400 license plate cameras coming to San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

400 license plate cameras coming to San Francisco

ktvu.com

63 pointsrntn115 comments

This is practically becoming the sign of whether a Bay Area city or suburb is affluent: whether they have a contract with Flock Safety.

Before this SF purchase, they've also sold to Los Altos Hills, Alameda, San Mateo, Palo Alto, Woodside, Novato, Piedmont...

To tell, look for the small black cameras with solar panels. Or search for: https://www.google.com/search?q=flock+safety+transparency+po...

I'm skeptical about the actual efficacy and the privacy tradeoffs. But this is apparently a good line of business for a YC investment..

I get the attraction of this technology for the police, but we definitely need to acknowledge the massive potential for misuse. I think I would be more OK with these license plate readers if they only scanned for and recorded plates when a warrant or other court approved order was issued. Allowing them to capture and record all license plates at all times seems like an overreach.

Yes.

It's easy to screw up permissions, or to mis-code a request, and then cause misdirected attention and a violation of rights.

Certainly was of no help for me when my truck was stolen a few weeks ago in Alameda.

As people (cops) become more expensive, the push to automation (cameras/drones) is going to increase. The sacrifice is privacy, since these things don't sleep and can be scaled, but at least it removes some human bias out of the loop.

> at least it removes some human bias out of the loop

There is some argument that these solutions calcify current biases.

How? A cop is going to spend extra attention on minorities driving through white neighborhoods, a camera doesn't care.

There are initial decisions to be made with the deployment of these automated policing tools. For example, this is from an EFF piece on predictive policiing[0]:

"For instance, if police put majority Black neighborhoods under intense police scrutiny and surveillance, they will be more likely than in other neighborhoods to make stops and arrests according to minor quality of life infractions. Therefore, derivative maps purporting to show where future crimes might be committed will disproportionately weigh those neighborhoods already living under the weight of intense police presence. This can create a self-fulfilling prophecy that uses the supposed objectivity of math to legitimize racially biased police procedures."

There is also a piece on other issues with license plate readers in particular.[1] I'd recommend the whole series if you're interested.[2]

[0]: https://sls.eff.org/technologies/predictive-policing

[1]: https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-rea...

[2]: https://sls.eff.org/

The solution is easy in this case: just put them everywhere. The technology means that this scales, although where I live it is the richer cities that have deployed it (so Medina Washington has license plate readers all over...not a place you could call poor). But I can see how this is a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" kind of situation, after all poor neighborhoods complain that they don't have enough police coverage at the same time that they complain they have too much.

I think this is just people not liking police in general. Here in Seattle, we complain about not enough police coverage in the north because they mostly deployed in the south, given that this is where much more violent crime is (while we mostly have just property crime). If you station more policing resources where more of the problems are, you are going to get this no matter what (and you get accusations of bias if you and if you don't).

Some quick options come to mind:

  - unjust distribution of the cameras themselves

  - camera data is used for selective enforcement (alert a nearby office when minorities are driving through white neighborhoods)

Tools are only as unbiased as the people deploying and using them.

Those both involve biases from people in the loop, not the devices themselves.

The models are trained on data, if that data is inherently biased, the model will be too.

> at least it removes some human bias out of the loop.

I am very, very far from convinced that this is actually true. I suspect it just shifts which humans have their biases in the loop.

Unsurprisingly, Atherton also has license plate cameras. They do have signs announcing this on incoming roads.

https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2020/12/07/atherton-police-... https://www.ci.atherton.ca.us/476/Surveillance-Technology-In...

SFPD, per stats, basically stopped enforcing traffic laws during Covid/BLM.

This leads to an overall rise in crime, as traffic stops catch way more than speeders. Criminals tend to break many laws habitually, so it is a wide net. The car bippers tend to speed off (with the famous car flying down a ramp last year as an example).

The whole chain is broken though, Brooke Jenkins as the DA is running into massive issues with SF judges who simply won't prosecute.

Big chance this will end up in another example of anarcho-tyranny. Lots of citizens will pay their fines, but the worst offenders will simple ignore the various letters - and nothing will be enforced.

Let's see.

These aren't speed cameras, they aren't for traffic enforcement. They're for tracking location and movement of vehicles. Nobody's going to get a ticket from these.

All it's going to do is push criminals to steal cars or steal license plates. Stealing plates is trivially easy. Only innocent people will have to deal with the aftermath.

