California car burglaries are at crisis levels
latimes.com
latimes.com
however the real dishonesty is from Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) who claims a bill to at least remove the requirement for prosecutors prove a car was locked before being broken into based on costs. As in, they are very willing to pass the costs onto individuals; hence there still is a cost but to government it does not occur unless on their books. As it was pointed out, how is it never a crime to enter a vehicle you do not own without permission?
Prop 47 lead to an increase in shop lifting because it set the limit high enough that it basically insured no one would get prosecuted. the common method is to send a bunch of people into a store at one time to get the goods in volume but with each individual being under the limit in monetary value if being young enough prosecution won't work either
At another place kids get caught stealing they turn over a display and run out. Again, nothing done. All those costs are borne by the paying customers.
People are gonna get sick of it; the progressive supes are gonna rue this move. The DA race in SF was close. I think it’s gonna go the other way next election.
Also word on the street is apparently thieves prefer SF to Daly City because San Mateo county doesn’t play as nice as SF.
They are not imploring a right. I could make s citizens arrest under my rights but people will tell you, it’s a losing proposition because you subject yourself to other frivolous claims that take money and time to clear up.
So the reason people aren’t detained for police is because police will do very little in these cases because they are classed as misdemeanors. So why risk lawsuits, etc. when there is no upside?
Very debatable. If you as a non-LEO attempt to detain someone who you suspect of having committed a crime, and they feel threatened, you could easily end up in jail.
“They did a crime” does not, in fact, give you the right to crime too.
Edit: Can someone help me out? I’ve posted a bunch of controversial opinions in this thread, so why is the one factual claim the thing getting downvoted to oblivion without comment?
Am I somehow wrong about this? Like... can I actually crime someone just because they crimed someone else first and I don’t want them to get away with it?
I need to know this.
It's not factual - it's false.
> Am I somehow wrong about this? .. can I actually crime someone
Making a reasonable citizen's arrest is not a crime. That's what you have wrong.
(And you don't 'crime' someone, that's a noun not a verb.)
Both of the things you describe are corporate policies. They have nothing to do with state law anywhere, and they are there because of liability. Safeway doesn't want to get sued for 1) if an employee is an idiot/racist and misidentifies someone and harms them 2) employees get harmed substantially trying to stop a shoplifter. In these cases you have rare and small losses that are miniscule compared to bad financial outcomes of intervention.
It would be easy to stop, but that costs money. It's a very simple business decision for retailers: is the cost of loss prevention higher than the loss.
The fact that this surprises you is surprising to me, this problem is many decades old in retail.
Car burglaries are a much different dynamic, and another poster mentions that it's a felony that was reclassified to a misdemeanor, and that law probably does need to be changed and is a problem for lawmakers.
edit: and can we raise the elephant in the room, which is that this is fairly solvable with a national facial recognition database and fairly low end iptv/image capture tech?
And to your point. Yes different crimes but the point is there has been a surge in both as well as a new crime in the form of package theft.
Supplying the public good of crime fighting is the main reason to form governments in the first place.
Or do you claim it's like this in every city?
Beyond that what do you propose? Put a police officer in each store 24x7? How much does that cost and is that cost socialized? What if a police office causes issues with customers? What does the reporting structure and chain of command look like? Who has ultimate authority in that situation, the police office or the store? How is the cost borne by the store? What is the share of private and public burden in officer benefits/pension?
None of those questions involve the internet and closed circuit monitoring is almost 50 years old. The status quo reflects a lot of thought and money invested into the problem.
A) Clerk warehouse model:
Stores can allow shoppers to browse through aisles of display items, sample items, boxes, or whatever else causes them to feel like a consumer, take tickets for what they want, then bring them to a counter.
After payment is received, someone else comes out from a secured, monitored area with all your items in a cart.
It wouldn't be too difficult to develop a system to allow people to visually browse for and select meat and produce items.
B) Strict club model:
Store is not open to the general public, but club members only.
You can't be club member if you are under 18 or don't have a provable source of income. If you violate the club's code of conduct, your access is revoked.
Entry is strictly controlled. You can't enter the facility without proof of membership. All purchases verified upon exit.
A) Cigarettes. Always behind a counter for age checks, but mostly because of loss prevention. Top shelf liquor, electronics, razors, and batteries often have similar constraints because they are compact and resalable. What is the loss of sales compared to theft loss and clerk staffing requirements (or implementation of the technology).
B) Club model suffers losses just the same. You can counterfeit a membership, and you might have issues validating on entry otherwise. Faster validation on entry might result in capex, and again you have a loss prevention/loss cost benefit decision to make.
