San Francisco votes overwhelmingly to recall progressive DA Chesa Boudin
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
I worked in SF for the better part of a decade on and off and every year it seemed like things got worse, human shit on sidewalks everywhere you looked, needle casings littering the ground, aggressive homeless and crime that was out of control(only time in california I ever got a car window smashed in and stuff stolen).
I didn't see SF for 2 years during the pandemic but the week I did visit in 2022 it was down right apocalyptic, no normal people on the street at all, just homeless/drug addicts everywhere, graffiti and trash at levels I have never seen, no wonder the city saw its population drop by the largest percent of any major american city.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-populat...
I recently moved to the Bay Area. I've lived quite a few places around the world and US. Some I consider the nicest in the world (Tokyo) and some I don't consider nice at all.
I'd formed my view of SF based on comments I'd heard like these on HN, and was prepared for the worst when beginning to visit for the weekend.
Having now had several excursions into the city including places considered not that nice like the Tenderloin or Mission, I can't see how it's any worse than any other US city, and in fact consider it nicer than most other large cities in the US I've been to, like NYC and Chicago.
Maybe it's because I only visit on weekends and don't live there, but from the perspective of a frequent visitor it seems really nice to me, and I didn't go in expecting that nor am I a person particularly biased towards having rose colored views of things.
I wonder if maybe people in SF expect it to not have the same problems as other large metros like NYC. I'd be curious to hear from someone who has lived in both and thinks SF is "apocalyptic" what experiences made them think that.
I think in the Bay Area there's a large number of people who don't realize (or have chosen to forget) how inconvenient life can still be on average around the world and even the country, compared to the idyllic circumstances they've created here (especially in the valley). It's what makes it so easy for them to come across as judgemental or tone deaf when discussing problems at the national level.
Its a beautiful but broken city.
https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che...
This article goes into various claims about crime rates and most are either false or only partially true.
In my opinion conservative media and people on the right exaggerate the amount of crime in cities in general so they can point to the leadership who are almost Democrats
In my opinion people like you think that conservative media is exaggerating the amount of crime in cities, but it's actually happening. There is a ton of crime here. Scenes that look like they're from a zombie movie, people shooting up drugs and leaving needles everywhere, open-air markets peddling wares shoplifted from cvs/walgreens/etc. This is not made up.
What isn't rare is seeing people living in tents chopping up bikes and injecting themselves with needles in plain sight.
Your article also mentions the same thing:
> Many property crimes in the city go unreported, making it difficult to gauge the level of decline.
> San Francisco's increase in burglaries, however, did outpace the rest of the country.
People in SF complaining about crime aren't talking about homicides (thank goodness). But as mentioned in your article, burglary is way up. Most likely property crime is also way up. This is what people are complaining about. So saying "crime is actually down" doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Another time on a team outing in the city(2018) I saw a man hit a woman in the face on the street, and a homeless man lurched in front of our SUV carrying my team(Team Dinners are great in SF!).
My brother came to visit the golden gate bridge and ride his bike(2021), in the hour he was gone someone tried to pry his bike rack off of his car, he was shocked as it was a crowded parking lot for the GG recreation area so not some back alley.
Oh and here are some fun images of absolute anarchy with smash and grabs that cost the bay area $1B, so yeah things are completely falling apart under the current regime:
https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-stores-board-u...
Republicans: mental health is definitely an issue that needs to be solved in regards to guns but that's a long term solution - we also need a short term solution of preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place.
Democrats: There are racial issues in this country that can be solved in the long term through education and investment in communities. That being said crime is crime, and we also need a short term solution of arresting and prosecuting people who commit crimes - no matter what their circumstances are. Reform NOT defund the police.
The republicans are that way because a lot of measures to "preventing people who shouldn't have access to guns in the first place" use the large hammer of just banning guns for everyone instead of only those who should. Now they are scared of any attempt to do anything because historically it has taken away guns from safe gun owners who just enjoy them.
There is also the moral hazard: who decides who is safe to have a gun - with careful work you can take guns away from people you don't like.
There is a reason that the US has anomalously high HDI, income and wealth stats for a country that large. It is because they are all in on freedom, letting individuals better themselves if they can think of a way and putting lots of roadblocks in the way of government (one of which is allowing ordinary people to arm up to the teeth). Trading away that freedom will probably a regression to the mean and worsting circumstance. Out of control governments are much more likely to leave trails of corpses behind them then rogue gunners.
To put another way, every country with higher average per capita GDP than the US (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...>) has a population smaller than that of Orange County, California.
Exactly, this is most important point that people forget. It's all about freedom.
Personally I'm a safe cruise-missile owner who just enjoys it. Who are you to tell me what to do. If I wanna fire my cruise missiles in my own backyard I'm gonna do it. It's my God-given right. Sure, some people use their cruise missiles to blow up schools, but cruise missiles don't kill people, people kill people. We should just get every school to have a cruise-missile shield, and accompanying cruise-missile bunker. Discount coupons included free in the biology literature package.
