One contributor is the fact that law enforcement rarely strikes but used their FOP and “union” organizations to slow, or sandbag work as a negotiation tactic. With membership that is largely unaccountable the blue wall is a political tool to leverage public funds by threat of crime and alternatively allowing or shutting down private unionization efforts.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-po...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo...

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend...

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historic...

I can see how this would be the natural response to a situation where the DA refuses to prosecute crime. That said, simply giving in to lawlessness is clearly not the answer, and I doubt many cops find this to be a preferable path. It just validates the DA's backwards worldview! How are you going to replace them when the elections roll around, and they're able to argue "I'm not refusing to prosecute anyone! Just look, arrests are way down!" The only way to keep them honest is to continue doing the work and ensuring that the taxpayers have a clear understanding of what is happening.

> DA refuses to prosecute crime

Have there been any actual documented instances of this? I see it cited a lot, but rarely any specific names of DAs or cases attached to it, and it feels like an easy excuse for police to not even attempt to do their jobs.

Even without a specific policy to not prosecute crimes, there's a pipeline problem.

Courts are backed up and jails are full. DAs have to prioritize cases so that important cases are prosecuted within the statutes of limitations and constitutional speedy trial limits. Arresting people under suspicion of crimes that are unlikely to be prosecuted isn't very effective and nobody likes doing ineffective work.

or everything goes perfectly but the punishment is time served, a fine they can't pay anyway or some sort of service & promise not to do it anymore. I believe police and prosecuters want to do good work, but they also want the biggest impact of their work.

read all about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin

You can disagree with me all you want, but this guy was recalled as SF DA for letting criminals go. His wikipedia enumerates several cases of him doing just that.

> In March 2020, Boudin charged 20-year-old Dwayne Grayson with elder abuse after he filmed 56-year-old Jonathan Amerson in February 2020 swinging a metal bar at an elderly Asian man in Bayview–Hunters Point, San Francisco and stealing his aluminum cans. Amerson was charged with elder abuse and robbery. The video later went viral online. Boudin dropped charges against Dwayne Grayson after a spokesperson in Boudin's office said the victim expressed his intent to pursue restorative justice.

> Boudin has been criticized for his alleged lack of prosecution of drug-related crimes, with only three drug convictions in 2021, none of which were for fentanyl dealing. Boudin has defended his actions saying that many of the drug dealers in the Bay Area are from Honduras, and would face deportation if convicted of drug dealing.

Except that even when the DA was trying to pursue stuff, the SFPD refused to help, and forced the DA's office to do stuff like move evidence in a U-haul truck.

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

I agree with you on this one case. But this was after years of him letting criminals go. This case was in the run up to the recall in which he was removed from office by SF voters for being too soft on crime.

That was the narrative that was presented. However, though the data made available by the DA's office is limited and flawed, I don't think the story is really borne out.

1 year after the recall, violent crime was up.

https://missionlocal.org/2023/06/one-year-after-recall-viole...

After a little more than a year in office, she had raised the conviction rate slightly, but had a lower charge-filling rate -- i.e. charged fewer things but won more.

> in her first 15 months, raised the city’s conviction rate for the first time in eight years, according to data from her office.

> Despite the reversal in conviction rates, it appears that Jenkins is taking fewer individual cases to court. Her charge-filing rate is about eight percent lower this year than last.

> While conviction rates have risen slightly, the total percentage of cases charged, or prosecuted, by the DA has remained relatively flat.

This also came with a shift towards more convictions for petty theft and narcotics, and less use of diversion programs. But given that the charging-filing rate actually decreased, I think this implies that other more serious stuff was being charged less. So the "soft on crime" guy actually was filing charges at a higher overall rate, and was prioritizing the more serious crimes.

https://missionlocal.org/2023/09/sf-da-brooke-jenkins-revers...

Note, I tried to view the DA data dashboards today and none of them even load for me. The article above shows top-line rates but not with a breakdown by the type of violation.

> 3 downvotes? really?

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" [1].

> guy was recalled as SF DA for letting criminals go

Your comment would be stronger if you cited something from the article, versus just presenting it unadorned. (And at risk of being a hypocrite, I upvoted your comment.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> apprehending someone just for them to be released hours later

Should this not be the expectation for low-level/nonviolent offenses, under the presumption of innocence?

