Petty Thieves Plague San Francisco. ‘These Last Two Years Have Been Insane.’
wsj.com
wsj.com
I expect it won't be long before storefronts sprout rollup steel shields that extend from the pavement up and cover the complete storefront. That's what businesses do in Brazil.
Amazon is abandoning one of its downtown buildings because the employees don't feel safe there anymore.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/citing-crime-concerns-...
It's already tough enough dealing with all the tax, regulation, competing with large corporations and the internet etc. I can't imagine wanting to stay in business to deal with multiple burglaries and thefts, with the associated costs of security improvements and insurance premiums.
On the other side of Lake Washington, there are no such shields.
That kinda says it all.
“Stop! Or I’ll say stop again!” Is not a successful strategy. Three strikes is excessively punitive, but neither does allowing rampant crime to continue unabated.
Maybe. It can be pretty easy to commit crimes, but in general felonies are tougher to be accidental (although not impossible). The three strikes law has to do with felonies. If 2 stints in prison haven't deterred them from committing serious crimes, then it's likely they won't change (although a side note is that the current system could be enhanced in terms of rehabilitation efficacy - sort of a separate topic though).
Edit: why so many downvotes?
You are so close here. Maybe if the 2 stints in prison haven't deterred their crime it means that punishment isn't much of a deterrent and therefore we shouldn't blame decreased punishment for an increase in crime.
For example, as a kid you likely listened to your parents based on their threat of punishment. In reality, they have very little power and relatively minor punishments (with CPS getting involved).
On one hand we need to ensure people feel like a part of the system and have a chance at a decent job. If you know you don't have a chance then your more likely to act outside the acceptable system. That can help on the prevention side.
On the other side, it's pretty bad that police can't pursue thieves. Perhaps allowing law enforcement to pursue criminals and store/property owners to detain criminals.
So positive encouragement with feeling part of system and hope for a better life, with negative reinforcement of catching and prosecuting offenders (and not having criminal/civil policies that imped that).
Afghanistan too. It's a jarring contrast to see heavy steel walls installed on mud (?) brick; those must have been carefully thought-out expenses.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/15/world/asia/af... (on pages 15 and 21; not linkable)
People will blame the police, but I think this is a symptom of far greater issues in society, whose costs have been offloaded leaving the police to (poorly) manage it because that's probably the best they can do and everyone else is too busy avoiding culpability.
There is an ongoing national narrative about how shoplifting and petty theft has been out of control and yet the numbers rarely back up this narrative. A two year stretch in which the numbers dropped then bounced back up by 13% is not "insane" by any stretch of the imagination.
A. The city has incentive to hide the actual numbers[1], and B. Most business owners don't bother anymore with reporting, because what's the point?
I'd say it's probably a combination of the above.
Edit: [1]Because it is an election year. High crime looks bad.
... and cops have an incentive to overstate them.
For example: https://www.businessinsider.com/nypds-shake-shack-hoax-stop-...
I don't find that argument convincing.
There's a grim and extensive investigation at https://knock-la.com/tradition-of-violence-lasd-gang-history... of this.
As an example, the NYPD doxxed DiBlasio's daughter in revenge for his position on the George Floyd murder: https://www.newsweek.com/nypd-sergeants-benevolent-associati...
Overstating/cherrypicking crimes is a frequently utilized PR tactic to fight attempts at police reform, budget cuts, etc.
For example: https://twitter.com/dceiver/status/1493643563892150278
"Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year" winds up describing going from one to six.
It should be obvious that insurance serves as financial benefit for the insured or else the insurance industry would have collapsed a long time ago.
You know what we call a business that makes enough money on float to cover its operating costs? A bank.
If the float was so lucrative they wouldn't need to charge "high enough to matter" premiums.
Insurance companies don't have magical investments they can make that other businesses can't. They're not going to be making $0.50 on the dollar you give them. They're going to be making pennies, just like literally everyone else. This will mostly go toward subsidizing operating costs. In no universe do insurance companies make enough profit from their money pile to even come close to offsetting payouts.
The fact of the matter is that theft affects the entire area so it WILL be reflected in premiums, the same way things like the climate and adverse weather are reflected in premiums.
>It should be obvious that insurance serves as financial benefit for the insured or else the insurance industry would have collapsed a long time ago.
Using insurance to cover routine expenses never makes financial sense. There's a reason businesses self-insure as much as they can.
