Compare San Francisco to somewhere like Singapore, and ask yourself where would you rather live - and if the freedoms available in SF are worth the trade offs. BTW I'm not taking a stance here as I live in neither location.
The cities you mention have a different culture. It's ingrained into you as a kid. It's "less liberal" in the sense that the wider society doesn't accept these values. The media, your family and friends and other parts of the environment are a lot more effective than the law.
On the other hand, I also know that in general in any of those countries, the consequences for something like shoplifting are a lot stronger than they would be in most western countries.
As an island nation, Taiwan also has a somewhat easier time preventing narcotics smuggling. Whereas the mainland Chinese Communist Party has covertly targeted the USA for "Opium War 2" by tacitly allowing the smuggling of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels.
(In the 70s they also once bombed the mayor's house when they didn't like him.)
" SF’s police department has 335 fewer full-duty police officers than it did in 2017, with a total of 1,537 officers as of January, according to Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former police communications staffer.
A police staffing analysis indicated that the department needs upward of 2,100 sworn officers to satisfy city demands. As fewer officers are available to patrol streets or respond to incidents, the department says it has been forced to ask staff to work longer hours or pick up extra shifts. "
When the force is at 75% capacity, officers are overworked and deprioritizing non-emergency responses. It's a recipe for more George Floyds, not less.
The article the poster linked to does not show the overall department budget, rather that was spent on employees' wages. I don't see you or the other poster mentioning this at all though. Here is an article you can see the overall budget of numerous police departments including SF
https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...
18-19: 629.8M 19-20: 692.3M 20-21: 667.9M 21-22: 657.4M
I believe I see one increase and two decreases. Between 18-19 to 19-20 the departments funding increased. While the department had funding decreased from 19-20 to 20-21 and again from 20-21 to 21-22. Now whether or not this defunding (funding decrease) was due to "defund the police" or some other factor I cannot say. However I can say for a fact that the narrative police were NOT defunded is wrong. I have provided 2 overall budgets that show they were defunded for two separate time periods.
Its also worth noting we are not adjusting for inflation or cost of living increases.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/03/sf-mayor-27m-police-overtim...
https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/BLA.SF_Police_Dept._Bu...
Also based on the timeline for 21-22 they defunded, then recognized the need more money because you know they defunded from the previous year so then allocated more funding.
The article I linked didn't have 22-23.
You're also saying that 3 out of 4 isn't consistent. Fine. Does that make me a liar, or are you picking nits?
> The article I linked didn't have 22-23.
That's what I said.
I responded to you, you responded to someone claiming "The police aren't defunded in San Francisco. They have consistently gotten budget increases."
I pointed out the police have been defunded depending on the time span you look at. I also pointed both of you misrepresenting the data pretending it was the overall budget when it was in fact the employees wages.
>>You're also saying that 3 out of 4 isn't consistent.
I disagree with you. You claimed a link said there was a "$27.5 million to fund police overtime in 21-22". Could you point specifically to where that is?
One does reference a 27.5 million proposal and says "The Budget and Appropriations Committee of the Board of Supervisors approved a $25 million budget supplemental Wednesday to fund police overtime in San Francisco. It next goes to the full Board of Supervisors on March 21st." No where does this say that this is being added to last years budget. In fact the article is from March 2023.
Even if it was for 21-22, if original budget allocated less money than the previous year, they defunded the police that year. Rushing to add in extra funding AFTER the budget was done so people can pretend it never happened does not erase the original budget that defunded them.
So I still see it as 2-2 even with your added 22-23 data which is not consistent in my eyes.
And what does "have been" have to do with "are?" You seem to be having some difficulty understanding tense. That explains it.
As for not making arrests, isn't that self reinforcing? Of course police will slow down arrests if the other end is not completing the process.
I find your view of this unusual and puzzling.
If these people don't want to do policing, they should not collect a police officer salary.
[1] https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-budget-announcement-defun...
Also worth quoting this section of the article you linked to:
> That means over the two year budget period, the city reduced law enforcement spending to the tune of $110 million. As the budget process continues, supervisors will have the opportunity to propose further cuts that could get closer to $120 million, like they did last year.
[1] https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...
$692.3 million in 2019-2020
$667.9 million in 2020-2021
$657.4 million in 2021-2022
Source: your link.
The article's headline says it's up 4.4% but that's compared to 2019.
It refers top the whole department, not what individual officers make.
"Oh look, Ricky is stealing again, should we bother arresting his aggressive angry ass again for the 7th time this year? Nah."
An la times article said: “ San Francisco police officers Kevin Lyons and Kevin Sien have been temporarily suspended after they were arrested last year in connection with the destruction of evidence. They’re accused of destroying credit cards, identification records and suspected methamphetamine discovered in the luggage of a person staying in a hotel.
Lyons and Sien allegedly told staff that cataloging the evidence would take too long and instead disposed of the credit cards and IDs in a shred bin and flushed the drugs down a hotel toilet, according to state court criminal complaints.”
