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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

Here in oakland, tons of cars driving around with no plates (or stolen plates) and cops do nothing.

Oakland is practically lawless. The police admitted they are understaffed and put out tips on how not to get carjacked, I was leaving a park and someone threatened me with a gun about 1.5 months ago.

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/dont-roll-down-your-wind...

Gracious. The worst that happens in Toronto is the premier tries to sell you crack.

Right, Toronto doesn't have car thefts at gunpoint...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwSJJQqNBJs

"where she was approached by 3 males with guns who surrounded her vehicle and forced her out at gunpoint.

We're approaching 5400 car thefts so far this year in Toronto. That's a 50% increase from last year."

Btw, this is in a very nice, wealthy neighborhood.

Yep, my family has been a victim of assault with a deadly weapon (handgun) and OPD (almost) literally refused to take a report.

Called 911.

"Is this an emergency?"

"No this happened ten minutes ago in front of our house."

"Then you need to report it through the online crime reporting system" [click]

Um, ok. [report, report, report]

[next day]

Email from OPD says, report rejected because this kind of crime must be reported to an officer in person.

Called OPD.

"We'll send an officer"

[24 hours later]

Call again

"We'll send an officer"

[24 hours later]

[voicemail] This is officer XXX, I'm standing in front of your house, can you talk now? Here is my number (510) 555-4321, call me any time.

(I couldn't talk to him because I was away from my house)

[call the officer at the number he gave]

"The voice mail box at 555-4321 has not been set up, please try again later."

On and on. I finally gave up, which I think is the result they're shooting for. Talking to neighbors, I'm clearly not the only one with this experience. I'm a stupidity-over-malice kind of person but at this point I feel malicious compliance or malicious incompetence is not out of the question.

Not to be glib, but this is more or less what most voters want, isn't it? That is, in non-emergency situations, rather than confront people with an armed police response, to attempt to address it on a social level or with non confrontational approaches.

What were you hoping for the police to do in that situation? Do you have any number you can call to have a social worker take a report and look into the matter?

I was hoping the police would at least take a report. We had a description of the individuals, their vehicle, their MO, the location and time they carried out their attempted mugging. They rejected our detailed report, made an extremely lame attempt to contact us (only after our reinitiation) and then provided a dead end for follow-up. They're not even collecting data.

And local government officials run on platforms of vowing not to let police enforce these sort of actions. Not allowed to enforce speeding fines, parking fines, lack of license plate fine, public nuisance fines. I'm not sure what the end game is.

I understand the rationale that these indirectly target people of lower economic background, but is this sort of policy going to improve all this? Should we get our laws and standards down to the lowest common denominator? I'd love to hear balanced and convincing counter arguments, because the compassion card isn't quite convincing as is.

I admit to having been swayed by some of those arguments in the past, but the purely utilitarian case I feel has never been strongly made (and should be):

Are more people harmed in the process of police enforcing traffic laws (unlawful violence, egregious or excessive citation, etc.) than are harmed because of behavior enabled or exacerbated by unenforced traffic laws (running red lights, speeding, driving with lights off which result in property damage, injury, or death, or unlicensed vehicles used in other crimes, etc.).

Either way there is a social justice argument to be made, and I'm surprised I haven't heard a strong voice for enforcement, because my intuition is that more people are harmed in more broad economic terms when traffic violations are allowed to proliferate than those who would be harmed by interactions with police which run foul. It's just that when someone innocent gets unjustly murdered during a police interaction, it's such a horrific and newsworthy event and kind of distracts from regular, daily injustices (including traffic deaths). In a way kind of like mass shootings vs more regular low-grade gun violence.

When you drill into the social justice argument, at least some forms of them, the injustice is essentially that the poor are forced to drive and the bus service sucks. If you are concerned that the cost of registering a car, or paying tickets for expired plates, or repairing your headlights is outrageous and can cause a marginal person's financial life to spiral out of control, your first and best tool is better public transportation.

It would help if "public transportation" wasn't used synonymously with disgusting and dehumanizing "mass transit". I want to sit alone or with my co-travelers in a comfortable, sanitary pod that picks me up where and when I'm ready to leave and brings me just as close (or closer) to my destination as a car would.

> And local government officials run on platforms of vowing not to let police enforce these sort of actions. Not allowed to enforce speeding fines, parking fines, lack of license plate fine, public nuisance fines.

Seems like a mischaracterization to me. I have heard reducing pre-textual stops such as turning too wide or improper signal use, etc. Haven’t seen anything about not enforcing speed limits or allowing people to drive without a license plate.

I was at the corner of Bancroft Ave and Hegenberger waiting at a light last year. I got passed on the right by two helmetless people riding an offroad ATV and all I could think was "I can't believe they are driving in the bike lane."

In Seattle, a number of people make a habit of leaving their car doors unlocked, just so the windows don’t get smashed in case of a ransacking. It happened to a family member just last week.

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