Just because a financial product can be a net win doesn't mean that it will still be a net win if you use it exactly the wrong way. Speaking of things that should be obvious...
I didn't say float was enough to cover their operating costs. I said insurance companeis can and often do run for long stretches in which premiums do not cover claims. Float is the way this is accomplished. If an insurance company goes long stretches in which premiums do exeed claims, customers will begin to turn away. Interest on float is free money and therefore float has value regardless of how small the returns. These companies want as much float as possible and offering favorable terms to their clients is a great way to increase total available float.
I don't know, definitely don't trust myself to not notice something a lot more when it becomes a big thing in the media.
Why do you think there has been this sudden uptick in under-reporting? When did it start?
It’s just used when actual data doesn’t confirm what people want to be true.
You don't have to take my word for it. There are studies to support that property crime goes severely under-reported[1]. Also, people are drastically less likely to report crime when it is obviously nothing will happen and it cost more than the value of whatever was taken. Walmart loses millions on theft every year, they could stop it but stopping it would cost more than doing nothing.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
> Some former police officials said in interviews that officers don’t feel it is worth making an arrest in low-level cases because they assume the district attorney won’t file charges. They also point to a statewide ballot measure passed in 2014—Proposition 47—that raised the dollar amount at which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950.
> Mr. Boudin has pointed the finger back at the police, arguing that the certainty of arrest is low in San Francisco compared with other cities. More consistent arrests of criminals, he has said, would be a more powerful deterrent than the length of prison sentences.
Regardless of what side you take, combine an increase in crime with the fact it is unlikely that people will be prosecuted or arrested and it seems reasonable to think that could lead people to just deciding it isn't worth the time to report the crime.
Because the same policy causes both. DA's refusing to prosecute encourages shoplifting and discourages reporting.
When a thief steals something from a shop or damages property window, the cashiers can’t (and shouldn’t) try to stop them. But they can get a video recording of the evidence. If they upload the recording to a shared database, other security cameras can recognize the criminal and match them with other crimes.
In theory, if someone accidentally steals $3 of goods or something it’s not worth doing anything, so normal people shouldn’t be affected by this. I imagine repeat offenders commit the majority of petty theft and they would be the targets: the recordings would be used to stack up charges and figure out their patterns, and eventually police would be pre-alerted to catch them in the act.
In practice I have no idea. But considering how much companies spend on security systems, and petty theft is a real issue, I bet some are looking into this kind of thing.
I guess any city gets roughly the government they want/deserve/tolerate.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2017/08/09/what-s-the-pun...
the people stealing from retail have very likely had more of their labor stolen than they’re lifting (it’s likely true for you too)
https://fair.org/home/shoplifting-is-big-news-stealing-milli...
https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-bigger-problem-fo...
Try to stop wage theft, get an unproductive conversation, or worse, get fired.
Try to stop petty crime, get assaulted, or worse, get killed.
There’s a reason no one gives a shit about wage theft: they simply don’t care.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/cvs-health
I'm skeptical of that. Do you have any info on the demographics and work history of the perpetrators? I'd imagine that many are younger and may not have worked enough to have this be true.
Even then, I doubt they're stealing from the company that stole from them, and it doesn't make it right.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/cvs-health
A single walgreens theft recently resulted in hundreds of news reports… walgreens’ multi-million wage theft settlement? outrageously less coverage
just look at some of the comments here, people calling for increased prosecution of the poor (including jail time) without a mention of the wider scale deeds of the companies most commonly being stolen from
Of course the news blows almost everything out of proportion, but the general public is more worried about thefts going unpunished with seemingly no recourse.
These are thefts impacting thousands and thousands of people going unpunished without recourse. The companies paying settlements are huge and the settlements are a slap on the wrist. No one sees jail time, no one even loses their job.
Meanwhile CVS and Walgreens are pitching a fit about a homeless person stealing $200 of baby formula to resell to a slightly less poor person and commenters are making calls for increased punishment.
the sf city government is a failed-state kleptocracy beholden to the inertia of the political machine and rich landowners who shortsightedly vote against their own interests, in a massive region with no regional governance, in a state kneecapped by antitax demagogues abusing the initiative process, in a nation whose already rickety performance under decades of neoliberal austerity and privatization was then intentionally reduced to rubble by a TV star, and his replacement has pudding brain.
Is California known for low taxes or being anti-tax? I don’t live there, but as an outsider, I have the exact opposite impression.
This puts it at the 10th highest overall tax burden: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...