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Comment by Dem_Boys | Hacker News Reader

Could someone please enlighten me on why we don't treat governing like we do software solutions?

When I'm given a task to complete, my first instinct is to find where other developers have done what I'm asked to do and then utilize their wisdom into my own solution which will likely look very similar to theirs.

Why do we see such drastically different approaches to solving issues in society and government?

Want better education? Step 1: Find a state/city that has great education and study what they did to achieve it

Want less crime? Step 1: Mimic a state/city that has successfully reduced crime

Seems so simple to me but yet I never hear politicians/people saying things like "Boston has successfully raised their level of education by doing XYZ so we're going to follow those steps here with minor tweaks to best suite our area"

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> Could someone please enlighten me on why we don't treat governing like we do software solutions?

Because half the country doesn't like the answers that experience produces. Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime (broken windows policing). The formula works but because evenly applying the rules produces disparate outcomes among various groups it's evidently racist and it's preferable to just allow violent criminals to run unchecked on the streets.

It’s the “evenly applying the rules” part where everything breaks down in the US.

> Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime

Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).

On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.

Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."

Exhibit A. It works, but it seems like it shouldn't work, so we should reject it and do something that keeps not working.

America is a more violent place; it has been for its entire history. Things that work in places with incredible cultural homogeneity don't work here, no matter how many happy images they conjure. What actually works here is policing, and SF is an example of people who believe your post following it off a cliff.

Countries with globally low crimes rates are racially homogeneous. (For the liberals: This doesn't mean that racially homogeneity implies low crime rates, of course.)

Not just racially but also in terms of worldview, culture, and heritage.

> working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place

The conditions that prevent violent crime are simple: consequences for violence. Many jurisdictions let people that commit violent crime walk again and again.

From my neck of the woods? The perpetrator of the Waukesha parada massacre had a long history of violent behavior and was out on bail for trying to run someone over with his car a few days prior. Aliyah Perez, the niece of a Milwaukee alderman, was killed in a domestic situation by a man that had previously committed "a brutal domestic attack in which he stomped on, choked, and punched the victim, pulling out clumps of her hair and knocking out a tooth." He was given a minimum sentence only to return to his previous behavior and kill his next victim.

I don't care how our prison population compares to the rest of the world if clearly dangerous and violent people are walking free. The purpose of prison is to separate such people from the rest of society.

If all 2 million people in prison in the US are violent criminals, then there's a _really_ big problem.

Clearly it's better to stop people from becoming violent criminals, then to wait (or push them, e.g. by increasing income inequality, reducing respect for "unskilled" professions, etc.) for them to become violent criminals and then punish them.

You need to go one level lower. Your proposed solution works in countries that have a working social system. Current state and history of the US prevents your proposal to improve anything.

If everyone in a country feels valuable and equitable coming up with solutions that benefit everyone is very easy. As it stands in the US there will always be someone that sees themselves losing something and prevents any improvement.

If everyone in a country feels valuable, at least some people in such a country must be delusional.

> The formula works

It is far from proven that "broken windows policing" is effective, and in fact there is much evidence to the contrary. See, for instance, the peer-reviewed meta-analyses described here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...

This is correct.

There is not conclusive proof that so-called "broken windows policing" works as advertised.

Nevertheless:

Decent people fix broken windows - literal and metaphorical ones - no matter what the stats say.

Sometimes one of the "windows" to fix, though, is the community-government relationship. And when the only viable way to catch every graffiti artist is to stop-and-frisk every teen in the area for months or years on end - is that truly the right way to fix that relationship? Is that the decent thing to do?

> Could someone please enlighten me on why we don't treat governing like we do software solutions?

We do. It’s called “product-market fit” in software. It’s called “elections” in democratic government. The government provides the services and competence its leaders, and consequently its electorate, demands.

San Francisco’s electorate demanded what it’s getting. As you can see just from these comments, “the facts” are twisted, distorted, and obfuscated to confirm a preferred narrative. But the faith in the narrative, whichever narrative you hold, never wavers.

Elections don't decide which policies will work, only which will be implemented. It's quite simple to see what worked elsewhere and in the past if people would care to look.

The software market doesn’t always value what works best either.

We have politics tied to identities now, and how people "feel" about something, rather than looking at direct outcomes. It doesn't work.

"Facts don't care about your feelings."

Crime is a for profit business for the perpetrators, politicians, and law enforcement, and the only victims are, well, the victims. There isn't much profit in peace.

Didn't SF's mayor's brother murder someone?

we were supposed to be set up for this

the point of having a bunch of different states and municipalities is you can test something in one place and see if it works. like weed legalization, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try. or constitutional carry, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try.

there's some poli sci theory that politics is actually about the majority's schadenfreude at fucking over the minority. which seems increasingly credible. but that means we've been pushing more and more stuff to the feds for years so this is now harder to do.

let states and counties do more stuff again. like this should be a party neutral issue, let the dems to more dem stuff and the reps to more rep stuff.

I wonder, do livable minimum wages and affordable healthcare / education / housing have any significant effect on crime rates?

Yes, they're called "social determinants of health"

Politics has always had an emotional component because many people are led by emotions, but things are pretty bad right now. Question the emotional orthodoxy on either side and prepare for war.

The approach you suggest is very common in the public sector, almost to a rule.

Public services are just massive, costly, complicated, and cater to all sorts of vulnerable populations, and the public have pay for it. The time horizon on some complicated projects is so long that knowledge can change in the meantime and make the project/strategies look incoherent. E.g., some countries decommissioned public transport options over decades when cars became more widespread, and are undoing it now because cars became too widespread, and it'll take decades to rectify. Then there are world events that upend everything, such as Ukraine or COVID-19. It's just very complicated, far more complicated than anything in software development in my experience.

Which city should San Francisco look to to solve all of its problems?

Fwiw, "governance" does exactly that. Many states literally copy, or copy-then-tweak California law (e.g. motor vehicle efficiency requirements).

Singapore

Tokyo, Singapore, heck maybe even Dallas.

Tokyo? Really? Because that city has the same cultural values as San Francisco, so whatever works there would surely work in sf.

It couldn't be more different culturally, but Tokyo is definitely the "gold standard" when it comes to safe cities.

I know it can't be copied wholesale, but there are certain aspects I think would be nice, such as having penalties for committing crimes.

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