SF's crime debate turns nasty
cwnevius.substack.com
cwnevius.substack.com
There is a well-developed fencing process for this kind of thing: goods are stolen by individual thieves or groups; fenced to black-market warehouses; then redistributed to individual sellers, who either hawk in flea markets or to local businesses, or ship the goods in bulk to other areas. It's been this way for years. Gangs of bicycle thieves used to roam the entire Bay Area (probably still do) with this model—I believe they were affiliated with some L.A. groups as well—and more than one group was busted on state charges in the last decade or two.
Anyway, the people running the stolen goods warehouse intermediaries are committing felonies, regardless of whatever proposition or do-good D.A. people are huffing about. Where are the detectives? Where are the prosecutors? Where is the state of California?
You could increase punishment for folk buying the goods, but I'm not sure what negative ramifications that might have, e.g. you're second in chain buying a stolen phone.
Maybe I don't understand, but it all seems a bit bonkers to me.
For buying goods from random people instead of a distributor? No of course not. Any reasonable person would be suspicious.
But for criminal prosecution the fault should be proven beyond any reasonable doubt. IANAL, but proving beyond any reasonable doubt a person knew the item he's buying was stolen is more difficult than not.
It's not an unusual concept in common law. It's like manslaughter - you can have had absolutely not intention whatsoever to kill or harm someone, but still be held responsible for their death because you weren't careful enough.
Yes, if one has bought many shirts, bags, laptops from these people; even in this case, prosecutors don't go after the fencers(middlemen) directly. They bust the small guys, who flip for plea deals. Then these 'thieves' wear the wire and sell stuff to these fencers; this is how prosecutors collect solid evidence to convict fencers.
[a]: They are a person you don’t know, but it’s not like a flea market where you can’t read reviews before handing over the money
Quite right, and penetrating this "I dunno" defense is part of building a criminal case against the high-level traffickers. It's the job of the District Attorney (local), the Attorney General (state), and their teams of investigators; that is, the detectives. To do this they can surveil, pressure arrestees for lower-level crimes, penetrate organizations with undercover agents, and even tap phones and computers—pretty much anything you've seen in an American T.V. show, which is often dramatized but not always as far from the truth as you'd think.
> You could increase punishment for folk buying the goods
Do you mean the end-purchasers? Conceivably you could get some of the shopkeepers, if you can prove they knew the goods were suspect. But there's nothing criminal about buying household goods at a corner store—all the crime happened on the way there.
I guess this particular tactic isn’t an option if you don’t prosecute low level crimes like shoplifting.
I'm driving near my home. I see some teenagers hanging out alone by a river. My immediate thought: "what are they up to..." as I'm used to shenanigans in SF. As I drive by I take a look and...they're fishing...fishing! "Well..." I say to myself, "...what a wholesome activity...good for them"
At any rate, I live in the bay area now and I very rarely encounter issues with un-friendliness in the contexts mentioned in this thread. The lack of effusive friendliness that I do encounter for the most part is cultural. Which makes sense, as the bay area is extremely diverse culturally.
People may not talk to you about politics anymore, but anything else - work, kids, cars - is a fair game.
I want a burger. I Think about the unmotivated and borderline rude cashier I would have to deal with.
Then the smiling and upbeat workers at Chick-fil-A. Well guess it’s chicken yet again.
I still go to Chick-fil-A because the sandwiches are good, but I feel guilty about it afterwards.
So, yeah, I'm with treeman79. I think you're projecting.
It's the same story in San Jose, which has a bigger population than SF but similar size homeless population.
When you walk into Whole Foods, you get what you expect, whether in Maui, Denver, or SF. Supposedly the Whole Foods in Cupertino is among the largest.
We just got through this debate in New York City through our mayoral primary. Neither “side” won. But the process has so far produced two lead candidates who acknowledge the problem, pledged to focus on public safety and at the same time be mindful of the racial inequities of the NYPD’s recent past.
That compromise doesn’t exist in SF. The political space for it to exist doesn’t exist. There is a refusal to admit the problem on one hand. And a vilification of the incumbents as idiots, or worse, in bed with the criminals, on the other.
Bragg is a far cry from Boudin. He is, as a former prosecutor, leading in a field that had Boudinesque candidates, e.g. those with zero prosecutorial experience.
I would actually highlight him as an example of the sort of compromise that seems lacking in San Francisco.
https://www.alvinbragg.com/declination
they make sense.
Contrast that with one of Boudin's policies
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/12/24/da-critics-say-anti-d...
and then think about the drug abuse problem that is prevalent in SF.
The root cause being the federal laws governing involuntary committal for mental healthcare and lack of federal resources for mental healthcare which is super pricy for obvious reasons. In addition are widening income/wealth gap and the temperate climates exacerbate the issue in some places more than others.