The claim that SFPD ceased enforcing traffic laws, leading to a rise in overall crime, oversimplifies the complex factors influencing crime rates. While COVID-19 may have impacted police operations, it's unfounded to suggest a complete halt in traffic law enforcement by the SFPD. The correlation between traffic stops and a reduction in serious crimes is not straightforward. The challenges faced by the DA's office and judges in San Francisco are part of the usual checks and balances, and don't imply a systemic failure. The assertion that only law-abiding citizens face legal consequences while serious offenders escape is a broad generalization without specific evidence. Crime prevention and law enforcement are multifaceted and cannot be reduced to single-factor explanations.

it would be wrong to say giving a starving man ten grains of rice is providing food for the hungry. It’s a meaningless amount of food.

That’s just like how technically the sfpd hands out a couple tickets per day, it’s not meaningful enforcement. It’s splitting hairs to call that enforcement.

The entire traffic enforcement division hands out an average of about 10 tickets in its entirety for the whole city per day.

> Crime prevention and law enforcement are multifaceted and cannot be reduced to single-factor explanations.

Huh.

Unfortunately many tickets in the state of California can not be written without a photo of the face of the driver. You ticket a person, not the owner of the car. I looked into this recently because as a cyclist I've witness horrific drivers AND caught many such instances on camera, which are utterly useless at getting any tickets issued. I realize a personal camera and a state-installed device are not the same thing, but I believe the fact remains -- face photo to identify the culprit, or no dice on tickets.

The article makes it sound like these cameras aren't intended to enforce traffic laws but rather help solve other crimes that were aided by a car in some way.

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/valley-monkey-has-37-un...

for this to be true and also for it to be legal to have all your windows tinted is sad and absurd.

I assume it’s legal as in east bay I see fully blacked out windows and windscreens every day

Of course, any excuse to surveil us more.

How much of SF’s crime is committed by car owners?

I think it's mentioned in the write-up that the issue is not necessarily the car owners but the car themselves. I guess in San Francisco criminals do not make their getaway on mass transit

They do use stolen cars though and when you call police to report yours as stolen, they don't give a shit. Even if you have a tracking device in it.

Yeah, maybe that is something that should be changed, eh?

The first 2 shootings of the year, both in SOMA, were both committed by people driving cars, presumably car owners.

Oh please, you have a right to privacy in your own homes, but not in shared roads where your driving can endanger others. I welcome this news and hopefully one day we have traffic cameras across every block in the country, that have already proven to reduce speeding/reckless and driving, and to directly impact the ~40k deaths we have on the roads each year.

Read the article. These aren't speed cameras. They're exclusively for tracking location and movement of vehicles. Nobody is going to get a ticket for them. You're only going to get a knock at your door by the cops when someone steals your license plate and uses them to commit a crime.

Also you're completely wrong about the effectiveness of traffic enforcement cameras. Go read some stats on them some time. Read about the bribes and corruption and how these companies have cities shorten yellow lights. And how they pretty much are only used to milk people out of their money and send that money to the private companies who operate them.

I 100% agree about traffic enforcement cameras.

The article makes it sound like these cameras are not intended to enforce traffic laws but rather track the location of every car it scans to aid in solving other types of crime.

Right what's the problem you can simply stay at home your whole life

If you cover everywhere in license plate readers, the bad guys will just carry fake plates in their pockets...

It takes what - 30 seconds - to tape a new plate over the old one...

One thing Gersh Kuntzman found out on his criminal mischief operation was that cops did do this a lot, so the really bad offenders won't be picked up because they're part of the system itself that polices such things. Some of the cases were really in your face, with people using full plate covers with the car parked in front of a police station.

If you don't know who Gersh is check out: https://www.curbed.com/2023/12/congestion-pricing-gersh-kunt...

Not only do they have fake plates, they have stolen plates that match the cars they are in, so it's nearly impossible to determine the car being spotted does not match the car on the plates without actually stopping it.

Yeah, but that's for the premeditated stuff, not for opportunistic stuff. A lot of crime is opportunistic and law enforcement will have a better time following up on those.

If they even bother to follow up. Around here a lot of people don't even bother reporting small thefts since they know nothing will come of it, usually the only reason you bother is to get a police report for the insurance claim.

Aren't like 50% of rape kits not even processed?

