Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Death by gentrification: the killing that shamed San Francisco

theguardian.com

174 pointswallflower300 comments

There's a lot left out in Solnit's article, see: http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/alex-nieto-w...

> Nieto was clearly a man having a crisis, and his purported reaction when approached by police was not that of a rational person. Told to show his hands, Nieto allegedly demanded that the cops show theirs. He then reportedly drew his taser and fired three times. And so he was shot—and shot and shot—by officers who claim they did not realize Nieto was carrying a less-than-lethal device.

This is the stuff she should have included into her article?

This platitude about mental health,

> Our jails are full of men and women whose crime is being mentally ill.

Is not a more compelling analysis of the event than Solnit's take.

Normally I'm pretty damn critical of the police, but drawing a gunlike weapon that's actually a weapon and not a plastic toy, while also being clearly out of your right mind...

Well, he shouldn't have been shot, but wow.

The police, or at least two of them, claim that he drew the taser. That doesn't mean he actually drew it, but merely that the police did what police often have done in the past--embellish or exaggerate the details to exonerate themselves.

For this reason, and of course also to protect police from dishonest civilian witnesses, body cams should be standard issue equipment. In fact, I'm surprised SFPD hasn't long since required them.

Good points.

Here, let me help you out...

> ...there is no mention whatsoever of Nieto’s long and well-documented battle with mental illness. No mention of Nieto’s “history of aggressive and bizarre behavior and auditory hallucinations,” as described in a letter written by District Attorney George Gascón following his office’s investigation of the shooting. Likewise, no mention of “a clinical history of psychosis exacerbated by his failure to take ... medications.” No mention of a police report filed less than three weeks before Nieto’s death by a man alleging that Nieto tased him (Nieto, in turn, filed a police report claiming this was an act of self-defense). No mention of prior incidents in which police intervened when Nieto’s internal battles spilled out into the public sphere. - See more at: http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/alex-nieto-w...

The severity of his "long and well-documented battle with mental illness" is:

a) Disputed

b) Weaponized against him, taking advantage of the fear and misunderstanding people have of mental illness ("he burnt a book! that sounds like he'd pull guns on people!")

c) Used to avoid engaging with the racial issue that brought it to the fore

Disputed? He was confined on a 72 hour mental health hold twice. You need to be examined by health professionals for that to happen. I would argue his mental health problems are not disputed at all.

I also love how you said "he burned a book". No, he set a book on fire in his parents home, which they luckily extinguished, then took the ashes and ate them. Even his parents said they were in fear of their own safety.

Jesus, twisting facts knows no ends when it comes to supporting a certain narrative doesn't it?

I'm generally sympathetic to Solnit's previous writings on gentrification in SF, but this just seems too much of a stretch to me. Police violence in SF (and across the US) is out of control. They need training in how to de-escalate confrontations without resorting to overwhelming firepower.

I don't think that the gentrification is completely referring to the police, but also to the couple that called the cops.

I actually know the couple, they are very nice people and I am sure they feel terrible about what happened. But they are from upper-middle and upper class families, I am sadly not too surprised that they felt threatened by a latino man in a park.

Interesting counterpoint: "60 percent of the people shot by San Francisco police in the preceding nine years were suffering from mental illness."

I suspect that if neighborhoods were more static, then the neighbors would know who was a real threat; fewer false positives.

When reading anything on The Guardian it's important to ask what they aren't telling you, because it's almost certain that they are omitting many very salient details out in order to fit the story into their own narrative. If you knew that Nieto had other problems, you likely wouldn't come away from the Guardian article believing that he was executed for being Hispanic.

The Guardian and Salon are two of the worst offenders. I learned a little while ago that Sam Harris took on Salon. I always thought Sam Harris was a blowhard and annoying to listen to, but I have a lot of respect for him now. We need more honest, courageous intellectuals to take on the fourth estate.

How can you ignore the inciting incident in this case? Perhaps the victim was a man with some personal issues, but before being harassed by Evan Snow, Alex Nieto was a man minding his own business.

That's not what happened. Snow was an irresponsible dog owner; his dog jumped on Nieto. That happens to me on walks once every other week. I am rarely murdered as a result.

What made this situation special was that Nieto was armed with a taser. When Snow's dog assaulted him, as poorly managed dogs do, Nieto prepared to zap it with the taser.

Snow tried to tell Nieto not to tase his dog (the DA investigation says that Snow "begged" Nieto not to tase his dog, but let's allocate all charity to the dead and assume Snow was a dick about it). Nieto's problem stopped being the dog. Instead, he confronted Snow, threatening to tase him, and suggesting that the two fight. That, too, is detail we can only source from Snow's own report, but it squares with things like the text he sent to his friend and the reports he made to people outside the park.

The dog is Snow's property. His irresponsibility as a dog owner set off this series of events. The victim did not threaten a man's dog out of spite, he felt threatened by the animal and Snow's actions (or lack there of) escalated this unfortunate situation.

What did I write that made you think I would disagree with that? He was a shitty dog owner, and an asshole. There are millions of shitty dog owners and even more assholes (and that is an overlapping Venn diagram if ever). He was also probably a racist --- that text message did happen, and the DA report suggests he's a firearms enthusiast as well. He's a creepy guy I don't ever want to meet.

That doesn't make him in any way responsible for Nieto's death. Sorry, it just doesn't.

This police-assisted murder is a shame but I don't understand why we expect neighborhoods to remain frozen in time forever, never changing their racial or socioeconomic makeup for as long as the area exists.

It's a given that neighborhoods, especially in the city, will change over time. The real issue isn't whether people who don't look like the lifelong residents will move in, it's if those new neighbors will treat the area and neighbors with the same reverence and respect that those before them did. I don't think people resent a changing neighborhood so much as they resent people with different values settling down and expecting the neighborhood to bend to their preference.

This is clearly what's at stake in the death of Alex Nieto.

I don't think many people would argue with the evolutionary nature of cities. I think what people would say, however, is that when cities change those with the least economic muscle tend to be the most adversely effected (e.g they lose their homes/tenancies when they can't afford to pay inflated rents).

Again, that in itself might not be a problem if there were other places to move that poor communities could afford and wouldn't detrimentally affect their lives.

I can speak from experience in London, poor communities have NO WHERE to move if an area is gentrified and they are forced out. Prices are city wide too high, gentrification has left no where 'cheap'. What that means is moving further from central London, which means moving further away from the main source of work and increasing expense of travel. Which all in turn means an even greater slip into poverty.

Those doing low-paid work in London are obviously important to the city, but I'd argue that those doing high-paid work make more sense to live in the city because theirs is the work that benefits most from the agglomeration that big cities provide.

If low-paid workers have to travel further, then their wages will be forced upwards as a result. Employers are forced to pay prevailing market rates to get the staff they need.

The situation in London is complicated by a large influx of workers from elsewhere in the EU, who are willing to live in sub-standard conditions (many to a room, sharing beds, sheds in back gardens, etc.) and work for minimum wage, or even less.

Some larger employers pay a "living wage" on principle, but nobody feels the need to raise wages for unskilled workers for lack of supply.

This is a very salient point about London. It's not widely known about just how squalid and cramped the living conditions are — though just ask any recently arrived migrant. It is not as black and white as poor people living in zones 3-9 and rich people living in 1-3.

In a theoretically perfect economic market you're right, but there is little if any evidence to suggest there is a causal link between economic displacement and wage growth. In fact wage growth at the low end has stagnated in London[0] despite the advancing economic displacement of it's low paid workers[1].

[0]: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Economy%20Comm... [1]: http://www.londonspovertyprofile.org.uk/indicators/topics/lo...

Those doing the high-paid "work" are often those abusing state granted powers to issue credit. They say to the poor "pledge more of your working life to me in exchange for the right to exist or I will banish you".

There is no relationship between value added and money gained in London.

If you don't understand the benefit to society of mortgages and business loans, this really isn't the forum for you.

I understand the benefit of credit but not loose credit. If you don't understand 2008 being a problem then this isn't the planet for you.

I also like water but understand I can drown in it.

The problem in 2008 was that credit dried up! Remember? The "credit crunch"? A lack of available credit? Which ground the economy to a halt?

#facepalm

I'm afraid you are looking at the problem from the wrong end. You are looking at an event and associating it with the immediate result.

Banks lost trust in each other and stopped lending because they knew many were going to fail due to over-issuance of credit leaving them far too leveraged.

Citigroup head: whilst the music is playing we keep dancing.

Your use of twitter hashtag in this debate seems very young.

When you fall off a building it's only the last second that is a problem. Your solution is to keep digging a hole faster than terminal velocity. Mine is to not jump off the building.

Housing would be cheaper if they built more of it. Rents in Seattle actually declined this year.

Broadly speaking you're right, but in London in particular housing stock growth has been significant in the last 10 years but it has had consequently little effect on housing price deflation[0].

There are many theories as to why that is, but a personal pet one is that London is lacking in housing stock across the market and as such it is economically more viable to build at the middle and top end of the market where profits are higher than at the low end. When this is combined with a record low investment in local government social housing in London you get London's extreme housing market e.g. demand is high, but supply has all gravitated to the place where returns are highest

[0]: http://data.london.gov.uk/housingmarket/

Very dense residential areas still seem rare in London, compared to other cities of comparable size (it has lower population density than e.g. NYC, Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo...)

Completely agree. London really needs to embrace 'up' as a viable building solution. Apparently, a lot of it has to do with some archaic laws surrounding building in London, the 'Protected Views' one is of particular note:

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

No idea why you are being downvoted. Supply and demand, this is Economics 101. I have made the same arguments about SF and people downvote me too. The #1 way to decrease rent is to build more supply. If there was double the apartments in SF, the rent would not be as high.

Many European countries had big supply pre 2008 and prices continued to rise. China has huge oversupply and yet prices have risen.

It's loose credit. It's the banks.

I'm not familiar with European real estate, but I have to ask: Where within these countries are prices rising? Is it universal or is it constrained to popular, low-unit count areas (like is generally the case in the US)?

> No idea why you are being downvoted.

Perhaps because the parent poster is wrong. Seattle rents did not decrease this year, or last year.

The rate at which rent is increasing has slowed (previously double-digit percentage increases have dropped to single-digit percentage increases). But actual rents have not fallen.

Seattle rents continue to grow each year, just at a slightly slower pace than before.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/2015/11/bad-timingas...

(This is not an argument against building new housing, I also believe we need more of that. But the issue is far more complicated than simply "supply and demand, economics 101")

>Perhaps because the parent poster is wrong. Seattle rents did not decrease this year, or last year.

Ah! Then someone really should have just told me instead of downvoting!

I was surprised to see how much of greater London is covered by town houses, detached homes and 2-3 story buildings when I visited.

