Czech news crew in SF covering APEC robbed at gunpoint while filming | Hacker News Reader

Czech news crew in SF covering APEC robbed at gunpoint while filming

sfchronicle.com

102 pointsimpish920897 comments

The press conference from Gavin Newsom is also pretty incredible to watch, based on these snippets:

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1724093441519341573

https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/17241686730766050...

Why are locals defending this? Don't you feel you have a right to a clean and safe city and community to live in, all the time, instead of just when fancy people turn up? Especially given your tax and cost-of-living burdens?

Is this just an information problem? If SF destitution defenders actually had lived experiences in other global, world-class cities, which are clean, safe, and good to live in, they wouldn't be so forgiving of this? Or is it cognitive dissonance and just circular, SF is the best so SF is the best?

There is political support for clearing homeless encampments, but some elected judge decided that they cannot force them off the street until there is shelter space.

At which point you reach the current impasse. How do you get enough shelter space? By building more.

San Francisco is faced with two options:

1. Allow open-air drug markets, mass homelessness, rampant and organized property theft, and mass defecation on the streets, OR

2. Building more housing

If you know anything about San Francisco, you know that they will NEVER allow more housing to be built, no matter how egregious the alternative is. Too many people have too much equity and rent income that depends upon their self-inflicted housing shortage. Even their so-called "socialist" members of the board of supervisors are multi-millionaire landlords.

This is correct. San Francisco, and the whole SF Bay Area, has a staggering housing shortage. People earning minimum wage cannot afford housing and must move to cheaper areas and lose their community relationships. So more of them turn to crime.

Here's a video on the topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...

> The city has a clear message for would-be thieves, Cretan said: “The police will arrest you, and the (district attorney) will charge you.”

What is the clearance rate for robbery in SF? Here in Seattle our homicide clearance rate isn't even 50%, let alone robbery.

I remember getting robbed in SF on my 2nd time visiting and we waited for 4hrs for the police to show up and the bar owner being mad we called them, before we gave up. Never got a call back from the police either.

- "The camera equipment was valued at US$18,000 (S$24,500) and San Francisco Mayor London Breed has promised the city will help replace it, according to the newspaper."

Through what legal mechanism is this a thing a SF mayor can legitimately do? To make a discretionary gift of city money to a favored crime victim?

It would be pretty irresponsible for the city government not to have some budget for good will items like this. It’s not about making a favored victim whole. It’s about preventing a news crew going back to their country and saying “hey, we wanted to air a story on X, but we were robbed so we’re doing a story on SF crime instead”

I assume the city is ethically barred from offering gifts of that type, and that the reporters are ethically barred from accepting any.

Why would you assume either of those things? There is no conflict of interest for the city here. The journalists, maybe, but such a conflict would be tenuous.

Would it be legal for the mayor to make a gifts to reporters conditional on positive coverage? To invent an example: write a positive story, get a red curb parking pass. Write a negative story, we take the pass away. It seems like that ought to be illegal. Since the quid pro quo might be implicit and hard to prove, ethics rules in other contexts sometimes ban gifts entirely.

In my view, there are enough other factors going on here that this doesn’t look very corrupt. Nevertheless, I expect those reporters are probably now debating how negative a story they have to write to avoid the appearance of impropriety!

The conflict of interest is precisely defined in GP. This is tantamount to bribery paid to journalists so they write a nicer story. Corruption is corruption.

It would have to be from the PR budget /s

Then it's curious the PR gymnastics they would go through to explain it to their citizens how much they cared about a foreign crew getting their cameras replaced, while its tax paying citizens can't even get the city to investigate crimes committed against them.

This was originally meant as a reply to a now-deleted comment about "don't leave things in the car"

Kind of funny tangent: both a friend and I now live out of state but are from the Bay area. We've met up a few times in SF and on two separate occasions he got smashed/grabbed with my car parked right beside. He's still somewhat conspiratorial about me being the vandal.

Clarification: I thought comment could not be deleted from HN. Has this policy changed?

Comments can be edited and deleted for a short period of time after posting.

2 hours, and replies prevent deletion.

The DA treats anything less than automobile burglary as not worth their time. The way the law is written, smashing the window of a car and taking the contents is simple vandalism and theft (not as serious as burglary) unless there's evidence the car is locked.

If the car owner testifies at trial that the car was locked, then that's evidence. But ~no one visiting SF is going to come to town to testify at a trial, especially when trial dates can move around somewhat unpredictably. So a criminal can operate with relative impunity if they only ever break into tourist cars.

