and Estonia. Of the three, Estonia is the most budget-friendly.
A major problem as I see it is a lack of nuanced policy. Currently in America it seems that you can either have police brutality and criminalized homelessness or you can have non-enforcement. What we really need is to prosecute crime but without tolerating police brutality or making laws designed to punish the poor.
You have pointed out the essential part of the policing problem. Anytime police are given genuine punishments for excessive force the entire department’s response is to stop doing their job.
Another problem I see is that in some cities (mine) people see racism at any attempt to alleviate the crime problem in lower income areas. I used to use the public transit system but it is now filled with drug users and people who enjoy terrorizing others. Police do nothing about it partially out of a fear of being called racist.
For whatever reason I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.
> I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.
My childhood friend's dad was a cop in a riot of historic significance in my country.
Protesters greatly outnumbered the police, and they threw stones and pushed them into a corner. Shots were fired, nobody died. They really thought they were going to be stoned to death because of all the anger. The few dozen cops left the event with PTSD and a handful never worked again.
As an individual policeman there is very little you can do about an agitated crowd who starts chanting.
So while a harsh reaction to police brutality is understandable, every single policeman carries the recent collective history of violence and knows they could be the subject of retribution. So the healthy thing for them, as an individual, is to not engage, because previously only potential perpetrators would engage in violence, but with enough heat, even bystanders may. Maybe the non-racist cops can't hide behind a collective, when entering a public conflict, as well as they could before.
In the U.S. my sense is that police do not fear retribution by the public. They fear only being held accountable in the same way the public is held accountable. Police mete out non judicial punishment all the time and are almost never arrested for it. They fear being held to the same standard as non police.
1. Laws and adherence to laws are required for a society to function.
2. Policing is necessary to enforce the law.
3. Policing, as a job, sucks. It's the tedium of TSA + the rare but lethal risk of being in a combat zone.
4. Policing, as a job, is made worse by politicians abusing it as a panacea, where other, less politically- and financially-palatable solutions would be more appropriate. Trained mental health professional intervention, drug programs, etc. Instead, cops are put in situations they shouldn't be.
The issue is thus not that police fear being accountable in the same way the public is held accountable. It's instead two-part:
A. Police feel they are owed a different sort of accountability than the public, both in service to and as a reward for doing a job the public doesn't want to do.
B. Effective police work requires a different sort of accountability than the public, as criminals doesn't operate in a vacuum and exploit known police limitations.
C. The most effective police work, for both police and the community, is deterrence -- the prevention of crime from even happening, by simple virtue of police presence. Deterrence requires respect and/or fear, and impoverished people without economic opportunity and living in communities where might makes right aren't deterred by gentle policing.
All of the above are contradictory with civil rights (and also with themselves).
Ergo, the appropriate level of accountability for policing is "what gets the job done, with the resources the city/state/federal government are prepared to invest in it."
Which makes it a multi-variable optimization problem.
Clearly, SF's current values are not producing an acceptable result.
I don’t disagree with the essence of your point. I suppose I fall further to the side of accountability than you do. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people not be beaten once arrested. That people not be met with violence for exercising their rights. Perhaps I’m naive and what I seek is some sort of utopian Star Trek society that is completely unreasonable to expect.
A lot of cops went to the ju-jitsu gym I used to go to. They assumed that I was an ally so to speak and were quite candid and about beating suspects. The whole system is rotten. Part of the problem is your point 3. The number of guns in the country makes it prudent for police to treat every encounter as if they could be shot. I imagine that alone puts quite a lot of stress on the mental health of police officers.
I'd say that it's always bad for people to be beaten once arrested. Or with violence for exercising their rights.
But I'd put the "optimal" (in the efficiency and good-social-outcomes sense, as distinct from a morally good-bad action perspective) amount at >0.
A credible threat of violence by police is a powerful deterrent. Especially to people who don't see the world in more nuanced light.
If someone like that is afraid of the police and so doesn't commit a crime, then everyone wins -- the potential perpetrator (who isn't exposed to the criminal justice system), the victim(s) (who don't have a crime committed against them), the police officer (who doesn't have to be in that situation and can focus on better parts of the job), and society as a whole (who save the substantial cost of dealing with all of the above: incarceration, rehabilitation, salary, lost productive economic activity).
The more nuanced discussion that tends to get lost in the weeds is "How do we simultaneously allow police latitude to do the job we want them to do, while also ensuring that latitude isn't disproportionately employed against minorities or political out-groups?"
In other words, police may need to crack a few hard heads. But those shouldn't be statistically-over-representative person of color heads.
Of course, fold in that economic situation is also racially biased, as a consequence of historical inequities, and actually accomplishing statistically-fair policing seems intractable. :(
But at the end of the day, people getting stabbed isn't good for anyone.
Even from an anti-police perspective, it builds support for "hard policing" policies among the general public, and eventually an election swings someone they support into office.
--
There was another comment in here that asserted that cops commit domestic violence more often than the general public.
Which immediately made me think "Why?"
Obviously, the acceptable amount of domestic violence is zero, but (if those statistics are true) there's something causing police officers to commit it more frequently than the general public.
It's probably partly that policing selects for "tough" people, by virtue of the work...
... but it also speaks to cumulative trauma caused by the job, and the effects of that.
You can't watch humans be shitty to each other, repeatedly, without it changing you. :(
It feels like we need a more complete lifecycle than "police for life," that includes cycling through various related components, some of which provide an opportunity for healing.
E.g. also stints helping defense and prosecuting attorneys, legal defense funds, partnering with mental health professionals, EMS, fire/rescue, etc.
I agree with what you wrote and largely agree with it. It’s a tricky situation and I don’t pretend to know of any realistic solutions. I’m a keyboard warrior spreading the gospel against illegal police violence. Such voices are needed if we are to keep excessive police violence from being normalized and accepted. Voices are too needed in support of police. Extreme outcomes on either side of this issue are bad.
I wasn't sure if you were the OP of that tidbit or not.
But yeah, to me, if I see police officers are 2-4x more likely than the general public to engage in domestic violence, that engages my curiosity about the job rather than the people.
You don't pick bad apples at a reliable 2-4x rate across the entire country.
And so much police reform (when it happens) seems to start and stop with the individuals. 'Find the officers who are doing bad things and apply more consequences to them,' etc.
Part of the solution, to be sure, but IMHO we should look equally closely at what all these super-offenders have in common -- the same job!
"How can we change the policing job to one that doesn't cause its employees to perpetrate domestic violence and employ excessive use of force at greater rates than the general public?" is a question I don't see much.
As an analogy, farmers commit suicide at far higher rates than the general public. Yet somehow I doubt it would fix the problem to identify only the suicidal farmers and just help them. The root cause is the stress and challenges of the profession, shared by all, even if it only ends tragically for a subset.
> As an individual policeman there is very little you can do about an agitated crowd who starts chanting.
You can kneel with protestors.
A cop tried this at a BLM protests I was at, which was peaceful including when the cops inexplicably arrived in riot gear. His buddies yanked him back and we never saw him again.
So you're right, very little cops can do when the system selects for bad behavior.
Police say that's the reason, but as you noted in the first paragraph, they're willing to manipulate the public for their own ends: why trust them on this motivation?
What consequences do they have from perceived racism that they fear it so much? Again as you noted, they are rarely punished for anything at all. They also do a lot of pretty unambiguous racism without apparent concern over this.
> For whatever reason I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.
It's both, and the reasons are interrelated. Passivity in some areas protects their right to do violence in others. Public fear of crime, avoidance of public spaces, these are results that benefit them institutionally. What incentives do they have for not working towards that result?
What consequences do they have from perceived racism that they fear it so much?
When the white liberals (like me) of my city unite with poor people of color and decry an action of the police it does affect them. They are human and criticism does affect them. It especially affects them when the whole city is up in arms over something they do. Mostly white liberals in my city don’t think about policing issues until something egregious happens. My experience is that when the whole city is up in arms about their actions then police respond like a petulant child by refusing to enforce the law.
Public fear of crime, avoidance of public spaces, these are results that benefit them institutionally. What incentives do they have for not working towards that result?
I grew up in the Canal Zone in Panama and remember the time during Noriega when he and the U.S. were opposed to each other. I remember the way I had be when dealing with Panamanian police during that time. Even though I was a white American I had to be very careful when dealing with them. I feel the same way around American police as I did when I dealt with police of a dictatorship.
My experience in America is that it is considered suspicious if a group of people are just hanging out outside. Four black kids walking together in my neighborhood would have the police called on them. We are, in essence, a nation of building dwellers who only go outside for the purpose of getting into a vehicle to drive to another building. It is as you say a situation that benefits police.
We don’t really have civil rights in the U.S. because police can, with impunity, fuck you up for exercising them.
No. I live in the area and there are places near Lake Street that police simply won’t go to unless it’s a violent crime in progress. One councilman from south Minneapolis, before George Floyd, mentioned that in his district police took their time to respond to calls and when they did show up told people to thank their councilman. They didn’t like his calls for greater police accountability and this was done in retribution. There are links in the comments regarding how police hold cities hostage when they are held accountable.
It makes sense, I think in this case a "middle ground" position is actually a legitimate opposition to both sides.
The rightward view of american policing is basically they're functioning as intended but are not powerful enough to achieve their desired effect and must be reinforced to succeed.
The leftward view is that they're functioning as intended, the violence and fear they cause is success, and so the entire thing must be dismantled.
The "centrist" view is I think something like the goal of policing is good & correct but the system is malfunctioning and must be adjusted. Neither side will agree with that: the right doesn't agree that it's malfunctioning (except so far is that it's held back from achieving its goal) and the left doesn't agree that its goal is just.
I think “right” and “left” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Are you talking about people in power, or are you talking about people on Twitter and a perception advanced by sensationalist news sources? I ask because at a national level this description doesn’t seem to match the policies being enacted (and a lot of people on Twitter are pretty vocally unhappy about it.) Everything else seems to vary greatly on a city-by-city level.
More individual self-identification yes. There are effectively no leftists in power in the US, the democrats mostly have what I've described as the centrist position. There is a lot of space to their left in terms of possible policy, but no one in a position to affect it seriously proposing it, afaik.
The problem is they get treated as if they're a member of the opposite side, not a third viewpoint. I can't count the number of times I've been called a Nazi and a communist in the same day.
FWIW, coming from the far left here, I don't really consider either of these positions "opposite" me but they are both clear opponents to my vision of meaningful change.
There's no neutrality or inherent virtue in a centrist position: it's a side like any other and you don't get credit just for inhabiting it. That doesn't make anyone calling you a nazi or communist justified in doing so or correct in their assessment. But it does indicate that neither considers your stance a compromise or allied position in relation to their own.
There's also no value in being an extremist either, you're not a significant member of any party that would lead to change in this country, nor will any of your goals come to fruition, you are outnumbered heavily and it looks like thankfully that will be the case for the remainder of my lifetime.
I find that I must act in alignment with my moral values to the best of my understanding and ability. It's not up to me to discover or calculate the "value" of those results, and that's not any part of my motivation.
I don't know what it would be like to select political goals based on their likelihood in the face of such incredible violence and injustice as we create. I'm grateful I can't lathe my soul in such a way. Seems chill though.
Not too long ago, advocating for gay marriage was considered an extremist position, but that eventually passed. On the other side, advocating for the illegality of abortion even for a child rape victim would be considered an extreme position in most of the US even though it is the current law in several states.
The Overton window can move surprisingly quickly, and policies which you consider extremist now won't be in a decade.
What fraction of people have to agree with something before it isn't extreme? Support for marriage equality among Americans was as high as 25% even back in 1990, if XKCD is to be believed.
Given the current state of voters, ranked choice seems like the best way to break the logjam by creating situations where palatable-to-all get elected over loved-by-most-hated-by-many.
Ranked Choice Condorcet. Instant Runoff is a band aid for the most glaring failing of the plurality system, but it doesn't actually support moving away from the two party system. Most places that have adopted IRV seem to have mitigated its failings by having multiple election stages, but we'd be better off with a voting system that directly chooses the winner from the entire field of candidates (when that's possible).
The downside of high-plurality systems is the lack of voter knowledge, especially without the historical press function.
I'd support that if it were coupled with multiple-choice position forms that were required to be filled out by each candidate, covering core issues and options. That is, no free response, not-an-answer answers.
Given the type of candidates that tend to occupy the low plurality spots, I'd say that problem is there regardless.
But yes, I totally agree with your proposal. I can even see it helping with cutting through all the boilerplate verbiage candidates are having to use to pay respects to various things, and return some focus on actual policies.
Vote Smart tried to do something similar... but the effective end result was that few candidates wanted to go on the record. https://votesmart.org/for-candidates/
Which is a shame, because "knowing what you're voting for" seems like a critical component of democracy, and campaign ads are useless (and expensive).
I meant ranked choice can be the least worst way of conducting democratic elections.
Individual results will still rightly depend on voters. You can blunt the attraction of extremism, but hearts and minds need shifting before voters will take a fundamentally different approach.
Posts such as this are sociologically amusing, "meta-heuristic" and the like. Using prepackaged terms to disparage people and dismiss them, without actually having to think objectively and consider opposing viewpoints. Also interesting how the choice of language completely outs people, as the extreme right/left adhere 100% to their respective terminologies, to signal membership and loyalty to their group. This post is a good example.
> it seems that you can either have police brutality and criminalized homelessness or you can have non-enforcement
NYC shows you can have broken policies AND do a better job on homelessness.
NYPD brutality, stop-and-frisk, broken windows, "it's Giuliani time" -- the cruelty of the NYPD is long-standing and well-documented.
Yet, NYC has done a massively better job directly addressing homelessness than SF.
SF's vaunted liberalism is largely for show. This is where a homophobic psychopath murdered the mayor and supervisor and was hailed as a hero by many residents. This is where massively corrupt machine politicians like Willie Brown feathered their nests. This is a city with some of the worst-managed public housing in the country, and neighborhoods like Hunter's Point awash in toxic chemicals.
This is a relatively tiny city with economic inequality and effective segregation outpacing cities many times it's size.
Just because they've elected a progressive DA here and there (and then recalled them LOL) doesn't change the ugliness underneath.
I only entered this comment section to watch the trash fire, and without making any observation on any other aspect of your comment (or any other for that matter) but - the Milk assassination was, what, almost 50 years ago? Surely that can’t be terribly dispositive of what the city is today.
(I do think there’s probably an indication there about the attitudes of “old San Francisco” - but how much of that generation is left at this point?)
> 50 years ago? Surely that can’t be terribly dispositive of what the city is today
It's relevant because at the time, like today, SF was seen as exhibit A of liberalism run amok, and yet couldn't unite against a homophobic assassination of their own elected officials.
Now, the zeitgeist insists that SF's broken homeless policies come from misplaced liberal compassion as opposed to a long history of neglect and corruption, which was particularly acute toward hispanic and black communities.
That’s what progressives in SF would say they are doing - with the stipulation that moderate amounts of theft, violence, and disorder are simply part of being marginalized, so criminalizing those behaviors is inherently oppressive.
>SFPD will not arrest them because Boudin refused to prosecute. New DA has not gotten back to me despite repeated attempts.
The same is happening in Philadelphia too. Its sad, because the city was on the upswing in the first half of the 2010's and making a lot of progress on reducing crime. Then a new DA came in and did a complete 180. Now its worse than ever. Look up videos of "Kensington, Philadelphia" on Youtube. Its like Mad Max these days.
I drove through Kensington twice during my last visit to Philadelphia this past year. It seemed to me a conscious decision by the city to have one open air market that they couldn’t control but at least manage. Sacrifice Kensington and contain the violence and drugs everywhere else.
I live in Philly. "Mad Max" is really pushing it and slightly offensive. It is still, like, society over here. Up until last year my gf worked everyday at a school in Kensington. She was never attacked by raiders or whatever. People everywhere have lives and are doing the best they can with what they've got.
Citizens can press civil charges, but the power to prosecute someone for jail time is reserved for the government. And the local and state governments, not the federal govt.
DAs are elected, so notionally, Boudin, the DA for SF, is representating the will of the people by not prosecuting criminals deemed to be "low level crimes".
Citizens don’t get to decide whether to press criminal charges; only the government can decide that. They may take the victim’s request into consideration, but that’s the extent of it.
Not sure what is going on in SF. But in Baltimore they would have been arrested and chargeg. Sure the city might drop the charges if the police bungle the investigation purposely or due to incompetence. But people are arrested and charged.
Did Boudin specifically refuse to prosecute the men who stabbed you, or did the police simply refuse to arrest them claiming as an excuse that Boudin will not prosecute?
Did the lawnmower specifically chop off your hand, or did you simply refuse to stick your hand in it claiming as an excuse that the lawnmower would chop it off?
> SFPD will not arrest them because Boudin refused to prosecute
It was explained to me a few times that it wasn’t supposed to be an issue. The police will just as eagerly do their job and arrest criminals. But that never made sense to me. What happened in your case seems a lot more likely. What would be the point in going through all the trouble arresting a suspect if there is a good chance charges will just be dropped.
Why should police care whether the DA brings charges? Their job is to arrest people committing crimes. Besides, even Boudin would charge violent criminals. Your story sounds like a clear case of police not doing their jobs.
those fast food places are the site of regular drug deals -- hard drugs, all the time. The police do not know if you are a customer or what .. its an ugly situation.
What would it take for it to change? Really? It is never too late to change.
But right now, the SF tech travel agents here and in the comments section are going to have a hard time at pitching that the city is 'safe' for them and now have to admit that it has gotten worse.
But maybe we should start with identifying the 'problem' which has something to do with 'who' is running those streets and seeing if there is a patten in other cities in the US...
I personally think the issue is that SF residents are like the frog in the boiling pot. Things only get a tiny, incrementally bit worse year by year. We get immune to the changes and begin to accommodate things we never would have in decades past.
I’m worried that there’s going to be a massive collapse of the tax base long before any serious reform attempts.
The problem is that the people saying those sorts of things also tolerate police brutality and oppose addressing the poverty issues that are behind much crime.
Articulating the problem is political suicide in San Francisco and in most other progressive leaning cities as well. People pretend to not notice and or attribute the crime to other variables. It is impossible to fix a problem you won’t even identify, or have been gas lit out of being able to recognize.
I just want to know why do people let the current status quo be in SF? I mean hearing cases like these makes you lean to the right even though you disagree with them, but when you look what the left is doing, you are left with no alternative..
This became a "right" thing when the Democratic Party--or more succinctly, the people they put on the ballots in liberal cities--have moved so hard to the left that they are unrecognizable to normal classically liberal Americans like myself. When these folks are running in the general election, they say all the right things to keep the votes from normal traditional Democrats who appear to have no idea who they're actually voting for. Once they're in, they go completely radical and do so relentlessly. Some of these DAs appear to be the worst, most evil, least-caring public officials I've ever observed in my life.
I'm familiar with that argument--but my suspicion is the whole "Dem cities are havens of crime" trope, is masking the true issue--in effect creating partisan polarization that distracts and outrages folks, in place of actual clarity, and results that shift the status quo in a more favorable direction (which, by virtue of such change not occuring, seems reasonable to conclude that said change must be imposing on some powerful interest--but what interest that could be, that wants there to be crime, I cannot fathom).
The data in SF is pretty clear (https://www.sfdistrictattorney.org/policy/data-dashboards/ , "District Attorney Actions on Arrests Presented" for example), and as the trend appears to be everywhere else, arrests are down and rates of charges filed are similar or even higher. In the SF case rates have been higher in the last two years than all of the previous data there back to 2011. Similar story in LA where filing rates did not appreciably change.
It's partisan but only because of the state of the parties. Democrat-run Austin Texas used to be heaven in the 1970s and 80s. Then radicals took over and somehow got elected and now you have a total sh*tshow.
So then you are aware that what passes for “left wing” in US politics is considered moderate in the rest of the developed world, i.e. Western Europe, Scandinavia, Canada.
Yet virtually all these countries have far better outcomes than us on most social issues, including violent crime and rehabilitation.
On the specific issue of policing, the left wing of American politics, takes an extremely strong stance on the minimalization of the role of police. Yes, this is in spite of generally being more economically right than most European countries left wing parties.
I hope against hope that you aren't acting in bad faith, because I'd hate to see discussion on HN further degrade into oversimplified sound bites.
Roughly 8 years ago.
Trying not to politicize this, but the deliberate act of not prosecuting certain crimes has been a movement driven by the left in recent years. And it's not going well for society at large.
However, I work in the physical security space (eg: cameras, video AI, access control, etc.).
Overall, it does not feel like actual crime rates are down, but there are many things that are simply going unreported. Thus, the stats might look better, but they are not always a representation of reality.
As one example, loss prevention departments have always been busy, but they could usually get a response from the police. Now you have retail theft gangs/rings openly walking out with thousands of dollars of product, getting into a stolen vehicle, driving off, and police more or less just not even returning a phone call in many areas.
This is not everywhere at this point, but a lot of major metropolitan areas are seemingly observing significantly increased "petty" crimes, which are going unreported and unresponded to.
Crime trends are well below the late 80's early 90's peak, but are significantly up since covid, which is a reversal of the trend downwards we have seen.
People generally are uncomfortable with crime being up 50% in 3 years, even if it's still down 30% from 1991.
Numbers are nationwide. My city's crime rates have doubled since March 2020. SF could be an outlier, but based on the melancholia in this thread, people may just not be reporting crime as much any more in SF.
Underreporting seems like a huge problem, even here with our blooming crime rate. I've had to call the police twice since covid, once because by house caught a stray bullet from a car chase/shootout, and the cops said that the only people who bothered to report were myself and the elementary school down the street. The folks in the other house that took rounds had no desire to interact with the police.
When a city is overwhelmingly Democrat, as most cities are, you'd expect them to elect Democrats. But the people who get in office are actually leftist radicals.
It's a weird social phenomenon. Groups based on trait X will tend to choose the most radical and forceful members for trait X as their leaders. To the point where trait X is actually warped beyond recognition.
Nothing really changed from a right leaning perspective. It’s been my perception that not putting all sorts of criminals in jail has become a left leaning thing over the last decade or so.
The push to shut down private prisons, especially in California for example.
By proxy that made it a right leaning thing.
I’ve heard my more right wing friends suggest that a big Democratic donor has been specifically backing DAs who do this type of thing. I have no references for it at all, but I know that Desantis even mentioned it in the press while discussing the Trump charges in NY.
Shutting down private prisons without replacing them with public prisons leaves you more limited on your capacity to convict people and keep them off the street though.
I would support a law that outlawed private prisons and provided funding for replacing/nationalizing them. I think that many on the left would support that.
See, that's the thing about crime stats: they only tell you successful convictions. They do not factor in police inactivity, people not reporting, police not filing, plea bargains to misdemeanors, DAs not prosecuting, cases getting dismissed.
Homicides however mean a cadaver is involved, and that can't be policy-washed: it is there in the morgue on file with the medical examiner.
I don’t believe that is the case. I don’t think the police have been particularly “Johnny-on-the-spot” regarding the situation but I also don’t get the impression they’re actively stonewalling me.
Is that how it works? I thought if a victim wanted to press charges, then police process it and the process starts. I understand in some places the police won't let tourists / non-locals press charges against locals--effectively giving locals a carte blanche to abuse/assault/harass outsiders however they want with zero repercussions, an implicit impunity they nevertheless seem to understand and most definitely actively exploit sadly, tragically and abusively--particularly if, and exacerbated by, language barriers--i.e, if you're a non-local victimized by a local who doesn't speak their language in such a place, like Taiwan, the locals feel pretty confident no one can touch them (tho I haven't heard of that happening in the USA)...what's the prosecutor got to do with it? Isn't it a police decision?
> I thought if a victim wanted to press charges, then police process it and the process starts.
In the US, victims can’t press criminal charges; only the government can.
> what's the prosecutor got to do with it? Isn't it a police decision?
Usually, it’s both. Ideally, the prosecutor decides whether to prosecute, but if the police never pass information along to the prosecutor, the decision is effectively being made by the police.
I think you are correct but the DA office usually decides whether or not to proceed to court. It could be the DA has given the police "don't bother us with XYZ because we cannot go to court" and so the police don't bother either. Perhaps available jailspace is being triaged and that type of crime will ultimately be given a slap on the wrist so it's a waste of resources. I'm not in California but the news often has stories about California's jail overcrowding situation and having to early release criminals to make space.
„Conservatives who think people will grow out of it, or that observable declines in quality of living or public safety will have an impact, don't get it.
I’ve lived in the southeast, the Bay Area, and Europe. The Bay Area is my favorite, but every time I go back to visit I’m just astonished — is this what the residents really want (well, SF more specifically)? I can see people agreeing with the group-think in public to fit in, but in the private of the voting booths they still vote for representatives and policies they know are going to destroy the city? It’s mind-blowing to me. Are we so split on issues to the point where we can’t have clean, safe, healthy, well-educated cities anymore?
Things that seem paradoxical and totally inexplicable like the one you mentioned, do have good (but not necessarily intuitive) explanations, but it takes a while to wrap your head around it. Its not even particularly obscure, leftism has been treated philosophically since centuries, often with astonishing foresight (eg Burnham). Check out Twitter & Substack, start with Yarvin and people associated with that sphere, and you shall be enlightened.
Boudin specifically declared in your case he would not prosecute? Did he leave a record of his reason? Or did the SFPD just say he would? SFPD went on holiday to make him look bad, so the difference is important.
I should be clear it was his office (I’ve never talked to the man), not him, where I encountered the most trouble. SFPD at least feigned caring about my situation but repeatedly pleaded their hands were tied, that they could arrest but the men would end up back on the street in days.
The new DA’s office has made a lot of promises but there’s been no substantial progress. Their continued increasing rates of prosecutions on violent crimes gives me a bit more hope that they’re truly battling through an immense backlog - but I’ve simply run out of patience and energy to fight the system in order to compel them to simply do their jobs.
I think the case against Boudin would be made if the police made the arrests and the DA did in fact refuse to prosecute. Maybe there would have been that case.
During Boudin’s admin, I struggled to ever talk to anyone. I was able to confirm they had all the info I had collected and the various reports the police I had done. They did seem oddly interested if I felt there was a possibility I instigated the attack (I was assaulted seconds after walking out the door).
Since Boudin left, they have been much more responsive and have intimated they well get to my case. I just haven’t seen any action yet - but they have been far easier to communicate with.
If the police are not arresting, they were the ones who made the decision not to prosecute… not the DA. They may blame the DA, but really they just didn’t want to do the paperwork.
The prosecution and the arrest are independent. In particular, the DA can charge someone with a crime and then get the police to arrest them because they’re a flight risk, a danger to the community, or they don’t show up for court dates.
Why did you just trust the police? They could be telling the truth but they could also be lying. And in either case they did not even bother to try. If they do not investigate and hand the case to the DA's office how would the DA be able to press charges?
Their accusation against Boudain could be correct but they could just as well be lazy and blame it on what the DA's office may or may not do in the future.
And, notably, the police had a pattern of lying about Boudin because he was trying to crack down on police misconduct. This led to absurd scenes such as the DA forced to rent a U-haul truck and rely on the assistance of federal agencies to transport seized stolen goods, and arrest a suspect after the bust of a major car burglary ring: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SFPD-didnt-stop-Quick...