Come on now, your post seemed reasonable until the very end; there would never be a discount.
Yeah, that's my biggest problem with the "in the wrong hands" wording, far too often those words have been code for "in the hands of black people".
Pretty much any seemingly reasonable requirement we come up with can be manipulated this way. It's a lot like voter IDs, where the problem is that you can get them at a DMV for free, provided you can take off of work and drive 50 miles to the nearest DMV because the republican governor shuttered the ones near black neighborhoods.
Unfortunately I think the only solution is going to come in the form of applying restrictions to everyone. As someone who believes in the second amendment for a variety of reasons, and who owns firearms, I've come to the conclusion that this is preferable to the status quo.
Which would drive up costs, which would again just make it a thing only the wealthy effectively had access to.
Gun control obviously isn’t working, so let’s just ratchet down the supply instead. We just don’t need 13 million new guns a year in this country.
Really the two groups who benefit and perpetuate this are from this are the gun industry, who has spent lots of money propagating this messaging over decades, and politicians on the right, who are able to with one hand to fill their election coffers with industry funds and with the other have a reliable bloc of voters that will never vote democrat.
And those who want to want to own firearms of course: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem... There's significant ownership of firearms among suburbanites and urbanites and there's significant ownership of firearms among moderates and even among the left. And, of course, purchases of firearms, including first time buyers, increased during the recent pandemic: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-12-21/....
Continuing to blame the traditional conservative bogeymen and ignoring that there is broad support for firearm ownership by the voting public is just sticking one's head in the sand. Until that unwelcome reality is faced and legislation crafted that the public wants (e.g. not bans), gun control is going to remain stalled.
"They are coming for your guns" has been consistent messaging put out by those with an intrenched interest with no basis in reality.
There are over 300 million guns in the US. I don't think there are any "short term" solutions with that many guns.
We KNOW this from page after page of examples where sensible gun laws immediately decreased gun violence, in short order.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/legal-gun-pur...
You’d already know this if you spent even two minutes investigating. And the claim holds up no matter how you choose to define a mass shooting. If you want to restrict it to only the most deadly and infamous mass shooting incidents, the percentage actually goes UP.
Don’t take my word for it, Google it yourself and read five or ten good sources. The proof is overwhelming.
I would like to point out a few interesting tidbits from the data and inject my opinions after the citations.
> Most individuals who perpetrated mass shootings had a prior criminal record (64.5%) and a history of violence (62.8%), including domestic violence (27.9%). And 28.5% had a military background. Most died on the scene of the public mass shooting, with 38.4% dying by their own hand and 20.3% killed by law enforcement officers.
It's interesting that out of the 64% that had a prior criminal record, they somehow were re-released which allowed them to commit a mass shooting. Something is wrong here. It seems like we're holding people with less severe crimes in prison for too long, and the ones who should have stayed in prison are being released too early.
> Of the known mass shooting cases (32.5% of cases could not be confirmed), 77% of those who engaged in mass shootings purchased at least some of their guns legally, while illegal purchases were made by 13% of those committing mass shootings. In cases involving K-12 school shootings, over 80% of individuals who engaged in shootings stole guns from family members.
I'm not sure what this means exactly, but it's interesting to me that they phrased it this way "77% of those who engaged in mass shootings purchased at least some of their guns legally". This seems to indicate that of this 77% who purchased some of their guns legally, they may have purchased the guns used to commit the mass shootings illegally. I don't know why they phrased this this way, but it seems to indicate these individuals may have purchased guns farther back in the past legally, then been barred from buying guns, purchased more guns illegally, and then used those illegal weapons.
> Nearly half of individuals who engaged in mass shootings (48%) leaked their plans in advance to others, including family members, friends, and colleagues, as well as strangers and law enforcement officers.
It's very sad to me that almost 50% of these cases could have been avoided! In some of these cases, law enforcement knew about it in advance, and it still happened.
When you actually read the data directly from the sources, and avoid a right wing or left wing propaganda outlet, and you form your opinions on your own, you may be surprised about the statistics.
But don't take my word for it, Google it yourself and read the actual papers that did the research. The proof is quite ambiguous, and it seems like there's lots of variables that could have changed these outcomes.
[0]: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/public-mass-shootings-da...
Gun laws work. Have worked, do work, will work in the future if passed now.
"A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies." ~ George Washington
Military supplies. Not "civilianized" equipment.
I have no idea how it would work in practice, but I think it might go a long way to address how people operate with guns.
"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them." ~ Richard Henry Lee
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty .... Whenever governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." ~ Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun." ~ Patrick Henry
What you describe is basically Switzerland and Israel.
People on this thread are using the word "literally" as a source for their claims, I wouldn't expect too much from this site, at least highly political threads.
