Much of SFs homeless population and crime is concentrated around the Tenderloin and SOMA areas with downtown also being relevant. You can use something like the Citizen app to get a rough geographic understanding.

This is an important topic but so many clueless individuals (not OP, in general) decide to comment anyways.

If you're in the Tenderloin, Civic Center area, parts of the Mission or SoMA, then sure, you know you're in a dodgy area. But I'm pretty sure that if you're in Forest Hills, West Portal, Lake Merced, or the Presidio, you'll feel pretty safe, and crime maps seem to bear that out. I'll take my preschoolers alone to visit friends in the city on public transportation - I drive to Forest Hills, park in the neighborhood, muni to the Castro. Never had a problem.

I think that what gets tourists to SF is that areas you'd expect would be safe are actually bad. Normally you'd expect that major shopping districts like Union Square, or the city government like Civic Center, would be safe. In SF they're right next to the Tenderloin, which is a cesspit of filth and addicts. And gentrified vs. dodgy areas in SF are very close together, like walking two blocks toward Valencia and Guerrero in the Mission is dramatically different from walking two blocks in the opposite direction to Van Ness and Folsom, or being on the north side of Potrero is dramatically different from wandering the south side.

I have no delusions though, I would not consider any part of the city as truly safe, the metric being I'd be ok with my wife walking around alone.

Kara Swisher is a self-involved imbecile, please don't compare me to her.

Crime being rampant in US in stark contrast with ANYWHERE in EU is a good hint that it is actually not because of "dem liberals", but rather a direct consequence of troubled people being left without any support in poverty. They find a way.

Social policies aren't only there to help people in need, they're there to make society as a whole safer.

And officially, I guess I don’t mind it. I left SF, and if the current residents are happy with the current results, they’re free to continue.

That really doesn't mesh together with the extremely restrictive building code that makes housing crisis so much worse.

I think the criminals are mostly either desperate addicts who have no chance at turning it around unless they had serious help with their illnesses, or, just callous criminals who could change but prefer doing crime to working. And it doesn’t even take that many — especially of that second group — to make everybody miserable.

Edit: just want to clarify: I am absolutely in favor of a “build, build, build, build, build” housing policy. Despite everything I said, it would still make lots of things better including improving density, making transit make sense.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am working on my self-control.

Murder Rape Robbery Assault UNREPORTED UNREPORTED UNREPORTED UNREPORTED

If none of these stats are being made public, how are they able to compute 1 in 18 odds ?

I can't reply to your comment below, but that wasn't the point I was making. The stats are probably bad for both, and I don't think I trust anything that neighborhood scout is putting out for anywhere, was my point.

But to your suggestion, it _is_ measured by folks. It's called the Commuter Adjusted Day Time Population.

https://www.6sqft.com/see-nycs-population-pulse-over-24-hour...

https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/rudincenter/dynamic_pop_manhatt...

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...

It also belies the reality that attempting to protect valuables is likelier than alternative action to turn a property crime into a violent crime.

Show some evidence of this. I just gave you a counter example. Property crime is huge in SF and it never gets anywhere near the "most violent cities in America" lists, it's well below its weight in that regard.

Here's a quick googling for such a list, notice the absence of San Francisco: https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/most-viol...

In my experience SF Police are extremely on it. They caught the suspect in my case based on Nest video camera footage.

SFPD in the Mission is useless: they came to a property theft and told use to watch youtube videos about how thieves are opening garage doors, issued a perfunctory report for insurance, and left.

SFPD's office is a a mere 3 blocks from 16th street open-air drug market, there is very rarely a police officer on site. Another 3 blocks away, Capp street, just got closed to auto traffic by SF politicians because the police were so incompetent that it was becoming a fire risk (for SFFD on 19th).

SFPD mostly are known for shooting at the unhoused, after arriving in caravans of police SUV cars with lights blazing, which mission residents walk by every day unarmed.

Completely useless.

Yes, it is obvious that SFPD doesn't give a shit about the sex work on Shotwell st, etc. in the Mission - but that is different from saying they would not follow up on a violent assault or murder.

https://www.ksbw.com/article/sfpd-refused-to-help-stop-san-f...

https://www.davisvanguard.org/2022/03/columnist-sf-police-ta...

etc etc

Not going to keep replying, my point is merely that i think the SFPD will respond to violent crime reports.

There was no suspect or anything, I didn't have good evidence, I did not expect them to solve anything because that would be an unreasonable expectation. They gave me a report number to give to insurance.

I had a half dozen car and home break-ins in San Francisco that I did not report. I now regret this as I should have done my part to at least make the statistics accurate, even if it wouldn't help me recover my goods. I see it as being part of the solution opposed to part of the problem

I also recommend getting renters insurance, which can help with the financial burden

I've certainly read theories that it's a malicious strategy of the police union to make the city council look bad, and the SPOG president has made some pretty shocking political statements, so it honestly wouldn't be that surprising.

I'm guessing it's a mix of both, but I can't really prove anything.

Why make the comment then? What can anyone gain from reading it?

The same was true of both SF and Austin, to be fair.

So for the vast majority of property crime, the victim ultimately ends up being the insurance premium, and everybody involved kind of knows this, even if they don't say it outright.

The nature of the drugs (fentanyl), the manifestation (homelessness) and the enforcement (or lack there of) are central to the problem faced here.

It is not a US problem. It is not a west problem. It is not a city problem. It is an urban-west-coast-city problem.

The nature of the drugs (fentanyl), the manifestation (homelessness) and the enforcement (or lack there of) are central to the problem faced here.

It is not a US problem. It is not a west problem. It is not a city problem. It is an urban-US-west-coast-city problem.

If your society is full of thieves, what do you do to address it? HINT: the French Monarchy tried solving the problem via tightened enforcement.

Ultimately though, you have to change the culture. Make thieves seem pathetic and mean rather than rebellious and cool.

I see this a lot on the internet and comments like this are not as relevant as you might think.

Saying place X is better off than place Y is often an incongruent comparison followed by similar fallacies. Y'all, each place is unique and faces a long and considerable history as to how they got there and the type of people that have and currently do live there. I can't even begin to recall the number of times I heard this type of comparison during the Obama administration. America is not similar to Sweden, Finland, Germany, Japan or Canada.

For example: here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re neck and neck with chart-topping Japan for life expectancy - while most of the Deep South has a life expectancy roughly in-line with the average Iraqi.

Yes, America is an Odd Place.

Except for, you know, they are each an organization of humans with access to technology and other cultures. Maybe there's something to be learned.

The cultural diversity in America compared to the countries above far exceeds what most people give credit for. First and second generation immigrants with different cultural ideologies amplify the differences that you would experience in somewhere like that set of countries. These cultural differences create multitudes of challenges that are not experienced anywhere else to this scale. Again, America is different.

This seems completely unconnected to the discussion, but ok.

> Now that Europeans have sufficiently Americanized they’ll soon discover that the problems america faces now are in fact universal to all liberal democracies.

I concede, this may be true.

Regardless of what they themselves or anybody else calls them, what matters is what policies they concretely support.

They serve as arbiters of morality to keep the “normal” liberals in line and make certain the window of discussion never again approaches heretical talk of “nationalization” or “the 1%”.

There’s still old school leftists around that strongly support the policies you described, but they’ve been essentially banished from the political sphere at even the metro level. Even the DSA has been nearly entirely co-opted by this quasi-religious garbage.

Your words indicate your knowledge of the Ukraine conflict is lacking. But believe what you want. https://www.thepostil.com/conflict-in-ukraine-genesis/

Neither was Stalin.

which state, with lots of asterisks about why this comparison is difficult and likely not telling the complete story, that:

>For England and Wales, we added together three crime categories: "violence against the person, with injury," "most serious sexual crime," and "robbery." This produced a rate of 775 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

>For the United States, we used the FBI’s four standard categories for violent crime that Bier cited. We came up with a rate of 383 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

On the other hand stabbings and murder are taken very seriously by law enforcement.

You're expecting the police to show up in a 60 second window? Do you realize how little time it takes to smash a window and leave?

You think that a few honey pots and cameras will slow them down? Imaginative but unrealistic thinking. Someone stole some wood from my yard, and I have them on camera. What am I supposed to do with their image? How do you suggest I find them? Is it worth my billing rate to walk around the neighborhood with their image asking people where they might be for $30 worth of wood? Say we have a database of petty criminals, if I find them do you think they have the assets to pay for the glass and items?

The economic incentives are not aligned for a moonshot on stopping petty property crime.

The US criminal justice system is not set up to handle these sorts of offenders, most of whom probably just require detox and social services.

I assumed the same but based on reporting I've seen on SF local news, at least some of them are doing it out of cars. Pull up next to a likely target, dude jumps out of the passenger seat and takes a quick look, smash & grab if there's anything good, drive off.

I've lived in multiple cities and can say that this is wrong.

I find that generally most people imagine these thefts are being done by homeless people on the streets but it's usually actually organized gangs driving in from Oakland.

Same thing when I lived in DC, organized criminals driving in from SE DC to rob the rich neighborhoods.

Say I came to your car in the middle of the night and left a strange note on it and then walked away. Do you think there is any way that you could find me with no clues about who I am?

It’s totally an American craziness.

When I was younger and walked around at night me and my friends would get mugged fairly regularly (~6X over 4 years) and the police would maybe show up 24 hours later at a random time. One time I even had a clip from a gun the dudes dropped as they were running away (it was empty) and the police never came and took it. I probably still have it around somewhere.

I moved to the suburbs recently and it is amazing being able to park and walk around without being afraid of break ins or muggings.

You've been taken in by a lot of false media narratives. Trump said his bit about "American Carnage in our cities" and set about this revival of the tough on crime rhetoric from the 80s and 90s, a time when violent crime was much higher than today.

Your position is not backed by the statistics.

Sort by total for property crime and it's 4th.

I can 100% assure you it's not crime rates driving this perception. There were pandemic related increases but the trend of the last 30 years runs counter to the narrative.

I regularly stay in SF in SOMA, and the thing that gives the impression it is unsafe is all the violent, mentally ill addicts roaming around accosting people. The last time I was there, I couldn't go a single day of walking two blocks from hotel to office without encountering at least one.

You can deny that reality all you like, but it is a reality.

Most of the car theft crime comes from organized groups driving here from Oakland, not the addicts who largely are shoplifting from Walgreens, etc.

Uber and Lyft drivers in SF often come from similar places. Basically distant cities with less prosperity and fewer job prospects.

Maybe you should work on this "you being afraid" problem rather than question my ability to deal with reality.

Fyi, my brother is a mentally ill homeless person in another part of the state.

You're a very tolerant individual.

to address your immediate example(s), ignoring your obvious hyperbole which shouldn't need to be addressed in this discussion, as it's not related to the types of human interactions the OP clearly described (which you've lumped into your comment in bad-faith, anyway).

i am not sure why you've filled your head with so much fear, or why you've lumped a certain population into a category of subhuman, inferior, and not deserving of compassion, help, respect, kindness, integrity, and understanding -- if you are finding it difficult to make eye contact with people in general, and regularly, let alone sick individuals, this might distinctly be a personal issue, and perhaps one governed more by trauma, fear and sociopathy than basic decency and human kindness.

i mean christ, imagine leveraging children in order to promote a rather uncaring and indifferent treatment about people, who were once also children. obviously there's a discussion here about appropriate behavior and whether or not someone, say a junkie, is behaving appropriately in a given context, but to somehow suddenly subscribe to this notion that once a person behaves inappropriately, they are no longer deserving of basic decency (eye-contact) is appallingly inhuman to me, and privleged.

since you're leveraging children, am i safe in assuming that i imagine you are okay with children being around alchohol, or even participating in the attending of sporting events (american football for example)?

like, am i safe in assuming you have seen children come into contact or be exposed to effects of alcohol or alcholism, where people behave (in)appropriately -- let's be real, the behavior of a lot of drunk fans at sporting events_in_front_of_children_is laughably appropriate at best

or do you stop the buck short once the lifestyle is a couple of standard deviations away from what you find.. "acceptable"?

perhaps if you started viewing people as well, human beings, perhaps... just perhaps, you'll start asking yourself: "how would i as an individual wish to be treated, if i were sick? would i like to be screamed at, ignored, condescended, looked down upon, shamed, ostracized, ridiculed, ..., or would i like to be treated with at least basic dignity?"

i wonder what would happen if we as a society shifted our attitude as a whole a few standard deviations back to a more compassionate middle ground, instead of constantly enabling, perpetuating, and encouraging fear-based/fear-driven relationships and interpersonal interactions.

also as a total aside, i am really curious: just how much personal time have you spent being around addicts/junkies/or anyone living a deviant lifestyle?

Did Bob get killed by perception?

But, I've heard that risk from casual contact with hypodermic needles is rare. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2529409/

Risk is obviously much higher if you re-use the needles to inject drugs. Casual contact with the needle is low risk.

That's assuming lots of needles. I see needles sometimes. I use the 311 app when I see needles. But I don't see them in an area where my kids are going to play.

Many people are leaving California due to this insanity.

Murder rates are higher in Republican-led states. And we have a dual-sovereignty model (federal/state), cities aren’t sovereign entities, and state governments can and do interfere without limit in their government.

> Many people are leaving California due to this insanity.

People are leaving California largely because (1) they’ve made out well from the economic success of the state and can live luxuriously elsewhere on their savings, or (2) they haven’t participated in the economic success, and are squeezed out by the effect that success has on in-state prices.

(1) is a non-problem, (2) is a real problem, but one that the state is finally taking significant action on (targeting housing, particularly), having generally left it to local governments who have failed to act (before about the last decade, that wasn’t as much an active state policy choice as the fact that the combination of Constitutional supermajority requirements for the state budget plus minority party obstructionism had made the state effectively ungovernable for decades, once that was swept away there were a lot of issues to address.)

With the highest murder rates being in the Democrat controlled cities in the otherwise Republican State. Again, most of the country is wide open spaces with mostly friendly people.

The period of the Pandemic & lockdown also had a high increase in violence.

> People are leaving California largely because (1) they’ve made out well from the economic success of the state and can live luxuriously elsewhere on their savings, or (2) they haven’t participated in the economic success, and are squeezed out by the effect that success has on in-state prices.

So if you make money in California, the great weather, social networks, & the business opportunities are not enough to offset the downsides?

If you don't make enough money in California, the cost of living is higher than other states.

California is a large state. Why is the cost of living, including the rural areas, so high there?

How does the Purchasing Parity in California compare to other states?

NYC: "However, compared to other communities of similar population size, New York has a crime rate that is noticeably lower than the average. This means that for comparably sized cities all across America, New York is actually safer than most according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis of FBI crime data."

SF: "Importantly, when you compare San Francisco to other communities of similar population, then San Francisco crime rate (violent and property crimes combined) is quite a bit higher than average. Regardless of how San Francisco does relative to all communities in America of all sizes, when NeighborhoodScout compared it to communities of similar population size, its crime rate per thousand residents stands out as higher than most."

Edit: having lived in both (currently in NYC) I also want to point out the two cities are incredibly different in almost every way. It's really tough to compare data across the whole "city" between the two because of the differences in geography, population density & distribution, types of crime, history & expectations, and overall city governance.

The remarkable thing about SF and Seattle, is that crime is highest in high desirability/high-foot-fall areas. Many folks I know all go to downtown SF/Oakland/Seattle for work, drinks, dinner, concerts and public events.

At the same time, it seems impossible to park your car on the street in any of these neighborhoods. I thought it was an exaggeration, but "every" person I know, who has parked their car for a week in one of these neighborhoods, has had their cars broken in. It's shocking.

On the other hand, the high-footfall / popular parts of east coast cities are fairly safe. (Pickpockets are an exception). For better or for worse, a person would never accidentally find themselves in a bad neighborhood in NYC, Boston or DC. (Bad neighborhoods aren't always correlated with race or poverty. Sometimes it's just a self fulfilling prophecy) This means that violent crime on the east-coast has very little spill-over outside the communities ravaged by it. IE. The average stranger is safe.

In that sense, west coast's 'open drug market in the most important parts of the city' policy is a uniquely west coast problem. It really doesn't affect other cities in the US or elsewhere in the same way. The unique incompetence of west coast politics is squarely to blame for the dilapidation of their cities. This is not endemic to cities at large, and cities around the world should actively distance themselves from the sort of accusations that get flung at 'all cities', when it is meant to be targeting west-coast cities in particular.

I mean it’s good that we have stopped throwing addicts in jail, but we’ve just exposed another layer of the problem.

Is it though? The streets are a lot safer with the addicts safely contained elsewhere, not stabbing random people.

What if SF started a Thieves Guild, and only registered, properly trained members were allowed to steal from people? (and only after showing their Thieve's Guild registration card first, of course)

I think the politically correct term is "politicians". Or, for more distinguished members, "Congressmen".

I do miss Terry Pratchett.

