Post some police outside the store. When someone runs in, steals a bunch of items, and runs out, arrest them. What am I not understanding about law enforcement in this situation?
Imagine reading an honest job description for being a police officer:
* Good benefits, poor hours
* Willing to risk life to save others even if they hate you.
* Must make split second life and death decisions and if you are wrong, you can go to jail for lifetime.
* You will be recorded and every important decision will be second guessed by people who have never done the job
* Even if you follow training perfectly, public opinion might go against you which could lead to criminal charges.
Just like we have done to teachers in our schools, I think we have made the job almost impossible. In a more gentle society, I can see the plan working, but in our current cities, I think our expectations are complete fiction.
* 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.
However, there are areas in the lower stratum where the rug has been pull out from them in the form of jobs exports (sending MFG overseas) as well as depressing wages via low-skill immigration --these immigrants put price pressure on the native population due to the expanded worker pool.
"Must make split second life and death decisions, and you've qualified immunity to protect you even from deliberate wrongdoings"
There was a good Radiolab episode on training that police are given on how to convince juries that they were afraid for their life when they fired their weapons, because the law gives them immunity in that case.
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.
The guy getting arrested files a brutality claim, and the cop is jammed up for a few days with pay. Because the garbage bags of shampoo and shaving cream are <$1500, it’s petit larceny, and the DA won’t prosecute. So the guy gets printed and released assuming no warrants.
When the cop gets off of the leave, the sergeant sits him down and says “Hey asshole, officer bob over there missed his kids concert covering your dumb ass. The lieutenant is pissed because you’re burning his budget.”
Police aren’t idiots and faced with knee-jerk policy, they take the pragmatic approach - do nothing. Same thing happened with shootings. Pre 1990s, people pulling knives on officers would get beaten with a club. Lawsuits/liability made it more pragmatic to leap to lethal force.
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.
If you have large numbers of mentally ill and/or drug addicted people living on the streets with little to lose then it's pretty easy to do a DDOS to the rest of society.
Like drug dealing, you really want to catch the people a couple of steps up the chain, as the people on the frontline are just disposable cannon fodder and easily replaceable.
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.
Personally, the reason I don't rob stores is that it's a waste of time. Software development is easier and pays far better than robbery. There's no moral aspect to it.
If other people are robbing stores, they must be in a position where they think robbery is their most profitable option. Maybe they are desperate and need money today, maybe they don't have the skills to do anything more useful. In any case, that type of situation should never happen.
>Twice this week I've witnessed people acting violently in public. They know there will be no repercussions
It's not that they know there will be no repercussions, it's that they have nothing to lose. They don't have a career to keep or money or a house or the respect of others. They aren't integrated with society. You don't see politicians or executives doing this.
Or put another way: what's the reward for good behavior? It should be much, much higher than the reward for crime, to the extent that people would never commit crimes simply because it's not a good use of their time.
Yes, well, where I grew up there were plenty of people with nothing to lose that behaved civilly. Because if they didn't, cops took care of business and the perpetrator would walk away with a broken nose or rib or two, while the mentally ill would be locked up in asylums. It seems that in SF these options are not available for various reasons.
(edit: so I guess they did have something to lose).
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.
I will admit Amsterdam is certainly not a bit as safe as the Hague/Rotterdam/Delft in my experience, but even then it appears (to me) to be relatively tame.
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.
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.
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?
I'm sure that's a factor, but physical altercations also bring risk to the cop. I don't know how generous their disability pensions are, but I suspect it's better for them and their family to still be able to work. Also, anyone in the US can be armed which tends to raise the stakes that cops perceive with every interaction - look at their training material/propaganda sometime and it paints a very adversarial picture.
It's not their money, so many of them have no problem spending it.
That's not to mention those who personally benefit from putting more people in jail because they have investments in the prison industry, get some sort of bribe/kickback, or just have an easier time getting elected/appointed because they're "tough on crime".
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.
SF still has a lot of work to do but Chessa Boudin is no longer running the SF DA's office.
The folks running in shoplifting and robbery gangs are not stealing a loaf of bread to feed their starving children, criminality is their profession.
Yes, poverty and crime do correlate strongly. Although be careful about conflating violent crime and property crime with each other.
That said, correlation is not causation. There is likely /some/ causative element between poverty and crime, but it is not absolute, rather poverty is also strongly correlated with other non-criminal behaviors that both lead to poverty and lead to crime. There is definitely a cultural element in wealthy countries to generational poverty, just as there is a cultural element to criminality.
If we can break that cycle for people, it benefits society as a whole, and I think it's worth investing what we can as a society into doing so, however current research certainly doesn't support deferment of responsibility for criminality because of poverty.
Except that's just not true. The US has thousands of mostly independent police departments. Some use civil asset forfeiture (fewer, now that the supreme court has stepped in). Many don't.
What a small town in Alabama does has no connection with what the SFPD does.
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...
45 traffic enforcement offices only manager to give out an average of 10 ticks every day. That’s not each, that’s as a whole department. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
When the district attorney is busy busting a car burglary gang, doing the SFPD's job for them, the SFPD refuses to help.
https://www.ksbw.com/article/sfpd-refused-to-help-stop-san-f...
SFPD is a reactionary gang who are invested in making crime in SF be and appear to be as bad as possible.
At the same time, I've lived in US cities for the past 7 years. 6 months ago, I moved to a small town. Why? It wasn't because I don't like city amenities, or I can't afford city prices. I moved because the city I lived in didn't feel safe. Between the rampant bike theft, the rampant auto theft, the break-ins, and the muggings, I did not feel like trying to walk and bike around my city any more. It just felt too risky.
Maybe...but the two might be related, no? After some years of the police observing that the people they arrest are released with no charges and no prosecution, why would they bother to keep arresting people? It sounds demoralizing.
Police productivity and effectiveness is a nationwide crisis.
Unfortunately, it almost always takes more time to build things than destroy them, so the damage may take a long tome to reverse.
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-shoplifting-now-de-facto...
You have less crime when people aren’t dramatically poor compared to others in the area and have access to care.
Really confusing policies by progressives who (probably) mean well.