[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us/politics/new-york-mask...
Lets look at San Francisco. I'm going to get my stats right from the San Francisco Police Department.
Homocide - Down 20%
Rape - Down 23.8%
Robbery - Down 20.7%
Assault - Down 8.8%
Human Trafficking - Down 83.3%
Burglary - Down 45.4%
Motor Vehicle Theft - Down 6%
Arson - Down 7.9%
Larceny Theft - Up 12.8%
Year over year the only type of crime that is up is Larceny Theft, and most of that is shoplifting. Everything else is down, and some of it by significant margins. There is no real basis for this "crime wave" people keep talking about. That pressure is really just right wing propaganda.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Quick Edit: When I published this the stats were only current to February 6th, but they were updated after I posted with data up to the 13th. So my numbers above are going to be slightly off, but you can confirm them by changing the timeframe to end on the 6th.
Some "right wing propaganda" from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/briefing/crime-surge-homi...
And WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/21/homicide-ra...
And The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/28/san-francisc...
Later edit: This chart [1] taken from said article maybe will clarify some of the ongoing discussions.
[1] https://archive.fo/78rGz/270f56724e7a40242b6639537e4183aea3b...
The idea that larceny (petty) theft doesn't matter is also a big reason why you think there's no crime wave. Petty theft is the crime most often encountered by everyday citizens. People don't like having their property stolen. I don't know why you refuse to acknowledge that.
Underreporting has always been an issue with crime data [1], but the change in the Larceny rate doesn't seem like it's caused by an increase in underreporting. The change in reported Larceny from 2020 seems fairly correlated with COVID restrictions.
Here is the monthly Y/Y change in Larceny Theft Reported incidents for SF, for each month in 2020 vs. 2019:
Jan: +15.7% Feb: +5.4% March: -28.7% (SF Shelter In Place) April: -47.1% May: -45.6% June: -48.9% July: -51.8% August: -50.1% September: -54.5% October: -54.9% November: -39.2% December: -46.7%
Larceny did go up in 2021, especially at the end of the year when COVID restrictions started to lift, but is still down ~20% relative to 2019. Other crimes went up in 2020, but then decreased or flattened in 2021.
I think you may have a point about Larceny being encountered more, especially with foot traffic + tourism way down in many SF neighborhoods. I'm not sure how exactly to use Open Table reservations as a proxy for that, so it's hard to say whether it's relatively up or relatively down.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
The prediction was that next people would use the evidence that there are fewer crimes being reported as proof that nothing is wrong. This does seem very much like what we are seeing here.
According to the SFPD link above, homicides in SF rose from 48 to 56 over the entire year 2021 vs 2020.
So given how flawed that premise was to begin with, I don't think an explanation is needed for why your overall point is disingenuous at best.
People trying to hype up the crime thing deliberately ignore these sources because, as you can see, it allows them to make up as much crime as they can imagine and base their argument on that.
Infact from my own experience in Seattle area and the auto enthusiast groups I'm in, we've definitely seen an uptick in car prowling, smashed windows, cat thefts and outright vehicle/trailer thefts.
Motor Vehicle Theft is now up by 0.3%.
I see clips of train robberies in LA like this https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/01/14/train-the...
And then I have to ask myself how is that possible in modern society? Train robberies seem shocking enough that they HAVE to be indicative of a broader crime wave. Is there something about the US context that I am missing?
>According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
It's possible because Union Pacific thinks they can get taxpayers to pay for their security, and they can funnel more profits to their shareholders.
There definitely has been a surge of crime after the pandemic.
You think most Canadians support the illegal blockade? Really? Evidence please.
If Trudeau opened debate weeks ago I wonder where we would be today.
There was nothing to debate - the convoy does not have a cohesive message. Some of them are sovereign citizens. Some of them want the government to be dissolved. Some of them want some weird QAnon stuff. The only thing that unites them is shitting in the streets and driving around waving flags and honking.
Trudeau just looks weak at this point, and for a prime minister that got in because of his good looks and his dad's popularity it's not a good omen.
The ones protesting are either uber-libertarians (and possibly also "sovereign citizens"), dis-educated, or have some sort of mental/emotional shortcoming where they will resist any sort of directive given to them even if it goes in their in their interest.
Sometimes people will lash out anyone who gives a helpful order because they feel like they're losing control.
Heavy equipment tow operators have recieved threats of violence, which is why at least some of them have not helped.