The police achieved their objective of getting Boudin replaced by a DA who would let them continue to act with impunity. As you seem to have experienced yourself, fighting (non-Police) crime does not seem to have changed much.
In a broader sense, and without delving in to politics, administrative and resource constraints require District Attorneys to set priorities and guidelines to determine which matters to pursue. It is an ugly side of the criminal justice system I witnessed firsthand.
DA's have a budget and a limited number of assistant attorneys. They have to manage their office's caseload, and keep cases they do pursue moving through the pipeline. Even then, they must compete with the priorities of the judiciary and individual judges to reduce their caseload and keep cases moving.
It was not uncommon for judges to periodically advise prosecutors, public defenders and other key defense attorneys to convene a forum for the expeditious resolution of cases (essentially a fire sale with lots of bartering) to lessen their load and improve their KPIs.
So I think it is fair to say, Chesa Boudin, in his capacity as managing attorney responsible for setting his office's prosecutorial discretion policy, refused to prosecute the case. No different from any other prosecutorial discretion decisions made by countless prosecutors around the country daily.
How would the DA even be able to press charges if the police do not investigate at all because they claim that the DA will not press charges? The DA does not go round investigating criminal cases, they rely on the police for that. It was clearly the police who dropped the case, not the DA. Maybe the police have given up because they are correct in that the DA will not do anything, but they could just as well be blaming the DA for their own prioritization issues.
Given that the police did not bother to investigate there is no wonder the DA did not "press charges". I do not really get the grand parent post. Police investigation happens before any charges are pressed. So no matter how incompetent the DA is I do not see how they could possibly be to blame here.
Because if the DA says he won't prosecute certain crimes, why would the police bother to arrest someone that will be released on no cash bail. Why would they risk themselves or being in a situation where they need to use force and come under public scrutiny?
In many of these cities, these DAs are propped up with insane campeign funds, get elected, and refuse to charge, or push for no bail, so someone gets arrested for a felony, they end up back on the street the next day. Just read some of the cases where some people are arrested over and over and keep reoffending before their trial date.
The "certain crimes" that the DA said he would not prosecute are, in his words, "Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc.".
It's a bit of a leap from there to conclude that attempted murder would not be prosecuted.
It's a different DA, but the current Manhattan DA (who appears to be from the same school of thought as the one under discussion), upon taking office in January 2022, issued a written policy memorandum which stated that his office will stop prosecuting, among other things, trespass, jumping the turnstiles, and driving without a license or on a suspended license; and further downgraded burglaries and drug cases, in some cases from what the text of the law classifies as a felony down to a misdemeanor.
Does it say anywhere on that memo that attempted murder would not be prosecuted? Of course not. Do these policies generally increase the feeling of lawlessness in the jurisdiction? Yes. Might that precipitate higher degrees of lawlessness? You be the judge.
You're making a "broken windows" argument here, which may or may not be true. But what I was discussing was a different question: Whether the DAs in question classified stabbing / attempted murder among those crimes not to be prosecuted. And I have not seen any evidence that they have.
People have trouble disentangling the problematic behavior of the police and the consequences of prosecutorial discretion.
The OP's argument is likely that the police didn't arrest an attacker because they knew that the DA wouldn't do anything. There is the plausible alternate explanation that the police were engaged in a bad-faith work stoppage or slow down. The third explanation--nonunique to DA--is that the police were overworked or incompetent.
The third explanation is the only one that makes sense. SF police haven't done their jobs before or after Boudin either. The Tenderloin has had open crime for decades, and that didn't change just because there was a new DA.
They are not mutually exclusive either. It could have been all three. Let me also add that morale is an issue. The police have been taught to value their work in a certain kind of way (chase the bad guy, lock him up, get rewarded), but the world is changing. A lot of these cops feel betrayed by new political positions like "don't arrest for theft," and they legitimately start to wonder what is the point of doing a difficult and dangerous job if they don't have support in their own (I cringe) chain of command? For an external observer it seems like this should not prevent police from e.g. arresting people for murder, but it really has an impact on outcomes.
You can go ahead and call and try to get something done. I spent two years on it and was stonewalled by both the PD and the DA’s office.
It’s incredible when there are so many stories of the police doing nothing and statistical evidence of the previous DA not prosecuting cases, that you choose to, at best, accuse me of being imprecise with my terminology or, at worse, claim that I’m lying about one of the most traumatic events of my life.
I don't think they're accusing you of lying; I think what they're saying is that your expectations (and blame) are misplaced: the police are not empowered to make arrest decisions based on how likely they think the DA is to prosecute. The fact that they're making those decisions extralegally suggests that they were playing political hot potato to sink a DA they don't like.
(It's worth noting that Boudin was recalled nearly a year ago, and so perhaps the SFPD will have discovered the will to cooperate with the new DA.)
In the US, The police are so empowered and do it all the time. I am unsure why gp thinks otherwise. They are not required to nor do they simply get arrest warrants in every case they think they have probable cause. Anything else would be silly. They would get an arrest warrant, arrest, it would get dismissed without charges at the initial hearing a day later.
If the DA is involved already or they know the office policy,
Cops will not get an arrest warrant if the DA is not going to back them.
If DA is not yet involved they may do it for various reasons, but again, they usually aren't going to touch it if they know the DA won't back them. They have too much to do to be that passive aggressive.
As for the other part,
Whether individuals can get arrest warrants actually varies from state to state, though it is very uncommon no matter what.
After being arrested, you press charges against them
You know, folks get charges without being arrested - and folks get arrested without getting charged. These two aren't actually connected.
It isn't just that, but you - the private citizen - aren't really the one that determines whether or not someone gets charges against them. Sometimes, if you won't testify, they won't follow through. This happens in Domestic violence situations. But other times, they simply don't take the case to court or they take the case to court even if the victim doesn't want it.
RIP Bob Lee! I was highly inpired by some of your Java talks in Youtube and other places. Aside from that alas! what have things come down to in San Francisco? It has become an utter lawless city.
People in big cities get mugged, sometimes violently. This happened in Republican led cities when I was young. It happens in Democratic led cities now. It happens in London. It happens in Moscow. You can have policy differences with the government of San Francisco, but please don't capitalize on this tragic death to advance them. It's exploitive and disrespectful to Bob Lee's family. I know I'm whistling in the wind, but I needed to say it for myself.
China, Korea, Japan, has some of the largest cities in the world and violent crime is extremely rare in those cities. Crime was never on my mind when I lived in Tokyo. “Big cities” isn’t the cause.
My friend is in Japan right now and we just had a discussion about how shame is a tool of social control. I was even reminded of the old 80's introduction of the concept of "toxic shame". Obviously a lot of Westerners have no shame and are proud that no one controls them and will declare it loudly to your face.
On the other hand, a good time to debate about how to make our cities safer is now. Today. Bob Lee's tragic death can be a catalyst. The loss must be immeasurable to his family. Wow. That doesn't mean we should throw our hands up and say violence happens everywhere. I think spurring us to action would be a small positive in a sea of tragic loss. It's not at all commensurate, but it's something.
A lot of it is about how many people are around (and how you fit in). I have no problem walking in many areas of Manhattan late at night though try to stick to busier streets and avenues.
As we heard all day yesterday, nyc has the most massive and powerful police force in the world, which is understandable since it is a target of terrorists. It also takes an awful lot of money to live there. Must be nice. I dream of living there myself one day, but my time and money have run out.
Everyone commenting on here about how bad things are in SF has likely rarely or never stepped into the core parts of Protrero Hill, Noe Valley, Richmond, Sunset, Glenn Park, Forest Hill etc. SF is a tale of two cities divided by natural barriers. There is a side to the city where you see almost no drugs, or homelessness. This is not a dismissal of the real issues facing the city but an acknowledgement that it is still a very livable city.
I lived in Potrero Hill (I see you misspelled it, are you familiar with the neighborhood?) for over a decade and can tell you it didn't feel safe at all.
Had a bike stolen from my garage with power tools, caught a man with an angle grinder in another garage cutting through locks and threatening my life, mentally ill people yelling in the street and saw a few people with machetes walking around.
I used to go to Whole Foods, to Chez Maman, to the library and the rec center all the time. I moved out in 2020 and will never return, my mental health has improved significantly and I'm not exaggerating. I feel so much better now, it's like a flip switched and I started appreciating the beauty of life and community again...
I lived in two of those areas for several years, and still saw more scary things happening on the street than I have in significantly longer time periods in other major metro areas. (The biggest difference fwiw was whether I lived on a very steep hill or not; the hill reduced the amount of street-side madness that I saw to near 0).
The clean and safe neighborhoods of SF are livable (I loved living there), but at least personally I have found them to be notably sketchier than any other city I've ever lived in and I agree with you that the contrast is not particularly close. >95% of the shoplifting I've personally witnessed in my life happened in SF despite it being a relatively small part of my total life experience.
I'm sorry, I'm glad you've had it fine but that's bullshit, I've lived in those areas and have seen rampant crime that would not be tolerated in most other cities.
Literally every generation of suburbanites and ruralites think cities are big scary places with violence and drugs on every corner. It's just being amplified in this thread because that's what social media does.
While I agree those areas are much nicer, most people still need to commute to go work in, and spend considerable amount of time in soma, fidi, etc.
I used to live in one of those areas you talk about, yet still was attacked and threatened several times in the span of 6 months during my commute to our office on Market street.
Noe valley and Richmond have homeless people. In the Richmond, on geary you'll see a lot of homelessness and drugs, especially from 4th-10th. There are also a few near Safeway on cabrillo. In noe you'd definitely see it on 12th Street. I've seen some really unstable people clear out coffee shops because they we were ranting in the middle of the shop.
There aren't many homeless people in the purely residential areas, but they are definitely where the businesses are.
12th St isn't even close to being in Noe. There's usually two homeless people in Noe, one woman who always sleeps between Church and Noe on 24th St, and an older man. Outside of the misfortune of being homeless, they don't really cause any troubles, and most people in the neighborhood often give them food or a warm tea / coffee. There's not much we can do on our own, and the city doesn't really seem to help sadly.
The reality of the matter is that SF is the diametric opposite of NYC. In NYC, people live in Murray Hill for a year, move somewhere else and talk about their amazing experience in the UES for the rest of their lives.
In SF, they live in new builds (all of which are in former non-neighborhoods that were either highway overpasses or industrial districts), move somewhere else and talk about how they basically lived in Pac Heights and even there it's scary.
Sorry, you're right. I actually meant to write 24th street. Also, I do not blame homeless people for their situation. They are not getting the help that the state and city needs to provide, but aren't actually interested in providing.
Bob was a good friend, tried to hire me numerous tries at Square, and was my next door neighbor for 3 years. I knew him well and spent a lot of time with him. He will be dearly missed.
I have been told from very well placed sources in the US Intelligence community this is probably a hit.
That being said, I left San Francisco in 2018 because I was worried I would eventually become the random murder that would finally wake up the tech world to what an absolute crime ridden shithole San Francisco is. Don't quote statistics at me. I had numerous police officer friends who told me the statistics are all fake since they purposefully don't report over 50% of the crime in order to keep the city looking halfway decent since so much of it depends upon tourist revenue.
I tried for years to tell my friends the city needed to take the crime problem more seriously and the response I always got was dismissal or that "it's no worse than any other major city."
Well, I live in another major city now and I can tell you with great certainty, SF is much, much, much worse.
> I have been told from very well placed sources in the US Intelligence community this is probably a hit
do you realize how specifically you have to know the right person for an individual in the intel community to even remotely come close to knowing anything similar to this? not only are there over 100,000 that technically "work" in the intel community. 95% of those are not even in operations. even 5% of those in the field, 90% of those are working in intel related to external sources.
so what is that, we're down to the last .5% of individual who happen to work in operations, who happen to work on foreign/domestic actors within US who happen to focus in SF? yes, focus in SF, because people in the field don't have intel on what neighboring fields are doing unless they are "read-on." that's what sensitive comparmentalized information means--that you don't have any access unless you're directly involved with supporting that specific operation.
it's very highly likely that you're with some dweeb that works some support role, probably not even intel related. I can't even begin to tell you how many incompetent people work in this arena and how much even love to exaggerate and that they're part of something 'important'
I imagine even if the person doesn't know the specifics of the case, they can take a look at the police report and make a professional assessment on whether it was a random attack or something else. It's also possible the phrasing resulted in a miscommunication between the "intelligence professional" and the person upthread (they could have said something like "it wasn't random", and Bob's grieving friend referred to that as a hit)
In almost every random stabbing, the person doing it is arrested, no? To be clear, I'm talking about random, unplanned, and unmotivated stabbings, not premeditated robberies and other similar crimes.
It also just occurred to me that there is no mention of a suspective motive in the report
The police statement did not provide any details on the circumstances of the stabbing.
“This is an open and active investigation. For that reason we are not releasing further information,” Officer Niccole Pacchetti, a public information officer, said in an email. “We will provide further details when they become available.”
If it was an obvious robbery, I would expect the police to be OK with mentioning that in their statement (in other words, saying valuables were taken and it looks like a somewhat random robbery).
And maybe his wallet/phone were taken, but if police thought it was an open-and-shut motive, I don't see why they wouldn't mention that.
If you knew the kind of people that are my friend's neighbors. Basically you have the 0.01% of a country there, if you know people you know people, information reaches them way faster.
There was an interesting comment exchange on FT.com a few hours ago[1].
One person wrote:
> Lee’s former company, Block, is currently under investigation by the SEC after the app that he founded (Cash App) was alleged to have been facilitating money laundering. Wonder if there is a connection?
And another responded:
> A hitman isn't going to use a knife.
But when you think about it: if you didn't want something to look like a hit job, that's exactly what you would do – use a knife in downtown San Francisco at 2 AM – and nobody will be surprised.
Personally, I find it a little suspicious, that an important individual could have been murdered accidentally in a city with an average of 4 murders per month, just 2 weeks after the SEC opened an investigation into the platform he created[2].
Also, the place of the murder wasn't described as particularly dangerous at night by multiple locals[3][4].
Simultaneously, I don't understand your post. The second paragraph states "I have been told from very well placed sources in the US Intelligence community this is probably a hit." But then the rest of your post rails against the SF crime problem in general, finishing with "And now a good friend is fucking dead." Starting off by saying it was likely a hit would appear to indicate that SF's general crime problems (as bad as they may be) are largely irrelevant to this particular case.
To be fair, it's probably easier to organize a hit in a city where murder and crime are somewhat regular occurrences. Not that I am saying this was a hit.
If we accept this framing, we might speculate further by imagining the "random street crime" part is either a cover-up or the murderer intended it to look like, "random street crime".
A bit too morbid to speculate on for my taste, but I hope this helps to explain.
Yes, it is a tragedy. On The investigation side does anyone have any actual details of how this played out?
For instance, was Bob Lee possibly at a friends apartment party or a late dinner and drinks and then he’s about to get into his car near that park on the 300 block of Main Street and then thought “oh I need to get some cash for tomorrow”, so he just cut across the park to the Charles Schwab. Someone spotted him and then when he came back towards his car they ended his journey for the paper his wallet?
I have not read any details, but the location where it happened that’s a possibility. When i heard about it at first i thought maybe it had something to do with MobileCoin… maybe someone lost a lot of money or was afraid to lose market share. I haven’t read anything, but i would love to know more details.
> I have been told from very well placed sources in the US Intelligence community this is probably a hit.
I generally agree with the rest of your post that SF has become a crime-ridden hellhole, but how do they know so quickly? Are they omniscient? Did they have Bob under a scope (if so, why did they not interfere)?
If they really had Bob under a scope for some active intel interaction and some well placed source in the US intel community started talking about this outside (no matter to how close a friend), that someone is going to lose his access, his tongue or his head very quickly. And knows it.
all powerful people are potential targets of assassination. if someone said “shinzo abe was assasinated”, would you respond “theres no way that could happen because no one could have confirmed that unless an intel insider was talking about it, and then that insider would lose their access really quick!!” i mean my god
I wonder if this is crypto related? There seems to be an coordinated/ongoing government response to taking down crypto in the past several months. Maybe that's why they'd keep digs on him?
There's a bit of a difference between 'former head of state shot down in broad daylight' and 'company exec stabbed at 2:35 a.m. in the center of a major city'
He was Chief Product Officer at MobileCoin. Hopefully we learn who stabbed him, and why. 43 is just way too young. Thoughts go out to his wife. He was instrumental in creating Android. Whatever you may think of it today, we wouldn't have it if it weren't for him.
San Fran is filled with homeless schizophrenics... I would bet on one of them having killed him... Some of the mentally ill in the large cities are also addicted to meth or fentanyl
The person you are replying to did not even get into the politics of it or his feelings on SF, but are we really denying facts now? Sure, anything could have happened, but 95%+ chance he got stabbed by a crazy homeless person.
Ken Griffin on Citadel leaving Chicago for Miami..."In April, Griffin expanded on the crime issue in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” he said. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from.”
Ken Griffin left Chicago because he wasn't able to get his little conservative candidates to win elections with all the money he was pumping in, and he didn't want to pay Illinois taxes anymore.
Chicago now is probably safer than it ever has been.
He lived in a giant half-block-long mansion a short ride from downtown, and his employees were paid well enough to never touch public transit if they wanted.
It was a transparently BS political play that everyone in Chicago saw through and rightfully ridiculed. Those quotes are designed for people who only know Chicago through right wing media like the Wall Street Journal.
"For McDonald’s, though, the issue isn’t just about conditions in stores — it’s also about recruiting leaders to the company’s headquarters and convincing corporate workers to return to the office,” the CEO said.
“It’s more difficult today for me to convince a promising McDonald’s executive to relocate to Chicago from one of our other offices than it was just a few years ago,” he said. “It’s more difficult for me to recruit a new employee to McDonald’s, to join us in Chicago than it was in the past.”
And when it comes to returning to the office, he said, “one of the things that I hear from our employees [is] … ‘I’m not sure it’s safe to come downtown.’”
That was the company line. Ken Griffin aiming for a cabinet post with DeSantis so that he can divest without paying capital gains taxes is also a likely factor.
To those who are going to be curious about crime statistics, it appears that while SF isn't high up in terms of violent crime rates, it is unusually high for robberies (#20) and *very* high when it comes to property crime rates (burglary, theft, etc) where it ranks 4th in the nation.
If we think logically about what allows property crimes to remain high in one city vs another, a couple things come to mind:
1. A higher poverty/homelessness rate leading to people resorting to property crimes
2. A higher repeat offender rate if the DA of that city chooses not to prosecute/press charges against many of those who commit that crime
For factor #1, this would be remedied by tackling the causes of persistent homelessness with things like Housing First initiatives to house people dealing with those conditions, and to also give them medical assistance since a good chunk of them are dealing with mental illnesses.
For factor #2, this seems like it would be a simple case of the DA needing to be more aggressive in prosecuting property crime perpetrators to both deter the act and to keep them off the streets to begin with. The SF DA office is particularly known for being too loose with this, unsurprisingly.
I'm by no means a crime expert or a lawyer, but this is what seems like is going on at face value.
That’s ridiculous. I lived there 2014-2019 and it was delightful. Certainly many bad problems that weren’t getting fixed but ray to day life for most people wasn’t anything like the horror show it’s made out to be.
I lived there 2015-2019. A year less, but in my experience
5 car break-ins
2 bottles thrown to me
1 mugged, wallet gone
Chased with an axe
These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood. The Tenderloin area definitely experiences worse. Surely everyone that has walked Market St or taken the train has seen things uncommon in most other urban American cities.
I struggle to understand how in SF we've gotten accustomed to downplaying these experiences.
I suspect these people have never actually lived somewhere nice and think junkies threatening you on the street is just normal background noise you have everywhere.
this kind of shit happens everywhere along geary and market stretching all the way past divisadero and to castro. there's a reason the tenderloin is right where geary and market come together. i lived in SF for 2 years around 2008 and it wasn't safe then either.
and more recently i've seen crazy shit go down (or the aftermath, like broken glass everywhere) every time i visit friends. the western more suburban parts of the city are much better.
sf has basically been broken since the gold rush. seems to me the primary goal these days is to make enough money to insulate yourself from this stuff as much as possible, or just leave.
SoMa was a crime-ridden area nearly as bad as the tenderloin and has slowly gotten better, but pretty large parts of it never did. It's really hard to believe you lived in SF and thought SoMa was nice. Inner/Outer Sunset/Richmond are nice. Potrero Hill went from being kind of rough to being nice.
Lots of other areas are nice, but it's honestly very difficult to say SoMa, as a whole, was ever nice.
> These things happened at SoMa, which is objectively known to be a "nicer" neighborhood.
What? After the Tenderloin, SoMA is absolutely the worst neighborhood for interactions with crazy people. What on Earth gave you the impression that it's "objectively known to be nice"? IMO it's the single worst neighborhood in the city; at least the Tenderloin has history and some great commerce.
You're right, I've lived and worked in both areas (several times during 2000-2016).
SoMA varies a LOT by exact location (at a per-block level) and changes with time of day, time of year, and has changed in cycles over the years. The area where this incident happened was historically one of the safer parts of SoMA, but not the safest, pre-Covid; I don't know how much worse it's gotten but directionally worse.
When I lived in TL (136 Taylor) I had someone brandish a firearm at me, witnessed two murders (in one incident), a bunch of people fighting other people, public drug use, etc., but SoMA is where more people I know personally were assaulted (partially because they're more likely to be walking around there...). I had a few non-consensual interactions which luckily stopped short of escalating too far, and a few times had to abort trips to an office, store, etc. to avoid stuff.
I didn't enjoy stepping over human feces when walking down the street every day, carefully dodging used needles on the sidewalks or watching homeless people piss or shit in front of Starbucks at ~11AM but to each their own.
You must carry around your own alternate reality bubble. I was in SF for 6 months in 2015, by all reports a much safer time than now. I lived adjacent to the Berkeley campus and took the Bart to market street.
Got chased into the street twice, and had someone smear their blood on my jacket another time. I watched people eat morsels out of the gutter, defecate in public, scurried away from cars getting broken into and my Bart station was an open air drug market at 8am. I watched drugged out people wander into traffic, just to see other passersbys scream at the police for interfering. I’ve been to the poorest countries in the world and have never seen anything like the Tenderloin.
"Elites decided they were vulgar, and during the reign of France’s Louis XIV, court chefs banned sugar and spice from all meals except for desserts."
And it was right in HN a while back that someone was poopooing non-European cuisine's use of spices as "a means to cover up subpar ingredients". Turns out that at least in Europe it had nothing to do with subpar ingredients.
SF is the people's choice, no? The people in SF elected DAs who release booked violent criminals right away, multiple times. The people in SF elected politicians who told us, repeatedly and publicly, that looting is a way for people to express their anger or looters were hungry, and violent criminals are victims and questioning their policies are homophobic and racism. The people in SF elected politicians who could stand up projects in the name of helping homeless at cost of more than $100K per homeless person per year. That's $100K equivalent of after-tax income of a normal fucking American! The people in SF elected school board members who dumbed down curriculums. The people in SF painted "kill techies" on streets of SF and the people cheered it.
And most important of all, per the comments here, SF is fine and violent crimes are just the right's wild accusation.
We can have empathy for sociopaths and psychopaths, and still want them separated from the rest of society.
We can try to understand and address the socioeconomic causes of crime, while also aggressively deterring crime and punishing criminals.
We can recognize that the police are over-militarized and under-trained and burdened with too many responsibilities, while also recognizing that they face a population that is increasingly armed to the teeth and hostile due to a social media outrage machine.
We can have a sane immigration policy and protect our borders while recognizing that immigrants are vital to the economy and having empathy for refugees or people simply fleeing violence, and without separating children from their parents or locking them in cages.
Are you not connecting the dots here at all? You think SF would have headed in this direction if it wasn't heavily gentrified by enormous SF salaries and subsequent nimbyism?
It's the same gentrification -> disparity -> flight -> neglect cycle that's happened to lesser degrees elsewhere. This is unique only in its severity.
I think you may be the one missing the dots. The comment you responded to is pointing out that cycle you list (gentrification -> disparity -> flight -> neglect) is a direct result of the residents actions. They are the ones that elect the politicians and vote on propositions. The residents made a choice to go the route they did. What you see is a direct result of the residents' choices.
I live within a couple hours of SF and I got to say I 100% agree with the person you responded too. The residents of SF caused the mess they are in.
I think it's an oversimplification and ignores the fact that a large number of renters in SF were displaced all along the way.
The existing old residents (50+) were already homeowners before the SV wave, and the new homeowners (who are younger and richer) followed the same bad habits of the older generation (albeit, for some different reasons).
The controlling political power in SF are homeowners and both new and old have come together to try to keep more people out, which has subsequently caused a bigger problem than what they originally feared.
SF is extremely liberal in some senses, but when it comes to housing they're extremely conservative. It's basically the worst combination you can make in the US right now.
I'm still a little confused by your point. Your last comment seems to support what I and the other poster was saying.
The residents (home owners new or old and renters are included in residents) caused this issue. You refer to them voting themselves into this mess as a bad habit. But who has that bad habit? The residents of course. Hence I lay the blame at the residents feet. I know numerous people that saw the writing on the wall and moved away from SF because they knew the end result (where we are today) of path the other residents were voting for.
A quick google search (number of renters vs number of home owners in SF) says SF is 65% rental household. Not sure how accuracy of that but lets assume its reasonably accurate. That would mean the renters have a larger voting power than the homeowners. If the renters choose to vote against their interests or not vote for decades in my eyes they are to blame.
The current renters are an entirely different class of people than the previous generations and they're generally young wealthy people working for tech companies. In my experience they do not care about the SF that the people they displaced built, and they're not at all politically active. The homeowners gradually took over through the dot-com era and again in the latest boom... there's no one (in numbers) left that cares enough about SF to stop them.
But yet again here you are arguing my point for me. The residents of SF caused this. If the current renters don't care enough to do something about it by voting in different politicians/policies are they not to blame? The population of SF (city) is ~815k. The voting portion of that population could vote in different politicians if they wanted too. They have not. Hence once again we are back at SF being the way it is because of the residents voted and continue to vote it that way.
Also please remember the homeowners are residents too. The are exercising their right to vote the things they want. If the renters are not exercising their right because they just don't care or are not political active that is the RENTERS issue. No one else's.
>>The homeowners gradually took over through the dot-com era and again in the latest boom... there's no one (in numbers) left that cares enough about SF to stop them.
So what you are saying here is the residents of SF that are renting and not owners do not care enough to try and fix the issues. Or to put it another way, SF is the way it is because the residents refuse to do anything about it.
> I think it's an oversimplification and ignores the fact that a large number of renters in SF were displaced all along the way.
And the government's answer is always rent control, eviction moratorium, and etc, despite that many landlords are hardworking people who carefully managed their finances.
The real answer should be increasing supplies, yet SF's tourism has a strong lobby group...
Yes, it seems absurd that rental housing is an enormous for-profit industry. There should be a harsh cap on how many housing units individuals can own and rent.
Of course landlords and homeowners don't want to expand housing in their areas, it's watering down their investment.
No government is perfect, but there's a much greater incentive for governments to build and encourage housing than landlords.
Every major city in America has slum-lord landlords that own dozens of properties, fights all development that isn't their own, and barely maintains their stock so they can increase their profit margins.