This is why lawmakers faff around with stupid ineffective solutions like "a firearm cannot have any of these features" instead of something more "common sense" - odds are it's been tried, and repealed or overturned.
When was the last time a prosecutor got recalled because they failed to reduce crime by locking a lot of people up?
Now, you have someone that's had a lifetime of anxiety because they couldn't perform academically (which will get you shunned by your peers) with little to no prospects in life. Add in social media where these people can see their peers going to tropical islands, college parties, just living a nice life they'll never attain, and you've tipped the scales into driving someone mad.
So, if you want to solve the 'mental health' problems, you need to fix what's causing them. We're human beings, not robots. We don't need to be locked in classrooms and have performance measured 8+ hours per day for our entire childhoods.
If this were true, they would have proposed legislation to fund healthcare.
Any comparison of the parties can't be done in good faith.
‘Defund the police’ is what you see on the signs at democrat protests.
When you get in a discussion, it’s not quite what they mean, but that just means it’s a stupid slogan where you have to redefine every word to get at what you mean.
Human politics and all…
But it's a great way to lie about your political opponents to keep anything rational from being done about gun violence or other issues.
Plenty of prominent Democrats quotes here that say otherwise.
It's very clear that Republicans don't actually believe that improving mental health or mental healthcare is actually a solution to gun deaths, but only use it as a distraction from improving gun regulations that are desired by over 80% of Americans, including a majority of gun owners.
Democrats on the other hand actually do understand that mental health issues are a part of the gun problem, and therefore provide solutions to tackle it both by improving mental health care access, as well as improving background checks to prevent those with mental health issues from accessing lethal weaponry easily.
Everybody deals with hassle, they just need to get paid for it. People that need mental healthcare have no money to pay for it. Why would smart, capable people go to work in a field where the pay is not commensurate to quality of life at work?
Simply doing something like paying people in mental healthcare competitive wages would help. Why would it not? Money serving to incentivize is the basis of our society.
We can't throw our hands up in the air and claim it's impossible because there's more than 1 problem. We have to fix both problems.
If government insurance were to create a shortage of mental health care workers, then one way or another we need to get to more mental health care workers. It would be nearly impossible to wait for a proper number of employees before giving everyone coverage. You'd end up with an excess of supply.
There's already a lack of supply.
The US spends more than any other country on public health care per capita than any other country in the world. Over 50% more per capita public expenditure than the runner up Norway. [1]
I don't know if money is the problem
[0] https://www.crfb.org/papers/american-health-care-health-spen...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...
Medicaid requires you basically give up your house - and most health plans normal people have come with deductibles too high to actually use. So poor folks don't seek preventative care until it's too late, pushing up prices for everyone.
The whole thing is unconscionable, and the price tag you point to is a function of massive structural inefficiency and not something to be proud of. Canada provides healthcare to 100% of the population for half the per-capita cost. Norway, 66% of the per capita cost.
There is no true free market for healthcare, anywhere. A free market requires voluntary agreement between buyer and seller, but regional monopolies saying 'pay up or I'll let you bleed out on the floor' ain't it.
Certainly, there are huge issues with laws around involuntary commitment to mental institutions also and the legal costs there, but I figure the first step is creating the quality mental health institutions in the first place.
It is also possible this is simply an intractable problem (I think the needed expenditures are far too big to be politically palatable), so we will just trend towards a situation where those that can afford to, erect walls and security and whatnot around their lives, like other countries with large gaps in poor and rich.
In general, “fund x” means a wealth transfer from wealthier people to poorer people to pay for “x”, and Repubs have no track record of this outside of military/police/security ventures.
If Republicans believe that healthcare for working adults is best covered by the private sector, then the government doesn't need to do anything to fund that. If the government did take it over, there is no guarantee it would include mental health aspects or if it would just expand sick care to all. There are a lot of assumptions that a government funded plan will be the exact plan everyone wants, but that is very unlikely, because everyone wants something different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
ACA only happened because of Democrats pushing for greater access to healthcare, but also had to heavily compromise to win the votes of a couple senators who had insurers’ interests at heart.
Republicans didn’t vote for it largely as a political strategy to not be seen as giving Obama a “win”.
But the other poster is right that the ACA was essentially the “free market” conservative version of universal healthcare.
And certainly, if Repubs had control of Congress in 2008, they would have never passed ACA, or any other broad wealth transfer mechanism like it.
1. Ronald Reagan was the Repub who defunded and shuttered mental health facilities in California, so I'm not sure how Repubs will manage to solve mental illness issues without tripping over this inconsistency and that it reeks of big government/state funding/social support.
2. One of the things that supposedly impacts African American families is the loss of father's to incarceration, so even if you pump in education and money, you've got a family life missing a second parent and the negative outcomes associated with that.
There's nothing "supposedly" about it; of course an absent father has an impact. And you're right, money isn't going to fix a cultural problem.
