The only way to break the cycle is to have a safe supply of prescribed drugs, an alternative to (often literally toxic) street drugs. This would mean that persons don't need to raise money to buy street drugs, which should reduce the related petty theft, but this is not the status quo "war on drugs" approach so it remains politically challenging for weak politicians.
The status quo continues where police pretty much don't have options other than to harass drug users and confiscate drugs, which only makes things worse as drug users with no money now have to raise more money yet again to buy more drugs, potentially stealing again.
The "tough on crime" path is often advocated by people frustrated and wanting to see police knock some heads around, but it leads to the unsustainable and wildly expensive absurdities of like jailing people for stealing deoderant and such incredibly minor crimes.
A few years ago, Multnomah County and the City of Portland started a program to guarantee housing for all homeless families. It had to shut down, after becoming overwhelmed by people from across Oregon, it's neighboring states, and across the United States generally [1]:
"More than 800 adults, representing about 500 families, answered the question. About 45 percent gave addresses in Portland or Multnomah County. Significant numbers said their last addresses had been in other cities in the Portland metro area that do not fund the shelter, including Vancouver, Beaverton and Oregon City. Smaller numbers said they’d come from communities across western Oregon, including Salem, Eugene, Medford and Seaside. And about one-third of the shelter residents reported their last permanent address wasn’t in Oregon. They came from dozens of states, including Alaska, Nevada, Louisiana, Texas and Virginia."
I can't imagine that the results of implementing a locally based legal drugs harm reduction policy would be any different. The United States needs policies like this applied at the Federal level if they are going to work.
[1] https://www.opb.org/news/article/portland-oregon-homeless-ch...
The short of the video is that you need rehabilitation for these drug users AND you need accountability. When you pick up a drug user, you give them two options: rehab or jail. Fail out of rehab, go to jail.
Unsurprisingly, most people pick rehab. In either case, the problem is solved for the rest of society.
We give people the resources and help to solve their problem without letting them jerk the rest of us around. It seems like a fair compromise to me.
The advantage of prescribed safe supply is that drug users are now interacting with the medical system and this is a touch point where medical professionals can interact with drug users directly and divert people that are ready for counseling and rehab to those options.
The fact that police would quit the force because one of them got held accountable for their actions is incredibly alarming and only feeds the ACAB mentality.
I tried to keep this list as neutral as possible, and just report the facts as I understand them to be true. #13 and #14 include more of my own viewpoint, but I think those are broadly true statements.
That's how defund should work. Start funding a properly functioning department, and starve the other one.
Eugene, Oregon has been running a program called CAHOOTS for several years now, and Portland is starting to mimic it. It's basically a team of mental health professionals who roam the city responding to mental health issues that don't require an armed response. It seems to be working pretty well for them, and I think the model could be expanded.
You cover this a lot, but you also fail to mention that PPD is _notorious_, nation-wide, for its association with white supremacists and right wing groups.
There are incidents where PPD will agree not to arrest Proud Boys who have warrants out if they show up to protest.
Or where a Sergeant will tell Three Per Cent'ers that they're about to start firing off tear gas and rubber bullets in an area where they are clashing with "Antifa" or BLM. "Go hide in the lobby of this building and we'll send you a text when we're done gassing them so you can come back out and keep going".
Repeated, numerous times. And the very large majority of PPD doesn't even live there.
I wonder what the above could do to foster a "general culture of disrespect for authority"...
1.) The police in Portland were barely interested in dealing with property crime before the massive uptick in 2020. They'd show up...eventually, but they certainly weren't going to show up in time to stop anyone and any investigation was minimal.
2.) The newly elected DA in Portland is a strong believer in restorative justice, and avoiding incarceration when possible. He is also a vocal critic of the police, which has earned him their ire. This has created a circular animosity that manifests in the police not bothering to do their jobs in documenting and investing crimes, because they don't' feel like the DA's office are going to do theirs by prosecuting them.
3.) Judges in Multnomah County, where Portland sits, tend towards light sentencing.
4.) During COVID, the court system effectively shut down for a while. This generated an enormous backlog. The net effect is that there are many people currently awaiting hearings for very serious offenses, who in ordinary times would be in jail, but aren't because of jail capacity issues.
5.) Multnomah County has underbuilt jails for years, and doesn't have much capacity in the ones they haven't closed yet.
6.) Due to COVID, the courts are very reluctant to remand anyone to custody except in the most violent cases. There are numerous reports of violent offenders being immediately released because there's no room in jail while maintaining the recommended COVID guidelines.
7.) Recently Oregon, through a ballot measure, decriminalized user amounts of pretty much all narcotics. The jury's still out on how that's playing out, but it's looking like we may have inadvertently invited a lot of transient drug users to come live here.
8.) There's a massive homeless population in Portland. Almost every neighborhood has one or more encampments. It's not uncommon to see things like stolen and stripped cars, bikes, and other property concentrated around them, because theft is the primary way that these folks have made money.
9.) There's been a massive uptick in meth use across the western United States, which is going under reported because of the opioid crisis. The meth in question is industrially made in Mexico, using P2P as the base. This particular formulation of meth has a very different effect on users than previous formulations (which were based on ephidrine). Ephidrine based meth tends to make people euphoric and sociable, while P2P based meth tends to make people paranoid and aggressive, and in higher doses it mimics the symptoms of schizophrenia. Sam Quinones' new book "The Least of Us" goes into fascinating detail about all this.
10.) Oregon has an awful mental health system, which is way overburdened. The net effect of this is that a lot of people with behavioral problems end up on the street, where they co-mingle with the rest of the homeless population.
11.) There's been an enormous uptick in shootings in Portland, owing to a gang war between the West Side 18th Street, the Young Come Ups, and a few others. There was an inciting incident earlier in the summer where a member of one gang killed members of another at a memorial service, and it's been an escalating series of gun battles ever since. This has seriously overtaxed the police, to the point that in some shootings, one office has been left to process the scene entirely alone because the rest had to go to another shooting.
11.) Police are quitting, for various reasons that range from mask mandates to anger and solidarity that the DA prosecuted one of their own for use of force during the 2020 riots. Portland already had a very low per-capita number of police to begin with.
12.) Until about June, there were two or three activist gatherings per week, and at least one of these usually turned into a small group of people either directly antagonizing the police at their headquarters, or marching around smashing windows and setting dumpster fires. This, too, kept the police very busy.
13.) The culture in Portland forgives a lot of anti-authority things. Theft is excused is "survival crimes". Vandalism is tolerated and sometimes praised, especially if it's enacted against larger corporate businesses. You'll get no pushback for saying "All cops are bastards" to a random stranger in public.
14.) There is an activist culture here that will fight City Hall tooth and nail on any attempt at remediating anything. Attempts to clean up homeless camps are met with protests, sometimes by armed activists. An entire city block was occupied by armed protestors for a month or so last December.
So, in summary, burnt out/jaded cops, relatively soft on crime judicial system stretched to it's max, homeless crisis, meth crisis, fentanyl crisis, general culture of disrespect for authority.
Not sure how much of this is true in San Francisco, but I think a lot of them are generally true across the larger West Coast cities.