Then came this brave new world of “atomized social leftism” - this highly destructive political chimera that somehow successfully subverted leftist class consciousness into a twisted parody of individualist libertarianism, while still maintaining the absolute moral certitude and zealous fervor of a revolutionary.

This is not the same left-wing ideology responsible for building Euro-style social democracy (of which I long admired). This is a homegrown American political monster wearing the skin of a revolutionary leftist but designed to serve the interests of international elites. Compare modern Antifa with the Seattle anti-WTO riots in the 90s for an illustrative example.

I live in a West Coast American city that has decriminalized hard drugs nearly to the point of de facto legalization, while “soft” drugs like marijuana are fully legal and psilocybin is on the way.

The results have been disastrous. Property crime has skyrocketed, gang violence over hard drug profits has shot the murder rate up by xxxx%, human beings wander the downtown in broad daylight moaning with visible skin sloughing off their bodies like we’re in a zombie movie.

And the despairing response to this from most of my “lefty” acquaintances has been “well this is all because we haven’t fully legalized hard drugs” - as if that was a coherent argument for why we shouldn’t just abandon the decriminalization experiment and return to the former status quo that didn’t have these problems.

Even marijuana, an extremely mild drug (as far as such things go) that has been legalized, resulted in the literal cartels rolling into the southern half of my state and taking over production.

I find myself increasingly thinking that “American democracy” is a failed system and we just haven’t realized it yet. Wile E Coyote confidently running in mid-air over the abyss with a cloud of dust under his feet labeled “It’s the Wokes/Racists”.

An interesting thought experiment would be to see if any US state could (or even might one day) meet the criteria for joining the EU (the 'chapters' iirc).

https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/enlargement-p...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

My concern (which I hesitate to fully express, lest my Hispanic ass be labeled a “white supremacist”) is that Euro-style social democracy is incapable of surviving waves of economic migration unseen on the continent for literal millennia.

Either the right wing is correct and the migration itself will be overburdening the social structure to the point where it collapses - or the right wing is wrong about full collapse, but the stress fractures from mass migration are enough to put the Prophets of Privatization in power and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Note that some places in Europe have already seen large scale immigration since WW2, usually from their former colonies - e.g. UK, France, and Portugal again.

Kids don't care about race or ethnicity. It just takes a generation or two.

I'd rather not have downtown be monopolized by people consumed by addiction, which is what your solution would directly cause. The myopia libertarians have about the mean self control of the population in question seems to know no bounds. Not everyone can just "do some opioids" once in a while and be fine (I suspect the % of the population is that can actually do this is approximately zero).

Whole lot of “I don’t know why this fence is here, but it’s gotta go” behavior ripping apart thousands of years of collective/cultural moral development - and the proffered alternative is an abysmal mashup of Alister Crowley and early 2000’s internet libertarianism.

Most remarkable is how “Do As Thou Wilt If It’s Consensual” has become the dominant ethos of even the left. Back in my Occupy days, we used to joke a lot about the goal being Star Trek style “gay luxury space communism” - I guess they figured “one outta four ain’t bad”.

At the end of the day, it really should be just that. Legalize, standardize and actually enforce it ( because as it turns out, legalization did fuck all to that with exception of medical grade stuff ). Then let people do what they have always done anyway. And the freedom still ends precisely where I and my property starts.

I suffer no illusions. People will die. But they are dying anyway. We might as well make them die in a predictable way ( and by their own choice ).

So yeah. Legalize and then enforce it bro. It is not rocket science.

Allowing people to buy and sell doesn't mean they must be allowed to do it openly on the streets or freely cause trouble.

Regardless I’m waiting to hear if his wallet or phone was stolen. If it’s still on him I’m more suspicious this was just some random mugging gone wrong.

What you don't have is nut-job city officials that refuse to acknowledge there is crime and actively promote it.

It's not Europe but a similar murder just happened in Vancouver. Guy was stabbed to death outside a Starbucks while his wife and kids were inside buying coffee.

This is in many ways a West Coast thing. Really crazy people have somehow been elected into positions of power out there.

There are certain things the US does well, I think assimilation of immigrants is a really strong point for our culture here. Maybe it's because our culture has never really been much more than a gigantic mixing pot and is a lot younger. And maybe it's cause the population is so much larger and discordant than any single European nation.

>Brice De Ruyver, who spent eight years as security adviser to then-Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, said Molenbeek suffers from a cocktail of problems. “Youths are poorly educated, attracted by petty crime, have run-ins with police, and then there is a vicious circle, which leads to recruitment by radical groups,” he said, adding that the problems are now so serious, that it is hard to find police willing to bother tackling them.

>“We don’t officially have no-go zones in Brussels, but in reality, there are, and they are in Molenbeek.”

The Los Angeles Times disagreed with the harsh description <http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-paris-attack-molen...> of Molenbeek, but the funny thing is it did so only by favorably compararing it with the French banlieus! That well-known right-wing rag The New Republic agreed <https://newrepublic.com/article/120714/charlie-hebdo-attack-...> regarding the banlieus,, as did The New Yorker <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-other-franc...>. (I highly recommend the last, by the way.)

The US has the likes of Detroit, Chicago ("Chiraq"), etc., and we're discussing San Francisco now. In none of those places, however—not during the worst of the "Fort Apache" years in the South Bronx in the 1970s, or South Central during the crack epidemic in the 1980s—did the police refuse to enter them, and thankfully they are all better than they used to be. That doesn't mean that these European neighborhoods are worse than the South Bronx c. 1975, but it does mean that the police in those places have overtly or implicitly made a decision regarding them and their own safety.

Or just any area within Munich where it would be unsafe to walk at night, thanks!

We really need you to stop breaking HN's rules though. You've been doing it a ton.

SF has 4X the murder rate of Toronto, for example. (And Toronto has about the same murder rate as London, and less than Amsterdam — I can't find the comparative stat for Munich though)

By that list, sorted by the total violent crime rate from highest to lowest, SF is 37th on the list of 100 cities, NYC is 59th, Austin is 73rd. In absolute numbers, SF is 715/100k, NYC is 539/100k, Austin is 415/100k.

Also, by that list, the top cities for violent crime with population over 1M are: Chicago #17, Houston #18, Philly #25, Tuscon #29, Dallas #31, LA #32, Phoenix #33.

Now if only we could get a graph of this data mapped over time, it would be interesting to see trends.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

And NYC is now famous for prosecuting you for engaging in self defense as well.

https://nypost.com/2022/07/10/nyc-bodega-owners-urge-da-brag...

https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/nyc-garage-worker-charged-with...

In the second story, who knows what in the hell is even going on. It happened too recently for there to be any clarity on what actually happened there. That could easily have been an over-zealous person causing problems (like George Zimmerman) rather than self-defense. Time and the trial will tell.

All of this is alleged, and based only on testimony of the person who did the shooting. We simply don't actually know what happened here yet (if we ever will). You're making assumptions based on the New York Post's reporting, which is a tabloid at best. It's entirely possible that the person who did the shooting was the one who had the gun all along.

Nobody looks into random cars in a lot without intent to steal and he was the only one to introduce a gun into the affair.

They never should have been filed. The victim was cuffed to his hospital bed recovering from two gunshot wounds.

That’s ridiculous and horrific.

If you’ve ever been falsely arrested, you’d realize that the process alone is punishment, and should never be applied without significant care.

How do you know this? Why aren't other cities affected by this under reporting?

So, to more directly answer your second question: other cities absolutely also suffer here, but New York has been at it the longest, and so is perhaps best known for this issue.

For more background, Reply All did a two-parter a few years ago exploring the history here, which is quite good. This is the first part: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34

I was asking for evidence that was the case for nyc and that it was such an extent as to change the danger of the city compared to others

The primary difference I notice is that in SF, people seem to expect that the police will care about this? I am not sure why the expectations seem so different - perhaps it is the large number of people coming from more suburban parts of the country where the police do investigate these crimes?

And maybe, probably because they should be investigating these crimes.

If you want to see stats for all cities, view the FBI UCR directly [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...].

e.g. NJ cities incl. Camden are at https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

2019 snapshot has 2018 data: https://web.archive.org/web/20190508183318/https://ucr.fbi.g...

But there's no data after 2019 in any of the snapshots, up to 2023. I wonder what happened in 2020 that makes it impossible to collect any data since then...

I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that victims of violent crime are less likely to report it post-BLM/George Floyd? I know some people have been less likely to call certain things in, like someone having a mental health crisis, out of fear that police may escalate, but violent crime?

The same is observed pretty much everywhere where "defund the police" crowd rules the day.

In short, someone will attack a progressive spectre, such as BLM, police abolitionism, rehabilitative justice, or the fact that economic inequality is strongly correlated with crime, they will be asked to show data supporting their position or shown data that directly contradicts it, and the op will then respond in anger with a lot more strawmans of progressive positions.

Given that you don't have the data to support your position, and others do have data to support the position you clearly and vehemently oppose, I'm really curious why you still hold that position? Like, what are you feeling right now?

I did.

> shown data that directly contradicts it

It wasn't.

> will then respond in anger with a lot more strawmans of progressive positions.

That didn't happen. Defunding the police is exactly the position of the prog-woke crowd, and until the disastrous results started showing up, they didn't hide it - they campaigned on it. Once the inevitable happened, they started screaming "we didn't mean that" and pretending it's all strawmen. Yes you did. You meant exactly that, and you got what you wanted, and now people who trusted you are suffering the consequences. Some - the lethal ones.

> Given that you don't have the data to support your position

Except I do.

> others do have data to support the position you clearly and vehemently oppose

Except they don't.

> I'm really curious why you still hold that position?

Because I not only dislike myself being stabbed, but also others being stabbed? And when these policies are followed, people get stabbed. Also shot, mugged, robbed, carjacked, and so on. If you think ideology is worth it - enjoy it. I do not.

> what are you feeling right now?

I am feeling sad that more people have to suffer in service of idiotic ideology that clearly does not work, and I am feeling glad I am no longer one of these people.

Results have been disastrous in the usa because economic inequality has been skyrocketing. This is what the "prog woke" crowd has been warning about, and, as the data shows, very little if any of the "prog woke" policies have been enacted, even in "prog woke" hub San Francisco.

It's getting worse because the predictable reactionary cycle and ratcheting continues. A region virtue signals progressive positions, maybe even does a half measure (like eliminating cash bail, a blatantly classist policy), then ratchets back into reactionary land by cherry picking events, even if overall data shows improvements as expected. Or, like in the case of SF, contrarian forces will mean you can have a situation like "socialist DA elected," then the cops will simply stop doing their jobs, so whether the new da tries progressive policy or not is moot - enforcement will plummet.

Reactionary systems are remarkably powerful in the USA and that's why things will probably keep getting worse there.

Not sure how much of these cuts were achieved by the time they reversed the course, in 18 months, but that certainly was the plan, it was announced as such, and had full support of the police chief. Not that by 2020 SF wasn't drowning in feces anyway, so the defund itself certainly wasn't the cause - just another brick in the wall.

> Dealing the final blow to the local "defund" movement last year was a city council vote to essentially refund a cut they'd made the prior year. Mayor Jacob Frey is proposing another budget bump for the next two fiscal years.

https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/how-city-once-called-...

As far as I'm aware, every single city that defunded its police to any extent - ended up with a major crime surge and then reversed itself. You can see in the article that Minneapolis was no exception to that rule.

Just go home.

But they won’t do it. Hell, if they did all the above I wouldn’t mind paying them double.

Agreed. They won't though. Sigh.

Hearsay.

> E.g. constant car break-ins is useless to report

Not if you want to file an insurance claim, no. Or for example if you oppose car break-ins, then you might want the statistics to be correct.

What the majority of people are concerned about is the chances of violent crime that is likely to affect them. Yes, there might be 80 gang murders a year in Atlanta but a $100k+ income working professional in downtown has a very different threat model than a gang member in some of the worst neighborhoods of the city.

I think the reason SF gets so much negative attention is because the threat to "average people" (realistically, above average income people) is anecdotally quite high in SF, even in "nice" areas of the city where affluent people frequent.

But is it actually quite high?

Anecdotally, I notice many more people going through psychotic episodes here, but generally less organized violent crime. The drug dealing/prostitution is mostly restricted to a few parts of the Mission and the TL.

I don't know, I also care about violent crime that happens to anyone. I care about all life, not just my own.

Both Manhattan and SF are now more dangerous than downtown NOLA imo, but NYC is tame compared to SF. SF is getting next level - almost comparable to Johannesburg ZA

LA is of course the home to the most infamous hoods of all but traffic is a much bigger practical concern since you won't be on foot. Seattle was never as desirable for techies as Bellevue - Amazon went to Seattle for cheap office space. Portland gets a bad rap because of Antifa but East Portland was always bad news

The only somewhat normal (and somewhat sleepy) city on the US west coast imo is San Diego

But imo by far the best city on the west coast overall is Vancouver Canada

Property crime is what substantially contributes to the image that SF is an unsafe city.

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm

Which makes SF far more dangerous to law abiding professionals like ourselves, compared to cities that have the same homicide count, but where the victims are other demographics and not our own.

If San Francisco has national average drug crime as well as above national average rates of "professionals" as well as organized crime, then it seems to follow that if SF homicide count is close to the national average, you are actually less likely to be a victim of a homicide than if all of those homicides were among a small population of "professionals."

You keep trying to counter that with wild speculation that contradicts well-established facts. It simply won't do.

Or maybe show me how the fact that Bob Lee was murdered proves that SF is more dangerous to law-abiding civilians than other cities?

"But the fact that people think SF has too much of B is indicative of how sheltered we are, so to speak, as a people when it comes to the rest of the world."

[0.] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/us-city-vi...

The article you link to does not argue or support this position, at all. Was this the wrong link?

I'll pull out what I've gotten from it. It's called "The Liberals Who Won’t Acknowledge the Crime Problem", and the author tries to argue that various liberals (which he conflates with progressives) are ignoring a crime problem. The author starts out by framing the piece against various crimes that occurred in various cities. And then says this:

  Anecdata, of course, are not the same as data. And in cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco, progressive district attorneys have insisted that their critics have gotten the facts wrong. As The New York Times recently reported, the now-recalled San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin routinely “confront[ed] voters with data that shows overall crime has not increased meaningfully while he has been in office.” Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s cantankerous district attorney, has developed a habit of browbeating critics in town-hall meetings with appeals to “the science.” His in-house criminologist, Krasner has insisted, can give people the real numbers if they really want them. Ordinary residents are being told that what they perceive to be true is not, in fact, true.

  The problem here is that humans understand and interact with the world based on perception and feeling. Politics is about policy, but it is also about human nature—which, however one wishes to characterize it, is a constant to contend with. You can try to transcend human nature by appealing to people’s better angels or through education and enlightenment—but only up to a point.

Of course the author tries to claim that the stats can be cherry picked, but they just step in it. They cite a NY Times article which tells:

  There is no compelling evidence that Mr. Boudin’s policies have made crime significantly worse in San Francisco. Overall crime in San Francisco has changed little since Mr. Boudin took office in early 2020.

  “the pandemic and other broad societal factors seem to have influenced the patterns of property crime, rather than any causal link to policies within the purview of a district attorney.”

But yes, it does mean businesses and tourists face the brunt of crime again (as they did earlier), and they no longer have enough revenue to be able to eat the losses.

The first step is to acknowledge the failures. And then rise up with greater understanding.

We can't get past the first step.

As soon as the problem is framed in right-wing terms, then the "solutions" above get proposed. Crime problem? Arrest people. Still a crime problem? Arrest more people. Not enough room to hold all the people in prison? Build more prisons. Still a crime problem? Arrest more people. This is the reason USA has the highest per capita prison population in the world (I think it might be #2 now after China because we let some people out).

We don't want those solutions, so we refuse to frame the debate in right-wing terms.

I won't be voting for democrats again. It's not the party that I stood for once.

Most progressive ideas are flat out wrong but drummed incessantly through woke Academic madressas we call Universities. It's producing people at an alarming rate, almost 90% progressives right off the bat. Brainwashed.

I work in a suburb in the rural midwest now. Neighborhoodscout says my odds are 1 in 1100. So my chances of being a victim have improved from 1 in 18 to 1 in 1100. How does it feel ? 8 year old kids here bike to school a mile away, snow or shine, no cps, nothing. As to property crime - once we went away for the weekend & the garage door acted up in our absence. So for a whole 3 days, the garage was wide open & anybody could have walked in & grabbed whatever. Nothing was taken. On the contrary there was a nice note from the neighbor about applying grease on the railing so the garage door stays closed.

So if you are an immigrant & safety is a priority, yeah there are many towns in the midwest southwest etc. where you can be very safe. Houses are quite cheap & I was able to buy my house with straight cash, but ironically that cash was earned in SF! Indeed, I now get paid 4x less than what I made as a programmer back in SF.

So yeah, from an immigrant pov, it looks like in this country you first have to pay your dues. Work in some high-crime zone like SF,NYC etc, accumulate capital. Then move to some peaceful rural place in the midwest with no crime & no nothing. We don't even have a mall.

