Prominent S.F. developers charged with bribery in widening corruption scandal
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
They're really genuinely at odds with the public in the city, they have real contempt for them and dont even hide it well. They view them as the enemy and actively work to quell their voice and continue the status quo. It's depressing really. Bad people.
Plenty of places extract bribes while being pro-development too (they just generally more directly ask for bribes - or ‘planning fees’ - and are more consistent with it, so that it actually functions).
Very few places with the type of control a city planning department has don’t end up corrupt.
The problem seems more that most San Franciscans are civically uninvolved. There are elections where less than a third turn out [1]. From what I hear, most voters never bother reaching out to their electeds.
So you have a naïve, ignorable centre. And vocal minorities who engage. Most San Franciscans are reasonable; the problem is they’re electorally irrelevant.
It's ironic, given that local issues actually tend to impact us more directly and immediately, while at the same time local elections are where your vote has proportionally the most impact (aside from a few unique situations thanks to screwy districting and the electoral college).
Which is unfortunate for the reasons you mention. And most people just tune out.
About the only people who will consistently turn out for those are local activists and retirees/local property owners, of which a big city has a proportionally small number.
Some other comments have raised the question: if you're stuck in a corrupt system, should the payers of bribes to government officials be punished as harshly as public officials who take them? Or even punished at all?
A way to square this circle without having open-season for payer-initiated corruption would be to allow blanket amnesty for bribes that are preemptively reported, whistleblower-style to an anticorruption agency or mechanism. That is, before delivering any money-for-favors, you pre-register (with a person or trustworthy system) your confession/testimony against the recipient, in a manner to be revealed automatically for prosecution at an appropriate time.
Further, the payer could be given a default hard-to-reverse presumption of keeping any such purchased approvals, if-and-only-if the bribe-taker is punished/removed-from-office, and further the payer should be given first priority in recovering the bribe funds.
Then, the incentive flips for everyone under pressure to pay bribes to instead become skillful 'sting' operatives against corrupt officials.
Similar ideas have been suggested by prominent economists, including India's chief economic advisor 2009-2012 Kaushik Basu, before: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/03/re...
It depends.
If the bribe is coerced through threats of violence? That should be seen as an extenuating cirumstance.
If there are no such circumstances, then yes, they should absolutely be punished just as harshly. They had an opportunity to report the behavior and they passed on that to benefit themselves at the expense of others.
> Then, the incentive flips for everyone under pressure to pay bribes to instead become skillful 'sting' operatives against corrupt officials.
That's all very interesting. How about instead, we just hire law enforcement with specific skills in combating these crimes, and then let them work on it?
Under the systems proposed, their amnesty depends on their cooperation with prosecution. (Under the specifics I described, they must pre-register their reporting before paying anything.)
> How about instead, we just hire law enforcement with specific skills in combating these crimes, and then let them work on it?
Because that is essentially the current system, which will result in the current results.
Just expanding the current approach still leaves both sides of the problem with their incentives to both continue the corruption for mutual, & cooperate in covering-it-up against investigation.
Thus, even an extra dollar spent on that enforcement regime that has to fight both payers & recipients, and will be less effective at catching bad actors – and even more importantly, deterring future acts! – than that same extra dollar if the bribe-payers have been turned to assist enforcement.
Remember: the whole point of bribery is not just for the briber to gain an unfair market advantage. It also lets the bribee unaccountably extract phantom taxes from the wider economy. Furthermore, because participation in this system is illegal, the bribee can further blackmail the briber into paying additional bribes to avoid prosecution.
Naive prosecutions of corruption can, ironically, institutionalize it.
SF's system is almost intentionally designed to breed corruption. The reason is that elected officials are aligned with "community organizations" which are just extortion outfits, but favored ones, like MAC or TODCO. SF's policies direct the flow of bribes into these organizations, who if left un-bribed will sue to stop your project, and the groups in turn kick part of the money back into campaigns.
1. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
One of the reasons for byzantine regulations and procedures in the first place is exactly to extract extraneous informal payments to those in position to smooth over the roadbumps which their kind created to begin with.
It's the New Jersey way, badda-boom-badda-bing!
Someone has decided that rank cynicism is the fastest route to justifying criminal behavior.
> the whole point of bribery
Bribery is a tool of convenience not an end unto itself.
> the bribee can further blackmail the briber
This assumes the the "briber" has no proof of the transaction or no standing to present it. If they do, then this logic fails to be applicable.
> Naive prosecutions of corruption can, ironically, institutionalize it.
Um. How?
Um. How?