So, how do they identify tourists? Apparently they look for wheels that aren't curbed properly. Curbing your wheels is one of those things most people learn for their driver's test and never think about again, but if you live in a place where you're frequently parallel parking on steep hills, it becomes second nature. (Also, it's one of the few things SFMTA will issue a parking ticket for.) So thieves target cars that are parked on a hill but don't have their wheels curbed.

I'm guessing you curb your wheels, and your friend doesn't.

I just drove a shitty car in comparison. That all makes sense though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEbZ34ghVxk

Boy this really doesn’t help SF’s image. Glad they’re okay, though. As a local, and like the article mentions, I feel embarrassed and somehow responsible for stuff like this. It’s so sad to me that they came here with an open mind to see what SF is really like and this happens.

Of course you are not personally responsible but Jefferson said “The government you elect is the government you deserve.”

With the current political circumstances in free fall, you’d think we would have hit “enlightenment” by now. It can’t be long!

Tell me, comrade, have we achieved it ? Is this full Communism yet?

The amount of clickbaity “news” around miraculous metamorphosis of SF into safe, clean and wholesome city overnight is staggering. Ironically my Czech friend was reposting something about city getting rid of criminal activity right before I sent him this link

> Officials in San Francisco raced to clean up city streets, squelch crime and burnish the city’s reputation before world leaders arrived this week, treating APEC as a critical opportunity to tell a new story.

Clearly the citizens should figure out a way to have a constant stream of world leaders visiting for various reasons. If they can set up an event every month, they should be in good shape.

This is why it's stupid to live or visit California. Criminals can rob you at gunpoint, but law-abiding citizens aren't allowed to defend themselves. I'd rather be in Austin and conceal carry.

Turns out, a full about-face on tolerance for crime in the city wasn't enough to deter the more determined criminals. Given how frequent this occurs, and how there appear to be a few very prolific thieves, it's obvious that even low-effort police sting operations would reduce property crimes by a significant amount. It's a shame then that the police in SF have no interest in doing their jobs.

The police are interested in doing their jobs. They are not allowed to by a local government that will harangue them for trying, and district attorneys that won't prosecute or push for meaningful jail time.

SFPD is actually more useful and chill than most major city police departments.

APD in Austin doesn't actually do much. Property crimes are not responded to at all, but they pretend to occasionally about 48 hours later. If you want personal safety, your only option is to conceal carry and defend yourself because the police have a long call backlog, morale is terrible, and are critically underfunded and understaffed by over 150 officers.

The police is mostly controlled by the city.

It's not very clear who controls the city.

The police are rarely controlled by anyone but themselves. Even MPD, who murdered George Floyd and faced protests and riots calling for reform, was able to successfully resist any form of accountability.

They simply stopped responding to calls in all of the districts represented by the councilmembers calling for reform, and made sure to tell whoever happened to call them.

That's what happens when police and their unions are politicized. They just go around blaming liberals instead.

Also, bit funny how the mayor of SF is London.

Follow the rhetoric when city officials talk about and react to police activity and it's plainly apparent they are completely captured. After all, the strategy used to oust Boudin was simple: police stop doing their jobs and then tell the news stories about how crime spikes are the DA's fault.

Coming from Eastern Europe, which used to be dangerous in the days following the fall do communism, and coming to the US, the richest country in the world, you expect it to be safer than your poor European country. The reality however is very different.

The US barely squeaks into the top 10 richest countries (GDP per capita), and even during the worst days of post-Communist chaos I doubt there was ever a case of a camera crew getting robbed at gunpoint in Prague.

This simply isn't true. Looking at the IMF numbers in 2023, the US is number 7. Every country ahead of the US has something that is massively distorting their GDP per capita. Tax havens, nationalized oil, etc.

Why would you expect that?

This has happened in Guayaquil too. More than once I think. It's really hard to bust up the gangs once they are entrenched.

Guayaquil, where I saw armed guards (with rifles/shotguns?) at shopping mall entrances.

The 24 hour Jack in The Box in the Tenderloin (SF) had 2 armed guards. Around the corner, crack dealers openly sold rocks.

Welcome to SF!

We're watching social Darwinism take place before our very eyes.

Hats off to the news crews documenting all of this.

Welcome!

Socialism country is pretty safe actually. Nobody, except government, has the privilege to rob people.

I would wager fewer people are murdered by police too.

Waiting for our own Batman to emerge.

- We got the billionaires who lack superpowers.

- We got the complex persona of tech loving traumatized brotherhoods.

- We got the real-time deductive capabilities of AirPod + Whisper APIs

At this point I'll gladly accept Anduril bots circling the city streets and shooting nets and stun darts at miscreants.

> Waiting for our own Batman to emerge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_norton

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