Everyone seems to be missing a piece of critical non-political information.

One setting is rural, everyone owns the house, lives there long-term, everyone knows neighbours. You don't want to ruin relationship with neighbours for $100.

The other setting is Urban, you don't know neighbours, you don't care what they think. Everyone appears out of nowhere and disappears into obscurity.

The social dynamics is totally different, and the housing crisis has a big role to play in it.

Also you do not Have_To own the house to feel like you live there long term and know neighbours - many European countries have social housing, or massive restrictions on landlords kicking out tenants. So tenants stay in the same place for decades, and there is a real community.

I once forgot a briefcase on the street out of a bar in the center after work. I realized only when I got home. I got back there, sure that I would not find it anymore. I come from Italy and that is just the norm there.

Not only I found it, but someone moved it out of the way of the bike rack where I forgot it. So it was definitely noticed, and yet nobody took it.

Another anecdote. Once at a dancing event, the organizer just left and went to sleep. He told me that if people wanted a drink, they could just grab one from the fridge and put money in the money box. Where I come from, the fridge would have been emptied and the money box would have disappeared.

It's not a matter of urban vs. rural. It's a matter of culture.

The reason why people don't come in and take the shit out of our houses in my shit neighborhood is not because we all know each other. It is because unlike in SF, that would be a death wish (sure maybe not the first time, but it would not take many times). Also unlike in SF the police will probably pat the back of the home owner while what is left of the robber is removed from the property.

In the past few years, crime in some US cities are committed by certain groups of the population - who are partly encouraged by the local powers.

And yet crime levels in various urban settings are wildly different, from places like Johannesburg on one extreme of the continuum to Reykjavík or Tokio on the other one.

Looking at the worst cities worldwide as far as homicide goes, almost all the top contenders are from Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, the US or Colombia, with Mexico being heavily overrepresented. 17 of the top 50 homicide metropolises are Mexican. Damn.

There isn't a single European or Asian city in that list. Germany has some 60 per cent of the Mexican population, but isn't present in the top 50 at all. Heck, even India and China just aren't there, and they together account for almost half of mankind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

The pattern is too non-random to claim that urban life in itself is somehow inherently dangerous. It is only dangerous if your governance sucks.

And yes, SF governance sucks, though not to the degree of Ciudad Juarez - but that is a low, low hurdle to clear.

If you want 'tough on crime' that actually works, but you have to be tough on all crime, including crime in the police. And make sure the entire justice process works.

UK has a 'tough on crime' government, they've increased severity of sentences, but have cut funding to the police. The rate of prosecution, i.e. how likely you are to get caught, fell off a cliff. Also now that police is poorly paid, we have corruption in the police.

Research shows that certainty of punishment is far more important than severity of punishment. Criminals are chancers.

Then we have to make sure that suspects get proper legal council. The current plea bargain system in US is absurd. You can prosecute some poor shmuck for a crime, they can't afford a lawyer, and state lawyer sucks, so they take the plea. Taxpayer pays for their imprisonment, police reports great success. Meanwhile real criminal goes free to commit more crimes with more experience. And they will be harder to catch next time.

Most european countries do not have severe punishment of criminals, yet crime rates aren't crazy.

I havent been to US, so i am not sure about any Bay Area shenanigans

So we completely agree because I’m pretty sure that is all that actually matters.

The issue in US currently is a deranged political fade has taken hold that sees criminals as victims of their circumstances and has started not punishing criminals.

It can be simultaneously true that criminal behavior is often a result of bad circumstances AND that it requires consistent punishment, not that the first point negates the 2nd. Instead social programs need to focus on improving circumstances that lead to criminal behavior not removing punishments.

This political fade is a bankrupt flawed ideology that is effectively mass social psychosis or insanity.

The problem is there’s another flawed political ideology that tells us that—investing in social programs to improve the circumstances that lead to criminal behavior—is bad because communism.

UK is regarded as extremely highly policed state by other Europeans and yet it's less safe than here in mainland Europe.

Which ones? Britain is one of very few countries in Europe where the police don't routinely carry guns, and are perceived as approachable.

I think you should look instead at inequality. Britain has the worst income equality in Europe.

My police is approachable and I don't care about the gun on their belt. I saw them use it for protection of the citizens - I appreciate they have it and don't consider it over-policing.

It's not about the gun, it's about the rights of the police. The police here carries a gun but has zero rights/power against citizens not breaking any laws. They can't even stop you and ask for your ID - that would be considered "communism" here.

It's not worth continuing the discussion since you haven't said which country.

Vienna is pretty mixed since the times of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but fairly safe. Glasgow is almost purely Scottish, but dangerous. Naples is probably less ethnically mixed than Rome, but more dangerous. Marseille is a lot worse than Genoa etc.

I don't doubt that particular kinds of immigration can worsen crime situation considerably, but some places can manage that and some fail miserably. You can even see it in the same city if the political representation changes. AFAIK the current mayor of Barcelona is notorious for letting street crime fester.

...

No it isn't. Absolutely not. No way. Never coming there. Damn this place. Doesn't matter what the offense has to be, it's never fine.

Do you think that each and every judgement of judicial caning was correct? That mistakes can't happen?

Isn't this mostly a myth? You will get fined for littering in Singapore just like elsewhere, though their fines are higher and the police arguably enforces laws against littering more eagerly than in the West. Caning (not flogging) is reserved for more serious offences (IIRC the lightest one is vandalism.)

Dubai employs flogging, but for Shariah offences, not for littering.

Hong Kong doesn't use judicial corporeal punishment at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_work_order

Like all 'proper oldschool' conservative societies, in Dubai laws is applied only to the 'right people'.

For example extramarital sex is a crime, but if you open Tinder it's full of hookers.

There are tons of immigrants in Germany/Western Europe and east Asia.

That is an absurdly inaccurate assertion.

There are Vietnamese communities in CZ/SK everywhere, even in very rural areas, but, you won't see them much in the streets, because they spend their life indoors working, and they usually own their shops, living right behind them, so they aren't even seen commuting to work and back. Quite often the only small grocery in a village or a small town is Vietnamese-owned.

But maybe East Asians are now considered (elevated? condemned?) as basically white by the American racial discourse?

Whether left or right, their concept of ethnicity is primitive. white/black/asian.

Are Russians same ethnicity as Germans? Are Germans same ethnicity as Bavarian? Russian government considers Russia to have ~100 ethnic groups native to Russia.

Us discourse is either about skin-colour, or about man-made country borders.

The only scientifically based concept is Haplogroups, bur noone knwos about them.

The rest is man-made concepts and culture.

>The rest is man-made concepts and culture.

You got to it at the end. There’s nothing about any of it that is scientific, it’s all just culture.

The reason why it’s “primitive” in America is because that is what is true in the American context. It just doesn’t map to the European context.

Lions prefer lions. Hyenas prefer hyenas. They coexist. But they prefer the company of their own. And that's ok. It is nature.

No need to add complexity. It's nature. Always has been. Always will be.

Ironically, America in the 90s and early 2000s seemed to be approaching a sweet spot where cultural expectations and “mild” authoritarian policing were successful at crushing urban crime rates. This whole thread is full of longtime West Coasters bemoaning how much better city life was in “the good old days” of 10-15 years ago. Odd how there’s zero political will to simply go back to what worked.

Also worth pointing out that homogeneity isn’t only along an axis of race. Example: There are plenty of Mexican Americans who are extremely racist towards newer Mexican immigrants to their neighborhoods. LATimes has done several pieces about this dynamic. People will always find reasons to put other people in categories.

Also worth pointing out that the society in Japan is more overtly racist towards outsiders of any race. My source is a life-long friend (white American living in Japan for 15+ years) who overheard lots of conversations when the locals think he doesn’t understand their words.

America has been a “melting pot” for a while, so we have moved our racial/homogeneity issues at least one layer below polite discussion. Most Americans will put up a façade about not being racist, but don’t actually put any effort to align their behaviors.

Sadly, I think identity politics has tossed the melting pot ideals aside. It encourages zero sum thinking where different groups are enemies and relative sucess is what matters. This means pulling others down is just important than lifting people up. Unfortionatly, it is easier to pull people down than lift them up.

Crab bucket mentality in practice.

My theory racism and identity politics have a positive feedback relationship. That is to say identity politics is counterproductive at bringing about a less biased society.

Yes, Japan is a very high-conforming and ethnically homogeneous society. It is also a low-crime society. However, to derive just from that that absence of racial homogeneity alone leads to high crime makes no more sense than claiming that not using logographic scripts leads to violence - since Asian society are generally less violent than, for example, the US. You need to do much more work than just picking one difference and attribute everything to it.

It’s not the homogeneity.

Please read the first line in the main body of your article and you’ll find the answer. It’s so predictable it’s more accurate than science.

Cronulla was a one-off event almost 20 years ago, was extremely shocking and out of the ordinary, and as far as I can remember no-one died. As such, it’s not a great example of anything much, other than the fact that ethnic tensions existed between white and Arab communities in Australia in the mid-2000s (which is not all that surprising given the context of 9/11, the Iraq War, etc)

I do agree with your first point, however, that Sydney is a good example of one of the most multicultural cities in the world being quite safe, without requiring authoritarian policing (lockouts and drug dogs in train stations aside)

But I’ll stop you right there from swaying the blame onto someone else and reaching entirely false conclusions. What crime is NOT due to:

- Crime is not due to poverty. Plenty of poor cities who aren’t violent.

- Crime is not due to previous crime. Put white felons on an island and you get Australia, as the joke says.

- Crime is not due to high-density area. Tokyo.

- Crime is not due to immigration or displacing population. Ukraine migrant kids who spoke French astonishingly fluently in 6 months, a better score than all kids from “other” French backgrounds.

- Crime is not due to mixing population. Singapore.

Each of them is easily proven by finding great counter-examples of constructive people being moved/concentrated to place X or Z and not having high criminality.

It must be something else, something which can be found in all evoked areas and not found in peaceful areas, but I’m not going to say it.

Is it water?

Also, your list doesn't mean some combination of those things can't result in worsening incidence of violent crime.

My own belief is that its some combination of:

- Extreme wealth inequality

- High cost of living

- High incidence of poverty (relative to the aforementioned cost of living)

- Poor social safety net

- Poor community cohesion and trust

- Individualistic cultural attitudes (as opposed to collectivist cultural attitudes)

- Poor public protection

- Easy access to drugs (including alcohol)

I think the drugs just become a symptom of the problem; people get addicted because they are suffering (see rat park). They develop antisocial behaviours, which reduces community cohesion and trust. The city then becomes less happy overall, and it becomes a cycle

When kicked out of the front door, try to come back through the backdoor?

You can create convoluted science that a combination of those factors leads to violence. Since it’s a combination, it’s even less provable, a correlation doesn’t cause causation, and I’ll keep finding counter examples, to which you will find even more convoluted reasons.

But there is a much, much simpler hypothesis, and for my part it explains the world with accuracy and predictability. What defines a science is its ability to predict the future based on some inputs.

So, my stance is to never make a decision based on prejudice, which is satisfying in terms of humanism, but don’t forget that people will reliably get killed, mugged and raped, and in quantity, if you don’t watch out for the thing-I’ll-not-say which was ever predictable. And it’s both our responsibility to put our family out of harm’s way, and an incredible feat of the XXIth century that we’re feeding our own relatives into a crime machine that reliably gets them killed or raped.

Speaking from experience. But everyone who has a grave opinion on this topic has, someday, seen a relative crossing the path of those people.

You’ll hear stats about the high percentage of Japanese people in Japan, but those statistics invariably refer to Japanese citizens, not ethnic Japanese.

At least, that’s my belief as an American who has spent several years living in Japan.

Perchance those things are related?

What really are the genetic basis to say Japan is a country that's markedly different from other asian populations?

The people living in Japan have not lived there for long enough for their genetic to become too different from those of other asian countries. Culture on the other hand changes much more rapidly. Culture is the "genetics" of society, it is passed down from generation to generation and it mutates and these mutations are also hereditary... it's just much faster than biological processes.

But ultimately, it seems very unlikely (and as far as I know, there's very little evidence that suggests this is the case) that race and genetics will have a huge effect on culture. Specially given that countries with similar genetic populations will have vastly different cultures.

The Ainu’s skin tone is more like Caucasians than East Asians and the majority population, (Yamato?) are noticeably shorter than the Koreans to whom they are most closely related. There’s clearly been enough isolation, for long enough, for some differentiation. That’s not to say the distribution of traits doesn’t overlap. We’re not talking Sardinians and Swedes here, never mind Bantu and Basque.

Seoul, like Tokyo, could also be described as a HNer’s dream city. Ultra safe, ultra clean, amazing transit. And like Tokyo, a city like Seoul could never exist in the US for similar reasons.

(Then again, cars and public transit coexist somewhat harmoniously in Seoul, with cars being an aspirational item for many Koreans, so maybe it’s not a dream city for the banallcars HNer crowd)

Keep in mind the culture of the various regions could easily cause fast natural (?) selection. I’m no expert on Japan’s history, and even less so on China/Korea/etc. I know enough that Japan had periods of pretty constant war, and that the young and the brash would essentially volunteer to be mercenaries. It seems to me that could pretty quickly weed out the most aggressive genes in a population. It would be different, of course, if soldiers were conscripted instead.

That’s just one example and as I said, I’m not a historian. Another example would be America. People always come up with silly reasons why we became the dominant world power. In my opinion the reason is simple: the people that immigrated here were risk takers, hard workers, and dreamers. Their kids would inherit those genes.

So, I’d say culture begets genetics which begets culture…

Yet that didn't happen to other regionally isolated countries like Mexico or Brazil - hell, or even Canada.

And yes, youth always volunteer for wars. Like I said, I'm not a historian and my example was just an example of how things could guide selection. That said I don't think many countries had something similar to what ronin, or even samurai, were. It was a fairly unique system.

China's Great Leap Forward would be another example of something that could guide who lived to procreate and who didn't.

because publicly acknowledging this obvious reality comes at a cost: you WILL be attacked. most people do not want to be attacked and would rather take the easier route of pretending to not notice this or anything that's going to cause them a problem.

they have even done studies with 1 day old babies where the scientist holds the baby's nose shut and guess what, babies of different races react in different ways. same as when they take baby boys and girls and put them in a room the boys go for the toy trucks and the girls go for the dolls. i'm sorry but that study doesn't need to happen if you don't live in an ivory tower and have to act like a politician because you have so much money to lose for having the wrong opinion.

It’s why even in America you see racial/ethnic blocs and enclaves form. Hence the mentions of an “Asian voting bloc” or “Hispanic voting bloc”, during elections. Would we be hearing about such things if the US was monoracial? Even among many divisions, it would be one less divisive factor.

(yes, I’m aware in the past things were carved up even among whites - such as Italians vs. Irish etc)

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34615972

[2] https://qz.com/2029525/the-20-countries-that-dont-collect-ra...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_Japan

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Brazilians

A glance at Japan's history and geography will tell you that Japan is an incredibly homogenous country as far as ethnicity goes.

Furthermore, up until 1869 Hokkaido was a separate kingdom peopled by the Ainu - Japan has a long history of exchanging people with Korea. It's not some fabled walled-off kingdom, it's a regular country full of regular people

Not how that works.

If I was being more careful I could have written the country "indirectly elects" the Supreme Court judges. My basic point still stands, San Francisco policy is in many ways set by the entire country.

So far the city is processing 72 applications, and they expect to get nearly 100 to 200 more over the next year. Which is very different from the four we processed in the past 10 or so years

Source: https://californiaglobe.com/articles/san-francisco-begins-is...

Certainly 100 permits a year are not going to change things much and definitely four issued in the last 10 years didn't, and if anything sounds like "strict gun control", then four people allowed to carry in 10 years is it.

Singapore is a better example, but requires a form of authoritarianism to pull off that would be unacceptable to both the right and the left.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%c5%8dban

Japan takes few immigrants, but those that do immigrate there are expected to be guests and live within the established norms of Japanese culture and society.

That’s the opposite mindset of the US - especially the liberal leaning areas, where the society is expected to accept and respect diversity and differences.

You can immigrate to Japan as a Westerner (or even as a outwardly similar looking East Asian from Korea or China, etc), live there for decades and become fully assimilated into Japanese society, even gain citizenship, but still be treated as an outsider - not necessarily disrespectfully.

You could probably say the same for other East Asian countries such as Korea, China, Taiwan, etc.

Someone gets in your house while you are on vacation? Bad luck, you will live on the street before the law sloooo...ooo..wly makes is way and you are almost there but, bad luck this is winter now and you cannot get anyone out and then comes summer and, shit, they now have a baby and they cannot be thrown out.

You will also get a fine if you try to do it your own way, and they will sue you on top of that. And sue you if they get harmed in your house

No surprise that in other to rent a box you need to be royal.