Some people aren't aware it's de-facto legal to go into a SF store and steal $949 worth of stuff and leave and there's nothing anyone will do. Shop owners who call the police will get in trouble themselves.

Unbelievable that it got to this in the first place but that's a political mono-culture for you, they get to try wild and different policies without push back hoping for positive counterintuitive results that somehow lessens crime and improves equity but all they're doing is creating food deserts as business flees.

It is sad. A minority of people in SF had been saying for years that the situation was getting out of hand -but the other side would scoff and accuse critics of being of all things Republicans, not progressive, anti-whatever they could come up with.

Willie Brown may have been corrupt, but SF would never have spiraled like it did under his leadership. Towards the end of Newsom's tenure we saw cracks --there was always the homeless who no matter what they did, it was never their fault, the drug addicted kids in the Haight too.

I remember having cops investigate if I was stopped on the wrong side of the street (parked facing the wrong way), or I was stopped in an area too long. It was annoying, sure. But it kept crime down.

It took many years to get to the nadir, and it will take years to recover as well.

This is misinformation. CA raised the threshold for felony grand theft from $400 (which is what it had been since 1982) to $950.

$950 is still lower than 1. The threshold as it was originally set, corrected for inflation 2. The threshold in 40 other states and for the federal government.

It is not legal to steal up to $949 dollars of goods from a store, it's still a misdemeanor which is, despite the name, a pretty serious crime. It's just not a felony.

Police love to use it as an excuse not to do their jobs though, so the misinformation has thrived and spread among those who have strong feelings about criminal justice reform.

Well, there is more to it than that. Today you cannot: Charge them with petty theft with priors, nor can you charge them with burglary. But now it's purely a misdemeanor and cannot be charged with petty theft nor obviously a felony.

So, while other states have higher thresholds, the thieves can be still be put in jail and fined for misdemeanor offenses, whereas in Calif, prosecutors are loath to file changes for anything below the felony threshold.

That means in Calif stealing 949 is very unlikely to land you in Jail. In other states, even if you steal less than the felony threshold, you can get significantly fined and jailed for the misdemeanor[1] --that makes Calif more attractive to shoplifting gangs.

[1]Occasionally you get an 9-year old kid in the news because the kids was arrested for stealing a "candy bar"

I don't know what you're talking about with petty theft. You can still absolutely charge someone with petty theft or petty theft with priors.

>So, while other states have higher thresholds, the thieves can be still be put in jail and fined for misdemeanor offenses, whereas in Calif, prosecutors are loath to file changes for anything below the felony threshold.

Ok, so your problem is with prosecutors, not with the $950 threshold. Are you sure that CA prosecutors are uniquely unwilling to charge people for non-felony theft?

>stealing 949 is very unlikely to land you in Jail.

This is a very different claim than "It is legal." There are a lot of illegal things that are unlikely to land you in jail.

>I don't know what you're talking about with petty theft. You can still absolutely charge someone with petty theft or petty theft with priors.

CAPC: Say thefts of $950 dollars or less is shoplifting. You cannot add petty theft with priors to it.

>Ok, so your problem is with prosecutors, not with the $950 threshold. Are you sure that CA prosecutors are uniquely unwilling to charge people for non-felony theft?

The law heavily disincentivizes it. And your supes, mayors, and activists push back against prosecutors using the full extent of the law. Often citizens have pass additional laws because existing laws are ignored.

>This is a very different claim than "It is legal."

That's a red herring. I made no such claims. It would be imbecilic to believe it were legal. Other states jail and or fine shoplifters under the felony threshold, Calif does not and has led to increased opportunistic as well as organized shoplifting.

they didn't claim it was legal, they claimed it was de facto legal.

It was not merely an adjustment to keep up with inflation, it was a whole social justice campaign to keep people from going to jail for stealing the proverbial loaf of bread. Basically look the other way, poor folk are just trying to survive. It all gets flipped in the open on mission st.

Even in the case that it's not just a ticketed offense (getting a ticket for robbing a pharmacy is wild to me) the cops could arrest somebody and see them back on the street a few days later, you'd stop doing your job too if your actions had no effect on the outcome.

True. Commenter made the point that for opportunistic crime they will be able to find you and track you down which is probably a lions share.

Also - I bet they could run a quick query matching license plates to state databases to find illegal cars in near real time. Cost a decent amount of change and some privacy issues but that would be a simple step after having the images in the cloud.

