The root cause being the federal laws governing involuntary committal for mental healthcare and lack of federal resources for mental healthcare which is super pricy for obvious reasons. In addition are widening income/wealth gap and the temperate climates exacerbate the issue in some places more than others.
So the solution at the state and city levels is to use police to push people that are likelier to cause problems around so they are not comfortable being around, and incarcerating them and keeping them in the system for various offenses.
Then the police and politicians get heat for being prejudiced or biased or unfair, and they relax the rules, and then the problems return, and people will complain about thefts and property crime and etc until it gets bad enough that there is once again political will for a crackdown, and rinse repeat.
Note that I am not saying there are not legitimate prejudices and biases that need to be addressed in the police/judicial system, nor that society should let minor offenses go and make police think about the political ramifications of every interaction they have.
On the other hand, broad and flat-footed anti-police sentiment has increased and has manifest as either explicit depolicing policies or unofficial pressure on police officers in the field to avoid routine stops and other preventative policing efforts, as well as pressure on DAs to be seen as “soft on crime” (not intending any sort of disparagement with this term). Which isn’t to say that police don’t need reform—I’m one of the 90% of Americans who think some kind of reform is necessary, but perhaps something a little more sophisticated than “defund the police” is in order (better training for police officers, weaken police unions, increase protection in vulnerable communities while increasing funding to other social services, etc)?
As for whether the pendulum will swing too far against crime, when was the last time that happened in SF? I suspect SF’s robust corps of progressives have successfully prevented the pendulum from swinging even to the center for the last decade or two.
I do think this is the root cause of the shoplifting examples in the article. Stealing handbags from Niemen Marcus is, I think, unrelated to mental health issues.
These people know that you don’t do that in DC without consequences, so they go up to SF.
Oh, yes.
Yup. People alive today look back the three strikes law and think “how could the voters ever wanted that?”.
But you live long enough and the the cycles start to emerge. If crime gets bad enough in the cities you’ll see a repeat of the 70-90s where law and order was priority #1.
Bragg is a far cry from Boudin. He is, as a former prosecutor, leading in a field that had Boudinesque candidates, e.g. those with zero prosecutorial experience.
I would actually highlight him as an example of the sort of compromise that seems lacking in San Francisco.
https://www.alvinbragg.com/declination
they make sense.
Contrast that with one of Boudin's policies
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/12/24/da-critics-say-anti-d...
and then think about the drug abuse problem that is prevalent in SF.
Whether SF or NYC, inequality and racial segregation have increased, corporations build glass and steel temples of capitalism, billionaires treat the world as their lab and playground, and even the middle class hoards the world's production and labor resources from the comfort of their couches, advantages all accumulated over centuries of exploitation, colonization, slavery, genocide and ecological debt that the poor and future generations will have to pay back.
But to keep things simple, let's just consider the "anarchy" in light of where SF and NYC (shining lights on the hill of liberalism) rank in the dimension of racial segregation:
- https://gothamist.com/news/new-yorks-schools-are-still-the-m...
- https://belonging.berkeley.edu/most-least-segregated-cities
- https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism
- Most major metropolitan areas have become more racially segregated, study shows: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/21/us/housing-segregation-cities...
It's not the worst time ever. There, I said it. Happy? Now, are you going to say "'Not the worst time ever' can still be pretty bad and in need of fixing"?
Who do you think has been making all the progress to get us to not the worst time ever? You’re welcome, by the way.
Sorry, is the argument that public safety can’t exist in a desegregated city?
if anything, the upper castes rely on segregation to feel safer, thereby making things worse.
Most likely this is the result of our flat-footed “defund the police!” rhetoric that manifest as either explicit de-policing policies or else as unofficial pressure on police to reduce preventative policing practices like routine stops. I don’t think anyone disputes this correlation even if they don’t subscribe to the causation hypothesis.
With respect to racial segregation, I know ordinary liberals and moderates are generally on board with increased integration but I’m not sure how that will hit the I-oppose-race-mixing-but-in-a-woke-way crowd, particularly in SF?
Poverty? I would get it. But how the fact that someone is richer than you justifies shoplifting is beyond my understanding.
Maybe it’s possible to have a kind of inequality where the rich get richer without the poor getting poorer (although I suspect it would just mean that the purchasing power of a dollar falls even though the poor have as many dollars as they had before) but in practice in America I think we have the kind of inequality where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (and more numerous).
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
I'm sure it's possible to construct a measure which will show that poverty went up - as it's equally possible to show the opposite - but either will mostly likely be overfitting, i. e. hand-picking data to prove the desired point.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
Poverty is definitely definitely going down, not up.
What if one argued that some enslaved people in 1850 Georgia were better fed than before they were kidnapped from Africa. All ok then?
And why should rich people complain if there were a revolution and they were relegated to the middle class? The middle class of 2021 live longer and have better healthcare than the kings of even 100 years ago. What rights does anyone have to anything? By what reason doed anyone have a claim to injustice?
Note that while I do specify the bay area here, it's only for the purposes of this comment. It's quite obviously spreading to other places. The moral madness of social media is slowly but steadily spilling out into every day society.
While SF and cities like it vilify incumbents, they also vilify the opposition. In my city of Portland, no one will consider electing a republican because they have constructed strawman as to what a republican will be like (forgetting that the last Gop mayer of Portland was loved).
New York had a republican only 20 years ago.
LA was also revived by a republican mayor.
There's a pattern.
Sorry for being so blunt, but at some point we need to name the problem.
Bloomberg was in the middle and now Deblasio/Wilhelm’s tenure will likely propel a moderate Democrat into office who promises to bring order back to the city.
SF could learn from that but it doesn’t happen. SF is very ideological do instead of admitting mistakes progressives keep doubling down. At some point the constituency will say enough! But SF keeps surprising me.
Brown was corrupt but at least crime was dealt with. Everyone since Brown has been on the ideological bandwagon and won’t admit to mistakes and keep on doubling down on ineffective and detrimental policies.
At this point I say bring someone like Willie back.
So to answer your question, there is no compromise because compromise would be admitting failure - that these policies don’t work. And also admitting that putting some people in jail is a net benefit to society.
In "The Three Languages of Politics" Arnold Kling classifies three basic perspectives that can become central in a person's mind in such a way that expressions of the other perspectives are incomprehensible. The perspectives are described through axis of 1) oppressor-oppressed, 2) civilization-barbarism, 3) freedom-coercion. In the original article the author describes social media communication on the part of government staff that highlights the oppressor-oppressed without acknowledging other perspectives. Similarly people victimized by or by witnessing crime or crime-hype may find civilization-barbarism the most salient perspective. Without a consideration for all axis a productive conversation is unlikely.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17831052-the-three-langu...
Because it's related to the issue of race, and this is one of the most difficult subjects to discuss and has been so for many decades. If anything, the debate became worse.
Sometimes I think that authoritarian regime combined with freedom of movement is a potential alternative to democracy.
You don't like it here? You don't live here.
What I find hilarious about bay area residents is that they'll say things like this as if it's at all unique to the area.
In reality, knowing your neighbors is common throughout the country
We just got through this debate in New York City through our mayoral primary. Neither “side” won. But the process has so far produced two lead candidates who acknowledge the problem, pledged to focus on public safety and at the same time be mindful of the racial inequities of the NYPD’s recent past.
That compromise doesn’t exist in SF. The political space for it to exist doesn’t exist. There is a refusal to admit the problem on one hand. And a vilification of the incumbents as idiots, or worse, in bed with the criminals, on the other.