Physically placing police officers outside literally every store in a city seems very impractical and expensive.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.