Because half the country doesn't like the answers that experience produces. Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime (broken windows policing). The formula works but because evenly applying the rules produces disparate outcomes among various groups it's evidently racist and it's preferable to just allow violent criminals to run unchecked on the streets.
Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).
On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.
Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."
America is a more violent place; it has been for its entire history. Things that work in places with incredible cultural homogeneity don't work here, no matter how many happy images they conjure. What actually works here is policing, and SF is an example of people who believe your post following it off a cliff.
The conditions that prevent violent crime are simple: consequences for violence. Many jurisdictions let people that commit violent crime walk again and again.
From my neck of the woods? The perpetrator of the Waukesha parada massacre had a long history of violent behavior and was out on bail for trying to run someone over with his car a few days prior. Aliyah Perez, the niece of a Milwaukee alderman, was killed in a domestic situation by a man that had previously committed "a brutal domestic attack in which he stomped on, choked, and punched the victim, pulling out clumps of her hair and knocking out a tooth." He was given a minimum sentence only to return to his previous behavior and kill his next victim.
I don't care how our prison population compares to the rest of the world if clearly dangerous and violent people are walking free. The purpose of prison is to separate such people from the rest of society.
Clearly it's better to stop people from becoming violent criminals, then to wait (or push them, e.g. by increasing income inequality, reducing respect for "unskilled" professions, etc.) for them to become violent criminals and then punish them.
If everyone in a country feels valuable and equitable coming up with solutions that benefit everyone is very easy. As it stands in the US there will always be someone that sees themselves losing something and prevents any improvement.
It is far from proven that "broken windows policing" is effective, and in fact there is much evidence to the contrary. See, for instance, the peer-reviewed meta-analyses described here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...
There is not conclusive proof that so-called "broken windows policing" works as advertised.
Nevertheless:
Decent people fix broken windows - literal and metaphorical ones - no matter what the stats say.
We do. It’s called “product-market fit” in software. It’s called “elections” in democratic government. The government provides the services and competence its leaders, and consequently its electorate, demands.
San Francisco’s electorate demanded what it’s getting. As you can see just from these comments, “the facts” are twisted, distorted, and obfuscated to confirm a preferred narrative. But the faith in the narrative, whichever narrative you hold, never wavers.
The notional goal is good governance, sure, but it's been reduced to a (very high stakes) game by the parties in control, at least in the US. The is primarily due to the conservative party's realization half a century ago that they could motivate their base with rage and grievance politics instead of with good policy, and win doing so (google "southern strategy").
Where we are in 2023 is the logical extension of that. The GOP is all about anger and, honestly, hate. They have not offered a policy initiative intended to address any societal woe in a meaningful, effective way in my lifetime, and I'm 53. Any movement of the ball, progress-wise, has come from the other party (e.g., the ACA, which absolutely HAS resulted in more people having health insurance -- that makes things better, but we still have huge systemic problems with health care).
Nobody on the Right seems to want to interrogate problems with an eye towards actual solutions, which tend to be multipart, intersectional, and complex. It's easier to sell "hey, just get more cops" than to explain that crime is often driven by economics -- lack of jobs or opportunity, protracted intergenerational poverty, etc.
Democrats are mayors of 31 of the nation's 34 largest cities, most of which are places I certainly would not care to live. Is it "good policy" that lead to the reason for this article, or are all of San Francisco's 8 Republicans to blame for this tragedy?
> The GOP is all about anger and, honestly, hate.
Ahhh yes. Supporting school choice to get inner city kids out of crap schools is hate based. Not wanting children who aren't even able to consent to going on school field trips to make permanent, life altering decisions by destroying their bodies? Clearly an anger thing.
> It's easier to sell "hey, just get more cops" than to explain that crime is often driven by economics
Yep, people are stealing iPhones because they're starving. That's 100% a thing that is happening. And violent crime surely has economic advantage attached to it, right? The guy who killed Bob is now richer thanks to his actions?
You appear to be completely unable to engage on the issues in good faith while whining that "the other side" is doing exactly the same thing.
Yeah, that tells me a lot about you.
Local governance is often stymied by Federal policy, or by state policies that remove local control.
Moreover, most of the issues that plague American society require federal solutions, not local ones. You can't fix gun violence with local laws, for example.
>Ahhh yes. Supporting school choice to get inner city kids out of crap schools is hate based. Not wanting children who aren't even able to consent to going on school field trips to make permanent, life altering decisions by destroying their bodies? Clearly an anger thing.
