This article from May talks a bit more about the causes: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

Many people point to Prop 47 which “reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950”

Some also point the finger at DA Chesa Boudin for his low “charging rates”: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...

Basically if you shoplift in SF the benefits outweigh the costs.

The stats seem to say shoplifting is not increasing in sf. Though that doesn't mean that any chain isn't experiencing something different.

Or that the sf crazies aren't being even crazier post lockdown and causing more of the mentioned security incidents.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-shoplifting-ris...

>The Chronicle analyzed Police Department incident report data from January 2018 through April 2021. [...] The data shows that shoplifting rates dipped at the start of the pandemic, when many stores shut down, and have since recovered to just below pre-pandemic levels.

Is sampling bias potentially at play here? If you know that calling the police wouldn't do anything, why would you bother reporting it?

It’s definitely at play here - the cops often don’t even show up, and the stores have stopped bothering to call.

If you don’t record it, it isn’t happening, as it were.

There is no social reason. chaos and destruction is the human normal without civilization to stop them. Increasingly we have been happily destroying those things which make a civilization, such as the ability to enforce and make laws, our public art and symbols, our values, even our history. We have come to be a nation that loathes itself and we are reaping the consequences.

I think there is a social reason. It only takes a small number of people acting destructively to create chaos, even if the vast majority of people are law abiding. When society refuses to deal with people acting destructively, that is a social reason for the chaos we are witnessing.

This is certainly a valid take, as espoused by Hobbes. John Locke famously took the other side - humans are honorable and nobel creatures.

What is your life experience that makes you prefer one over the other? They both seem equally valid, depending on ones choice of available amplified evidence.

Both are correct. Most humans are honorable, but the damage done by the few who are not is so disproportionate in scale to their numerical strength that a society is lost if it does not aggressively bring its worst impulses to heel.

Correct

The universe tends toward disorder. Order requires many times more effort than disorder.

An orderly society requires many times more people to buy in to its precepts than the number of disorderly people needed to make a bad society. Once a small segment of a society no longer buy in, disorder follows fast.

My life experience is one where I have confronted the fact that the universe itself is quite terrible. Disease, death, destruction are all inherent parts of a universe that depends on the increase of entropy in order to provide us with the fleeting pleasures of life.

Two experiences bring me here.

Firstly, losing several children before birth made me realize that the universe is not some happy place filled with goodness. By its nature, it tends toward destruction and disorder. The byproduct of such things is suffering and it is omnipresent. Like entropy, overcoming suffering (which is permanent and the normal state of things) requires the expenditure of energy and effort and even then the results are localized and fleeting. Sometimes, by sheer luck, spontaneous bursts of order arises as when all the particles in a fluid in Brownian motion once in a while align in their trajectories. But, suffering and disorder is normal and happen without reason. Only order and goodness and beauty need reason and effort to occur in a prolonged state.

Secondly, my visit to my parents home country as a five year old. Going from a pretty safe suburb in America to the abject squalor of that place, with death and sickness all around and poverty everywhere made me understand that the good society we have in america is abnormal in the grand history of the universe. Good society takes effort and is easily destroyed.

Humans and our behavior do not escape from this system of chaos. It is only through constant expenditure of energy that life itself is able to impose order on small parts of our universe.

Human society is no different. We have been handed down how to use energy to have a good society by generations upon generations of humans who have succeeded in doing so and whose processed has been homes by natural selection. Our current technocratic society has little trouble accepting Darwinian natural selection producing life saving instincts, while simultaneously rejecting the notion that cultural tradition has been similarly honed by natural selection for human survival.

By our own hubris in deciding to undo lots of traditional behavior and values just because, we now find ourselves once more lost, trying to explain to ourselves why this is happening. But we miss the obvious because we don't want to see, which is that the squalor we are currently in is a byproduct of having thrown away and ignoring the results of the very process that gave us the thing we valued.

Edit: reworded some things

Edit2: I'll also add that none of what I said makes me think most humans are not noble or dishonorable. To the contrary, my religious convictions teach me that human beings are naturally driven towards the creator of the universe, who is the source of all order. Most humans are still mostly drawn to that. It's just that when we abandon that drive and refuse to acknowledge it, then the marginal change in our behavior is enough to tip the fragile scales of order into the direction of chaos.

That is to say, even though most humans are good, and no one can be perfect, there are varying degrees of perfection. no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough

Edit3: the two philosophies are not equally valid. Mine, which acknowledges our universes fallen nature and tendency toward eventual absolute chaos, is backed by empirical observation.

What makes you believe that your experience is representative of others? Or, for that matter, how do you know you aren’t just reinforcing your own presuppositions with how you process information, ie confirmation bias?

Fwiw, it’s not a particularly interesting argument to say “my experience has taught me this so this is the way it is.” What if you’re just wrong, have you considered that? I spend most of my time thinking I’m probably wrong - it’s the best way to become less wrong over time.

