The true criminals are mostly the people higher up managing the backend distribution who you don't see who are systematically taking advantage bail reform and of the low level actors who may indeed need the money for food - at scale.

The nice thing is that societally there probably isn't much disagreement that these higher ups who are buying second vacation houses with these "earnings" need to be held accountable.

For instance with the San Francisco retail thefts [1]:

"agents seized and recovered approximately $8 million of stolen merchandise from retailers across the San Francisco Bay Area"

"Video from a police stakeout shows Drago unloading trunkloads full of merchandise at one of his warehouses — mouthwash, cleaning supplies, shampoo, foot spray, over-the-counter medicine, and more than $1 million dollars worth of razors. Drago allegedly directs the boosters to steal small, compact items, with long expiration dates, and high resale value."

To add another dimension of irony if there's a similar pattern to the CVS/Walgreens shoplifting distribution mechanisms - the main distribution back into the system is Amazon and E-bay, etc.

"The stolen goods eventually find their way to Ebay, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and Amazon, where they are sold at a steep discount. Dugan says there’s a big societal cost to saving a few bucks."

So in that case, Amazon stuff is getting pilfered only to back into Amazon to be sold as Amazon marketplace items - no questions asked.

[1] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/10/06/major-san-franc...

What is that based on?

I admit its probably my own imagination that if one has warehouses, cash counters and shell LLCs for this size of operation that one is also aware and actively figuring out how to exploit bail reform and sub-$1000 theft limits in a way akin to BigCo lawyers reading anti-trust legislation to figure out the loopholes.

"Working with the task force, investigators tracked the stolen goods to 16 different storage lockers, warehouses and homes across the Bay Area. Much of the goods were then sold online through what law enforcement says was a shell company ... they found cash, a high-speed bill counting machine, and multiple vehicles... they found stacks of hundred dollar bills. Drago’s money was laundered through real estate transactions and other businesses."

Usually the hard part of money laundering is the opposite: how to turn cash into something a bank will accept.

You don't need a quote from a Walmart executive to know that Walmart is benefiting from its employees getting Medicaid and food stamps. So similarly you don't need a quote from a criminal leader to know that the criminal organization is benefiting from lax law enforcement.

But I'm not finding good data on how lax the law enforcement actually is.

There are certainly a number of places pointing it out, such as a member of the board of supervisors of SF saying Thieves “are obviously choosing locales based on what the consequences are,” Safaí said. “If there are no consequences for their actions, then you invite the behavior. Over and over.”, Walgreens saying the thefts in their SF stores are 4x other cities, and CVS calling SF “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime”[1]. One woman stole 120 times[2]. Former assistant DAs say the DA "selectively enforces laws"[3]. The police say hundreds of repeat offenders are responsible for shoplifting in the city.[4]

On the other hand, the police's actual numbers aren't convincing:

>In 2018, there were 238 repeat offenders, 20% of them were rearrested. In 2019, there were 219 repeat offenders, 29% of them rearrested.

>While in 2020, there were 116 repeat offenders -- 33% rearrested.[4]

So the repeat offender numbers are going down. That seems to indicate no problem caused by bail reform. And why are the percent rearrested low? That seems like it's the police's fault, not directly a bail problem. Also, I'd be more interested in knowing the number of thefts committed by repeat offenders, rather than the number of repeat offenders. And especially what percent of thefts are committed by repeat offenders. Shoplifting has been declining in SF, and SF, while much higher in shoplifting rates than some cities, is also much lower than others.[5]

So I think it's obvious that lenient bail and prosecution will aid shoplifting groups, but it's unclear to me how lenient the bail and prosecution is, or how severe shoplifting is in SF.

Thanks for spurring me to look into this more; it's more complicated than I thought.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...

[2] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/aziza-graves-sa...

[3] https://abc7news.com/chesa-boudin-recall-brooke-jenkins-san-...

[4] https://abc7news.com/sf-shoplifting-retail-theft-in-san-fran...