The population of greater London is about the same as that of NYC (~8.5m people), but the population density is half (5,432/km^2 for London vs 10,756.0/km^2 for NYC).

When middle class families move out it's called *-flight. When poor families move out, it's called gentrification. Both are due to economics, some precipitated, not so much by individual bigotry but rather by self interest (the former wanting to preserve value individually in anticipation of devaluation of property, the latter get pushed out due to economics whereby its not viable to remain in a valuating neighborhood while earnings remain flat for the individual.

While I'm sure there's plenty of self interest at play, it's important to remember that there were explicitly racist legal practices as well. A specific example is the practice of racially restricted covenants, which literally prevents a home from being sold to a someone who isn't white:

http://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1920s1948-Restrict...

And which haven't been enforceable for ~70 years, where they existed in at all. Some stuff has happened since then.

And after that there was the FHA:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci...

Yes, "stuff" continues to happen, for better or worse, but it's hard to believe that the state of housing is independent of bigotry given the evidence.

And those policies ended 50 years ago! Liberals have been in charge of housing policy for literally decades.

And yet, race is still today a factor that can be quantified wrt housing:

https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas...

Gosh, it's almost like there are worse outcomes regardless of housing policy.

1. Economics is not morally neutral, it's not a force of nature that blows through a town like a snowstorm. Economics is deliberate human activity. Economic justice and injustice is a coherent concept.

2. White flight and the creation of urban slums was a deliberate policy on the part of the government and its various partner institutions. Redlining by banks, whites only suburbs, highways built through poor and black neighborhoods, tearing up businesses and uprooting families, policing policies that targeted undesirables, etc. I find it hard to believe anyone can examine the evidence and come up with such an apolitical explanation as "self-interest".

>When middle class families move out it's called *-flight. When poor families move out, it's called gentrification.

There's a vast economic difference between a family moving further upscale and further downscale.

I think the difference is choice.

White flight is white folks choosing to move out of an area.

Gentrification is white folks choosing to move in to an area.

No-one else gets a choice. Only the white folks.

> No-one else gets a choice.

Everybody gets the same choices, or can you point me towards a mechanism that prevents e.g. Chinese or Indians form moving?

The difference is narrative: It's currently acceptable to blame whitey. Criticising non-whites is not socially acceptable in left-wing circles. Your comment is an instance of this behaviour.

Wealthy white folks that is. Whites are more than half the population. Not surprising of wealthy pop many would be white. Plenty of poor ones.

And this is SF the gentrfiers are white and Asian

Is there a word for people refusing to move? Because then every possible housing decision by a white person could be framed as a terrible thing.

hehe fair point :)

> No-one else gets a choice. Only the white folks.

That's not really fair. White flight was a result of mandatory school integration policies, which forced middle-class (i.e., by-and-large white) and lower-class (i.e., by-and-large black) children into the same schools; white folks didn't have a choice about that, nor did those who stayed a bit longer have a choice about the continued decline of their cities.

Poor city folks have the same choice now that white city folks had in the 70s: stay & deal, or flee elsewhere. The sticky point is that it's a lot easier for someone middle-class to afford to move to the suburbs & commute to work than it is for a poor person.

To be clear, Brown v Board of Education school integration ended racial segregation, not economic segregation. Things are arguably different now, but back then race was a major component of the perceived "decline."

Really? White folks were forced to move away because their kids might go to school with black kids?

Only in America...

> White folks were forced to move away because their kids might go to school with black kids?

It's really, really unfortunate that race is a proxy for class in America. It's a natural and IMHO good human tendency for folks to want to be around others of their own class; the problem is that in America race and class are so conflated that one gets this horrible self-reinforcing racist spiral, which is unfair to blacks and poisonous to whites. And race isn't even all that good of a proxy for class, but due to the aforementioned self-reinforcing racist hate spiral it has been extraordinarily difficult to eliminate.

> It's a natural and IMHO good human tendency for folks to want to be around others of their own class;

Natural, but not good. Good is when we eliminate class, not enjoy its stratification.

It's always a choice. We have freedom of movement, we don't have hukous, we don't assign neighborhoods to people, racist housing policies haven't been a thing for a while.

People need more housing choices, cities need to build more housing at different price points, bug also without strong-arming developers.

People move due to economics. Looking for better, or looking for affordability.

Middle and upper class will also move away from poor whites. See what happens when school districts are consolidated and blue collar kids and middle class upper middle get sent to the same schools, the ones who can move will move.

Also, it's not as if gentrification does not occur in Tokyo or Lagos or Berlin.

Housing stock goes through phases of attractiveness.

What we need is more housing and less useless blaming, blaming will not address any of the issues of housing shortage.

Well this phase passed through cities like Chicago ages ago when the row homes were bought up literally street by street. Gutted and rebuilt on the inside into much nicer homes. The rising housing costs would increase taxes on adjacent homes and streets accelerating the process.

Likely Detroit will one day face this provided they can ever get themselves in order. It should be considered the fruit of fixing up what drove people away in the first place.

What is a neighborhood if all the people who live in it are completely fungible? What does it mean when a city is far more enthusiastic about spending money on neighborhoods of wealthy people and is glad to neglect neighborhoods of poor people? The most substantial funding American cities are willing to allocate for poor neighborhoods is police.

> I don't think people resent a changing neighborhood so much as they resent people with different values settling down and expecting the neighborhood to bend to their preference.

Honestly, that's just wrong. People resent how the schools only get better when wealthier people move in. People resent how petty violations are brutally enforced on the poor and relaxed once the neighborhood "gets a little better". People resent how a neighborhood improving implies they, the undesirables are forced out. These are all things i've learned from people speaking out about how they feel about their neighborhoods gentrifying. Where are you getting the idea that they care about "values"?

It all depends on who has the money and therefore the power. When the newcomers are wealthier and inclined to view the residents as undesirables, you get this sort of thing.

It goes the other way, too. In Amarillo, where I grew up, some neighborhoods had an influx of Vietnamese working in the meat packing industry; near where I live now, there's a large community of Mexican immigrants doing chicken processing. In both cases, take a wild guess who the police have problems with.

> Evan Snow, a thirtysomething “user experience design professional”..., who had moved to the neighbourhood about six months earlier (and who has since departed for a more suburban environment)

> Snow never seemed to recognise that his out-of-control dog was the aggressor: “So Luna was, I think, looking to move around the benches or behind me to run up happily to get a chip from Mr Nieto. Mr Nieto became further – what’s the right word? – distressed, moving very quickly and rapidly left to right, trying to keep his chips away from Luna. He ran down to these benches and jumped up on the benches, my dog following. She was at that point vocalising, barking, or kind of howling.”

>– in his deposition for the case, under oath, his exact words were that he was distracted by a female “jogger’s butt”. “I can imagine that somebody would – could assume the dog was being aggressive at that point,” Snow said. The dog did not come when he called, but kept barking. Nieto, Snow says, then pulled back his jacket and took his Taser out, briefly pointing at the distant dog-owner before he pointed it at the dog baying at his feet. The two men yelled at each other, and Snow apparently used a racial slur, but would not later give the precise word. As he left the park, he texted a friend about the incident. His text, according to his testimony, said, “in another state like Florida, I would have been justified in shooting Mr Nieto that night”

Is this guy real? This is the sort of person I'd expect to see on Silicon Valley not in the real world, he fits the techbro stereotype exactly. After each sentence I read, I thought this guy couldn't get even more stereotypical, but he managed to lower the bar further.

This is a person Rebecca Solnit chose to single out, carefully juxtaposing reports of his (incredibly obnoxious) behavior against Nieto's shooting, to which, even by Solnit's account (read carefully), he was not a party.

I don't want to get drinks with this character in Solnit's story, either. But I'm not sure we should applaud the tactic of summoning up and focusing outrage on people like this.

Her implication is that this guy's dog is why the taser was visible, and the taser was reported as a handgun, and the police responded to that. I'd say he's a party -- his self-reported distraction started the whole series of events.

He didn't call the police, he didn't report a gun. He was an asshole. We are all assholes, many times per week.

Applying the same label to different people doesn't make them equal or equivalent.

He certainly wasn't a murderer, not even close. But he was an unusually big asshole. I, for one, do not express any serious wish to shoot people very often.

I certainly wouldn't express it in writing over any electronic medium in today's world, but that's a different discussion.

I'd be inclined the believe that, if the title wasn't - Death by gentrification.

I mean, you could write the title - Death by Snu Snu and you could paint his girlfriend as some shady character.

Other people said he seemed agitated and nervous when their dogs were walking about by him. I imagine if a dog just charged at you and was barking/howling while its owner was staring at someone's ass, you'd be on edge for a bit as well.

No shit! I agree. I read the first half of the first graf of the story angry at Solnit, for singling out this guy and scare-quoting his occupation. Then I got to the bit about the dog jumping up on Nieto and the simpering excuse-making this guy made about that and I instantly got angry at the guy instead. What an asshole!

That lasted a couple minutes. But "poorly managed, barking dog jumps up on someone" happens millions of times a day, and those dogs owners are not complicit in murders.

As reported elsewhere, Solnit's story leaves out Nieto's mental illness, which is apparently severe: he appears to have been schizophrenic. We don't know what Nieto's reaction was to the dog. He could have terrified, or he could have been outraged.

A previous version of this comment suggested that Nieto had tased someone else at the park; he had not. I misread something; the taser incident I read about was unrelated to the park.

If true, why had his taser license not been revoked?

Is there a such thing as a taser license?

I don't think people should be allowed to arbitrarily carry tasers around, either, by the way. Certainly I don't think it's OK for bar bounces to have them. Dozens of people die every year when the police tase them. Tasers are not safe.

Gonna need a citation? Tasers certainly sound safer: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3800082

Your argument here appears to be that I am misguided because tasers are safer than firearms. I am not in favor of guns either.

Ah, sorry, I meant for morbidity claim.

I don't have good statistics, but late last year I went through the Guardian's police shooting database and bucketed all the killings in a spreadsheet, and I was startled to see how many people were killed by tasers. Tasers are dangerous.

I see that Taser combined with drugs or alcohol can increase risk of heart arrhythmia. That seems to be responsible for most of the deaths. Police Officers would encounter those folks more often than the general population.

Nieto's mental illness if it exists, is not relevant. Many people are "mentally ill" but not a danger to anyone else.

In fact 50% of the people killed by police are "mentally ill".

Also consider that having severe depression, autism, ADD, etc. are considered mental illnesses.

Alex's Nieto's "mental illness", even if existent, is not an excuse for his death.

You are entitled to that perspective. You might be right. But Solnit is not entitled to make that decision for all of her readers by withholding that detail.

