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Comment by YoyoyoPCP | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco has its heart in the right place and is struggling to grapple with the reality that lax drug laws invites the wrong kind of people to the city.

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So does basically legalizing theft for under $950, choosing not to prosecute "property crimes" and so-called bail reform where most people are just released back into society after arrest. All sound good until put into practice.

Correct. Absolutely devastating to small business owners.

I've heard stories that SF is so inundated with car theft that it has created a portal that automatically approves car break in claims for insurance.

I ran a bootstrapped software company in SF till i got the hell out. Here's a video i made in my building https://youtu.be/xRjuii_jtgM

  So does basically legalizing theft for under $950

Yeah, no. Theft under $950 is still theft and it's still illegal. If you're whining about the felony threshold $950 puts it pretty much middle of the road compared to the other forty-nine states. Hell, the threshold in Texas is over $2,000 and has been that high since before Prop. 47 was passed. Find another boogeyman already.

Those other states still prosecute though. And although a misdemeanor isn't as big of a deal as a felony, having to go to court and deal with probation etc. acts as a huge deterrent that you don't get if something just isn't prosecuted.

  Those other states still prosecute though.

Boudin prosecuted most cases that were brought to him. In fact he prosecuted a larger percentage than his successor has so far. Boudin also prosecuted police misconduct which made him a lot of enemies.

This is nonsense. He filed charges then let them off. That's not prosecuting.

Texas prosecutes misdemeanors. Californian cities essentially do not.

They really don't, and it's important for people to know that or they might be under the illusion it will be fixed at some point.

The people who vote in SF and run the government there are obsessed with punishing some undefined "privileged" set of people who are somehow causing all the issues. Of course they are themselves highly privileged so it's a self hatred.

It will keep getting worse.

Switzerland and Portugal are the counter examples that prove you wrong. Both decriminalized drugs and treat them as the medical problem that they really are. The heroin problem was especially bad in Switzerland and you could find homeless addicts all over public places.

Yes but they dont allow open drug scenes. And they dont allow the rampant theft and dysfunction that comes with those encampments

That's not right. It's not that they don't allow open drug scenes.

In Lisbon you can easily find the part of town where everyone is smoking weed outside.

With Switzerland if you want your free heroin it's at the doctor's office and you get it injected there. So it's not a matter of not allowing it. Addicts not surprisingly go where the drugs are. Which is inside now.

Back when they treated it as a crime problem they would shut down outdoor drug camps and the camps would just reappear somewhere else nearby.

The theft went down because the addicts don't need to pay. It's not about better enforcement as you implied. The theft also went down because a lot of the addicts are now employed. As long as you can get your daily injections, most heroin addicts are highly functional. Dr. Halsted - one of the founders of John Hopkins hospital and a hard working doctor - was addicted to morphine for most of his long adult life.

Not quite - the Swiss system much prefers substitutions than giving out actual heroin. And the police do enforce drug laws, mostly against the dealer networks but also against individuals for possession for other drugs. Also it's not like heroin is legalized. You must have been an addict for at least two years to get it from the health system, and it's a last resort, you must have failed at least two other addiction treatments first.

The Swiss approach was also somewhat specific to heroin. If you read about it, it's always heroin that's being discussed. The policy could work because there aren't huge numbers of addicts and the number has been in natural decline for a long time. Addicts are mostly old so the population is shrinking, the cost of giving them free drugs is low. Heroin addiction was a phase, people moved onto different drugs now, but the decline is often attributed entirely to this policy.

So what do we see if we look at e.g. crystal meth or cocaine? Not so successful there. Swiss cities dominate cocaine consumption in Europe:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/drug-use_why-swiss-citi...

Numbers of addicts are growing and the police do enforce the law, albeit in Neuchâtel for the first meth offense (of possession) you can get out of it if you attend some counselling sessions. After that it's back to prosecution.

https://www.thelocal.ch/20161003/neuchtel-dubbed-crystal-met...

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/crystal-meth_power-cut-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/05/swiss-police-s...

They aren't handing out crystal meth, suffice it to say.

There is also the ethical issues involved with forcing people who stayed clean to pay for other people's addictions, which is what this boils down to. Of course it can still be rational when considering other costs but that doesn't change the underlying ethical issues.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions…

>San Francisco prosecutors will no longer ask judges for cash bail as a condition for the pretrial detention of defendants

I wonder if the police have become apathetic about making arrests.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/sf-da-boudin-announces...

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