Democrats: There are racial issues in this country that can be solved in the long term through education and investment in communities. That being said crime is crime, and we also need a short term solution of arresting and prosecuting people who commit crimes - no matter what their circumstances are. Reform NOT defund the police."
Umm... you have those parties completely backwards.
It's Democrats (not Republicans) who are for gun control.
It's Republicans who want to arrest and prosecute people regardless of their circumstances, and are more opposed to defunding the police.
I think that the OP could have made their point less open to misinterpretation by writing something like:
"To Republicans I'd say..."
and
"To Democrats I'd say..."
-No Due process for the accused, so guns are simply taken from innocent people and the first they know is when a cop shows up.
-No process to return taken guns or ammo after a specified period.
-Doesn't prevent acquiring new weapons.
-Little or no credibility requirements for red flags.
-These laws often don't require any sort of conviction or charge, so it's a lot like civil asset forfeiture in that it takes things from innocent people.
Translation: anyone that even has an anxiety disorder is just one step from turning into Mister Hyde and going on a rampage, so instead of dealing with guns by reducing the number of them in the population we'll just scapegoat people with emotional and other sorts of mental problems instead.
At what point does someone with mental health issues lose their rights? I mean we're literally barring them from one of their constitutional rights, because they're depressed. I can come closer to understanding schizophrenics that don't know what's reality and what's not (that's a recipe for disaster), but merely being checked into a facility?
I wonder if all the pro-recallers will use stats to say the next DA is doing a good job, or if the data will start mattering then?
If the new DA's stats stay mostly the same or get worse, will they recall their own DA because they believe in effectiveness, or was this whole recall movement was just full of shit?
I'm not optimistic changing DAs will do anything to improve safety or increase quality of life in SF, especially with the recession coming.
I just hope that people who claim to "still support criminal justice reform" actually vote like that, because I'm betting they vote for people unwilling to make the hard / unpopular decisions to enact real reforms, who instead talk reform while continue the status quo.
All of this is also just window dressing on an otherwise broken social safety net that leaves us with a large / desperate underclass who commit most of the crime. We're never going to arrest our way out of this, and likely unable to solve a lot of it with reform alone. We need real change to our social contract in the USA, but we can barely pass things that are already broadly popular. Easy to be pessimistic...
Wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Edit: I am literally wondering - I have no knowledge of the situation.
"The bodycam footage shows [Officer] Samayoa drawing his pistol while the cruiser was still moving. The video then shows him open the side door and fire a single shot through the window as O’Neil runs by in the opposite direction. O’Neil was not armed."
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/forme...
How is allowing the city to get that bad progressive? Isn't that creating an even more radically two-tier city where the rich live in gated homes and work in posh offices while everyone else can't afford to live somewhere that doesn't smell like human waste? (If they can afford a roof over their head at all. Real estate costs in SF are still batshit insane.)
SF may well be the city in the US with the most radical division between rich and poor. Nobody who isn't rich can ever hope to afford homeownership unless they want to commute three hours.
How is any of this progressive? To me it looks like a lot of elitism plus general political incompetence and corruption coated with a superficial veneer of low-effort progressive rhetoric to sell it to naive young liberals who vote for mere words and don't pay attention to outcomes.
I've become fond of saying this: "Texas is more progressive than California because in Texas a working class person can afford a place to live." That seems to sometimes wake people up to the rank hypocrisy of all this.
We've created a political environment where we give far, far too much weight to words and not nearly enough to deeds or outcomes. Ultimately only outcomes matter and when measured by outcome SF's policies are not progressive.
You're right. SF isn't very progressive. It does occasionally have a progressive policy or candidate, but mostly it chases big tech money and just pretends to be progressive. The politicians are mostly mainstream dems, who are just as corrupt as other politicians. The cops aren't as bad as NY or LA or Chicago, but they're not better than average in terms of competence or racism. Boudin is progressive, but he's being recalled.
SF likes to pretend that it's better than other cities, but for the most part, it isn't. It is richer, and a lot of SF's problems are attributable to it being richer without being more equal.
The GOP angle that SF proves progressivism turns places into shitholes is also a complete lie. The city isn't very progressive, and it also isn't actually a shithole. (I mean yes it's literally dirty, but not nearly at the level the media likes to rant about.) Similarly with the whole "Boudin caused SF to have a crime wave" thing. SF's crime stats during the pandemic were not especially different from other major cities, and the DA doesn't have much of an impact on crime stats anyway, especially not in the short term.
> We've created a political environment where we give far, far too much weight to words and not nearly enough to deeds or outcomes. Ultimately only outcomes matter and when measured by outcome SF's policies are not progressive.
Right. And some people try to argue against progressive policies, by saying that "progressive" deeds don't lead to the desired outcomes. But SF isn't a good example of this. It has progressive words but NIMBY deeds, so of course it isn't getting progressive outcomes.
