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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law. Look at major cities across the country. Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad. This isn't 'liberal policies', this is corruption and ineptitude.

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> Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad.

Your impressions are, bluntly, wrong.

LA and San Francisco have the 32nd and 37th highest violent crime rates out of the top 100 largest cities in the US, and the 72nd and 7th in overall crime rates. Homelessness, driven by lack of development combined with the the attraction and generation of concentrated wealth is a real California statewide problem (though there are plenty of non-California cities with serious problems, NYC is nearly as bad as LA, and far worse than San Francisco, in terms of population share that is homeless.)

"homeless and crime" are usually associated with property crime such as larceny.

SF is 4th highest in the United States for larceny rates. Note that larceny is the most frequent type of property crime per the FBI.

There is a high degree of "blueness". I live in Austin, which is very blue, but not so blue that we didn't criminalize public tent living and enforce it. Dallas and Houston are "blue", but far less than Austin.

The West Coast cities, LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle are much more liberal than most "blue" cities.

Dallas and Houston are two cities with higher violent crime rates than San Francisco, so some array of reasons has Austin better off than both.

Regardless, I live in SF, and love it here, for way more reasons than the tech scene (it's actually a coincidence I live here as far as my job goes). I really hope we can improve this situation, regardless of the relative scale compared to other cities. It seems like part of a national problem.

> An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law.

But hasn't the hue and cry been "defund the police"? We heard it as far back as the mostly peaceful protests that ravaged major US cities across the US in 2020-21. And it's been the chant of mostly left-leaning politicians and organizations.

'defund the police' has literally only been uttered seriously within the blm movement. Even the most progressive of politicians knew it was dead on arrival.

Sure, they may have known that "defund the police" couldn't last, but during the summer of 2020, progressive politicians took it seriously enough in public (much of it due to BLM). We got CHAZ in Seattle, Antifa trying to burn down federal buildings and police stations, and progressive DAs (e.g., Chesa Boudin) at the time decided to severely reduce the penalties that they would pursue for even serious crime. A few cities even got around to attempting to redirect funding from police to social workers and the like. Progressive politicians continued to take "defund the police" seriously until the fall, when it was clear that the issue had turned an easy election for Biden into a close election that he was at significant risk of losing. All of this indicated to criminals that law enforcement would be much lighter, which is why crime skyrocketed during that time and has continued to stay elevated until this day

Sometimes it helps to read more than just a slogan before commenting on issues. "defund the police" does not mean that there shouldn't be policing, it means that more attention needs to be brought into preventive measures and community building, so that you don't NEED the excessive police force that helps stirring the violence.

1. Police have never been defunded. San Francisco PD budget is up 5% from 2019. This is similar to every other city in the US (LAPD has $250M more in funding after George Floyd).

2. "Defund the Police" usually means diverting money away from reactive policies (policing) to proactive policies (community initiatives that prevent people from falling into abject poverty to begin with). You can claim that "defund the police" is bad optics, but honestly the US is such a far gone police state that "liberals" could have picked any rallying cry and it would have been weaponized.

3. The reason you see police forces doing less even though they have more funding is because they are using the narrative that they were "defunded" (recall this never happened) as a bargaining chip for police unions to negotiate with lawmakers for less oversight and more funding.

4. There is no correlation between police funding and crime rates. Police only show up AFTER a crime has been committed, and anyone who has dealt with police firsthand knows how much they love to drag their feet:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2022/03/31/preven....

5. This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state. While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.

If your goal is to simply remove "undesirables" from the view of the public then police are a great tool, but if our conception of justice is that crude then we might as well return to the code of Hammurabi.

If the goal is to reduce violence and crime overall, then police are not the best tool for the job. Preventative measures must be taken to keep people from getting to the mental state that causes them to commit crimes.

Where are you getting your numbers? This link [1], says budget was cut 15% in 2020, 11% in 2021, and 11% in 2022.

This link [2] says police headcount is down 25% from 2017.

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/new-report-sfpd-short-8...

https://missionlocal.org/2023/03/police-staffing-crisis-san-...

https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

Police budget was lowered in 2020, that's from a decrease in tax revenue though, not ideological.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/breed-orders-departments...

It was also increased back to normal levels in 2022.

> While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.

Well, quite frankly, they deserve that outcome a lot more than guys like Bob Lee. I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes

> I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm.

This is some Hammurabi thinking. It's not about protecting "Osama Bin Laden" (although justice should be blind and not paywalled), it's about ensuring that our system produces fewer Osama Bin Ladens.

To steelman your point, let's say that police are 100% necessary in society and the more police the better. In this universe the police never cause collateral damage and are always 100% in the right.

In this world, even if you lock up every "Osama Bin Laden" you are still putting the police officers in harm's way. They are using their bodies to ensure that the Bob Lee's of the world can keep on innovating.

To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means. If society is a machine that produces Osama Bin Laden's as a byproduct, isn't it in everyone's best interest to reduce the rate at which we produce Osama Bin Laden's? Especially the police who put themselves in harms way?

I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line. You see this in places like Singapore that are extremely safe yet have much lower incarceration rates. As for the police obviously it’s unfortunate that they get put in harms way, but it is kinda what they signed up for, to an extent. An over focus on cop safety leads to situations like Uvalde.

If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.

Singapore has perhaps the world's most robust and citizen-accessible public housing system, which enforces not only class but also racial diversity in placement.

>I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes.

Controversial take incoming, brace yourself. Bin Laden was the son of a construction magnate who was radicalized in a war where he fought for the US by proxy, only to be abandoned (except where Western meddling was advantageous for Western interests) when it was over. His picture is the illustration for the proverb, "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."

Bob Lee sounds like a great guy. He is among a class who benefited enormously from federal and state policy that subsidized suburban communities at the expense of cities, arguably in a way that shifted, rather than eliminated, the social ills that are endemic to most human societies above a certain population threshold. The policies that gave Bob Lee et al. their advantageous start created the dangerous, crazy people, when different policies might have diluted the circumstances which shaped them to the point where they might have been treatable, without necessarily cramping Mr. Lee's style.

There but for the grace of housing/economic policy advantageous to my intersectional identity go I.

(Note that we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.)

The countries with the most severe punishment tend to be the most dangerous countries. Singapore is a bit of an outlier. Most safe countries like Korea, Japan and Norway are not known for brutal punishments.

> I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line.

See my point #5 in the parent comment:

> This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state.

When you give the police overwhelming power to punish dangerous people, you have created a new class of very dangerous people. In my theoretical universe where cops are infallible this is not a problem, in the real world if you give an institution that much power what do you think would happen when they "solve crime". Would they willingly relinquish that power? Or would they aim to extend their influence onto larger swaths of the population with more draconian laws?

> If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.

I think you're missing the point. I am not saying there should be zero accountability for criminals and zero police. I am saying we should also attack the root causes of criminality instead of just using punitive measures. Right now we are treating the symptom and not the cause.

> To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means.

Conversely, increase the number of officers. This will cause the incidence per officer to fall.

There are places in the world that have done this. For example [0], where the populous has been deputized in order to quell violent crime.

[0] https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2023/04/03/ecuadors-...

I don't think you get the point.

Selective non-prosecution and non-enforcement of the law is a liberal policy. You see it with Soros-sponsored DAs and you see it with immigration. What is a “sanctuary”? Somewhere you don’t have to worry about the consequences of breaking federal immigration law.

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