That link doesn't really have any data and it's not from a credible source. It's also an 19-year-old article.
An entire generation of San Franciscans have been born and become adults since that article was published. Even if you accept the premise that there was significant displacement in San Francisco in 2004 that doesn't say anything about whether there is today.
I do not believe there is a large amount of displacement happening in San Francisco today because I have not yet seen any evidence.
People leaving is not the same as displacement. Many people chose to leave during the pandemic for a variety of reasons, including tech workers moving away to work remotely.
After all, why stay in a city when everything is closed when you can get the same experience cheaper somewhere else?
Any time window that includes 2020 is going to include very strong pandemic-related effects.
All you provided is evidence that people moved away from San Francisco during the pandemic. We all know that. Many of the people who left could have afforded to stay and chose not to. That is not displacement.
Proof of displacement requires demonstration that people left SF because they could not afford to live there anymore. It's really that simple.
Techies with six-figure incomes leaving town to move back in with their parents during the pandemic doesn't count as displacement.
The government gets happy when rich people move in. The people are happy when rich people move out.
We seriously don't need rich people near us. They have too many whines and gripes and are too resourceful to not stay. I say that as a (mildly) Rich person.
But when a native sees the town go down, the native doesn't just leave. They still stay.
I'm not putting any blame on Bob here (I've always been a dawn guy, not a night owl), but the city I'm in (not CA anymore) has lots of its bad things happening at 2am (the time of his stabbing) too.
When I was working in SF (downtown, SoMa, FiDi) I had a schedule that got me to a gym at 5am, the office at 7am, and back on Bart before 4pm. I can't remember the last time I was in SF after dark. Walking the city at 5-7am is like wandering the aftermath of a war zone. It's sleepy, but the overnight destruction and misfortune was on display.
That said, all the talk of crime here feels slightly premature -- the linked story doesn't clarify whether he was the victim of a random attack or by someone known to him.
It really struck me that he was out that late on a Tuesday... could have been a mugging when he was on the way back home from something... but the time just doesn't feel right. A mugging on the weekend late night seems more likely for a variety of reasons. Then again, I've seen recordings of individuals with mental health issues that literally just randomly attack a stranger completely unprovoked, so who knows anymore.
Precisely. It’s intriguing to observe that the prevailing emotional response appears to be based on presumptions, despite the limited information available regarding the actual events.
The greatest deterrent for crime is the person's belief that they would be caught[1]. No amount of punishment deters people, not even the death penalty, from committing crime more than being certain that they would be prosecuted.
I don't feel safe at all living in the Bay Area. Just the day before yesterday, I heard that a colleague, who works from home, had his house broken into and robbed, even though it happened during the daytime and while he was home."
It was first reported here on Twitter (https://twitter.com/lucy_guo/status/1643451123230031872) -- I'm friends with a bunch of people at MobileCoin where he was working and unfortunately it is true. I only met Bob once but he was a great man.
(Trying to just be sad about his loss and not angry at what San Francisco has become, but it's hard.)
Homicide rates aren’t relevant to a regular person. What matters is the probability of being a victim of a violent crime or a homicide when you weren’t involved in a criminal organization or weren’t already committing a crime.
Many cities with high homicide rates have them specifically because of gang activities and they don’t have any relevance to regular citizens.
Additionally, gun friendly states with “stand your ground” laws will have higher homicide rates just from self defense in robberies.
Tldr; homicide rate is meaningless to how safe you are as a bystander.
“Stand your ground” laws don’t just increase the rate of homicides, they increase the rate of murder. Turns out that thugs are better at killing than civilians
Jake Shields says that it was someone reputable in the tech industry and a close friend of his who was killed. And that the family doesn't want to reveal the name yet.[1][2]
Additionally, if you search through Jake Shield's Twitter feed, you'll find instances where Bob Lee talked to him. [3][4]
Very strange title, given that it's not at all verified by the contents of the article. I guess I'll have to flag this one, maybe if it's verified someone can provide a different source for the submission?
> Joshua Goldbard, the CEO of MobileCoin sent the following statement to ABC7 News: "Bob was a force of nature. Helped to birth Android and CashApp into our world. Moby was his dream: a privacy protecting wallet for the 21st Century. I will miss him every day."
Still, though, these comments here are an absolute dumpster fire, and until there is more information, I don't think stories like this produce any sort of insightful/curious discussion, so thanks for flagging.
It was verified in the comments but the only source was a tweet which has since been deleted. I want to assume people are telling the truth but I could see this being one of those "pranks" where we find out what people are willing to believe without proof.
I accompanied my wife to a conference in SF a few years ago. While walking along Market Street, returning to our hotel from picking up food for the kids, one of those dishevelled guys with big coats ran at me full tilt. I was forced to run across the middle of the street into traffic to get away from him. He pursued me, pulling out a gun and pointing it at me midway across the street. After I got across the street he gave up and went back to his side.
I think the gun was probably a toy, but the only reason I think that is because he didn't fire it. It was small, but gunmetal colored and realistic. Now, I feel like I could have just as easily been Bob Lee, and my kids could have just as easily lost their father. For nothing more than flying in for a weekend and walking along a main thoroughfare.
It seems like this story is completely unremarkable in SF. Nobody in the vicinity seemed to care what was happening to me. It was obvious there was no point in calling 911 to report this. Apparently it's just normal that you take your life into your hands walking along Market Street, and some resident mentally ill guy might decide to end you because he doesn't like your face.
I’ve often wondered if the above is part of the reason we have so many tech delivery companies - hire someone else to take the risk for that burger for you.
I'm sure that you can even argue it's a win/win! The poor doordasher probably has encountered situations multiple times a month, and can recognize them and avoid them, whereas the untrained rich person may not have the same "street smarts".
And you could get dark real quick when you realize that for many a dead doordasher is a statistic, but a dead rich man is a tragedy.
(Even if all above is true, it still would sicken me)
Easily. Whenever I feel a hanking for good Yemeni (Yemen Kitchen) or Mizrahi (Limonana) food, I just order via Doordash because there's no way I'm walking on 6th or lower Jones.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Looking carefully at what is, in most of the world, this wouldn't have happened in the first place. The Texas solution doesn't sound much better than the SF situation to me.
"Rather then the innocent being killed, the person who did the assault would be killed. This is preferable."
You chose to interpret this as a very different claim. Yes, an effective good police force and a population that doesn't assault others is essential. There is not one single part of a solution that should stand alone.
I stand by my above truth claim. Don't put other words into my mouth.
Didn't mean to put words in your mouth - I actually found your wording very hard to parse, which is why I said I wasn't sure what you meant. I agree that the Texas solution is likely a local maximum. Sounds like we both agree it's not a global maximum.
Being able to defend yourself during an assault has nothing to do with "a solution". It just means in a moment when the clock is ticking, it is more likely an innocent life is saved. Nothing I said implied this being "a solution". Texas isn't the wild west. We have laws and police. Self defense is just a thing that helps preserve innocent life when laws are disregarded and police are not present.
On another timeline (in Texas), a case of possible short term mistaken identity ended up with a person being killed, when the alternative was one party retreating, which bought both parties enough time to avoid injury or a death.
So a (probably) psychlogically ill/troubled person with a (probably) fake gun would have been shot dead by some random passer-by? In what way is that better than the traumatic situation that the op described?
This is assault and must not be tolerated. I do not know your inner feelings and I do not know if the gun is fake or even loaded. It is still assault. If you think an ill/troubled person is not capable of being out in society then they need to be locked up or kept under supervision.
If I applied your logic to times I ride my bicycle on the road, I would have at this point fired upon... many tens of cars.
I find your take to be relatively sociopathic and bloodthirsty. It doesn't sound like it makes for a good society to live in. It kinda sounds like Somalia or something.
That person would be a clear and imminent threat. It's completely irrelevant whether they're of sound mind or whether the realistic-looking gun is, in fact, real or not.
Add this to the list of reasons why I refuse to live or work in San Francisco. I screenshotted your comment and shared it with my family.
I know this is anecdata, I know the article we're discussing lends itself to these kinds of stories, and I know there're a lot of positives in SF, too; but there comes a point at which the negatives outweigh the positives by severity, regardless of relative quantity. SF is past that point for me.
You are in danger as a pedestrian always near traffic
Social cohesion breaks down near congested roads
You can tell if you are in one of those areas by asking yourself
Would you let your young child move through this area unattended?
If not - you're in an area built for cars first and not for you as a pedestrian
I have such fond memories of my (work) visit in San Francisco in June 2015 during the week of the NBA Finals. I didn't know much about the city but I thought it couldn't be any worse than Manhattan.
The only time I got sketched out was when I was walking up Filmore St. near the McDonalds. Some caricature looking fella started calling me ching chong trying to mess with me. I crossed the street before crossing the light and just walked on the other side pretending that didn't hear anything (earbuds) while keeping an eye on him.
I always thought that I can go anywhere I want after growing up and living around slums in the third world at that time but every place has its own unique set of dangers.
Assuming that the murderer has lots of priors, why is it so hard for cities to (1) not overpolice minor crimes (i.e. weed) and also (2) take violent crimes seriously and incarcerate anyone who commits X number or X severity of them?
Instead every time at least in NYC when you hear about someone killing an elderly Asian, turns out they had like 20+ priors, including some violent misdemeanors, which are often quite serious. No one wants to put people in jail for stealing a loaf of bread (a straw man that often comes out) but if repeat violent offenders keep committing more violent crimes, maybe we actually need to keep them in prison longer?
Why are people such bleeding hearts for repeat violent offenders?
So sad. Bob was brilliant and an all-around nice guy. He gave the JRuby team a tour of the Square offices when they were just getting started and advocated for our use there while he was CTO. What a tragic loss.
He was a really interesting, good guy. Getting stabbed by some filth.
Fucking shithole of a city. In the last 10 years every time I am there I can't help but wonder HOW??? How can such rich city with so much potential be turning into this?? I grew up in east Europe, in general few places in US trigger my prep for fight or flight.. SF you are having a nice conversation, walk wrong way 50meters and suddenly my heart goes to 170bpm. I started carrying a collapsible baton last time I had to stay there for business. SF is going full Detroit, 100% self inflicted.
If you use that baton, or even if you are seen with it by the wrong person, there is a good chance that you will be charged with a crime. Look up penal codes 12020 and 22210, possession of a club or baton in California is not legal.
(To say nothing of the desirability of such a law - just as a FYI)
In this thread everyone blaming homeless and the poor without any context of who the perpetrator is. It’s a big leap from shoplifting to a stabbing/murder. Also consider that even if the shoplifting/car break ins is being committed by the poor, they could be being directed by organized crime which is quite active in the area (look at the high profile heists in downtown that occurred in the past few years). The car break-ins in particular are as I understand it primarily organized crime not the homeless.
>In this thread everyone blaming homeless and the poor without any context of who the perpetrator is.
You are right. Nothing in the report points to the demographic being blamed in the majority of comments. It could be a person in his circle, a stalker, or even a rich drug dealer that stabbed this guy.
Non-premeditated street crime is generally among the least of the dangers a crypto industry exec is exposed to. Pinning it on the homeless is a bit premature.
I witnessed a guy steal someone’s phone on the bus. When the phone owner ran out of the bus and caught him, the thief punched him in the face.
Just saying. It’s not clear to me the kind of personality that uses the threat of a weapon but it’s not going to be your average thief / shoplifter. I’m not saying it’s a hit man assassination but it could be a gang member (violence is escalated there) or a gang initiation (severe violence is a hallmark). My coworker got mugged in Austin and beaten up extremely bad. I believe the police found the people and it was a gang initiation.
You are grouping shoplifters with muggers. These are meaningfully different.
A shoplifter ideally wants to snatch and go. They are in the business of fleeing, partially because they know they won't be confronted. The most likely outcome is that they have someone shout at them or maybe get pushed.
The mugger is not this situation. The mugger has to give someone a reason to comply - that means a threat of violence. The mugger doesn't want to use that threat (they want the stuff) but they need the threat and need to be perceived as serious. Often muggers are new to criminality so they are jumpy, irrational and likely to accidentally apply violence.
Among concealed carriers, one of the hot topics is the situation of an armed mugging. While the mugger doesn't want to harm you, the risk of accidental harm is very real and muggings "fail" and end up as stabbings/shootings all the time. No small amount of time is wasted discussing how concealed carriers should respond to this threat - and I'll let you youtube your own security footage of this happening.
The gang situation is an unfortunate one. I'm sorry your coworker had that happen to them, and it's been a growing issue in Austin.
I think you totally misread what I wrote. I told you about a mugging I witnessed first hand that happened on Muni. The mugger was not using a weapon.
Anyway, I was trying to show that the broken windows theory is flawed. The broken windows theory suggests that if you stop shoplifting and other trivial crimes it’ll also prevent more violent crimes. That’s unlikely to be the case and the research done so far has not found any supporting evidence for this theory.
You may be conflating it with a VERY misreported meta analysis, the 2019 Daniel T O'Brien et al. which found BWT theory does not impact *mental health* of a neighborhood. He also normalized for SES which BWT is probably a direct predictor of (basically social funding).
Bob worked at a key position at one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world and later a mid-sized exchange.
>Occam's razor is a safe starting point for this situation.
The simplest explanation is he wasn't targeted and it was just a random mugging where he didnt want to hand over a few $1000s in belongings under the threat of violence?
Violent situations are not logical negotiations. People react in fight or flight (both the attacker and the defender!).
But yes, it is absolutely the most likely occurrence that an obviously wealthy exec, an older man, was an easy mark for a random mugging gone wrong at the wee hours than some crypto bro plotted an assassination.
"Mugging gone wrong, someone got stabbed" is a very, very common situation. Also note that he lived to receive initial aid and perished on the way to the hospital - it's not like he was shot and stuffed in a car trunk.
Oh I understand that. The sad part is that the evidence is extremely limited and careful experiments done to empirically validate it have failed with other more plausible alternatives provided (see the criticism section).
The most compelling one to me is that the cities that applied this theory and the ones that didn’t saw similar decrease in crime suggesting an overall downward trend that couldn’t be attributed to this theory. That’s basically an A/B test at scale that fails to find anything.
Also:
> Baltimore criminologist Ralph B. Taylor argues in his book that fixing windows is only a partial and short-term solution. His data supports a materialist view: changes in levels of physical decay, superficial social disorder, and racial composition do not lead to higher crime, but economic decline does. He contends that the example shows that real, long-term reductions in crime require that urban politicians, businesses, and community leaders work together to improve the economic fortunes of residents in high-crime areas.
That sounds like the theory has cause and effect reversed and treating the effect does not actually address the underlying cause. If your wood beam is rotting, a fresh coat of paint can help but at some point it will collapse.
> In the winter 2006 edition of the University of Chicago Law Review, Bernard Harcourt and Jens Ludwig looked at the later Department of Housing and Urban Development program that rehoused inner-city project tenants in New York into more-orderly neighborhoods.[25] The broken windows theory would suggest that these tenants would commit less crime once moved because of the more stable conditions on the streets. However, Harcourt and Ludwig found that the tenants continued to commit crime at the same rate.
Oh look, another controlled A/B experiment that fails to validate anything.
> In his 2012 book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, Jim Manzi writes that of the randomized field trials conducted in criminology, only nuisance abatement per broken windows theory has been successfully replicated
So the only thing we can link it to is nuisance calls. All that work and hassling for a super minor win.
It’s impossible to scientifically prove something but there’s enough holes to indicate that this theory provides an exceedingly poor model for crime. It’s also easy to consider a hypothetical scenario where one person or a small group of people steals all the money in the neighborhood such that everyone is poor and can barely feed themselves, if that. The poor now need to steal and commit crimes to feed themselves and their families and cause disorder by using drugs too try to escape their situation / self-medicate. Would broken windows policing actually accomplish anything when the root cause is that the money was stolen from the area?
This is sad news, but as much as I am a critic of SF’s policies around homelessness and drugs, it is not a dangerous city that someone will get murdered. SF has one of the lowest homicide rates of big cities. For some perspective, Oakland has half the population of SF and almost 3x the murder rate
If your first reaction to someone being literally stabbed to death is to write a comment about such a thing being literally impossible as political cover for your 'side'...you might be the problem
A random act of violence can happen anywhere. Objectively, SF is not a dangerous city when it comes to violent crimes. In 2000s, SF was indeed a violent city with triple digit murders.
And Europe has 10x the rate of Asian cities. What’s your point ? Every country has their own nuances and a city within a country is not devoid of context
To those who are going to be curious about crime statistics, it appears that while SF isn't high up in terms of violent crime rates, it is unusually high for robberies (#20) and *very* high when it comes to property crime rates (burglary, theft, etc) where it ranks 4th in the nation.
If we think logically about what allows property crimes to remain high in one city vs another, a couple things come to mind:
1. A higher poverty/homelessness rate leading to people resorting to property crimes
2. A higher repeat offender rate if the DA of that city chooses not to prosecute/press charges against many of those who commit that crime
For factor #1, this would be remedied by tackling the causes of persistent homelessness with things like Housing First initiatives to house people dealing with those conditions, and to also give them medical assistance since a good chunk of them are dealing with mental illnesses.
For factor #2, this seems like it would be a simple case of the DA needing to be more aggressive in prosecuting property crime perpetrators to both deter the act and to keep them off the streets to begin with. The SF DA office is particularly known for being too loose with this, unsurprisingly.
I'm by no means a crime expert or a lawyer, but this is what seems like is going on at face value.
When I was younger I had this fantasy of moving to and working in SF. Then one day a SF guy joined our company in London. Said it was foggy all the time. Totally ruined the fantasy.
If you want to make money so that you can save up a nice nest egg rather than be broke at the end of every month, London is probably the worst place to move to, unless you are working in the City or some other very high paid job, or you are lucky to have a permanent line of credit from the Bank of Mum and Dad. And not only will you be broke, you'll be living in a damp hovel shared with strangers. Kind of like being a student, but with all the responsibilities of having a job.
Why you are talking about Londen all of a sudden is beyond me, but might be some bias.
But it seems that I struck a nerve: that ‘nest egg’ is at the detriment to other people, exactly my point. The homeless pay the price for your nest egg.
The disdain for poor people is dripping from your reply. Yet you have much more in common with the homeless than with the people who pay you. You will be used and discarded as we see happening and who knows where you will end up…
Um, where did I show disdain for the homeless? On the contrary, I pointed out that London has become unaffordable for all but the rich. One might say the same of San Francisco and other cities with gross wealth disparities and sky-high rents.
A "nest egg" means "having a bit saved up" so one might have some economic security. Again, what does that have to do with the homeless?
I pointed out that cities - taking London as an example - are unaffordable to people who do not have a high salary. Yet for some reason you are attacking me for...having a high salary?
Small question: does anyone have any actual numbers about crime in SF and whether or not it is actually more dangerous than other comparable cities (population, wealth, density)? I want to believe the claims of people who’ve been there that is quite dangerous but very few of them are actually giving out numbers to justify this position.
All anecdotal: I believe many, like me, that are claiming the decline in safety are actually living here. I've been here since 2010, FWIW (not saying that is long, but long enough to see changes, IMO). When I first got here, I remember seeing someone shoot up in an alley. I remember a drunk or drugged man smashing his head into the window of a bus. But, against the expectation that I would become assimilated and desensitized over time, I am more shocked now. The last time I went to the TL (six months ago), I was actually scared, and vowed not to return without good reason. I wish I could point to a single thing. Maybe it was the needles strewn, the folks dazed and walking into traffic, the knocked out folks on the sidewalk; it felt lawless. Maybe I'm getting older and scare more easily, that's also a possibility.
East Bay (by which I assume the Tri-Valley and LaMoraga+Walnut Creek) always had a massive tech presence - going from Livermore+Sandia+Berkeley Labs to PacBell to PeopleSoft to HPC@Cheveron+PGE to Workday+Veeva today and the Telcos in LaMoraga+Walnut Creek. Most Asian and White techies with families try to buy houses out there hence why you see Palo Alto level housing prices.
If by East Bay you mean Oakland and its denizens, I don't see it happening. Oakland+Berkeley local govt makes SF appear very startup friendly.
it makes me super sad to see SF like this. it's by far my favorite US city -- the weather is great, people are quite welcoming, the food scene is out of this world.
but the last time i went there, just before the pandemic, it was just... horrible. within 1h of leaving my hotel, i saw a guy breaking into a car. a block later, two homeless people were arguing and then started beating each other to a pulp.
Reminds me when I first moved to SF. I saw a guy breaking car windows on the street at night and called 911 to notify the police. They seemed a bit baffled that someone would call to report something so trivial and I don't believe they did anything about it.
Why don't they do anything to fix it? I truly don't understand the logic here. It's the same as Seattle. They've gone so far left that they've started delving into the absurd.
> i saw a guy breaking into a car. a block later, two homeless people were arguing and then started beating each other
Implied is that you didn't do anything about either of these things you witnessed. I don't mean to single you out, but collectively for the people of the city: wouldn't it be better if you stopped expecting somebody else to fix the problems? Instead, be part of a better community by trying to right what wrongs you can. At the very least, photograph the thief and send it to the police, if not trying to stop him yourself. Similar for the fighting homeless people.
Yeah, maybe that's dangerous. I don't want to start the conversation of Californians trying so hard to give up their right to self defense. But maybe that's the reason we don't see such a big problem in, e.g., Texas.
I don't think you get it. The community is no more. Its all transient SV, just like NYC.
Most pay taxes, sometimes very high taxes. And, San Franciscans have voted to have someone else fix the issue.
The citizens gave the monopoly of violence to the government, so citizens would be safe. The government has stopped protecting its citizens and their property. The social contract is broken.
I think you misunderstand me - I think you and I are in agreement.
But although the SFans made a deal with the devil, there's no reason they can't go back and change that. It's not written in blood, they still can go take back their community themselves.
There is no community to turn this around anymore. What could have been the community is gone. Those people are not voting anymore.
They leave. Gone. Poof.
For something to turn around, you have to make an investment (money/time). People with money and means are going to invest elsewhere especially since they don't really have a true community to defend. They started as transients, remember that. No generations of family. No roots.
Attempting to fix these issues yourself every time they occur (which would be often in SF) is a recipe for ending up in TFA. Last time I tried to offer something to a homeless man, he pulled out a knife and started chasing me (he must've not been anywhere near reality). It needs a collective response from everyone, like government, not a lone vigilante.
A "lone vigilante" is indeed a useful idea for SF.
The local SF TV streamers and memers should re-broadcast Charles Bronson's "Death Wish" movies. Perhaps doing so will inspire civic responsibility in SFans! IIRC there's even a bit of drone technology in one of the later movies.8-))
The police will not pick up the phone for homeless people fighting or a car break in. If you are advocating physically intervening then that is terrible terrible advice. Keep your head down and don't walk around in certain areas or at certain times.
What can you do? Lots of people have tried and do try.
As per other comments, the police won't act on it and if they do the DA won't and even when all this happens they get let go of easily and come back for more. Lots of these people are repeat offenders.
Tech in SF causing massive inequality in the city combined with structural American problems is how SF got where it is today though. Moving tech somewhere else (Austin seems to be next) will just result in a similar situation.
An injection of rich taxpayers is exactly what most cities with a poor and needy population would be crying out for, in order to fund social services.
It is specifically the decision to keep housing close to zero-sum that makes this such a catastrophe. SF isn’t the only place that would make that decision, but is also possible to welcome & accommodate growth rather than trying to strangle it at the expense of all your renters.
In other countries you have cities begging for any kind of tech investment. The idea of tech being anything other than boon is essentially outside the political spectrum
Dude did you spend any time in San Francisco in the 80s? The 90s? San Francisco is how San Francisco got where it is today, the same place it was 40 years ago.
Lol. Tech or backlash against tech didn't create SF culture. SF culture comes from the 60s, Berkeley, Hippies and left wing policies, protest movement politics.
Austin has rich cultural background that is different. Moving to Austin won't change it into SF unless enough people bring failed ideas with them.
> Hippie Hollow Park (originally known as McGregor County Park) is a park located on the shore of Lake Travis in northwest Austin. It is the only legally recognized clothing-optional public park in the State of Texas.
I would bet that Austin's culture is not the same to SF's culture but there is probably some overlap that makes it appealing to the people moving there.
Parent was wondering if the same will happen. Of course Austin is lefty culture. Anyone suggesting Austin wants that.. but it is not SF... you can open carry your gun in the nudest park..
I'm not 100% following what you're trying to say here. I will note that until 1995 in Texas, no civilian could carry a gun full stop; there isn't actually as much of a rich history there as people might imagine. That said, I doubt many people in Austin voted for the legislators who made that happen at the state level.
Housing inequality could be fixed with a land tax. A land tax makes nimbyism significantly more expensive, so they're more willing to sell property to high density housing developers.
Places like Texas, with a property tax and little zoning, would handle a concentration of wealth better. Although, it'd be even more optional with a land tax instead of a property tax.
This idea is DOA because it always results in human interest stories on the local news with an 80-year-old grandma who lived in the house for 40 years suddenly not being able to afford her taxes. And then you get Prop. 13 to prevent that.
It is unclear how a land tax would specifically affect NIMBYs and not everyone. It seems more akin to a plan for almost total divestment of private land ownership.
You're talking about raw communism, whether or not you know it. It is immaterial whether or not land is forcibly taken or the (I assume federal) "land tax" is raised to the degree that no one can afford land except government subsidized high density housing developers. With this being the intent of raising the tax to whatever level it falls.
You may as well just confiscate the land and dispense with the pretense.
Before you begin confiscating land, try proving that inequality issues can be solved with parallel yet less potentially damaging measures. As a test run. For example, begin with educational outcomes. What have been the quantitative results of massive funding toward eliminating educational inequality? Metros like DC have some of the highest per student public school funds in the Nation.
The housing parallel is the failed social history of high density urban "projects". Which no one likes to live in nor to be around. And which have been a disaster for urban areas, with few exceptions.
It's amusing to consider that among some adherents to Henry George's theories (which largely undergird the concept of the land tax), there is a narrative that Marxist communism was a plot by neo-aristocratic parasitic monopolists to diminish the capitalist classical economics of Smith and Ricardo by sidelining Georgism (which they view as compatible with classical economics) while pushing neo-classical theories. See the work of Mason Gaffney:
How is this unfair to communism? The elimination of private land ownership and housing choice are core methods of Leninism. The only others being forced culture cleansing and imperialism.
Explain how government forced divestment from single family private land ownership is capitalism. Other than communism, you seem to be thinking of a potential action inherent within fascism.
It's also because, by coincidence, U.S. State Department official Wolf Ladejinsky was influenced by Georgism. He was certainly no fan of communism, as he was a Ukrainian refugee from Bolshevik rule!
Incidentally, while Taiwan does not have exclusive government ownership of land unlike Singapore, Hong Kong, or mainland China, it is a very successful example of land reform (which involved confiscation):
It's not. For one thing, rental prices have been going up in a steady trend for over half a century. The tech industry didn't cause the rise in prices per se, the general economic growth of the region did (and does) that:
> Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago.
For another, look at the history of the city, we have been a nut house for ~150 years, since the gold was discovered. We had an Emperor! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton
If an increase of wealth creation is a problem for a city, that city is being badly run.