It’s a story mentioned here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-03/twenty-p...
In civilized society, you make a pact with the state. They have a 'monopoly on violence' and in exchange, you and your property are protected. That pact seems to be broken in SF, and to a lesser extent in CA at large. People should do what they need to in order to keep themselves safe. If that means a gun? So be it.
One can fire non-lethal rounds, and aim around a person (or into the ground), instead of at them. I'm not a believer in urban gun ownership. But there are ways to responsibly be one and benefit from it without putting others' lives or your own freedom at risk. (Counterfactual: pulling a gun on a criminal is a good way to have a criminal pull a gun on you.)
i pray i never need it but i'm glad to live in a place that's not without its problems, but where i can at least defend myself and my property.
also @JumpCriscross since his comment is dead: that's silly, you shouldn't make a threat you aren't willing to follow up on. more importantly "warning shots" are a really good way to cause collateral damage. might be you shoot through a wall. plus your eye is on the threat so it's irresponsible to shoot elsewhere bc you aren't actually evaluating what's there and what's behind it.
Thankfully, the US and California are still Democracies for the moment.
Anyone who tries to hold up Singapore as a beacon of "good governance" simply isn't working in reality ...
It's dumb to jail homeless and mentally ill people, but it's just as dumb to just stop jailing them without providing them the help they need.
The most liberal cities in the world don't have big homeless and crime problems because help and housing is provided.
I don't know, I'm not the judge of that, but it sounds a bit like a very mobile goal post. Usually, "liberal policies" are removing or weakening penalties and enforcement. A liberal drug policy will decriminalize drug use. liberal = tolerant, so liberal policies tolerate a lot more things.
And SF is in many regards more liberal than European cities. Whether it's your preferred kind of liberal politics, or whether it's combined with other effective policies etc, is a different question.
To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.
> To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.
It does to me, too, that's one of the reasons I moved to the suburbs, and it wasn't anywhere as bad as in SF and other US cities. But I felt that the priorities were backwards and I understood that the majority of people wanted them pushed further in the direction I considered wrong. So I moved, because why stay and suffer if you don't believe in those policies but most of your neighbors do?
In a sense it’s closer to the original Christian ideal than most, but I don’t see how that can lead to peace, joy and prosperity long-term in a society where a minority abuses it.
Are they? In the US "liberal policies" are also associated with higher taxation and government regulation. So which is it?
Statements like this seem to be exactly why people are frustrated with SF's policies. What is the "help they need" that will be sufficient to keep them from being a problem? I've known addicts and schizophrenics, and it's near impossible to fix them, even with an affluent and caring family to support them the whole way. What will an incompetent state actor possibly do that is better, other than just lock them up to keep them from harming others?
> Since I moved [to SF], I have seen people break into cars (numerous times), fill suitcases with products from Target and Walgreens and leave without paying, casually smoke meth in a crowded bus, empty their bladder and bowels in the middle of the sidewalk, etc. all of this brazenly and in broad daylight.
I'm not aware of any major European city where this kind of behaviour is tolerated, much less common.
As for smaller cities in Europe like London or Berlin, they're also still reasonably safe (I didn't like night buses in London but that's about it) and the crazy stuff is mostly contained.
I guess a huge part of this is that most countries over here at least have something resembling a working social system.
Liberalism in the US heavily resists the usage of asylums and actually helping people in general. In Europe that's not really the case.
Singapore
But hasn't the hue and cry been "defund the police"? We heard it as far back as the mostly peaceful protests that ravaged major US cities across the US in 2020-21. And it's been the chant of mostly left-leaning politicians and organizations.
2. "Defund the Police" usually means diverting money away from reactive policies (policing) to proactive policies (community initiatives that prevent people from falling into abject poverty to begin with). You can claim that "defund the police" is bad optics, but honestly the US is such a far gone police state that "liberals" could have picked any rallying cry and it would have been weaponized.
3. The reason you see police forces doing less even though they have more funding is because they are using the narrative that they were "defunded" (recall this never happened) as a bargaining chip for police unions to negotiate with lawmakers for less oversight and more funding.
4. There is no correlation between police funding and crime rates. Police only show up AFTER a crime has been committed, and anyone who has dealt with police firsthand knows how much they love to drag their feet:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2022/03/31/preven....
5. This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state. While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.
If your goal is to simply remove "undesirables" from the view of the public then police are a great tool, but if our conception of justice is that crude then we might as well return to the code of Hammurabi.
If the goal is to reduce violence and crime overall, then police are not the best tool for the job. Preventative measures must be taken to keep people from getting to the mental state that causes them to commit crimes.
This link [2] says police headcount is down 25% from 2017.
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/new-report-sfpd-short-8...
https://missionlocal.org/2023/03/police-staffing-crisis-san-...
Police budget was lowered in 2020, that's from a decrease in tax revenue though, not ideological.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/breed-orders-departments...
