Neither insinuation is supported by evidence.
As for the welfare system, people are using EBT to buy bottled water, dumping the bottles out in the parking lot, then turning the empty bottles back in for cash through the recycling program. They use the money for drugs or alcohol. That’s one example.
I know you can't prove a negative or whatever but why are you so confident in your claim that no one is doing that, and why should we believe you? I dated someone who worked at a drug rehab facility and after hearing the stories she told me about the ways people there took advantage of the system, I have 0 problem believing the water bottle thing. I take these stories with a grain of salt, but to outright deny that anything like that happens is really just demonstrating your ignorance of the subject. Talk to anyone who has ever worked with homeless people or drug addicts and they will tell you some wild stories.
This is only a problem if "policing" these crimes actually removes them. All evidence shows that unless you just intend to permanently lock up all homeless people (therefore giving them....housing), policing drugs and poverty doesn't fix the problems for anyone
> Billions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been given to nonprofits to improve homeless conditions
True. The west coast has a massive homeless problem. And a progressive government. So they invest in trying to fix it.
> but they’ve only gotten worse
Housing inequality has also gotten massively worse over the last several decades. And in general many other social programs have gotten defunding (Such as mental health support)
And in general North America-wide drug usage is only going up and indicators of despair are going up.
Western society has problems and we are not dealing with the root causes. Middle-class millennials have resigned themselves to never owning a house, and never being able to retire. While they have a social safety net from their boomer parents, it's not yet a crisis. When the boomer parents spend all their accumulated wealth to survive the last decade of their lives, it will become a societal crisis.
But the early signs are already being shown by the lower class.
My point is that we don't know HOW MUCH WORSE the problem would be if those organizations weren't in place. For all we know, they are dramatically reducing the rate of regression.
> while the nonprofit operators grow rich.
[citation needed].
This is an absolutely ubiquitous conservative talking point but the only evidence I see of it is that people working for these non profits make living wages (good, shouldn't they be able to?), and the CEOs of these companies make comparable money to CEOs of profitable organizations. Which...is good, isn't it? Don't you WANT to be able to hire the best people for these roles, and don't you need competitive comp to be able to attract it.
> People exploit loopholes in the safety nets to get money for drugs.
Drug addicts will do almost anything to do drugs. The root causes of drug addiction may be character weakness (they're not, but we don't need to have that debate today) but once someone is addicted, it doesn't matter what happened - they have a medical disease, and treating it as anything but does not help anyone.
But if we want to help people not become drug addicts we need to deal with the underlying societal causes of despair.
> These are all unintended consequences of poorly conceived policy making.
You're right. For instance, one terribly conceived policy is policing this problem and spending millions of dollars to lock up people in jails and prisons for this instead of just spending money on socialized subsidized housing.
A social safety net from housing to universal basic income will dramatically reduce the problems in questions.
But even in the most progressive cities of North America, this is just not on the table. And instead when people speak about "bad policy" what they're really saying is "I want to see MORE police".
Oh wait...
If people who sell Heroin die, then there will be less victims who will get addicted to such products.
Consumers who get addicted to Heroin are essentially poisoned (and nearly condemned to death) by their dealer.
It takes some time, but it would cleanup the whole situation, without putting the blame on regular consumers (who are eventually, step by step, pushed toward finding solutions to their addiction because sourcing the products is more and more difficult).
Yes, murders happen, even in peaceful societies. No matter if you have strong laws.
Now if you get rid of dealers, then, not only you have less drug issue, but you also have less murders due to less gang fights (as an interesting/bonus side-effect).
So, double benefit.
This much repression and zero tolerance of drug usage percolates to the rest of society and other civil liberties that most people in the West would say they want full freedom to partake in. (Including soft drugs)
People elect the government they deserve.
Edit: This is a situation with most metro areas. Definitely with Chicago where there is a large contingent of folks who commute from the suburbs.
It's possible for harmful but popular policy to go forward with no one but your average constituent to blame, but when every option is a different set of false promises and failures to execute, and "the discourse" is driven mostly by dollar-driven propagandists, it's hard to place the blame for dysfunctional government on voters generally.
It's possible for harmful but popular policy to go forward with no one but your average constituent to blame, but when every option is a different set of false promises and failures to execute, and "the discourse" is driven mostly by dollar-driven propagandists, it's hard to place the blame for disfunctional government on voters generally.