It's pretty obvious on the ground in SF that the homeless problem is fundamentally a problem of mental illness and drug abuse. A fairly large portion of the homeless there are not from SF but came there because SF tolerates behavior other cities do not. Even if there was an empty, free house offered to every homeless person in SF there would still be a massive problem because many of them would be unwilling to accept it.
A lot of high income people concentrated in one area leads to things like income inequality compared to everyone else. It also causes housing prices to rise which leads to homelessness which causes or worsens property crime, drug use, mental illness, and general desperation that can incite violent crime.
It only leads to housing prices rising (in the long-term), if NIMBY politics makes building new housing essentially illegal. There are plenty of examples of "boom towns" throughout history where prices may have rose initially, but didn't spiral out of control, and usually settled back to a reasonable baseline relative to wages.
We aren’t at the root cause yet. NIMBY politics are largely caused by the idea that housing is an investment rather a basic human need and depreciating asset which is a rather new idea in relation to “throughout history”. People generally don’t want to vote for things that harm their investments and building new housing harms the investment that all current homeowners have made.
If society thought of housing similarly to other large purchases like cars in that there was no expectation of profit, we would all be a lot better off.
Now what caused this housing as investment idea? I haven’t seen any research on this, but my guess would be as a form of forced retirement savings as it allows people to build net worth without the self-control normally required of saving. And the difficulty of that delayed gratification is really just human nature.
It's also the easiest way for most people to achieve high leverage. My friend got a $3000 down home loan in Colorado. $3k in for $450k. The leverage on that is astronomical. A 10% appreciation in value gives him 1500% growth in wealth, with no capital gains tax when realizing.
FWIW Calgary, AB is an example of tons of building doing a good job to manage housing cost increases. Something like tripled the population ~300k -> > 1M over 1990-2010s and house prices remained reasonable in the suburbs (which are still Calgary proper). One thing Calgary did well was "Infills" which basically was when someone would split their single family home into 2 properties, which may or may not share a wall. Sometimes they'd buy neighboring properties and do N parcels to N+1 (or >N) new homes. eg 2 neighboring parcels became 3 homes. Smoothly incrementing the density.
It could be a contributing factor, but SF seems to have more problems than other expensive cities with concentration of rich industries like Manhattan for finance or biotech/pharma in Boston and Cambridge. Maybe the rate at which income inequality changed is another part of this. There are probably also unhelpful policy differences in SF with respect to building more housing.
To what extent the crime policies contribute statistically I don't know, but for some of the more extreme mental illness cases (that disproportionately account for homeless people being actively aggressive), there is a disconnect between philosophical ideals and what practically would be better for everyone in the long run. Mental illness (especially when substance abuse is involved) can make someone resist help and they will be unlikely to improve unless they are forced into a facility. Where the line is for doing this is a tough question but if someone is routinely threatening people on the street or does something violent, it seems like SF policy is still opposed to it.
> SF seems to have more problems than other expensive cities with concentration of rich industries like Manhattan for finance or biotech/pharma in Boston and Cambridge.
I don't think people realize how much of an outlier SF is. Incomes are a good 25% or so higher than NYC and Boston. The percentage of the people who work in tech in SF isn't really comparably to any other city and their own high paying industries.
Though SF seems to have problems that Silicon Valley (defined as the area from Sand Hill to downtown San Jose) doesn't have. Mountain View, for example, has a big homelessness problem, but it doesn't really have a huge crime problem. The typical homeless family (and it's families in MTV, vs. drug addicts in SF) lives in an RV, has a single working parent, keeps to themselves, and does their best to send their kids to schools. SF schools are some of the worst in the nation, while Palo Alto schools are some of the best. San Mateo cops actually arrest people. All these places have a greater tech concentration, greater average incomes, and greater income disparity than SF, and geographically they're located just 50 miles south.
I think the problems with SF are largely cultural and political rather than technological or economic, though the economic issues are exacerbating it. It's an "anything goes" city and has been for 150+ years. The city values your ability to express yourself in any way you please, and that includes both healthy forms like street fairs, neighborhood scavenger hunts, or Bring Your Own Big Wheel, and less-healthy forms like being able to shit on the sidewalk when you please or stab someone who looks at you funny. And that filters down to the voting preferences of the electorate. You get what you ask for.
The South Bay has all the same problems of tech dominance, income inequality, insane housing prices, etc, but the cultural orientation is very different. People in the South Bay are generally there to work hard and build a better life for themselves and their descendants. Their time-orientation is much more long-term than SF culture. And that applies across the income spectrum - even poor, Hispanic, immigrant day-workers will do their best to make sure their kids do their homework. The type of tech industry that spills out of this also reflects this cultural orientation, with the South Bay doing much more foundational engineering research and SF being more focused on how to apply technical breakthroughs from 50 miles south in new and crazy ways.
It's impossible that a 100K techies descending into SF after 2010 could have any impact on anything like the 18000 SRO units that used to house all those folks in the Tenderloin. All that wealth sloshing into a city - gentrification is a liberal fantasy.
Of course, when you bring up Manhattanizing Mission, most of these "YIMBY" astro-turf types start screeching. They want theirs, and as soon as they get it they'll be pulling up the ladder behind them. But keep your filthy mittens off the Mission.
Ironically Austin’s housing market seems to have suffered the hardest since peak 2021-2022 prices because it’s more clear now that it isn’t becoming the next Silicon Valley.
There's this brewing sentiment in the rest of the US as California residents move out: please go away and keep your broken politics and social policies away from us.
I have family out in Idaho, and they complain that there a lot of folks from California moving there and screwing up the local politics by voting for policies that broke the state of California. They joke that the first thing people do is change their plates because they don't want anyone to know they're from Cali. I can't blame them, though, because it is an absolute train-wreck of a state whose condition is epitomized by SanFran.
Idaho's great, just don't be anything but white or straight, or god forbid don't be a trans kid since the state government just barely averted banning appropriate healthcare for teenagers there.
Plus they have a sweet setup since they're the 18th-most dependent state on Federal aid, so they'll glad take money from train-wreck states like California, they just don't want the people.
Is it so wrong for people to want to be left alone? We're talking a minority (which was the majority not too long ago) wanting to be left to their social and religious moors. The whole political mess in the US is driven by a clash of ideologies.
> don't be a trans kid since the state government just barely averted banning appropriate healthcare for teenagers
Case in point: many people in the United States disagree with surgically altering minors' genitalia, for whatever reason. And they'd prefer such policies to not be implemented where they live. This is part of the "please, just leave me alone" attitude.
More relevant to this topic (crime in SF): many people in the United States would prefer for crime to actually be punished, with punishments that are actually effective. Making it legal to loot up to 1000 USD in merch isn't going to deter crime, it does the opposite. Because the law is cancerous at this point, honest business ventures are closing up shop. People in other states see the cancer and (rightly, I think) say they don't want any part of it.
> The whole political mess in the US is driven by a clash of ideologies.
Not really. When you actually analyze the situation what you have is a bunch of folks who would like to just live their lives (you know, people who are gay, or non-white, or female.)
But there are some people who are upset by this, and want to stop it, who treat it like some battle for the soul of the Nation. They go out of their way to persecute and abuse other people for no reason other than they don't like them. Mostly they are members of various weird quasi-Christian religions.
So it's not really a "clash of ideologies" so much as it is attacks by radical religious people on anybody and everybody that won't toe their religeous/ideological belief systems.
Top hit on ye olde googelle [0] from a very respected children's hospital:
===
What services does the Surgical Gender Affirmation Program offer?
The Surgical Gender Affirmation Program for teens and young adults provides:
An opportunity to talk with our care coordinator before your first appointment. They will answer questions, help you prepare for an appointment and connect you with our schedulers.
One or more consultations with surgeons and a gender surgery nurse to talk about your goals and surgery options and to plan the surgery. We will offer to connect you with Seattle Children’s Fertility Preservation Program before surgery if you are interested.
Help after preoperative consultations to get ready for surgery, including working with your insurance company to have surgery approved.
Complex procedures, including face and neck surgery, top surgery (breast/chest), bottom surgery (genitals) and body contouring.
Follow-up care after surgery to check and support healing and to smoothly transition back to your usual gender care team.
Support from a social worker to help arrange transportation and places to stay when you come to Seattle Children’s for care.
I don't know about embarrassing myself. You are right, though, I did overlook the age restriction by accident. The other gender re-assignment hospitals all have the same age restriction. Though, genital surgeries for kiddos are in the works [0]. Almost like the slope is slippery or something.
From [0]:
===
The update also recommends:
—Sex hormones — estrogen or testosterone — starting at age 14. This is often lifelong treatment. Long-term risks may include infertility and weight gain, along with strokes in trans women and high blood pressure in trans men, the guidelines say.
—Breast removal for trans boys at age 15. Previous guidance suggested this could be done at least a year after hormones, around age 17, although a specific minimum age wasn’t listed.
—Most genital surgeries starting at age 17, including womb and testicle removal, a year earlier than previous guidance.
Also don't be a woman, because there are barely any OB/GYNs there anymore since they can be prosecuted for a felony for practicing standard medical care -- and are responsible for proving that they weren't violating the law as opposed to the state having to prove that they were. They are also open to civil suits from any member of the family of a woman who loses a pregnancy under the care of a non-emergency physician. Many hospitals don't even do births anymore and will just ship you somewhere else.
You're begging the question. Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon that does more harm than good.
> Plus they have a sweet setup since they're the 18th-most dependent state on Federal aid
Do you feel the same way about Virginia (second highest per capita federal balance of payments), New Mexico (4th), or Maine (9th)? They're all blue states that receive a lot more from the federal government than they pay in.
Do you also feel the same way about high income earners paying more than they get back? Because effectively that's what you're describing. California has a lot of high incomes and because the federal government does a lot of redistributing via taxation, the state as a whole pays more than it gets back. Though if you look at the per capita data[0], it works out to a few hundred bucks a year. It's also worth mentioning that since Covid, every single state has received more than it paid, and in aggregate California the most by far (which makes sense, since it's the most populous state). So California too has a sweet setup.
Implicit behind your sentiment is the idea that the "train-wreck" policies in California is causative of the high incomes that has it pay more than it gets back from the federal government. That is, your argument paraphrased is that conservative Idahoans can't criticize progressive Californians since California with its progressive policies has high incomes that pay for some of Idaho's bills via redistributed federal taxation. I find that assumption unpersuasive.
> Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon that does more harm than good.
Reasonable, empathetic people who have no experience with an issue personally should mind their own damn business regarding other people's medical decisions, especially when they themselves are actually, demonstrably (not suspectedly) ideologically motivated.
>Reasonable, empathetic people who have no experience with an issue personally should mind their own damn business regarding other people's medical decisions, especially when they themselves are actually, demonstrably (not suspectedly) ideologically motivated.
Sorry, kids don't get to make medical decisions and adults don't get to make harmful decisions for them. Your rant is borderline suited to an adult, and no one else. Last, imagine couching anti-child castration and mutilation as "ideological". Competent adults label this position to as sanity.
> adults don't get to make harmful decisions for them
I believe exposing children to organized religion is inherently harmful because it inhibits the development of a scientific, evidence-based temperament that I think is an important part of good moral character. Yet billions of people drag their children to churches, mosques and temples every day.
>adults don't get to make harmful decisions for them
Actually, adults that are the parents of children get to make all sorts of decisions for children, harmful and not harmful. It's literally none of your business.
First, that anyone not agreeing with your position is actually and demonstrably ideologically motivated. It may be one of the surest signs that your position is not based on reason, when you perceive it to be so blindingly clear that anyone disagreeing must have an ulterior motive. There's another commenter who said that the only way anyone could oppose their position is through stupidity, which is along the same vein.
Second, that people should mind their own damn business. I agree with this on principle, but it does have its limits. Am I wrong to be concerned about and disapproving of the practice of female genital mutilation in parts of the world? After all, it doesn't directly affect me one bit. I suppose you might consider me a cultural imperialist for thinking it a barbaric practice. Should I equally mind my own business if I see a neighbor routinely take opiates to the point of stupor? That's his medical decision, and one that I have no experience with personally.
At some point, the line between well-meaning non-judgmentalism and craven indifference is blurred. I want to help repair the social fabric in this country because I feel it is torn and tattered. The way to do that is through open dialogue on what I think is right and wrong. I can admit that this can be taken too far, and has been in the past on many matters. What you suggest is that I keep it to myself and don't condemn others, no matter what I see, because everyone walks in their own pair of shoes. I'm not convinced that this is the better way; at least one that doesn't end up in a world where everyone only cares about themselves.
To put another way: can you imagine a fast-spreading, medically-involved phenomenon that affects minors in the long term that you would be concerned about, even if you had no personal experience with it? Or is such a thing not possible in your view?
> First, that anyone not agreeing with your position is actually and demonstrably ideologically motivated. I
I said that the people who were doing were demonstrably ideologically motivated. This is because it is true and evidenced. This has nothing to do with how I feel.
> Am I wrong to be concerned about and disapproving of the practice of female genital mutilation in parts of the world?
Is FGM a medically accepted practice? No? Then it has no relevance to this discussion.
> At some point, the line between well-meaning non-judgmentalism and craven indifference is blurred.
This is ideologically motivated people advocating that politicians and laypeople legislate medical decision making that should be between a doctor and his patient and their guardians. Whatever else is drummed up by comparing it to barbaric practices ask yourself this: would you want a politician telling you what is medically appropriate for your child?
As parents, myself and my wife get to make medical decisions for our children until they become adults.
I saw a lot of push and propaganda in schools to subvert this setup, for my kids in the name of ideology. This is now the #1 issue for me to push back on. Just a single data point.
By "heavy advertising" do you mean letting kids know it is a thing that exists? Because that's just teaching kids the facts of life, something schools have a responsibility to do (since apparently you're not willing to tell your kids that medical transition exists?) It falls under the same bucket as sex education, another thing that schools should do regardless of whether the parents think it's OK or not.
This [0] that might interest you, then, if you think schools aren't involved in transitioning children.
Relevant quote:
===
Even though the policy states that “the goal in all cases is to strive for consensus between parents/guardians and student as to the application of this policy,” it adds that the decision to participate in the “gender transition plan” belongs to the student, and “does not require additional parent/guardian consent”—unless parental/guardian rights under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), or other applicable law, would be implicated.
The primary source cited in the article seems to have been wiped and replaced with "under review", but based on the article it seems it was primarily that if a trans kid is out at school, staff shouldn't assume they're out at home and so they should default to using the kid's legal name when communicating with parents. This seems like a good policy; if someone doesn't want to come out to their parents, it may be because they fear being beaten or thrown out of their home if they do.
"Schools transitioning children" is not a coherent phrase. "Transition" in the gender sense is not a transitive verb; transition is not something done to someone by others, is something that person does themselves.
>Implicit behind your sentiment is the idea that the "train-wreck" policies in California is causative of the high incomes
Quite a straw man you built there! I hold no such opinion.
> Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon
No reasonable, empathetic people that are in any genuine contact with trans kids are likely to feel this way, considering suicide rates and mental health outcomes of gender-affirming healthcare.
>Do you feel the same way about Virginia (second highest per capita federal balance of payments), New Mexico (4th), or Maine (9th)?
Are people from those states voicing the opinion that their states are well-function oases relative to the "train-wreck" that is California? I haven't heard much of it. Yet it's pretty common for red-state folks to rag on California as if their welfare governments aren't benefiting from our homofemitrans tax dollars.
> Reasonable, empathetic people are capable of thinking that "gender-affirming care" is an ideologically-driven phenomenon that does more harm than good.
The only way it is possible for a reasonable, empathetic person to believe that the state government banning GAC is good, is if they're stupid. Which is ok to some degree, many people are stupid.
If the point of gender affirming care (GAC) is to improve the mental health outcomes of the one being cared for, then it is a colossal waste of time. Mental health outcomes do not demonstrably improve after a person is placed on HRT and had their genitalia suitably modified. In fact, their long term health outcomes decline significantly later in life [0]. The suicide rate of transgender individuals is about 40%. This does not take into account whether they received GAC or not [1]. Per [0], even GAC does not improve late life all cause morbidity.
I oppose gender affirming care on the grounds that it does not effectively improve a person's life (which we can see over a 30 year period in [0]) and that it often requires damaging the delicate balance of the biological machine that is the human body.
Correct, that makes you stupid. Your premise is wrong (the correct endpoint is satisfaction and regret rates, since there are many confounding factors with something like mental health), your data doesn't show why you think it shows (the Sweden study was done in a time when the Swedish government mandated sterilization for trans people), and GAC changes the balance of the body much less than, say, lithium.
The Sweden study is backed up by the Trevor Project (which I linked above somewhere) that shows as many as 80% of the transgender population have suicidal ideations and as many as 60% have attempted suicide. And this is from self-reporting. The stats aren't just from Sweden.
And the Trevor Project report shows a number of interventions that provide statistically significant reduction in suicidal ideation and attempts. I assume you support those interventions, since you seem extremely considered with the suicide rates of LGBTQ youth.
That's crazy, my trans masc friend Kyle just carried a baby to term and delivered it, but to be fair I can't 100% confirm he didn't just hide a frozen turkey under his cardigan for 9 months
If a teenage girl standing 5'7" and weighing 80 pounds came to the doctor and said she feels too fat and needs to lose weight, the doctor would rightly tell her that she is anorexic, that her being too fat is only in her head, and that she should instead gain a bit of weight to be healthy. A doctor who instead prescribes her weight loss pills would be treated with skepticism; a doctor who performed gastric bypass on her would rightly be excoriated and maybe even have their medical license taken away. If there was an epidemic of such doctors, voters would rightly take alarm and may even petition the state legislature to ban such a practice. None of this would be stupid.
Correct, but anorexia is very different from gender dysphoria and involves diametrically opposite treatment protocols.
edit: responding to prottog:
> gender dysphoria was classified a mental illness [...] It's only very recently that with the former we started to take the (mentally unwell) patient's word over evidence.
You're the one begging the question now.
If gender dysphoria really is a mental illness, why are regret rates for gender-affirming care so low? One of the defining characteristics of a mental illness is that if you "feed into it", it gets worse. For example, with schizophrenia, you should not validate the voices someone might be hearing because doing so makes it worse. The situation with gender dysphoria is exactly the opposite.
Treatment protocols aren't divine edicts. They can be wrong. The medical community is as susceptible as any to groupthink and being taken in by the current culture milieu, as well as being influenced by moneyed interests.
As recently as ten years ago, with DSM-5, gender dysphoria was classified a mental illness, much like how anorexia is still classified as one. It's only very recently that with the former we started to take the (mentally unwell) patient's word over evidence.
Doctors used to say that cigarettes were good for you. I suspect that we'll look back at gender-affirming care the same way in a few decades.
> Treatment protocols aren't divine edicts. They can be wrong. The medical community is as susceptible as any to groupthink and being taken in by the current culture milieu, as well as being influenced by moneyed interests.
Do your suspicions in this instance merit an intervention in care for other people? At what point do your 'feelings' matter so much that you get to tell other people what to do medically with their own children? Apply this in an inverse fashion -- at what point do other people who suspect doctors are not right get to tell you how to make medical decision regarding your children?
Let's compare how many times Doctors as a group have been wrong about something vs Politicians. Are you still for Politicians making medical decisions for people?
NIMBY is an inherently local problem, and from what I've heard, that is at the heart of SF's issues: "you can't build affordable housing here, that will lower my property values"; "you can't build a big apartment building here, that will destroy the quaint local character".
I'm not saying that's a problem unique to SF, but SF can solve it without fixing the political issues that affect the rest of the country.
I'm in the treasure valley, I came up in the early aughts and even worked as an interstate mover for a time. I moved lots of Californians into Idaho who sold their house and came up here and bought two or three, or simply vastly upgraded their square footage and amenities. Something is different this time, maybe a critical mass has been reached but the change in culture and politics is apparent. Even in the smaller cities of the valley you see it, you hear it, I see stop white supremacy fliers around my little city. Keep in mind we were marching for Bernie Sanders in Boise not too long ago, he even came and did a rally. Boise and parts of the valley were always leftish, for as long as I've been here but it's different this time. It's more jarring. Again it's probably critical mass of certain ideologies or simply population densities but it's still different and really starting to change the culture across the valley. And not for the better in my opinion, I mentioned the fliers for instance well Hispanic and even African refugee relations have been good here. There's not a problem with white supremacy here but it's now being made manifest by outsiders... Why people can't leave well enough alone I'll never understand.
Are you talking about those kids doing donuts that circulated a few weeks back? That's super rare, I've lived here 20 years and never seen anything like that. Not saying that element isn't growing here, it has been, but this city is pretty dang safe.
A few weeks back? Not sure, but each video I see looks like they're new, so I'm only assuming that it's a regular occurance. To an outsider Austin looks pretty lawless on the roads.
Not that I know of, but there is a correlation between vehicle miles traveled and road deaths. Cars are big, heavy, and often move very fast. When cars collide with people, other cars, or built structures, it often results in deaths.
Pacific Northwest has loads of tech giants, move up here to the woods. No reason to live in Seattle, the big kids are over in the forest in Redmond (Microsoft, Valve, etc).
Seattle is very under appreciated imo. The pandemic didn’t do it any favors but it’s more affordable than the eastside suburbs with all the things you’d want from a city plus access to nature. Not everywhere is 3rd and Pike.
I agree. I live in the city and it would be more expensive to live on the east side. Public school quality in the city varies a lot, if you have young kids. The east side runs some really highly funded public schools.
Very sad to hear that. I loved this city when I lived there at the end of the nineties, although it was much more violent already than what I was accustomed to.
Sharing experience as someone who has lived in SF and around the Bay Area, and now has moved to another popular US city. At least pre-pandemic, there is a vibe difference, a sort of "magic" of having the expertise colocated (not necessarily in office though!). The best I can analogize it is imagine the networking value of being at a tech conference all the time. You'd meet people and they would know what you meant when you described your job, and you could have a conversation with them about it. Versus where I'm at now, people simply do not get it, you talk with them about tech things and their eyes glaze over, they discount you as "nerd" and usually remove themselves from the conversation. The sharing of ideas is far better than any online community (HN included) than I've ever experienced. It's hard to convey, you truly have to live it to feel the difference.
I don't mean to sound snarky, but... aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days, and the idea of building a homogeneous community should be anathema?
FWIW, where I live (outside Austin, but I don't think that's specifically relevant), as you predict, I don't feel that everyone just understands exactly what my job is. On the other hand, I do feel like people are curious and eager to learn. I find (I know, just one datapoint) that whether I'm talking to somebody from our local semiconductor industry or a lifelong Texas rancher, there's some respect for the idea that we prosper by being a community from all walks of life.
ETA: I'm not necessarily talking about any kind of "protected class" of race/gender/whatever. I mean people that are rich and poor, Christian and Buddhist and atheist and whatever, techies and ranchers and oilmen, and so forth. In other words, people who really have different ways of interacting with the world, not just skin deep.
> aren't we supposed to be valuing diversity above all else these days,
Perhaps, but after years of you being the person who is not valued, precisely because you are 'diverse', the idea of a homogenous group is likely appealing. I don't quite count myself in there, but I do live in a rural area, and there aren't as many people in software as there are in other industries. I don't particularly get the sense that people who don't know what I do care to learn or are all that curious, on the whole.
+1 I wasn't intending to say all of SF/BA are tech people. I'm saying a noticeable difference in the number of people who are Tech aware and tech open minded.
I used to live at 8th/Mission, I have felt the difference you speak of and still I could never live there again. There is a cold, passive hostility there that you don't feel in other places.
I don't think the parent is arguing for SF, but for A place where tech is highly concentrated. I moved away from SF in 2013 and miss the tech focus all the time. I feel like I moved away from the center of the earth. I loved my time in SF, but likewise cannot imagine moving back due to all the problems around crime and crazy prizes due to NIMBYism. I'd love to live in a place like SF in the late 00s/early10s though.
I didn't feel safe in SF until maybe the mid-late 90s. SF was seriously a violent place until the tech boom. China Basin, where the ballpark is now, was one of the worst parts of the city.
A "safe" SF only existed for about 20 years total.
San Francisco is safer (in terms of violent crime rate) today than it was at any time in the 1990s. (It also went up from the late 1990s to the mid-00s, so if you only started feeling safe in the late 1990s, that was probably your personal circumstances, not the actual safety of the city.)
Fair enough. I don't think it's that unsafe now either. It just felt like it had a lot more rough edges when I was younger, but that could've been due to differences in experiences as I got older.
It’s like how all the glass makers lived on a single island in Italy during the Renaissance. I could be wrong, but advancements in telescopes, microscopes, and even beakers are somehow related to the glassmakers in Florence
Zoom and FaceTime won’t replicate this. The question is whether AR and VR can come close within 10 years?
I go back and forth around whether these dense communities of industry are bad or not. It certainly creates bubbles and echo chambers, but there's also a lot of real innovation that happens because there's a rich ecosystem of skilled people to hire to build things.
This is coming from someone who has never lived in SF.
You can hire people from anywhere with the internet. Economics alone are likely to dictate that things move from centralization to decentralization.
$3m dollar homes, extremely high office rents, wasted energy and time on commuting, higher comp expenses, smaller hiring pool. Even if centralization/in-person is more efficient, likely not efficient to enough to overcome these economics.
The businesses that learn how to maneuver in a decentralized/online first manner have huge starting advantages over those that don't. Though, we will see in time.
It's possible the centralization gap will be much smaller in cities that choose to meet demand for housing/office/amenities.
That only really applies to work that can be efficiently done remotely. While a lot of software can, there's a significant chunk that cannot and never will be able to. As soon as you have situations where you need specialized hardware, remote work becomes really inefficient/untenable.
True, though many types of hardware work can still be distributed.
More than one phone prototype can be made and shipped to different branch offices, for example. Do you need the entire company working off one hardware prototype? Is that even a practical way to iterate? Not really. It's only the more bespoke/expensive hardware that is more difficult to distribute.
But software employment is currently much larger percentage of the IT workforce anyway
Or centralize it in the Midwest and put it next to the work that enables us to eat and use diesel to make consumable calories. Columbus, Des Moines, Oklahoma City. This is the way.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this was an innocent typo, but seeing a "tech bro" mythologize the midwest and then misspell Oklahoma is just too funny. You realize OKC has a higher violent crime rate than SF right?
Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.
I just think it's so bizarre watching people act as if Oklahoma of all places is a beacon of rational governance and domestic tranquility.
(Source: I grew up there and it's no different from most other places in the country. Our country's problems are dispersed fairly homogeneously. The opioid crisis is not limited to cities and neither is homelessness)
I don't know if people really comprehend that it's a national issue and not localized to any area. Inequality + years of segregation and neglect + drugs have been left to fester and our only tool against these issues has been a big boot.
Suburbanites are insulated by 20 miles of highway from the problematic areas and can't even fathom what it's like-- the talking heads on their TV are more real to them than whatever is happening in the inner city. But even then their kids are popping xanax and getting DUIs. They just have a better support system and can continue functioning in society instead of getting locked up. In rural areas too, there's so much drug crime and violent crime.
The unfortunate part is that our anti-poor propaganda works flawlessly even on the conventionally "smart" as we can see in threads like these.