We have a great social system I wholeheartedly support. And then come the leeches we are to week to get rid of and everyone suffers because of that.

Massively reducing prosecutions causes police to stop arresting people since they get released without being charged. This changes the incentive structure for criminals. They get more aggressive, more brazen, and they tell their friends. This isn't complicated.

Hahaha. What a joke. Unbelievable. So disconnected from reality.

> I'm a bit surprised people are seriously believing this. This is someone's shower thoughts six hours later when they strawmanned some ridiculous positions to caricaturize "opponents".

You're trying to portray the story as fabricated, but that's likely wrong. IMHO, it's more likely exaggerated (e.g. there probably wasn't a "lively debate in the commons," more likely comments directed at no one in particular morphing two opinionated randos getting mad at each other).

>> So if you are an immigrant & safety is a priority, yeah there are many towns in the midwest southwest etc. where you can be very safe. Houses are quite cheap & I was able to buy my house with straight cash, but ironically that cash was earned in SF!

> Like, where is this low-income "suburb" (two hours from a major center...) that has no crime? As someone who grew up in a smaller town in the rust belt, I find their claim hysterical.

He didn't say it was "low-income," just cheaper compared to SF. I grew up in a smaller city in the Midwest (four hours from a major center), and his account rings true to me. There's more to the Midwest than the rust belt.

> And FWIW, every single small city I checked around 2 hours outside of Chicago has property crime rates worse than Chicago! Isn't that amazing? No, it isn't, unless you're deluded enough to believe their nonsense.

There's a lot of Midwest outside of that region. Even if what you say is true*, it's a skewed sample that can't reasonably be assumed to represent the whole.

* Which I doubt, especially there can be confounding effects in whatever statistics you're looking at, like differing reporting rates (which was already called out in this thread or a similar one, w.r.t San Francisco).

That's pretty much average for the US.

It all depends on you, your age, and what you like. If you're a people person who loves and needs interaction, shopping, coffee/beer nightly, absolutely don't move out there.

If you are a homebody who just wants to be left alone, move far, far away.

I'm somewhere in between. I like to get out once or twice a week, then be left alone most of the other times. What I strongly prefer is a place in a small town/city that's within 30 mins or so of a bigger city. And that town/city needs to have its own shopping, groceries, restaurants, post office, etc, because having to drive 30 minutes every time you need a battery or something gets old really, really fast.

I ask for no reason other than interest. No blame at all, I also prefer cities like you describe. I've lived all over the US, in some places like you describe (in KY, which isn't far), so was curious.

I absolutely love visiting W Michigan, a real hidden gem. Definitely go check out Holland and the sand dunes north of there if you've never been. Unfortunately, the brutal winters mostly keeps me from moving to that general area.

So… you came to the MidWest just to contribute here to the very problem you were trying to escape

This is going to end well for society. Remind me in 20 years.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Look at a graph of murder rates for LA vs NYC and their surprisingly similar even with very different politics. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/18/us/chicago-mu...

Chicago, NYC, LA, and many other US cities all had similar trends over similar time periods which line up with national trends. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...

“Broken Windows” policing was a radically different paradigm that initially got a great deal of praise because it seemed to be working.

Do you disagree?

Call me crazy, but perhaps if those in SF could afford a home/ to live/ the basic necessities of a U.S. citizen, they wouldn’t be out on the streets being low lifes.

Not all of them, some people are truly irredeemable - but truly irredeemable people are typically doing much harder crimes than property theft & petty break-ins.

When you look at the desperate parts of the midwest, of the ones that weren't always that way, you'll find most of the worst of the ones became that way after all the skilled / rich people left coupled with other capital flight. Not the other way around.

In other words, the entire point of my comment. Thank you for your assistance.

Most rural US problems seem to come from unwillingness to build higher density. Europe has plenty of 5k-20k towns with relatively dense centers that have all the basic services. At the upper end of that range you can even get things like hospitals. And that's in a country with basically no property taxes.

once upon a time, not that long ago from a historical PoV (the 1950s), Detroit was THE wealthiest city in the USA and it's now among the poorest

and if you look at the decay of those once-wealthy city, the pattern is that they took it for granted and stopped caring and competing

hard times make good men, etc etc

What I wonder is where are the fathers in this scenario. I can't imagine the conversation about the son's income coming from stealing phones going very well with his father.

All the fathers stepped out for a pack of smokes some years ago and didn't come back.

For what it’s worth, these are solving two different problems. The reported train discussion was a disagreement on a solution to the systemic problem. Jailing the perpetrator only treats the problem with that specific person. Both problems need solutions.

A little implausible?

> Work in some high-crime zone like SF,NYC etc, accumulate capital.

People love living in these cities, as real estate prices show. It's not 'paying dues'; those are much more preferred than small towns, as those real estate prices show. You of course are free to prefer whatever you like.

It's 60th of 83 major cities (Top 3 most dangerous are St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit).

I defined murder rate as "Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter" / "Population" and "major city" as "Population > 250k."

PS: Someone should update Wikipedia; its numbers appear outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-... [2]

The justice system in the United States is broken in many, many places. And the issues that spawn from a broken justice system leak into every other facet of life.

I could talk about privately owned prisons that are incentivized to keep bodies in cells (that's how they get compensated). I could talk about the judges that are bribed to ensure these prisons get filled.

We could move on to things like jail-time for minor drug offenses. Is this a DA problem? Or a policing problem? I'm not sure.

Or, conversely, violent criminals who get their jail time commuted. This is a judge and DA problem.

Or, continuing, the definition of "felon" in the United States is a byzantine thing. See [0].

Our laws are too jumbled and onerous. Justice, the ideal, is not sought nor executed in many cases. I don't know how to fix this. A part of me wants to burn two centuries of case law and go back to a bare Constitution, with an emphasis on personal conduct and responsibility (those darn Puritans were on to something). But that's too simple. We're caught in a trap, and I honestly don't see a way out.

There's a quote that comes to mind "representative rule only works when the people are moral". Something like that. Are we moral?

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

"crimes involving conscious planning can be more easily deterred than those that relate to addiction or sudden emotions;

increases to prison sentences that are already lengthy have little deterrent effect; and

policies that increase the likelihood of being caught deter crime more effectively than those that increase punishment. "

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

No it didn't. It had 56 murders [1] and a population of 808,437, so 6.9 murders per 100k [2], vs London's rate of 1.42 murders per 100k.

[1] https://sfist.com/2023/01/03/sf-sees-exact-same-number-of-ho...

[2] https://sfstandard.com/research-data/san-francisco-bay-area-...

Still, the low murder rate, by American standards, in SF is almost 5 times higher than London’s.

I went to the local walgreens in SF and was trying to buy a tube of toothpaste, apparently the theft is so bad I had to have a person who works there open the case, and while I was waiting in line to buy it a homeless person ran out with merchandise.

There are thousands and thousands of similar stories from others but until residents in SF start voting different I see things getting even worse than they are now. I know that may be hard to believe but we have been experiencing a boom economy, once that changes and things go south expect crime to surge to levels unimaginable.

Very true actually, I agree wholeheartedly.

Things would be much better if SF (and more of America) would vote for progressive left-wing parties and politicians. But with the two party system and two right wing majority parties, I think chances are quite low that you'll get what you want. Shame.

I ask because left-to-right isn't really a one-dimensional scale. California has legalized recreational weed, for instance, and that's not a thing in Germany or Scandinavia (or even the Netherlands, technically). Those countries have much nicer prison conditions, but there's also no way anyone there - from the voters to the police to the government - would tolerate the sort of crime that the justice system in SF tolerates.

In general, I suspect on many axes San Francisco/California politics are to the left of European social democracies, while being to the right on others. It'd be helpful to understand what specific ways it needs to move left to solve these problems, and why you believe that'd help. Of course you might just say "SF should be at or to the left of the Scandanavia on all axes", but I don't think that's a very substantive critique.

(I'll add, with the caveat that I suspect these are apples-to-oranges comparisons: some quick Googling suggests that the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg - which spends more than anywhere else in Berlin - puts around 2.5EUR per resident per year towards homeless programs, whereas apparently SF spends more like $600 per person per year. I don't know what the apple-to-apple numbers are and couldn't find them at a glance, but I do have a hunch that spending in SF vastly outstripes that of anywhere in the EU, another way SF would be further to the left.)

The things you’ve listed aren’t income inequality, they are a social safety net. Having access to healthcare doesn’t put you much closer to a billionaire in terms of wealth. Perhaps a weak social safety net is to blame, but given that SF has some of the most extensive social services of any city in the US, that also seems unlikely.

If I had the money I made in the us then I could have maybe put them in a private hospital. You’re only as free as how much money you have in your pocket, nothing else matters.

[0]: https://healthysanfrancisco.org/ [1]: https://www.medi-cal.ca.gov/

My understanding is that the worst difficulties (bankruptcy, avoiding care, crippling premiums, large out of pocket) are in fact experienced by middle income people who don't qualify for Medicaid/Medicare. There is none of that in the Netherlands.

It's hard to directly compare policies when the systems are so much different. But I gather a great deal of SF criminality is due to people that are not from California and do not reside there legally. Those would not be able to live in any European country like that, they would be forced to leave. That's one example.

[1] - https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-...

The current Democratic Vice President of the United States is a San Francisco politician.

The Democrat who has been engaging in national political media battles with the second-ranked contender for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024 is a San Francisco politician (also, Governor of California.)

There may be some reason to see a connection between San Francisco politicians and the Democratic Party at the national level.

>The current Democratic Vice President of the United States is a San Francisco politician.

No on both counts. Nancy Pelosi has had nothing to do with San Francisco politics for the last 40 years.

“Federal politician who lives in San Francisco” != “San Francisco politician”.

For Americans, that looks like communism I guess. For the rest of us, it's milquetoast centrism and performative virtue signaling to further protect capital interests.

SF politicians vaguely discussed defunding the police in order to virtue signal as the only valid "progressive" option in a city that might elect actual leftists if they don't perform well enough. Then they increased the budget as per usual, and London breed called the cops on a homeless person laying on a bench. Performative.

SF is allegedly a progressive capital in America, but lets units stay empty while there are homeless. In the rest of the world, a progressive policy system would make it punishingly expensive to leave units empty, or even restrict ownership to property you live in. There would be dense state housing. There would be well funded programs to help homeless people get into housing and find work.

If sf was progressive it wouldn't do half measures of rehabilitative justice that simply feed conservative blood cult rhetoric baying for the lives of young poc that stole bread once (an actual thing happening in this very thread). Not charging someone with a felony for stealing food, thus guaranteeing their lifelong status as a criminal? That's great. Not doing any work then to figure out why food was stolen? Not great. See: Norway. The system works. They have the lowest rate of recidivism in the world. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitation_(penology)

If sf was progressive it would understand that economic disparity strongly correlates with crime and do a better job of distributing its incredible wealth to those that need it. Allegedly, sf spends up to 100k a year on each homeless person, cycling them in and out of jail and whatever else. A progressive policy would simply give homeless people that money, or spend it on an apartment for them.

Performative liberal half measures are why sf is the way it is. Others say "what republicans are there in sf to prevent progressive policy? Who are you blaming?" Which demonstrates the blinders people wear in American politics, where apparently only republicans can be conservatives and only democrats can be progressives, and by the way all those democrats are somehow actually socialists. In reality sf politics maintained the American Overton window and simply elects moderate and conservative politicians under the democrat party banner. One time they elected a semi-progressive in the form of Chesa Boudin, but then they got cold feet and recalled him (which notably seems to correlate with a rise in crime, huh).

Most cities others are touting in this thread as beacons of whatever reactionary talking point they're reaching for, like "having strong police" or "being racially homogenous," are in reality just progressive, or exist in progressive countries. Singapore has state housing. Taiwan and Japan have universal healthcare. Where is San Francisco's universal healthcare? Where is its state housing? Where is its strong labor protections, guaranteed 3 weeks vacation for all workers, minimum wage adjusted for cost of living in the city? Where is the legal system that doesn't optimize for plea bargains, that doesn't to this day result in people being turned into felons and thus forever made unproductive members of society?

San Francisco is not progressive.

Let's turn it to you. Evidence bears out that progressive social policies and justice systems have better long term results. The data is in favor of what you call progressivism. But I guess the "common sense" ideas of retributive justice just kinda... feels better or something? Elsewhere in this thread people are essentially arguing for lopping off the hands of thieves. Given that the data supports progressive policies such as restorative justice and tackling income inequality as a means to drive down crime, why do you think so many people so stubbornly hold outdated, conservative ideas of how justice systems should work?

> Take a breath from American politics for a second and it's abundantly clear that SF politicians, and policies, are peak Liberal America.

> For Americans, that looks like communism I guess. For the rest of us, it's milquetoast centrism and performative virtue signaling to further protect capital interests.

I'm not American. I've lived the majority of my life in Canada, and about 8 years in America now. It doesn't look like communism. Being "progressive" does mean enacting communism, though if that's your bar, yeah I agree San Francisco isn't communist. You're kind of all over the map here, but your general claim seems to be that because San Francisco is not successful at achieving the desirable outcomes of progressive policies (low incarceration, safety, material needs met, low income inequality), it's not progressive. And cause they have empty houses? That's just... bizarre. Everyone knows it's a failed city. That doesn't make it "milquetoast liberal". You know it's a city right? It has to operate within the constraints of the nation it's a part of. Comparing to to sovereign nations that have the full autonomy of the state to enact their policies (Norway, Singapore, Japan) makes no sense.

I'll try to zero in on a few well known progressive policies in San Francisco.

- open air drug markets have been allowed to operate with impunity, drug laws are generally not enforced

- harm reduction programs for drug addicts, here's a list of needle exchange places in San Francisco for example https://endhepcsf.org/san-francisco-needle-exchange-schedule...

- they do provide low cost, and even free, housing for homeless people, addicts etc. I'm not going to link this for you but it's easy to find

- they have long been a sanctuary city and do not aid in enforcement of the immigration policies of the federal government

- here is their universal healthcare - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_San_Francisco it's been around for 15 years

- they elected Chesa Boudin. the "cold feet" they got was cause people aren't safe in San Francisco. people prefer not to be robbed or killed, even progressive ones

The American Overton Window is irrelevant. San Francisco's policies are progressive on an international scale.

Then you want to "turn it to me" and actually put stuff in quotes I've never said lol. Who are you arguing with? I never said anything about restorative justice (I'm actually fairly sympathetic to it). I said San Francisco has enacted a significant number of progressive policies. It has. That's really it.

> but your general claim seems to be that because San Francisco is not successful... it is not progressive

No, the person clearly said the measures were *half measures* and that's the problem with them. And they did give a *specific* example about someone stealing and not being prosecuted for it, but social services/etc. not following up to see why someone may be stealing. You might disagree and argue that not prosecuting people for non-violent crimes (so they don't get permanent records that might affect their employment, housing opportunities etc. forever) should be enough, but it's a bad faith argument to say that the previous commenter simply thinks SF is not progressive because their progressive policies aren't successful. Your logic doesn't follow.

> And cause they have empty houses?

No, because they have empty houses and skyrocketing housing/rent prices and have so much homelessness at the same time.

> Comparing to to sovereign nations that have the full autonomy of the state to enact their policies (Norway, Singapore, Japan) makes no sense.

If it doesn't (your assumption seems to be that a city doesn't have enough political power to enact certain legislation/measures), then you are proving the point you are replying to: that these measures SF has, no matter how progressive they look, can only be half-measures. It doesn't matter what the intentions of people enacting them are, by your reasons (if, again, we take your assumption that SF doesn't have enough political autonomy to do much) can only be milquetoast half measures.

> open air drug markets have been allowed to operate with impunity, drug laws are generally not enforced

ok sure, you kind of have a point. Obviously there are a ton of stuff to be said, but I'll let you have it.

> harm reduction programs for drug addicts, here's a list of needle exchange places in San Francisco for example

Obvious straw man. By definition, these programs try to reduce things like HIV among people who use drugs. If you provided data that showed incidence of HIV increasing among homeless and drug using populations after needle exchanges were introduced, that would be one thing. What does this program have anything to do with anything about the root issues behind homelessness/drug addiction?

> they do provide low cost, and even free, housing for homeless people, addicts etc. I'm not going to link this for you but it's easy to find

No they don't, and you can't link it because it doesn't exist! And no, shelters don't count. If you research a little bit, you will see that a lot of homeless don't like shelters because the communal living situation makes them vulnerable to many other sorts of threats. Long-term, affordable, adequate housing. Find me the link for that.

> they have long been a sanctuary city and do not aid in enforcement of the immigration policies of the federal government

Again, nothing to do with the main point, unless the perpetrator was an undocumented immigrant (and even then, N=1, so what is your point?).

> here is their universal healthcare - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_San_Francisco it's been around for 15 years

Ok, this is good, you take this.

Anyways, you might disagree, but don't just ignore actual points made.