What you're experiencing is confirmation bias. You read about one crime, then started noticing all of the stories about crime, formed a theory based on this hyper focusing, and now you believe it's worse than ever despite the stats clearly showing otherwise.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
If you are a resident, you very well know that a huge portion of crimes, violent or not, are not being reported because of the end result. Property crime is through the roof. My car has been broken into 3 times in the last year or so. Before that, I've only had my car broken into once in a decade before. I've had to call the police 3-4 times (apart from the car break ins) in the last 2 years for individuals in crisis, sometimes threatening violence. I never had to do it in the decade before. In fact, the first time I had to do it, I wasn't sure if I call 911 and had to look up the non emergency line. Yes, all of this is anecdotal or "personal experience", but talking to everyone I know around me, all of their "personal experiences" have only gotten worse recently. Which makes me believe that at this point, the data paints as accurate picture as anecdotes these days.
https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/San-Francisco-crime-Che...
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/crime...
Seattle, NYC, Dallas, Chicago and a hundred others also have huge homeless populations and even higher rates of violent crime that are actually trending upward, but you don't see the populations of those cities going into a full panic or claiming that the violent sky is falling. SF residents are getting caught up in mass hysteria. It's really as simple as that.
Also statistics can be manipulated in many ways, I'd trust 1000% more the feeling of people living in the town, than official statistics.
Here, all the testimonials I see, my own experience in SF, plus all the posts really confirm that there is an issue, without having to care about the statistics or what the politics or police wants to show.
You don't see such with Tokyo for example.
And Tokyo, you get your cup of tea/coffee stolen, it may be accounted as a crime. In SF they would laugh at you and it would be a total waste of time.
It's a concerning level of paranoia to suggest that multiple and separate data collection sources, including the city government, local police, state police, the FBI, justice advocates and local journalists, are ALL manipulating statistics to create a narrative that SF is safer than your perception. Especially considering that your personal narrative would be preferable to the police agencies, since it would allow them to more easily demand (and receive) more funding if violent crime were actually on the rise.
Please go read the threads about the Bob Lee suspect arrest, so you can see all of the people who were making the same mass-hysterical argument you're making, but admitting how they now regret getting caught up in that "SF is the Thunderdome" hysteria.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
>Please go read the threads about the Bob Lee suspect arrest, so you can see all of the people who were making the same mass-hysterical argument you're making, but admitting how they now regret getting caught up in that "SF is the Thunderdome" hysteria.
Yes, you really disproved SF as a violent and lawless place with that argument.
> "Below is a look at the total number of crimes reported to the San Francisco Police Department over the past five years."
Those "studies" aren't hard data, they're pure propaganda.
The fact checkers, who I am accusing of being empty political bias machines, lie by pretending that "are the official crime statistics lower" is the question that residents and tourists need to know. Their headlines and conclusions don't match the questions they're asking and they're smarmy in their dismissals of disbelievers as politically motivated.
> if it's propaganda, it's self-defeating propaganda,
No, it's not the police who are propagandizing here. It's the "news" misusing the police data.
> making it far more likely that you're experiencing paranoia based on mass hysteria
Very tactile hallucinations.
Exactly. The whole "crime is terrible in SF" is just a Republican propaganda narrative that people who should know better are buying into.
Same shit in SF, Portland, Seattle, and even Vancouver CA!
It's a PNW problem. We are simply too libertarian and hate cops too much. Everyone else in this thread thinks it's something else. It's not. People here fucking hate cops and will turn society to anarchy to be rid of them.
Your own statement implies mentally ill people are a danger to everyone. That's just sickening.
The real problem is that you don't have any solutions other than "do the same thing but more louder". And, yes, mentally ill people are in fact a danger - to themselves and quite often to others. Completely bizarre that there's ostensibly smart people who don't get that.
>They'll get out of jail and go right back to it.
Many of these people should not be allowed out of jail. You are imagining that everyone in that situation is a benign hippie that is just down on their luck.
>End of the day, no one really seems to care what happens to the _people_ having trouble, just that they're not visible.
This is a totally dystopian way to frame this. People like me, who have a problem with these policies, are pointing out that the infatuation with homelessness some progressives have is making things worse.