Not a huge fan of US police departments in general but this isn't necessarily all on them.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-police-union-po...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo...
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/police-unions-spend...
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/historic...
Two years later gets a call from a detective they got the guy. He got arrested they took his DNA and it was a match for the DNA on the beer can. So they charged him for the break in and stealing the rifle.
Cops in the Bay Area would never even bother with that.
Have there been any actual documented instances of this? I see it cited a lot, but rarely any specific names of DAs or cases attached to it, and it feels like an easy excuse for police to not even attempt to do their jobs.
You can disagree with me all you want, but this guy was recalled as SF DA for letting criminals go. His wikipedia enumerates several cases of him doing just that.
> In March 2020, Boudin charged 20-year-old Dwayne Grayson with elder abuse after he filmed 56-year-old Jonathan Amerson in February 2020 swinging a metal bar at an elderly Asian man in Bayview–Hunters Point, San Francisco and stealing his aluminum cans. Amerson was charged with elder abuse and robbery. The video later went viral online. Boudin dropped charges against Dwayne Grayson after a spokesperson in Boudin's office said the victim expressed his intent to pursue restorative justice.
> Boudin has been criticized for his alleged lack of prosecution of drug-related crimes, with only three drug convictions in 2021, none of which were for fentanyl dealing. Boudin has defended his actions saying that many of the drug dealers in the Bay Area are from Honduras, and would face deportation if convicted of drug dealing.
https://www.ksbw.com/article/sfpd-refused-to-help-stop-san-f...
1 year after the recall, violent crime was up.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/06/one-year-after-recall-viole...
After a little more than a year in office, she had raised the conviction rate slightly, but had a lower charge-filling rate -- i.e. charged fewer things but won more.
> in her first 15 months, raised the city’s conviction rate for the first time in eight years, according to data from her office.
> Despite the reversal in conviction rates, it appears that Jenkins is taking fewer individual cases to court. Her charge-filing rate is about eight percent lower this year than last.
> While conviction rates have risen slightly, the total percentage of cases charged, or prosecuted, by the DA has remained relatively flat.
This also came with a shift towards more convictions for petty theft and narcotics, and less use of diversion programs. But given that the charging-filing rate actually decreased, I think this implies that other more serious stuff was being charged less. So the "soft on crime" guy actually was filing charges at a higher overall rate, and was prioritizing the more serious crimes.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/09/sf-da-brooke-jenkins-revers...
Note, I tried to view the DA data dashboards today and none of them even load for me. The article above shows top-line rates but not with a breakdown by the type of violation.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" [1].
> guy was recalled as SF DA for letting criminals go
Your comment would be stronger if you cited something from the article, versus just presenting it unadorned. (And at risk of being a hypocrite, I upvoted your comment.)
Courts are backed up and jails are full. DAs have to prioritize cases so that important cases are prosecuted within the statutes of limitations and constitutional speedy trial limits. Arresting people under suspicion of crimes that are unlikely to be prosecuted isn't very effective and nobody likes doing ineffective work.
Should this not be the expectation for low-level/nonviolent offenses, under the presumption of innocence?
Release after a minor arrest should be as expected of course. In most isolated offenses, not even an arrest preferably even - since "arrest" can come with massive baggage in the US. It's refusing to even bother collecting records, documenting, tracking, and in the end arrests which means that the initial offences essentially did not exist. So that the next offenses are still initial offenses - and don't exist.
However, when cops feel any kind of animus, it's really apparent that they can make life awful for people by harassing, intimidating, or assaulting who aren't doing anything illegal. They understand that even if the DA will never pursue anything, being a victim of over-policing is itself a shitty position to be in. Further, it can create the basis for claims of resisting arrest. For example, in my city there's press about a woman who was physically accosted by an officer for jaywalking. There's video of an officer doing a rapid U-turn after seeing a woman walk through a crosswalk, follow her down the street and slam her int a wall. The officer claims that the woman, who was just walking down the street with headphones, disregarded his (impossible?) instruction to show him an ID without reaching into her pockets or purse.
So we supposed to believe that cops have the energy to rough up random jaywalkers (who we're pretty sure the DA isn't interested in pursuing, and which is actually legal in my state now), but not enough to pursue people doing car break-ins, mail theft, vandalism, etc because of the DA's lack of interest?
If you were a mail thief, and not a priority for the local DA (... though isn't mail theft actually a federal crime?) but the police decided that you should be picked up and detained for 1-hour less than the window at which they're obliged to release you if no charges are forthcoming, and also all the stuff you stole, and some other stuff that you didn't steal, was confiscated and you didn't get your actual property back for an indeterminate period, you might understandably reconsider the pro/con list of stealing mail, even if you never went to court.
I think the explanation for why cops don't direct their harassment power at actual criminals is not that cops are rationally not doing work that won't lead to convictions. Rather:
- police budgets increase with the severity of the perceived "crime problem". Solving problems doesn't get you more money next year.
- priorities get set by political pressures. Mail theft, package theft, car break-ins, etc have diffuse harms over a broad set of the population but not necessarily against organized political blocks. But the X Neighborhood Merchants Association that donates to the campaign fund of the incumbent supervisor can probably organize to get more policing in their area.
- policing isn't about stopping or even responding to crime; it's about being seen projecting power. Report a theft in my neighborhood, and the cops will at best take a report that you can send to your insurer. If you have video footage of the crime, no one will look at it. The won't come to the location where the crime occurred. But routinely I will see 5 cops standing around talking, with 3 cop cars blocking traffic/bike lanes/lightrail tracks, while one cop is looming over/talking at a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk. There aren't enough cops to look into serial theft, but we need all hands on deck for this one disruptive unhoused person, b/c the world needs to see how we respond when you visibly step out of line.
https://missionlocal.org/2024/08/black-woman-injured-by-sfpd...
Simpler explanation: "Get home safe at the end of the day" is by very far the priority in US police. By outright policy. This gets translated with EVERYONE showing up when one of their colleagues gets an idea of doing something. All the more so that this probably looks good in the end-of-day paperwork, and counts as having done something. And is perfectly safe. And you get to chat with your colleagues while on the clock.