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Comment by more_corn | Hacker News Reader

Sf police don’t give a shit about stolen bikes. I saw a homeless guy pick up a bike (wheel locked to frame) prop it on a shopping cart and run away. Called the cops. They didn’t give a shit, belittled me and refused to come. You’ll note in the article that it’s impossible to get the police to show up even when there’s known stolen property inside and clear gps evidence.

sfpd doesn’t do anything about anything. Check out that great video of the cops rolling up on a burglary in progress. Perp comes out the door, gets in car and drives off. Cops do nothing.

When vigilantism is the only justice available you’re living in a failed state.

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Not just SF, and not just bikes. My experience is that cops don't give a shit about any theft unless it happens right in front of them. No amount of evidence you can hand them will convince them to spend so much as a minute investigating.

> vigilantism

Cops and the city council WILL retaliate against you though for embarrassing them.

Depending on the type of vigilantism, that could be the most reasonable move.

SF police don't care period. It's a corrupt organization that simply exists to steal funds from the state. It needs to be burnt to the ground and re-created.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/t2u3fq/guy_in...

You are correct. As a rule SF police do not live in San Francisco. So it's just a cash cow to them.

Make sure you tell your city representative. City level elections are generally easy to change if you put in effort to knock on doors.

It sounds like a very similar situation to Seattle. While living there, it was remarkable to me how useless and/or hostile the police felt compared to the police in other cities. I've been threatened multiple times while going home late at night and it was never the police that actually helped. I'm convinced we really need to get better at helping each other as a community rather than relying primarily on the police.

Seattle Police Department is terrible, but still the city keeps trying to give them more funding.

Giving it less funding won't make it better, nor would it magically make something else appear. You'd need more funding to have a program like "actually firing them if they don't do their jobs".

If you think SPD is bad, try Kent. [1]

A workplace of someone I know is constantly getting burglarized. They even found the guy selling their stolen stuff on Facebook. Kent PD, of course, won't lift a finger about it.

Yet, somehow, they manage to soak up half the city's budget, and also secure a million-and-a-half dollar settlement for a police sergeant who was fired over having a nazi poster in his office.

KPD doesn't even need to pretend that defund movements are to blame for their incompetence - because as far as I can tell, the mayor's full-time job is covering their ass.

[1] For people who don't live here, Kent isn't some liberal hippy paradise.

Ha, sounds like you know me and my business. Yeah, happens all the time. We have cameras and even know who did it. Doesn't matter. Cops don't do anything.

I think it extends well beyond SF. There’s a guy on my local Nexdoor whose car was stolen in Oakland; after waiting for more than 6 hours to file a report, he was told by an officer that they prefer to avoid reports as they have to do paperwork each time one is filed.

(As a counter anecdote, I’m further out in the East Bay, and when I caught a guy taking my bike from my garage, the cops stayed on the phone with me as I chased him down and actually arrested the guy when they caught up with us. I was surprised.)

Remember this when people say Chesa Boudin was the cause of the spike in crime.

In reality, police departments went on effective strike, enforcing only the policies they wanted to, and leaving many cases open so as to provide statistics for bad faith actors to smear the reputation of the DA who has no actual control over the police.

This disturbed local populations, but those people were quick to blame "criminals" because there seems to be an infinite fount of good faith assumptions reserved for police, even in the face of so much evidence of how bad they are at their jobs (willingly or otherwise).

Chesa definitely made it much much worse since it was plain policy. Hundreds of small business places got robbed, not just by established thugs, but by opportunists. Why wouldn't they, when the city declares they won't prosecute robberies <$600?

The statistics don't bear that out. You were convinced by a PR campaign that publicized crime and associated Boudin with it, not an actual rise in crime.

There was an actual rise in crime, both perceived and statistical, immediately after he was elected. Hell, Boudin ran on a campaign that people like his terrorist parents should not be prosecuted.

It's a well documented fact that Boudin refused to prosecute pretty much anything besides police officers. Why would police officers arrest anybody in that case?

It's the same story with other Soros-funded prosecutors: Gascon in LA, Kim Foxx in Chicago. To give them credit, they don't hide that their own goal is to protect criminals. People should listen.

Love to see Soros come up. Very clear where you spend your time online.

Ah, I see, you prefer to believe the narrative presented by police press releases and ads on the sides of buses, rather than actua(ria)l statistics.

A note about the recall campaign: the funding for both sides would have been roughly equal except for one PAC -- NEIGHBORS FOR A BETTER SAN FRANCISCO ADVOCACY.[1] That PAC ultimately took in 84 donations for a total of roughly $5.8MM, meaning average donation size was roughly $70k. If each donation was given by one person (reasonable estimate) and each person lives in SF (provably false) then that represents around 0.01% of the population of SF. Not exactly the groundswell of support it was portrayed to be.

An article in The Nation[2] goes into detail about the context around Boudin's time in office and the hysteria of commercial real estate interests who, rather than working to mitigate the problem that generates such fears, stokes the fears instead.

[1] https://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.asp...

[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/chesa-boudin-reca...

> When vigilantism is the only justice available you’re living in a failed state.

What you're observing isn't a 'failed state'. The apparatus of the state is working quite fine, and the state is completely capable of enforcing its will on its subjects. [1]

What you're observing is the police doing their job[2] (Which is protecting the state), and not the job you want them to do (protecting you and yours.)

[1] The definition of a failed state is one that is incapable of enforcing its will on its subjects. Which is what you see in, say, 2021 Afghanistan, where the central government is only theoretically in charge, with Taliban rebels actually being able to enforce their will on the country. There's a categorical difference between 'can't' and 'can't be arsed to' - and you're observing the latter.

[2] Why doing that job entitles them to half of your municipal taxes is an exercise for the reader.

Don't know why you are downvoted, you're 100% correct. Police do not exist to help individuals, they exist to maintain the state monopoly on violence and to protect capital.

If individuals get any benefit from this it's either accidental or police trying to protect their image.

The anecdote above is about police not "protecting capital", stopping a store robber is "protecting capital" as opposed to "helping individuals".

I thought we lived in a democracy, aren't rulers also subjects???

> sfpd doesn’t do anything about anything

sounds like vancouver police

sounds like seattle police

unless you're literally engaged in a gunfight with lead flying around their response is terrible.

> sounds like vancouver police

We had 4 bikes stolen from our shed in Vancouver and the police were helpful. We called the non emergency number and an officer followed up quickly via email, sent a case number for insurance claims and one of the bikes was returned a few days later on a Sunday evening from a chop shop bust.

They even have a dedicated bike theft officer - https://www.macleans.ca/society/meet-canadas-only-full-time-...

so that's 4 bikes out of the thousands that get chopped up or show up in DTES tent marketplace.

Then you've been living in a failed state all of your life. The cops would only have ever gone out for that call in a sleepy wealthy suburb, and even then only if the cops personally knew the person who called in.

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