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Comment by bart_spoon | Hacker News Reader

It seems strange to me that when a person is murdered the first concern is how it will affect criminals. I mean I understand the concerns of an over active and under regulated police force, but my understanding is that San Francisco’s issues are largely the exact opposite: the police and the DA office have essentially legalized many forms of crime by refusing to prosecute people. It hasn’t seemed to make San Fransisco any better for it. At what point does the idea of punishing individuals for criminal activity stop being taboo?

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> It seems strange to me that when a person is murdered the first concern is how it will affect criminals.

Funny, I have never seen the “first concern” being how it will affect criminals.

What I have seen, instead, is a weird fetish by most Americans, but most importantly, politicians, to increase punishment for criminals and expand police powers and protections, despite tons of evidence this doesn’t work and the US already having more punishment and more police powers than peer countries with far lower crime.

Some people respond by suggesting that we should try changes that actually help reduce crime and homicides as opposed to those that just help satisfy a knee jerk animalistic desire for punishment.

We have spent the last 2 decades decreasing punishments. It is not work in real life.

Punishment works better than whatever we are doing now.

Clearly by people who have never feel threatened by violent crime.

There is a huge difference between being a keyboard warrior and being terrified to walk outside at night.

I think people who overestimate how threatened by violent crime they are outnumber the people who underestimate how threatened by violent crime they are at least 100:1 if not 1000:1

You only have to be wrong once.

I know that "better safe than sorry" makes for great low effort virtue points but at the end of the day there is a point at which the broad and diffuse harm that we incur combating crime is greater than the marginal reduction in said crime.

I don't want to live in a world where walking down the street of a neighborhood one looks too low class for invites a police response because of someone else's poor risk assessment.

When the local population stops electing people who think it’s a good idea to legalize crime.

It's not legalized by the legislature. It's just not enforced by default by the prosecutor. There's a big difference. The prosecutor can still choose to enforce as they see fit or in "special" circumstances. On one hand I can respect the check and balance against an out of touch state legislature that prosecutor discretion provides. But a state policy to not prosecute certain classes of property crimes that have a victim(!!!) because of demographic make up of the people who engage in them hearkens back not to a prohibition era sheriff saying "alcohol isn't my job" but to a Jim crow era sheriff enforcing inequality under the law.

Prosecutors are elected

> first concern is how it will affect criminals

My first concern is how it will affect people the police historically over-target. That means black people and LGBT people. I'm re-reading my comment and I think I alluded to that, so I'm a little concerned that you said "how it will affect criminals".

> the police and the DA office have essentially legalized many forms of crime by refusing to prosecute people

This is a broad oversimplification of the situation in SF. I keep hearing this myth from people that don't live in SF that the police have been, like, abolished or something, but in reality no politician comes anywhere close to touching police abolitionist rhetoric.

In reality the cops absolutely hated the last DA and it seems they started sucking at their jobs on purpose as a result. The new DA they seem to like a lot more. Regardless, blame always seems to deflect off the cops and onto the nearest politician when it comes to basically anything in SF.

Replies to you are discussing how "crime is legal" in SF and I really have no idea what this could mean. It sounds like fox news gobblygook to me.

> My first concern is how it will affect people the police historically over-target

What's worse, some people feeling unsafe around police, or everyone feeling unsafe around everyone?

This is a false dichotomy.

You're right, it's not everyone; the criminals aren't feeling unsafe.

No, your false dichotomy was supposing that we must have some arrangement of people (historically in the usa this means black people) feel unsafe around police in order for the rest of us to feel safe in society.

It's not just a false dichotomy, it's illogical. If a given set of people doesn't feel safe around the police, they don't feel safe in society. They are us, unless you're willing to dehumanize them, so therefore a world where we don't feel safe around the police is actually your second case, where we don't feel safe at all.

I click through this thread desperate for a conservative position that isn't teetering on a stack of rhetorical fallacies or cognitive biases. Are you able to provide one?

I thought I was providing one, in the form of the utilitarian argument that it's better for some people to be scared of police than for everyone to be scared of each other. You can disagree with utilitarian ethics, but it's not a rhetorical fallacy to promote them, and certainly not when presenting them as "the least bad option."

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