Regarding Healthy San Francisco, it's certainly an incredible program and a fantastic way for a city to try to address the clown show that is the American healthcare system, but it's not universal healthcare. It's missing the universal. You can be someone whose life would be dramatically improved by universal healthcare (aka a person one surgery away from bankruptcy aka the majority of Americans) and be ineligible for Healthy San Francisco.

I will however grant that it is likely the most progressive policy in the city. Even still it falls short of the most basic standards of human rights by other industrialized nations (that being access to healthcare).

> I simply can't get good, data-based positions from those that are here to cry for the blood of those they label criminals.

That's the nature of it, unfortunately. The people who freak out the most about murder are the most excited to call for additional murder, and the mental gymnastics needed to resolve that cognitive dissonance means you're not going to get a good faith argument. They don't even necessarily believe what they're saying in many cases, it's just lashing out after getting riled up thinking they're being targeted somehow. There seems to be a lot of that here in this thread especially, since the victim was a techie.

I try to remind myself that it's not about convincing the person you're responding to, it's about reaching who else might be reading.

I mean, check out how much the comments calling for level heads, or simply linking to contradicting evidence, are getting downvoted. It's wild, and disappointing. These are supposed to be some pretty smart people on this forum.

I dunno what your N=1 point is supposed to mean. Being a sanctuary city is a progressive policy. And calling needle exchange a straw man is odd. How is it a straw man? A straw man means I'm setting up a fake version of my opponent's argument and arguing with that. It's an example of a progressive policy that exists. You seem to be saying it's not progressive because it doesn't solve the root causes. So the only cities that get to be considered progressive have to SOLVE drug addiction? I don't buy into that definition of progressivism. A harm-reduction drug program is a hallmark of progressive cities all over the world.

Here is SF's free and subsidized housing policy. It does exist. https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-sys...

They have 12,000 units. You as a resident will pay between $25 per month and up to 30% of your income (if you have one). I don't believe any of these are shelters. You confidently claim something doesn't exist that a two second google search brings up. Private residence, long-term, extremely subsidized housing does exist in San Francisco. I'm not saying it's adequate, perfect, or solves the homeless problem, but it exists.

My points follow a simple premise. I think SF has sufficient policies to be considered a "progressive" city, and I gave examples of progressive policies. I am not going to do the HN thing where you go back and forth snip-quoting each other's points, that misses the forest for the trees. But if SF is not progressive, then no city in North America is.

No, I am not saying that policy is not progressive, I am saying that that particular policy is irrelevant to housing/homelessness itself. Electric car mandates can be considered progressive. It doesn't mean anything for homelessness. It is a strawman, because needle exchange programs don't claim to reduce addiction, not to mention homelessness. They claim to reduce harm from addiction. By your logic, why not list every single progressive policy that SF has? I am sure SF has a lot of bike lanes, which is also a hallmark of progressive cities. Why didn't you bring that up? There is a drag queen ban in Tennessee for example. By your definition, not banning drag queens is progressive, so that could be a policy you could list.

It is a strawman, because a) you brought it up because it is tangentially related to homelessness and addiction so it "feels" relevant b) it is something that you can use to construct your premise that SF can be considered a progressive city (which sure why not) and c) nobody is arguing with you about if SF is progressive by common definition or if a particular policy is progressive. The argument is that these policies don't try (not solve, not be successful, just try/address) the root causes of homelessness, and are thus half measures, so it doesn't matter what other progressive policies the city has. This is not an argument about semantics.

The broader argument that the person you were responding to (I don't want to speak for them, but just my interpretation) is that these policies are just there to give the appearance of progressiveness without doing anything to change the material conditions, on which I agree. And you don't need to go that far and seize anything, just give universal healthcare and a better social safety net like most EU member countries and that would suffice for now. It is not a binary choice here.

> Here is SF's free and subsidized housing policy. It does exist. https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/the-homelessness-response-sys...

I stand corrected. You are right. But you do say yourself that it is not enough and solves the problem, just exists. And before you say "well does it have to be enough to be progressive", no, that's not what I am saying. This is a progressive policy. But it doesn't change the material reality that housing prices are skyrocketing and clearly there aren't enough of these units to house everyone that is on the streets. So let's assume there is a sudden change of heart and everyone in bay area starts voting conservative. These two policies being the progressive policies they are, are rolled back. Besides straight up throwing people in the jail for being homeless (which, coincidentally, Tennessee just passed a law for), how would the roll-back of these two policies change the situation in SF for the better? I'll tell you: it wouldn't. It would a) cause more harm by spreading blood-borne diseases among the addicted population b) increase the number of homeless people.

Your points don't follow a simple premise. Your flow of thought seems to be:

SF has progressive policies that are, while not enough, and some of which are not even related to the issue at hand, progressive -> SF is a progressive city -> SF has homelessness -> SF is a failed city because it is progressive -> Progressive cities = bad because SF is progressive and homelessness isn't solved, so progressive policies can't solve homelessness. -> progressive policies broadly = bad

But this is just playing with semantics. The OP's point is that these policies are there to give an appearance of being progressive. It is not the standard argument to anything. It just doesn't solve the problem, that's it. Let's assume the OP and I want to be considered a different category called progressive+, the policy definition of which is anything that fully tries to solve a given social problem like homelessness. If we think that progressive policies, which is a strict subset of progressive+ policies, don't try to solve the problem, then we are done. That's it. Notice that they are a subset of policies of progressive+, so they give a semblance of it, but they are not progressive+. If the OP believes that unless you try policies in progessive+, you are doomed to fail, then your argument doesn't make sense, because it doesn't matter what direction the half measures are, because they don't try to address the problem. Being half-measures, they try to give the appearance of a sincere effort.

On the other hand, let's do a thought experiment. If every big city in every red state where it is mandatory to drive the biggest most polluting cars possible and it is a crime to now own a gun or whatever, and using alcoholic mouthwash is considered drinking, and anybody that speaks Spanish needs to report for a daily check in with customs (for reasons longer than we should get into, cities don't tend to vote for conservatives usually) decide to provide permanent adequate housing and healthcare to every resident in their state. That's a great policy, and while I would have a lot of other issues with such a state/city, I would really like that policy. That policy would be in the subset of policies that progressive+ policies have that the progressive subset doesn't. You are playing with semantics, because I don't care if a particular city is considered progressive or not. A city's reputation is irrelevant. The other policies (while draconian in this example) are not relevant.

It seems to me that rising crime in the western world is a general pattern. The biggest port city in my (European) country (still pretty small compared to big US cities, granted) switched to a right-wing nationalist government about a decade ago, after literal decades of unbroken social democrat rule. And gang violence has only gone up since then.

I'm not blaming the current mayor for that, because other nearby cities are suffering from the same problem, including those run by social democrats. But the policies that the right wing have been shouting would definitely work to keep crime down haven't been working here, demonstrably.

If you're insinuating that progressive politics per se somehow inevitably lead to crime and urban decay, have a look north of the border.

What passes for centrist politics up here in Canada's major cities would make Berkley look like a conservative stronghold (at least in terms of economic policy... maybe we lag behind in biodynamic freegan wine co-ops). Yet Toronto and Montreal are by far the safest large cities on the continent. We absolutely have the same kinds of problems — homelessness, poverty, inequality — but our "socialist" welfare safety net and public healthcare have so far kept us out of the dystopian mess that seems to be unfolding in the US.

> but our "socialist" welfare safety net and public healthcare have so far kept us out of the dystopian mess

I've been to Vancouver a while ago and that's the first time I've seen open drug market and homeless camp taking over a city block. SF didn't feature such sights by then yet, that came later. Haven't visited since then - maybe something changed, but certainly the same dystopian mess could be found in Canada back then.

One thing to note: Toronto's police annual budget is about the same as SFPD's, even though Toronto has more than 3X as many people. In other words, SF has much worse pre-capita crime than Toronto, even though they spend 3X as much on policing per capita.

I know SF already spends 100k/yr per homeless resident, but we really need to push that up."

This whole line of thought is absurd, you're in a bubble.

Yes, they definitely have made your life better.

If there were no ads, people would judge based on the quality of products, instead of being manipulated to buy things.

I obviously block ads. I understand that lots of things would cost money that currently are free, but many things would still be free. The old internet consisted mainly of free things and was not infested with ads.

Please, tell me one positive effect that ads have on society as a whole. (So not for you personally, because I know they make money)

Having loads of money isn't just about generating value. It's about extracting value.

It might lag a bit, but almost exactly. That's the whole idea. Real household incomes in the US from 1950 to 2000 very nearly doubled, and purchasing power increased even more. The 'rich get richer' is irrelevant if everyone else is, too.

> By your metric Bell Labs should be worth more than any other company in existence.

The fact that they aren't means that no, they shouldn't be. It's the capitalism equivalent of "the guy with a great idea for an app". If you aren't actually delivering that value to people that need it, you aren't getting paid for it.

> Having loads of money isn't just about generating value. It's about extracting value.

Generating and extracting value are the same thing, ignoring the connotation.

If you create a device where, with one press of a big red button, you can cure cancer/world hunger/war/disease, but you never actually press that button? You haven't actually created any value. You haven't done anything.

> If you create a device where, with one press of a big red button, you can cure cancer/world hunger/war/disease, but you never actually press that button?

What if you create such a device and decide to publicly share the design, with no plans to monopolize it? You'd probably be the lose financially, but did you not create the most value?

Have Linux or Git created no real value except for the companies that can build service models around them?

As for bubbles, I would hazard that your accusation is a confession.

To think the 3rd most significant source of value in your life is cheap microcontrollers is.. wild.

Indoor plumbing? Refrigeration? A health department that ensures you aren't eating food fried in gutter oil?

You are taking these entirely for granted, because everyone has those, right? This is a great example of what privilege actually is.

Let's make this simpler for you.

Your original proposal is that, of course, the wealthy (read: anyone that makes more than you) have too much, the homeless have too little. So, like a child faced with this problem, you surmise we should take things from the wealthy and give them to the poor.

SF spends $100,000 per year, per homeless resident, on 'fixing homelessness'. Exactly how much more should they be spending, and why would that change anything?

Had someone like this tell me Venezuelans should be supporting Democratic candidates...like what. A country whose people are so poor a lot of them wonder what they're going to eat next should be focusing on another country's politicians?

Next will be the inevitable fallout of destroying ~45 trillion in wealth. The consequences of which, bluntly, I can't even really fathom at the moment.

I'm assuming you'll be planning to tax more to give the effected some sort of UBI? Please confirm and I'll explain how that will also blow up in your face.

> conceptually the solution is pretty simple

It is if you don't actually think about it. At all.

your arrogance is surpassed only by your foolishness.

Don't you think you would have a stronger argument without resorting to this kind of thing?

See, this is what I mean. This sort of 'solution' is advocated by people that have never bothered to contemplate the second order effects.

Try to imagine what would happen if we implemented this. Anyone that is homeless gets permanent, free housing. You pat yourself on the back.

Except, now I sell my house. And I come to you and tell you that I'm homeless. Are you going to give me permanent, free housing too?

Because if you do, you have now created the economic catastrophe that I described.

And if you don't, because I don't deserve it on the basis of XYZ, you've just recreated section 8.

yes. it probably won't be as nice as something you, a wealthy person, could afford to buy, and it probably won't be exactly where you want to live, but everyone could be guaranteed safe and stable housing without complicated means testing.

> you've just recreated Section 8.

Section 8 disqualifies people for all kinds of "character" issues associated with drug use, mental illness, etc. That's a big reason there are so many homeless on the street. I am against means testing, but even that system could be a lot better than it is now.

Perhaps you can explain why taxation is so anathema to you. Are you one of the nutcases who consider it theft?

No, because despite the mixed-bag that a single payer system would bring, it is not actually destroying healthcare. Unless you intend to force them to provide their services for no pay.

> Perhaps the costs of allowing a deleterious institution to continue existing dwarf the costs of reforming them, on occasion.

Absolutely. Private property is not one of those institutions.

> Family formation is down, bankruptcy is up, and somehow I imagine that you have not figured in the trillions in lost value from these and the like realities that are extant because the 3rd most basic human need is unaffordable in this country.

It is substantially less than destroying the entire real market, unquestionably. That doesn't mean that it's not a problem that should be addressed. But free, permanent housing to everyone is not, in any way, a practical solution.

> Perhaps you can explain why taxation is so anathema to you. Are you one of the nutcases who consider it theft?

I'm not. I've got no problem at all paying my taxes. I have no interest in those taxes being wasted.

Welfare spending is the least of your concerns, then.

>it is not actually destroying healthcare.

I didn't say it would. "Healthcare" is not the same as "the healthcare industry as it currently exists".

>Absolutely. Private property is not one of those institutions.

Ironically: despite the mixed bag that crashing the value of real estate by implementing a housing guarantee (or even simply increasing construction velocity) would bring, it would not actually destroy the concept of "private property", legally or otherwise.

>But free, permanent housing to everyone is not, in any way, a practical solution.

Again, that's not what I said. You seem to have a problem with this. It would be interesting to see you actually argue against something other than a strawman. Are you capable of that?

EDIT: Going out on a limb here, but are you perchance a real estate agent? Because that would be the most hilarious of conflicts of interest.

Yep. In fact, I specifically asked you for your proposal, and you chose to rant about identity politics instead of policy. Which is on brand, I guess.

> Going out on a limb here, but are you perchance a real estate agent? Because that would be the most hilarious of conflicts of interest.

Nope. The current system for performing real estate transactions is wildly inefficient, rent-seeking, insecure, and I'd love to see it destroyed.

As for the gadgets which you alluded to as contemporary society's savior just a few replies ago, I tend to attribute their existence to the basic research and, yes, cheap microcontrollers that made them possible, rather than the glorified middlemen who repackaged them as high-margin luxuries and sold them with spyware.

> So, like a child faced with this problem, you surmise we should take things from the wealthy and give them to the poor.

Also, like a concerned and informed adult, but yes.

>Exactly how much more should they be spending,

However much it would cost to house them permanently (and reduce housing insecurity in general), bounded by tax revenues, of course.

>and why would that change anything?

Well, generally-speaking, when a homeless person has housing, they cease to be homeless.

>Let's make this simpler for you.

I'd like you to stop projecting your own insecurities on me.

Even if you solve housing (NIMBYism, slow permitting process, low-density zoning) crime won't solve itself. (Because organized crime fits in its niche, and doesn't want to give it up. And it'd require changes of federal law to move it.)

This is an interesting wrinkle. I would hope that addressing the corruption that enables NIMBYism would also affect the viability of organized crime.

I disagree that law enforcement is underfunded. Public services which would reduce the prevalence of crime are absolutely underfunded; law enforcement is not one of those services, as it currently receives enough funding (and more) to carry out its part in crime-lowering efforts. Fixing its mismanagement means funding separate institutions dedicated to oversight, for example.

At this point, I'm fairly certain that it's a pipe dream to assume that it's possible to "fix it" without serious sustained effort (which costs some money obviously) and without also drastically improving the adjacent systems (as you said also). Sure, we can call it social services, but the goal is to really reduce both crime and police brutality.

It's a complex problem, but very simply the funding issue is that militarization was cheap (because military handed off a lot of things for cheap/free), and any and all social service thing got more expensive simply due to big "external" factors like the Baumol effect (human labor is relatively getting more expensive compared to anything that benefits from capital investment, ie. industrialization, mass production, technological progress), the Southern Strategy culminated, War on Drugs revved up, social polarization increased, inequality shoot up, these all led to more crime, more tough-on-crime programs, more people in the criminal justice system, and that's a lot more expensive. And of course reintegration and related social programs got worse for the same reasons.

See also https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-mor...

The author here confesses his disconnect with the majority of people in San Francisco. This assessment is correct - the author and his views are disconnected from those of the majority of working people in San Francisco.

The magnitude of the wealth disparity in San Francisco is almost hard to comprehend. Many in this thread have advocated militarizing the city, and cleaning it out of poor people so that it can be some kind of elite utopia for tech bros and VCs. The people of San Francisco do not share this view. That they do not share this view is not in my opinion (although it is) - but in the opinion of the parent poster. As those from more equitable European cities have said in this thread - Europeans don't have these kinds of problems where they live.

The US already has one and a half million people incarcerated, which does not count all those on probation or parole. It has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, although I think Rwanda has more, no large or industrialized country has a higher incarceration rate. Not sure increasing the incarceration rate even more is the solution.

Name another country just as free and open with fewer incarcerated. Not Switzerland for sure.

Also the incarcerated population is 1500k not 500k.

You take those 1500k and put them into some other country and have them do the same thing they did that got them incarcerated in US prison, and unless they are friends with somebody important in the government there they'll get incarcerated there too. Furthermore, in lots of countries selling / smuggling drugs is an executable offense. Furthermore, many of these 1500k would not even be admitted to enter many Euro countries with the low incarceration rates that you envy.