Refusing to fund urban education in poorer districts is absolutely biased choicemaking, sure.
Later you accuse me of not engaging in good faith, but as has been often noted, with Republicans every accusation is a confession. Transphobic and homophobic bigots just love to suggest that the Democratic party is out there trying to allow minor children to surgically transition on a whim, but that's just not happening.
OTOH, what the AMA says is that reversible gender-affirming care is appropriate for teens experiencing gender dysphoria. Surely choices like that should be between families and their medical providers, and not involve a right-wing politician angry that gays and trans people exist.
But it's not just trans kids. Or gay kids. It's the GOP that uses outright racist messaging to motivate their base, and has done so since the early 70s if not earlier. It's the GOP that continues to insist that decisions like Obergefell were wrongly decided, and that seeks to overturn them. Why? Because, clearly, my married gay neighbors are a threat to liberty, I guess.
And, of course, it's the GOP that is foursquare opposed to literally any gun regulation in a country where gun violence is the leading cause of childhood death.
I'd cite chapter and verse from the party platform, but I suspect you know that, since 2020, the national GOP has explicitly said "no platform, it's just whatever Trump wants."
Don't bother replying. I see who you are from your weird COVID posts here.
On a per capita basis (i.e., per 100k pop), almost all of the 50 most dangerous metro areas for violent crime are Republican strongholds, the only exception being Detroit at #5.
I've got no dog in this fight, and this comment is peak American. If you don't see that the other side is doing the EXACT same thing, you're part of the problem.
I'd also welcome any example of a policy initiative led by the GOP that addresses any of the myriad serious issues in American life, chiefly those addressing poverty, education, and health care.
Democrats purposefully supporting far-right candidates in the 2022 primaries because they believed they would be easier to win against in the general election doesn't exactly speak towards their supposed self-righteous ideals.
I don't know about you, but amplifying the voices a party claims to be so dangerous purely because they believe it to be in their own short term self-interest is pretty damn egregious to me.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/12/democrats...
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/19/keri-lake-democrats-ariz...
But yeah, sure, tHe pArTiEs aRe tHe SaMe.
The root of sarcasm is truth. There are indeed awful people and decent people on each side. Politics is not a team sport.
The problem in the US is that one party is attempting governance in good faith, and the other is marching towards fascism with absurd levels of party discipline, which means there's very, very little ideological variance in GOP candidates.
Fwiw, "governance" does exactly that. Many states literally copy, or copy-then-tweak California law (e.g. motor vehicle efficiency requirements).
I know it can't be copied wholesale, but there are certain aspects I think would be nice, such as having penalties for committing crimes.
Who's we? you forgot that people have the right to vote, they don't necessarily vote for the best of their interests, only for what politicians promise them. So no societies will never be like managed "software solutions", because humans tend to be irrational.
Public services are just massive, costly, complicated, and cater to all sorts of vulnerable populations, and the public have pay for it. The time horizon on some complicated projects is so long that knowledge can change in the meantime and make the project/strategies look incoherent. E.g., some countries decommissioned public transport options over decades when cars became more widespread, and are undoing it now because cars became too widespread, and it'll take decades to rectify. Then there are world events that upend everything, such as Ukraine or COVID-19. It's just very complicated, far more complicated than anything in software development in my experience.
the point of having a bunch of different states and municipalities is you can test something in one place and see if it works. like weed legalization, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try. or constitutional carry, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try.
there's some poli sci theory that politics is actually about the majority's schadenfreude at fucking over the minority. which seems increasingly credible. but that means we've been pushing more and more stuff to the feds for years so this is now harder to do.
let states and counties do more stuff again. like this should be a party neutral issue, let the dems to more dem stuff and the reps to more rep stuff.
When I'm given a task to complete, my first instinct is to find where other developers have done what I'm asked to do and then utilize their wisdom into my own solution which will likely look very similar to theirs.
Why do we see such drastically different approaches to solving issues in society and government?
Want better education? Step 1: Find a state/city that has great education and study what they did to achieve it
Want less crime? Step 1: Mimic a state/city that has successfully reduced crime
Seems so simple to me but yet I never hear politicians/people saying things like "Boston has successfully raised their level of education by doing XYZ so we're going to follow those steps here with minor tweaks to best suite our area"