One store’s decision to leave San Francisco over crime

In addition, the police standing idly is an unfounded claim. As far as I can tell, a major part of the problem is that each police action takes a huge amount of overhead to execute. Booking a suspect is a multi-hour trip to the station.

So you get this situation where there's a strong will to do something, but the process gets locked up.

In Minneapolis there was a vote to replace the police department, it failed. The whole discussion surrounding it was a mess. Discussions where you took issue with the approach to replacing it inevitably involved accusations of racism and etc. Even just taking issue with the slogans about "Defund the police" (I felt that was not a good route to get folks on board) would result in being accused of being some pro police nazi or something.

The proposal was defeated even in neighborhoods that supporters felt would obviously support it.

Well hold on, you're leaving out one critical component. That same side will -- in the face of certain demographics committing the overwhelming about of street crime (like said shoplifting) -- do things like eliminate cash bail, increase the threshold for felony shoplifting, and the like in order to not "destroy minority lives" by throwing them in jail despite repeated violations. There is such a thing as TOO MUCH compassion, but I'm not sure if SF has figured that out yet.

That side has been running San Francisco for a long long time. It spends $22k per public school student per year, but doesn't manage to teach even half of them to read or write at grade level (which isn't even a high bar).

Either that side doesn't want to solve the problems, or some combination of individual incentives, incompetence and lack of second-order thinking prevents it from achieving its objectives.

Of course, if some of these problems were to disappear, this would reduce the ability for politicians to funnel money to cronies via their non-profit organizations.

"A few bad apples", is only the first part of the expression that ends with: "spoil the batch". I think it is applicable here as well.

You don't have to catch and convict them every time to be effective. If you caught and convicted even 2% of the crimes, crime would be massively lower within 6 months, because it's the same people doing it over and over.

If you look at SF compstat, larceny-theft is on pace to be about 34,000 citywide this year, which will put thefts for this year lower than every year 2013-2019, and higher than 2020-21, which were exceptionally low (pandemic).

If you look at the FBI UCR report you'll see that clearance of theft is on a 40-year-long monotonic decline. Theft rate was about the same around 1990, but the SFPD clearance rate was 3-5x higher back then. This has nothing to do with the DA and everything to do with the SFPD being a civic cancer who refuse to do their jobs.

Anyway if you want to know why we have to constantly hear about thefts in SF which are objectively at the lowest levels in a recent years, here's the explanation for that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/26/crime-mid...

Times were that the shop owner would physically stop shop lifters. Now we mostly have low wage employees in shops. Understandable that they don't want the risk of injury and liability so they don't stop shoplifters.

Ok, so we hire specialized employees ostensibly trained in security. But due to liability reasons they aren't allowed to physically stop shoplifters. That makes them basically useless.

Ok, so well there's always cops. But they have a similar cost benefit analysis as the other parties with the same result. It's not worth it to the individual cops to intervene. Why risk going viral over some druggie stealing $100 worth of stuff?

The DA/politicians have a similar calculus. Why spend $50k locking up some druggie because they stole $100 worth of stuff? And why risk the blowback of a police brutality incident?

A new DA will take time to right this ship. At least the new one has intention to arrest crime where the other one was sympathetic to criminals.

I'm seeing this in nyc right now. Twice this week I've witnessed people acting violently in public. They know there will be no repercussions, and everyone else does too.

The second disaster as you refer to: criminals don't care if they are caught. Criminals unlike Hollywood says are kinda dumb and desperate. You can put them in jail for shop lifting for a few months at society's expense but they'll just do it again.

But I have no idea about what is stolen, where it ends up, etc… I’m sure someone does this, but it isn’t widely publicized, probably for good reason.

* Unbelievable benefits, poor hours

* Carte blanc opportunity to deliver violence on anyone you hate

* Must make split second life and death decisions, and you've qualified immunity to protect you even from deliberate wrongdoings

* You will be joining a team whose reputation is so miserable that they're asked to record everything; those cameras can be turned off or trashed.

* If you fail to follow your training perfectly, you're probably going to be able to keep your job through to retirement anyway.

Can you imagine what kinds of people take jobs like this?

One thing that you and I agree on — in a more gentle society, police departments would work. We've spent the past forty years dismantling society, tearing the copper wiring out of every support structure for the lower class, and driven people deeper into poverty. If we didn't create a society that required stormtroopers to keep order, we wouldn't have this kind of crime or need stormtroopers.

It’s impossible to charge someone who wasn’t arrested or, in the rare occasion they are arrested, with shoddy evidence work.

The police even had their own catalytic converters stolen

This is not even remotely a good-faith description of the reality. The police brutality cases where there are charges filed are always very obvious deliberate murder by the police. And very few of those go anywhere, only the most blatant receive any kind of sentencing.

I challenge you to present cases where a police officer making an honest split-second mistake has been sentenced to jail.

If I was micromanaged and scrutinized anywhere near the level we micromanage cops, I doubt I could do my job very effectively. I've only had negative cop interactions in my life, but I do empathize over this.

Sadly, I'm not sure how to solve the problem. Today's culture doesn't seem to have any accommodation for people screwing up in any role.