Colorado and Massachusetts come to mind as possibilities. I've lived in the latter and it did not seem too badly run, certainly much better than SF. It did still have the unaffordable housing problem that dogs every "blue" city and state, but nowhere near as bad as SF.
The unaffordable housing problem is not just because of NIMBYs. It's also because of a lot of regulation in general including endless environmental reviews that add tons of cost and uncertainty to housing development. When you increase the up-front cost of building anything by tacking on a bunch of compliance and regulatory requirements, you bias the market heavily toward luxury high-end developments in which the builder can recoup the cost. You can't build affordable housing in a high-cost environment because it doesn't deliver the margins.
As a rule any regulation with difficult or costly compliance is a tax, and usually a regressive one since huge corporations and/or high-margin products are less impacted.
I don't know of any one place that does a great job. Different places have tried different components of progressive policies, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Like Salt Lake City isn't overall progressive, but it's done a good job building housing for homeless people. Berkeley has a reputation for being more legitimately progressive than SF, but I haven't looked into the details on that and I'd bet there are still serious issues. Massachusetts and Colorado have done well at some things. And at least SF, like Massachusetts, makes health care relatively accessible even to poor people.
> The unaffordable housing problem is not just because of NIMBYs. It's also because of a lot of regulation in general including endless environmental reviews that add tons of cost and uncertainty to housing development. When you increase the up-front cost of building anything by tacking on a bunch of compliance and regulatory requirements, you bias the market heavily toward luxury high-end developments in which the builder can recoup the cost. You can't build affordable housing in a high-cost environment because it doesn't deliver the margins.
Agreed. And it's tough because you do want environmental reviews and building codes, especially in an earthquake zone. But Cali in general definitely goes overboard on these and other red tape. Also the land is expensive, labor is expensive because the workers need to live in or near SF, etc.
And SF has rent control. This is sort of a progressive policy, and it's basically the only way that less-than-rich people can still afford to live there, but it also skews the market and makes the remaining places even more expensive.
Most frustrating of all to me is the Enlightened Centrism memes which equate a rational middle position with agreeing exactly half with both sides and poisons the well for anyone trying to find policy that is effective, regardless of its origin.
A big part of why our politics is so broken is the culture war. It's a godsend to incompetent and corrupt politicians since it allows them to pay lip service or toss low-cost political bones to their "base" while freeing them from the need to do anything hard or get any real results. With the culture war politicians don't have to be competent or earn your vote.
Works for both "red" and "blue" sides. There are terribly run places with all-Republican single party rule.
Unfortunately the trend has been toward hyper-polarization on culture war issues, making it even harder to select for competence over "correct" cultural alignment with the base. The right likes to bash political correctness but they have their own form of it as well as their own "safe spaces" where only their speech is tolerated. It's definitely a both-sides problem.
I found it fascinating and I think would form the base of your "American Competence Party". Sign me up!
You are not thinking clearly about the history of American politics if you group all the movements that called themselves "progressive" together as one.
Someone says, "X isn't producing the results people who advocate for X wanted." Then someone else inevitably chimes in, "X was never intended to produce those results from the beginning! It was a plot to benefit a few at the expense of everyone else all along!" X is variously Capitalism, Communism, in this case Progressivism...
What is the point of making comments like this? It seems very useless and gets us no further towards a discussion of things that might work.
Please drop the rote attempts at agitation. Agitation has never motivated anyone to make the world better. Only a vision of how things could be instead can do that.
A felony record is still a scarlet letter in employment and other areas of society. So whatever's causing it, whatever we do about it, this is a huge weight on the male population and on black males in particular.
We can't seriously attempt to address racial issues in the US without addressing this.
It’s not the 80s / 90s anymore. It’s very difficult to end up in jail anywhere on the west coast due to run of the mill drug possession.
[0]https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/research/wp-content/uploads/sites/17...
Violent crime dropped on his watch. Although thefts are up [0]. The stats show it. Very disappointing result.
[0] - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-06-07/2022-san...
The only thing that works, partially IMHO, is periods of "broken-window-theory" policing followed by gentrification, healthy streets, and mixed use development. If residents value their communities, they will take care of them physically, economically, and socially.
This was explored a lot in a classic work by Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). It's still a relevant read and informs much of new urbanist thinking.
https://www.statista.com/chart/10593/how-much-do-us-cities-s...
It should at least have as many police per capita as Spain, 534/100k, not 239, which is less than even Taiwan.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Then you have the case where the police were afraid to go into a school during an active shooter incident because they were “afraid of getting shot”
https://nypost.com/2022/05/26/texas-cops-feared-getting-shot...
But more importantly, they will feel less stressed knowing backup is nearby, they will have more time to process and investigate and take care of the victims.
As the saying goes, happy police, happy polis.
The most police ever do is take a statement so you can file an insurance claim. Which isn’t bad. It is just stuff. But if I’m in the house, that’s a different story.