What happens is SF doesn't have the traditional US organizational structure of 'heavily policed mall-like downtown -> elevated highway over poor neighborhoods -> suburbs' (like it or not, even NYC has turned into that with the gentrification of Manhattan and extreme Western Long Island).
So people see all that a city has to offer when they go to SF, while they'll never set foot in East New York.
For the most part, anywhere that Democrats have held TOTAL power for decades is a dump. They become more of a dump as the politics become more progressive and they hold even more power. We should acknowledge this. That having total Democrat control results in really bad places. They need to be challenged.
NYC is a great example. Was a dump until Giuliani came in and became the gold standard city when Bloomberg took over for 12 years. He called himself a Democrat at the end, but they all hated him because he was pragmatic and got shit done. There was a tension there though and it worked out well.
DeBlasio came in and almost immediately things started to turn. As SF has consolidated power it has just fell off the deep end. Chicago has this story going for 50 years.
2000 vs 2021
Murder 673, 488, down 185 27.5%
Rape 2068, 1491, down 577 27.9%
Robbert 32562, 13831, down 18731 57.5%
Felony Assault 25924, 22835, down 2089 11.9%
Burglary 38362, 12811, down 25551 66.6%
Grand Larceny 49631, 40870, down 8761 17.7%
Auto Theft 35442, 10415, down 25027 70.6%
Progressives ran these places in the 70’s and 80’s and they went moderate in the 90’s and 00’s mainly. Progressive last 10 or so years and they’re dying again.
I know this thread is old but I can't help pointing out that Guliani ran nyc until 2001.
Rudolph W. Giuliani 1994-2001
Shouldn't the crime rate in 2000 be lower than today? He wasn't a progressive, he followed the broken window theory, cracked down on small crimes, blah blah evidence.
You think crime is bad in nyc because of a campaign by Republicans/conservatives to make cities look bad combined with an actual recent hike in crime probably due to Covid causing layoffs in the service sector and now inflation
> every midwestern city of any size is violent as fuck. STL, KC, Indy, Chicago, OKC
If there's nothing there, why are they so violent? Answer: they really aren't. If you've lived in a midwestern city you'd know that there are areas that have more violence (like probably any city) than others, but I would wager that proportionally they're much smaller compared to outlying metro areas than larger cities.
I've spent a few weeks in each of SF and Chicago. SF constantly felt worse/scarier/more tense.
Most of that time in both cities was in business and/or tourist districts. There are pockets of Chicago I would definitely avoid, but the core felt safe. In SF, the core does not feel safe.
* Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.*
At least in the Midwest the thugs have the courtesy to congregate in known bad areas.
I'm fully for that. I'm fully remote now and based in Asia (between HK and Taiwan). I much prefer tech to be decentralized. But if the hub is going to stay in the US and somewhat centralized, almost anything would be better than SF.
For that to happen, people need to accept more remote work related technologies like AR and VR. AR is still far away with NReal being the closest thing that’s usable. With VR, the device form factor is so intimidating to people that many refuse to even try it.
Or most cities for that matter. I keep hearing "but culture" and I scratch my head... is culture expensive bars, restaurants, breweries? Yes the museums and art galleries can be cool, but most people see those once every few years. Similar to concerts/live music, its easy to travel into a city a few times per year for an event. Otherwise, they seem far from vibrant. (I've lived in SF, NYC, and LA - and haven't been back since the pandemic).
Most Americans have no idea what "culture" is; they assume it refers exclusively to consumption, i.e. what is available to consume and how people prefer to consume it.
I wonder where it would move to? Does it seem a bit curious that a "rotten to the core" city would be so synonymous with the tech industry? Perhaps they are intertwined for a reason. Personally, I've never been there, but am somewhat curious to visit. Not so much after dark though.
Pacific Northwest already has a lot of giants, and no reason to live in Seattle itself. Microsoft, Valve, etc are over in the forested towns like Redmond. Nintendo is over in North Bend.
Valve is in Bellevue and Nintendo is next to the Microsoft campus in the outskirts of Redmond. There is nothing in North Bend (except Twin Peaks fans and hikers).
Yeah, you see a ton of people commuting from Seattle where they live because they want to be around culture to the east side to work because they have to
Adding to a regional flamewar with personal attack is the sort of thing we ban accounts for. I'm not going to ban you because it doesn't look like you do this habitually, but please don't post like this to HN, regardless of how provocative another comment is or you feel it is. We need users here to follow the site guidelines even when that happens (or rather, precisely when that happens). Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral.
Lol no. The insane city government is why SF is a mess. It’s been this way my entire life. When I visited SF as a child, before any tech was there, it was a hot mess. Now, 30 years later it’s still a hot mess. (Though America’s healthcare and Fentanyl crises make it worse).
You have to understand that the entire SF housing situation is rigged, for the benefit not of the wealthy but of those who got there first. I know a guy who rents two apartments in Nob Hill, one for himself and one for his unemployed son. The guys job? A part-time substitute teacher at a public school. He’ll be retired soon and live there for another 20 years as he can’t possibly afford to move anywhere else. That’s rent control for you.
Meanwhile me and my wife both have tech salaries and don’t live in SF as we can’t afford it. No wonder the city has more dogs than children.
Anyway the root issue in this specific tragic incident is not housing - but the lack of treatment for the mentally ill, the ready availability of fentanyl and the willingness of the city government to roll out the red carpet of enablement with millions of dollars funnelled into city programs (that pay for their “jobs”) which amount to nothing more than an open-air mass suicide. It’s as tragic as it is despicable.
I see this mentioned often when people move to SF or other large cities and then complain about a lack of culture.
The people who brought culture into a city and were part of the city for a while end up leaving due to prices being driven high because of the tech industry (or really anything that causes huge price spikes).
Cities become known for their people and their culture. If nothing is done to keep those people in the city, then no wonder this complaint pops up.
Having less inequality does not contradict meritocracy. Studies show that a fair society does not spread welfare equally [1]: a fair society still rewards merit, work, and contributions, but not to the exaggerated extent as we do nowadays most likely due to the herding and random effect of advertisements [2]. The U.S. and California lead the pack. Hopefully we will learn and adjust, but most likely it's going to be a very slow and unfortunately painful process...
[1] Starmans, C., Sheskin, M., & Bloom, P. (2017). Why people prefer unequal societies. Nature Human Behaviour, 1(4), 0082. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0082
[2] Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science (New York, N.Y.), 311(5762), 854–856. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066
I don’t disagree that the person you are replying to has an idealistic perspective on this… but turning around and blaming the situation on the “woke mind virus” is _even more_ idealistic.
A causal relationship seems very difficult to establish here. Housing prices in SF are mostly due to the fact that it's very, very difficult to build more homes. High wages, even if it's concentrated in one particular sector, spreads out to the rest, since those high earners have to spend their money somewhere. The average hourly wage among all occupations in the SF area is almost 50% higher than the nationwide average; in food service, 35% higher.
Of course, none of this causes drug addiction and mental illness.
Massive income inequality is a root cause driver of a underclass that gets crushed under soaring costs and inability to pay for basics necessities like housing and healthcare.
…because of an utter lack of ability to build more housing.
The massive wealth brought by the tech industry could easily allow abundance. But when it’s impossible to build anything, it doesn’t matter how much money is raised via taxing that wealth, it just goes everywhere OTHER than building housing, which is needed desperately for lower income folk there and working class folk who do the work in healthcare.
A fixed amount of housing will just get bid up and up and up into the stratosphere. And for the progressive Boomer types who bought into the market decades ago and are now sitting on multimillion dollar property valuations, they will support any measure other than one which increases supply in a way that could reduce their property values (see Robert Reich). It’s a recipe for misery.
And Robert Reich is why I think that concern about inequality is not actually a productive route to fixing the problem. He’s one of THE greatest voices decrying inequality (and in the past I really agreed with a lot he had to say), and when push came to shove, he opposed new housing in his area (Berkeley) which could’ve threatened his household wealth. Be concerned about “community voice” and the power of existing homeowners (which in SF means millionaires or more) to oppose building housing.
Question those who question—under the guise of progressive (or conservative) goals—the creation of abundance. “Sure, you’re creating greater overall wealth that will help the vast majority of people, but the wrong people get most of the benefit.”
> Question those who question ... the creation of abundance
I cannot agree with you more on this point. The whole history of capitalism and all it depends on (rule of law, strong private property rights, laissez-faire economic policies) has been one of a rising tide lifting all boats.
Now in the developed world, material wealth has gotten to such a level that people in power are much more keen on divvying up the pie as they see fit than baking more pie. People have gotten myopic on this topic because they see more wealth than ever before; they question why we need to create more wealth, instead of spreading the existing wealth around? And that leads to precisely the kind of thinking you underlined: a further rising tide is bad, if some people end up in bigger yachts.
Increased housing costs don't cause drug addiction, but it does cause an increase in homelessness, and that does cause drug addiction, which in turn over time can cause mental illness or make it worse.
I think that's because our winters are brutal. Homeless people would rather live in a milder climate or a place like New York with a better public transportation system.
Well, that pretty much sounds like communism, atleast in practice. Majority is suffering while the leaders and a small group are ultra rich and lives in luxury, at the expense of workers and ordinary people.
Doesn't it make sense to aim at increasing wages at the lowest end, instead of targeting higher earners?
I get the sense that people in HN believe that most tech workers in the Bay Area are some sort of high rolling millionaires. They mostly are not, and the proof is that most are priced out of housing in SF too.
Saying that inequality is caused by tech workers is thus a myopic statement.
Anyone who spent considerable time in SF before the most recent tech boom would likely argue that it was the tech industry that caused the rot in the first place.
The foundation of safe cities is vibrant local communities with historic roots. Parts of the city where people choose to have and raise kids. Places with a sense of shared community where neighbors look out for each other.
The rapid influx of extremely high income individuals transformed SF over the course of the last decade. Uprooting those communities and replacing them with largely transient techworkers with no real interest in forming communities that don't help them to increase their TC and level up with their next new role.
Then when tech declines you really see the impact this has.
SF was treated as basically a luxury mall for rich tech workers to get whatever they want whenever they want. As tech workers start to leave it's no wonder the city feels like an abandoned mall.
Xenophobic natives pursued an anti-housing strategy in order to thwart what they perceived as tech workers getting too much of what they wanted. It just didn’t work. Tech workers could still pay the inflated rents that you decided we should have in the service of “community.” But no one else could. Then you turn around and blame us for the collateral damage you caused with this narcissistic “look what you made me do” attitude.
Americans are entitled to move within the United States. Always have been, always will be. You can keep trying for de facto migration controls all you want, but you will never be able to dial them in to curate exactly the population you want. It will always blow up in your face like this. That’s very, very good and it makes me damn proud to be an American. This isn’t the feudal system. We don’t allocative the best land to the people born on it. It’s insane that this ever became a left-coded position.
This claim isn't backed up by the demographic info of SF [0], and SF has historically been a very diverse, immigrant friendly city.
Percentage of US born (as well as specifically California born) residents of SF started to rise with the tech boom. The lowest number of US born residents of SF was 2000, it rose slightly by 2010 and continued to increase into 2020.
SF’s in-group is clearly not “white-bread American” but it absolutely has an in-group, an out-group, a sense of being overrun by the wrong kind of people, and a politics focused around defending its “original” territory, identity, and culture from the outsiders.
You're just describing a "community" and the "shared values that define them".
So I think we agree: tech people came in, attempted to displace the local community and trampled on their values (and claimed them "xenophobic" for resisting).
And now that the tech community is withdrawing what's left is a broken city without the community and shared values that once defined it.
The tech community wanted SF to be a shopping mall for rich tech workers, some parts of the community resisted being turned into a shopping mall, they lost and now SF is rotten.
US cities aren’t country clubs or coop buildings. You may think of yourselves as a “community” in some respects, but you aren’t entitled to require referrals, conduct culture fit interviews, or deliberate about whether to accept prospective members. The right to reside in the US is the right to reside in the US, and not just technically. This is good and important.
Trying to approximate these hukou-style controls through building permits is what created displacement - tech people just wanted places to live.
SF has definetly seen QoL drop like a stone, but how much of that is because techies now live in neighborhoods that used to be the ghettos until the early 2010s.
Like Hayes Valley used to be crack dens until Twitter money, Mission District was a Latino ghetto until FB money, and Portrero Hill and West Add were the African American projects. Plus Chinatown and Tenderloin had an active Triad and Vietnamese+Cambodian gang presence.
Now you see upper net worth people living in Hayes Valley, houses in Portrero go for millions, every new grad SWE getting a shithole studio within walking distance of DoLo Park, much of Polk St and northern Tenderloin is now classified as "Lower Nob Hill", and all the Triad members and Viet gangs got caught in the ICE dragnet or retired.
> Hayes Valley used to be crack dens until Twitter money, Mission District was a Latino ghetto until FB money, and Portrero Hill and West Add were the African American projects
I lived in Potrero hill and Hayes valley in the early 2000s and was no stranger to the mission.
Would anybody be willing to entertain the idea that he was a whistleblower to the Hindenburg short seller report against Square/Block that indicts CashApp, or that there is any link?
Something aside from “random degeneracy and vagrancy in SF with no leads”?
Where to start? I have such a special place in my heart for Bob. He was brilliant. He was a gentleman. He was kind. Shining. Thoughtful and so so very generous. On more than one occasion he was a safe place to play, a deeply heart centered friend, and always offered genuine parts of himself to our interactions. Seeing Bob was always a bright spot in my San Francisco life, even when it was dark to be there. And now, when darkness seems to have won a battle, his light will always live on in our hearts. Thank you for being such a wonderful man, Bob. I love you.
This is sad, but the reality is the homicide rate in San Francisco isn't that bad, in fact it's been steadily declining for 30 years and doesn't sit in the top 50 in the united states.
Both of those sources are from third party sites without valid sourcing. I think it's important to note that while researching a rebuttal for both of these sources you guys provided, solid data from reputable sources is VERY hard to come by, which I found interesting.
I'll also think one reason might be because municipalities report to the FBI UCR on a voluntary basis for their reports, and cities don't stand to gain much from reporting very bad numbers.
Cash App founder, a rich 42 year old father of 2, found dead at 2:35 AM, one week after an explosive report accusing his startup of being extensively used for crime and fraud[0].
I see people excuses this as "it's part and parcel of living in a big city". No it's not, this is a West only phenomenon.
Singapore is safe, The entire Japan is safe, Korea, Taiwan. I deliberately removed mainland China cities to avoid "...but authoritarian..." arguments.
Plenty of government in the world kept their citizen safe and getting murdered walking down the street is never a risk factor to those dewellers and they are way worse GDP and even wealth disparity than US.
The places you mention may have higher actual wealth disparity in some cases, but they have lower economic disparity, because they all at least guarantee healthcare, among other things. Singapore even guarantees housing. The PRC allegedly guarantees all of it, but when I lived there it sure didn't look like it, I saw tons of abject poverty.
Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so please don't post like this here—regardless of how other commenters are behaving.
>> Americans clearly have very low expectations for their standard of living.
One SF startup I saw had executives mostly working remotely in Sonoma county (wine country) or Marin County (mountains and beautiful views) or Atherton. HR declared themselves remote also. For office visits, many Uber-ed in or drove in, conveniently avoiding all the chaos outside.
The median listing home price in Atherton, CA was $10.4M in February 2023. Unfortunately, it is easy to ignore the other half when decision-makers in power living in some of the most beautiful places on earth.
Low-level workers were the ones trekking into SF daily and dealing with reality.
Every city in America is so much incredibly safer than it was in 1990 that nobody old enough to remember that is going to be bothered by much of anything.
(That is, if you think now's bad, you should've seen it then.)
Nobody really cares about the murder rate. What they care about is being murdered.
A city where gangs are killing each other off but never bother normal people will feel much safer than a city where a comparatively few people are killed but it’s from the greater pool of everyone.
Nationwide crime is up 50% in the past 3 years, and at about 70% of the 1991 all time high. It's safer than our absolute peak for sure, but this historical reversal should be very concerning.
We should all be incredibly skeptical of the claim. For the 2020-2021 years our rates in Charleston were returning to the “90s Crack Epidemic” rates.
Much like other commenters in the thread, I’ve had a man threaten to “cut my mother effing throat” in broad daylight in front of a dozen bystanders. Thankfully, he turned tail once I drew a handgun and no one died that day. Police showed up 45 minutes later and were of no use, so why bother reported the three times I’ve had guns pointed at me in traffic since 2020?
When police response times are at or above the hour mark and the best you’ll get is an “oh that sucks man, need a report for insurance?” people stop reporting crimes. Now the politicians get to pretend crime is “better”.
These are all too gameable. Some even go against the grain of common sense. You think if you include porch pirates that theft is down, or that everyone knows there is no point in even reporting it. Murder is the only useful thing to track as a proxy for other crimes, but even that can make things seem better than they are due to better medical interventions.
Things like hospitals tracking gunshots and stabbing is harder to game, but a city can be relatively nonviolent and still feel like an absolute shithole of theft is petty and common.
This is certifiably untrue. Philadelphia, for example, just had our highest 3 year murder period ever. Additionally, we should really compare this to previous eras, not just the other highest crime periods you could name. We're at triple the homicides of the 50s and 60s, for example, and our population has declined since then.
Isn't there a Father Ted episode in which they're trying to lure him from rural Ireland to somewhere in the USA with "it's really not that bad: last month there was a something-percent fall in the number of drive-by shootings"?
America is a land of extremes. We actually have relatively high standard of living thanks to extremely high wages, which allow us to live lives of relative luxury. We also have high wealth inequality and tolerate many horrors - some unfathomable to other developed countries (e.g. gun deaths).
Arguably the latter is a symptom of the former. So there are broadly 2 approaches to tackle the problem - reduce inequality, or use draconian measures to control the people who got the wrong end of the inequality stick.
Nothing seems complicated if you wave away all the details. You made quite a leap even in the first link of the chain ("wealth inequality => poverty"). I don't see how poverty follows from wealth inequality. That there are people who earn more or have amassed more wealth than me, sometimes fantastically so, doesn't make me any poorer. In fact, often times my own life is enriched by the value created by those who ended up becoming wealthy. Of course, this is not to suggest that every rich person created value for others to get there, or that people who create value for others necessarily become rich.
The link between poverty and homelessness, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, is mostly due to policy choices local to SF and California as a whole that greatly disincentivize building more homes to keep up with demand. I come from a country where (with some exaggeration) it feels like an urban park might have higher population density than San Francisco. There's no reason why one of the most desired markets in the world should be that way, other than through artificially restricting the supply.
> Countries that have affordable housing and jobs don't have this problem.
Very few countries, whether housing is cheap or expensive and whether jobs pay well or poorly, have this problem of people strung about, high in public, engaging in antisocial behavior. Most countries don't turn a blind eye towards drug addiction from a personal liberty standpoint, which I think is quite a uniquely American concept. Most will imprison people for possessing or consuming any and punish with death those who traffic. There is broad cultural acceptance of behaving in this way.
There's no leap, but we don't even need to have that conversation.
Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.
This is not because of "local SF and California" policies. Homelessness is a problem in nearly every North American cities, from Vancouver to New York. Large cities in Europe also struggle with it, albeit to a lesser degree.
I'm not against building more housing, but no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.
And I don't know where you got the idea that the USA is "turning a blind eye" to these problems. There's no blind eye. The US has the highest carceral population in the world. Cities already spent hundreds of millions on police. The problems are not being ignored, the solutions attempted just don't work.
> Homelessness is a problem in nearly every North American cities, from Vancouver to New York.
It's an order of magnitude higher in San Francisco at ~2.5% of the population compared to New York at ~0.8% and Vancouver at ~0.3%. SF isn't the only city with homeless people, but it likely has it to the highest degree, with other undesirable traits like open-air drug use, public defecation, and property crimes.
> no matter how much you build, not everyone will be able to afford it.
That's true, but we should still build more so that more people will be able to afford housing. No policy choice will completely eliminate poverty or homelessness nor reduce it for free without opportunity cost, so as a society we have to make prudent tradeoffs that help the most people for the least cost.
> Poverty exists, which leads to homelessness.
Are you suggesting that we're capable of totally eliminating poverty?
What's your point? What are you even arguing here? You started at questioning if wealth inequality lead to the current situation, and now you abandoned that point and moved on to claiming SF is unique (it's not), and going off on tangents that you yourself admit don't solve the problem.
Places with lower wealth inequality seem to have fewer mentally ill drug addicts terrorising the public.
Putting aside arguments of social responsibility and taking a purely self-interested perspective, it's typically cheaper and more effective to provide for these people than it is to lock them up. When there's nothing to take away, enforcement doesn't provide any deterrent and frequently leads to an escalation of behaviour instead.
Well I was surprised by the number of murders so far this year. It's less than my much smaller hometown that isn't considered particularly unsafe, while on here everyone acts like SF is hell.
There's no question there's a huge homeless problem in SF but the number of murders there are really low compared to a southern or midwestern city.
Americans have low expectations when it comes to the acceptable level of violence in a country that has third world levels of crime. And in Europe, many politicians wants their own citizens to live in what the former perceive as the ideal society? Just no.
Even being rich in US doesn't protect anyone from being murdered randomly...
The decades of internal and self-violence are quickly forgotten when something happens to a tech bro. I simply can't take that country seriously anymore...
This is very sad.
On comparing city safety. SF has 1M people and 55 homicides. Jacksonville, FL has 1M and 162. Is there a reason people in the US seem to highlight SF more in situations like this?
I know nothing about the guy but nobody should die in a street like that. Tragic. I hope they find and hold person/people responsible accountable. His family must be in bits.
How long before companies start putting moratoriums on travel to SF? We've talked about it on our team w.r.t. conferences and non-direct-business related things.
lol. dude provides "data" for the first part of this year and one year previous. Notes there's an increase and blames the city for Lee's murder. If you go back several years, you'll see that the recent past is about the same (around 6 murders per 100,000). Turns out that 2022 had a lower than average # of murders in the first three months of 2022. In 2007, the murder rate was twice what it was in the last several years.
So I guess Mr. Leahy is getting good use of his "Statistical Cherry Picking for Dummies" book.
Apparently murder is not a problem until a member of the rentier class is affected.
Honestly this city is a pathetic embarrassment to the United States. The most powerful, richest country in the world, and our second most expensive city is a dilapidated unsafe shithole where our societal leaders get murdered on 1-day business trips. I’ve been on the fence about moving up to SF for a year but I think this might seal the deal to keep me living in South Bay. Shame on people who continue to work their brains into overtime trying to justify the city’s policies as they currently exist.
I'm so sick of crime in the Bay. We need to be way tougher on crime. Immediate life sentences without parole for murder, ending catch+release for property theft.
The mere thought of stealing, or attacking a stranger, or dealing drugs illegally, must become so unappetizing that they simply refuse to do it even when they have no other options.
The event that sparked all this conversation is the homicide of Bob Lee. If we're talking about the problem of car break-ins, robberies, or vandalism, that's one thing. But on the matter of homicide, SF (6.35)¹ tracks closely to the national average (7.8)².
Property crime is what substantially contributes to the image that SF is an unsafe city.
I think it's the fact that most of the people in the comments section here weren't alive in the 80s to have a point of reference. 6 homicides per 100,000 per year? That's high? You should have been here or NYC in the 80s.
That being said... yes... 6 homicides per 100,000 is 6 homicides per 100,000 too many.
Not every city can be like Cupertino, which basically has 0 homicides per 100k, where the streets are often devoid of police patrols (the city not have a police dept), where the public schools are the pride of the city and the youths are beaming with optimism. The streets are clean, the local community college is beautiful, and the businesses are classy but with an interesting dash of old-school mom and pop ethnic restaurants.
But I don't think any Cupertino in the US can scale to 800k and maintain these stats.
Do you know what's a great predictor for a high crime rate? High levels of wealth inequality. Yes, the poors are more likely to turn to crime (at least the kind of crime that has officers with gun chase you around rather than the kind that requires expensive lawyers) but there's less incentive (and spite) if everyone in the neighborhood is similarly poor.
Part of the issue might be how the murders are distributed. Some cities with high murder rates have a very small segment of the population killing each other (eg drug dealers/gang members), whereas normal people go on mostly untouched save for stray bullets. Maybe SF murders are more randomly distributed among the general population?
Yeah. Makes total sense. That's why the wild west was crime free, because everyone feared the retributive punishments...
People don't pull out a knife then think "wait, but I'll be punished" and put the knife away. What you are proposing feels good but in no way lines up with the reality of society in a contemporary city. If you want there to be less crime you have to treat it as the social class problem it is and find ways to get people access to other ways of living, or if they're ill (mentally or otherwise) get them care and shelter.
That, or we can continue to price people out of being healthy members of our social strata. It's clearly going great in SF
>> We need to be way tougher on crime. Immediate life sentences without parole for murder, ending catch+release for property theft.
> If you want there to be less crime you have to treat it as the social class problem it is and find ways to get people access to other ways of living, or if they're ill (mentally or otherwise) get them care and shelter.
IMHO, you probably have to do both. There do exist people who are just antisocial, who don't have the self-control to stop themselves from committing crimes or who lack the moral framework to avoid crime if it would otherwise satisfy a goal. And even with crime was driven by "social class problems," even if you solve all those there's still the problem of transitioning from one regime to the other, and dealing with people who's habits and mindset from the old regime keep them committing crimes in the new one.
People who want to crime do tend to avoid places where the police are more aggressive with enforcement. E.g. you don't really want to do petty property crime in Bellevue Washington when more tolerant Seattle is right across the lake.
The same problem exists for "getting care and shelter" in that the problems themselves are hardly immobile, while the solutions are expected to be provided locally.
This is a very valid and important point. It also causes knock-on effects that are aggravating factors. The important subtlety in what you are stating is: People don't consider punishment when they're committing crimes but they do absolutely seem to consider the likelihood that they will be caught (hooray for the complexities of being human!).
So we end up with densely concentrated areas of crime in places that are "soft on crime". But it's very clear that the solution isn't increasing police presence in these areas, if it were that simple NYC the 80s would have been crime free. The solution is to fix the problem at its core but to do that we need to agree to cooperate on a broader scale... with something like a federal government that can enact wide policies to create incentives for these things to end. This is how it works in "crime free" japan. But we seem to have given up on federal solutions to these things ages ago.
You can definitely push the problem somewhere else with more aggressive policing, but that relies on a soft on crime area nearby or rather popular as a place to push it to.
China is "crime free" also, but the hammer hits really hard so really it is either just very well hidden, or accepted by the police informally (e.g. tea scams, red light massage parlors).
Tougher sentences have almost a zero effect on crime. Somebody who isn't worried about a 25 year sentence for murder isn't going to worry about a life sentence.
Far more effective is to increase the chances of getting caught & prosecuted. A guaranteed 10 year sentence for murder is far more effective than a life sentence when you believe you won't get caught.
Among other reasons, imprisonment is used for reasons of incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation. It should be fairly easy to see how light or no sentencing has compromised those goals.
> Immediate life sentences without parole for murder, ending catch+release for property theft.
Interesting that you skip right over any idea of prevention, deterrence (other than by threat of incarceration), or alleviation of the conditions that lead to criminality. "Tough on crime" is not the only way to actually reduce crime, and I posit not even the best. Would you care to elaborate on possible solutions other than the punitive?
