Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_d | Hacker News Reader

> Meanwhile, the SFPD has the lowest rate and biggest decline in arrests per reported crime

SFPD (as well as other Bay Area law enforcement agencies) are hamstrung by the judicial system. From policies that effectively eliminate accountability (thefts below a dollar amount, individuals below an age, etc) to DAs cutting people loose as soon as they are booked so they never even see a day in court.

Think of it this way: If you are a QA engineer working on a video game, and week after week 100% of your bugs get closed as WONTFIX. Are you going to continue finding 10 bugs a day, or will maybe 2 a day get you by?

To be perfectly clear... I believe policing should be hard work. From an investigative perspective they should have to put in the hours and not just get a surveillance state handed to them. But I also recognize that once a potential perpetrator is located, we give them no good options for how to proceed and make our community safer.

View on HN

Interestingly, the previous DA was recalled and a pro-police DA was elected. The previous DA was in charge till Jul 2022. Here are the crime dashboards: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

One way to measure the success of this is to provide a bedding-in period to give the new DA a chance to settle her office and hire people, etc. and then compare.

The UI there lets you select the period from Jan 1 to May 21 and compare year on year. This lets you see the change in crime. Given that the hypothesis is that DAs that cut people loose significantly affects crime, we can get some evidence for this by looking at that period against the previous year (thereby getting rid of seasonal effects like crime being higher in some months).

We can get an idea of how much of the variation is natural by looking at that period for the last two years, since the previous DA was in charge from Jan 2020 to Jul 2022. I won't repeat the numbers here since the UI makes this really easy.

Eager to hear about anyone else who would like this form of hypothesis-examine loop and what other testable hypotheses they can put forth.

The SFPD are used to doing nothing[1], and will continue to do so until they face actual consequences for their ineptitude. The recall of a DA that believed police should not be free to commit crimes and the appointment of a pro-police DA in his place only emboldened them.

1. https://sfist.com/2022/05/23/report-sfpd-refused-to-particip...

SF got their new DA, where is the reduction in crime? Or maybe that was never the problem and police just don't do their damn job, because as we see all over the country, there is no legal obligation to do their job, and you basically have to try to get fired.

"Police bad" doesn't account for differences in performance between SF police and others. "DA bad" at least tries to do this (although as you note, is in some tension with the facts).

“tries to, some tension with the facts” isn’t that called just making shit up

Sure, DA may not be the major issue on a fully objective level. But his point that "police suck" does not explain why SFPD is so bad relative to other cities still stands. If it's purely a police force problem, what makes SF police different? Genuinely curious if anyone has theories about this besides DA.

multiple things can be true: SFPD is a borderline PAC at this point and does nothing, and the DAs office was reaching incredible amounts of incompetence under the previous DA, rivaled only by the rest of sf's government. whether it was literally showing up to court unprepared and getting chewed out by judges, being tone deaf towards certain communities, or seeming extremely aloof and nonchalant in the face of real crime concerns (blaming republicans doesn't work when there are like 3 of them in SF)

i don't trust the current DA's office either bc she was appointed by our incompetent mayor + is very cozy with the sfpd w/o recusing herself from cases involving them.

Crime reduction is a multi-year cycle. Criminal cases are a six month to multi-year process. Putting more "bad guys" in jail eventually reduces crime as well as the chilling effect of "I knew a guy who did this and is still in jail so I won't do it."

San Francisco and California in general still have a lot of additional work that needs to be done to now empower the DA (they can obviously only enforce what is law).

This bit from the Chronicle I think sums up the DA change and its effect on policing: "A previous Chronicle analysis showed officers immediately made more stops after Jenkins was appointed, and the District Attorney’s Office’s data shows that has translated into more arrests. The D.A. data shows that police have presented about 100 more arrests to the office each month on average (about 755 a month) since she assumed office than the last months of Boudin’s tenure (640 a month). This increase didn’t happen in any of the past three summers, suggesting it’s not a seasonal pattern." https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/brooke-jenkins-chesa-...

So after the DA changes, the police suddenly show up with a hundred more arrests per month on average? How was Boudin supposed to be tough on crime when the cops literally weren't arresting people.

Nevermind that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not those hundred extra arrests are actually useful.

Sounds a lot like cops not doing their job, and diverting the attention to a DA that wasn't cooperating with whatever they wanted.

I think it is pretty logical that when you fire the boss that keeps saying "don't do your job" and hire a better one, the employees might step up.

> the chilling effect of "I knew a guy who did this and is still in jail so I won't do it."

This sounds logical to many people. But the actual empirical research in the area finds no strong link between sentence length and recidivism [1]. We can get better outcomes by, for example, making it easier for criminals to stay in contact with their family while in prison.

An alternative explanation is that your average criminal isn't very good at thinking about consequences.

https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...

Did you read the research you linked? It does not say what you claim it does, it actually claims the long sentences (over 60 months) deter recidivism significantly.

Low-level thefts are not counted in this statistic. Read the post you are replying to again (emphasis mine).

> The SFPD’s low rate of clearing violent crimes compared to other police departments is especially worrisome. San Francisco’s reported rate of Part I “index” offenses (the four violent and three property felonies used as a standard measure of crime) is by far the highest of any major California city, yet SFPD arrests have dropped 41 percent by number and 60 percent per reported offense during this period.

As to the rest of your point: if the judicial system says "we're only going to prosecute violent crime" then wouldn't the logical reaction be to... focus on violent crime? Why bang your head against the wall of low-level theft, if not for the explicit purpose of overriding the judicial system, which is 100% not the job of the police?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com