I’m much more concerned about police targeting me because I as Black person am “suspiciously” walking to the pool in my own neighborhood where the city is less than 4% Black.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/28/ving-rhames-...
I’ve never once thought “I have an issue. Let me calm the police and have to deal with the ‘justice’ system”. Now I just have more problems
https://nypost.com/2022/05/31/la-lifeguards-raked-in-up-to-5...
We don’t need to spend more - we need the state to fix how money is allocated.
I am definitely suggesting spending more money on police though. Both in police employment and in police education. If I were king, I'd introduce a new rank of police officer, that gets paid 30% more and 10% more time off, that requires a year or two extra education, continuous education upkeep and extra scrutiny on their record of interactions (i.e. complaints). Too many complaints, or screw up in some bad way and you lose your rank for 1 to 5 years. Police departments would be required to gradually increase their ratio of the higher ranked officers to 30 to 50%. Just daydreaming though.
Only 3 countries in the world spend more per pupil than the US: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Education/Sp...
Furthermore, racial differences in per-pupil funding are negligible, with Black and Latinx funding slightly exceeding White:
on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23328584198724...
Anyway, we should be 1st. Not 4th. We're the richest country.
Blacks are underrepresented among the rich, so if rich private school spending was relatively significant, one would expect the Black per-pupil spending to be the lowest, not the highest.
Throwing more money at a problem is very rarely the best solution.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
Because we aren't spending enough on K-12 education already? Throwing good money after bad is terrible policy.
(Medicine has lots of issues too, but it's an entirely separate issue from criminal justice.)
Some schools do. White schools. Take a look at any high school in the south side of Chicago and tell me they are doing just fine.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
You can see in the inflation-adjusted graph it has been flat except for after Covid.
If you aren’t getting the result you want, you will have to increase inflation-adjusted spending to see a change.
> In the United States, education spending falls short of benchmarks set by international organizations such as UNESCO, of which the U.S. is a member. The nation puts 11.6% of public funding toward education, well below the international standard 15.00%.
Spending night be misallocated but a bigger budget won’t do anything by itself. There are no big, obvious wins out there.
https://www.cato.org/blog/addressing-critics-purportedly-no-...
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
>In August 1971, Nixon severed the direct convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold.
At the federal level? Not really. The Department of Education is something like less than 1% of the federal budget.
Furthermore the problem comes down to how schools are actually funded. In the US, it's almost entirely through local property taxes. Which means that racial and socioeconomic segregation cause children to be doomed to an underfunded school district, perpetuating the cycle.
https://communityresourcehub.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonza...
It seems like it's hard to know:
- If these policies would have helped reduce crime over the long term, but not impacted it over the short term
- If these policies would have helped reduce crime over the long term, but increased it over the short term
- If these policies increase crime over the short-term and the long-term
It seems like it's going to be difficult to follow a data-driven approach here. It could take a long time to collect enough data and like most of the other social sciences, it's difficult to isolate causal from correlative factors.
I empathize with San Francisco not wanting to be the guinea pigs to find out. Being tough on crime feels like the right solution even if we don't know objectively if it is or isn't.
Also nobody likes hate crimes are getting their car broken into.
- Under 18 year old convicts in practice do not get sentenced to prison no matter the crimes they commit, instead they tend to get off with a warning for 'small crimes' and are sent to social care ('ungdomsvård' or 'youth care') for 'larger crimes', this can be in a closed facility for crimes like murder and rape. Under 15 can not be prosecuted at all. This has led to a large increase in the use of under-18s by (ethnically segregated) criminal gangs where "att brösta en fyra för att bli en hundragubbe" [2] (taking four years of 'ungdomsvård' (for murder) to prove your 100% loyalty to the gang) has become a way to get away with murder while gaining new recruits.
- Under 21 year old convicts get reduced sentences ('ungdomsrabatt' or 'youth discount') which is also useful for gangs which see their members back on the streets within a short time.
So going by the long-time experiment run here in Sweden the conclusion seems to be that these policies do not help in lowering the crime rate, in fact the opposite seems to be true.
[1] https://www.aklagare.se/lattlast/ungdomar-brott-och-straff/s...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/26/fatal-shooting...
[3] https://www.svensktidskrift.se/ett-parallellsamhalle-som-let...
No, man, no. It's not hard to know. Pro-crime policies increase crime. That's what they do, and that's their entire purpose.
Everyone here seems to think this guy was acting in good faith. No. He comes from a proud terrorist tradition [1], and he's playing his part. Almost every "right wing" news source points out that he is bankrolled by George Soros, and the left (Who could hardly stop repeating "Koch Brothers" whenever they could) needs to realize that there are powerful forces out their intentionally trying to harm society.
[1] Literally.
That's a weird comment—the left recognizing that there are powerful forces out there intentionally trying to harm society is why they keep on about the Koch brothers.
I think we should check his birth certificate.