Umm... European cities do have high wealth disparity. Checkout an ethnic ghetto the next time your in Manchester or Paris, for example... there are areas of these cities that get scary AF after dark.

Homelessness is not a crime... but the homeless and drug addicted commit a lot of crimes. And they (particularly the drug addicted) frequently have very little to lose and very severe motivators to rob, mug, etc. As others have said, not policing crime is recipe for disaster, chaos, and tragedy. And it is a human tragedy: for the people who are suffering homelessness, drug addiction; the people within those domains who are victims of violent crime, and for society at large.

A lot of homeless people in CA were not born in CA... and a lot of them didn't hit the street in CA... they migrated to the west coast. Drug addicted homeless people flock to SF and LA because (1) the weather is better than many places in the country, (2) the extremely lax policing, (3) availability of drugs, and (4) the social support system: food, shelter, clothes, money. Indulging depravity is not a solution.

SF needs to double/triple police presence, prosecute crime, and significantly increase drug and mental health services.

I was born in SF, lived there off and on for many years, and have family who still live in the Bay Area... parts of SF are just disgusting now (human feces and trash all over place)... parts of Oakland and Berkeley are no better. Parts of Oakland have so much broken safety glass on the street it's a glass/gravel road.

I used walk around SF late at night as little as 10 years ago; now, there are so many places in SF that I would not walk around in after dark unless I had no other choice. This is coming from a white dude who used to play basketball at playgrounds in South Central LA on saturday nights in the late 90's (because the pick-up basketball was that good).

Until you live somewhere else, you may not understand just how bad and crazy the situation in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, Los Angeles really is. Where I live now, I can leave thousands of dollars of stuff in my car in pain sight and nothing gets stolen... ever. My neighbors' kids leave their bikes on their front lawn overnight and they are still there days later.

I once saw a person break into a Telsa on Piedmont Ave. in Oakland at 2pm on Saturday in front of about 50 people to snatch a backpack. WTF?

Lots of places have poverty, not all of them have the level of crime that SF has

There are 100K techies in SF. The number of white techies being murdered in SF is now not zero anymore. If you’re white and rich in SF, violent crime statistics anecdotes aside have no bearing in your reality.

My brother and I were no longer living there because we were in college. My parents decided to send my sister, then starting highschool, to a city in central Mexico with friends of the family to avoid having her grow up in what was a life and death environment. My parents stayed.

Mexicans speak a lot about cartel wars and the violence it comes with. What is not often mentioned is that what _really_ kills the city and society is the unorganized crime that pops up when laws are not applied.

The cartel wars laid bare that the police was not going to prosecute anything in fear of retaliation. This opened the door to anyone to commit any sort of crime. Carjacking was increasingly common. My uncle fled one such attempt and miraculously escaped to the US unharmed but with his truck showered with bullets. My mother saw a guy getting shot in the streets just because of road rage. Friends had their parents killed or kidnapped.

Every crime that goes unprosecuted is an invitation for a repeat crime. This is as true in Juarez as it is in San Francisco.

The most basic definition and purpose of the state is to hold the monopoly of violence. It must jealously protect this. The alternative is unsustainable anarchy followed by someone else filling that void.

San Francisco has been ceding its monopoly of violence for years if not decades.

Whatever the fix for institutional racism is need not be contradictory to Broken Window. They can work together.

Now obviously there's a real debate to be had about how severely petty theft and vandalism should be punished. I mean, George Floyd was killed over a counterfeit bill.

But once you get into violent crime everybody is on the same page.

But basically, in order to get all the violent crime under control, you need a hefty police force. And a hefty police force means a lot of cops roving around hassling poor people and people of color who are just trying to live their lives, which is what the left-wing activists get angry about.

Figuring out how to get effective policing without intrinsic racism/classism that always seems to come with that is a big challenge.

The broken windows theory isn’t about violent crime, it’s literally about property crime and offenses like vandalism. The idea is that when that kind of petty crime goes unchecked, the crime situation in the area spirals, both in terms of quantity and severity, eventually leading to more violent crime.

You can disagree with the theory all you want, but to assert that the issue is that it should only apply to violent crime is to fundamentally misunderstand the assertion the theory is making.

As a result, the term "broken windows" now carries a ton of baggage, and is sometimes used as a racist dog whistle.

What some, or even a majority, go on to redefine it as does not change its original meaning. If a place looks like a dump people will treat it like a dump. You and wherever you read this from is conflating the issue with racism.

Most engineers aren't working on siege works any more.

How about we listen to what people are actually saying instead of twisting meaning to fit a narrative to further control speech? For those that are offended by speech and are demanding, essentially, the removal of the first amendment, it is a learning opportunity that words don't actually harm, only actions.

(And that’s just one state, every single state has had similar issues with this in their police forces)

The core problem is that this very important part hasn’t been happening.

It’s very simple. People who are never looked after by their community, but only harassed, beaten and killed, will not see themselves as part of that community but as an enemy.

Social values really matter. Countries with low crime rates don't have them because the police are educated about deescalation. That is important too and I support that, but the police are largely irrelevant to the underlying issue. This is coming from someone who grew up thinking social conservative types and people going on about social values needed to relax. I was wrong and realized that when I had children. Children absolutely need stability, reassurance, love and guidance from their mother and father, it's absolutely critical.

violence is inherent to animal life and it does not require delusion. that's like saying an alligator is delusional for attacking a deer.

Police are good for exactly one thing: responding to violence with violence

> The policy targeted people in areas with a significant amount of physical disorder and there appeared to be a causal relationship between the adoption of broken windows policing and the decrease in crime rate. Sridhar, however, discusses other trends (such as New York City's economic boom in the late 1990s) that created a "perfect storm" that contributed to the decrease of crime rate much more significantly than the application of the broken windows policy. Sridhar also compares this decrease of crime rate with other major cities that adopted other various policies and determined that the broken windows policy is not as effective.

> In a 2007 study called "Reefer Madness" in the journal Criminology and Public Policy, Harcourt and Ludwig found further evidence confirming that mean reversion fully explained the changes in crime rates in the different precincts in New York in the 1990s.[38] Further alternative explanations that have been put forward include the waning of the crack epidemic,[39] unrelated growth in the prison population by the Rockefeller drug laws,[39] and that the number of males from 16 to 24 was dropping regardless of the shape of the US population pyramid.

As always, the wikipedia article is a good place to start to look into further sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

It's time to let "broken window theory," and bloodthirsty, punitive "justice" strategies, die.

Perhaps this is true, and perhaps this is a part of the issue the usa has with "different facts for both sides."

> I'm certain that there are studies out there showing that broken windows policing was in fact the main contributor to the decrease in crime.

I'm going to challenge you on this because I feel like this basically just contributes to the problem. Think about what you wrote, you're "certain," certain that studies exist showing our that broken windows policing works, and thus you believe it works.

You arrived at a conclusion of the world with, genuinely, no evidence. You don't even know if the evidence exists! In fact you arrived at two conclusions: that your conclusion is correct, and that a lot of other people proved this with good studies.

Now I challenge you to simply read the wikipedia article on the subject in its entirety and pay close attention to the "criticism" section. I've done this because I care deeply about the issue, and I've also read the various studies linked. For me, I found the "for broken policing" studies to be dubious and problematic, and the criticisms to be valid. As a result, my understanding of the world is that broken window policing doesn't work, the basic theory is a misunderstanding of actual mechanisms, and that the application of broken windows policing pulls resources from more effective solutions while also delivering inequitable justice to society. So, when you're read up as well, do you still disagree with me?

> You arrived at a conclusion of the world with, genuinely, no evidence. You don't even know if the evidence exists! In fact you arrived at two conclusions: that your conclusion is correct, and that a lot of other people proved this with good studies.

Here's the thing - I do have evidence. But it's the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, not something I've read in some paper or study. My evidence is (I see no other way to put it than to be frank) just common sense.

I've met plenty of people in my life. I've seen humans and I know how humans behave. When there is threat of punishment, legitimate actual punishment, people fall into line. You have to know this to be true - it's literally human nature. People will act out as much as they possibly can before things get serious. Go look at any school, for instance. There's a massive difference between the "harsh" teachers' classrooms and the teachers who are known to be pushovers.

Punishments work. Deterrence works. It's something I personally know, as someone who has faced punishments many times. Another thing I personally know is that you can't take any shit. If people start trying to test your shit, test your boundaries, you have to stamp that behavior out immediately, or it will intensify. Again, it's a human nature thing. There exists bullies and sociopaths out there, and they will keep raising the bar of abuse. So in my view, tolerating petty crimes only leads to people pushing boundaries and more and more violent crime. Just like troublemaker students pushing the teacher further and further in poorly run classrooms.

And also, quite frankly, I like clean spaces. I hate grafitti, and drug addicts bothering everyone, and drunks passed out in the subway cars. I feel that our society should not tolerate such disorderliness, and instead should actively shun and punish such behavior, in order to strongly incentivize people to become productive and contributing members of society. Tolerating that stuff is like handing these people the keys to their own destruction. Sometimes other people do indeed know better and society needs to help these people get control of their lives.

Have I seen studies or other acceptable documentation for my conclusion? Nothing that I can specifically remember, or at least nothing that I have at hand. But I don't feel I NEED documentation. It's just so obvious to me that punishing crime serves to deter crime, and the harsher the punishment, the stronger the deterrent. I personally don't commit any crimes, I'd guess that at least 90% of people don't either, and I feel that harshly punishing things like vandalism or burglary will only make society better for all law-abiding citizens.

> But it's the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, not something I've read in some paper or study

Known as "anecdotal evidence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

> "Anecdotal evidence is considered the least certain type of scientific information. Researchers may use anecdotal evidence for suggesting new hypotheses, but never as validating evidence."

> My evidence is (I see no other way to put it than to be frank) just common sense.

No, it isn't, because it isn't common to me and other people that are in favor of evidence-based judicial methods, nor in general, left-leaning people. I notice a tendency of conservative ideology to claim "common sense" for their principles, but this seems to have usually just meant "the traditional beliefs I hold, backed by anecdotal evidence, confirmation and selection bias, and arrived at by refusing to think past the very first principle conclusion of a subject." A good example is "build the wall." Immigrants are coming in and that's Bad, for whatever reason. Simple, build a wall, that'll keep them out. I've seen fences keep my dogs in the backyard. It all works! This example is unrelated to the current topic, more representation of the style of thinking I believe necessary to maintain positions that fly directly in the face of evidence and deeper analysis.

> I've met plenty of people in my life. I've seen humans and I know how humans behave. When there is threat of punishment, legitimate actual punishment, people fall into line.

This argument could be used to justify, for example, corporeal punishment, which has been demonstrated to not work. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/corporal-pu...

It's another great example of why your self-assured "common sense" position fails. "If I threaten to beat my children, they stop stealing candy." No, they simply get better at stealing candy in a way that you don't notice, because you selected for avoiding traumatic punishment, not correcting behavior. Ample evidence holds this to be true and it is now the generally agreed upon medical consensus in child rearing, in short, it is "common sense" for those in the know.

> You have to know this to be true - it's literally human nature.

I don't know this to be true, it contradicts my experience, driven by a considered and researched approach to interpersonal relationships. Dale Carnegie is considered by many to be the foremost expert in interpersonal relationships and effective communication - where does he recommend "threat of punishment" in interpersonal relationships? Instead, he recommends empathy, treating others like equals, calmness, and clear communication. These are incompatible with harsh punishment.

Try this on for size: who gets better results, the asshole boss wielding the stick, or the boss that puts in the effort to get to know their team, communicate expectations, and shares and celebrates wins? Pick up any startup book recommended by all these ycombinator folks, see what type of boss they recommend you be.

Regarding your teacher example, I was once a teacher, and I come from a family of teachers. I'm not arguing for teachers to be pushovers, but the "harsh teachers" don't really get good results, at best they might get a quiet classroom. Is that what you want to measure and select for?

> Punishments work. Deterrence works.

Hammurabi code logic, and punishment + deterrence aren't as effective judicial strategies as restorative justice and rehabilitation of criminals. Example: Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_Norway with the lowest recidivism rates in the world.

> Norway's prison system is renowned as one of the most effective and humane in the world.

Yet somehow this "least punitive" justice system on earth has the best results. This contradicts your "common sense."

> Another thing I personally know is that you can't take any shit. If people start trying to test your shit, test your boundaries, you have to stamp that behavior out immediately, or it will intensify.

Trying to apply your own interpersonal philosophy like this to a society's judicial strategy alone seems flawed. This is vague, which alone means we shouldn't be basing policy off of it. It also doesn't sound to me like a very developed personal philosophy. People have been writing about interpersonal philosophy for a while and I'm surprised this simplistic "smash those that give you shit" style didn't evaporate upon first reading of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

> There exists bullies and sociopaths out there, and they will keep raising the bar of abuse.

Ironically, those in my camp find the "retributive justice" arguments you're making to be sociopathic. You see a homeless drug addict and immediately jump to "throw this degenerate in prison," rather than the more empathetic take of wondering what caused the person's life to fall to such a wretched state. You'd rather spend the money keeping them behind bars, punishing them for their "personal failings," than spend (demonstrably less) money trying to help them. As a former conservative, I believe this is because empathy, especially for perceived degenerates, feels icky and feels like weakness, which is an intolerable personal feeling to have. Forgive me for reaching so far if this isn't how you feel, but this is what I perceive that other still-conservative people believe.

> So in my view, tolerating petty crimes only leads to people pushing boundaries and more and more violent crime.

There isn't evidence to support this, and also this ignores that the definition of "crime" can change. Example, there's no good reason for weed to be illegal, and yet alcohol to be legal, considering alcohol is the far more dangerous drug. We saw exactly what is to be expected when alcohol is made illegal: the formation of alcohol cartels (mafia) that took over the streets. When prohibition ended, their power (income) was cut into pieces and the era of the mafia ended. No, going to war with them in the streets didn't solve it, ending prohibition did. And yet by your logic every person smoking weed on a street in Texas is technically a criminal. By tolerating their action we "tolerate more violent crime." The logic doesn't hold.

> I feel that our society should not tolerate such disorderliness, and instead should actively shun and punish such behavior, in order to strongly incentivize people to become productive and contributing members of society.

We tried that, and it doesn't seem to work. It turns out the best solution to homelessness is simply housing the homeless. "Housing First" is what I'm describing, and evidence shows it works better than what you're suggesting: https://endhomelessness.org/resource/housing-first/

It's also gross that what you're arguing for is kicking a beaten dog.

> society needs to help these people get control of their lives.

It's super weird to me that to the extent you're willing to acknowledge society has responsibility to their fellow man (who happen to be homeless), it's only to argue that we must essentially brutalize them to make them feel even worse about being homeless / drug addicts / whatever.

> Have I seen studies or other acceptable documentation for my conclusion? Nothing that I can specifically remember, or at least nothing that I have at hand

That's because there are none. That's because your position is based on feelings, not facts.

> But I don't feel I NEED documentation.

As an engineer, if I said this in a meeting about considering which technology to choose for a given application, I would be fired. I don't know why you think this is an acceptable way to opine about social issues, literally willfully ignorantly.

> It's just so obvious to me that punishing crime serves to deter crime, and the harsher the punishment, the stronger the deterrent

You are partially correct, but then entirely incorrect, regarding harsher punishment being a stronger deterrent:

> "The certainty of being caught is a vastly more "powerful deterrent than the punishment.

> "Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime."

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf

> I personally don't commit any crimes

I don't believe you. Have you weighed every lobster you ever purchased? Ever picked up a feather without knowing it was a bald eagle feather? Ever diver storm sewer water for fun?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/03/29/crime-law-...

There may be as many 300,000 federal regulations that carry criminal penalties. What's your bet you've never broken a single one? (hint: you basically can't possibly know, and this is why you should never talk to cops btw)

> and I feel that harshly punishing things like vandalism or burglary will only make society better for all law-abiding citizens.

This is reactionary rhetoric that just "others" undesirables and is why people like me push back so hard, btw. There's no such thing as a "law-abiding citizen" as I explained earlier. I don't want to get too much into the weeds of this, how cops are trained to see everyone as a potential enemy etc etc, but this is where this rhetoric from my position comes from.

Because you're self admittedly willfully ignorant, nobody should listen to what you have to say, right?. You literally said "you don't need documentation." Why should we care what you say, then? You have nothing to offer but whatever random stuff you come up with.

First of all, I feel like your post emanates barely-contained anger. Your choice of words and tone kind of betrays your contempt for me and my opinion. You're "fascinated" by my response, my views are "sociopathic", I'm "ignorant," yada yada. I can't say it makes it an appealing prospect to continue the discussion, because we fundamentally disagree, and I have a feeling that more insults will be flung my way. But against my instincts, I'll continue.

The first few segments of your response have to do with rejection of my principle of "common sense" as a guiding principle in my opinions about some of these issues. You go through point by point, rebutting each example I listed with a detailed refutation and a link to some study. There are quite a few strawmans and a lot of insinuations that I'm a conservative. I'll just start this discussion by telling you I voted for Biden, I don't ascribe some umbrella label to myself, so let's just cut this name calling out right now.