It was also increased back to normal levels in 2022.
Well, quite frankly, they deserve that outcome a lot more than guys like Bob Lee. I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes
This is some Hammurabi thinking. It's not about protecting "Osama Bin Laden" (although justice should be blind and not paywalled), it's about ensuring that our system produces fewer Osama Bin Ladens.
To steelman your point, let's say that police are 100% necessary in society and the more police the better. In this universe the police never cause collateral damage and are always 100% in the right.
In this world, even if you lock up every "Osama Bin Laden" you are still putting the police officers in harm's way. They are using their bodies to ensure that the Bob Lee's of the world can keep on innovating.
To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means. If society is a machine that produces Osama Bin Laden's as a byproduct, isn't it in everyone's best interest to reduce the rate at which we produce Osama Bin Laden's? Especially the police who put themselves in harms way?
Conversely, increase the number of officers. This will cause the incidence per officer to fall.
There are places in the world that have done this. For example [0], where the populous has been deputized in order to quell violent crime.
[0] https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2023/04/03/ecuadors-...
If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.
>I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes.
Controversial take incoming, brace yourself. Bin Laden was the son of a construction magnate who was radicalized in a war where he fought for the US by proxy, only to be abandoned (except where Western meddling was advantageous for Western interests) when it was over. His picture is the illustration for the proverb, "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."
Bob Lee sounds like a great guy. He is among a class who benefited enormously from federal and state policy that subsidized suburban communities at the expense of cities, arguably in a way that shifted, rather than eliminated, the social ills that are endemic to most human societies above a certain population threshold. The policies that gave Bob Lee et al. their advantageous start created the dangerous, crazy people, when different policies might have diluted the circumstances which shaped them to the point where they might have been treatable, without necessarily cramping Mr. Lee's style.
There but for the grace of housing/economic policy advantageous to my intersectional identity go I.
(Note that we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.)
See my point #5 in the parent comment:
> This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state.
When you give the police overwhelming power to punish dangerous people, you have created a new class of very dangerous people. In my theoretical universe where cops are infallible this is not a problem, in the real world if you give an institution that much power what do you think would happen when they "solve crime". Would they willingly relinquish that power? Or would they aim to extend their influence onto larger swaths of the population with more draconian laws?
> If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.
I think you're missing the point. I am not saying there should be zero accountability for criminals and zero police. I am saying we should also attack the root causes of criminality instead of just using punitive measures. Right now we are treating the symptom and not the cause.
The West Coast cities, LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle are much more liberal than most "blue" cities.
Regardless, I live in SF, and love it here, for way more reasons than the tech scene (it's actually a coincidence I live here as far as my job goes). I really hope we can improve this situation, regardless of the relative scale compared to other cities. It seems like part of a national problem.
Your impressions are, bluntly, wrong.
LA and San Francisco have the 32nd and 37th highest violent crime rates out of the top 100 largest cities in the US, and the 72nd and 7th in overall crime rates. Homelessness, driven by lack of development combined with the the attraction and generation of concentrated wealth is a real California statewide problem (though there are plenty of non-California cities with serious problems, NYC is nearly as bad as LA, and far worse than San Francisco, in terms of population share that is homeless.)
SF is 4th highest in the United States for larceny rates. Note that larceny is the most frequent type of property crime per the FBI.
I think initially it started as "being poor is not a crime" with the good thought that you can't arrest people for not having a house. I think this escalated toward a lax attitude toward drugs and many "petty" crimes (e.g. public urination, stealing a case of beer).
The interesting thing was that when I lived there sometimes I'd ask or joke about it (bicycle theft was a huge problem, car windows being smashed, etc). People would mostly pretend they didn't see it and have no idea what to say to my joke for fear that somebody around them had a very strong opinion and they would offend.
Also, I remember once my improv class was chatting outside the theater and a homeless man asked for a cigarette and then started berating my classmates when they ignored him, and they actually felt bad. I know their sympathy came from a good place. Many of these people are damaged mentally and jail will only get them out of your face. But in my opinion something more proactive needed to be done.
I don't even think it needs to be traditional jail. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these people would be happier/healthier working outside in the sun getting some exercise instead of being in a cell. I think that's not boolean enough for most people though.
Jail alternatives are more expensive in the short term, and that is all that matters to this faction.
To get approval to build new housing is essentially impossible.
When aggressive crimes are enforced less strictly than code violations or regulatory approvals, SF is the result.
The full, uncomfortable answer, is people who wear liberalism/equality as a fashion accessory - instead of really caring about it. The "don't criminalize homelessness" line is towed to the degree of mandating homelessness. There is a culture of blocking solutions, while offering no alternative solutions. This makes it almost impossible for the homeless who want to be uplifted (by far the majority) to make progress. Even something as simple as having a mailing address and a shower can make a huge difference (especially for finding employment and government aid), but such progress is blocked by faux-liberalism.
Ok, but apparently it was shit even before that, so this can't be full answer.