Ya. People without plates or stolen plates are a huge problem where I live. Cracking down just on that would be useful to making things safer.

Or paper tags (thank you, Texas!). Texas finally passed some legislation to get rid of the tags recently and force real ones, but that is going to take some time to implement (2 years)

For those that weren’t aware, Texas has had such a massive problem with its paper tags in how easy they are to fraudulently produce that criminals in all 50 states use them: https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/how-texas-paper-tags-b...

It’s actually a decently cool story because it was directly the result of a newspapers (the Statesman) reporting about the problem that led to the investigation, prosecution of criminals and legislation that’s fixing it. A great reminder of how important actual journalism is

Washington now requires laminated paper temp plates that are displayed outside before the real plates can arrive.

Texas’ problem was not really the fact that you can print them easily, but the fact that you could produce “legitimate” ones without any verification whatsoever that the car actually existed. The DPS also had some limitations in what they could do enforce anything for several years which made the problem worse (legislative red tape). So all these tags were actual legitimate tags that showed up in a legit tag database, they just never were real cars that corresponded to sales. So even something like a license plate reader wouldn’t have caught these.

Although I will say anything that a layman producing with a printer that has value is always going to have a counterfeit risk. It just wasn’t counterfeit in the typical sense here.

Even metallic license plates can be counterfeited, I assume its just not worth the effort yet.

If you have a database of legit license plate numbers to VIN, you should be able to (a) detect that the license plate is on a vehicle that matches the VIN, and (b) detect if the same legit license plate number is being used at the same time (flagging it).

Precisely, and that’s why it was even more wild that it wasn’t implemented like that. I think now the right laws have been passed that let DPS do that now correctly. But for a long they they either wouldn’t or couldn’t

They already do it as it is, they various thieves either use a stolen car or stolen plates.

Should we stop trying to enforce laws because people try to evade enforcement?

Yes. Anarcho tyranny that selectively enforces more against the more innocent is worse than anarchy.

Tape over the lettering, even easier

Ideally you want a plate that is not yours, but that won't get you pulled over for not having a plate.

Do people really get pulled over for no plate?

Steve Jobs was characteristically coy when he told biographer Walter Isaacson why he felt no need to have a license plate on his Mercedes. Jobs brushed off the question as if he were invincible, but it turns out he was just exploiting a loophole in California's vehicle laws.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/how-s...

Steve Jobs used dealership plates. If you have a metal plate with tape over the numbers, there is a 100% chance that you're breaking the law.

Or install hideaway license plates

https://xkcd.com/1494/ comes to mind.

https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/vehicle-registration-li....

With the number of openly operating fences, wouldn't that be an easier target for actually reducing crime rather than building a surveillance dystopia?

How will the State get the panopticon that it desires? It is obvious that the State sees the people as the enemy of the "good". Can't have enemies moving about freely. They might do bad things.

Criminals are not dumb, they take plates of the same make and color of their stolen car...

https://sfist.com/2022/01/18/license-plate-theft-victim-unco...

i'll definitely be ordering some new license plate screws with a nonstandard bite before I go into the bay again, i used to worry about my catalytic converter but getting a license plate stolen sounds like a pain in the ass

The City of Ottawa (Canada) has gone in big on traffic cams and its paying huge dividends. $0.5 million + from one camera alone over a ~4 month period.

This changes surveillance from requiring the cooperation of a cell carrier to passive warrantless mass surveillance. This will be abused. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/what-we-learned-oaklan...

Great. The ability to track cars used in smash-and-grab theft will be a huge benefit. No more excuses once we have data on where the criminals are hiding out and fencing stolen goods.

What happens when COVID 25 hits and they lock us down again “for our own safety”? Any license plate captured and the owner gets a knock on the door from the police. Like China.

Does anyone else have an endless confirm/page reload with the cookie dialog? Lame.

Worked fine for me. Are you running something that messes with sites' JS perhaps?

"The city is rampant with crime, and police needs to crack down on it."

"Police budgets are bloated, and we need to cut them."

"We can't have cameras and license plate readers because they violate our privacy."

Ask an average SF resident walking down the street (or commenting on HN) and they likely hold all these views simultaneously. Ask them how exactly the city should reduce crime, and there is no answer.

The views aren't necessarily self-contradictory, and in fact could be self-affirming. Relevant question:

Is the city rampant with the types of crime that cameras and license plate readers address?