So the solution at the state and city levels is to use police to push people that are likelier to cause problems around so they are not comfortable being around, and incarcerating them and keeping them in the system for various offenses.
Then the police and politicians get heat for being prejudiced or biased or unfair, and they relax the rules, and then the problems return, and people will complain about thefts and property crime and etc until it gets bad enough that there is once again political will for a crackdown, and rinse repeat.
Note that I am not saying there are not legitimate prejudices and biases that need to be addressed in the police/judicial system, nor that society should let minor offenses go and make police think about the political ramifications of every interaction they have.
I do think this is the root cause of the shoplifting examples in the article. Stealing handbags from Niemen Marcus is, I think, unrelated to mental health issues.
These people know that you don’t do that in DC without consequences, so they go up to SF.
On the other hand, broad and flat-footed anti-police sentiment has increased and has manifest as either explicit depolicing policies or unofficial pressure on police officers in the field to avoid routine stops and other preventative policing efforts, as well as pressure on DAs to be seen as “soft on crime” (not intending any sort of disparagement with this term). Which isn’t to say that police don’t need reform—I’m one of the 90% of Americans who think some kind of reform is necessary, but perhaps something a little more sophisticated than “defund the police” is in order (better training for police officers, weaken police unions, increase protection in vulnerable communities while increasing funding to other social services, etc)?
As for whether the pendulum will swing too far against crime, when was the last time that happened in SF? I suspect SF’s robust corps of progressives have successfully prevented the pendulum from swinging even to the center for the last decade or two.
Oh, yes.
Yup. People alive today look back the three strikes law and think “how could the voters ever wanted that?”.
But you live long enough and the the cycles start to emerge. If crime gets bad enough in the cities you’ll see a repeat of the 70-90s where law and order was priority #1.
Whether SF or NYC, inequality and racial segregation have increased, corporations build glass and steel temples of capitalism, billionaires treat the world as their lab and playground, and even the middle class hoards the world's production and labor resources from the comfort of their couches, advantages all accumulated over centuries of exploitation, colonization, slavery, genocide and ecological debt that the poor and future generations will have to pay back.
But to keep things simple, let's just consider the "anarchy" in light of where SF and NYC (shining lights on the hill of liberalism) rank in the dimension of racial segregation:
- https://gothamist.com/news/new-yorks-schools-are-still-the-m...
- https://belonging.berkeley.edu/most-least-segregated-cities
- https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism
- Most major metropolitan areas have become more racially segregated, study shows: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/21/us/housing-segregation-cities...
Sorry, is the argument that public safety can’t exist in a desegregated city?
if anything, the upper castes rely on segregation to feel safer, thereby making things worse.
Most likely this is the result of our flat-footed “defund the police!” rhetoric that manifest as either explicit de-policing policies or else as unofficial pressure on police to reduce preventative policing practices like routine stops. I don’t think anyone disputes this correlation even if they don’t subscribe to the causation hypothesis.
With respect to racial segregation, I know ordinary liberals and moderates are generally on board with increased integration but I’m not sure how that will hit the I-oppose-race-mixing-but-in-a-woke-way crowd, particularly in SF?
Poverty? I would get it. But how the fact that someone is richer than you justifies shoplifting is beyond my understanding.
Maybe it’s possible to have a kind of inequality where the rich get richer without the poor getting poorer (although I suspect it would just mean that the purchasing power of a dollar falls even though the poor have as many dollars as they had before) but in practice in America I think we have the kind of inequality where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (and more numerous).
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
I'm sure it's possible to construct a measure which will show that poverty went up - as it's equally possible to show the opposite - but either will mostly likely be overfitting, i. e. hand-picking data to prove the desired point.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
Poverty is definitely definitely going down, not up.
What if one argued that some enslaved people in 1850 Georgia were better fed than before they were kidnapped from Africa. All ok then?
And why should rich people complain if there were a revolution and they were relegated to the middle class? The middle class of 2021 live longer and have better healthcare than the kings of even 100 years ago. What rights does anyone have to anything? By what reason doed anyone have a claim to injustice?
It's not the worst time ever. There, I said it. Happy? Now, are you going to say "'Not the worst time ever' can still be pretty bad and in need of fixing"?
Who do you think has been making all the progress to get us to not the worst time ever? You’re welcome, by the way.
So to answer your question, there is no compromise because compromise would be admitting failure - that these policies don’t work. And also admitting that putting some people in jail is a net benefit to society.
Because it's related to the issue of race, and this is one of the most difficult subjects to discuss and has been so for many decades. If anything, the debate became worse.
