The mere thought of stealing, or attacking a stranger, or dealing drugs illegally, must become so unappetizing that they simply refuse to do it even when they have no other options.
Property crime is what substantially contributes to the image that SF is an unsafe city.
---
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
That being said... yes... 6 homicides per 100,000 is 6 homicides per 100,000 too many.
But I don't think any Cupertino in the US can scale to 800k and maintain these stats.
People don't pull out a knife then think "wait, but I'll be punished" and put the knife away. What you are proposing feels good but in no way lines up with the reality of society in a contemporary city. If you want there to be less crime you have to treat it as the social class problem it is and find ways to get people access to other ways of living, or if they're ill (mentally or otherwise) get them care and shelter.
That, or we can continue to price people out of being healthy members of our social strata. It's clearly going great in SF
The same problem exists for "getting care and shelter" in that the problems themselves are hardly immobile, while the solutions are expected to be provided locally.
So we end up with densely concentrated areas of crime in places that are "soft on crime". But it's very clear that the solution isn't increasing police presence in these areas, if it were that simple NYC the 80s would have been crime free. The solution is to fix the problem at its core but to do that we need to agree to cooperate on a broader scale... with something like a federal government that can enact wide policies to create incentives for these things to end. This is how it works in "crime free" japan. But we seem to have given up on federal solutions to these things ages ago.
China is "crime free" also, but the hammer hits really hard so really it is either just very well hidden, or accepted by the police informally (e.g. tea scams, red light massage parlors).
> If you want there to be less crime you have to treat it as the social class problem it is and find ways to get people access to other ways of living, or if they're ill (mentally or otherwise) get them care and shelter.
IMHO, you probably have to do both. There do exist people who are just antisocial, who don't have the self-control to stop themselves from committing crimes or who lack the moral framework to avoid crime if it would otherwise satisfy a goal. And even with crime was driven by "social class problems," even if you solve all those there's still the problem of transitioning from one regime to the other, and dealing with people who's habits and mindset from the old regime keep them committing crimes in the new one.
Far more effective is to increase the chances of getting caught & prosecuted. A guaranteed 10 year sentence for murder is far more effective than a life sentence when you believe you won't get caught.
Interesting that you skip right over any idea of prevention, deterrence (other than by threat of incarceration), or alleviation of the conditions that lead to criminality. "Tough on crime" is not the only way to actually reduce crime, and I posit not even the best. Would you care to elaborate on possible solutions other than the punitive?
One difficult aspect of violent crime is that you have to have a suspect before you can bring them to trial. And it's funny because the murder clearance rate seems to match the police funding rate. And the police funding rate is on par with taxes collected nationally and locally.
So sure... you can have police investigating murders, or you can have a zero-tax libertarian utopia, but it appears that you can't have both.
One problem with that idea is that even murder convictions are not even close to 100% accurate, so you'd end up killing lots of innocent people.
It’s fine to take that approach, you’re just a complete pacifist at that point who won’t defend his women and children. I thinks it’s why pacifism is a fairly rare quality.