As for Boudin himself, he's the one who keeps bringing up his parents during his original campaign and all the puff pieces whenever he is interviewed. His stance is that his parents' imprisonment was the grave injustice, not that they were responsible for the murder of two policemen (including the first Black officer in Nyack, NY) and a security guard.
It's worth noting his privileged mother got the best legal defense you can get (her lawyer father's partner) and was sentenced to far less than her husband, the latter got 75 to life and she 20 years to life. When she was released, she was promptly hired as an assistant professor by Columbia and got her own department to manage, clearly the difficulties felons face in finding employment did not apply to her.
The problems are a lot more regional than the national political media would have you believe, because SF is not an island in the ocean. The East Bay and the South Bay are all in similar economic conditions. There's been an uptick in homelessness in the once-suburban commuter cities, and if those places can't provide services then migration to SF is one possibility because more services are provided in the city. People might be able to get a hotel room in SF, for example.
"New data shows explosive growth of homelessness in these Bay Area suburbs, May 2022"
https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/east-bay-homeles...
One of the main political flashpoints in SF is this: nobody wants homeless services in their neighborhoods, and the wealthier the locale, the more political power they have, and so that's where you'll see police responding to homeless mental health incident disturbances. The result is a ridiculously wealth-stratified city, with the police basically being asked to serve as a barrier between the wealthy regions and the poor regions.
This isn't even something the state of California can address: if all the money in the state went into providing housing and services for the bottom rung of society, and no other state did that, you'd again have the migration problem. See the Great Depression and 'Grapes of Wrath', for example. Indeed, it is an international problem as all the desperate poor people seeking entry to the USA over the past decade demonstrates.
Of course they can address it. Make it easy to build housing for everyone. State and local governments control housing policy.
He either refuses to acknowledge that the Democrat voters themselves are rejecting his policies out of hubris or it’s a way to shame democrats by accusing them of acting like Republicans. But it didn’t work and only infuriated and calcified anti-Boudin people even more.
Democrats at the federal level better take heed. If San Francisco who is overwhelmingly Democrat will reject extreme progressive policies like Boudin’s, hopefully it means the Dems can regain some sense of rationality.
My friends and I have all made a pact that we will vote Republican until the Dems come more to the center, no matter how horrible the Republicans candidate is. That’s the only way we can change behavior is through voting, and in CA they have come to take voters for granted for decades and left California a progressive experiment gone off the rails to the point of lunacy.
I just can't imagine a world where an ousted politician (or elected bureaucrat in this case) says "wow I guess I really fucked up, I'm sorry. I'll pack my things and be out in the morning". They have to save face by blaming somebody.
In Canada, most defeat speeches I've watched were about the candidate mistakes, what they were proud of having accomplished, etc... Playing the blame game is pathetic.
If you want an example, Stephen Harper's concession speech in 2015 was pretty good.
A recall is specifically calling out the politician for failing badly enough to interrupt the election cycle.
That's pretty illustrative of a lot of American politics. Republicans have been moving further and further away from the center for the past six years, and have paid little price for their extremism.
I would recommend making an exception for Republicans who deny Biden won the 2020 election. The #1 rule for voting in a democracy is: never vote for somebody who doesn't believe in democracy, because chances are you will never get to vote him out.
This is an extremely dangerous position to take. You are literally willing to vote Hitler into office rather than a progressive?
Is it though?
"we will vote Republican until the Dems come more to the center, no matter how horrible the Republicans candidate is."
No matter how horrible.
We came within a hair of a fascist takeover of the US in 2021. That threat is now stronger than it has ever been.
Even if it escalated past that point (i.e. Trump messing around) there wasn't key buy-in from several necessary parties. How in the world was it "close"?
How in the world was it close? You answered the question yourself: all that was missing was key buy-in from several necessary parties. Namely: Pence, several low-level elections clerks, and several secretaries of state. Republicans have been working to replace these individuals with insurrectionist since 2020, and to also change laws where they were thwarted before (see the Georgia GOP's new ability to completely take over and throw out independent county elections where they don't like the results.)
The plan would have most certainly worked if Pence had left the Capitol on Jan 6. Grassley would have taken over Pence's duties, and he would have refused to certify the election. At that point, the vote would have eventually ended up at the House, with one vote allocated per state delegation. With Republicans in the majority of delegations, they would have installed Trump as president against the will of the people, thereby ending 200+ years of American democracy.
The plan was very complex, it was thought of by very smart and powerful people, it was executed with the explicit intention of ending democracy in America by people at the highest level of government, and thankfully it ultimately failed. Yet, it almost succeeded and we must take note that they only had 2 months to prepare. Next time they will have had 4 years. So please, for the love of country, watch every second of the 1/6 committee hearings. Please.
Even if the vote was delayed the legal system isn't an ethereum smart contract. Congress and presumably the supreme court would get involved to reverse the decision, or worse, have something similar to a civil war.