If people are eating licence plates then it could assist with prosecuting public defecation.

According to the article 70% of crimes committed in the city involve a motor vehicle, so the answer is likely yes.

Isn’t it also common to believe there is not enough housing, a homelessness crisis, but that housing shouldn’t be built anywhere?

Few people hold both of those views simultaneously. Few people actually believe that no housing should be built anywhere. A lot of people believe housing is great as long as it doesn’t directly affect them in any way ie isn’t within X miles of their home or on their commute

well at least not in their backyard. As much as I support housing I also think there should just be a genuine attempt at increasing the ability for people to actually have meaningful/paying work that can put them in said housing. It seems like there isn't enough of that (despite all the supposed claims to the contrary)

If there's not enough housing then improvements in wages will just inflate the cost of housing.

Not mutually exclusive if the problem is seen as "too many people".

i don't think anyone who has been to any of the world's top 100 biggest cities could in good faith say SF has too many people. it's barely got a midwestern suburb's level of density.

SF is the second most dense big city in the USA. There is no way that:

> it's barely got a midwestern suburb's level of density.

Is true.

The dense part is geographically confined.

SF really has a perfect storm for real estate hyperinflation: high paying jobs, NIMBY attitudes that can be summarized as “keep everything like it was in 1972,” opposition to transit links to less constrained areas, and geographic constraints.

> The dense part is geographically confined.

I don't see how that is relevant.

> SF really has a perfect storm for real estate hyperinflation: high paying jobs, NIMBY attitudes that can be summarized as “keep everything like it was in 1972,” opposition to transit links to less constrained areas, and geographic constraints.

It also has nice weather and has been a desirable trainhopping destination since the late 19th century.

Given the cost of nearby areas, I'm not sure transit links would help out much, if anything the city and surrounding areas would become even more desirable, pushing prices up further. HK has much of the same problems (in terms of geographic constraints) and has a nice transit system to get around that, but it hasn't moved the needle much on affordability. Things get a little better in the rest of the Bay Area, but no one would call Shenzhen affordable.

I wasn't sure why you were comparing the San Francisco Bay Area to Shenzhen. Then I realized you mean the bay area that's ten times the population of the San Francisco Bay Area. Now that's a bay area...

HK actually has plenty of land to build, but the government funds itself through land sales so they are incentivized to keep the price of land extremely high

> "The city is rampant with crime, and police needs to crack down on it."

> "Police budgets are bloated, and we need to cut them."

The synthesis of this is that essentially these police are the "government employees" that conservatives keep telling horror stories about: they're unaccountable, overpaid, lazy, and incompetent, but protected by their union. They have their own ideas about which crimes to investigate or not bother with. Because they're not very good at clearup, they prefer situations where the crime comes to them.

The solution is to police the police. Sack those found to be committing abuse of citizens or overtime fraud. Investigate differential clearup rates for crime. Divert some of the money into social services in problem areas. Copy the highly successful Scottish Violence Reduction Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit (itself inspired by work in Boston).

Oh sweet summer child. New York City has tons of ALPRs and cameras of all kinds, but it also has an epidemic of unsolved hit and runs, unlicensed drivers and a police force where a large proportion of cops will deface and mangle the license plates of personal and municipal vehicles to evade law enforcement.

Stop believing a magic tool can fix policing.

There's no need to start your message off being patronizing. It doesn't make you look as clever as you think it does.

The post you're responding to definitely didn't describe anything as a magic tool. It's just a regular tool that helps to catch some crime without additional manpower. That's a good thing, and exactly the type of thing we should invest in.

They don’t work. They also get used by the state for unrelated surveillance. But sure cheer it on and YC for pushing it.

But it doesn’t. That’s the whole point.

What an awful opening paragraph:

> London is considered one of the classiest places on earth, what with its wealth of history, iconic landmarks, and… thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras. It’s also home to knife crime, pervasive racism, and soccer hooligans, with plenty of residents exhibiting all three of these traits simultaneously.

How does this crap get published? Why is it appearing here?

Wow geeze, I can't believe this happened!?! It's almost like every time you pay tax, the government does the exact opposite of what you want. Who could have possibly predicted this????

She is an elected official...

If they're operating fences and other criminal operations openly and police aren't doing anything, it's either corruption, laziness, or they've actually lost control of parts of the city.

