I don't get why people aren't arguing to just convert jails instead of shutting them down. If there is a lot of demand for people with mental health issues and not a lot of people who truly need to be behind bars, then just convert the jail property into an asylum. Whether you operate with mainly jails or mainly asylums you still need public land and facilities and jails are frankly a good site to store sensitive people. If you shut down jails before you build these asylums then you now have to go to the market and try and get land together for these things, and we have seen what an enormous hurdle that has been for governments undertaking those efforts

At least with the subway in LA the way the cops currently patrol it is pretty useless. I've seen four cops talking amongst themselves about 100 feet just on the other side of a stairwell from where someone was using a creme brule torch to light up a glass pipe for their buddy in the middle of the train platform. I see hard drugs smoked probably once or twice a week and I'm going during the 9-5, I can't imagine how much more is smoked during off peak hours when the stations are much more dead.

It seems like subway security is better solved by just having someone sit in a room looking at all the camera feeds in the station (there are already cameras everywhere on every corner but evidently they aren't used for much), seeing when someone is clearly hitting a crack rock or prying into a maintenance power outlet, and sending someone down to respond to what was seen on the video feed just now. Otherwise, people aren't dumb, they will just quiet down when they see a cop and start acting out again as soon as the cop is out of sight or earshot. Cops will also not care to do anything unless they literally saw it occur in front of their eyes, so having them be directed by a video operator at least serves as a record.

Hmm, yea, the drug stuff seems a lot worse out West. I'm sure there are people openly doing drugs in NYC but they must be way out in the outer boroughs. You'll see people strung out a bit sometimes in Midtown though. But it's nothing like the Tenderloin in San Francisco.

It really just comes from a lack of any enforcement of that sort of use in public. I mean its 5pm in downtown LA, hundreds of people are at 7th street metro center station trying to get home from work, and 1/3rd of the heavy rail line platform has people looking straight forward not trying to make eye contact with the people actively smoking rocks on the benches behind them. It's ridiculous. I've seen everyone from custodial workers to actual uniformed metro security just turn around and pretend like they aren't seeing what they are seeing. Not even a report or a warning for these people to leave the station or public park, just a "not my job, not my problem" attitude which is a shame that its come to that, and inevitably makes the job of custodial worker or security guard so much harder when they allow people engaging in these behaviors free reign to continue these behaviors. You look in the rail gutter of the station and there are probably hundreds of used needles.

It seems like cops in California at least are pretty ambivalent about doing any sort of petty policing, in stark contrast to the cops out east. Here in California I've never seen anyone pulled over on the highways at all. Meanwhile out east, I know people who've been pulled over for going a few mph over, or hanging out in the left lane too long, or "swerving" allegedly, and going on to see their vehicles searched with their possessions tossed to the side of the road like they are at a gestapo checkpoint. If they are walking outside late at night the cop rolls up slow and follows them for some time, then flicks their lights on to ask them where they think they are heading at this time, hoping to stick a public intoxication charge or follow up on a warrant presumably. There's definitely some happy medium between not enforcing the law at all and having a fascist power complex to ruin people's lives using the law, and I hope saner times in the future strike that balance.

So far the NYPD subway surge has basically been working as well as predicted: utterly failing to address violence, while criminalizing people of color for low-level offenses [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-04/is-it-saf...

This seems to be talking about a much larger span of time. The recent push has been in the last few weeks to a month.

We'll see if it's any different this time. I think it's in response to the uptick described in that article.

Sucks if you jump a turnstile in front of a police officer, they'll certainly stop you for that stuff.