Nobody is throwing money and low margin grocery chains. So cash flow positive operations are a big concern.
In the case from September, the suspect still hasn't been found, even with security footage and multiple witnesses and a description. Even at the vons, my regular shop on account of the stabbing at the ralphs, about once every other month the security guard has to bear hug and haul out a destitute person who decided to get belligerent with a cashier or customer. And this is a neighborhood that commands 1br rents north of 1.8k, but functions like Mos Eisley.
The solution is some sort of hired security, whether police or private. The ralphs situation could have been much worse without security guards.
I've seen a shoplifter (also in SF, Safeway) take it to the next level, repeatedly yelling, "I'm pregnant! The guards are killing me and my baby!". None of which appeared to be the case, and security was as nervous as you might imagine.
This kind of stuff happens a lot at Safeways in SF (also Starbucks and CVS, but mostly Safeway it seems). Other times you'll just see someone running out the door, guards look into the distance for a moment and that's that.
My wife calls them Unsafeway, heh.
At my supermarket, I have never observed proper going-out-the-door shoplifting. I am still able to get offended when somebody eats a grape that they haven't purchased. I'm sure worse crime happens, but in-store grape consumption is the worst I've ever observed.
I've seen people stealing liquor there as well.
I'll also mention that drunk drivers caught at checkpoints are arrested for a victimless crime while every car burglary has a victim.
Its a gray area and I think its best to be on the side of caution but lets at least be honest about it.
It doesn't take much time to investigate property crime. They don't even both to take the video footage from the cars. Just ask on any Tesla forum where all the cars have a motion activated security cameras. They could spend 5 minutes to take the screen cap of the person and send it out to all the officer and community.
Change thief’s cost a little money to insurance companies
Ideally both are stopped. But I would rather more drunk drivers are stopped over more change thieves.
A victimless crime at the checkpoint, yes - but many people driving drunk end up in accidents and endanger public safety.
As for the real issue here: it's a problem only if there is not enough police to simultaneously conduct sobriety checkpoints and prevent crimes against property at the same time.
Fix police education, payment and staff and the problem is solved without pitting different dangers to society against each other. Or, even better, provide adequate public transport to allow people to have a drink without having to rely on driving drunk to get home...
Police notice what isn't prosecuted. They don't enjoy the experience of wasting their time arresting people repeatedly for deeds that the prosecutor doesn't care about.
Then there's stuff like this:
> “In an era where our streets are filled with homeless people looking for shelter from the elements this expansion of the prosecution and incarceration time for individuals who have not damaged a locking mechanism of the vehicle to gain entry could negatively impact those with the least of means,” the public defenders said in a letter to lawmakers.
Prosecuting those with the least of means for anything less than heinous, violent crimes also isn't a good look.
So therefor just because you’re homeless you’re free to steal? That’s total BS, and also rots society.
The bigger problem is nothing is being done to make prisons better, or to address the deficiencies that allow people to become homeless in the first place.
I don't necessarily want to lock people up for petty theft. But I do want them to face some sort of punishment, even community service, with follow-up and escalating punishments if the community service is not completed.
If the implication is that we were prosecuting these crimes before Prop 47, them we can still prosecute every one of them, we just don't need to charge them as felonies.
Depends on the misdemeanor. Feds are clamoring to deport folks for the misdemeanor of illegal immigration.
The problem is not Prop47 or "liberal"/"progressive" politics.
The problem is a police and justice system that seems to be underfunded or understaffed to take care of small/petty crimes. No need to ruin someone's entire future for a shoplift or smash-and-grab, but also no reason to let them off "for free" only because the system is so overloaded.
> Prop 47 lead to an increase in shop lifting because it set the limit high enough that it basically insured no one would get prosecuted.
In Germany, we have the concept of "gang theft" (§244 StGB for the interested), which penalizes exactly the modus operandi at play here.
Also, do you think that charging more people with felonies is an appropriate solution to crime that has it's roots in addiction and poverty?
No idea about the law, but I would hope you value human life more than a stolen black suitcase.
A single mother working 2 minimum wage jobs in different parts of the city uses her car to travel to work. She basically lives in her car so she must keep belongings she will need in there. While working her first shift for the day her car is broken into. Her bag with her uniform for her second shift is stolen along with everything else.
The cops tell her that the damage to her 20 year old used car's window and the items stolen add up to less than $950 so they can't do much of anything for her.
Meanwhile, across town, a rich tech elite's high end electric car is broken into and some valuable electronics are stolen. The damage and theft adds up to well over $950 so the police are able to investigate.
At the end of the day the tech elite orders replacement electronics with next day prime delivery and has their assistant work on repairing the window. The single mother gets fired from her second job for not having the appropriate attire. Great work California.
