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?