What good is a license reader going to do? They literally know where these operations are.

Correct because the issue isn’t with the police, it’s with the elected officials and DA’s office. The law makers have essentially legalized crime, most of the DAs decline to prosecute criminals no matter how destructive the crime, police are totally useless if the rest of the apparatus refuses to do their job.

This is not accurate. The policies of the office of the district attorney haven't changed. The SFPD on the other hand has reached all-time-low productivity.

Would you mind backing these claims up with the raw data?

Your first claim is DA policies haven't changed, and down-thread you claim "The prosecution rate in SF has been about the same since records began", where are you getting the data to run these reports that support this claim?

Your second claim is: "The SFPD on the other hand has reached all-time-low productivity."

Do you have data to back this claim up as well? if so please share.

You would be unproductive too if 100% of your arrests led to the immediate reslease of the suspect.

The police won their recall election and the Mayor appointed one of their allies as the DA.

Their rates are still abysmal.

The police won their recall election? I wasn't aware that SFPD was sponsoring recalls. And if you're trying to imply the mayor's choice of DA impacted policy, it seems like you should take it up with the person who claims that the DA's policies haven't changed.

I guess if you can name a city where that's true then you'd have a point. The prosecution rate in SF has been about the same since records began.

Prosecution rate is conditioned on the cases presented, so it’s not an independent variable. You can’t infer much from it being constant over time.

Url changed from https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/18/san-francisco-bets-big-o..., which points to this.

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Ah, finally catching up with the us in UK who have enough of these on the road to track most motor journeys start to finish.

Naturally, crime has all but disappeared here. /s

And London's ULEZ cameras have created a whole new form of crime. Activists felling them like trees, or vandalising them in other creative ways. Probably causing collateral damage to traffic lights and cameras used for other purposes in the process.

(But I guess this is considered legitimate activism these days, not real criminal behaviour. After all, Just Stop Oil were essentially given free rein to throw paint around and block traffic repeatedly...)

> Just Stop Oil were essentially given free rein

And that was a mistake which was rectified, and now they aren't.

The last lot of them that sat in front of a bus learned that it was a whole new game.

Cameras are great but the Bay Area has a bigger problem. They don't know what to do about crime. Does the new SF DA have a better relationship with the police? Are crimes now being prosecuted? Even when I lived there it was not hard to witness blatent crimes in the hotspots, car thefts, muggings, store theft, smash and grabs etc. You could just station some cops in those hot spots.

The cops aren't interested in work. The rate at which the SF DA brings and wins cases had been about the same throughout history. The rate at which the cops arrest people and present cases had fallen almost to zero.

The data does not support the conclusion. Cops bring cases based on what’s chargeable. The conviction rate staying the same may be an indictment of the DA, since the composition of cases brought has changed.

For example, if you used “overdoses reversed by narcan”, you’d think SFPD only started working in the mid-2010s and has been on a tear in the last two years. Meanwhile, their booking rates for public intoxication are on the historic floor.

Their booking rates for murder, robbery, rape, assault and all other major crimes are also on the floor. No thinking person believes the police fail to solve rapes because they're just demoralized over whether the case will go to trial. It's because they are incompetent.

SFPD’s clearance rate for violent crime has been basically flat from 2010-2020. This is despite having a flat budget in real terms paired with increasing demands for professionalization in policing from county and state oversight authorities. This has led to a department composed of more paper pushers and fewer patrol officers.

Compare this to a place like Vegas which has something like a 90%+ murder clearance rate for decades straight because they also have the country’s 2nd biggest crime lab after the FBI and a well-trained and invested in police force.

You can’t increase the overhead of policing, keep budgets the same, and then look at lower outputs and scream work strike.

Isn't that in the noise though? SF does not have a lot of violent crime to begin with, and rape is not something that the police often catch anyways (rather it is reported than acted on by the police). Staffing levels have also fallen drastically, peaking at 1900 officers in 2017 compared to 1600 in 2023, while population is increasing at the same time.

Support here for this is ideological, in other words non-thinking

If you’re accusing me of being an ideologue, you could not be more wrong. Especially on this matter, where I am a relative expert (I have worked as a paid consultant on criminal justice reform projects) and my interlocutor appears to have a fairly shallow, mainstream progressive understanding of the dynamics at play in policing.

Are they going to put licence plates on the homeless to track them?

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