It's not releasing them that is the issue. It's that the charges are dropped.

Some San Francisco Bay Area police departments were whining also recently that minor crimes spread out in different cities and counties made the work harder. And celebrated a case where they HAD done the work and arrested a group for spread out offenses.

Release after a minor arrest should be as expected of course. In most isolated offenses, not even an arrest preferably even - since "arrest" can come with massive baggage in the US. It's refusing to even bother collecting records, documenting, tracking, and in the end arrests which means that the initial offences essentially did not exist. So that the next offenses are still initial offenses - and don't exist.

You are right about that, friend in Nevada county had his house broken into, guy stole some stuff including a rifle, drank one of his beers. Cops came dusted for prints, took the empty beer can. And nothing came of it.

Two years later gets a call from a detective they got the guy. He got arrested they took his DNA and it was a match for the DNA on the beer can. So they charged him for the break in and stealing the rifle.

Cops in the Bay Area would never even bother with that.

I've seen press about police departments making such an argument, and it seems really disingenuous. The implied claim is that if no charge will be pursued by the DA then there's "no outcome" or point in doing any police work or arrest.

However, when cops feel any kind of animus, it's really apparent that they can make life awful for people by harassing, intimidating, or assaulting who aren't doing anything illegal. They understand that even if the DA will never pursue anything, being a victim of over-policing is itself a shitty position to be in. Further, it can create the basis for claims of resisting arrest. For example, in my city there's press about a woman who was physically accosted by an officer for jaywalking. There's video of an officer doing a rapid U-turn after seeing a woman walk through a crosswalk, follow her down the street and slam her int a wall. The officer claims that the woman, who was just walking down the street with headphones, disregarded his (impossible?) instruction to show him an ID without reaching into her pockets or purse.

So we supposed to believe that cops have the energy to rough up random jaywalkers (who we're pretty sure the DA isn't interested in pursuing, and which is actually legal in my state now), but not enough to pursue people doing car break-ins, mail theft, vandalism, etc because of the DA's lack of interest?

If you were a mail thief, and not a priority for the local DA (... though isn't mail theft actually a federal crime?) but the police decided that you should be picked up and detained for 1-hour less than the window at which they're obliged to release you if no charges are forthcoming, and also all the stuff you stole, and some other stuff that you didn't steal, was confiscated and you didn't get your actual property back for an indeterminate period, you might understandably reconsider the pro/con list of stealing mail, even if you never went to court.

I think the explanation for why cops don't direct their harassment power at actual criminals is not that cops are rationally not doing work that won't lead to convictions. Rather:

- police budgets increase with the severity of the perceived "crime problem". Solving problems doesn't get you more money next year.

- priorities get set by political pressures. Mail theft, package theft, car break-ins, etc have diffuse harms over a broad set of the population but not necessarily against organized political blocks. But the X Neighborhood Merchants Association that donates to the campaign fund of the incumbent supervisor can probably organize to get more policing in their area.

- policing isn't about stopping or even responding to crime; it's about being seen projecting power. Report a theft in my neighborhood, and the cops will at best take a report that you can send to your insurer. If you have video footage of the crime, no one will look at it. The won't come to the location where the crime occurred. But routinely I will see 5 cops standing around talking, with 3 cop cars blocking traffic/bike lanes/lightrail tracks, while one cop is looming over/talking at a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk. There aren't enough cops to look into serial theft, but we need all hands on deck for this one disruptive unhoused person, b/c the world needs to see how we respond when you visibly step out of line.

https://missionlocal.org/2024/08/black-woman-injured-by-sfpd...

> policing isn't about stopping or even responding to crime; [...] But routinely I will see 5 cops standing around talking, with 3 cop cars blocking traffic/bike lanes/lightrail tracks, while one cop is looming over/talking at a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk.

Simpler explanation: "Get home safe at the end of the day" is by very far the priority in US police. By outright policy. This gets translated with EVERYONE showing up when one of their colleagues gets an idea of doing something. All the more so that this probably looks good in the end-of-day paperwork, and counts as having done something. And is perfectly safe. And you get to chat with your colleagues while on the clock.