Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) | Hacker News Reader

Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

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137 pointshanging242 comments

This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding. People don't want to take public transit if they will fear for their lives, or be surrounded by drug addicts and mentally disturbed people yelling at and spitting on other passengers.

BART trains and stations are like this on a regular basis; Muni has the same problems but not as bad. I've seen this kind of thing happen on Caltrain late at night also, but much less often. I have never, ever seen it happen in London or anywhere in Japan.

It's easy for people in the Bay Area to believe this is what all public transit is like, unless they have experienced better systems elsewhere. Why would they want to use it, or pay for it with their tax money? It's safer to take your own car, or an Uber.

I'm a big fan of public transit, especially trains, but it's just never going to be improved in the Bay Area if people don't feel safe.

I don’t have the numbers to back this up, but I strongly suspect that if the true cost of driving (both in terms of environmental destruction and massive land use and construction cost for roads and parking lots) were reflected in the price of cars or gas, people simply wouldn’t be able to afford the luxury of a private commute, and mass transit systems would be able to compete even without any public funding at all.

Sure, but you are describing a situation in which commuters are strictly worse off. It’s unlikely they will vote for that.

Remember also that existing transit links are beyond fully saturated. It’s not really possible for people to switch to transit en masse before the decades it takes us to build bus terminals and train tunnels have elapsed. No public transit system has the slack to absorb the Bay Bridge drive-alone traffic, let alone 101 or 280. People physically won’t fit into the vehicles. There are decade-scale projects to address that, and I support them, but I don’t expect to see their fruits during my working life. Anyone working now is going to be retired by the time a second Transbay Tube starts passenger service, assuming we vote to fund it right now.

The original Bay Bridge was built in 3 years, with 1930s technology. We used to not be a bunch of incompetent idiots when it came to building infrastructure, but now we clearly are. I understand why people don’t want to pay large amounts of tax money to pay incompetent idiots to take a long time building tiny amounts of infrastructure.

Yep. In many ways we are simply stuck with whatever we built before we lost the ability to build things. Not because it’s the best, but because it’s no longer cost effective to improve at current efficiency levels.

How did we become so inefficient?

I don't really think that it's about inefficiency or incompetence. Rather, it's about where our priorities, as a society, are today when it comes to infrastructure projects vs. what it was in the post Great Depression era.

Here [0] is an article to covers parts of this exact subject.

[0]: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2013/08/09/building-the-bay-bri...

The original design for the Bay Bridge retrofit was $400 million.

Instead, we got a less-safe, grandiose art piece for over $8 billion. $400 million more if you want a bike lane.

Is this corruption or incompetence? I honestly think it’s corruption. Why can’t we just outsource this to a European engineering company that is capable of accomplishing this? It just makes no sense to me.

Of course it's corruption (in this case, Jerry Brown and Willie Brown and their minions being the primary drivers).

Corruption was blatant and rampant in the era that saw most of our infrastructure development. The New York City subway was built in the era of Boss Tweed. Honestly I think this is not a coincidence. Projects that balance their own goals with fairness and deference to “stakeholders” will naturally be pathetic compared to projects that simply pursue their goals.

  The New York City subway was built in the era of Boss Tweed

The NYC subway system wasn't fully public-operated until 1940.

a European engineering company that is capable of accomplishing this?

What makes you think European engineering companies are any better? Europe is just as littered with failed, bloated, late and vastly over budget infrastructure projects. Hell the small bridge down the road from my office was supposed to be closed for 4 month for some maintenance work, it's now been closed for 14 month and there is still no estimate for when it will be done.

For cars, the roads really are free.

Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight. Normal cars effectively do nothing to roads. The damage comes from buses, fire trucks, UPS trucks, FedEx trucks, bucket trucks... and more trucks.

Switching all that to rail is completely unreasonable. Fire departments getting around on rail?

So we need the roads anyway, and cars don't wear them out. Cars do not impose a cost. As it is, car drivers are paying money to fix roads that are being damaged by buses.

What if we charged bus passengers the true cost of taking the bus? Each passenger on a bus is contributing to road damage. Each driver in a car doesn't cause damage.

Road damage is only part of the story.

How many lanes would we need if there were only trucks on the road? We build massive road capacity to subsidize car use.