It turns out that there's a pesky problem with our judicial system in that it requires people to be charged and then tried by a court before sentencing them to life in prison.
One difficult aspect of violent crime is that you have to have a suspect before you can bring them to trial. And it's funny because the murder clearance rate seems to match the police funding rate. And the police funding rate is on par with taxes collected nationally and locally.
So sure... you can have police investigating murders, or you can have a zero-tax libertarian utopia, but it appears that you can't have both.
It’s not an invention of mankind. See Chimps, other animals.
It’s fine to take that approach, you’re just a complete pacifist at that point who won’t defend his women and children. I thinks it’s why pacifism is a fairly rare quality.
Yes, our prison system needs to be severely reduced. Someone smokes weed and gets thrown in a dog kennel for years? And we call ourselves humane for that?
I would be shocked if it were anything but random/senseless (or opportunistic robbery), happening on the street at 0230 in SoMA. This police request for information appears to be related. https://twitter.com/sfvas/status/1643328384234315777
I've never been to SF. Never met Bob and have barely any personal experience with crime at all.
And I'm fairly high on the bleeding heart liberal scale but my opinion looking at the crime stats for the US (and other western countries) is that you get the society that you are willing to pay for.
When teachers, social workers, doctors, police, justice systems and prisons cannot teach, help, cure, protect, judge, punish, and rehabilitate people who are not following the laws because there aren't enough of them and they have insufficient resources then this is what you get.
There are people out there who are unintelligent, vulnerable, mentally ill, and occasionally just sociopathic. You need a comprehensive system to try and help those people and protect the rest of society from them.
We've (across the western world) have decided to not put our tax dollars into solving these problems.
Agreed that we're not using our tax dollars effectively to help people in SF. But SF (and CA in general) have some of the highest tax burdens per citizen in the entire nation -- very similar to many European nations. We should emphasize that taxes provide more than enough money to make a functional city, but some combination of internal corruption or mismanagement is preventing those dollars from effectively helping those in need.
Well you've made an assertion that the there is more than enough money but not provided evidence. My understanding is that a lot of the homeless people in SF come from elsewhere so if that's true then a straight comparison of taxation might not be valid. But this is a very very big topic so I'll just point out that actually society is not taking care of the people who need it anywhere in the US or the western world. This is a choice that people make.
Very true, especially on a worldwide scale: we could allocate resources much more efficiently to take care of a lot of people who are suffering around the whole world.
Within the microcosm of SF? I would make the basic argument that SF's population has grown and its tax rate has increased over the past 20 years, yet there are now orders of magnitude more people suffering in the city from high rent, homelessness, and other affordability issues. It's hard to point to any specific numbers but I recall a much nicer city back in 2005, and even as recently as 2015. Of course you're also very correct that no city is an island so there could be a lot of suffering people coming to the city because in SF they can access social programs that aren't available elsewhere.
For those of us who consider ourselves liberals, at what point do we have to ask ourselves if decriminalization/restorative justice is actually working?
I mean, we obviously want to believe it works- but does it actually? And if, hypothetically, it were counterproductive- what then?
SF in a lot of ways is a microcosm of the US and the broader world which is currently suffering what can only be described as emergent behavior in social networking. Like unintended gradient descent to get everybody maximally polarized by learning what most upsets them and feeding them more of that.
I'd also ask what is the other side of this. What are the largest conservative cities in the US around 800k scale? It seems like the largest cities in big conservative states, such as TX (Houston, San Antonio, Dallas) or FL (Jacksonville, Miami), are at most as conservative as "purple" or liberal leaning.
SF is also quite close to the national homicide average while being denser than most cities.
Largest is probably Oklahoma City. They average around 70 murders annually for a population of just under 700K, or around 35th in the nation for major cities. It has twice the rate of murder as SF according to that Wiki list posted above.
Only vaguely related to your comment, but comparing cities can give unreliable data.
City boundaries within a metropolitan area are often quite arbitrary. A murder can happen on one block and be in the city and two blocks over and outside the city.
A good example is Detroit. Greater metro Detroit has 4.3M people, but the city of Detroit has 632,000.
And the city of Detroit is where most of the poverty is and most murders happen, within the larger metro area, so you end up with super high murder rates for Detroit and super low murder rates for the surrounding area.
But in the grand scheme of things it’s just one big metro area.
The largest cities in big conservative states are where all the Democrats in those states live. And the rural areas in all the big liberal states are where all the Republicans in those states live. Democrats by and large run the cities.
I really like Singapore, but it’s almost a single party police state. It’s somewhat unique in a couple of respects. Mostly that it does actually provide the safety and stability that you are theoretically promised as a trade of for the compromised civil liberties, and that the government is kinda, mostly benevolent… But I don’t think it’s directly comparable to a country that embraces civil liberties. It’s probably pretty safe to walk around Pyongyang too.
Economically speaking they also embrace a basically libertarian style of free market capitalism (in respect to everything except land use), which is another reason they’re not a great comparison.
> I really like Singapore, but it’s almost a single party police state.
SF is a single party city defunding the police. While they parallel Singapore in the single party system they are close to the opposite in nearly all other aspects and it shows. Both places are awash in money but one of them only seems to get worse the more money pours in. If I had to choose between the political system of San Francisco and that of Singapore I would choose the latter.
It is a good thing I do not have to choose though since I don't like either of those systems, it is just that watching the slow-motion train wreck of San Francisco (among others) being run into the ground by self-proclaimed saviours of humanity is so disheartening, especially seen in the light of the claims made by those who push these policies. They must know that they are destroying the place, they can not be so blindsided by ideology. This only leaves the possibility that they are so hell-bent on staying in power that they will do anything it takes, no matter the consequences. How they can rhyme this with their self-proclaimed virtuous goals is beyond me.
Just the normal bullshit you get with any political argument (cherry-picking, dishonesty, etc), but particularly exaggerated. The subset of people I'm referring to are not interested in fixing the problem - only in using it as evidence of how justified their hatred for their political enemies is. This is obvious - I'm not referring to something subtle or defending the SF government.
That's nothing more than hiding your head in the sand though, isn't it? When the wry fruits of those policies are so clear to see it is no more than logical that opponents of those policies - who have been clamouring about just those things for years - point out what happened yet another time. This is not cherry-picking at all as there are no cherries to be picked in this garden, only rotten fruits. There is no exaggeration either since there is no need for such - and isn't it a sad thing all in itself?
As to "fixing the problem" I'd say that when your house is on fire you first take to the firehose before you chastise your children for playing with matches.
What's the other side, but portrayed as a straw-man?
Chasing the poor out of the city by sending armed thugs after them, redistributing wealth from poor to rich by ratcheting up rents, keeping rich to poor wealth redistribution to a minimum, and importing more yuppies until gentrification is completed. At some point the poor will be displaced thus reducing wealth inequality in the city thus reducing crime.
I understand that social climbing requires participation in this lying game. Maybe your HN account is tied to your irl identity, so I understand if you can't speak honestly here.
neither "side" wants to address anything even remotely close to the root causes of it, so the options are very limited. The right, at least, favours a solution that is congruent to its reactionary values, in a way it is a more internally consistent ideology than social progressive liberalism. The latter has to content with the unavoidable internal inconsistencies it creates.
In other words, liberals have the uncomfortable task of ruling the richest cities with the largest wealth and income inequality, in such a way that is both progressive and economically liberal. So you end up not regulating the real-estate industry or providing livable wages, but you are also not bulldozing the tent cities or investing in larger prisons to more effectively mass-incarcerate poor people crimes.
Are we talking about the same city? SF real estate is super regulated, it’s my go to example of real estate regulations taken to an insane level. This is the city where any citizen can appeal any project for just a few hundred dollars, and basically every medium-large project is a negotiation with the SF board of supervisors (and often random non profits too, just look at what happened to 469 Stevenson St).
I was more so referring to public housing projects, rent control, banning institutional investment firms and more. I'm sure they have much regulation in place, doesn't mean it meaningfully addresses the housing cost crisis in any capacity.
A Hacker-libertarian anti-freedom ideology where drug abuse and homelessness are re-criminalized and mass institutionalization of others against their will.
Not even 66th of all US cities, only of the hundred biggest by population. Of all US cities last year it was no worse than 120th per capita and 140th by total[1].
The US, as a whole, ranks #60, at 6.5 intentional homicides per 100k. This is just under Russia, Nicaragua, Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Paraguay, and Tanzania, and only slightly better than Argentina, Sudan, Tunisia, etc.
By contrast, countries like Germany, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Hungary, etc. rank in the 150-160 range with 0.5 to 0.8 per 100k. Here in Japan, we're #181 with only 0.3/100k.
From my perspective, SF's murder rate is huge, and the entire US is a violent, "developing" nation. (I put "developing" in quotes because it seems like it's actually going backwards, unlike most developing nations, and the use of "3rd world" here doesn't make logical sense according to its original definition.)
Why are you comparing San Francisco against cities with completely different demographics? If you compare SF against similar cities, it is far more dangerous. It has almost twice the murder rate of NYC for example.
Speaking as an immigrant - Worked in SF most of last decade. Left in 2018. Crime was on a steady uptick while I was there. Once in the Bart, a young man grabbed a cellphone from the guy seated right next to me & bolted out of the train. The train started, and the cellphone owner gave chase. The Bart police arrived soon after, with guns pointed straight at the passengers. The robber was fast and jumped over the turnstile & got away with the cellphone. I felt like I was like in a cops and robbers movie. People are trying to peacefully commute to work and instead you are subjected to guns in your face because of some shiny iphone. Rest of the train trip was some heated political debate between the left & the left-left, arguing what should be done. The left wanted to integrate the youth into the tech community by offering free coding classes so they wouldn't rob cellphones. The left-left argued for free iphones for everybody. I was like, hey how about catching the robber & some jailtime, which is what they'd have done where I come from. Ofcourse I didn't actually say anything, I don't feel comfortable talking about your politics.
I work in a suburb in the rural midwest now. Neighborhoodscout says my odds are 1 in 1100. So my chances of being a victim have improved from 1 in 18 to 1 in 1100. How does it feel ? 8 year old kids here bike to school a mile away, snow or shine, no cps, nothing. As to property crime - once we went away for the weekend & the garage door acted up in our absence. So for a whole 3 days, the garage was wide open & anybody could have walked in & grabbed whatever. Nothing was taken. On the contrary there was a nice note from the neighbor about applying grease on the railing so the garage door stays closed.
So if you are an immigrant & safety is a priority, yeah there are many towns in the midwest southwest etc. where you can be very safe. Houses are quite cheap & I was able to buy my house with straight cash, but ironically that cash was earned in SF! Indeed, I now get paid 4x less than what I made as a programmer back in SF.
So yeah, from an immigrant pov, it looks like in this country you first have to pay your dues. Work in some high-crime zone like SF,NYC etc, accumulate capital. Then move to some peaceful rural place in the midwest with no crime & no nothing. We don't even have a mall.
> So for a whole 3 days, the garage was wide open & anybody could have walked in & grabbed whatever. Nothing was taken. On the contrary there was a nice note from the neighbor about applying grease on the railing so the garage door stays closed.
Everyone seems to be missing a piece of critical non-political information.
One setting is rural, everyone owns the house, lives there long-term, everyone knows neighbours. You don't want to ruin relationship with neighbours for $100.
The other setting is Urban, you don't know neighbours, you don't care what they think. Everyone appears out of nowhere and disappears into obscurity.
The social dynamics is totally different, and the housing crisis has a big role to play in it.
Also you do not Have_To own the house to feel like you live there long term and know neighbours - many European countries have social housing, or massive restrictions on landlords kicking out tenants. So tenants stay in the same place for decades, and there is a real community.
You can have Urban setting without the squalor that is currently swallowing the Bay Area. I know it because I have seen it - in the same place. The difference between what I have seen in SF when I came there for the first time, in early 2000s, and what I am seeing now, in 2023, is striking. Everybody has a long list of reasons why, but the basics are clear here I think - it's not that you can't have urban setting with reasonable quality of life. It's that somehow whatever is being done in the Bay Area does not lead to this - very possible otherwise - outcome. It's not some inevitable law of nature - it's what people do, how they organize their society, and it's clear that the way they do it now leads to some consequences and so far they are not intent to change their ways substantially - so the consequences will continue.
I live in an urban setting, Amsterdam, 1M+ inhabitants in the area. I barely know my neighbors. And yet, the description of the parent could apply to life here.
I once forgot a briefcase on the street out of a bar in the center after work. I realized only when I got home. I got back there, sure that I would not find it anymore. I come from Italy and that is just the norm there.
Not only I found it, but someone moved it out of the way of the bike rack where I forgot it. So it was definitely noticed, and yet nobody took it.
Another anecdote. Once at a dancing event, the organizer just left and went to sleep. He told me that if people wanted a drink, they could just grab one from the fridge and put money in the money box. Where I come from, the fridge would have been emptied and the money box would have disappeared.
It's not a matter of urban vs. rural. It's a matter of culture.
"The other setting is Urban, you don't know neighbours, you don't care what they think. Everyone appears out of nowhere and disappears into obscurity."
And yet crime levels in various urban settings are wildly different, from places like Johannesburg on one extreme of the continuum to Reykjavík or Tokio on the other one.
Looking at the worst cities worldwide as far as homicide goes, almost all the top contenders are from Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, the US or Colombia, with Mexico being heavily overrepresented. 17 of the top 50 homicide metropolises are Mexican. Damn.
There isn't a single European or Asian city in that list. Germany has some 60 per cent of the Mexican population, but isn't present in the top 50 at all. Heck, even India and China just aren't there, and they together account for almost half of mankind.
Seems like all the cities with ethnically uniform population established for hundreds of years are safe, while those much younger cities with historically lots of immigration from various different places are unsafe. Not sure what the US should do with that, it's not like there is (almost) anybody other than immigrants or any truly old cities at all.
What has you rejecting a much simpler hypothesis that strict law enforcement makes cities safe? pursing, arresting, and severe punishment of criminals.
You've just blended all of justice system into a single metric that is too basic.
If you want 'tough on crime' that actually works, but you have to be tough on all crime, including crime in the police. And make sure the entire justice process works.
UK has a 'tough on crime' government, they've increased severity of sentences, but have cut funding to the police. The rate of prosecution, i.e. how likely you are to get caught, fell off a cliff. Also now that police is poorly paid, we have corruption in the police.
Research shows that certainty of punishment is far more important than severity of punishment. Criminals are chancers.
Then we have to make sure that suspects get proper legal council. The current plea bargain system in US is absurd. You can prosecute some poor shmuck for a crime, they can't afford a lawyer, and state lawyer sucks, so they take the plea. Taxpayer pays for their imprisonment, police reports great success. Meanwhile real criminal goes free to commit more crimes with more experience. And they will be harder to catch next time.
Most european countries do not have severe punishment of criminals, yet crime rates aren't crazy.
I havent been to US, so i am not sure about any Bay Area shenanigans
> Research shows that certainty of punishment is far more important than severity of punishment.
So we completely agree because I’m pretty sure that is all that actually matters.
The issue in US currently is a deranged political fade has taken hold that sees criminals as victims of their circumstances and has started not punishing criminals.
It can be simultaneously true that criminal behavior is often a result of bad circumstances AND that it requires consistent punishment, not that the first point negates the 2nd. Instead social programs need to focus on improving circumstances that lead to criminal behavior not removing punishments.
This political fade is a bankrupt flawed ideology that is effectively mass social psychosis or insanity.
> It can be simultaneously true that criminal behavior is often a result of bad circumstances AND that it requires consistent punishment, not that the first point negates the 2nd. Instead social programs need to focus on improving circumstances that lead to criminal behavior not removing punishments.
The problem is there’s another flawed political ideology that tells us that—investing in social programs to improve the circumstances that lead to criminal behavior—is bad because communism.
The fact that many US cities have very strict law enforcement and yet they're on the list. Meanwhile, I really wouldn't say we have as strong law enforcement here in EU as it is in the US.
UK is regarded as extremely highly policed state by other Europeans and yet it's less safe than here in mainland Europe.
The street police doesn't carry guns, but what about all these cameras? That'd be considered a serious breach of privacy and personal freedom where I live.
My police is approachable and I don't care about the gun on their belt. I saw them use it for protection of the citizens - I appreciate they have it and don't consider it over-policing, it's not moving that scale anywhere.
It's not about the gun, it's about the rights of the police. The police here carries a gun but has zero rights/power against citizens not breaking any laws. They can't even stop you and ask for your ID - that would be considered "communism" here (same with the cameras, that's a "communist practice").
The Mexican cities topping the chart have very little immigration, while many safe Asian cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai have huge amounts of immigration from all over the world.
Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai are all places that practice extreme police/state overreach unacceptable by western standards. I don't consider a city that will have a person flogged for littering a safe place.
You will not get flogged for littering in any of those, although Singapore famously does have judicial caning for intentional vandalism. And unlike the US, you are extremely unlikely to get shot by the police.
Edit: It's applied rarely and only for egregious cases, eg breaking into a depot to spray-paint subway cars and getting caught on CCTV doing it. There are plenty of things to criticize about Singapore (for one, there's a lot less oversight on prisoners getting caned as an administrative punishment), but the way they handle vandalism isn't really at the top of my list, not least because it's remarkably effective.
"a city that will have a person flogged for littering"
Isn't this mostly a myth? You will get fined for littering in Singapore just like elsewhere, though their fines are higher and the police arguably enforces laws against littering more eagerly than in the West. Caning (not flogging) is reserved for more serious offences (IIRC the lightest one is vandalism.)
Dubai employs flogging, but for Shariah offences, not for littering.
Hong Kong doesn't use judicial corporeal punishment at all.
Yes. The normal punishment for littering in Singapore is a fine, while repeat offenders may get Corrective Work Orders, meaning having to pick trash off roads while wearing a yellow flouro vest saying so. Caning is not on the menu.
Vienna is pretty mixed since the times of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but fairly safe. Glasgow is almost purely Scottish, but dangerous. Naples is probably less ethnically mixed than Rome, but more dangerous. Marseille is a lot worse than Genoa etc.
I don't doubt that particular kinds of immigration can worsen crime situation considerably, but some places can manage that and some fail miserably. You can even see it in the same city if the political representation changes. AFAIK the current mayor of Barcelona is notorious for letting street crime fester.
There's nowhere near the amount of immigrants you see in the US, where it's practically everyone. The more eastern you go, the less immigration. In Poland, Czechia and Slovakia there are major cities with zero non-white people and single digit percent immigrants from nearby states.
"In Poland, Czechia and Slovakia there are major cities with zero non-white people and single digit percent immigrants from nearby states.
reply"
There are Vietnamese communities in CZ/SK everywhere, even in very rural areas, but, you won't see them much in the streets, because they spend their life indoors working, and they usually own their shops, living right behind them, so they aren't even seen commuting to work and back. Quite often the only small grocery in a village or a small town is Vietnamese-owned.
But maybe East Asians are now considered (elevated? condemned?) as basically white by the American racial discourse?
Indeed, is my problem with American racial discourse too - once you dig beyong sufrace level, it's inconsistent and primitive.
Whether left or right, their concept of ethnicity is primitive. white/black/asian.
Are Russians same ethnicity as Germans? Are Germans same ethnicity as Bavarian? Russian government considers Russia to have ~100 ethnic groups native to Russia.
Us discourse is either about skin-colour, or about man-made country borders.
The only scientifically based concept is Haplogroups, bur noone knwos about them.
As much as I love my country (France), our housing laws are fucked beyond repair.
Someone gets in your house while you are on vacation? Bad luck, you will live on the street before the law sloooo...ooo..wly makes is way and you are almost there but, bad luck this is winter now and you cannot get anyone out and then comes summer and, shit, they now have a baby and they cannot be thrown out.
You will also get a fine if you try to do it your own way, and they will sue you on top of that. And sue you if they get harmed in your house
No surprise that in other to rent a box you need to be royal.
We have a great social system I wholeheartedly support. And then come the leeches we are to week to get rid of and everyone suffers because of that.
I'm all for adopting policies that resemble that of Japan/Tokyo. However, half the country would accuse you of autocratic behavior and infringing on constitutional rights.
I don't believe the low crime levels in Japan/Tokyo are the result of policy decisions. I suspect they are the result of a community-oriented culture enforced by other means.
No, that couldn't be further from the truth. The police have extremely prominent placement in Japanese society. Look up "kōban" ("police boxes")[0]. If you visit Japan, you'll see these things everywhere, on every street corner.
I don't see how a cop sitting in a little box on various street corners equals "extremely prominent placement in society". In fact, I rarely see cops on patrol in the city, unless there's something going on.
I am having hard time thinking about any example where San Francisco government did not implement some policy because the other half of the country didn't like it. If anything, that'd be even more reason for them to implement it, just to "own" "those stupid idiots".
The San Francisco government is not the only source of policy in San Francisco. If the San Francisco government wanted to implement strict gun control like they have in Tokyo, for example, they would be blocked by the Supreme Court judges elected by the rest of the country.
I'm well aware of how it works. The country votes into office the politicians who nominate and vote for the Supreme Court judges.
If I was being more careful I could have written the country "indirectly elects" the Supreme Court judges. My basic point still stands, San Francisco policy is in many ways set by the entire country.
Err, SF had strict gun control for years. Getting carry permit in the whole Bay Area has been mostly a "who do you know" thing. Recent SCOTUS decisions made that approach theoretically illegal, but in practice the city is still requires long procedure to get a permit, and is not very generous with permits:
So far the city is processing 72 applications, and they expect to get nearly 100 to 200 more over the next year. Which is very different from the four we processed in the past 10 or so years
Certainly 100 permits a year are not going to change things much and definitely four issued in the last 10 years didn't, and if anything sounds like "strict gun control", then four people allowed to carry in 10 years is it.
Exactly which race is his statement advocating as superior? There's a bunch of ethnically homogeneous nations in the world, and their ethnicities are quite different from each other. Japanese are not the same ethnicity as Norwegians.
As someone else mentioned, Japan is one of the most culturally homogenous societies in the world.
Japan takes few immigrants, but those that do immigrate there are expected to be guests and live within the established norms of Japanese culture and society.
That’s the opposite mindset of the US - especially the liberal leaning areas, where the society is expected to accept and respect diversity and differences.
You can immigrate to Japan as a Westerner (or even as a outwardly similar looking East Asian from Korea or China, etc), live there for decades and become fully assimilated into Japanese society, even gain citizenship, but still be treated as an outsider - not necessarily disrespectfully.
You could probably say the same for other East Asian countries such as Korea, China, Taiwan, etc.
Japan is in the middle of demographic collapse, obviously you don't see a lot of murders in retirement communities (though LA and Half Moon Bay shooters gave it a try a few months back).
Yes, but Japan isn’t safe and harmonious because of racial makeup, it’s save and harmonious because of cultural inclinations. In Japan, the individual defines themselves with a much greater emphasis on their place in society. Societal good is given far more importance than in other countries. In Western nations, individualism is so strong it borders on narcissism, in my opinion, and a consideration for society always takes back seat to the individual. Countries like the US will never achieve the social cohesion of Japan, not because of racial makeup, but because we are too obsessed with ourselves.
At least, that’s my belief as an American who has spent several years living in Japan.
Unless you believe racially japanese people are significantly different to people from other asian countries. No.
What really are the genetic basis to say Japan is a country that's markedly different from other asian populations?
The people living in Japan have not lived there for long enough for their genetic to become too different from those of other asian countries. Culture on the other hand changes much more rapidly. Culture is the "genetics" of society, it is passed down from generation to generation and it mutates and these mutations are also hereditary... it's just much faster than biological processes.
But ultimately, it seems very unlikely (and as far as I know, there's very little evidence that suggests this is the case) that race and genetics will have a huge effect on culture. Specially given that countries with similar genetic populations will have vastly different cultures.
I’m not sure why it’s so hard for people to believe that evolution can indeed affect our brains just like everything else.
Keep in mind the culture of the various regions could easily cause fast natural (?) selection. I’m no expert on Japan’s history, and even less so on China/Korea/etc. I know enough that Japan had periods of pretty constant war, and that the young and the brash would essentially volunteer to be mercenaries. It seems to me that could pretty quickly weed out the most aggressive genes in a population. It would be different, of course, if soldiers were conscripted instead.
That’s just one example and as I said, I’m not a historian. Another example would be America. People always come up with silly reasons why we became the dominant world power. In my opinion the reason is simple: the people that immigrated here were risk takers, hard workers, and dreamers. Their kids would inherit those genes.
So, I’d say culture begets genetics which begets culture…
I would suggest you read up on the history of mercenaries worldwide and the history of youth volunteering for wars worldwide. These are by no means traits particular to Japanese people. I would also suggest you read up on the United States global positioning before and after WW2. It was regionally isolated from the brunt of the war, which allowed it to loan money and sell weapons and resources at very favorable rates for the majority of the war. This can’t be excluded from a simple explanation of its global dominance.
I'm very well aware of what people's argument is for why the US became dominant, and I'm sure it was a factor.
Yet that didn't happen to other regionally isolated countries like Mexico or Brazil - hell, or even Canada.
And yes, youth always volunteer for wars. Like I said, I'm not a historian and my example was just an example of how things could guide selection. That said I don't think many countries had something similar to what ronin, or even samurai, were. It was a fairly unique system.
China's Great Leap Forward would be another example of something that could guide who lived to procreate and who didn't.
"I’m not sure why it’s so hard for people to believe that evolution can indeed affect our brains just like everything else."
because publicly acknowledging this obvious reality comes at a cost: you WILL be attacked. most people do not want to be attacked and would rather take the easier route of pretending to not notice this or anything that's going to cause them a problem.
they have even done studies with 1 day old babies where the scientist holds the baby's nose shut and guess what, babies of different races react in different ways. same as when they take baby boys and girls and put them in a room the boys go for the toy trucks and the girls go for the dolls. i'm sorry but that study doesn't need to happen if you don't live in an ivory tower and have to act like a politician because you have so much money to lose for having the wrong opinion.
> The people living in Japan have not lived there for long enough for their genetic to become too different from those of other asian countries.
The Ainu’s skin tone is more like Caucasians than East Asians and the majority population, (Yamato?) are noticeably shorter than the Koreans to whom they are most closely related. There’s clearly been enough isolation, for long enough, for some differentiation. That’s not to say the distribution of traits doesn’t overlap. We’re not talking Sardinians and Swedes here, never mind Bantu and Basque.
A lot of the pros and cons of Japanese society could apply to Korean society too. There is a lot of overlap.
Seoul, like Tokyo, could also be described as a HNer’s dream city. Ultra safe, ultra clean, amazing transit. And like Tokyo, a city like Seoul could never exist in the US for similar reasons.
(Then again, cars and public transit coexist somewhat harmoniously in Seoul, with cars being an aspirational item for many Koreans, so maybe it’s not a dream city for the banallcars HNer crowd)
You think that cultural values are influenced by race? I certainly don’t. Culture a construct, not genetically determined. Let me put it this way, if you waved a wand to make America as racially homogenous as Japan, it would still have all the same discord because it would still all be Americans, and American culture is narcissistic and sociopathic.
I’d say it’s more influenced by having common ground with your fellow citizens, and race is one potential factor.