We’d disagree a lot about what the biggest problem in the story is, though.
One way to offset growth in welfare expenses might be to permit poor people some way to directly steal with impunity, thus they can still somehow be fed, while simultaneously reducing attendant enforcement costs and prison populations.
Not everything is about spending more to fed those already at the bottom — it’s better to prevent that in the first place. While certainly not a simple problem with simple answers, macro changes in culture would go a long way without requiring capital spending. Notice how low the crime rate is in Japan, despite plenty poor and hungry. Not without problems, the societal focus on family and thinking of the larger group has its benefits. The US could benefit a lot from changes in its culture to be less individualistic (and punishment oriented) and more civic minded.
The poor do little to directly increase revenues, so the cold financial evaluations that states are too good at will reveal a net benefit to the state.
I did not make an claim that "...everything is about spending more to fed[sic} those already at the bottom..." You are presenting a straw man.
The discussion about the entire U.S., which is an incredibly diverse region inclusive of almost every demographic except those found in the very poorest nations on the planet is not useful in a discussion on a specific region within the U.S., and worse is to compare it with somewhere else in the world and make no attempt to explain why the comparison is valid.
First, we aren’t talking about the whole US — California is literally in the title of the article. And it’s explicitly calling out SF and the Bay Area for most of the article (Scott Weiner, from SF, is the impetuous).
The idea that normalizing car theft is a good thing is indefensible. You’re advocating for harming others, as well as creating a lawless society. To attempt to say this presents a solution is to ignore how we got to this place, recognizing there are plenty of other ways to address these issues.
My point about Japan was not that it’s the same as the US, but rather cultural changes affect rates of criminal behavior. It’s one potential avenue that’s ignored in public debate in the US that costs no money but has great baring on our collective future.
I did not make a statement about what I would personally prefer the state to do.
In addition to being inefficient, a populace that is convinced that their government won’t protect them will eventually start taking justice into their own hands. CA doesn’t seem to be there… yet.
The last thing I would want is to spend a night in jail then released for time served, wander back to my crank den, where after getting more crank into my veins I will be back on the street finding more bike cranks to sell for scrap and continue feeding the beast until I die. You might say that sounds bleaker than reality, but Los Angeles just buried some 1500 unclaimed dead the other day.
You are speaking as someone who hasn't suffered from addiction. If you are an addict, you want drugs and you'll avoid withdrawl at all costs.
> Whatever the facility, I'd have medical staff monitoring my symptoms
You get the bare minimum in jail.
> The last thing I would want is to spend a night in jail then released for time served, wander back to my crank den, where after getting more crank into my veins
If you were an addict, that's exactly what you would want.
I understand that the historical lesson was that the Bloody Code (almost any property crime, even minor ones, were punished by hanging) but it seems extremely counter intuitive that harsh penalties carried openly wouldn't have a deterrence effect. I won't advocate hanging for a simple crime like this, but wouldn't a mandatory minimum of 10 years have some similar effect?
It just takes one wrong middle manager to have a bad day and their car broken into before a certain cloud computing company decides that their smart surveillance doorbells can easily be adapted as car cams.
This is entirely driven by the political atmosphere there where the DA would rather "its not really a crime" narrative than to prosecute and possibly face criticism from the progressive populace.
There IS a progressive effort to prioritize moving forward with felony charges over misdemeanors. Perhaps you got confused?
> It’s just a useful dog whistle for certain styles of law and order conservatism.
Oh yes, enforcing the law against property destruction and theft is definitely a dog whistle... O_o
Ultimately if it's known that breaking into a car is something that has a reasonable chance of a big punishment, it will happen less.
Also, you can break a window from across the street with a ball bearing. Good luck.
While I credit the police for showing up and putting a minor effort into investigating it, they were certainly not taking pictures and fingerprints and all the stuff you expect from TV. The attitude was mostly "eh, teenagers get up to bad stuff, make sure to lock your doors."
They have different laws for them. Wouldn't change a thing.
Weird law. Here in Wales if you leave it unlocked you might have a problem with your insurance but it’s still equally a crime.
I lived in San Jose, left my crap car's doors unlocked because there was nothing in it. Still, the thief just broke the passenger window (without trying the door?) , opened the glove compartment, saw there was nothing in there, and moved on.
So, not a crime I guess. Yay California. I don't live there anymore.
Talk about perverse incentives.
“It’s ridiculous that under current law you can have a video of someone bashing out a car window, but if you can’t prove that the door is locked you may not be able to get an auto burglary conviction"
So what? Surely you can still get a conviction for criminal damage (as it's called in the UK) or theft?