The vast majority of roads are narrow. The wide ones are extreme outliers. It may seem otherwise if you judge by the portion of time you spend on each type of road, but most roads are quiet little empty lanes.

So, on average, we don't really have more lanes than the minimum.

Is this just an American thing? Healthcare funding, or something?

I've never been to SF, but I've visited NYC, and the subway there feels like stepping in to a horror movie.

During a two week visit I saw people passing out and being ignored (I was the only one attempting to help), individuals swinging around bricks in socks, and various other obvious examples of severely mentally ill individuals.

In London I've never seen anything like it.

It genuinely felt like stepping in to some sort of twilight zone. Compounded by the fact that other commuters seemed jaded, as if it was normal to be regularly surrounded by individuals who act more like rogue AIs than human beings.

I think it really boils down to American voters having lower standards and being resigned to the fact that these things happen. I don't think a single politician has lost re-election over it recently. The last time there was a significant voter backlash over crime in New York was when Giuliani was elected mayor in the 1990s, and crime was a lot worse back then.

I suspect that elected officials would feel significant pressure to act if this happened in London on a regular basis.

I feel that this somewhat due to the lack of mental health funding in the US. It's one issue that affects so many areas such as homelessness and crime, yet funding mental health programs is just not popular with voters and politicians in the US.

Anything that even resembles taking care of other people is not popular in the US. There's no "preventative" care for people in here, either. We foster and think that a percentage of the children taken from their parents didn't need to happen if the parents were able to get help before it got bad enough for the children to be removed. But, oh wow, when I tell people my thoughts on that they look at me like I'm about to steal their wallet!

The funny thing is that, to me, the NYC system seems to work so much better than San Francisco’s, based on my usage of it. And NYC also has a much bigger police presence than San Francisco, which results in it feeling like a much safer city.

Agreed. NYC didn't feel much worse than London or Berlin. Even late at night. Public transport in SF was scary.

I'll also second this. Not as clean or orderly as the DC metro, but for the most part the NYC subway was easy and simple to get around in.

Only time I've ever been jumped or harassed on a train was in Madrid.

Surely it must be.

In my country, our recently former Prime Minister was known to regularly catch trains while going about his government business. Sometimes with a cabinet minister. Sometime on his own. And rarely, if ever, with a visible security detail.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Malcolm+Turnbull+train&tbm=i...

It’s due to a failure to enforce the law. The reason for that failure is needs to be addressed.

Is it really though? I feel like Americans regularly say things like this (guns is another similar topic) which only reflects an inability to think many steps down the line from the outcome. There is something deeper at play and I would suspect that it has to do with economic insecurity and lack of opportunity which is further compounded by a lack of education and social cohesion in general. American values are all wrong. You only need to look at the Black Friday mayhem for an example.

How would one go about fixing such abstract things as social cohesion and societal values?

A new social contract that distributes wealth more evenly. A focus on education, nutrition and healthy urban environments. Supporting parents so they can support their children (2 working parents is an absolute recipe for disaster). All the normal stuff we know we should be doing but don't. If you are interested in the importance of childhood and parenting there is a great doc series on Netflix called "The beginning of life".

America had that chance but Bernie was stabbed in the back. Maybe AOC can deliver.

It will take a lot more than one election. America needs to reevaluate it's relationship with many things including poverty, work, race, education, taxes, healthcare etc. It will be a long road however I am hopeful that the likes of AOC and Andrew Yang can start to shine a light on it and kick off the process.

> American values are all wrong.

how can you tell when values are wrong?

In this case it seems more like a Bay Area thing where the politicians and bleeding hearts want to be soft on crime but then it quickly becomes a downward spiral... For example, cops don’t do anything about most property crimes and theft and treat it as an insurance problem, they’ll tell you to report it to 311. Then they stop caring about trespassing and loitering and litering. Then they let junkies on BART and other criminals who don’t pay because “they don’t have anywhere else to go, have a heart.” So they’re constantly enabling this criminal behavior by preventing any real consequences. Because the voters don’t demand change, the District Attorneys and Judges largely do nothing about it either. I’m a social democrat but San Francisco is a cesspit. Being liberal/progressive shouldn’t mean letting junkies take over you city, defrcate in the street, and destroy the public life for everyone else. We’ve got to start creating some boundaries for this behavior and that starts with actual consequences for crimes. I think BART might have to be fined for them to take it seriously.