This isn't "truckers" protesting, this is the radical fringe.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/28/canada-truck...
It is perfectly possible to be pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, because the case for mandates makes no scientific sense. Forcing the vaccines on people will create more anti-vaxxers, not fewer! The whole thing is completely counterproductive.
Mandates make the remaining crazy people look more visibly crazy, but they were going to be there either way.
> People want things to go back to normal
The biggest problem is that people who defend the coercion believe that a higher vaccination rate will somehow end the pandemic. In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
It's the vaccinated who are driving the pandemic, and have been driving it the past few months. But all the blame is being heaped on the unvaccinated.
The Omicron wave will burn out, as waves do. The pandemic will end, as pandemics do. And the vaccination rate won't make one iota of difference in the long run.
> In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
Looking at https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations right now, the population of the ICU is 117 unvaccinated, 15 partially vaccinated, 150 fully vaccinated. Over 90% of Ontarians age 12+ are vaccinated. This says to me that the unvaccinated 10% of the population is making up over 40% of the ICU cases. While what you've said may be technically accurate, I think it's basically saying "most people are vaccinated" and the numbers suggest unvaccinated people are hugely more likely to end up in the ICU.
Am I misunderstanding the numbers? Or are we working off different numbers?
But the strain on the healthcare system and the pandemic as a whole is driven by total numbers, not relative numbers. The majority of cases are among the vaccinated, therefore vaccine mandates won't end the pandemic. But people who argue for the mandates argue as if it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and that's simply not true.
Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates? If so, do you think the moment it passed 50/50 in terms of ICU beds (or other similar stat) was the appropriate time to repeal them? Or what should the "trigger" have been?
Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area. This still seems like "too many unvaccinated people in the ICU" to me, even though they're not the majority. I can definitely empathize with it becoming a judgement call now though, and on that I agree. At some point someone is making a decision about the magic number, and I'm not sold on the current government's strategy there.
Only if it's targeted. The people ending up at the ICU skew older and many of them are probably retired. But the issue that spawned the trucker protest is vaccine mandates for the truckers, who as a group are probably a lot younger than the people who are currently occupying ICUs in Canada due to covid.
Age is the single most important factor when it comes to determining the personal risk of covid. A healthy unvaccinated child is ~1000x less likely to have a bad outcome compared to a vaccinated 80-year-old. But this is completely ignored when it comes to the mandates, the mandates are the same whether you're a 20-year-old trucker or a 60-year-old trucker, even though forcing 20-year-olds to get vaccinated is completely useless from a public health standpoint.
The second most important factor is natural immunity, because it is stronger and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity. Again, completely ignored. Forcing people with natural immunity to get vaccinated makes zero sense.
> Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates?
No, never.
If the vaccines had been more effective and actually stopped transmission, we wouldn't be having this Omicron wave, so we wouldn't have lots of people in the ICUs in the first place, which is the current reason for the mandates. The main reason so many people are still unvaccinated is because they've made their own risk assessment and decided they're fine with not getting vaccinated.
If the virus had been deadlier, vaccination rates would have been higher anyway, because fewer people would have decided to take the risk to stay unvaccinated. If the virus had been less deadly, we would have had a lower vaccination rate, but also even less people in the ICUs.
No matter which parameter you hypothetically imagine to be different, we would probably have landed in a collective societal risk assessment that would have produced the same results anyway.
> Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area.
I don't have this data for Canada, but here's the current ICU utilization in the US: https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
Right now that page shows ~78% total utilization, and a ~20% covid utilization. So one in four ICU patients are covid patients, which sounds like a lot. But if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone, and assuming there's a 50/50 split among vaccinated/unvaccinated in the US as well, that means you would reduce total utilization from ~78% to ~68%.
How the hell does it make sense to violate people's bodily autonomy, to force them or coerce them to get vaccinated, to increase people's distrust of government and public health, in order to have ~30% free ICU capacity instead of ~20%?
What the fuck? How about increasing ICU and hospital capacity instead?!? How about looking at the 3/4 of ICU patients that are there for something other than covid and see if there's any low-hanging fruit we can take care of there in order to reduce that number instead? Why would we curb people's freedoms and rights for a slight increase in potential ICU capacity? Why should ICU capacity decide whether or not people can go to a restaurant or not? That's a micro-managed technocratic bio-fascist dystopia! The healthcare system should serve the people, not the other way around!