I am going to gently push back on you, though, because you're making it sound as if Nieto had a completely unrelated historical diagnosis that is being used here as a smokescreen. Here are some details salient, I personally think, to this case:

* Nieto had been prescribed two antipsychotics. He had not been taking them at the time the police confronted him.

* Just three weeks prior to this shooting, Nieto had tased the ex-husband of a friend while they were putting their kid in a car. The victim removed the taser darts, and Nieto tased him again. The victim managed to get into the car and drive away as Nieto screamed and threatened him.

* The second of Nieto's two antipsychotics was prescribed two years prior, when he was placed on psychiatric lockdown after trying to set his parents house on fire.

There is mental illness of the kind that many of us suffer and manage, with varying kinds of assistance. And then there is uncontrolled, ongoing, and violent psychosis.

Nobody is arguing that Nieto's mental illness is a good reason for him to have been killed. But the notion that the police, dispatched to confront a subject reported in a 911 call to have been carrying a pistol, faced someone who did indeed refuse to show their hands and then did indeed draw a weapon is corroborated by Nieto's history.

This is not a gentle pushback, you're seeking to blame the victim without quoting any sources. Your inference that the story is "corroborated by Nieto's history" is pure speculation and does not explain the contradictory statements given by the police officers. If you've left something out here then I apologise but this story disgusted me, as does your comment.

> he ... had confronted (and tased) several people in that park

Do you have a cite for that? Cursory googling doesn't seem to pull it up.

I misread an article summarizing the DA report. He had, three weeks earlier, repeatedly tased someone as they were putting their kid in a car. He had not tased people at the park.

This entitlement among pet owners to inflict their animals on other people is extremely annoying.

I can tell you first hand that the neighborhood has been overrun by men like Evan Snow.

Considering you live in Chicago and that Rebecca and I actually live in Bernal Heights I think we have a much better perspective on the situation.

Where I come from you don't call the cops because you think you saw "a Mexican crazy man waving a gun around". If you see something, you leave, and you don't say anything to anyone. If you don't be a snitch then people don't get shot.

If you move from fucking Iowa and you think San Francisco is like adult Disneyland and you parade around town with your white ear buds and you're totally oblivious to reality, you might think that the SFPD is like the security guards at the mall and think you need to call them when you see some "Mexican kids hanging on the street in a pack".

The cops have fucking handguns and are very familiar with using them throughout years of gang violence in the Mission and Bernal. People who live in these neighborhoods don't look forward to having the police roll up searching for a Mexican with a handgun. Bullets fly in all directions. Completely innocent people get gunned down. Someone acting scary and just having a bad day but not hurting anyone gets gunned down. This shit happens all the time. I've been watching people get shot for no god damned reason for years and years and years.

STOP SNITCHIN'

Tell me more about how hardcore San Francisco is compared to the sleepy pastoral boulevards of Chicago.

Then, reread Solnit's story. The "snitch" we're talking about didn't call Nieto in. Someone else did.

This just feels like another damning indictment of US policing. "Don't call the cops, because innocent people will end up getting shot." In most civilised countries you can call the police without first wondering if its worth the risk of bystanders ending up dead.

It absolutely is another damning indictment of US policing.

There are two very different worlds here. The world Eric Snow lives in and the world Alex Nieto was taken from.

Eric Snow and Justin Fritz don't know the rules and never bothered to find out the rules yet decided to live in this world. Their actions got people shot.

Is this ideal? Hell no! It shouldn't be like this. No one fucking wants this. But pretending like it doesn't exist is irresponsible.

Let's be clear, it was the actions of the police officers that pulled the trigger that got him shot. I'm glad to live in a country where the police don't routinely carry firearms, and when they do evey instance of them even firing a round is investigated, never mind shooting someone dead.

Calling he police on someone waving a handgun around in public is not "snitching," it's doing everyone a favor.

That said, this isn't directly related to the story at hand as it is not clear that Mr. Nieto was in fact waving a gun around, but appears to be a convenient story from the police to justify having shot him.

> Calling he police on someone waving a handgun around in public is not "snitching," it's doing everyone a favor.

From the perspective of someone who's used to the benefits of calling the cops outweighing the costs. The parent poster gives valuable insight into the thought process learned from the very real places where the cost of calling the cops outweighs the benefits.

The Mission and Bernal are very real places indeed.

I heard a man gunned down by the cops just six months ago on a construction site on my block. Four years ago someone got shot execution style on the sidewalk 10 doors down from my apartment. That same apartment still had three bullets lodged in the walls and ceiling. Two years before that three people got blown away in a pizza restaurant underneath another apartment I was living in. That's five murders within 200 ft of where I was sitting in just 6 years. All of these happened in the Mission and Bernal neighborhoods where I've been living and where Alex Nieto grew up. That's just reality.

It sounds like a hard life out there in Bernal Heights.

Tom, I seriously can't figure out why you think that I'm trying to show people that "I'm hard" or something. I'm not. I'm a total wimp. I've had very few issues living in the Mission and Bernal because I keep my head down and mind my own business. Whatever picture you're trying to paint of me is completely irrelevant.

The point I'm making is that if you're in a neighborhood where there happens to be a history of gang violence you should know that calling the cops more often than not just escalates the tension and creates more opportunities for unneeded violence.

If different cultures are going to learn to live together peacefully we need to learn how to do so without getting the cops involved. How different would this have been if these people had just talked to Alex instead of making assumptions? That's the whole fucking point of the article. Eric Snow isn't in San Francisco to get to know people like Alex. He's here to make money and he doesn't know about nor care about what was going on in the Mission or Bernal before he moved to town.

And for fuck's sake, these are real murders I'm talking about and they rattle me to the bone. I'm a sensitive dude.

Seriously, follow these simple instructions for a much better life:

https://punchdrunktwolves.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/stop_s...

I don't think you're trying to be hard. I think you're trying to rep San Francisco as hard, to sell a narrative of the city as a place so beset by crime and class conflict† that responsible residents all follow a code. Knowing that code, any responsible white dude should know that letting his dog off the leash could end in someone losing their life.

What I have a problem with are stories with "good guys" and "bad guys". Very few stories are really like that, despite what Solnit so obviously wants you to believe. There's just tragedy layered on top of tragedy. There are injustices to be found, but they're probably not the ones you want --- the injustice isn't "white dude didn't follow the sacred white dude code", but rather "we give all the police firearms and put them in situations where they'd need to be superhuman to forestall tragedy", or "our care for the mentally ill is fucking appalling".

I don't care why Eric Snow is in San Francisco. He's a racist gun enthusiast. I'm never going to be his friend. But I also don't feel like I have any right to tell him where to live, and I don't feel like you do either.

And he sure as shit didn't kill anyone that day.

I'm "Thomas", by the way. :)

† We can both name cities that are really like that.

I'm just telling it how it is. If you wanna sit there in Chicago and tell me there's no crime and no class conflict going on in the Mission District of San Francisco, well, that's on you.

As a white male, I would only call the cops on a white male with a gun.

Everyone else I would try to ignore, because I don't want them shot. Anyone remember 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was shot by cops because he had a toy gun?

I would never live in Texas where I would be surrounded by white males with guns. At this point, I am more worried by crazy white dudes with a gun than I am by non-whites.

Update: I love the fact that I am talking exclusively about my own reactions and getting downvoted; love ya all.

"Update: I love the fact that I am talking exclusively about my own reactions and getting downvoted; love ya all."

Do not discuss your own downvotes. Don't mention them.

Do not interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

No, people do get shot. 12 year old boys get shot by gangsters in broad daylight, and no one says who did it. People get smashed on the head with poles by roving teenagers. That the cops are just another gang sometimes doesn't mean they aren't necessary, or that Stop Snitchin' is anything but aiding and abetting murder.

Except this incident precipitated the other events by likely distressing Alex Nieto and causing him to appear agitated.

I do not like being manipulated by journalists abusing their positions to push their preferred narrative.

Solnit would like us to believe Snow was complicit in Nieto's killing, because it supports her narrative.

Surely Solnit was made aware, before this article was published, of critically important details, like Nieto's diagnosed and medicated psychosis (he was off his meds), or his record of having violently confronted people in that same park. She chose to leave those details out of her story, entirely, because it would have muddied the point she hoped to make.

Meanwhile, Solnit is perfectly happy to write the story in such a way that a casual reader would have believe Snow was at fault. Some readers on this thread have apparently come away with the impression that it was him who called 911!

Psychosis: not important for us to know about. Later unrelated racist text message between friends: very important for us to know about. You don't feel manipulated?

no... Solint is using Snow as a narrative for representing the attitudes the gentrification brought into Alex's neighborhood. The attitudes that lead to Alex's death.

SoInit is not presenting all the facts because that is not a journalist's job. She has only a limited amount of space (yes even on the web) to work with.

But why are you talking about the messenger rather than the message?

Because it hits too close to home.

It hits 2,257 miles away from my home in Chicago.

What? Presenting all the facts is exactly a journalist's job. If a journalist is presenting a "narrative" instead of the facts, that journalist needs to quit their job and become a novelist.

Is there evidence that Nieto was behaving in a threatening manner, beyond that of having been attacked by a dog? Is there evidence that the responding officers knew of Nieto's diagnosis?

The message does indicate the state of mind of the responding officers.

Yes, there is, in the DA report. It's obviously all up for debate.

No, I don't. I also do not think Snow was complicit or otherwise responsible for Nieto's death, but help contribute to the environment where it was made possible.

Nope. Sorry, Evan Snow's recklessness in not getting his dog under control resulted in a innocent person getting shot, and cops whose careers are probably ruined.

Snow deserves a big chunk of blame here.

It's simple folks: if you're not highly confident that your dog will behave itself

For those of you who still harbor sympathy for Snow, do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs.

Now Snow's dog didn't end up biting, but that's beside the point. His dog clearly caused a major disturbance because he didn't control it. Snow's recklness is the root cause of this profound tragedy.

I'm pretty sure that pointing a device that appeared to be a gun at a group of cops after ignoring their requests for him to put his hands up had a bit more of an impact than the dog in this case.

That he pointed the tazer is very much disputed.

Ok, I'll play along. Unless you believe the cops unholstered his taser and placed it on the ground, chances are it was in his hands. Time taken to raise object that appears to be a gun and shoot someone <= time to unholster and raise weapon to shoot someone. Police need to be proactive in situations like this because being reactive could lead to getting shot.

The article suggests his hands were in his pockets when shot and that police fired the tazer after he was dead. The current rate of police killings indicates something needs to change. Being proactive doesn't mean killing someone each time you feel threatened. This case shows how that can play out. A little more "reactive" is exactly what was needed.