My observation of the universe is subjective. Nowhere did I imply it wasn't

What I did state is that there is a difference between the school of thought saying human nature is inherently good and the one saying humans are predisposed to evil. Because we can observe human nature and it does not seem oriented towards good. All people do evil things from time to time including myself. Some do evil that is disproportionate to the average though.

I have considered if I'm just wrong. Have you considered if I may be right?

Nowhere have you offered any argument against what I believe. You just asked pointed questions. I directly responded to a post literally asking me for what experiences I had that led me to my beliefs. I gave an accurate accountings focusing mainly on my subjective experience.

And your response is not to disagree with my conclusions but to attack the fact that I just provided the very experiences demanded of me...

If that were the best argument I could make against someone, I'd reconsider my own beliefs

My personal belief is that it's not meaningfully true or false to talk about human nature, as if we can simplify the complexity of contextual behavior into a single boolean variable.

At various points, I have believed that human nature tends towards the bad. As I've gotten older, I realize that people sometimes behave in good ways in bad situations; they sometimes behave poorly in situations where it would be easy to do the right thing. The same person could do both, within a 10 minute span. Heck, I even believe that people's behaviors would change if the simulation could be rewound and replayed.

Human interaction is so complex. If you expect me to behave poorly because you're in a bad mood right now, and I live down to your expectations, how should we interpret it? I don't believe it says anything generalizable about either of our natures - we could simply be having a series of bad days that makes it more difficult to act nobly.

If one of your key beliefs so colors your view of your fellow humans, it's probably a very limiting belief. For me, I don't think there's much value or truth in predisposing myself to negativity by projecting it forward. Especially when there's no real benefit to doing so.

I do not choose this. How can I opt-out? I want to return to a law abiding society.

Because the local elected government officials stopped prosecuting incident of theft under 1000 dollars. You can steal 350k worth of goods a year and not worry about going to jail. Guess which political party implemented that policy, guess which party those shoplifters will vote for?

I'd be willing to wager that most of the junkies and mentally disturbed people looting stores in SF don't vote at all.

> Guess which political party implemented that policy, guess which party those shoplifters will vote for?

The DA election was non-partisan, but in any event the lion's share of Democratic endorsements went to Loftus, not Boudin. Most of Boudin's Democratic endorsements came from out-of-state, and weren't from national office holders. His biggest endorsers were Bernie Sanders (I) and the Green Party. Boudin only won in the 3rd round of instance run-off voting, though he was the top vote-getter in the first two rounds. See https://ballotpedia.org/District_Attorney_election_in_San_Fr...

Also, interestingly, by the 3rd round the conservative votes split almost equally between Boudin and Loftus. Boudin won because of name recognition and mindshare regarding criminal justice reform. (Also, look at campaign money. Boudin led the pack--he has some very big benefactors, none of whom are mainstream Democrats, AFAIU.) Unfortunately, voters tend to vote based on one-liners, without understanding candidates' substantive policies, so many people who were "pro reform" ended giving a vote to Boudin even though they probably wouldn't have if they understood precisely what Boudin had planned.

Finally, to be clear, the only elected government official in the city openly supporting these policies is Boudin. His two allies on the Board of Supervisors have quietly slinked away. Most other city officials, especially the Mayor, have been vocally opposed to and critical of Boudin's policies from day 1. That said, he still receives a ton of support in the media, including from the SF Chronicle as well as commentators on KQED (NPR affiliate), unfortunately. (I'm a KQED member and donor, and SF Chronicle subscriber.) The narrative is that the evidence doesn't show any causation wrt his policies, though the narratives typically use straw men to "debunk" the anti-Boudin claims. To be fair, I don't tend to support or oppose these types of reforms because causation is indeed rather tenuous, but when you're the only city in a huge metropolitan region promising no jail time for these offenses, guess where all the criminals go to commit their crimes?

This is not simply the policy of a single DA in SF. For example:

Dallas

https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2019/04/11/dallas-county-district-a...

Los Angeles

https://abc7.com/george-gascon-los-angeles-district-attorney...

Seattle

https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-policymakers-untouchabl...

>The DA election was non-partisan

I'm surprised you didn't just blame the GOP, since that seems to be so popular these days. I mean our president just blamed the gop for the defund the police nonsense.

In reality, anyone can see that only one party wields any power in CA. And we all know the policies Boudin favors are more favored by one party over the other.

At some point, we need to be honest with ourselves.

Only one party has consistently and unequivocally condemned policies like boudins.

While I would love it for the democrat establishment to also denounce his policies and talk about how awful they are as much as conservatives, the fact remains that even once they do, they'll be late to the party and will have tolerated it for far too long.l

The local government officials stopped because it's a california-wide law. You can like the law or dislike it, but don't blame the local officials.

> The local government officials stopped because it's a california-wide law.

No, its not. Prop. 47 is a state law, but while it reduces the category of offense for some thefts, it doesn't require nonprosecution or no police response. That's a DA and/or police policy choice, and it’s not one every other place in the state does the way SF does.