Here's the problem. I tell you, "my entire life experience tells me that X means Y. I know this to be a fundamental truth of the universe. I am CERTAIN of this." You reply: "That's totally incorrect. Here's a study or example where X does not equal Y. Here's my explanation of why X does not equal Y. Therefore you are wrong and willfully ignorant for still believing X equals Y." But what you don't understand is that it is very hard to change someone's mind when they are CERTAIN of something. It's like if you told me 2 + 2 equals 5, and linked to some study proving it, and wrote an essay on why it is the case, it still wouldn't change my mind. Because it directly contradicts my reality. My lived experience. My "common sense" position of, for instance, punishments being effective to deter crime is based on literally every experience I've ever had in my entire life. Are they perfect deterrents? Of course not. But I've changed my own behavior to avoid punishment, I've seen a million other people do the same, and there's no possible universe in which I could just read some study online and go "wow, I guess punishments don't work to deter crime!" That's not me being willfully ignorant, that's me not wasting my time with obvious falsehoods. Forgive my being harsh, but the "don't punish crimes" movement is the same as the flat earther movement in my view - so stupid, so obviously incorrect, that it isn't even worth a second of my time.

Now onto the next point I want to make. I think it should be perfectly clear to you that when I talk about punishing crimes, I'm talking about SERIOUS crimes. We're on a thread about the stabbing of Bob Lee, after all. For you to suggest my opinion is dumb because I speed or don't correctly weigh my lobster and therefore technically everyone is a criminal... that's YOU being willfully ignorant, dude. Everybody speeds but practically nobody stabs, vandalizes, robs, rapes, etc. THESE are the crimes that I want harshly punished. It's literally common sense, a theme that seems to keep popping up here. I'm honestly just dumbfounded that you seriously think me saying "I don't commit any crimes" is tantamount to me saying "I have literally never sped or broken any law in my entire life." Like god damn. When I talk about law abiding citizens I'm talking about people who don't commit crimes that make life drastically shittier for everyone else. And the vast majority of people on the planet fall into this category.

I could continue on, and go over the Norway thing and how I believe it's a completely different situation than the US, or go over the housing the homeless thing and talk about how expensive that would be in SF, or any of the other points, but I feel this would be a waste of time. Because I would guess it directly contradicts your lived experience. That's the thing. I don't comment to change people's minds. I don't comment to dunk on my political oppponents. I don't comment to show everyone what an idiot the other side is via angry point-by-point takedowns that are dripping with contempt. I literally just comment on HN because I like the discussion, I like hearing how people think and what their insights are. Hence what I originally commented: I wanted to comment "so we can exchange perspectives and see what someone 'on the other side' of the issue thinks." I really think there's no need for the clear contempt of the tone of your reply. We disagree, dude. It's no reason to get emotional. There are a lot of people out there and you'll likely find yourself disagreeing with many of them.

Same here. People are ignoring the research that highly punitive retributive justice systems don't work, and reformative justice systems do, because of some combination of yellow journalism and cognitive / rhetorical fallacy.

> Studies are not the arbiters of truth.

Certainly not all truths, and I agree with you that we can't expect people to fact check literally every aspect of their lives. However, your flat earth example is fantastic, here's why: the earth being flat is common sense. If you don't fly (many people) and have never seen the ocean (many people), don't think much about orbits or astronomy, why would you think the earth is round? There's a reason flat earthism is so popular, it really does "make good horse sense."

Grant me for a moment that to believe the earth is flat in 2023 requires believing in a massive global conspiracy, maybe instead let's consider a detached farmer in 1920. How about this guy: https://youtu.be/RS27u6IqWt0 . Consider what's necessary to know with certainty that the earth is a globe, and consider how they disagree with "common sense."

A flat earth would allow for seeing all the way to the end of it, right, so since you can't see all the way to new York city from here, the earth must be a globe, right? "No, fog prevents that, and tall trees, and mountains." Ok, the shadow cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse is always round, and the only shape that can do that is a sphere. "Well, that's nice, but I've never seen a lunar eclipse, and I don't really care to sit around moving shapes in front of a candle to see if that's true." Ok, time zones! If the earth was flat it would be the same time in new York and San Francisco, instead it's different. "Is it different? I didn't know, I don't have a telephone."

Without resorting to things completely outside the realm of "common sense," and basically coming up with good explanations for someone's daily experiences, i don't see how you could explain to someone (pre space age) how the earth is a globe. Can you think of a way?

I wish there was a more polite way to say "willful ignorant" but my point is basically, you've had the explanations, with evidence, for why your common sense doesn't align with reality, set before you, and you said "I don't want to read that, I'm good with my view of reality." I'm not trying to sell you essential oils here, this is just something outside your domain and to do it well takes some research and perhaps I guess something that disagrees with the "common sense" of some people. What else can I call that?

And anyway, surely you agree that when it comes to setting up our laws, infrastructure, we want to make sure to be doing so correctly? Before we build a bridge, don't we want some studies done on concrete before choosing the right kind? And isn't it best to have the domain experts doing that? And doesn't it make sense that even though every time you tried to use consumer concrete to build something with a gap, it crumbled, that's ok because we use a different kind for building in industrial applications with techniques involving rebar?

And I still hold the position that the retributive model isn't common sense, I've found great success with never wielding a stick as a leader in various spheres: teacher, social worker, sales leader, engineering lead, scout leader, burning man camp leader. It just seems common sense and agreed with my every day experience that punishment drives shit results. A story from "How to Win Friends": a tech fails to fuel a stunt pilot's plane well, he nearly crashes and perishes. Tech is apoplectic, apologizing profusely, offering to resign, pilot says "why would I fire the tech least likely to make a fuel calculation mistake in the future?" I only use this example to demonstrate that even in the domain you chose, that being business / school / interpersonal relationships, the "retributive " model isn't common sense or effective, though again I don't think it's a great idea to try to draw too many conclusions between handling a fuel calculation error and a premeditated crime or crime of passion.

> "I don't commit any crimes" is tantamount to me saying "I have literally never sped or broken any law in my entire life."

Well, do you see why maybe your common sense is maladjusted? For me I'm genuinely surprised at your surprise. What else is a criminal but someone who breaks the law? That's why I pushed back so hard! Your definition is vague! "Someone that does these crimes I think are really bad." Well the USA doesn't care if you murdered someone or committed certain kinds of white collar fraud, or even something more mundane, all are felonies and you don't get to vote after. You're a criminal in all circumstances. Hence my point that your common sense doesn't map well onto an actual society, or at least not this one.

> We disagree, dude. It's no reason to get emotional.

This is the extraordinary privilege you live with. Imagine the conversation is discussing sodomy laws in Texas. "who cares, doesn't affect me, and anyway isn't that kinda gross?" You have the privilege to not worry about it, other people are literally fighting for their right to exist.

If you're finding anger in response to your position, why is your response to hand wave it? "Damn bro, calm down." Are you not at all curious why someone would be so passionate about this issue? Because what we're talking about is America's bloodthirsty retributive justice system that's resulted in one of the highest incarceration rates on earth and essentially a continuation of slavery (prison labor, for profit privatized prisons), and you're dispassionately making "common sense" arguments for not only how that's great, but we should do more of it, and by the way you don't care about whatever evidence I show you demonstrating that you're wrong, you just want to continue believing it or whatever. No shit that's infuriating lol.

> When I talk about law abiding citizens I'm talking about people who don't commit crimes that make life drastically shittier for everyone else.

There's plenty of things people do that make life drastically shittier for everyone else, that isn't illegal. Banks making bad investments and crashing the economy in 2008. Sending soldiers to die in foreign countries. Locking up refugees. Lobbying to keep minimum wage low. Torpedoing welfare budgets. Driving gas guzzling vehicles. Operating a fossil fuel company. Rejecting health insurance claims. Addicting someone to alert bubble dopamine hits. Harvesting user data.

Seems common sense to me that destroying the Gulf coast through blatant malpractice is just as bad as punching someone in the face, but nobody went to jail after the BP oil spill.

> Are they perfect deterrents? Of course not. But I've changed my own behavior to avoid punishment, I've seen a million other people do the same, and there's no possible universe in which I could just read some study online and go "wow, I guess punishments don't work to deter crime!"

It's worth pointing out by the way that this is basically a strawman, no study I linked said "we should stop punishing crime," the basic argument is that the best deterrent is certainty of being punished, whereas degree of punishment holds basically no effect. In this context that means the SFPD quiet quitting is having a much larger effect on increase in crime than, say, eliminating cash bail. In any case the other arguments are about actually solving what drives crime more than anything else which is economic disparity: improving that doesn't require halting the punishment of crime, my point is that the call to arms are a distraction towards ineffective solutions.

Btw I forget that some Americans consider "conservative" an insult, I didn't mean that in a name calling way, I meant that in an attempt to accurately describe the political leanings of the position you hold. I maintain that retributive justice is a conservative policy position, and indeed is a favorite of your Republican party. Note also though that Biden is also a conservative by most international perspectives, and sf politicians are mostly centrists or at best liberals (a term which here means "moderate centrist," not "progressive"). So I didn't mean to name call you, sorry.

> I could continue on, and go over the Norway thing and how I believe it's a completely different situation than the US

Norway is different but I don't see why that means the usa can't apply the basic restorative justice principles

> or go over the housing the homeless thing and talk about how expensive that would be in SF

First, housing first advocates seem to be demonstrating that housing the homeless would be cheaper than the current solution of cycling them in and out of jail while wasting police resources on tearing down their shelters. Second, so what it's expensive? We're talking about humans living on the street. Society is only as good as it is for those living in the worse condition it offers.

I admire you for having a clearer understanding of why you post here. I enjoy the discussions as well I think, and maybe I'm driven by a desire to seek truth? I guess throughout this thread I've been hoping people had SOME evidence to justify the retributive justice model they're all touting and seeking further implementation of, because otherwise to me it just seems like people are seeking further cruelty, but I haven't gotten that, just people saying "doesn't it just make sense? Cut off the hands of thieves, that'll teach them!" So maybe that's why I'm so frustrated.

So we have two dudes with common sense disagreements. We need to decide whether we punish thieves by cutting off their hands or by making them make society whole through labor or otherwise while investigating why they felt the need to steal at all. How do we resolve that other than by seeking the truest effective method through study, experimentation, publishing results? "We disagreed so we did research and found the right answer." Well that's basically what I'm saying we as a society should do and it sounds like you're basically saying "despite that effort I still prefer to just believe I'm right."

But, I've demonstrated, it's wrong. You're going to vote for things, and build society in such a way, that makes it worse for all of us.

That's probably the most obnoxious thing anybody's said to you in a while but I can't see any way around that fact: my point of view is absolutely correct so far as I have the ability to confirm this. You haven't been able to convince me otherwise (nor are you interested in trying) so I'm safe to assume my point of view is closer to the truth, and my idea (not mine rather but the one I support) of restorative justice is the correct way to build a better society.

You disagree, won't be convinced, won't read evidence contrary to your experience, and want to make the world more like what you think it should be, which will, as per the evidence presented, make it worse. Furthermore since you're not interested in investigative reasoning for certain subjects about which you're convinced you know the truth (my attempt at your words), when the world gets worse as we step further down the path of retributive justice, you won't acknowledge that your ideology is bad, because you've determined for yourself it's correct and won't be convinced otherwise, and will try to implement it even further. With this ideology locked as such I'd say it's not slippery slope fallacy to suggest you may one day find yourself arguing to literally cut off the hands of thieves.

Given these stakes, how could I not be angry? What a frustrating ideology to encounter!

But people don't respond well to anger so I'll say truthfully and earnestly, if you ignore the subject of the conversation and focus only on the logical and ideological framework I think you're applying here, can you see how refusing to consider studies or arguments that challenge your core beliefs can sometimes be problematic? How it can be a recursive and self feeding problem?

But of course, things do go both ways. Part of the reason people like me adopt such dug-in positions is because there's just so much stupid shit and terrible ideas in society that some kind of filter becomes necessary, and it's not always easy to tune. For every legitimate, good-intentioned proposition out there that may contradict common sense, there are another 10 idiotic propositions, and it can become very laborious to look through them all to try to find the good ones. And you have to understand that I don't have my position out of malice, it's moreso a greater concern for the welfare of what I'd call "law abiding citizens" than what I'd call "criminals" (now that we have clarified the definitions). You may disagree with this, but I don't think it makes me evil or malicious.

Now I do want to say one thing. It is not IMPOSSIBLE to convince me of something when my common sense tells me otherwise. If I could see an example of a major US city, very similar to the ones I've lived in, that has successfully been lenient on crime and had a crime decrease, then I would certainly be open to reconsidering my positions. But throughout my life it seems like the opposite has happened. It seems to me in fact that the "compassion not conviction" policies directly caused the increase in crime. SF is a city that seems to agree with me, given the Chesa Boudin recall. NYC is another example, where that city was actually quite safe in the 2000s and only seemingly with De Blasio's compassion-focused administration did it start to deteriorate again. Chicago is another example.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I don't feel I'm entirely "refusing to consider" arguments. But when it comes to things that I feel increasingly certain about, it requires an increasingly salient level of proof to convince me otherwise. Like for this particular issue, given that I've been to SF and seen with my own eyes what it's like on the streets there, it would require more than a study to convince me of this, I'd want to go and see the successful policy in action with my own eyes. Because right now my own eyes have seen that the policy was not really that successful, and news stories like the one in the OP reinforce my perception here.

This is kind of off topic, but if I could build my ideal world, I'd begin to do away with cops entirely. Modern technology could enable total, pervasive surveillance of an entire city's public areas. AI could enable automatic monitoring and enforcement. You could build a system of perfect justice, where nobody could get away with anything because it would all be seen. I'd still prefer privacy in the home so that it wouldn't be some hellish dystopia, but otherwise, hell, let's go full Minority Report. The tech is ready and I truly think it would make for a better and safer society, and eliminate lots of problems with human-centric law enforcement such as profiling, brutality, etc. In fact, I'm actually really hopeful that SF tries something like this out. Given the city's impending budget cliff and dwindling police force numbers, they may be faced with a choice between just tolerating increasing lawlessness or starting to use cheap tech to try and keep people safe in other ways.

I think I don't want to line by line you and link bomb, though the temptation is there, but before we go our separate ways I want to somewhat address what you brought up.

I think you're probably right that the usa is a unique environment to apply the reformative justice principles, as you say and for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere in the thread, such as difficulty of achieving true universal healthcare for example. I think a key reason though is the political divide in America and the outsized ability of various people and organizations to make or break a policy.

This is important in the SF case because my running theory, backed I believe by evidence (I won't link bomb) is that for example a relatively progressive politician like Chesa Boudin can be hamstrung by the cops not making as many arrests. For reasons I can't quite comprehend Boudin seems to be hated by a lot of people, but what I've found is that before he was elected the police union was already putting out hit pieces. In reality, Boudin's prosecution rates were the same or higher than his predecessor. In terms of actually putting people in jail, he was just as happy to do it as any other prosecutor, he just was brought less people to put in jail.

Now maybe he deserved to be recalled for his inability to work with the sfpd, I'm not sure, but that doesn't seem related to the two things in line with reformative justice that he did, eliminating cash bail and pretrial detention. Here's the key: there were iirc one or two high profile instances of a person out of pretrial detention that then committed a heinous crime. This is fodder for yellow journalism and confirmation bias. "See, it doesn't work, and furthermore this is an indictment of reformative justice and progressive politics!"

What is never mentioned is that certain forms of crime, particularly violent forms, did drop during his tenure, and in fact rose again after his recall.

The situation with him also seems fodder for misattribution. How much affect can one DA over the course of, what, two years, really have, in the face of record inflation and a historic pandemic? Property crime rose during his tenure but it rose across America (murder rates did too). I have lots of evidence showing that crime rates correlate more strongly with economic disparity than anything else, so if crime is going up in SF, it's probably because of that, rather than a single polarizing politician.

Basically my point is, yeah, your eyes are seeing things, no way I can deny that, but the news never reports the mundane, and the truth of it is San Francisco is a relatively boring place. There are far more violent cities in America, but for whatever reason the media loves to paste a sensationalist story of every single murder in SF, every single robbery. Your eyes can only see what's put in front of them, and crime stats aren't being put in front of them. Little Rock had 119 murders last year, twice San Francisco's, but the media doesn't tout every single one as either the personal failure of a socialist DA or the collective failure of progressive politics in general, so nobody talks about it.

