The current crop of California politicians are extremely noisy on Twitter and social media congratulating themselves on how great everything is but are very well protected from ordinary people. Another villain is the supervisor for Venice Beach in LA, a former bucket list tourist destination and now a massive homeless encampment. Supervisor Bonin refuses to talk to his constituents. People are getting very angry... https://vimeo.com/532718306

The politicians would find a way to charge you for it, because the law in the USA is applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner. If you're not a political opponent of them, they'll let the law operate (or not) as it normally would. If you're a political opponent, they'll scour the laws to find something to get you with, or at least prosecute you until you're bankrupt even knowing they won't convict.

See also:

"By the people" by Charles Murray

"Three felonies a day" by Harvey Silverglate

It needs to be a decentralized protest effort where the risk is shared. 100 individual actors stealing $899 of stuff from his garden over the course of a year and disappearing into the night until he gets the message. Would air to great effect on Fox news.

Unfortunately the political right is unbelievably bad at protest efforts.

How’s that working out in practice in San Fran?

Oh he absolutely knows it's bad policy, however he also knows it wins votes from people in San Francisco.

The problem is a large numbers of voters in SF don't realize it's bad policy, and maybe a bigger problem would be why are district attorneys elected positions in the first place?

Can someone who lives in SF chime in and tell us why you voted for Mr. Boudin?

Knowing what I know about bay area politics, I bet half the people who voted for him will say that crime in San Francisco is not the district attorney's fault and blame Regan for closing down the mental hospitals in the 70s.

I live just outside San Francisco city limits and everything is peaceful, because the criminals know that the laws are enforced here. It's that simple. Encountering homeless people shitting in front of me, or screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs at 2 a.m or whatever was a regular occurrence in S.F. I thought about homeless people every day in S.F. I don't think about homeless people at all where I live now.

The homeless budget in S.F is $300 million dollars a year. That employs a lot of people! Where I live now it's not a whole lot and yet there is no homeless problem.

I think it's partially a positive feedback loop. I'm not sure how to solve the problem.

But it probably goes: SF spends a lot of money on services for the homeless, so lots of homeless people keep going there to get those services. Other places don't spend any money on services for the homeless, so the homeless people leave.

If every place spent a little bit on services for the homeless, there would be just a few homeless everywhere instead of lots of homeless in a few places and no homeless in other places. But that would require coordination to ensure nobody free-rides and just lets other places take on the homeless.

$300 million is a lot though. I've worked on construction projects building ~250 unit apartment buildings that had budgets of $25 million. It seems like you could just build actual housing for most of the homeless with that kind of budget. (Of course that would require SF to allow housing to be built).

What would all those city employees who work in the homeless industry do if there wasn't a 300 million dollar budget? They wouldn't be able to afford to live in the city.

I think a lot of San Francisco's problems come from too much tax money. They have a $12.3 billion dollar budget. That's more than some small European countries! The city collects an enormous amount of taxes from all the tech money and needs to do something with it so they get the big idea that they are going to try and fix all social problems with the universal and only solution to all problems: more money.

> But it probably goes: SF spends a lot of money on services for the homeless, so lots of homeless people keep going there to get those services. Other places don't spend any money on services for the homeless, so the homeless people leave.

That's really not a realistic view of the situation though. Pretty much everywhere in the US, _all_ major cities at the very least, have "services for the homeless".

I think the problem lies a lot in the "progressive" idea that people claiming "homeless" somehow classifies for a privileged status. They setup a "homeless class" of people that don't have to work, and get paid to do so. The worse they act, the bigger the "problem" is according to their "caretakers" and the only outcome they can expect is to get an even _bigger_ payout.

In most major cities, shelters require a certain code of conduct. Those that don't abide by it get ousted, suffer the cold of winter, and buck up and man up and deal with it. In SF, they just camp out in the nicest of areas, people cry "hey there's some victims!" and they get an even bigger reward for their degeneracy. People that think they're helping stop some sort of cycle are literally just working at creating the feedback loop.

I didn't vote for him but remember the time around when he was elected. There was distractive conversations brought up by the progressives around his main rival, Suzy Loftus. I believe the mayor appointed her interim DA right before the election and the progressives called foul, thinking that she was choosing an incumbent that would go on to win the actual election. This combined with a low turnout and an election decided by less than 200 votes resulted in a win for Boudin.

The alternative would be that they believe it is good policy and they're willing to accept some increase in crime. Not saying I necessarily agree or accept that the policies are necessarily causing an increase in crime, but I do think it's worth pointing out that this is a possibility. (that imo is not unlikely)

In my social circle, which includes co-workers and families, this is explicitly stated, and it's rationalized with "they deserve more than they have, so if it takes crime to get them more, that's just in my book".

I think it's more likely than you expect, at least on the very vocal group that is aggressively pushing the overton window on our views on the social contract.

Next time you should ask them "do you think the all victims of those crimes deserved their fate as well?"

I try not to be aggressive when I engage in these conversations and instead focus on positive solutions based on finding out why they believe what they believe, instead of contrarian “in your face” sort of takes. They aren’t effective in my experience.

Read “the righteous mind” by Jonathan Haidt. Great audiobook too.

You are right it is a possibility, I actually think "incarceration rate" may actually be this alternative benchmark you suggested.

Now the question is do voters realize that benchmark can be artificially lowered by terrible policies that don't help anyone other than make some people "feel good"? We can literally make all crimes legal and we'd end up with an incarceration rate and prison population of zero.

I think there’s a lot of Californians voting in bad policy to curtail gentrification.

I’ve seen the logic used by many in SF.

I had to think about that for a second. It kinda makes sense and works. If you make SF an awful enough place, companies might finally start to consider leaving.

Even if they weren't, people would elect a Mayor on a progressive no-prosecuting-crime platform who'd then hire an awful DA…

The problem isn't with the position of DA, it's with "progressive" voters.

I consider myself liberal, but I agree with you, the California/SF branch of progressivism are extremely toxic.

Much of the platform is based on feelings and ideology instead of facts and problem solving, but it manages to even be worse than the right wing counterpart somehow because it comes served with a side dish of "holier and smarter than thou!"

Plenty of "holier than thou" to go round on both sides of the political spectrum.

Many cases are dropped by Boudin's office for insufficient proof, so police has to release suspects. All Boudin needs to do is to not drop that one case involving him.

What's the max punishment if he does pursue it?