A very similar narrative was built for what happened in Ferguson: eyewitness testimony that the victim was no threat, claims that police assertions amounted to "superhuman powers" for the victim, &c.

Then the DOJ report more or less refuted all of those eyewitness claims.

The police were called to the scene based on a report of a subject brandishing a firearm. They found the exact person the report referred to. The subject was indeed armed (though not with a firearm). They did not need to tamper with evidence. They didn't need to fire the taser. In fact, doing so would only put them at risk, if they somehow managed to screw up firing it themselves.

The police probably did not fire the taser.

One of the key assertions of the story is that he had no reason to believe that the people requesting he show is hands were police officers. It was dark and they hadn't properly identified themselves or used sirens when arriving at the scene.

We can't know the state of mind of the victim, but there's every possibility that he believed he was pointing his tazer at a group of assailants. It's incumbent on police to properly identify themselves before making demands of someone they expect to comply.

There was one eyewitness to the shooting. Their testimony contradicted physical evidence in multiple ways (from the location of the shooting, to the number of police cars that were present.) That same witness was forced to admit on the stand that their recall was compromised by alcoholism.

The same eyewitness is the basis for claims Nieto's hands were in his pocket when he was shot. But Nieto's hands were wounded by the shooting, and his pockets were not damaged.

I'm not sure I have a lot of sympathy for someone who's career may be ruined for shooting an innocent person in this situation. There is a lot of bs in the police story (staring the victim in the eye when her wore glasses, the tazer being off in photos, the tazer having been fired in later photos etc).

>>do a Google search for people who have been mauled by out of control dogs.

Also kids get killed being mauled by dogs.

Not sure why people don't get this. If you own an animal that can kill a human being, you don't own a pet, you own a very dangerous animal, responsibility of actions of whose should solely rely on you.

Pets are parrots, squirrels etc. Tender animals which can't cause meaningful harm to human life.

I agree that he should have controlled his dog better, but he certainly wasn't at fault for the conflict escalating to a shooting. It was out of his hands by the time the police arrived.

Wow, you techbros are everywhere. Way to watch out for your bro. /s

> Is this guy real? ... fits the techbro stereotype exactly.

I have the same reaction.

Complete, with an aggressive dog that, oh, vocalizes.

On a side note: people like this should not be allowed to own dogs. He clearly has no control over it.

Without knowing anything more than what was written in the article, I think the clear intent is that he's supposed to fit the techbro stereotype exactly. I think this article crosses the line into propaganda to ensure that one way or another, that's what the reader will take away.

That's not to say the underlying story they want to tell is necessarily wrong. I'd agree with the basic thesis that gentrified neighborhoods bring in people who cause no ends of problems for the people who have lived there forever, with in some cases, tragic consequences. And the guy may genuinely be exactly the preppy little asshole they're telling me he is. But my general political sensitivities are already as "bleeding-heart-lefty" as you can imagine, and if you cherry pick bits of my life -- "chief software engineer, according to LinkedIn", "likes golf", etc., you can paint pretty much any picture you like.

San Francisco used to be an awesome place, then all those people moved in from some white-only places and it's pretty much gone down hill. It used to be an awesome, diverse place with strong and creative people... now look at it. It's so sterile and void of originality it is sickening in comparison to what it used to be.

Alot of those people imitate the culture and creativity from San Francisco's once diverse population until it's just become another vapid rendition of a once vibrant city.

Look at clowns like "Lil Dicky" for example that exemplify the notoriety of the idiocy that is confused for San Francisco culture.

The worst are the police from the MidWest and other racist places where they openly shoot minorities (Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Latinos, etc...) then they are assigned to places like San Francisco, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Portland, etc... to gentrify the area. They have been working a lot with the white supremacist "techbros' that plague San Francisco, such that when altercations occur, the police will abuse the minority every time. They even laugh about it too. It's sickening.

"San Francisco used to be an awesome place, then all those people moved in from some white-only places and it's pretty much gone down hill. It used to be an awesome, diverse place with strong and creative people... now look at it. It's so sterile and void of originality it is sickening in comparison to what it used to be."

I think you would do well (and perhaps be surprised/enlightened) to read about the population and racial makeup of the mission district (as an example) prior to the immediate post-WWII era.

Hint: there were no tacquerias.

Things change. Places evolve.

Are you confused, since you are confusing "evolution" with gentrification. San Francisco de-evolved.

To undo your over simplification, in terms of evolution San Francisco is over specialized in an evolutionary sense. Can you parse that and understand what that means?

Why would a person ever point a taser with a laser sight at uniformed police in this country?

Yes this is a tragedy, but how are police supposed to react to a gun-like object pointed at them, in the heat of the moment?

Cops get shot also. They are nervous on the job. As we would be, in their position. Are they supposed to react to a pointed gun with understanding and open arms? I just don't think that's practical.

Please provide evidence he pointed the taser at them.

Witness Testifies Alex Nieto Never Drew Weapon

http://missionlocal.org/2016/03/witness-testified-alex-nieto...

And multiple other witnesses, including non-policemen, testify that he did.

Cops always say that they feared for their life when they end up shooting an innocent person. If we just take their word for it, we're effectively saying that there are no circumstances under which we can legitimately criticize the police for killing someone (because the officers involved will always say that they perceived their lives to be in danger).

Yes, but then the situation is evaluated

One of the reasons for body cameras

There isn't any camera footage in this case, is there? There is, on the other hand, witness testimony to the effect that the police are lying.

> Why would a person ever point a taser with a laser sight at uniformed police in this country?

this is why police continue getting away with it. there are people out there like TheMagicHorsey who just believe everything they say, no matter how ridiculous or nonsensical.

upon hearing something totally and utterly unbelievable, he thinks "this guy was crazy", instead of "the police are lying their asses off to cover their own ass, who you gonna believe, cops or the dead guy?"

and bless his heart, that's probably because he's never had to deal with the police in any meaningful way. good for him. must be nice.

You mustn't make too many assumptions about people with no information in their profiles.

But you should read about the witness testimony in this case before you leap to conclusions.

Have you seen my post history? I'm highly skeptical of state actors, including the American police. But in this case, there seems to be several witnesses backing up the police story.

Thats the whole point. The victim worked in security - he knew about police work.

So either the police was lying (as one witness said) or they did not identify themself as police

Not just worked in security; "He had graduated from community college with a focus on criminal justice". The article leads us to believe that they identified themselves from 90ft away near or after dark with "Show me your hands". If they are not lying it certainly sounds like he was not convinced they were police and they did a poor job of identifying themselves.

That police officers get nervous and can be consumed by an adrenaline fueled fight or flight response (while armed) seems to be part of the problem.

I wonder if there's a pharmaceutical solution to this problem that would suppress the adrenaline and the fight or flight response to allow officers to remain cool headed even if someone is threatening them with a gun (or appears to be as was, perhaps, the case in this instance).

So. Four policemen put 40 bullets in somebody, and that's supposed to be "normal". What the hell?

It can be, if the somebody is armed and going berserk.

But that was apparently not the case here.

People don't fall dead after single bullet like in movies. In real scenarios 40 bullets are quite usual.

This means each officer probably fired 10 rounds. This can be done in less than 5 seconds with a standard issue glock.

According to the article at least (which has been pointed out to be one-sided), at least one of the officers empties the first magazine and reloads. This would be 15-17 for the first officer, and the article also notes that the second car arrived after the shooting begun.

I don't know everything that happened, and haven't developed an opinion overall, but it isn't as simple as rounds fired / number of officers.

I'm pretty sure the OP was trying to state that shooting to kill shouldn't be the normal thing police do.

There is no such thing as shooting to not kill.

Officers are (correctly) trained that if they are in a situation which warrants them shooting, they should use all of the bullets currently loaded into their gun.

The issue is that in the US, officers seem to come to the conclusion that killing the person is warranted way too quickly.

I meant using their firearm as their first response before even knowing what the situation is. Tamir Rice was shot by police before the car even finished coming to a stop at the scene.

Source?

This source [1] [2], a police detective with 26 years of experience, contradicts it directly:

"Officers are told to shoot until the threat is neutralized, down, and no longer a threat to themselves or the public. They are not trained to empty the magazine into a target."

[1] http://www.hlntv.com/video/2014/08/19/police-protocol-your-q...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Brooks_%28journalist%29

I think it's possible for you both to be correct. The definition of "neutralized" could be taught to officers as "you are 10000% sure he is dead", which is only done by firing your entire magazine into them. So while not explicitly trained to empty a magazine, it could be taught implicitly. I get the impression there are lots of "gotchas" like this in police training. Evidence in many police shootings seems to suggest emptying their magazine is normal.

Obviously then the US police officers are trained badly.

For 2012 the stats for the german police are: 36 bullets fired at humans, 20 injured, 8 dead. 54 bullets fired as warning shots. So it's possible to incapacitate. Stats for other european countries are similar.

Firing 40 bullets at a single human, some of them after the suspect has been hit multiple times and is on the ground (and still missing the majority of shots) seems excessive.

Meanwhile, the NYPD fires 16 times in a single incident and hits nine bystanders. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/25/nypd-shooting-bystander...

That's probably just dumb luck for the SFPD that the incident happened in a park and not in a crowded street.

Shots fired at persons by the german police in 2014 (total): 46 [1].

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_in_...

And overall gun crime in Germany is lower by, what, two orders of magnitude?

Germany's shot rate isn't lower simply because individual German police are stingier with their bullets.

No, it's certainly not that simple. It's still a very stark contrast that the SF police department fired a years supply of bullets in a single incident. I picked 2014 because it's the last available stats atm, and it's actually slightly above average.

On average, per use of deadly force, the german police fires about 1/20th - 1/40th in terms of number of bullets. One reason for that is that the german police is trained to use deadly force as last resort and rather retreat than fire.

Shooting 40 bullets at a person in a park instead of trying to clear the area is unlikely to happen here. (or anywhere in europe, for that matter)

When you fire a gun at someone, your goal is to kill them. If you're confronting an armed subject and you manage only to wound them, then not only are you making it possible for the to shoot you back, but you're making it overwhelmingly likely that they will --- who could blame them for trying desperately to save their own lives?

So to me, 1 bullet, 20 bullets, 40 bullets, who cares? Dead is dead. If you don't want police shooting people by mistake, disarm the police.

My attitude towards this might be different from a lot of other nerds. In my experience, nerds tend to be firearms enthusiasts. I hate guns.

Dozens of bullets sounds excessive. Very certainly killing someone usually takes far fewer bullets.

This amount of gunfire always suggests an emotional component to me, hatred or something.

That's only very generally speaking, of course. I can imagine situations where dozens of shots are rational.