"In California a misdemeanor is defined as a crime for which the maximum sentence is no more than one year in county jail."
A year in jail is a serious punishment. Why can't these people be prosecuted?
At any given time, any given American can likely be prosecuted for a misdemeanor.
The question you are asking is, why are these people prosecuted only after every misdemeanor crime which is prosecuted, and additionally only after those misdemeanor crimes which counterfactually would be prosecuted before this one if more misdemeanor crimes were prosecuted?
The answer is complex.
Leave nothing in your car and leave the doors unlocked.
Leaving the door unlocked is the rule I adopted after a break in 30 years ago when only one of my doors was locked, and of course that window was broken!
Besides being pretty funny, it gives you some perspective on the people who shoplift with no shame.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWAhPpdcWedLgaB1KJEvfqA
Allowing rampant car theft is yet another way rich San Franciscans - who can afford both indoor parking and new windows a few times a year - keep the non millionaire rabble away from the city.
software companies were incentivized to go to SF many years ago by the mayor/tax breaks then, which seems kinda corrupt, or at least misrepresenting the will of the people: most SF residents don't want tech companies there in the first place.
If things are actually the way some of you are describing them, it sounds like SF particularly is about to collapse completely. Yikes. I can't imagine living there, much less having kids there.
But now... I haven't been there in over 10 years but from what I'm hearing it sounds like a terrible place to visit, much less live. I really hope I'm wrong about that, or, at least they can turn things around. I'd like someday to take my kids there and show them the places I loved to visit.
It's all very sensationalist - all of it.
There are very small grains of truth (about needles and homeless and feces and car break-ins) that are spun out of all proportion.
As a resident of the SFBA and somebody that spends a fair amount of time in, and all over, the city, I can confirm all of it[1] ... but at the same time, SF is quite nice overall and I repeatedly have complete, multi-day interactions in the city with zero dysfunction.
[1] I have been the victim of one car break-in, I have had run-ins with people using the tenderloin as a toilet, etc.
I will echo the poster you replied to you. The fact that you're celebrating that you've experienced more than a single day without seeing crime (in a 1st world country) sounds like madness to much of the rest of the world.
Every time I've heard someone defending the Bay Area recently it sounds like utter normalization of the insane. You've been the victim of 'only' one car break-in yourself, have seen people shitting in the street, view the homeless and drug epidemic daily, and yet expect people to think these issues are overblown because they haven't happened for multiple days at points?
As someone from the outside looking in, I truly hope the U.S. gets their shit together, because it's looking pretty bleak at this point.
The insane is in every city in the U.S., whether or not you find it during your daily life is another thing. It depends on whether you live in the rich city or the parallel working class city, and whether those two cities interface.
In cities where the rich are well separated from the working class (most of the east where the rich live in suburbs separated by distances only traversable by private car due to chronically poor transit), homeless is ignored because it's never seen way out in the suburbs.
In cities like the west cost and the few growing cities in the east, where rich people are moving into formerly working class inner city neighborhoods, of course there is now friction. The rich and working class cities are suddenly face each other directly and constantly, and the end result is the working class is pushed out as housing prices increase, or the rich leave again and it all collapses again.
Take LA. Way more homeless. Yet you get neighborhoods like hancock park, smack dab in the middle of the city, where you will just not see any homeless people, because there is no reason for anyone working class to set foot in that neighborhood. You are priced out of housing and priced out of even lattes. It's a rich suburb full of mansions, you aren't gonna get much panhandling done and will stand out like a sore thumb to police and private security who love doing favors to nagging rich white women without jobs.
But there are parts like downtown la, that used to have flophouses where drunks and addicts could actually rent housing. Or echo park that was a gangland in the 90s or a thriving working class latino community depending on whose reality you consult. Now 1brs cost 2k, the flophouses are bulldozed or renovated (or just get a new coat of paint), people commanding high salaries now interface with homeless and working class people and compete for the same apartments; the two cities merge in DTLA and echo park, as well as other neighborhoods in LA with increasing gentrification.
NYC has the most homeless of anywhere, 90k, and nearly half a million more living in public housing below market rents, but you don't see homeless encampments because NYC builds shelters and housing without NIMBY fuss; something like 95% of homeless are housed in NYC.
In any city you see these problems, and in cities with any semblance of demand that refuse to build supply to match, resulting in unaffordable housing for everyone not pulling >60k a year, you can see how this problem can grow exponentially larger. Never forget that the problem is present in every city, be it Columbus, NYC, LA, or Tulsa. The solutions are there and accepted in academic circles, but whether or not you see these solutions and their effect is directly reflective on the local political climate.