Well, if only new players and small fish get caught up in bribery charges (because the big and old players are so institutionalized they have almost no exposure and thus no risk outside of vendettas and such), bribery and prosecution of bribery actually ends up looking like the barriers for entry we see in over-regulated industries. Many times the biggest companies in a given industry actually lobby for onerous regulations because they know how to get around them (or can simply afford the immense costs with all their existing wealth), meanwhile they sleep easily at night knowing that new players are going to be burning cash with insane risk exposure just trying to get a foothold in a system of perverse incentives and broken policy. Bribery at the local level could very easily function in the same way to further stratify the local money/power structures.
1. Receiving bribes is just as illegal as paying them.
2. Good luck stopping a federal prosecution when you're some municipal politician.
I don’t think this is a good characterization of bribery. Probably just better to say “extract money” or “personal profit”, taxes are not bribery and are used to support government’s ability to do things like maintain infrastructure, pay for schools, etc. They are not generally for enriching individuals, unless there is also fraud going on.
The city invested in a building permit software system used by other cities in 2011, but that would make it easier to identify graft. From 5 years ago about the system that has still not been adopted, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Building-inspect...
Yet another way San Francisco snatches failure from the jaws of success.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
Is there a list of dark tetrad personality trait prevalence by occupation? I'm not sure how you'd quantify this, but I am curious in any case.
Is this because this would be unfair to other people who would like the government to do its job and don't have money for bribes?
From the article, it looks like both sides are being prosecuted, which is good, but tax dollars would be more productively spent working on a simpler, faster, less restrictive permitting system, instead of taking down people trying to work around the broken system.
For those who are happy about the outcome here, are you also happy when people who grow their own marijuana end up in prison? I feel like a lot of people are missing the point that a broken local government is the root problem, not people inevitably trying to circumvent the broken system. Although sure, bribery only helps the wealthy and connected get around the bad laws.
I wonder, would you feel the same if this was a meat packer or kindergarten or dairy or hospital who was bribing inspectors?
Building inspections are deadly serious, and when corrupt developers (who, in this case as in all cases, have the capacity to offer life-changing wealth to otherwise underpaid public bureaucrats) pay to cut corners, innocent people die.
It took two to tango, here. The rich asshole paying to circumvent safety regulations is at least as culpable as the motion bureaucrat who accepted the bribe.
No, I'm not. I don't advocate for bribery and the developer should be charged, although the prosecution's priority should always be on the person accepting the bribe, in my opinion. People are barking up the wrong tree because it's easier for some people to hate a rich guy than someone working for their preferred political party's government.
That being said, how many fewer housing units would exist in SF without this rich asshole bribing his way into making the new housing complexes? And where is the evidence that there was something wrong with the structural plans that was causing problems getting the permit? If you knew anything about SF, you would know that having a perfect plan does not get a building approved. The problem is with the approval process. By being a rich asshole and unethically aiming to help only himself, he objectively improved the city more than most, because the regulatory process he was circumventing is horribly flawed. Can you rectify that with your black and white worldview?
> would you feel the same if this was a meat packer or kindergarten or dairy or hospital who was bribing inspectors?
This isn't a story about a meat packing plant -- this is a story about a city with one of the worst housing shortages in the world, and the worst homelessness crisis in the country.
Some people have it so ingrained in their brains that evading regulation for personal benefit is bad that they fail to evaluate the possibility that the regulation is bad.
Both can be true! One can be more important! Which one is more important can depend on the specific circumstances!
"All theses people keep offering me tons of money, but this mediocre-wage job keeps me and my family 100% financially satisfied"
How would you like a system to develop in the city that unless you bribe city officials they each year randomly choose some local owners with buildings to condemn and then hint that they should be bribed. Of course to make it plausible, they choose buildings that they can come up with some kind of justification for.
Naturally, since they are that creative, this would develop into a system where they make buildings develop all kinds of inspection problems that they wish to take for their crime ring. A very common super broad area is ADA compliant ramps, markings, entrances, bathrooms. The building code has changed over the years and within a building department and between cities what the inspectors expect you to do wildly varies. When you go to get totally unrelated work done an inspector or the planning department can require you to make ADA upgrades.
Over time it is natural for some portion of the building stock to require work in the form of maintenance for just about every aspect of the buildings. Think of all of the opportunities they have to get your generous endorsement in the form of money, since this in this world you've created city officials demanding money is totally fine.
Pray any building or business in the city doesn't attract their attention!
The thought experiment is "What if it was legal to bribe city officials for matters involving their job, explore what would happen."
"It seems like the only crime should be in accepting the bribe, not in offering it"
I do agree that this is often wrong, but that's the rationale.
LMAO, great story, almost brought tears to my eye; but something tells me a lot of details were intentionally left out :^)
The Iran-Turkey border is Iranian Kurdistan which fell into chaos after the Iranian Revolution with a very brutal insurgency in the 80s, which occurred concurrently with the Iran-Iraq war which itself was horrendous. Despite all that people would literally try to escape via border regions under active war because the alternative in early 80s Iran was worse.
All the other stuff might be filler or PR-ified but the first part definetly tracks.