A big part of it is that people don't want to cause themselves trouble.

It's not often that I see people having fights in public here in Australia, but on the odd occasion that people are misbehaving, I really don't want to cause myself trouble and hurt myself. I'm not inclined to get bottled or stabbed for trying to help someone out.

On the other hand, if I do come across someone passed out in public who looks a bit fucked up, I will make sure they're alive and at least vaguely responsive, and roll them into the recovery position. I wouldn't call an ambulance though because they're expensive and I don't want to cause someone a $2000 bill because they were just drunk and sleeping it off.

> individuals who act more like rogue AIs than human beings.

That's a chilling but very accurate description. I don't have children, but I doubt I could live in SF/LA/NYC with kids. There isn't a major European city I'd say that for.

True, but a plaintiff's lawyer has an incentive to overstate the problem on the client's behalf. It's irresponsible journalism to just quot this and attribute it to 'lawyer' (a stereo typically responsible person) without mentioning the adversarial context in which the remark is made. 'Plaintiff alleges BART 'a free-for-all' for Criminals' would have been better.

The attorney's duty is to maximize the perceived level of risk, just as it is the defense lawyer's job to dispute that. The article only mentions a single statistic showing a 28% increase in crime in the first 6 months of 2018. One hopes the complaint is more statistically rigorous.

It's true though. Do you ride BART or live in SF or Oakland?

I don't think it is, and yes I do. I'm well aware that crimes happen on BART, someone was murdered at my local station not long ago. But I don't think that 'lawless' is a good description, although many of my journeys take me to stereotypically sketchy stations or occur late at night.

It's because of this subjectivity that I said I hoped the case would turn on a more rigorous definition.

Compared to any transit system in another developed country, BART is absolutely lawless.

A guy was murdered at your station recently and a girl was murdered randomly at another station less than a week ago. On the same system! And you think this is normal and not an indication of lawlessness? This is not normal! If there were murders regularly on systems outside of the US they would be national events. This is a good demonstration of how we got here.

Nobody was murdered on Bart less than a week ago, and the murder I was talking about was of a girl, not a guy, back in late July. Getting simple facts wrong is a poor way to begin an argument.

BART is certainly more dangerous than other transit systems in other developed countries, because the US in general is more dangerous than other countries. Deplorable as this is, clusters in small sample sizes are often misleading as to statistical trends, and many of the people commenting here seem not to have first hand experience riding BART.

> This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding

My fiance and I took the BART two stops to get to civic center to the Trump protests about 2 weeks ago.

We saw people selling meth/heroin/etc literally INSIDE the BART station in the public... No one cared. No police around.

This happened 2-3 times. We were on for TWO stops.

Seriously... BART needs to clean up their fucking act. I associate BART with homeless people, BO, trash, vomit, fights, and getting robbed.

The American highway system isn’t any safer. Rampant speeding, tailgating, swerving in and out, distracted on phones, etc. All of which is rarely and lightly punished.

You can probably look at any system in America at the federal level and find it to be vastly less regulated, particularly from a safety standpoint, than anywhere else considered "developed." The exception being commercial aviation perhaps.

If you ever want to give a Japanese visitor a significant culture shock, ride with them on the train (whether it's SF, NY, DC).

Untimely train schedules. Disorderly conduct. Blatant disregard for the rules.

I took the 7 Train from Grand Central to Flushing with a visiting Japanese colleague in NY. The face of concern he gave while on the train was like he was witnessing purgatory. I remember he looked at me and said, "Is this safe?", to which I replied, "I don't know, I guess so". Retrospectively, the honesty did not ease the anxiety. The crowdedness part he had no trouble in managing, given how packed the Tokyo metro could be. What struck the most was: 1. The lack of fucks people gave on train, 2. How much of a free-for-all the US metro systems are, and 3. How on-edge people are. There's people who take naps with their phones out on Japanese trains. On the NY metro, he was wide awake and clutching his belongings for dear life the entire ride. Of the various things to appreciate about the U.S., that was certainly not a highlight.