[5] http://www.cjcj.org/news/13165

This is exactly what the startup unicorns do - they disrupt. The scam world is computer savey, and feeds of information that hackers distribute. It could be said that we are part of the problem. Has your code been used in scam?

I don't think those are the only 2 alternatives. There's also the alternative of everyone getting good protection from crime.

"In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties move.

These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours... Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals."

Agree - its early data collected and correlation does not equal causation but the bail reform proponents should be investigating if more if/else/case statements need to be added to the underlying bail-reform feature codebase to prevent site outages being reported by power end users.

I'm hopeful that they are.

See the other thread for more nuanced commentary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29990457

Meanwhile, that same letter that spent 1/3 of a sentence mentioning bail talked about plea bargains for 2 paragraphs. I agree we have problems, but bail (or lack thereof) isn't the issue.

Zero bail for 30 felonies including auto theft

https://crimewatchmn.medium.com/hennepin-county-lifts-bail-r...

Auto theft a year later increases by over 500%

https://www.mprnews.org/amp/episode/2021/12/14/why-has-a-wav...

From reading news stories it’s the same people doing it. Mostly minors. I know correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it’s interesting here in a year period from those jail changes we see over a 5x increase in those crimes.

Bail-reform is probably a good feature worthy of keeping, just don't leave a potentially bug ridden implementation in production without a plan to fix it.

Also its for sure the same people running the backend operations. The front end people doing the stealing are somewhat interchange-able.

Its the backend APIs operating at scale that are the issue.

For example, regarding catalytic converter theft:

"This is a very significant step in stopping the widespread stealing of catalytic converters which have affected hundreds and hundreds of people in our county,"... 12 suspects are considered middlemen and thieves and the three other suspects worked at recycle businesses who knowingly purchased the stolen converters to sell... Green Metal Recycle... is suspected of possessing nearly $3,000,000 of stolen converters. "One of the officers said this is like a black market Costco and it really was," Rosen said. These businesses melt down the converters to get the precious metals inside- palladium, platinum and rhodium drive up the value.

$3M - that's a big number for inventory!

Further, your article about "mostly teen" offenders explains in great detail that that statistic should not be taken at face value. Since such a small percentage (10-15%) of carjackers are caught, there is a likely skew to younger, less sophisticated criminals.

Far from proving your point, you demonstrate crime is rising in the baseline, unchanged, crimes. Therefore, you raise the amount of crime needed for the cash bailless crimes to be attributable to that factor and not larger social changes.

Repeated lowered cash bail caused this guy to die.

This is only one example from Philadelphia, there are quite a few examples in the past two to three years, coinciding with Larry Krasner. He absolves himself of responsibility in this case, but ran on a platform very explicitly reducing cash bail to reduce incarceration rates on lower level crimes.

https://theappeal.org/the-successes-and-shortcomings-of-larr...

Here is an article fairly in favor of Krasner, and he is quoted on delivering these things.

Philadelphia hit a high score of 500+ shootings last year, and over 700 carjackings. We're already over 100 carjackings this month. There is plenty of blame to go around depending on who you ask, police, Biden, Krasner, COVID, the mayor, the economy.

One thing feels more true than others: if you are in jail, you cannot commit crimes. The costs to society and other people in the city looks very high right now. Krasner was just reelected, turnout was very low, and so we have another two years to see how it goes.

The sentiment among my neighbors on my block is: be careful going to your car at any time, don't be out alone late, use rideshare not public transit if you're a late night service worker. At least a quarter of them want to move in the next two years, split evenly between renters and owners. Can't remember that feeling in the past twenty years.

The problems with analysis like what you're doing is it just doesn't work. Like, suppose we locked up every person. Crime outside prisons would plummet! What if we made people wear GPS units at all time? Executed everyone who sped or worse!

What you have to show is that it made sense to deny him bail at the time.

Which article? On Josephus Davis? This was massive news in our city, Davis shot a dogwalker after robbing him.