It’s why even in America you see racial/ethnic blocs and enclaves form. Hence the mentions of an “Asian voting bloc” or “Hispanic voting bloc”, during elections. Would we be hearing about such things if the US was monoracial? Even among many divisions, it would be one less divisive factor.
(yes, I’m aware in the past things were carved up even among whites - such as Italians vs. Irish etc)
That sounds a bit racist, like "certain racial setups can live in prosperity, but as soon as you get certain other races in the mix, you should abandon all hope of having good quality of life". I prefer to think mutable policies have more to do with it than immutable genetic traits.
So you point out that it doesn’t match your priors and double down on not exploring whether your priors are correct. I find it more useful to be curious whether the parent’s stats are correct.
Also worth pointing out that homogeneity isn’t only along an axis of race. Example: There are plenty of Mexican Americans who are extremely racist towards newer Mexican immigrants to their neighborhoods. LATimes has done several pieces about this dynamic. People will always find reasons to put other people in categories.
Also worth pointing out that the society in Japan is more overtly racist towards outsiders of any race. My source is a life-long friend (white American living in Japan for 15+ years) who overheard lots of conversations when the locals think he doesn’t understand their words.
America has been a “melting pot” for a while, so we have moved our racial/homogeneity issues at least one layer below polite discussion. Most Americans will put up a façade about not being racist, but don’t actually put any effort to align their behaviors.
>America has been a “melting pot” for a while, so we have moved our racial/homogeneity issues at least one layer below polite discussion
Sadly, I think identity politics has tossed the melting pot ideals aside. It encourages zero sum thinking where different groups are enemies and relative sucess is what matters. This means pulling others down is just important than lifting people up. Unfortionatly, it is easier to pull people down than lift them up.
Racism hasn't damaged melting pot ideals? It's really hard to overlook centuries of it, and the widespread increase in overt racism in the last 7 years - including on Hacker News.
I suppose it has, although I do wonder why now. It seemed like the ideal was strong enough to stand up before and after the civil rights movement.
My theory is racism and identity politics have a positive feedback relationship. That is to say identity politics is counterproductive for bringing about a less biased and hostile society. It divides and pits people against each other as enemies.
There are plenty of people who hate other people for various reasons. We have a hot war with hundreds of thousands of people right in now in Europe, without any racial component involved. I fail to see how this provides any justification for racism though.
Yes, Japan is a very high-conforming and ethnically homogeneous society. It is also a low-crime society. However, to derive just from that that absence of racial homogeneity alone leads to high crime makes no more sense than claiming that not using logographic scripts leads to violence - since Asian society are generally less violent than, for example, the US. You need to do much more work than just picking one difference and attribute everything to it.
Perhaps "Japan is one of the most culturally homogenous countries on earth" would have been more helpful? It wouldn't surprise me if that was the intent of the comment either. The way people discuss and conceptualize "race" and "culture" is quite complicated. They are often muddled together in a way that can be hard to untangle.
As far as real world examples, there does seem to be evidence of an unfortunate “safe city” axis requiring either racial/cultural homogeneity or extremely heavy handed authoritarianism.
Ironically, America in the 90s and early 2000s seemed to be approaching a sweet spot where cultural expectations and “mild” authoritarian policing were successful at crushing urban crime rates. This whole thread is full of longtime West Coasters bemoaning how much better city life was in “the good old days” of 10-15 years ago. Odd how there’s zero political will to simply go back to what worked.
You mean, they don't create fictional 'races' of bluebirds and then spread hate about each other, including by asserting it's somehow inevitable? Oh, to be a bluebird rather than a Hacker News reader today.
This is a myth - Japan does not collect data on ethnicity/background [1], so we just don't know. Japan has a (to foreigners) invisible and extensive caste system [2] and a long history of looking down at Japanese of Korean background (who are quite common, but again, there are no official stats by Japan - South Korea tracks about 800k people in Japan [3]), plus all those Japanese of Brazilian background (Brazil estimates at least 1.4 million of those [4]
Your sources have little to nothing to do with the racial homogeneity in Japan although your initial point is correct - Japan does not collect data on ethnicity.
A glance at Japan's history and geography will tell you that Japan is an incredibly homogenous country as far as ethnicity goes.
Furthermore, up until 1869 Hokkaido was a separate kingdom peopled by the Ainu - Japan has a long history of exchanging people with Korea. It's not some fabled walled-off kingdom, it's a regular country full of regular people
And Fremont or Cupertino are murder capitals of the world by that logic? Nah. Even unskilled immigration reduces local crimes rates in US. Kind of obvious, people who made an effort to come to a country tend to try hard to make it work.
No relation to criminality, there are many countries with racially diverse backgrounds and peaceful communities. Sydney is one of them and Sydney has both Whites and Asians. Singapore has a lot of all of them.
Exactly as I said, violence is not due to the mix between Asians and Whites, therefore it’s not mixing people that causes violence. It’s inviting the wrong people.
Please read the first line in the main body of your article and you’ll find the answer. It’s so predictable it’s more accurate than science.
Sorry, but it sounds like you’re saying that allowing the “wrong” type of immigrant is what causes violence and using Cronulla as evidence?
Cronulla was a one-off event almost 20 years ago, was extremely shocking and out of the ordinary, and as far as I can remember no-one died. As such, it’s not a great example of anything much, other than the fact that ethnic tensions existed between white and Arab communities in Australia in the mid-2000s (which is not all that surprising given the context of 9/11, the Iraq War, etc)
I do agree with your first point, however, that Sydney is a good example of one of the most multicultural cities in the world being quite safe, without requiring authoritarian policing (lockouts and drug dogs in train stations aside)
Are you trying to hint a racist ideology, that the "wrong people" are some race you don't like. Maybe individuals make their own choices, and the ones who choose to be racists are the wrong people. What a dream if they all left for their own country.
Look, absolutely everyone in this entire page is trying to dodge strictly enforced DDR Germany-style taboo about saying the truth, so I’m not gonna say what is the obvious source of most criminality in the West.
But I’ll stop you right there from swaying the blame onto someone else and reaching entirely false conclusions. What crime is NOT due to:
- Crime is not due to poverty. Plenty of poor cities who aren’t violent.
- Crime is not due to previous crime. Put white felons on an island and you get Australia, as the joke says.
- Crime is not due to high-density area. Tokyo.
- Crime is not due to immigration or displacing population. Ukraine migrant kids who spoke French astonishingly fluently in 6 months, a better score than all kids from “other” French backgrounds.
- Crime is not due to mixing population. Singapore.
Each of them is easily proven by finding great counter-examples of constructive people being moved/concentrated to place X or Z and not having high criminality.
It must be something else, something which can be found in all evoked areas and not found in peaceful areas, but I’m not going to say it.
It.. sounds like you are hinting that you think the violence is caused by a specific ethnicity of people? Because if you're not, it'd be good to make that clear. Maybe you're saying it's a result of imported cultural values that encourages violence?
Also, your list doesn't mean some combination of those things can't result in worsening incidence of violent crime.
My own belief is that its some combination of:
- Extreme wealth inequality
- High cost of living
- High incidence of poverty (relative to the aforementioned cost of living)
- Poor social safety net
- Poor community cohesion and trust
- Individualistic cultural attitudes (as opposed to collectivist cultural attitudes)
- Poor public protection
- Easy access to drugs (including alcohol)
I think the drugs just become a symptom of the problem; people get addicted because they are suffering (see rat park). They develop antisocial behaviours, which reduces community cohesion and trust. The city then becomes less happy overall, and it becomes a cycle
> Also, your list doesn't mean some combination of those things can't result in worsening incidence of violent crime.
When kicked out of the front door, try to come back through the backdoor?
You can create convoluted science that a combination of those factors leads to violence. Since it’s a combination, it’s even less provable, a correlation doesn’t cause causation, and I’ll keep finding counter examples, to which you will find even more convoluted reasons.
But there is a much, much simpler hypothesis, and for my part it explains the world with accuracy and predictability. What defines a science is its ability to predict the future based on some inputs.
So, my stance is to never make a decision based on prejudice, which is satisfying in terms of humanism, but don’t forget that people will reliably get killed, mugged and raped, and in quantity, if you don’t watch out for the thing-I’ll-not-say which was ever predictable. And it’s both our responsibility to put our family out of harm’s way, and an incredible feat of the XXIth century that we’re feeding our own relatives into a crime machine that reliably gets them killed or raped.
Speaking from experience. But everyone who has a grave opinion on this topic has, someday, seen a relative crossing the path of those people.
People say this but are never able to offer any evidence for this claim. The fact is that Japan is much less homogeneous than white westerners tend to believe, and has liberalized immigration substantially in recent years.
You’ll hear stats about the high percentage of Japanese people in Japan, but those statistics invariably refer to Japanese citizens, not ethnic Japanese.
SF was always unequal. I lived there in 2002-2003 for a year. There was a ton of inequality. The crime is out of control NOW for obvious reasons that conflict with your prior beliefs, so you embrace this silly theory of "if people had more free/cheap stuff they'd be nicer".
Massively reducing prosecutions causes police to stop arresting people since they get released without being charged. This changes the incentive structure for criminals. They get more aggressive, more brazen, and they tell their friends. This isn't complicated.
this "not knowing the neighbors" is a flimsy excuse at best. This is mostly true of any densely populated city around the world, where people move in for jobs.
In the past few years, crime in some US cities are committed by certain groups of the population - who are partly encouraged by the local powers.
Yeah, that's what I did too. SF has the money, but once you get certain amount of money you start to ask yourself if it's time to get some quality of life, and whether to have to wade around drug addicts and excrement on the street is worth a chance of having more money. SF area (not only SF, same for San Jose) has gone downhill a real lot last ~15 or so years. And somehow people there are completely fine with it, judging from their voting patterns. I don't understand that, but I can't do anything about it, just move out to a place where people value quality of life more. Ironically, covid helped a lot here - many more companies became ok with remote work, and developed processes that allow to accommodate people working outside of the physical office.
Do you really believe that this public discourse occurred on a public train after a theft? Do you think they had a lively debate in the commons about how to solve crime?
I'm a bit surprised people are seriously believing this. This is someone's shower thoughts six hours later when they strawmanned some ridiculous positions to caricaturize "opponents".
I will go further and say that everything the person said seems...dubious, and are claims that are unverifiable. Like, where is this low-income "suburb" (two hours from a major center...) that has no crime? As someone who grew up in a smaller town in the rust belt, I find their claim hysterical.
> Do you really believe that this public discourse occurred on a public train after a theft? Do you think they had a lively debate in the commons about how to solve crime?
> I'm a bit surprised people are seriously believing this. This is someone's shower thoughts six hours later when they strawmanned some ridiculous positions to caricaturize "opponents".
You're trying to portray the story as fabricated, but that's likely wrong. IMHO, it's more likely exaggerated (e.g. there probably wasn't a "lively debate in the commons," more likely comments directed at no one in particular morphing two opinionated randos getting mad at each other).
>> So if you are an immigrant & safety is a priority, yeah there are many towns in the midwest southwest etc. where you can be very safe. Houses are quite cheap & I was able to buy my house with straight cash, but ironically that cash was earned in SF!
> Like, where is this low-income "suburb" (two hours from a major center...) that has no crime? As someone who grew up in a smaller town in the rust belt, I find their claim hysterical.
He didn't say it was "low-income," just cheaper compared to SF. I grew up in a smaller city in the Midwest (four hours from a major center), and his account rings true to me. There's more to the Midwest than the rust belt.
I can't reply to your other comment because it's dead. However, I wanted to respond to this:
> And FWIW, every single small city I checked around 2 hours outside of Chicago has property crime rates worse than Chicago! Isn't that amazing? No, it isn't, unless you're deluded enough to believe their nonsense.
There's a lot of Midwest outside of that region. Even if what you say is true*, it's a skewed sample that can't reasonably be assumed to represent the whole.
* Which I doubt, especially there can be confounding effects in whatever statistics you're looking at, like differing reporting rates (which was already called out in this thread or a similar one, w.r.t San Francisco).
Yeah that story was amusing at best. I half expected it to end with “That residents name? Albert Einstein” or something equally silly, and yet everyone here is falling for it hook, line and sinker because it confirms their beliefs. HN is supposed to be better than this.
I'm born and raised Midwest. I've lived in smaller cities and have absolutely zero desire to go back to that environment. Midwest living is one of the best kept secrets in the US, even though the secret is definitely out now. I make coastal money - it can be done although it takes some negotiating skills.
As an immigrant myself who moved here in the early 90s, I can no longer recognize certain parts of US as they’ve completely degraded (in terms of quality of life) at an exponential rate. My general observation is that it’s mainly been wealthy urban cities with ultra liberal policies which in-turn directly affect the local middle class…causing them to flee out to suburbs if not another state.
> Rest of the train trip was some heated political debate between the left & the left-left, arguing what should be done. The left wanted to integrate the youth into the tech community by offering free coding classes so they wouldn't rob cellphones. The left-left argued for free iphones for everybody. I was like, hey how about catching the robber & some jailtime, which is what they'd have done where I come from.
What I wonder is where are the fathers in this scenario. I can't imagine the conversation about the son's income coming from stealing phones going very well with his father.
I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35454781 and moved it to the top level (just for technical reasons - the first page of the thread is currently too comment-heavy).
> The left-left argued for free iphones for everybody.
A little implausible?
> Work in some high-crime zone like SF,NYC etc, accumulate capital.
People love living in these cities, as real estate prices show. It's not 'paying dues'; those are much more preferred than small towns, as those real estate prices show. You of course are free to prefer whatever you like.
suburb 2 hours from chicago. i have a few friends i visit in illinois, also in indiana and in columbus,ohio. its all very similar here, hard to tell apart. full of corn fields, windmills, large homes with giant basement, poorly funded schools with an outdated syllabus that lags behind asian schools by 5+ years, looking at my kids textbooks. people are quite poor out here. median household income stats is like 60k. if you like water view you can try michigan, otherwise its basically landlocked. again, i am just an average asian immigrant. i am not trying to "disrupt the local economy" like the person below claims. i am sorry he feels that way.
I ask for no reason other than interest. No blame at all, I also prefer cities like you describe.
I've lived all over the US, in some places like you describe (in KY, which isn't far), so was curious.
I absolutely love visiting W Michigan, a real hidden gem. Definitely go check out Holland and the sand dunes north of there if you've never been. Unfortunately, the brutal winters mostly keeps me from moving to that general area.
Do you feel that the trade-off is worth it? I constantly go back-and-forth over my head about whether or not, it’s better to deal with what you’re doing in the rural areas or if the amenities are worth the pain of living near a big city.
It all depends on you, your age, and what you like. If you're a people person who loves and needs interaction, shopping, coffee/beer nightly, absolutely don't move out there.
If you are a homebody who just wants to be left alone, move far, far away.
I'm somewhere in between. I like to get out once or twice a week, then be left alone most of the other times. What I strongly prefer is a place in a small town/city that's within 30 mins or so of a bigger city. And that town/city needs to have its own shopping, groceries, restaurants, post office, etc, because having to drive 30 minutes every time you need a battery or something gets old really, really fast.
> The left wanted to integrate the youth into the tech community by offering free coding classes so they wouldn't rob cellphones. The left-left argued for free iphones for everybody. I was like, hey how about catching the robber & some jailtime
For what it’s worth, these are solving two different problems. The reported train discussion was a disagreement on a solution to the systemic problem. Jailing the perpetrator only treats the problem with that specific person. Both problems need solutions.
Local SF politics notwithstanding, criminals figure they won’t get caught, not that they won’t get punished. But sure, jailing individuals can be considered a systemic fix, too.
I assume the comment you replied to meant the policies that led to the high crime rate. Which, I know many people who fear people leaving big cities to keep voting for the policies that lead to why they left the city in the first place.
Cities crime rates have little to do with their local politics. Giuliani for example got a great deal of praise for lowering crime in NYC but wildly different approaches also seemed to “work” in other cities.
NYC had “tough on crime” republican governor’s for about half of that time period. Try and locate their policies on the graph before looking up the details.
“Broken Windows” policing was a radically different paradigm that initially got a great deal of praise because it seemed to be working.
No, they’re coming & heavily disrupting the local economy which will lead to the current population unable to afford their lives after some time, which will lead to crime.
Do you disagree?
Call me crazy, but perhaps if those in SF could afford a home/ to live/ the basic necessities of a U.S. citizen, they wouldn’t be out on the streets being low lifes.
Not all of them, some people are truly irredeemable - but truly irredeemable people are typically doing much harder crimes than property theft & petty break-ins.
I never understand these types of comments, appeals to empathy over individual rationalism. How do people not understand at this point that societies are shaped by individuals making rational selfish choices in their own interests within a market system.
Wow, you sound like the people in my midwest hometown who freaked out when the Punjabis came in and bought all our gas stations.
When you look at the desperate parts of the midwest, of the ones that weren't always that way, you'll find most of the worst of the ones became that way after all the skilled / rich people left coupled with other capital flight. Not the other way around.
I think the gp is referring to coming in and buying a house for cash, something which is likely unaffordable for people who grew up in that community (because op says that pay scales are about 1/4 of what they are in tech metros).
Empty space isn’t livable homes & other buildings communities need to flourish & history has shown the free market won’t not greatly abuse the local population if they ever do decide to come in and build any.
In other words, the entire point of my comment. Thank you for your assistance.
I don't get takes like this. What are you even suggesting? More friction on moving from one place to another?
Most rural US problems seem to come from unwillingness to build higher density. Europe has plenty of 5k-20k towns with relatively dense centers that have all the basic services. At the upper end of that range you can even get things like hospitals. And that's in a country with basically no property taxes.
Detriot was once the richest city per capita in the US, in the 1950s. It is now the second poorest city per capita in the US, an actual wasteland. SF seems to be headed in a similar direction. It's because the people that live there simply don't live on this planet - they don't have to. It is so wealthy that there's no penalty for being delusional. Until it's too late of course. And that's when the weight of fate punches you 6 ft under the ground, and you never recover.
Much of it was people leaving Detroit city proper and moving into the suburbs around it which are technically separate independent cities. The metro area still went vastly downhill and the manufacturing never recovered (many of the US car manufacturers moved elsewhere).
It's been similar in the Bay Area since the 70s-80s. A common joke here in SF is "What's present are you getting your 4 year old? A house in Marin/Walnut Creek".
Also if we're being honest, SF was never the tech hub of the Bay Area - it was always Santa Clara County. Before the 2010s, the only major software company here in SF was probably Salesforce and that's because Benioff is a townie.
Twenty-five years ago, my nice, quiet, little Fortune 250 was "merged" with another Fortune 250 called Meritor, which subsequently went full-corporate-raider on my company, and pillaged it until all that was left was the carcass, which they then sold to PE. In the 3 years that they put on their show, I would occasionally work at a place they had renovated in downtown Detroit. It was a model turnaround! The city is recovering! The CEO, Larry Fuckin Yost(1), won "CEO of the year" from... someone or something. And, yeah, it was nice, but they had to put 12' fencing around it, and I was told not to leave the property on foot. Across the street were a row of derelict houses. On my first visit, I saw a semi tractor parked on the street in front of them. I asked why he would stop there, on the street, in front of those houses, and was told that the driver was likely getting a blowjob from a crack whore. I guess little has changed in the decades since.
If the police and or DA won't protect you for political reasons, that's a pretty good argument that you should be able to defend yourself.
It's fundamentally unfair to deny carry permits for decades and then also fail at effective policing.
Most murderers have already committed a lot of crimes, sometimes including other murders. If the police are ineffective many won't be known or reported, but I will hazard a guess that the attacker did commit them. In other words, the effective police+DA could have prevented the stabbing and didn't.
It sucks that the answer is to shoot criminals rather than prosecute them. But that is what the answer will be in the world of ineffective police+DA after Bruen. And frankly, it's good that the option will be there as a last resort for vulnerable citizens.
I know people will suggest all kinds of "better options". But those better options have been known for a long time and nothing has been done. The victims are just a statistic... collateral damage of politics.
Agree. I started carrying during Covid and have had to draw once to stop a mugger attacking me when I was with my elementary school age kid on the way to the science museum downtown (Seattle).
Out of curiosity, what was your take on firearms 5 years ago? I’m glad to see there are people realizing that in this country the only person responsible for your own safety is yourself.
Be careful defending yourself in a city like SF. You’ll likely end up in jail without the right attorneys.
My take is that if someone is close enough to stab you, you probably aren't going to be able to pull your gun in time to stop them, so it's better just to avoid situations where you might get stabbed.
A gun is not a magical shield of protection, but it gives a fighting chance and they do work at least sometimes. If we are already denying someone an adequate police+DA system, by what argument can we also deny them the means to defend themselves with a firearm?
"Avoid situations where you might be stabbed" is not a great answer, either. What was the victim doing to invite stabbing? Should we just evacuate SoMa and leave it to the criminals?
> What was the victim doing to invite stabbing? Should we just evacuate SoMa and leave it to the criminals?
I would not go there. This thread in particular suggests that it is a crime-infested hellhole, but it's a sentiment I have seen here and other forums commonly. Guns also give assailants a fighting chance; I also try and avoid situations where I could be shot.
Firearms rights are an intellectual exercise to me, for the most part. I know they are personal to some, but this is an intellectual forum.
In the last five years, the pro-gun-rights side of the equation has moved more away from the idea of fighting a tyrannical government to an idea of self defense.
Also, I see those two ideas as related. A tyrannical government need not turn the military against disfavored citizens. It need only deny them police protection and turn criminals loose.
Ukraine is also interesting and there's probably some lesson there about gun rights, but I'm not well informed on that matter.
He was Chief Product Officer at MobileCoin. Hopefully we learn who stabbed him, and why. 43 is just way too young. Thoughts go out to his wife. He was instrumental in creating Android. Whatever you may think of it today, we wouldn't have it if it weren't for him.
It's OOM worse in SF than any other city I've spent time in, including Zurich.
For comparison, I've spent maybe a month in SF put together over the last few years:
- In 30 days, I met more than 30 mentally ill people in SF. 40 Years everywhere else, I saw one old lady with dementia once in Copenhagen. And a few randoms few and far between in London. By mentally ill I mean the kind of ill where you're shouting nonsense in public.
- Then there's the guy who is aggressively threatening his imaginary friends. Seems to be a SF creature, doesn't seem drunk or stoned, just nuts. Even these guys outnumber the drunk/stoned nutters I've met in Europe in the last few years. I ran into them often, trying to stay away since you know...
- SF seemed like you were never more than 2 minutes away from someone with lower level mental health problems. I sat down in a Starbucks and realised I was hearing Cantonese from somewhere. Turned around it was some middle aged woman swearing while having a conversation with herself. But she wasn't in the category above.
- Never saw any crime but I've seen the shoplifting videos. That would not pass in Zurich. Probably not most places though I wonder if Metropolitan Police would get their act together.
- Extreme distress behavior like stealing food, never saw it anywhere else. In SF someone ran in to grab my leftovers when I was done eating. Not the same as a safety issue, but you can see how people might feel unsafe with that kind of thing happening.
- Generally an extreme level of inequality in living conditions might make people feel unsafe. I mean there were people on the street with no shoes, walking around Nordstrom department store in town centre.
Of course it's a long way between safety stats and feeling safe. I would guess if you're living in Sweden right now, you are safe despite the rocketing murder rate, providing you're not involved in organised crime. You might not feel that way and yes there's going to be innocents caught up with it. But safe means a lot of things.
I was recently in Copenhagen (one week, lived around King's New Square), and to be honest, I don't think I even saw any junkies there. Much less any obvious homeless people. Rode the subway every day, didn't see anyone there either.
It was pretty much the polar opposite experience of walking down any major street in LA or SF. Of all the metro areas I've visited in Europe, Copenhagen had the least visible amount of junkies and homeless people. I've been in Oslo tons of times, and there you see them quite frequently (but compared to California they're pretty much non-existent)
Try exploring less reputable parts of town, and not tourist trap areas. While SF has problems, others have some too. You probably just stuck in wealthy tourist areas, which they would probably police more to keep people coming and spending money.
I wonder if the mental health problems were mental hralth problems due to sickness, hpw many due to situation and how many due to drugs.
Drugs fry brains.
The existence of the problem and people denying it are intrinsically linked. You see similar developments in other big cites and it's not just limited to the US either but a phenomenon all over the Western world. Look at Britain and the cover up of those horrific gang rapes for many years.
Ideology is the problem. There are many who base their worldview not on reality but rather what they wish to be true.
This is precisely the problem. SF is the perfect example of a city where a singular political ideology has remained in control for decades, and what we’re witnessing now is the fallout to that. How can we ever change when it involves admitting that much of what people once championed about SF is exactly what’s killing it now?
It takes a lot to admit you were wrong, and it’s not the kind of thing I typically expect from the kind of folks well invested in ideologically driven politics.
What is the ideology? I’m asking honestly because from the perspective of an European, what the US calls “left” would usually be center or even center right here in my country.
You'll never get a straight answer because San Francisco represents nothing more to them than a symbolic confirmation of whatever bias they already had.
They'll ignore mitigating factors that might not fit their narrative - things like the Reagan repeal of MHSA, the bussing of 'problem' citizenry from other states to SF, police 'quiet quitting', among countless others.
Truth is, there's plenty of blame to go around, but one side deals in bad faith because they like it to be this way because it makes them feel right.
I gave a straight answer to the GP, it's too bad you felt the need to answer for me. It sounds like you've been in a lot of bad faith discussions around this topic, which is unfortunate and I'm sorry for. For the record, I'm a Canadian on visa, so if you were somehow reading my comment as some insidious GOP propaganda, you're sadly mistaken. In my limited opinion, both of your country's parties are broken in their own way, but in my experience living there, neither of them are as broken as the local politics in SF.
SJF is the political ideology which local governments like SF have embraced. It's one that I personally think is to blame for many of the city's problems, and I believe moderates like myself are ever so slowly being proven right on the topic.
The ideology is identity politics. Anti-equality, anti rule of law. There is overlap with traditional left wing ideology but I wouldn't generally classify it as such. Thinking in terms of "left" and "right" does not help to understand political developments.
Also much of it is not grassroots - that's the first mistake many make viewing it as. If you look at both the Democratic Party as well as Republicans there are wealthy elites behind both, funding the campaigns. But their policies and demands can be extremely radical and populist, much more so than in Europe.
Would you consider it far-left or far-right to demand payment of $5 million to every "Black adult" (they don't define what that means), as well as eliminating all their debt AND having them pay no tax AND guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years AND a home in San Francisco for just $1 per family? Might sound insane but that's an actual proposal from San Fransisco, it's not a made-up example.
The same party has been in power for over 20 years. This is actually not so different from some places in Europe. In Berlin for example you can see a similar development, although maybe not with the same level of crime. But the trend is comparable.
For Zurich this might be true, but there are definitely examples of European cities where the safety debate happens regularly (at least in my personal circles). Brussels and Paris come to mind with their explicit no-go zones and Naples and Rome are notorious for their pickpockets. Even Honest Guide[1], which is the main guide for my city, has half of its' videos dedicated to scams.
I've lived in Paris for over four years now, and I have no idea what these no-go zones people are talking about. I've never heard anyone in Paris talk about them. There is no neighborhood in Paris that I would flat out refuse to go to, even though there definitely a very small number of sketchy areas where I would be more on guard (the Barbès metro comes to mind). There is nothing here that is near as bad as the misery on display in the Tenderloin, or Skid Row.
