Incentives.
The justification would be that sexual assault is a serious crime that goes underreported. If victims are afraid to come forward because they fear arrest for other, pettier offenses, then predators are even more likely to escape justice and commit more assaults.
Really, any offenses. We could imagine that there's some method for abusing a policy of disallowing use of a victim's evidence to prosecute that victim for unrelated crimes, but until it happens, it's reasonable to ignore that possibility.
Boudin was on life support pre recall at this point in history and found the SFPD dna evidence issue which was a questionable use case of that data at best.
The woman had been arrested on suspicion of a felony property crime, with police identifying her based on rape-kit evidence she gave as a victim, part of a giant San Francisco only dna data bank her data was in and she matched to.
Given how incredibly hard Boudin made it for what is left of the SFPD to prevent crime this is one of those 'everyone loses' current realities
Can you point out the evidence that Boudin instructed the SFPD to use DNA evidence in the investigation of retail theft? Like is there a memo from the DA saying “I, Chesa Boudin, instruct you to collect DNA evidence for retail thefts, and make sure to mash the rape victim database up with the criminal database!”
I have never seen a group so fervently pro-police on this site as the pro-SFPD group (and I do not mean the anti-Boudin group, I mean the group that is critical of anyone that doesn’t tow the “poor SFPD, we would live in a utopia if only they had unlimited power” line.)
edit: Typos
We all lose because rape kit dna shouldn't be in the pool of felon dna data, the police were being impeded by Boudin at every turn resulting in inappropriate policing methods to try and get a federal case through. The streets of San Francisco are no longer safe for anyone as a result of this fiasco with the SFPD understaffed and relunctant to do much for fear of being on the wrong side of criminal advocate activists legal challenges....
Your point is that the lack of evidence that Boudin was involved in this is the proof that this is his fault? Is there any scenario where anything SFPD does that’s shitty isn’t his fault?
Edit: When were the streets of San Francisco “safe” exactly? I wasn’t there during this horrible period between 2020 and 2022 but in 72 hours in SF a few years back:
-I saw people buying oxy from a guy in a tent, about ten feet from an occupied parked cop car
-About eight guys “running a train” (taking turns having penetrative sex) with a woman in an alley whilst they all smoked crack
-A woman taking a shit out of the window of a moving bus
-I was chased by a homeless man for five blocks because I only gave him a dollar and he kept demanding “more”
-I was forced to accept a dvd of truly depraved pornography at a bus stop
-I saw an adult shop openly selling cocaine
-Countless people shitting on the street
Does Chesa Boudin have a time machine? It sounds like I experienced exactly what the SFPD superfans say he caused.
Edit 2: This was during Garcon’s tenure.
Did you really wonder if they meant "looking like a murderer is fine" or are you trolling?
What if you showed up with a bomb vest? Or showed up in a stolen military helicopter?
I’m not sure what the value is of these very obvious cases where common sense dictates that there is a plain and obvious limitation to this policy. The point is obviously to limit harm that people do to themselves and one another, not to function as some sort of philosophical thought experiment made concrete.
What is the purpose of this “what about”?
If the wording was something like "won't call the cops if you're way too fucking high" I'd find it more believable.
That’s exactly what they mean, and that is painfully obvious. I do not understand your point here. What exactly are you having difficulty believing? Do you think they intend to advertise that they provide blanket cover for every crime on earth?
I am having difficulty believing that anyone would actually believe that that is what’s intended by that statement. It is much more believable that a person would intentionally misinterpret that statement to make some sort of vague joke about language.
> HARM REDUCTION
> Medical staff will be available 24 hours a day to help in any situation, and they will not incriminate anyone. Do not hesitate to visit medical tents or reach out to any staff member or security member.
There's surely a threshold at which they will gladly incriminate you. The paramedics just can't reasonably foresee where said line is other than knowing it's far beyond the typical illegal activity you find in that setting. Moreover, I'm sure you could imagine in the case of federal crimes (drug trafficking, terrorism, high profile national news stuff, etc) the feds having no qualms about threatening to drag the paramedics through an expensive prosecution if they don't narc.
I'm getting strong Godwin's Law vibes from your response, btw.
Pre-collecting DNA from everyone to use as evidence against them in future criminal investigations is way over the line when it comes to “is this behaviour totalitarian or fascist”.
Using DNA from a rape kit to identify someone in a crime is a clear violation of the 5th amendment.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
The majority vote can be rallied through fear and propaganda into vesting ever greater authority in a centralized seat of power, with any opposition vilified as an existential threat.
The only way democracy survives is through a watchful and untrusting populace that constantly holds its government to account and seeks to limit its power and pervasive reach into the lives of the citizenry.
Freedom and liberty require at its core the ability to dissent. Dissent in turn requires privacy because dissent by its very nature will be suppressed by those in power.
I would theorize that mandatory en masse DNA cataloging is anathema to democracy because it inevitably is far too powerful a tool to suppress dissent.
The next logical step if you don’t think the 5th was violated is collecting DNA from everyone (eg: repurposing COVID swabs) so you can identify all the potential suspects from your sampled population while completely ignoring that someone from outside the sampled population could be the person you are looking for.
Being able to positively identify people is a reasonable function of a government, including democratic governments.