At the point where 50% of the Congress is voting against democracy, and the people are assaulting the Capitol, it strikes me as naive to expect institutions like scotus to save us at long last.
If you value American democracy, 2024 is the last stand. Sorry you feel this perspective is breathless, but also you don’t seem to have a grasp of the severity of what happened. Which is why I’m imploring you to watch.
Even then, what occurs four years later? Or even a few months later? He wouldn't have enough leverage to translate that into continued (real) power.
I'll guess we'll see what happens in a few years.
The plan was to use the delay to kick the process into something favorable for Republicans, and to use fraudulent slates of electors to do so.
A certified presidential election has no review for good reason. The certification is in fact the election review process. All grievances are supposed to be settled by the Congress at that time. SCOTUS has no say over this process because if they did, that would take power away from the Congress, which would be unconstitutional.
As to what happens after that? See Hungary. See Russia. See any other country that has transitioned from democracy to autocracy. Elections will be held, it the results will be known ahead of time.
> I'll guess we'll see what happens in a few years.
No, the time to shape what happens in 2024 is now. This is why I am imploring you to pay close attention to the hearings. Action in 2024 will be too late.
January 6th was terrible but it was in no way anywhere close to being a real threat to democracy. To insist that it was is delusional.
If you want, I’ll be your pen pal during the 1/6 hearings. I’d like to hear your thoughts about the evidence presented, and if that changes your feelings about 1/6. Let me know I’ll give you my email.
I implore you to watch the hearings because you are using very strong language like “delusional” and "deranged", yet you don’t seem to be up to date on the facts relating to 1/6; you are under the impression that the totality of the coup attempt was seizing the Capitol building. That is not true. The 1/6 hearings will tell you exactly how they would have succeeded, and it’s far more insidious than an insurrection.
You are right it would take far more than occupying a building. It would take a conspiracy between state legislatures, state secretaries of state, paramilitary groups, the DOJ, the DOD, and it would have to reach as high as the White House and POTUS. Unfortunately for the USA, that's just what happened here.
(Just to head off an anticipated response, yes I understand the connotation of a conspiracy theory, but conspiracies happen and when they do they are hard to keep quiet if they are far ranging, as I'm alleging this conspiracy was. The coup plot has not been kept quiet, which is how I'm able to assert these points before the 1/6 committee has held their hearings. Everything I said has been reported already. I mean, just watch recently indicted Peter Navarro explain the whole plot live on national TV. They even had a codename for their plot: "The Green Bay Sweep").
But don’t take my word for it, the 1/6 committee will prove all of this in the coming weeks. All I’m saying is watch the hearings today and through June. You owe it to your country if you value democracy.
Please cite any substantive sources about it being "proven to be fake". That's a Fox News line, not an argument. None of it was proven fake. At all.
I watched the hearing, I mostly agree with you except for this part. It seems to me there were a confluence of factors colliding. The plan was not thought of by very smart and powerful people, it was a cockamamie legal spiel on the fringe cooked up by one law prof. The former president, true to his method of decision making, said essentially, Yeah, let's go with that, why not?
Meanwhile, there exists pockets of hard right militias, members of which have para-social relationship with Mr. Trump's twitter feed. They thought he was asking, ordering, them to come to the Capitol. It was "planned" like, "she was definitely winking at me, she wants me to ask her to the prom".
I keep in perspective a sense of skepticism, this is a trial with no advocate for the other side. Mr. Trump cannot be at the same time a clownish buffoon as well as an evil genius. But, the opportunity makes the man.
A politician serving for people assumes his policy would benefit all people, no matter some non-voters agree or not. He believes eventually people will agree.
On the contrary, politician serving for voter, in order to solicit votes, would intentionally surrender a part of people's benefits, for his votes. Decades ago, most politicians were shame of doing this. But now, seems their bar is getting lower and lower.
Sadly, Chesa is the latter.
Pretty hard to prosecute petty theft with Prop 47 in power, and it sounds like there was also a pretty major decrease in policing of petty crime over the last few years - that's not a DA fault, that's the mayor.
I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle and the police deserve a fair slice of blame, but so did Chesa. I think San Franciscans are sick of both sides and looking to send a message. Now the police have no excuses, and if it doesn't get better Chief of Police and Breed will be next.
Where there's a will there's a way.
Nationally, media will ignore the community progressed right on from their mistake.
That is actual progressive politics; moving politics along.
Conservatism is keeping the same defective political process in place and forcing deference to it.
Progressivism is not embodied in one DA, or policy pipe dream. It’s simply not being kowtowed by the past.
Electoral turnovers should be the norm, not the exception: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766
They've identified a real issue where 10% (arbitrarily chosen number...it could be higher/lower) of the justice system is not working well. But at the same time, 90% of it does work. They've turned out to be really bad at handling that 90%.
This recall is just one example of this.