That's why the number of bullets always gets reported: it supports a narrative about angry police. But ask around (really try): the police are trained to do this. Emotion isn't a major component of bullet count --- though it is a huge component in the decision to fire a gun in the first place.

Why fire at all in the given setting? Instead of "Wait for backup, clear out the area"? Retreat out of the immediate danger area, take cover, take time to assess the situation. The general way things go wrong seems to be "police arrives at scene, pulls gun, pulls trigger until clip is empty." [1] - in this case multiple officers, even after the assumed hostile was on the ground and not moving. I'm fine with a deliberate assessment and a deliberate kill shot - it's warranted some times and in that case shoot to kill and make it count. It's just that I don't see the assessment.

[1] the kid on the playground in cleveland, the guy in the supermarket aisle, ...

We do not disagree.

When you fire a gun at someone, your goal is to kill them.

NO NO NO NO NO!

In the US in civilian life, and this includes police although they don't really count as that any more, the goal is to stop them. Deliberate killing is reserved for the judicial system after due process.

Now, if you're not lucky enough to either have a target who stops after the first hit (this is very common) or gets a Central Nervous System hit, you're going to have to keep shooting until they lose enough blood or are otherwise physically disabled, and there's a good chance that'll result in death. Especially since it's not unheard of for that to require a magazine dump, and if multiple police are engaging the target, you'll get this sort of "40 bullets!" outcome.

Can you cite a piece of police training material that suggests police be sparing with bullets once they commence firing at a target?

Again, to be clear: I think the police should largely be disarmd. I do not think patrol officers should routinely be armed with handguns.

I think it is monstrously silly to suggest that the solution to police shooting problems could somehow involve police being more judicious with the number of shots they take. The problem is the guns, not the way that they're used.

Sorry I wasn't clear enough: once you make the decision to use the lethal force of a gun, you keep shooting, as quickly and accurately as you can, until the threat is over. The only "judiciousness" in this comes in making the decision to start, and to stop after the threat is over, and of course the latter is not always clear.

I misunderstood you, and also wasn't very clear in my comment. You're right: the goal isn't to kill; it's just that no part of the goal involves avoiding killing.

That the police shot this person at all is a tragedy, but the number of bullets --- a detail reported brethlessly in all police shooting stories --- isn't particularly important.

Police training demands they shoot to kill. The notion of using a firearm merely to wound is mostly a TV fiction. Especially with a subject they believe to be armed (as with this case, where someone called 911 reporting a gun), if the police start shooting, they're going to make sure the target can't react. Their concern will be that even a fatal shot might leave the target with 10-15 seconds with which to get off a shot in reply.

That this is probably a reasonable thing for the police to do is, for me, a strong argument that most police should not be armed with guns. But that gets us into an unproductive discussion about American gun culture and gun control.

> Police training demands they shoot to kill.

Something that is incredibly fucking stupid, and there are plenty of countries who do very well without this misguided use of of lethal weapons.

If you are saying that it's incredibly stupid to routinely put police into situations where they have less than 5 seconds to decide whether or not they are required to kill someone to protect themselves or their partners, I agree. I think we should disarm most police.

Well, obviously the less police and the general public are put in this position the better, and when there is a gunman running around the neighborhood, there better be police to subdue, and yes, if it's required to save other lives, kill him.

The point here, though is not to deny police their right to self defense, the point is to train them in a way that their first action to exercise that right is not with as much force as possible, but with as much force as is necessary.

Clearly emptying multiple magazines into someone speaks of fear, rather than necessity, and I do not wish to be policed and protected by the fearful.

But to your larger point, I agree: building a society in which there is little to none violence is a desirable goal.

That's actually not my point. My preferred solution to this problem isn't utopian. We could do it tomorrow:

Step 1: Ensure every police patrol vehicle has a shotgun locked in the trunk.

Step 2: Take away handguns from all patrol officers.

I think that's an entirely reasonable policy.

Let me expand on that: when discovering a violent, armed offender, 1 Policeman dies. Then their partner fetches the locked-up shotgun. Hopefully before they die too.

Gonna need a lot more Policemen. Because, attrition.

That's an excellent idea, especially considering that in my very limited time in California, their cops were the most heavily-armed human beings I'd ever seen in-person. And these were policemen and sheriffs in Redwood City. And I've seen on-duty soldiers.

California cops honestly had me wondering why anyone would ever really need to walk around looking like they'd stepped out of a Hollywood shoot-em-up movie, with two handguns, a rifle, and another larger weapon strapped to their back.

Maybe they were there for a cartel bust or some shit I didn't know about, but that simply was not appropriate for ordinary beat policing. Luckily, I was white enough that they didn't give me crap for staring at them.

Most police are not the kind of police you see on COPS. If COPS imitated real life, most of the episode would be spent filling out paperwork or giving citations.

>Something that is incredibly fucking stupid

Any evidence of this point?

>and there are plenty of countries who do very well without this misguided use of of lethal weapons.

Many countries choose to not use guns. There is a vast difference between not using guns and trying to shoot to wound. If you want to protest against the police using guns, speak directly to that.

You ask of evidence in a thread about a man being killed by police emptying multiple magazines into and the area around him. That doesn't even sound like shoot-to-kill that sounds like they were afraid to death.

There's plenty of more stories of where that one came from. Were you unaware of that?

It ultimately comes down to the relationship that you want the populace to have with their police force. A policy of shoot-to-kill tells the populace, that ultimately the lives of police are more valuable than that of any other citizen, and you better be terrified to be caught in any situation with the police where stress-levels are elevated.

A policy of shoot-to-disable, where killing an offender is a possibility, but it's a policy of using this lethal force as as a last resort, sends a message that the police actually care about the people they are trying to protect.

I'm not protesting police using guns, clearly there are situations where it's necessary to match and up the force of a threat. And clearly there are situations where police are justified in killing a human being.

I take issue to the police being justified in using lethal force as a first resort.

Surely we can train them better than "just try to hit the general area of where the suspect is, it's fine if you hit them in the head".

>You ask of evidence in a thread about a man being killed by police emptying multiple magazines into and the area around him.

This is a question of accuracy and situation awareness, not of intention when shooting.

>That doesn't even sound like shoot-to-kill that sounds like they were afraid to death.

My question was directly related to the comment made about shooting to kill, not about when to shoot.

>There's plenty of more stories of where that one came from. Were you unaware of that?

Stories about shooting when you shouldn't, not about shooting to kill.

>A policy of shoot-to-kill tells the populace

No, the policy of shooting too soon, without assessing the situation, is the cause of the problem. There is a distinction between when to shoot and how one shoots once they have made the decision. My question was focused on a comment made about the latter.

>I take issue to the police being justified in using lethal force as a first resort.

And I agree they are too quick to shoot. But my question was directed to a comment made about how they shoot once they shoot, now about when they shoot.

Where is the evidence (or argument) that shooting to kill is, and I paraphrase, something that is incredibly stupid? Arguments supporting knowing when to shoot, knowing what is around the target you are shooting, knowing how to shoot such that you hit the target do not answer this question.

It's a value judgement.

From the point of an officer in danger, a killed adversary is one where they can be 100% sure that the danger from that particular individual is eliminated. That's just good policy if your main objective is to save police officer's live above all.

If you're concerned that the general populace in general and the criminals with guns do not forfeit their chance at life for being in the wrong place at the wrong time or indeed be violent criminals out with guns to kill people, then that approach of "if you see a lethal threat, try to kill it", becomes less desirable, because innocent people get killed.

And while you are free to argue the difference of "shoot-too-soon" vs. "shoot-to-kill", the issue is, you might agree, that the outcome of shooting-too-soon-in-the-head and shooting-too-soon-in-the leg are decidedly different.

In the end arguing about whether the training someone to assess a situation before acting on it, is a little moot in general: Many of these situations involve incomplete information and the immediate need to act on it. In this case the officers say that, due to the guiding laser, they were under the impression to be in imminent danger. I sympathize with their lack of information to take easy decisions on.

But they point is: if they had decided to shoot to disable instead of kill, he would still be alive today, as would they be.

And even considering an actual armed adversary who was trying to take their lives, shooting to disable him would, often enough, still get them out of immediate danger to reassess how to apprehend the person and bring them to justice, instead of delivering a death sentence on the spot.

You might disagree, but a government policy which willingly accounts for the death of innocent people by direct force of the executive, to me, is fucking stupid.

You might argue that that's reverse, that a shoot-to-incapacitate policy would backfire, as officers would draw their guns more often perhaps, and I would agree. It's not the only thing wrong with policing today.

There is no such thing as "shoot to disable". That's something from TV. When you "shoot to disable" someone armed with a gun, they shoot you back. If you can find any law enforcement guidelines --- or for that matter, any firearms training documents --- anywhere that suggest otherwise, can you please cite them?

If you want the police not to prioritize threat elimination over everything else, you need to not equip them with hand-held firearms.

If somebody gets shot by the police because of having a gun like taser than, well, it´s exactly the right time to talk about gun culture and gun control.

I agree completely.

In this case, it's worth remembering that the victim was reported, in a 911 call, to have been carrying a pistol. Not a taser. The police came to the park to confront an armed subject. Upon finding him, they told him to show his hands. He refused, and then pulled out his weapon.

The police would have had just moments to decide what to do. You can imagine the level of adrenaline they were dealing with was such that they could probably taste it.

The police obviously made the wrong decision. But they were set up, by circumstances and by a system that forces police to make split-second life-or-death decisions like this routinely.

...and set up by military and paramilitary training to treat any potential threat as an actual, lethal threat. Furthered by the knowledge that the alleged aggressor was likely of an undesirable economic group and race.

No, it's not reasonable. These are allegedly highly trained professionals who spend a significant portion of their time training with firearms and they can't bring down one unarmed person without using more than one magazine and over 20 bullets each? They should be fired for being incompetent shooters at the very least. Absolutely unacceptable. If you're going to murder someone as a cop and be believable about it, do it on the first shot. If you reload, you're a murderer unless you're police and the defendant can't even get one Hispanic juror on the jury in the Mission of all places on earth. If this shooting hadn't been done by the police does anyone think the shooters wouldn't have been convicted of murder?

Stress.

Under stress the fight-or-flight response kicks in and a lot of fine motor skills and training goes out the window. An instructor of mine said that when the adrenaline hits, at best you have half of your trained skill, lose a lot of fine motor control, and won’t be able to think coherently for thirty to sixty seconds. You’ll do what was trained to the point of being automatic or is simple. Police officers typically get somewhere around one hundred hours of firearms training during academy and anywhere from eight to fifty hours of annual retraining, practice, and/or recertification. This is a lot less than needed to become or remain proficient. Had someone asked any of the officers immediately afterward how many times they pulled the trigger they probably would have answered two or three times or that they don’t know.

then they probably need more training or they shouldn't be police.