That's a really American perspective about public transport. Here's a counter example:

While Marcel Rohner[1] was CEO of UBS he took the train from Aarau, where he lived, to UBS' head office in Zurich. That's despite the fact that the CEO of UBS has a car and driver at his disposal.

But the point is that he'd nevertheless be stuck in traffic jams like us mere mortals and taking the train is just that much more efficient.

And that's the thing. People chose their mode of transportation based on efficiency and economics. You're not, by definition, a social outcast just because you use train, trams of buses and that goes for a lot of countries outside the US, provided there's investment into the public transport infrastructure. But unless people feel safe it's a non-starter if you have alternatives.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Rohner_(banker)

I do think there's some truth to the idea that our failures in mental health care have some pretty high costs on our society in other places. If we did a better job with mental health/drug addiction, maybe there would be a few less needles and piles of feces for commuters to content with.

If you take BART and ride into Oakland -- you are on your own.

There is no one that will protect you. My next door neighbor was assaulted. She was brutalized. Sigh. It was bad. THEN she went home, reported it with police.

This is where it gets weird. The people that assaulted her -- armed with her ID card went to her APARTMENT -- luckly she was somewhere else with her parents. The people that brutalized her ransacked her apartment without care of being caught.

The detective on the case was really awesome from Oakland PD. He talked with me since I saw one of the guys leave the apartment. He mentioned: "She is lucky". Unfortunately, he explained, there is no way to prosecute these guys unless there is camera evidence.

I feel that surveillance in the form of Little Sister (https://medium.com/@chaostheory/little-sister-14bf095d3441) will be even more prevalent if not ubiquitous. Decent megapixel cameras now can be bought for about $25. Between the crime that you mentioned and the rise of petty crimes such as package theft, many people are willingly putting Amazon's and Google's eyes both inside and outside of their homes.

This ideology of inaction, or "nothing" we can do about it, is a phenomenon unique to the bay area. I used to live there, and it is one of the reasons I left. Criminal activity is not pursued, bad behavior is not penalized. I'm sure there are many reasons, but I suspect a big factor is that police and politicians are afraid of cracking down due to the political fallout and backlash. There is a palpable disdain for police officers there.

The ironic thing is the people who are mostly likely voters and taxpayers are the ones who are fed up with the crime and leaving.

Yea I'm in SF not sure how long I'll last.

It's a cess pool. Criminals have more rights than children.

There was a crazy homeless guy who would shit everyday in front of a school in Bernal. The police couldn't do anything about it.

You are completely right about the fear of political fallout for wanting to uphold the law. It's sad.

>Criminals have more rights than children.

This is the most succinct way I’ve seen it explained and it’s 100% accurate. You’re also right about the fear of upholding the law. It’s sad AND ridiculous.

A relevant article about another local offender cops just ignore: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Co...

Thanks. It came to me when I saw a Mom with kids get harassed by a crazy person on the sidewalk. Also there's a similar story in Bernal where a crazy person kept shitting in front of a school. But nobody could do anything about it (for fear of hysterical backlash). I can't find the article though.

What's the risk of a backlash actually occurring? Seems ridiculous.

That's a good point. I think there's this recent fear that someone will ruin your life with a well-written blog post.

Something something privileged white male something something out of touch with mental health something something homeless issues

I guess it comes down to not caring.

> You are completely right about the fear of political fallout for wanting to uphold the law.

The erosion of respect for the rule of law is a direct result of the attempt to use law to implement a top-down social design, chiefly the "war on drugs". With policing being a public good, those with the least means should appreciate police the most. But rather their communities were persecuted using the police, and so those communities were pushed into adopting an alternative view. Similarly, even mainstream society does not actually expect police to be helpful towards us but rather as a source of trouble to be avoided (eg speeding tickets).

Given that public opinion cannot be directly changed, good initial steps to restoring public faith in the institution would be to eliminate invasive vice legislation, completely remove police from the enforcement of traffic regulations, as well as fully prosecuting criminals even when they're police officers.

I'm not sure I follow or agree with your first premise RE war on drugs. (The 'why')

But I do agree on your initial steps for restoring public faith.

Who will enforce traffic laws if not the police? We can't have anarchy on the roads.

> Criminals have more rights than children.

