A small percentage of people commit crimes over and over and over again. Usually when you learn the perpetrator of a stabbing like this, they have priors. And when someone has priors, odds are they have committed many other crimes for which they weren't caught.

So "reactive policing", as you say, can't stop every crime. But consistently catching and enforcing the law on repeat offenders can have a dramatic impact on overall crime rate.

Yep. It’s quite uncommon for a murderer here to be arrested without a history of multiple violent offenses. But they keep being released until they finally kill someone. Just a few days ago a young woman was randomly stabbed to death by a man with a long history of priors who had just been convicted of armed robbery and was awaiting sentencing. One judge said he was much too dangerous to be released, but was released anyway, and when he didn’t show up for sentencing no one went after him.

It’s hard to think anyone actually believes that there’s no difference between a society that gives violent criminals free rein and one that actually takes them off the street.

Unfortunately, a lot of elected officials have very strange priorities these days. A few months ago, a teenager was part of a group of criminals carjacking cars in the middle of the night, got into some confrontation with a resident, and ended up shot to death. There was a huge outrage among elected officials, community meetings, calls for justice, etc. When an innocent bystander gets randomly stabbed to death by a violent career criminal that was let free when they were supposed to be in prison? Absolutely zero mention from any of our elected officials so far.

Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.

The evidence is so overwhelming I don't know where to begin. How about https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...

To say this you have to pretend as if there is no history of cities successfully deterring and dealing with crime via law enforcement.

I don't think you have to pretend.

San Francisco has the 8th highest police budget per capita, and 7th overall, despite being the 18th largest city.

Police budget != law enforcement

Fine, then you have to quantify what metric you are using for "law enforcement".

There have been multiple links posted in this comment chain alone

Show me a city that has high income inequality but also low crime because of law enforcement.

Singapore

Now try the US

The largest cities in the US are politically in sync and have been for decades. It’s no surprise there’s not much diversity of outcome when everyone is calling the same plays from the same playbook.

Singapore has publicly stated that reducing wealth inequality is their top priority and reached a record low in 2020.

Is that of their citizens, or their population. Because The citizens have become more equal at the expense of taxing an enormous permanent resident and migrant work force who do not get the full benefits. The US and most other countries can't hope to have such a deep reservoir of foreigners to bleed dry in the name of equality.

https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/1b57c13c04baed2bc1c218...

Zurich

Hong Kong!

It has some of the highest rates of income inequality in the world, and it's also one of the safest places in the world.

Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai (most of China tbh), Dubai, Geneva, Oslo...

Why not both?

Yes you need some prevention by fixing societal issues that underlie criminal activity, but you also need police and prosecution of crimes to deter them.

The two are not mutually exclusive.

100% agreed. I don't think we should get rid of police. They are an important institution in modern society and when functioning well, they in fact can reinforce democracy.

Except it has worked in almost every city that's done it. A strong police presence deters crime, there's no arguing that. Yes, you should also "fix underlying issues". Whether those issues have led to crime is debatable depending on what issue you're referring to.

Additionally, you need to fire every worthless DA cities like SF and NYC have. They deliberately go soft on crime and let criminals right back on the streets to commit more crimes. So, if you want a fix you can start there. Throwing money at homeless people and "minorities" is not a fix.

Remove the police and enjoy what you get. Its been tried before, in no distant history.

> One of the "lies to children" we repeat over and over.

The (2nd) greatest deterrent of crime is the likelihood of being caught. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.

If you expect to be caught for committing a crime then it is a deterrent. But that is hard to maintain, and once you hit a tipping point and it’s out of control, it is much harder to get it back under control. Then it’s a question of is the juice worth the squeeze? Because you need to squeeze hard. If you have no reason to commit a crime that is the better way to go (eliminate poverty, inequities), but way more complex and and way more political. It’s easy for people to say just add police.

That’s all true for premeditated crimes by someone mentally healthy enough to be processing likely outcomes and consequences, and making a very rational decision whether to crime or not.

Fact is, the vast majority of criminals are dumb, or mentally ill, or both. They aren’t doing an ROI analysis.

Utter nonsense. Anyone driving on the highway will check their speed when passing a police car.

If you think speeding and murder are mere differences in degree, at that a mental model of a typical speeder also applies to a typical murderer, I guess I could see a “highway patrols deter speeding, therefore beat cops deter murder” argument.

It’s a little hard to keep a straight face though.

Well, you can't deny that "stop and frisk"--while unfair and discriminatory--prevented and stopped crime.

If you arrest and incarcerate a criminal, more criminals will spring from the ether. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

When they find the murderer who killed Bob Lee, it is a good bet that it will not be the first crime they've committed, nor the first crime for which they were arrested.

Almost all crime in San Francisco is committed by repeat criminals. You add beat cops to arrest those criminals, and you elect a DA who will prosecute those criminals when they are arrested, and you elect legislators who make sure there are laws that allow convicted criminals, especially repeat offenders, to be sentenced to long prison sentences.

That process is called "fixing the underlying issues in society".

The saddest part is that Lee almost certainly has some hand in his own death as he likely voted for the current regime that allowed the crime to get so bad. He likely even agreed with many of the new policies that lead to his death. This whole issue is entirely one of their own making. They’re so racist they think only black people commit crimes, and thus an anti-racist policy is one in which no crimes are prosecuted.

We have a different view of what the underlying issues in society are if you think the solution is just more cops and longer prison sentences.

California already has overflowing prisons. It's not like people aren't being arrested and put in jail.

Not saying that SFs approach to policing hasn't had an impact, but there are plenty of other cities with bigger or equivalent populations, similar per capita policing, and lower come rate.

It seems willfully ignorant to presume that there aren't other factors that have led to an increase in crime

How would you compare the law enforcement south of the border to California? Do you think Mexico throws too many people in prison in Baja California or not enough? Do you think California is more or less safe than Baja California?

That's a pretty weird comparison. SF is in Northern California, which is basically another state away by distance. Baja California is a 27k square mile piece of land with a widely distributed population. San Francisco is a densely populated city, and California is both huge and not what we're discussing.

I.e. I wouldn't compare SF to a rural part of California to and use that as a metric for how good / bad SF's law enforcement policies are. I would compare it to other large, metropolitan cities throughout the US and the world.

Choosing such and out-of-left-field comparison makes it seem like you have a specific agenda that you'd like to make a point about.

Exactly. There's nothing short of homeless concentration camps and AI pre-crime harassment that could have stopped this.

Cops can only show up after the fact.

Crime is a byproduct of poverty. If you give people something to live for, they're less anti-social. If they have mental health issues making those connections harder to make, we need social safety nets for them.

SF crime seems exaggerated. I spent a week walking around that city and the worst thing I saw was an opiate shit the size of a hoagie.

"Crime is a byproduct of poverty." If that was true middle America would be full of crime and the coastal cities would be free of crime That's the opposite of what is happening

This might be shocking but if you legalize a crime i.e. shoplifting, you shouldn't be surprised this increases the rate of that thing occurring.

Have you ever dealt with police in Tokyo or Seoul? Criminals breaking car windows and stealing your bag/valuables aren't a problem in Japan or South Korea's biggest city