As a civilian, we are expected to exercise restrain when using lethal force when defending ourselves. Multiple bullets and reloading would be used as evidence as intent to murder.

From a European perspective this is more 'Death by police state' than anything else.

What happens in Europe when someone is seen in a public park waving around something that looks like this?

http://i2.wp.com/missionlocal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03...

He'll be asked to put his weapon down. And will subsequently be charged with possession of a firearm or of something that looks like a firearm, and in addition probably with some kind of charge for endandering people and if he pointed it a police officer there'd be a charge for that as well.

If the police felt especially threatened he might be shot in the leg or tasered (depending on what the police in that country is equipped with).

All the charges together would probably result in a hefty fine, something like a few thousand euros and probably some jail time (a few months tops).

p.s.: I'm talking about northern european countries here, southern/eastern countries are significantly less easy going.

Do police in these countries somehow have enhanced marksmanship and reaction times vs US police? I am not going to blame anyone for taking someone pointing a gun at them seriously and protecting their lives. Aiming for someone's leg (or let's try some movie techniques and shoot them in the hand) is only going to slow down reaction time and possibly end up with a worse situation.

I think in Europe police doesn't assume that something that could be mistaken for a gun is a gun because presence of actual gun on any given random event is minsicule.

If some gun was fired or if they are pursuing known serious criminals they use guns. In europe use of a gun is a planned action, not instincive response to feeling somewhat threatened.

The cops probably would get called, they might shoot. Police is trained to shoot to disable, not to kill. Sometimes they need to of course. Then if there is any doubt they would be prosecuted and jailed if they overreacted ( this happens ).

Of course these situations are extremely rare as Western Europe is not as a violent society as the US is.

edit: to add: private citizens carying tasers ( let alone guns ) around is unheard of / extremely rare.

"shoot to disable" is not a thing.

You are welcome to visit.

edit: this was in reply to 'if you are, you are living in fantasy land'. which OP edited away. lame.

Please provide one piece of evidence that police anywhere are trained to "shoot to disable".

https://www.politie.nl/themas/schietincident.html

Perhaps it's my poor Dutch, but your link does not say that.

"An agent can also shoot to arrest someone suspected of a serious offense. In such situations has taught the agent on the legs of the accused to target. Where there is self-defense, the agent may shoot on the trunk of the suspect."

Modulo Google translation.

No meaningful difference. For one thing, shooting at someone's legs to arrest them makes no sense, and leads me to believe that something has been lost in translation.

But more importantly, the Dutch police will shoot to kill in self-defense, which is exactly the same as the US.

There are far fewer guns floating around in most of Western Europe, so it's less likely in the first place.

I think this is the key point. In a society with as lax gun control as we have here, police are placed in much greater danger than they are in Europe, and their training is adjusted accordingly, with lethal repercussions.

It also doesn't help that we leave our mentally-ill citizens to fend for themselves on the street, instead of giving them the care they need like most other first-world countries do.

Put the two together, and American police are faced with the very real possibility of facing an armed crazy person any day they report for work.

There are a lot of guns in Switzerland but the police doesn't come in shooting.

Most important training the police gets is how to diffuse a situation not how to shoot to kill.

It sounds like suicide by cop, which is a real thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_cop

Are you implying death by police state is not a thing?

It's not a thing.

This article seems to miss some crucial details. How does a jury go from the given description of a man armed with only a Taser being not only shot to disable but absolutely destroyed and vote unanimously in the police's favor? Was the question asked to the jury more specific, did the Guardian leave something out or was the jury really racist as the Guardian implies (by listing their races)?

> being not only shot to disable but absolutely destroyed

There is no such thing as "shoot to disable" with firearms. Firearms are lethal weapons. They should only be used when deadly force is justified, and cannot reliably be used to "disable" someone apart from killing them.

You can "shoot to disable" though it can often result in death. Which can be useful if your trying to keep someone alive to interrogate. However, US police are flat out trained to kill.

Note: Disable does not mean they are unarmed / unconscious, it generally means they can't move quickly and even if they could still be quite dangerous.

Case in point, Salah Abdelslam, the Paris terror 'suspect' who was arrested last week in Brussels, was shot in the leg as he was charging the police, then arrested.

Its because compensation for killing someone is on average less than for disabling someone.

The article provides some key details you don't mention here:

> It was a civil trial, so the standard was not “beyond a reasonable doubt”, just the “preponderance of evidence”. No one was facing prison, but if the city and officers were found liable, there could be a large financial settlement and it could affect the careers of the policemen. The trial was covered by several local media outlets. On Thursday 10 March, after an afternoon and morning of deliberations, the eight jurors – five white, one Asian woman and two Asian men – unanimously ruled in favour of the police on all counts.

Namely:

- It was a civil trial,

- preponderance of evidence was required,

- the penalty would come back to hurt the tax-base,

- the jurors were insulated from the racial component.

How can you not get one Hispanic juror on your jury in San Francisco? This to me, is mind blowing. I'm not saying the jury was racist necessarily, just ignorant. Some people go against all reason and trust cops despite common sense that says not to. It's hard to fathom, but I think that's where a lot of these problems come from. One minute, you have a senior in high school who bullies, beats up other students, and can't be trusted with anything and the a few months later, this same person carries around a gun and a badge and society basically absolves him of wrongdoing. Until those attitudes change, the police will continue to get away with blatant murders like this one. Even if every police person in the US stops being racist at once, there will still be murders until our society starts to hold the police and courts responsible for their actions. You do not get to over 2 million people in jail (mostly non-white) without society approving such a mass crime against humanity.

Because most people try their best to not serve on a jury? I served on a jury in SF not long ago. ~80% of people called were dismissed due to hardship, which I assume would impact lower income folks more.

The remaining ~18% tried their best during questioning to make sure they were kicked off the jury. We ended up with a jury that was mostly professionals or retired folks.

It's truly sad. Last time I sat through voir dire, about 10 people tried to get out of jury duty by claiming they felt the system was too racist for them to give it a fair hearing. Aside from being rather unconvincing, it seems wrong that people who ostensibly care about minorities being railroaded would not want to be on a jury.

But maybe I'm just angry I had to sit through two days of lame excuses.

It is true that this case has the signs of unnecessary, racially-biased police brutality written all over it. It is also true that gentrification in SF is causing serious problems and culture clashes.

But I think it's unfair and quite a stretch to take this example and say that 'gentrification' is directly responsible for this killing. The underlying problems here are racism and police brutality, which in this case are correlated to, but an entirely separate issue from, the sudden influx of wealth.

The death wasn't caused by racism and police brutality in the abstract. It was caused by the confluence of the two that manifests in the context of gentrification. Cities have a huge incentive to police these neighborhoods in a way that makes the gentrifiers "feel safe." That causes an atypically unstable situation.

This is the taser Alex Nieto pointed at the police and refused to drop (if the police are telling the truth):

http://i2.wp.com/missionlocal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03...

allegedly pointed

The four police officer's stories contradict one another as well as some of the physical evidence.

If the taser was found anywhere but holstered it means that he _likely_ drew it. Any motion to draw a weapon(lethal or otherwise) is seen as a threat. Given that it is gun-shaped, it was a really stupid move if he did draw it.

Given that he studied criminal justice and had no criminal record whatsoever, I'm sure he knew how stupid that would be. Nobody has provided a reasonable explanation for why he would've done something so stupid.

He was suffering from schizophrenia and earlier that month shot his friend three times with the taser, according to the friend's testimony at a restraining-order hearing.

Er, the taser some officers claim was pointed at them, and the one that was lying on the ground beside his collapsed body as it was still being shot by officers

Allegedly. In any case, that makes it to trial, the police by default have always claimed that a weapon was pointed at them, and the suspect refused to cooperate.

It's the only reasonable defense, and plays out better than the more realistic "cooperation wasn't instantaneous, we argued, and then my fellow officer started shooting for unknown reasons so I automatically shot too".

In this case, there are multiple bystanders who testify they say Nieto pointing the weapon at people and the dog:

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Man-killed-by-S-F-police...

The only witness described as seeing the Taser drawn was the owner of the dog that had just threatened Nieto.

Plus four police officers. And there's also this testimony:

According to San Francisco court records, Nieto's former friend Arthur Vega described a March 5 incident in which Nieto had used a stun gun.

In a March 14 request for a restraining order, Vega said Nieto shocked him four times in the back in front of his wife and 3-year-old son. Vega said he had been picking up his son when Nieto appeared and forced himself into his wife's car. Vega said Nieto had screamed profanities. He and his wife got away, but two days later he saw what he believed to be Nieto's car following him.

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Man-killed-by-S-F-police...

The previous incident seems irrelevant to the behavior of the actors in the situation in question.

I personally have problems with eyewitness testimony in general. Uncorroborated testimony of the defendants...

Lacking any “real” contradictory evidence, I guess we have to take the police’s claim reluctantly at face-value. The police don’t exactly have an impeccable track record when it comes to on-the-record honesty, but in this case their (often inconsistent) testimony is all we’ve got. And when you combine that with the lead-up to his police encounter, where basically everyone he ran into (in this narrative) treated him disrespectfully, then it starts to smell understandably fishy.

EDIT: Is it too much to ask for responses in lieu of down-votes? Discussions work better when we work together on our ideas instead of just shutting down the stuff we disagree with.

From the article:

"The city lawyers brought in a Taser expert whose official testimony seemed to favour them, but when he was asked by Pointer to look at the crime‑scene photos, he said the Taser was off and that it was not something easily or accidentally turned on or off. The light is only on when the Taser is on. Officer Morse had testified that when he arrived to kick it out of Nieto’s hands there was no red light or wires coming from it. The Taser wires are, however, visible in the police photographs documenting the scene."

Real contradictory evidence?

Whether he did or not is almost irrelevant.

The police wouldn't have even been there if some dude hadn't decided to call 911 on the guy for "walking while hispanic":

> Fritz said he only saw Nieto pacing near a bench and eating from a bag but did not himself see any weapon.

http://missionlocal.org/2016/03/witness-testified-alex-nieto...

Fritz wasn't the one who called the police. Multiple other witnesses testify that Nieto had the weapon out and was pointing it at people and a dog:

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Man-killed-by-S-F-police...

What would you have done if you'd seen that?

> Fritz wasn't the one who called the police.

Yes, he was.

> What would you have done if you'd seen that?

I disagree with the ridiculous US weapons laws, but if a defensive weapon can't be drawn against an aggressive dog, when can it be drawn?

