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Comment by dmode | Hacker News Reader

Mods - can we update the title to “San Francisco dog poop crisis” ? Note that the category of tickets in 311 is “Human / Animal waste”. I personally went through 100 random tickets on the sf data portal and found that 95% were either dog poop or miss classified (eg abandoned car or trash collection). People automatically read the headline and correlate to human waste.

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I’m sure looking at numbers it’s going to be mostly dog poop.

There should NOT be ANY human poop at all!!!

That it’s even trivialized goes to show the growing acceptance of this phenomenon. On a few occasions I’ve seen people (perhaps transients or whatever) going behind bushes in plain daylight. I’ve seen it on sidewalks and also on public steps. That should not be a thing in a country that emerged from outhouses and such a century ago and understand cholera etc...

I’m looking at the data portal and at least the last 300 waste complaints have no details (details field just says “Human/Animal waste” or is empty) - how did you figure out if they’re dog poop or misclassified?

Edit: E.g this one https://sf311.org/track-case?ref=11716075&email=

Look at the mobile uploads. They have photos attached

What is the methodology for classifying human vs. animal waste?

This. Would love to know but am not willing to scan photos of excrement to do my own analysis. I have my own personal experience of living in SF for 10 years, in the Mission. I’ve seen a lot of human looking fecal matter.

This is why man invented machine learning...

lol, are you combing through photos of poop and categorizing them?? yeah right

Ok, I put dogs in there in parens. Open to better suggestions.

I don't think that's accurate as well. Since it is not all dog. Lol, I know it is hard. May be just say "dog and human" ?

Ok, I've squeezed in mostly.

Edit: since other commenters are still questioning this, I've put a question mark on that bit.

I wouldn't mind half the police force being reassigned to fine the sort of people who let their dog shit and run.

My buddy had a small garden patch on the sidewalk in front of his house. It was the only patch of garden on the block, so it was basically chock full of dog feces within a day after he cleaned it from people walking their dogs. You'd get a whiff of it just walking to his house.

He eventually had the tiny patch of land paved over.

i have a dog and always pick up her poop. i also hate it when other owners don't.

beyond being a nuisance, dog poop is actually more of a threat to dogs than to people (cross-species pathogens/infections are relatively rare).

what i don't get are the folks who who go through the trouble of bagging the poop and then dropping the bag on the ground.

Yeh! I think it would really help law enforcement community relations if they moved away from ticketing people for violating letter of the law rules (street sweeping hours, etc.) and started ticketing people for stuff that lowers quality of life in the city: taking up two parking spots by not pulling forward all the way, not picking up dog poop, parking in bike lanes, etc.

Didn't we just elect a new DA who has openly stated he will not prosecute any quality of life crimes?

His childhood history of having parents who drove a getaway vehicle to a robbery resulting in a dead police officer apparently has colored his outlook toward policing.

Hope springs eternal.

Why do we need someone with a gun to handle this? I'd much rather see a civilian from Vector Control or a similar city department enforcing this. If people fail to pay up the fines, maybe then the guys with guns can be dispatched to deal with "contempt of court" or whatever.

Oh come on, we all know it's not because of the dogs. San francisco is in the midst of a homelessness crisis, and all that comes with that.

A response of "oh, come on, we all know.." to someone that said they personally went through 100 tickets is not really contributing much. Worse, actually, as presenting your assumptions without evidence as counterfactuals to someone that purports to have actually done legwork actively muddies the discussion.

Of the more than 100 poop complaints I've filed with 311 the majority have been human sized. The one with a string/tapeworm coming out of it was ambiguously sized and spread out over like three blocks.

Yesterday I submitted one of bloody handprints smeared all over a building on Mission St. Pretty sure those weren't dog handprints. I called it graffiti since I didn't see anything more suited towards "blood smeared all over someone's building".

http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11720974

This was voluminous enough that I think it was probably human:

http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11019074

Out in the western neighborhoods this size was more common (and I'd assume was dog sourced):

http://mobile311.sfgov.org/reports/11541986

And that is a useful set of information to add to the discussion.

I'm not sure how accurate size is as an indicator of species for feces, given that some dogs are quite large with large feces (and some many humans have small feces for dietary reasons), but it's not like the original commenter explained in much detail how they classified the feces either (other than indicating it was through images for many).

Edit: Regarding your second link, I have a pair of 65 pound dogs, and their poop is generally about 1/3 to 3/4 that size. I assume it could be a ~100 lb dog, but agree it's more likely from a person.

Huh. This whole time I thought the crisis was around human waste.

It is.

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