I have also lived five years in San Francisco, and Paris overall feels much safer to me.
I also lived in Paris. What Americans get from their media as "no go zones" are areas with a large population of African immigrants or poor people. Yea, they are sketchy at night and I wouldn't go there alone if I was a woman, but it's nothing like sketchy areas I've seen or heard of in Chicago or SF.
> Yea, they are sketchy at night and I wouldn't go there alone if I was a woman,
So they are no-go zones. I'm glad you've cleared this up. I can now tell my liberal friends that a Parisian has confirmed the existence of such and it isn't just American conservatives telling lies.
As a Canadian, northern parts of Paris, (Seine-St.-Denis and some parts of the 18th) are really sketchy. Maybe not like some parts of American cities (fewer guns to start), but the 18th put me on guard in a way you'd never see in Canada.
No Go Zones are complete nonsense, but there's a gradient of safety.
One thing I’ve noticed is that cities in the USA seem to grow bad areas that are considered “don’t stop, don’t slow down, run a red light at night, the cops won’t care” - whereas the cities in Europe seem to have times when an area becomes an epicenter for something, but then everyone disperses.
The short video clips may seem similar, but the lived reality is vastly different.
Never thought about it like this. Yeah, nobody would question the safety of many European cities even if something like this were to happen. It would be considered a freak incident.
To be fair, most of the scams exposed by Honest Guide are targeted at tourists, not locals.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, as tourism is a big contributor to Prague's economy, and I don't like when people are getting scammed. But this doesn't affect much the average Tomáš' life.
It was just a few years ago that bien-pensants denounced Trump for repeating what others (including the authorities [1]) had said about no-go zones in Europe. I have since observed a slow but steady change in the European zeitgeist for what is happening, with a perceptible acceleration since Trump's departure from the White House; presumably, it is less embarrassing to acknowledge that he might have been right when he is no longer in office.
Nice! In Japan you can leave your laptop in the cafe while you go to the bathroom. This should NOT be amazing. Why do people find this amazing? This should be the norm. Sadly, SF people find it amazing.
Zürich certainly has dicey areas and such events happening. It is however, a much much smaller city. I don't know if it really makes a lot of sense to compare the two.
This also happened when Trump said there were no-go zones in some European cities. The MSM instantly "fact checked" his claims and said he was lying. Fast forward a couple of years and now even those countries' governments admit that those zones do in fact exist.
I live in (as I remember it) the prime example here. Birmingham UK. There were many articles about it some years ago. So, to fact check from the ground, there are no no-go areas. We're multi-cultural, and we do it well.
Considering the main hobby of Glaswegians is fighting each other over football games, does that mean it's possible to not be violent enough to belong there?
Not really. I think it boils down that most cities (and their areas) in the UK are mixed: so you have few streets of expensive houses, and next to it could be a council estate.. In Paris for example, it's not so mixed and you will get whole districts that are poor and deprived. These districts are usually inhabited by immigrants, and forgotten by local govs. Hence the so called "no-go" zones.
France literally has official names and policies for those areas, but all French politicians were like "what the hell is Trump talking about, is he crazy, ha ha funny Americans"
For those curious, SF has the 37th highest violent crime rate of anywhere in the country actually, far ahead of Seattle, St Paul, and Vegas. Number 2 for property theft though!
I'm pretty sure you would see these threads about Zürich if you were in a net community that has a substantial proportion of members living in or near Zürich.
I spend a lot of time in Zurich, and I’m in tech. Lotta googlers there. I haven’t seen any discussions like this about Zurich yet. When someone says Zurich is quite safe people nod and move on.
It’s not news and it’s not controversial.
Have you accounted for all confounding factors though? From my experiences of Germany, their news cycle isn't as hype-driven as the US's, I imagine Switzerland is even more restrained.
But the Swiss cities are so safe that people let 6yo kids go to school alone through the city center.
At night you can just go out and walk through the city with virtually no risk.
Accept that the two cities are not comparable in regard to crime, your reasoning above was flawed. Really, it's so safe that it feels weird, especially at night.
I didn't even bring up Zürich, the person I was replying to did.
And I'm not trying to claim that it's comparable. The only point I was trying to make is that this statement is reductio ad absurdum:
> Funny how people try so hard to show/prove/argue that SF is safe. If it was, these discussions wouldn’t exist.
Given the significant overlap between "people who live in or near SF because they work in tech, with a strong history of startups" and "people who discuss things on HN, a website about tech, with a strong history of startups", it's entirely unsurprising that people would discuss SF crime rates on HN, and the fact that they do so can't be construed as any form of evidence for any position.
I am pretty sure that when there is a stabbing in Zürich, locals will discuss it in their relevant online communities.
Sigh, I'm not even trying to affirm or deny anything about SF, I've only been there once, met some lovely homeless people, and some very unwell ones.
I tried looking up comparative crime rates; closest I could find was that for homicide, SF is 5 times worse per capita than Switzerland.
For a sense of scale for anyone who hasn't been, Switzerland has tax funded drinkable water fountains basically everywhere, and (if you will excuse the surprising conjunction) rolls of free bags for dog poo mounted on the dog poo bins which are also basically everywhere.
I'm not surprised, there's a lot more inequality in the US than in Switzerland.
Only point I was trying to make is that this statement is reductio ad absurdum:
> Funny how people try so hard to show/prove/argue that SF is safe.
If it was, these discussions wouldn’t exist.
Given the significant overlap between "people who live in or near SF because they work in tech, with a strong history of startups" and "people who discuss things on HN, a website about tech, with a strong history of startups", it's entirely unsurprising that people would discuss SF crime rates on HN, and the fact that they do so can't be construed as any form of evidence for any position.
Sigh, I'm not even trying to affirm or deny anything about SF, I've only been there once, met some lovely homeless people, and some very unwell ones.
My only time there, in town for some fancy proprietary DB training, the only accommodation I could get (due to a Salesforce conference) was right beside the Tenderloin. That was an experience.
Correct me if I am wrong but they are giving money to the homeless in SF. This is attracting a lot of homeless people into the city. In fact, based on recent interviews, I know people from as far as Boston are making their ways to SF freighthopping.
SF reminds me of college campuses. I went to a liberal college town. Everyone was a bleeding heart liberal who wanted to save the world. They voted Democrat. Even when their homes are trashed or burglarized, having to pickup hypodermic needles from drug users who tossed it on the street so their kid doesn't step on it, or when they are confront with homeless who became violent.... they would still vote Democrat. It's not about the party. It's the fact the policy we have does not work. Homelessness and NIMBY have become the third rail of American politics.
San Francisco has become a city of one-party rule, which simply does not work. It never will. When a political party's power goes unchecked, it always becomes corrupt, incompetent, or both. This is universal and irrespective of ostensible ideology.
It's because both parties have become extreme and populist. And there is only an illusion of freedom of choice. America needs more than 2 parties for accurate representation.
If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.
Marginal San Francisco voters are an uninformed bunch. Boudin won his election with the second choice votes of a candidate named Nancy Tung who was on the opposite end of the criminal justice reform spectrum, so much so that the coalition to which Boudin belonged could not even countenance Tung as the mayoral appointment to the police commission.
Winners of San Francisco elections come down to reality of machine politics and not ideological preferences.
i've lived in portland, stl, and DC. Just moved to bay area a few weeks ago and never have I in my entire 36 years of living in the US have I felt so unsafe. Not sure if you are blinded by living here for your entire life but this place is really not normal and it is by no means even close to what I would consider remotely safe.
SF is weird and should probably not be considered a city for these kinds of analyses without Oakland and possibly the rest of the bay: the majority of the violence occurs in Oakland.
You can go your entire time in San Francisco without visiting Oakland, and all the cities on the Peninsula or North Bay you're likely to visit instead have much, much lower crime rates. I'm not sure why including Oakland is necessary to make an apples-to-apples comparison to Portland, which OP claims was safer than San Francisco.
Sure and you can live in Chicago without venturing to the south-side, most people who live on the west-side in LA only go to south LA for events and stay out of east LA.
My point is that SF is a bit odd in that it's a county and city that ends very abruptly, and Oakland is a 12 minute car or BART or 25 minute ferry ride from Embarcadero, thus the crime stats in the bay don't make much sense until you start averaging them across the metro area. It's not that Oakland is crazy violent, it's just that the a lot of the most violent areas of the metro fall in its borders, it's not that SF has the most vagrant or larcenous population, it's that it has a good climate for it: lots of the soft targets and toothless police force.
How safe you feel and how safe you are are two different things. San Francisco’s homicide rate, compared to other large American cities, is not high. America is just a batshit violent country.
no because i live in mountain view area now and there's a community of tech enthusiasts/engineer here that makes it valuable for what i'm looking for in life. It comes down to your goals and what you or your family want/need. Everyone will be slightly different so it may not be the best decision for anyone else.
>> SF has become so unsafe. Why aren't the democrats in charge voted out of office for other people who will do something about it? Do people just not vote in that city?
> If you’re outside of a situation looking in and wondering why people aren’t voting the way you think they should it almost certainly means you’re misreading the situation.
Didn't SF recall its local prosecutor recently over crime issues? It sounds like people may actually be trying (somewhat) to vote the way the GP thinks they should.
I would hazard a guess that the answer to the GP's question is something along the lines that SF residents hate Republicans, but Democrats only come in so many flavors nowadays (and not even all of those are available in the Bay Area).
Maybe recalling Boudin is right or not, but either way when a lot of money is injected into a campaign, it tends to influence outcomes. Just see Prop 22.
Boudin had plenty of donors from around the country (including from billionaires) and was getting free puff pieces placed about him in The New Yorker about his Los Angeles fundraisers. Money flows in all directions.
> By June, the groups seeking to recall Boudin together raised $7.2 million to oust him, while the district attorney’s backers gathered about $3.3 million.
The narrative was against Boudin by the time of the recall, but that campaign was nevertheless still funded by big money, which has a tendency to amplify narratives, and this entire discussion was focused on the recall anyway.
The entire discussion has no focus and starts with a false claim about violent crime being down between 2020 and 2022. In any case, claims that money influenced outcomes are ill-substantiated since many San Francisco election results go against the best-funded outcomes.
Yes, even in that case. In a ranked choice election, you cannot simply look at the numbers in isolation. The opponents to Boudin ran something of a slate where they cross-promoted each other. So in a real sense, Boudin won despite being outspent in 2020. (Though there is a compelling case to make that Boudin's victory was mostly a fluke due to Nancy Tung's Cantonese language voters being misled by local Chinese-only newspapers about policy positions.)
It is not a false claim. Violent crime is more than homicides. Violent crime was down according to SF city police department: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7kTBb/1/ You can see more statistics in the discussion here: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...
Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA.
Homicides give a useful corrective since they’re harder to under report.
Given this fact and the various confounders (e.g. how do you rob or assault someone during a time of complete shutdown, how does nilling out the substantial daytime population increase do to per capita rates, is an overdose death really not worth reporting in crime statistics), at best we don’t know what actually happened to violent crime rates in the last three years.
Shoplifting is not a "violent crime". It was everywhere, out in the open, broad daylight. Ride a bike into a store, ride out with a garbage bag full of stuff, set up a table around the corner and sell what you stole at a discount.
SF has a significantly lower charging rate than other major cities, but there's many factors that go into that (the quality of police work, percentage of defendants that live in the district, etc.).
Homicides were not outside of historical trends during Boudin's tenure. A few homicides difference across years has nothing to do with the DA. This narrative that radical leftist district attorneys are responsible for crime is media propaganda completely divorced from the factual realities of crime.
Comparing charging rates of recent San Francisco district attorneys with other cities shows San Francisco has tended to charge way fewer crimes brought to them. Boudin and previous attorneys have blamed this on poor policing, and that SF is unique in that people in surrounding metros travel into SF to commit burglaries. Even so, that has nothing to do with the political leanings of the DA, since cities with much higher charging rates and lower petty crime have Democrat DAs.
You really think 41 versus 49 homicides in a year is the result of which DA is in office? The homicide numbers are not far outside of historical trends, which is downward over the last few decades. https://patch.com/img/cdn20/users/22880695/20191114/014855/s...
The notion that the DA has any outsized impact on crime rates seems baseless to me. I've never seen any evidence which demonstrates a real relationship between district attorneys and overall crime.
I’ve replied to you elsewhere about the issue of using official statistics in the way you are. I’d recommend not making the same point in two places to minimize comment duplication.
I was not making claims here about causal relationships between DAs and crime rates. I was simply engaging with the question about trends of violent crime rates in San Francisco. If pressed, my guess is San Francisco under Boudin saw a slower increase in violent crime than comparable jurisdictions. However, I also think Boudin actually accomplished very little since most meaningful criminal justice reform occurs at the state level. Reasonable models suggest San Francisco incarcerates too little and Modesto too much. That’s why, for example, Prop 25 bail reform would have led to more pretrial detention in San Francisco while reducing the rate for California overall.
I disagree with your assessment of homicide trends. The United States and San Francisco both have seen a trend shift towards increased homicide that would set us back approximately three decades. This is significant.
If a DA in any case has no control over crime rates in the community, then it’s a vibes based job, and Boudin had horrible vibes, as evidenced by his getting recalled.
Not really relevant to what I’m saying. You were asking “why aren’t the Democrats being voted out”, I’m saying a question like that demonstrates that you don't understand the situation.
I live in SF. He understands the situation. This city is an insane asylum whose outcomes are driven by a combination of apathy, NIMBY-ism, virtue signaling, and good old fashioned leftist lunacy. The city was airdropped billions of dollars thanks to its becoming a technology hub (through no efforts of its own), and it would probably be better off if the entire industry left, the tax base evaporated, and it had to fend for itself. But then again, at that point it'd just turn into Detroit with nicer weather.
Here's how homicide rates compare in the 11 largest US cities with a Republican mayor and San Francisco (sorted by population):
13.4 Jacksonville, FL
12.6 Fort Worth, TX
6.9 San Francisco, CA
11.9 Oklahoma City, OK
13.0 Fresno, CA
4.9 Mesa, AZ
6.6 Omaha, NE
7.9 Colorado Springs, CO
3.1 Virginia Beach, VI
10.7 Miami, FL
14.3 Tulsa, OK
14.7 Bakersfield, CA
For comparison here are 14 cities with a Democrat mayor from the top 50. I picked these cities by taking the 11 Republican cities and for each picking the next highest and next lowest population Democrat cities:
3.2 San Jose, CA
8.2 Austin, TX
22.4 Columbus, OH
31.8 Washington, DC
4.4 El Paso, TX
17.1 Tucson, AZ
10.9 Sacramento, CA
30.7 Kansas City, MO
32.0 Atlanta, GA
5.5 Raleigh, NC
8.1 Long Beach, CA
30.9 Oakland, CA
22.1 Minneapolis, MN
5.8 Wichita, CA
SF has a slightly lower murder rate than the US as a whole. Lower than most of the republican states, and lower than Miami, which some people seem to be trying to make the new tech capital.
Murder rate is a proxy for proximity to trauma care. SF does well. The better measure of societal violence is the crime rate. SF is worse than 98% of cities in the US.
Which crime? According to this [1] San Francisco is high for larceny-theft (#2), but #66 for murder and non-negligent manslaughter, #67 for rape, #20 for robbery, #66 for aggravated assault, #55 for burglary, #34 for motor vehicle theft, and #23 for arson.
This is out of the 100 most populous of the cities that have data in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports system.
Here are the top 5 in each of these categories.
Murder etc: St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, Baton Rouge
Rape: New Orleans, Anchorage, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Spokane
Robbery: Baltimore, Cleveland, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis
Aggravate assault: Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee
Homicide is an interesting metric because death is harder to cover up and thus we should expect it to be reported. There are many other crimes which people just wouldn't bother to report.
It would be overly speculative to argue that Jackson MS, one of the most conservative 100k+ cities in the US, has a spectacular murder rate compared to SF because medical care is so good in SF.
>Jackson MS, one of the most conservative 100k+ cities in the US
Jackson, MS is in Hinds county, which voted 73.4% for Biden in 2020, 71.1% for Clinton in 2016, and 71.5% for Obama in 2012. There hasn't been a single Republican mayor of Jackson in the Post-WW2 period. It's strange to call someone else's comment overly speculative when yours is flat out incorrect.
I don't agree with the parent broadly, but note that in America, a political party's numbers don't even need to be in the same universe as "overrunning" to hobble the other party's endeavors.
I don't think this is a point worth making in a city that is so solidly blue that you'd mistake it for the color of the ocean they're going to fall into in 100 years.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it a ton. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We have to ban accounts that post like this. I'm not going to ban you right now because it looks like we haven't asked you before, and because I noticed a few good comments too. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
Assuming you're making light of "common sense gun control," comparing the two is silly because it's much easier to cause fatal harm to someone with a gun than a knife, but also it is possible to both need weapon control and social programs like mental health care and help for the homeless at the same time. Not every issue is both, but we still need both.
Indeed: crossfire from a shooting would not fit the neighbourhood. Being attacked by someone with a knife definitely would, unless I've been staying in a different SOMA this last few years.
The east side of SOMA is a lot quieter than the west side. Main Street is pretty tame.
This did happen late at night... I would expect the victim and the assailant were the only two people around. Or close to that. It's pretty damn quiet in that part. IIRC there are ~two apartment/condo buildings on that block and that's it.
I have yet to see a knife rampage in the US get that bad, correct me if I'm wrong. Let's up it to the Las Vegas shooting 2017 - killing 60 people and wounding at least 413. Also in the US I haven't seen a single person in a car attack that did that much havoc.
Why does it have to be all at the same time in a single rampage? Some killers do it over time. No guns required. Arsonists can kill dozens of people at the same time as well. No guns required. The point is the problem is the person not the tool.
If you think air travel hasn't become a much more restrictive process since then you are not keeping up with reality. We can't carry on peanut butter let alone a box cutter. We all get irradiated and scanned. There is a massive no fly list. I remember flying in 1999 and having relatives meet me at the gate which is a laughable idea now.
The utility of airplanes outweighs the utility of civilian firearms designed for assault/defense, or the two are at the very least incomparable. I don't believe that you don't believe this.
I think the chances of getting killed in a random stabbing is low in SF… and this is from someone that really hates going into any city.
However, the crime in general… that’s not something one can claim is “cherry picked.” I know of several companies that have stopped letting employees visit SF because it is too expensive to insure.
Still though, it’s been said how dangerous SF is becoming in general… and now such a high profile hacker is dead from a random stabbing. Certainly awful optics.
SF has a higher murder rate than Sau Paulo, Brazil and they have a "Level 2: Exercise Increased Caution" advisory. We have many cities (Baltimore, Chicago, detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, etc) that are higher in terms of violence. I think our violent cities should have a Level 2 warning if we want to be consistent.
Something like 75% of homicides are what's referred to as "passion crimes" and committed by a spouse/close relative/etc. If his wife had stabbed him on a random street corner she would likely already be arrested. The longer this takes the more likely it's a random stabbing
> top comment is saying to not talk about SF politics
The top comment says not to only talk about SF politics, but also share some memories of the deceased. It's followed by a thousand posts discussing SF politics. Let's not pretend the politics are being ignored here.
any other sources supporting this notion? it sounds reckless which is understandable from an emotional point of view, but nonetheless demeaning for homeless people and unproductive for justice.
I wasn't aware that tech companies had any influence over SF's failure to build housing. Were they lobbing for zoning restrictions or excessive permitting or CEQA delays?
Most cities bend over backwards to recruit employers who bring high income taxpayers to their city. I've never understood what's special about SF that would make that event undesirable. If these employers pulled out en masse, which seems like the desired outcome here, I feel like they'd be thrown under the bus all over again for causing urban blight.
I agree with your point, but most cities in the US can't build housing. There's definitely a correlation between tech coming in and house prices going up. In some ways not having tech come in at all is better for the segment of the population that doesn't own property.
> I agree with your point, but most cities in the US can't build housing
The word you're looking for isn't can't, it's won't.
Cities can absolutely crack down on entrenched landowning interests, bring them to heel, and shut down their abusive rent-seeking operation. However, those interests have outsized political sway, and I'm sure they love to see a political circular firing squad amongst the groups that could band together to eliminate the rackets they're operating. Everyone focusing their ire on tech workers is an absolute godsend for them.
It's worth mentioning that the naive go-to lever, rent controls, won't solve the housing crisis because it won't build more housing. It will just create lottery winners and losers.
California is only beginning to address this by using state-level authority to strip zoning privileges from the recalcitrant municipalities and the rentier class they serve, but it's likely going to be a decade before this begins to bear fruit.
All this being said, I would love the government to aggressively enter the housing development market, as Singapore has done, but I'm not holding my breath for that to happen. At the very least we should focus on building more housing by allowing development to happen naturally.
There are two issues to the affordability crisis. Supply and demand. Tech companies generated the demand, but the community voted to restrict the supply.
We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
just plain lying, you had objection maybe once long time ago if ever, I don't even remember it
if you are transparent show us those requests
moderation on this site really went downhill over years with shadowbans when your are unable to submit even link to BBC and HN lying you are posting too fast while this limit disappears immediately when you post comment
The karma threshold for flags is only 30. High karma users don't have any special voting or flagging power.
Edit: It looks like your account has been using HN primarily, if not exclusively, for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of what you're battling for or against—it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended going forward, we'd appreciate it.
I didn't flag it, but if you read the comments here, there is confusion about whether it's even him (apparently the identity was only even mentioned in a now-deleted comment on the article), and there's also the usual amount of posts about SF that are just using the topic as an excuse to express partisan anger. Both are reasonable reasons to flag. If you jump to conspiratorial sarcasm so quickly, that contributes to the problem.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
This feels like a heartless take; your condolences go to the murderer/city/activists, but not to those who knew and loved the man that actually died? I'm not arguing that the murderer and city don't have big problems, but to call them the "real victims" just feels strange.
The fact he believed that was a real opinion is very concerning, and the core of the problem with the modern West Coast. People have become fucking unhinged.
You broke the site guidelines badly with this comment. We ban accounts that do that. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note particularly the one about ideological battle.
I don't know why anyone would live in that city. Unless you're being bussed directly to a campus from out of area, it's an insane place to work, let alone live. Understaffed, under-resourced and under-appreciated.
Not to mention overly expensive. We just bootstrapped a remote first company, hiring people from all over the world, some are in rural areas others are in cities. If we grew to level that we need an engineering HQ, it will be in a European country.
Even then it's not worth it. When I was commuting to and from the city for work there would be 1-2 suicide attempts (or successes) every month and train delays for hours. I don't imagine that got any better after Covid...
SF is 6.9 per 100K -> pretty high... higher than any city in Europe or Asia not currently with an active war... (On those continents, only Ukraine, Iraq, and Afghanistan are more dangerous than SF)
Not to defend SF but there are about 30 US cities with a higher homocide rate, that don't get nearly as much attention. SF is absolutely overrun by homeless though.
Where did you get that 3 per 100k from? In each of the last 2 years there were 55 homicides in SF from what I can tell. Maybe you're thinking of New York, which is half of SF's rate?
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (second link) contains statistics from 2019. However, it seems to be the most recent edition. I have no idea if or where the 2020-2022 ones exist.
If someome could point me to them or explain why they don't exist, I'd appreciate it.
"I left SF 1,000 years ago, it's awful! I know, because I haven't lived there in 1,000 years!"
and
"I'll never move to SF, this is why! I know it's awful, because of the news!"
Not saying SF doesn't have problems. I don't live there, so I don't know! I do know that I live next to some cities that have similar or worse reputations, and I also know those reputations are overplayed.
You have to ask yourself - why would SF get this reputation among all possible cities, for no reason at all?
A lot of people have fun anecdotes about visiting San Francisco. For example, I was in SF for 3 days and was chased by a man with a knife in a park near a major tourist attraction. I lived in NYC for 12 years and nothing of that sort happened my entire time there.
Maybe SF is unique in the dangers are equally dispersed among residents, non residents, and across neighborhoods of varied socio-economic status. Chicago is reputationally dangerous, but the violence is really limited to non-tourist neighborhoods that mostly poor people live in. So probably not the type of people who will be posting stories on HN, or get a CNN article written about them when they die.
> You have to ask yourself - why would SF get this reputation among all possible cities, for no reason at all?
This isn't an argument.
> A lot of people have fun anecdotes about visiting San Francisco.
Also not an argument.
> For example, I was in SF for 3 days and was chased by a man with a knife in a park near a major tourist attraction. I lived in NYC for 12 years and nothing of that sort happened my entire time there.
Also not an argument. But I have had close calls in NYC as a tourist!
How many ex-CTOs of square have to die for it to be obvious that having thousands of junkies slowly decaying on the street in an orgy of madness and drugs might be a bad idea?
Not that this should matter, nobody deserves to be stabbed… but I knew Bob personally btw and he was a great guy.
I knew crazybob too. Met him his 20s at Google. Haven't chatted with him in years but the Bob I knew would have have your intro to be offensive and in poor taste.
I don't know. Saying someone was kind vs spouting hate rhetoric seems less bad to me. But this is subjective, obviously. I take your point but I disagree with your scoring.
From what I've heard about SF, there is an insane level of inequality there -- abject poverty and homelessness, next to gleaming wealth and SV opulence.
For all the "problems" that tech bros solve, it's somehow tragically fitting that the two worlds collide undeniably this way. The city didn't get like this overnight, and the tech culture that it supports has been one of the drivers of the economic divide.
Now the bubble is burst at the point of a knife... or is it? Will people see the root of the problem? Or will they just call for more police, more coercion, to double-down on the status quo? You could take this as a call to solve real problems, right there, at home.
San Francisco is a lost cause for a generation. The political machine that controls it does not care at all about the life of the average person. They live in gated communities on private streets. They even screwed over the guy who bought the private street and started charging them tolls. https://news.yahoo.com/rich-san-francisco-residents-got-1754...
I wish a political party existed in the United States that represented my definition of "normal people". One that wasn't focused on fascism/marginalizing people who are different but also cared about middle out economics by supporting policies that deregulate, spur industry, create jobs...
Or you could look at the data. Houston's crime rate is about 50% higher (than San Francisco.) Strangely... Chicago... that everyone talks about being "high crime" is about 50% lower.
When I was a kid, we walked 5 miles in the middle of the night to avoid being killed by rebels. So... I mean... things can always get worse. Maybe stop watching Fox News and read some data.
This caught my eye just because I remember reading an article about this company being engaged in alleged mischievous activity very recently [1]. Thanks for sharing!
> “I paid them hitters through Cash App”— Block paid to promote a video for a song called “Cash App” which described paying contract killers through the app. The song’s artist was later arrested for attempted murder.
I want to draw attention to Bob Lee, a well-respected technologist and prototype hacker, always curious and sharing lots of interesting technical developments. He was a great role model for how Engineers should be respected in an executive capacity as he advanced his career from 'Software' to 'Product'. His efforts contributed to technology used by millions. What happened to him is tragic and wrong; he deserved better. Thank you, I'll miss you 'crazybob'.
Please share your stories featuring Bob Lee, who I'm sure would like to be remembered for his contributions rather than as a victim of this unfortunate awful event.