In "The Three Languages of Politics" Arnold Kling classifies three basic perspectives that can become central in a person's mind in such a way that expressions of the other perspectives are incomprehensible. The perspectives are described through axis of 1) oppressor-oppressed, 2) civilization-barbarism, 3) freedom-coercion. In the original article the author describes social media communication on the part of government staff that highlights the oppressor-oppressed without acknowledging other perspectives. Similarly people victimized by or by witnessing crime or crime-hype may find civilization-barbarism the most salient perspective. Without a consideration for all axis a productive conversation is unlikely.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17831052-the-three-langu...
While SF and cities like it vilify incumbents, they also vilify the opposition. In my city of Portland, no one will consider electing a republican because they have constructed strawman as to what a republican will be like (forgetting that the last Gop mayer of Portland was loved).
New York had a republican only 20 years ago.
LA was also revived by a republican mayor.
There's a pattern.
Sorry for being so blunt, but at some point we need to name the problem.
Bloomberg was in the middle and now Deblasio/Wilhelm’s tenure will likely propel a moderate Democrat into office who promises to bring order back to the city.
SF could learn from that but it doesn’t happen. SF is very ideological do instead of admitting mistakes progressives keep doubling down. At some point the constituency will say enough! But SF keeps surprising me.
Brown was corrupt but at least crime was dealt with. Everyone since Brown has been on the ideological bandwagon and won’t admit to mistakes and keep on doubling down on ineffective and detrimental policies.
At this point I say bring someone like Willie back.
Note that while I do specify the bay area here, it's only for the purposes of this comment. It's quite obviously spreading to other places. The moral madness of social media is slowly but steadily spilling out into every day society.
I don't know whether crime in SF has gotten worse or not, but as a resident of a city where people don't defecate on the sidewalk, it boggled my mind a little to see someone apparently advocating for the city on the basis that sidewalk defecation wasn't a new problem.
The most simple explanation that fully explains what’s going on would be the policy of this specific city’s government.
Thus there is no need for mental shenanigans.
That’s not saying it hasn’t gotten worse in the last year or two. But it’s never been shiny and clean.
Storage unit broken into twice. Homeless guy LIVING in another storage unit. People dropping dookies in the middle of Illinois street during mid day.
Why deal with all this? Even the city has an income tax. Where does that money go? To poop tracking apps? Free shoot-up sites?
Gross mismanagement by weak, ineffective, and “progressive” anything goes ultra left politicians is ruining SF.
I left SF. Not coming back.
>And for some reason, Kate Chatfield, who is a senior director on DA Boudin’s staff, thought this would be a good time for a public official to take a shot at a local resident. Chatfield said the “Husbands are scared for their wives,” was right out of the famously racist film, “Birth of a Nation,” which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroes.
This is absolutely insane to me. Someone expresses concern about crime and someone from the DA's office publicly compares them to the KKK? How is that in any way acceptable?
>And frankly, lately they haven’t.
Over here on the other coast, I focus on littering in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, though related to the broad-daylight wide-open sales and use of heroin and crack combined by the police retreating from walking through the park to only standing behind barricades near the arch.
I posted a couple videos on it here: https://joshuaspodek.com/pride-destroyed-the-park-washington.... I've picked up litter every day since 2017, starting from an environmental motivation, but as a resident since the 90s with civic duty, safety and crime have become important.
Also way less crime.
Not sure that’s a good metric? It was a problem before Covid hit.
It is important to keep the whole social context in mind. Next door San Mateo county has much more serious enforcement and around 2500 incarceration beds available most times. San Francisco has huge political struggles over all police activities and around 250 incarceration beds available most times. People need to decide what they actually want and provide the resources to get there but so far that is not what is happening.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Data-driven decisions don't work if you have really bad source data.
I know more than a few cops, and current SOP is to ignore anything that isn’t an immediate threat to life.
I could see for big ticket retailers (jewelry, etc) insurance against theft makes sense, but CVS? When people steal $100 worth of makeup?
Insurance is meant to protect against catastrophic loss. If a loss isn’t catastrophic, it’s often cheaper to just pay for the loss yourself.
I suspect that stores do not have insurance for shoplifting, but perhaps someone with first hand knowledge could weigh in.
But in a year where the visitors fell off a cliff, you could have a drop in the number of incidents, which would show a decrease in crime in the official stats, even if there was actually an increase in the true rate of crime.
They also have 3x the security at self-serve registers, one per row, compared to maybe one total before.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/Target-San-Francisco-st...
Every Target in San Francisco now has reduced hours.
As of this weekend, the Target in the Stonestown Galleria's hours have been cut back to 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. because of an uptick in retail theft.
It's due to "a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents," said spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo.
"For more than a month, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores, similar to reports from other retailers in the area," said Harper-Tibaldo.