You're right, I mixed him up with Evan Snow:

"He grabbed the item in the holster, he removed it from the holster, and he pointed it directly at me,” Snow testified.

http://missionlocal.org/2016/03/witness-says-alex-nieto-poin...

It's perfectly fine to draw a weapon to protect yourself from such a dog. But when the police show up and tell you to drop it, it's incredibly dangerous to refuse.

>"walking while hispanic"

I'm hispanic, Puertorican to be exact. Guy seemed to be dressed like a hoodlum in all images I can see in the article. I get nervous when I see people dressed like that here in San Juan, and he definitely would have seemed shady wandering around in a park, alone, dressed like that.

Sure, maybe it's not tolerant to judge someone like that based on what they wear, but at the same time, I can't fathom why an innocent would insist on literally dressing like a gangbanger.

Orrrrr, people can dress however they like without the fear of getting assaulted by police, sexually assaulted, etc. What a close-minded and dangerous view to have, attaching one's perceived morality to their clothing.

Are you serious? It's a fucking 49er's jacket and some black pants. That's nowhere near close enough to be considered "dressed as a cholo".

It's the fact that some white transplant saw a Hispanic guy wearing a bomber jacket and Snapback hat, and decided that was a suspicious look. That's frankly " walking while Hispanic"

Why do you omit the part about him carrying and allegedly pointing around an object that looked just like a handgun?

Wearing 49ers jacket and hat in San Francisco is dressing like a hoodlum?

By itself, no. Were the jacket and pants oversized? How did he style his hair and facial hair? Lots of ways to signal "I am a thug", even if you aren't.

> it's not tolerant to judge someone like that based on what they wear

correct.

> Sure, maybe it's not tolerant to judge someone like that based on what they wear, but at the same time, I can't fathom why an innocent would insist on literally dressing like a gangbanger.

Can I judge you based on this statement?

Note: I am judging you based on your attitude not just how you look, therefore it is not prejudicial.

Seriously, why should it matter what someone wears? You may not be friends with them or date them.

The word 'xenophobia' literally means fear of strangers. But apparently it applies only if those strangers are Syrian illegals and not when they're white techies. It's unfortunate that the media is stoking this phenomenon. Strangely enough, here a British newspaper is concerned about the supposed invasion of a city half a world across from Britain.

This is a very sad occurence but I'd wish an article to read more as facts than as a sob story

Aaron Swartz commits suicide after being prosecuted for a crime that he did commit, and he's a martyr.

A working class latino guy in San Francisco gets shot by the police because some white dudes didn't like the look of him, and it's basically his fault.

Hacker news values.

yes. he obviously got killed because some white dude didnt like the look of him. the gun he was pointing at the cops is not related to his death.

He got killed largely because some white dude called 911 for no good reason. (I mean, we're talking about someone who's so clueless about what a city is that he thinks that anyone who's brown is likely to be "foreign".) We have no evidence that Nieto pointed the taser at the cops who shot him.

1. Please prove he pointed a gun at them. 2. People literally called the cops TO his location in the first place because he was sitting on a park bench eating. What is wrong with this picture? 3. He was shot 40 times. What is wrong with this picture? 4. The cop immediately called his union rep before an ambulance. What is wrong with this picture?

You are right they must be lying, it seems more likely that some random cops heard on radio that a guy was sitting on a bench eating and they just thought "let's go kill some guy eating in a park today".

LMAO what a fucking strawman. At least try to not be disingenuous from the get go

One might as well say: "20K+ fatalities on the Boko Haram insurgency, and counting, but you're up in arms about one maybe-murder in the most privileged city in the world."

Not every community needs to be about every thing.

If this murder was ignored by HN then fine, but the point is that the community is commenting about this case and, by doing that, showing its values.

"Hacker News" is not made up of a single homogenous group of people who all think the same things. That should be obvious by the commentary in this post. There is much debate and discussion. But even if the majority of posters find Swartz to be a martyr and Nieto to be "basically [at] fault", it does not necessarily mean the same groups of individuals feel both these ways, much less that racism is the reason, as you imply.

You've boiled two cases down to a single factor: race. You've ignored the fact that Swartz was charged with non-violent crimes and that some of the charges were disputed and seen as prosecutorial overreach. Even the B&E charges may have been nonsense, because they were linked to an attempted felony. And you ignore the fact that Swartz was doing what he thought was right.

You've also heavily mischaracterized the Nieto case. 911 was called because a man was seen pointing a taser at people and a dog. Whether the actual caller saw the weapon is irrelevant. The fact of it is not in dispute. The only disputed fact is whether Nieto pointed the taser at police. Given his previous behavior, and the fact that his weapon was found on the ground (i.e., not holstered), it seems at least plausible that he pointed at the police, or at the least, that he was drawing it or had drawn it. So it seems like, yes, it was largely in his control whether police would show up and how they would respond to him.

The point that the hacker news community is not homogenous is too obvious to be worth making. It doesn't imply that it's not possible to make generalizations about how it reacts to certain events.

Your second paragraph illustrates my point. In the case of Nieto, you're coming up with excuses for the police; in the case of Swartz, you're coming up with excuses for Swartz. There is no objective reason for excusing the authorities in the one case and the victim in the other. We know for sure that Swartz did a bunch of stupid things which had the entirely predictable consequence that he got in trouble with the law. Nieto may also have acted stupidly in this instance -- we don't know for sure whether he did or to what extent. But in the case of Swartz, we make excuses, whereas in the case of Nieto, we say "conceivably there's something he might have done differently to avoid being shot, therefore it's his fault he was shot". Apply the same logic to the Swartz case and you'd have to say that he also deserved what he got.

Your assumptions about both cases and your preconceived notions of racism have lead to you faulty conclusions. The Swartz case was about the response fitting the crime. The Nieto case is about police officers ostensibly fearing for their own safety and the safety of other.

Had Nieto's weapon been holstered and had he been arrested, I might have been just as critical about the prosecutorial response as I am in the Swartz case. And had Swartz come out guns blazing rather than taking his own life, I would not have faulted police for responding with deadly force.

Your generalization is faulty because you've trivialized the relevant details away.

>The Swartz case was about the response fitting the crime. The Nieto case is about police officers ostensibly fearing for their own safety and the safety of other.

This says it all: you think that the Nieto case is inherently about whether the police officers feared for their lives, and the Swartz case is inherently about how poor Aaron was prosecuted unjustly.

That is one perspective.

Another perspective would be the inverse: the Nieto case is about how an innocent man got shot for no good reason, and the Swartz case is about how a naive and perhaps somewhat entitled young man made a series of stupid and entirely avoidable choices that led, predictably, to his being prosecuted.

In other words, one could make an argument for blaming the victim in both cases. While it is apparently inconceivable to you that anyone should think of doing this in the Swartz case, it is so obvious to you that this is what we should do in the Nieto case that you can't even grasp the alternative.

That is the bias that I'm getting at.

> > This says it all: you think that the Nieto case is inherently about whether the police officers feared for their lives, and the Swartz case is inherently about how poor Aaron was prosecuted unjustly. > That is one perspective.

It is a perspective in which one can hold a different opinion of these government actions based on contexts other than race. You seem to have both acknowledge this and moved the goalposts.

> it is so obvious to you that this is what we should do in the Nieto case that you can't even grasp the alternative.

This is just pointless bickering at that has no basis in reality and borders on an ad hominem argument. I am quite capable of grasping alternatives and putting thought into those alternatives. My personal opinion on either case isn't neither here nor there.

The point is that you made generalizations and heavily implied that race was the motivating bias or context for people holding these different opinions. I am pointing out that you failed to make that case and, as a counterexample, provided another context in which people could reach those same conclusions without considering race.

I don't claim to know why people think about Nieto and Swartz in such different terms. I am just pointing out that they do. Objectively speaking, Swartz was much more at fault for his death than Nieto was, and yet for whatever reason, many people here are much more willing to blame the victim in the Nieto case. I think racism probably plays a part in that, but I can't look inside people's heads. What other (good) reason could there be for seeing Swartz as a victim but not Nieto?

(Let me add that I'm not saying that Swartz was at fault for his death simply because it was a suicide. I don't think that we should blame people for killing themselves. What I'm getting at is that he freely chose to engage in civil disobedience without having properly thought through the potential consequences, which fairly obviously included at least some jail time.)

Why is gentrification bad?

Because in order for cities to function properly, it's important that blue collar workers are able to afford to inhabit them. Un-governed gentrification and unreasonably low levels of low income housing result in situations like exist in the SFBA now, where many middle class households are either forced into extraordinarily long commutes (leads to higher stress, worse health and increased mortality) or cramped living in shared multi-family apartments/houses.

What force makes people stay living in the same rented house no matter how bad it makes their life? Somehow people all across America are managing to survive despite not living in gentrified areas. Is SFBA the only place those middle class people can find a job? That sounds kind of unbelievable. Are they unmotivated to move because it's too much hard work? Afraid of losing friends and being unable to make new ones? I know these are costs but they really too high to bear?

Personally, I live in a relatively small city and my income is far higher than my expenses. I once lived in London and the two were almost equal. Life was less comfortable then but I certainly didn't blame the rich bankers for pushing up my rent and bus fares.

"Is SFBA the only place those middle class people can find a job" Do you know how expensive it is to move? I mean, move across the country from the Bay Area? Should people be forced to move into the Central Valley, a 2+ hour train/public transit commute into the SFBA? What kind of crap quality of life is that?

>Somehow people all across America are managing to survive despite not living in gentrified areas.

No, they're not. Employment, especially mid-to-high-wage employment, is geographically concentrated. Most of the land-area of the USA, so to speak, is poor, and getting poorer. Also, remember, 80% of the population actually lives in large metro-areas, not in the countryside.

The thing is, it partly depends on how you feel about societal well-being in general. If you believe these folks are valuable contributors to society, then you should naturally also believe it's important to help them continue doing so in ways that are not hazardous to their health, demeaning, or cause societal breakdowns (homelessness, drug abuse, child endangerment, etc).

If you don't believe they're valuable contributors, I challenge you to describe how any high-CoL metro would successfully function without blue collar service workers.

It's not just about the same house. It's also about moving away from friends, family and support structures that make life better no matter who you are and can make poverty more survivable. And it's about a city's inability to function without people who can pay the rent somewhere close enough to their low-wage jobs (in retail, bartending, waiting tables, etc - at the businesses which make the city desirable to live in in the first place) to make sense for them to work in the city instead of in another community.

> I once lived in London and the two were almost equal. Life was less comfortable then but I certainly didn't blame the rich bankers for pushing up my rent and bus fares.

I don't know your particular situation, but moving in a place you already know is expensive is an entirely different case than being priced out of a place you've already been living. (Plus it's hard to blame individual bankers or techies or whatever for it, it's more of a matter of public policy).