The particulars on Mr. Davis:

He was released on reduced bail (300k->20k) for armed kidnapping the month before. He was also released after carjacking a rideshare driver the year before.

This is not a nice person.

>Like, suppose we locked up every person. Crime outside prisons would plummet! What if we made people wear GPS units at all time? Executed everyone who sped or worse!

Not sure why you're assuming I think this.

The purpose of showing this local story is that if there are not some kind of consequence to bad actors, things repeat themselves. Reform of cash bail appears to have side effects.

So we should continue to jail innocent people based on their income level?

Instead they need to put back on their work gloves and figure out how to deliver their promised feature (i.e. bail reform) while actively fixing the failure modes that their new feature introduced until all existing users are happy enough not to be submitting Jira tickets again.

Note that the people in the communities vote overwhelmingly for these reforms, and they are the ones living with the outcomes. A large proportion of people who have problems with it are outsiders.

Speak for yourself. Boudin and Gascon both are facing recalls, and even Portland and Oakland are reversing changes to policy funding. More likely there's a sizable portion of the said electorate that's sick of bearing the brunt of this failed sociological experiment pushed by progressive gaslighting. Not to mention the survivorship bias of the many of our friends / family who got sick of it and uprooted.

And at this point it's still just a highly correlated but not necessarily causation [1][2] - until more underlying data with more context about the crimes/criminals. But the move fast/break nature of the roll out makes the a/b test feedback cycle challenging. Perhaps it should have been tried in one or two counties first.

And don't get me wrong either - I'm more than happy if the move fast and breakers can stick around and perfect the new feature (i.e. bail reform) by adding some additional checks. It's a worthy goal/feature. Perhaps all that's needed is a check like - "if you are arrested a second/third time we are going to have cash bail".

[1] California Supreme Court Nixes Cash Bail Some Defendants - March 25, 2021

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-25/californ...

[2] Original Post - "In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties move. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours... Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals.

There is no correlation I'm aware of. Two things happening around the same time isn't correlation. Furthermore, changes in crime rates across the country are similar regardless of the local DA policy (per the FBI's crime report), which would indicate a lack of correlation with bail policies.

> In October 2021 alone, the increase was 356% over compared to October 2020. Not only do these dramatic increases represent retail product thefts – they include increased assaults and armed robberies of UP employees performing their duties mov

Crime for one private business isn't data supporting a correlation with actions that affect the entire city.

And yes - its still early innings and the single data point is end user collected from a "bug report" by a major power end user (i.e Union Pacific).

But at the end of the day - UP is a power enterprise level user (of California as a Service) who happens to provide a useful add on service to a large chunk of the CAaS end user community.

I'd say as a proactive PM/dev responsible (i.e. Newsome, CA District Attorney, etc.) for championing the new feature (i.e. bail reform), I'd be attentively listening to all users of the community about their feedback/UX experiences and very actively thinking about tweaks to improve site uptime even before definitive data existed that pointed to my feature causing outages. Or concretely ensuring/proving its not.

If I wanted to get that promotion that is.

That part is incorrect: Correlation is defined as (A => B) AND (!A => !B). (I.e., that's a logical AND; both terms must be true.) Every morning, the rooster crows and the sun rises; that's not correlation because if the rooster doesn't crow, the sun still rises. (The actual definition of correlation is, IME, a very powerful tool for analysing through assertions.)

As you say, correlation does not mean causation, even using the proper definition. For example, two people completely unknown to each other may, over the course of an hour, laugh, cheer, and cry at the same time, in a highly correlated manner. But there is no causation between them; they are merely watching the same live TV show.

this requires more inspiration to solve than just pointing at having vs not having cash bail

for now, they ended cash bail without implementing any additional system, and that has undermined a merely familiar balance in our society. there is nothing saying that balance could be restored while also not having a cash bail system, but people are pretending like these two concepts are intrinsically tied.

Saying “jailing innocent people” is just playing with words.

But you’re not put in jail before trial because you’re guilty, it’s to keep the public safe and/or make sure you don’t flee.