Translation: "I have up to 5 days a week where I experience dysfunction in SF"
Like, if your benchmark for "quite nice overall" is "I can go multiple days without seeing someone breaking into a car or shitting in the street", then your niceness-o-meter is whacked, to say the least.
In New York state, January 1, 2020 a set of law changes take effect that reclassify many crimes to misdemeanors, turn arrests into desk tickets, and help expunge records. They want to go further than that (eliminate cash bail, and more). It's not quite as bad as California, but it's getting there.
In New York City specifically, the City Council / Mayor have in the past few years decriminalized quality-of-life crimes. In the (non-right-wing) press, they put it in quotes like this, "quality-of-life crimes" like it's some game, some ruse, or like quality of life is a meaningless sin or privileged pursuit. We should all suffer equally, is the implication. Meanwhile, the city has gotten noticeably less safe, with homeless people becoming more aggressive, open urinating / drug use (of the needle variety), and incidents inside the subway.
There's nothing worse than being forced to take an underground car, being locked with other people, and having other people screaming schizophrenic fantasies, or walking back and forth trying to hustle for money. Every day. Twice a day. 30-50 minutes+. It's an enforced suffering.
Guess what? If you're wealthy, you have a driver and/or you live near work, you live in a doorman building, and many other amenities. Dealing with street quality-of-life issues affects poor and middle-class people, which is what is personally so enraging about these so-called progressive ideals.
That doesn’t seem like a crisis in a city the size of San Francisco.
This doesn't obviously address the issue that I doubt there's even 400k cars there which more than doubles the likelyhood. That's not nothing, it's over 25k stolen cars in a year and an enormous burden on the local police force.
Of course, with both cars and bikes, police have much more important to do. That's the invariant: whatever the crime, there is surely something more worthy of their attention out there, so nothing is ever done.
I'm only half-joking.
Naturally, it's the one window that even my Haynes Book says "don't try replacing it yourself; hire a professional". Thanks, guy-who-desperately-wanted-my-jumper-cables-and-jump-box-out-of-the-back-of-my-car. Real considerate of you.
Smash and grab makes sense if you don't have those tools and know no one, not even pedestrians, react to broken glass or car alarms in that part of town.
edit: slightly disappointed I was downvoted for this; I literally just googled how many cars there were in SF and tried to work out the percentage. Am I factually incorrect? If not, can someone please explain what I've done wrong so I don't do it again, please.
For calculating probabilities, it's much easier to work in fractions than percentages, so I'll convert 0.01% to 0.0001 and equivalent for other percentages for the remainder of this comment.
If every day of the year, 0.01% of cars are broken into, the probably of being broken into is 0.0001 and the probably of being safe is 0.9999. To calculate the odds for a year, you need to take the being safe probability to the 365th power (0.9999^365). That gives 0.9642. This is the probability of being safe from break-ins for a year. You can subtract from 1 for the annual odds of being broken into: 0.0358.
0.01% per day is 3.58% per year. Also can continue to get longer term odds. Break-in chance is 30% over 10 years. At 19 years, it's 50/50 whether you'll be broken into. At this term, you get a big deviation from the incorrect calculation, which would give 0.01 * 19 * 365 = 69.35% chance of break-in over 19 years.
Of course, this ignores the uneven distribution of break-ins, etc., etc.
(70*365) / 500,000 = 0.0511
You have about a 5% chance of having your car stolen in SF annually.
Or to replicate your process:
70 / 500,000 = 0.00014
1 - 0.00014 = 0.99986
0.99986^365 = 0.950180248299
Again, about a 5% annual rate.
Not SF but I once had the cup holder/ashtray stolen from an old mini van I was driving, I assume because it had a few dollars in change in the ash tray.
More amusing than anything.
Cars are terrible for cities, doesn't bother me in the least that protecting tourist's cameras isn't an enforcement priority.
> Tourists are disproportionately targeted because they are more likely to have valuables in their cars
What a flippant and short sighted thing to say. I've known people whose car was broken into and had their medical devices, medication, and clothes stolen. That's more of a problem than a tourist's camera.
Regardless of your opinion on car transportation in cities the idea that victims of a crime should take the blame because they left something valuable in their car and locked it is the same as saying a rape victim is at fault for the crime because of what they were wearing. It is pretty sickening.
One can express their agreement with current allocation of resources without blaming victims for the crime, can’t they? To me, as to someone who knows a rape victim, likening car burglary to rape sounds much more horrific than that.
Did victim-blaming get edited out of the comment you were replying to after your post?
Where did I say anything about it being someones fault? Of course in a perfect world there would be no theft but aggressive enforcement against car thefts isn't something I support in the real world.