I think it is generally seen as a process that ends up pricing out and displacing the people who used to rent within an area (or even own, if property taxes end up spiking), thus dissolving the original community.

It's a double edged sword: it generates wealth and regenerates an area. On the other hand people who may have lived there for 20+ years can get priced out of their own neighbourhood.

Arguably, people have a right to continue living where theyve always lived, and should be able to live close to work. This is at least believed in the UK, in theory.

Unfortunately, what normally happens is that house prices in the area grows exponentially fast and serves to only make the rich richer. Rental prices are usually pegged to housing prices and thus, the original inhabitants are pushed out.

Decreased quality of life for those who rent and can no longer afford to live in the gentrified neighborhood.

Increased property taxes for those who already own can force even long-time residents to move, regardless of whether they actually want to, simply because their home has suddenly and unexpectedly increased in value. You could argue that this is a windfall - but being forcibly displaced by increased cost of living isn't fun, even if you do get a bunch of money for your house (that you didn't want to sell in the first place).

Also, change is scary.

> Increased property taxes for those who already own can force even long-time residents to move, regardless of whether they actually want to, simply because their home has suddenly and unexpectedly increased in value.

That's not really an issue in California as property tax growth is fixed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1...

Cash poor home owners get "stuck" in their homes because if they sold and bought a new house, they'd have significantly greater property taxes. Theyre better off keeping the home and either living there or renting it out.

In California, real property is only reassessed at market value when it is sold or transferred. So property taxes won't increase on long-time residents who don't move. Rent control is, I believe, intended to provide the same effect for long-time residents who rent instead of own. I agree that increases in other components of the cost of living of an area can have the same effect though.

It's also reassessed if you improve it in any substantial way. My property taxes doubled after a remodel. Some of that was the remodel, but roughly half was due to prices in the neighborhood going up since my wife and I originally bought the house.

In my case we can afford these extra taxes, but I can easily imagine that in other circumstances this would be difficult. The alternative is doing work without permits, which comes with other risks.

You got permits for your remodel? Everyone else I know in California does it on the dl and doesn't tell the city for this reason(and many others).

We built up, no way to avoid it. People get caught in our neighborhood unless they're keeping it way under the radar.

Basic reason is that it displaces the existing population through increasing prices in housing and services and alienates the existing population socially and culturally. The only people that experience the benefits of gentrification are wealthy newcomers, whereas existing populations suffer varying degrees of harm with the gradual destruction of their communities.

Because changing environment unintentionally pressures previous long-standing residents into leaving the area, and causes discomfort as two divergent groups meet in the same location and one feels the other is destroying, ruining, or usurping their culture.

It's not "bad" as a moral stance, but certainly some claim it is bad from their perspective if they end up on the losing end of gentrification.

To give an example that more people might empathize with. Parts of central London used to be affordable by the mid to upper classes, but these scenic locations are now 100% owned by others who only buy them for use as vacation homes. It's an odd case of gentrification pushing relatively wealthy people out of an area so that extremely wealthy people can live there instead.

It goes hand in hand with an increased cost of living (e.g. the nicer things get the more expensive it is to live there) which in turn causes a displacement of people and communities who lived there before the gentrification happened. In many western countries there is also a strong correlation between the above displacement and it overly effecting minorities, who due to economic/political/social disenfranchisement have congregated communities in low cost areas.

If you are a member of the more affluent population who moves into a gentrified area, it's great, but if you're a part of the community who has lived there for a long time and you suddenly can't afford to any more, it's really not great at all (to it mildly).

So in a narrow sense 'gentrification' isn't a bad thing, however put in the wider context it can have very significant negative effects on poorer communities. Especially when combined with a lack of social/affordable housing.

Gentrification is fundamentally a dramatic increase in local prices. The change isn't usually driven by locals earning more but by new people moving in and pricing the former residents out of the market.

It's great for the new residents. It is terrible for the old – particularly old residents who don't own their own home or are otherwise unable to capitalize on the price shift.

That sounds like a net zero, not a net "bad", which is what the OP was asking.

Why is outsourcing bad? Change is all good and fancy, until you are the one left behind/on the receiving end.

The West right now - especially US and UK have a bad track record of redistributing the gains.

Because not many people own homes in the US. So if local prices go up, renters have to move elsewhere. If you own a house, chances are you still have to move because other services become too expensive for you, but at least you made a nice profit on the house. If you rent, it's a lose-lose situation.

Because it means that society is rationing resources at a level of scarcity well above the actual level of scarcity. It means that some of the potential utility of just building more housing is being left on the table so that an artificial class conflict can be created between new and existing citizens.

It often screws over the residents who worked hard to make an area desirable. A typical pattern goes like this: 1. An area is cheap because it is considered undesirable and all the rich folk move away. 2. Poor folks move there - artists, minorities, families. 3. These folk work for years to make the area safer, nicer to live in, more interesting. 4. Now that poor folk have improved the neighborhood, rich folk flood back in and buy up property or just drive up rents, pricing the original residents out. 5. Lower class folk forced to move to the next crappy neighborhood, and repeat the process.

In this case, the newcomers regard the residents generally as undesirable and specifically as criminals.

In general, things which disrupt a community are not readily welcomed by the community.

THANK you for comments, I honestly did not know that someone would be against it.

I assume this is from a left POV, I see it as plus that a local business succeeds, or a new local hosting gets built, at worst more tax revenue = more services. I wonder to self if higher education is also viewed as bad, as it has same effect - higher local prices. So the outcome to anti-gentrification is the abandoned neighborhoods that investors would not want to develop. Not something we can solve, just a warning to business to not grow in the anti-gentrification areas.

What about the "UnProvoker": free floating handcuffs that at the press of an easily accessible button will clamp on your hands and fingers, so if the incoming cop team shoots you, they won't be able to claim you acted menacing? Also the cops then have to come untie you, maybe time enough to start a conversation about racial profiling?

Some other articles have mentioned that he was previously on some pretty powerful psych meds and there weren't any found in his system by the coroner. Quitting those medications cold turkey can make someone with previously minor mental health problems go full "point a taser at the cops" crazy.

This is exactly like (minus the human tragedy) the bars that start getting noise complaints after more residential building move into their area

And somehow people moving into a certain area think that what was there before should cater to all of their demands

Really

I know of a place where there's been a gun club since the 40s. There's a road called Gun Club Road. There's a housing development called Gun Club Estates or somesuch. And people who move there complain about the noise of the … gun club.

People are stupid.

Is there no rent control in SF or other US cities? How do people get priced out?

San Francisco has very strong rent control laws that limit rent increases to below the rate of inflation, that ensure well-behaved tenants generally can hold onto an apartment for their entire life if they want, and keep paying an ever-discounted rate, and they even apply when the tenant is wealthy.

But when poor tenants voluntarily move out, they're usually replaced by someone willing to pay a lot more.

Also, in any given year, a very small fraction of landlords (less than 1/10th of one percent) decide they don't want to be landlords anymore, and an extremely controversial California law called the Ellis Act allows them to decline to renew the lease and stop being landlords.

Why the opposition to the Ellis Act? If I own a home and want to sell it, I shouldn't be limited to selling it to someone who wants to be a landlord (a very small minority of people). And if I buy a home, I shouldn't be forced to rent it to someone.

If you rent a home you do not own it and you should not have any claim to what happens to it beyond the end of your current lease.

By the Copenhagen Theory of Ethics (https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...), once you rent an apartment to someone for a particular price, you have a moral obligation to continue doing that forever.

This was tried during the 1600's and 1700's, there were 99 year leases on land between the gentry and the yeomen. When costs increased, the gentry were unable to adjust the price on their leases and paved the way for social upheavals.

99 year (or longer) leases are still very common in the UK for apartments ["leasehold property"]. There are issues with leasehold, but "I can only sell my landlord's interest to somebody else willing to be a landlord" isn't really one of them -- it's just an asset with an income stream and a certain amount of upkeep costs and responsibilities, and there are buyers out there who'll take them on and a generally accepted mechanism for valuing them.

And the pool of buyers who wants to deal with that is demonstrably much smaller than the pool of buyers who simply want to live in the damn house. If someone wants to sell their personal property I see no legitimate reason why there should be restrictions on who can buy it.

I don't see the word "rent" anywhere in your linked article but maybe a synonym is there somewhere.

Regardless, if you agree to rent $PROPERTY to $TENANT and I you want to sell me $PROPERTY, I don't see why I should be bound at all to any agreement with $TENANT outside of letting their current lease expire.

I don't buy that there is any moral obligation in the first place but to extend that to third parties seems a bit silly.

I don't buy it either, but the majority of SF voters do.

That sounds like a great way to ensure no one ever rents an apartment to anyone.

Know thy audience.

Those who own and rent to others are not looked upon favorably by those who rent. It's the Scrooge principle: A man who provides a service to those who would otherwise have no service are despised by all.

The sad thing about the opposition to the Ellis Act is how much it hinders the renting populace. By not allowing the landlord to pass along costs to the user, the user ends up losing more because the landlord is less likely to sink more monies into a facility.

Edit: If you are going to downvote me, please take the time to provide a reasoned response, I am open to hearing opposing points of view.

There is rent control in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Oakland, CA. People get priced out of the market through an increase in demand and a lack of corresponding supply opportunities.

1. The lessee stays in a rent controlled location during a period of price increases, absolving themselves of the real-world price increase that is occurring to the landlord. So, to move from the house would mean the costs the landlord absorbed will be now absorbed by the lessee, meaning there is a large expense in moving. So, you either make the lodging you are in work, or else you move out. If you move out, lacking a corresponding wage increase, you will be priced out.

2. For San Francisco, there are height and zoning restrictions galore in the city. Supply to meet the demand is just not going to be allowed by the locals who push for "Keeping San Francisco like San Francisco." Since, demand increases, supply is static and those who would like to come in at $X wage are simply priced out of the market.

DC technically has rent control, but there are a variety of loopholes and it does not apply in most cases.

What are the loopholes? Is it like Section 8?

They fell in the statement because it was listed on the Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_Sta...

Thank you for the heads up.

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http://dhcd.dc.gov/service/rent-control

The most common exemptions from rent control are for rental units that are:

- Federally or District-subsidized

- Built after 1975

- Owned by a natural person (i.e., not a corporation) who owns no more than four rental units in the District

- Vacant when the Act took effect

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To be clear, DC has an extremely tenant friendly set of laws. But the rent control is basically just a legacy of an earlier era.

Yes SF and NYC have rent control. And other regulations that make it less profitable to build and rent out homes. This reduces supply of rental homes, which increases prices.

"In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city - except for bombing." - Assar Lindbeck

One more vote for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United...

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