So that's why I argue so strongly in favor of the boring: awareness of cognitive biases and rhetorical fallacies, research, and statistics, because I don't think the more exciting way of being aware of the world will give you an accurate picture. Maybe the job of people like me is to find ways to get this information in front of people that doesn't involve insulting them on internet forums lol

In any case having previously lived in SF I feel like what you're seeing on the streets there is less to do with murderers and more to do with the outsized homeless population and lack of public restrooms. I suppose the car break-ins thing is bad but from what I've read the sfpd is neither defunded nor under staffed (compared to cities with worse or more crime), so I'm not sure what's preventing them from making arrests? My pet theory is they're just kinda shit at their jobs, maybe on purpose. Plenty of stories on here of people showing them GPS tracking for a stolen bike and them shrugging their shoulders.

As for your ideal world, that certainly agrees with the evidence that certainty of punishment is the best deterrent (though deterrence is not necessarily the best way to reduce crime). Having though lived in a pervasive surveillance police state (the PRC) I hesitate to throw my weight behind it. Then again Taiwan has somewhat pervasive surveillance and I haven't found any privacy issues as a result, perhaps because the digital minister is an advocate for privacy, or maybe because much of the surveillance is from private businesses on their stores. There's other considerations with the AI thing such as AI can fail to face recognize on black people more frequently than white depending on the model which could deepen inequalities of the application of justice in the USA. Also such a tool, if built with good intentions, could be abused upon the election of some kind of fascist, and used to target political enemies. In general I'm on board with ideas that reduce brutality and profiling.

I will drop only one link, a quick fact checking of various crime theories in San Francisco, from I think about 2 years ago now https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che...

Anyway my final question I think is: if you were willing to grant there might be something to my idea that the truth may be more hidden away in statistics and studies, is there a way to bring that truth "before the eyes" of a million people all who have their own things they're worrying about?

Yet there's so many more people incarcerated in the US for such long periods of time than in most other countries. "Life without parole" basically doesn't really exist in Europe.

> Here's the thing - I do have evidence. But it's the evidence I've seen with my own eyes, not something I've read in some paper or study. My evidence is (I see no other way to put it than to be frank) just common sense. I've met plenty of people in my life. I've seen humans and I know how humans behave

Straight out of a Trump speech :)

I want to be absolutely clear - I am in no way suggesting minorities are genetically inclined to be criminals or asking you to speak for all minorities or anything like that. I'm just curious, given your views and your background, what you think when you hear politicians claim that they are fighting inequality by not prosecuting criminals.

I still think we need more cops. We lag behind Europe in cops per capita, and have higher crime rates.

The idea that we should stop prosecuting crimes because it affects one type of citizen or another is ridiculous for a ton of reasons, but specially because of this: minorities are more likely to be in the receiving end of a crime.

We can do both invest in the social aspect to level the playing field and prosecute crime wherever it manifests.

I've heard this excuse before and I don't put much into it. Most of the videos I've seen are bad cops terrorizing people who aren't armed. George Floyd was unarmed, as were countless victims. Karen Garner couldn't hurt anyone. There are many more examples. Also, we're currently a much less armed society than we were before we had this policing issue.

It's because these cops are bad people and there is no accountability. I'm sure in some departments this sort of thing is encouraged, many it's excused. We can agree that bad police should be fired and charged right?

I don't get the gun angle, people have always had guns in the US. There are fewer households with guns now than there were since the 1990s.

Someone did a survey of 15K police officers and gun restrictions in 2013 here:

https://www.police1.com/gun-legislation-law-enforcement/arti...

And when it comes to finding ways to reduce gun violence and large scale shootings, most cops say a federal ban on so-called “assault weapons” isn’t the answer.

More than 91 percent of respondents say it would either have no effect or a negative effect in reducing violent crime. This is an overwhelming response by those whose job it is to actually deal with this issue on the front lines.

More than 91 percent of respondents support the concealed carry of firearms by civilians who have not been convicted of a felony and/or not been deemed psychologically/medically incapable.

A full 86 percent feel that casualties would have been reduced or avoided in recent tragedies like Newtown and Aurora if a legally-armed citizen was present (casualties reduced: 80 percent; avoided altogether: 60 percent).

Most gun deaths are by handguns, not "assault rifles". They also know that a federal ban can be negated by 2 minutes of work with a drill bit.

Similarly, police aren't afraid of people pulling assault rifles out of their glove boxes and pockets.

What videos did this person see, that you are referring to? Are you saying there isn't evidence of a problem of police brutality? I recall a survey of Black NY city police; most of them had been harassed when off-duty.

Could you give an example of who has this idea?

> minorities are more likely to be in the receiving end of a crime

So therefore innocent people should be harrassed and abused, beaten up and jailed?

> prosecute crime wherever it manifests

That's not what happens.

If the laws are bad, fix them. If the police are too brutal, curtail them.

This is the only path towards with a healthy society. This isn't always easy, and sometimes it seems impossible. However, sanctioning lawlessness and giving up on reform is no solution. It is a race to the bottom, and hurts minorities even more. If you think building towards the equality is hard, imagine how much harder it is when theft, rape, and murder is rampant in your community.

This is represented in the opinions and surveys of minority communities. People want less bias and police brutality, but they also want more police on the streets and more enforcement of laws.

Trends suggest otherwise: https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/

The big peak in violent crime in the 1990s is the crack epidemic. I personally saw driveby shooting attacks and personal murders in broad daylight; 24th street (and the Mission in general) used to be considered a no-go area by folk in better-off neighborhoods.

It seems to me that the basic problem in SF is wealth disparity. The city is a great place to make money if you are in the finance or tech industries and have decent social skills. But the wealth that stays in SF tends to build upward rather than lift up less well off neighborhoods. Not only is housing expensive, community space for weird stores/art galleries/music events is also at a premium, which severely limits avenues for grey market enterprise and social mixing/mobility. The unorganized crime exists because regular jobs are not that profitable and there's a large and deliberately-created (at the federal level) underclass of undocumented people with no straightforward path to legal workforce participation.

SF was a remarkably different city prior to 9-11, which ushered in a securocratic mindset in many respects. A simple but telling example is that nearly BART stations used to have toilets, though as you might expect some of them were nasty. After 9-11, these were closed in the name of security, a 'temporary' situation which has persisted for over 20 years. Concession stands like news/candy/flower vendors gradually vanished too, along with buskers. Subway stations stopped being part of the city's social life in favor of pure transit functionality. Likewise bus stops now have all sorts of built-in tech to tell you when the next bus is arriving in 20 different languages, but the bus shelters are deliberately constructed not to provide any shelter from the elements, or even make it easy to sit down.

The state (qua city government) very much maintains its monopoly on violence; police budgets have gone up rather than down. It's just selectively enforced because the police are themselves a political constituency who compete with other agencies for funding.

https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

> In April [2022], [...] the dept issued 338 tickets for traffic violations. By comparison, in April 2014, the year Vision Zero began, the department issued 11,612 tickets.

Does that mean nobody violates traffic laws in SF anymore? Of course not. But if the tickets aren't issued they're not rolled up into stats. Same with all sorts of violent and property crime.

When I lived in the mid-mission a few years ago I had to call in a shooting that happened outside my bedroom window.

> The letter highlighted alarming data backing up many residents’ concerns that police have thrown up their hands. For example, last year the Department of Police Accountability opened 595 cases into alleged police wrongdoing; the largest share by far, 42.6%, related to “neglect of duty.” That percentage has ticked up steadily since 2016, when neglect of duty made up 32% of complaints. [1]

[edit] Your own source seems to back that up. Your source is for all of California, not SF. And one of the big sub-headings is "crime rates vary dramatically by region and category" and specifically calls out SF as having an outsized quantity of property crime.

> The state’s highest rate of violent crime was in the San Joaquin Valley, which had 640 violent incidents per 100,000 residents. The highest rate of property crime was in the San Francisco Bay Area, at 2,718 per 100,000 residents.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

(They will happily and helpfully suggest that a report isn’t necessary and probably you don’t want to file one anyway. They are human, and lazy.)

Basically, someone in this story is confused.

That's 100% speculative. Do you have evidence of their effect on crime stats, and wouldn't that effect also take place when crime was higher in the 90s?

E.g, someone smashes window and I don't expect cops to do something. So I don't report it. But someone shows up dead on my doorstep, whether or not I expect to them to solve it, id report it because there's a dead person on my doorstep.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/violent-crime-san-...

How do you square this statement with gentrification? Feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation...

How - like tangible, tactical recommendations that have the political willpower to get enacted?

Really?

> police budgets have gone up rather than down.

And what do you think the police are supposed to do when the prosecutions by the DA fall off a cliff? Don't you think that maybe, just maybe, if the number of cops remains unchanged, but the percentage of criminals they detain being arraigned/charged/arrested drops, that maybe, just maybe, crime will go up?

The cognitive dissonance is just unbelievable here.

What are the stats on DA prosecutions - I've heard that claim in other places about progressive DAs, and they turned out to be false.

Also, it's not clear to me that crime goes up if prosecutions go down; it's possible, but it's possible that looking at all arrests the same, for every alleged crime, is meaningless; it's possible that more arrests means worse cases; it's possible police are providing worse evidence, or the distribution of crime types has changed, or criminals have no idea of crime stats and have other motivations.

Is there some correlation you can point to?

I don't waste time arguing with far left ideologues.

It's like talking to fundamentalist Christians about evolution: wasted time.

Your statement about it not being clear that crime goes up if less criminals are prosecuted is the most unintentionally hilarious thing I've seen in a long time. Do you even realize how utterly lacking in common sense the statement is?

"Overall Prosecution Rate in SF Remains Largely the Same Under Boudin" - NBC

Here's the raw data from the DA's office: https://www.sfdistrictattorney.org/policy/data-dashboards/

I'll also ask you to consider how this whole thread could have gone differently if you and everyone else had bothered to constructively engage with the discussion, and done the research you so dismissively told others to do.

"Guys, you'll never believe it! According to the DA's office, the DA is doing great!"

You have your dates and anecdotes off. The crack epidemic was in the 1980s, not the 1990s. There was, however, always a serious heroin trade in that area. After the gang truce in 1992, the Mission was incredibly safe and a great place to live. Going to the bars after work and spilling out into the streets after 2 am was a safe and peaceful affair. Further, a lot of the property crime that people are complaining about has nothing to do with locals; it was perpetrated by organized gangs from outside the city. This is still true today and several investigative news articles on this phenomenon have been published recently. The Mission was never a "no go" area by people who lived in the city. It was an incredibly vibrant place to live and work, with great bars, restaurants, stores, and culture. In many ways, the Mission is the heart of San Francisco given its centralized location and history. For anyone to describe it as a no go area reveals that they never lived there and know nothing about it. That all changed when the tech bros moved out from the Midwest and East coast and chased all the artists out of the city. These people who were forced out were the people who actually cared about their communities and helped each other out and were the spirit and life blood of what the city was in its heart and soul. Now the new blood doesn’t like the new city they helped create, but of course, it’s always someone else’s fault.

For anyone to describe it as a no go area reveals that they never lived there and know nothing about it.

...which was why I said it was considered that way 'by folk in better off neighborhoods.' People who lived in places like North Beach or the Marina were horrified by it.

You are right about the influx of tech people during the first boom (along with the finance bros, though those have shaped SF in various ways since the gold rush) pushing people out. By the 1990s Haight/Ashbury had already become an unaffordable tourist trap with most of the fancy victorian houses being super expensive. In contrast SoMa was a much more industrial than it is today, with enough turnover that there were always empty spaces that could be rented or borrowed for a rave.

Honestly, if that’s what you took away from my comment, I don’t think there’s anything I could say to explain it to you. From a systems POV, artists are the bellwether indicator for the health of a city. They function to maintain homeostasis and self-regulation of the community. When they are forced out of a city, the city goes into decline. It’s more complex than that, but that’s part of it.

But to put your misinterpretation and misreading aside for the moment so as to focus on something more constructive, there is good evidence that as more money was pumped into the city from newcomers, a new predator/prey relationship arose from organized crime groups which focused on smash and grabs and home robberies.

The so-called South American Tourist Gang has targeted homes throughout California, for example. It’s also of note that organized criminal gangs engaging in smash and grabs are not unique to California.

The popular right wing talking point that blames progressive California laws and lax law enforcement for crime has almost zero support in the academic criminal justice community and is based mostly on fear and anger, not evidence. It makes for good political fodder for conservative candidates but isn’t based on reality.

You own data suggests otherwise

https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/

The peak in violent crime was the 90s. The peak of property crime was 80s, and there were 40 years of crime decline at the exact same time wealth disparity was growing. What changed recently was the new lax attitude on crime, decarceration, and hated towards the police.

Truth is, San Francisco did not follow the pattern of the rest of CA and saw rising murders through the 2000's. It finally declined in 2009 after a huge federal and local crackdown on gangs and MS13 in San Francisco.

Indeed, I hate when wealth disparity breaks into my car.

I lived in SF for a year (in Nob Hill) in my early 20s living with my then GF, back in 2002-2003. It was a beautiful, safe, just chill place then. It's disgusting now. I was there in 2019, and one of the things that jumped out at me was how I constantly smelled piss and a big portion of the city looked the way only the Tenderloin used to. And yes, it's the fault of the SF politicians.

> Growing up in highly orderly, safe environments, they completely take order for granted.

Do you have evidence for their background and reasoning?

Much of 'order' is often abusing politically vulnerable people, which provides 'order' for the wealthy white population, but not for others.

Can we re-phrase "monopoly of violence" to maintaining the rule of law. The government has an obligation to maintain the rule of law. Monopoly on violence by itself does not provide real legitimacy.

I've had my car stolen once and broken into several times. I've had two bikes stolen, once out of an office building, and another time through an iron gate that blocks my doorway. My neighbor had his motorcycle stolen out of his garage. I've caught someone stealing packages from a building I lived in. Last time I moved, someone tried to break into my U-Haul. I've seen people walking out of several stores with bags stuffed full of stolen goods (going to Westfield mall feels surreal—even inside the mall, shops need to hire their own private security to protect themselves).

These are just a few incidents that come to mind—I could list many more. My point in listing all of these cases is to say—it's not enough to look at crime metrics. Not to say that we shouldn't look at metrics and try to improve them, but the current metrics are flawed to some degree. People in SF-proper (e.g. mid-market, SoMA, Mission, Haight) are living with a constant low-to-moderate anxiety that they will be robbed at any time.

In all cases that I've been close to, there have been no arrests or prosecution. You won't find that I had to chase away someone trying to break into my U-Haul in any crime statistic report. No one from SF is comfortable leaving anything in their car, leaving their garage open, parking their bike outside.

All I want is a candidate to run on the platform of simply enforcing the law—it's baffling to me how controversial that is. Perhaps we'll get the right catalyst for that to happen someday.

And this is what gives a chance for extremist to flourish. For some reasons, US politics has no centre, it’s always far away from the axis. I think it’s time to have a “Balance Party” in the US :)

Unlike other solutions, this one takes years or decades, but, on the other hand, it might actually work.

It could already exist and you'd never know it, because the establishment would label it as ultra-maga-right-fascist-nazi-wing and ban it from the internet. The whole notion of another party opposing the regime is supremely infantile. You would be the first to condemn it.

In my view the main problem is not the politicians but the ineffective opaque police that does not have to produce any metrics and is not subject to any kind of oversight, not in SF and not anywhere else either.

For example, I had a car window smashed not in SF but in Fremont, and when I went to the police, they informed me that that is not even an arrestable offense. Window was smashed in front of a hotel with a prominent security camera overlooking the street. The police told me they left a voicemail with the hotel asking if their camera caught anything. The hotel never returned the police voicemail, the police never bothered to follow-up with the hotel, and told me they don't have authority to take the security footage of the public street without hotel's consent. Some time later I noticed that the hotel removed that street-facing security camera they had, leaving just an empty pole.

So even if SF is bad, outside SF it is not much better. Another nugget to consider is that back in 2014, back when crime was nowhere as bad as today, CA voters, not liberal politicians, voted for Proposition 47 "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" which made potential felonies chargeable only as misdemeanors.

All of the west coast suffers from high structural costs. People really only endure SF for the venture money and trips to GG bridge, otherwise it makes little sense as a founder to operate there. My dream tech scenario would combine Sand Hill or London VC with Eastern Europe operating costs and lifestyle. But SF is a hotbed of AI now and so ppl literally risk their lives to work there

If you could fund and run an AI startup on the Croatian coast, SF would empty out pretty quick

I remember whenever I mentioned the swaths of homeless people, locals would often tell me “they are homeless by choice”.

This attitude again, seemed to be very common and was one of the main reasons why I never wanted to move to the Bay Area.

Mekka it was no more - the disconnect was just too apparent to ignore from an outsider’s perspective.

Fact: the last 4 out of 7 friends I had that got their car broken into didn't bother reporting. They just fixed their car and went about their life.

This is known as the “dark figure of crime” btw: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_figure_of_crime

What makes Austin shine, and SF not ?

Don't national issues affect everyone more or less equally ? And even if they didn't, why is it that the outcomes are so wildly different between SFO and comparable large cities that have huge net inflows of people ?

What are the comparable cities? In terms of weather, size, social aids, etc.