I was in SF for a job interview a while back. Got off at Civic Center BART to meet a friend. Hoooooooly Cow! I'm not sure about 'rights' per se, but I saw at least two people shoot heroin up, in broad-daylight, in the middle of Market Street, on a Thursday, round about 1pm in the afternoon, not even 20 feet away for at least five uniformed SFPD officers. The officers did nothing. My friend says that's kinda how it is.

https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/21/17488516/farrell-civic-cente...

I was in SF recently. I heard Starbucks employees complaining about police inactivity in their conversations to each other.

  there is no way to prosecute these guys unless there is camera evidence

... and the original batch of "surveillance cameras" were nonfunctional dummies[0].

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Use-of-decoy-cameras-se...

I'm sure that some other people have run into this scam on BART but I had it happen a few years ago.

Right before the doors close at the SFO BART stop headed to Milbrae, a guy runs on all out of breath yelling and pleading for money to get a ticket for his sick daughter. He's a war vet and needs to get her to the hospital in Travis but they won't let her on the plane for some reason etc...Does this till the Milbrae stop and I assume gets on going back and does it again.

When I told him I'd help him if he could just produce his mil-ID or VA-ID he came over and flashed a wad of 50's and 100's and threateningly said "I don't need to show you shit." Then went back to his histrionics.

Obviously this wasn't an attack, or illegal but it was pretty brazen, as it was in front of everyone and he didn't even seem to care that everyone saw his huge wad of cash. Most of the people I see doing illegal stuff on BART (and even on WMATA here in DC) don't really seem to think anyone is going to stop them and they seem to be right most of the time.

Ha, I had a guy similar to this today on the SFO airtram going from the rental car drop off to the terminal. He got on at International A and got off at the next stop.

Like your guy, he was pleading for money for his daughter. He had a very long back story, including the fact that a police officer already gave him $17 (and referred to the cop by name). Lots of unnecessary detail like that, trying to make it seem more plausible.

Everyone ignored him. He got off then jumped on the train going the opposite direction.

I wonder how much he makes a day.

It happens all the time.

One more reason not to carry cash unless concealed in a bag or hidden pocket. I'll pay for things with card or phone just to avoid high-pressure pan handling situations like this.

I was especially surprised when that gang of 50 people stormed a Bart and robbed a bunch of passengers and nobody was ever arrested. I don’t know if it’s the Bart police at fault or the Oakland police but it sure seems like law enforcement is weak on the Bart.

Good lord, someone is going to get fed up and pull a Bernie Goetz if that's the sort of thing happening.

Very rarely see police on the Tube in London (or in Berlin, Lisbon, Milan or Barcelona for that matter). Still little crime (other than pickpockets) and practically no violent crime.

Seems to me like the problem is probably bigger than just failings in law enforcement.

This is, I think, partially the result of decriminalization. When a vocal sub-population says "oh no, but poor people have no agency, and therefore no choice but to commit crime / evade fares, etc. and we should be more lenient" this is the result. And the people who suffer the disproportionately are the working class who rely on public transit.

Even if BART doesn't have enough officers, spending a few thousand to put up high-def cameras so some other PD can kick open these assailants' doors and arrest them would help significantly.

Evading fares is one thing. Assaulting people us a whole other matter!

My coworker was sexually assaulted on the BART, on the East Bay side of the tracks. A group of youths started sitting around her, took off her headphones, groped her, took her picture several times with them groping her, laughed and then left after terrorizing her for 10 minutes unabated. There was nothing she could do, she is a tiny, attractive Asian female sitting by herself and no one stepped in to help her (to be fair, who would risk themselves by stepping in against a large group of youths). She contacted the police, but they said there was nothing they could do and frankly they couldn't have cared any less. She never took the BART again, and moved to the peninsula.

There's nothing stopping criminals from victimizing you except the law of large numbers, meaning your only protection is dumb luck these days, and not the police. And if it happens to you, the police largely won't do anything about it.

"These days"? So there was some magical protection against criminals in the past, which no longer exists?

Yes, it was called the criminal justice system. At some point along the way we decided to have a minimal police force and prosecute only the most obvious and heinous crimes, letting all kinds of “low level” stuff like this become effectively consequence-free.

Sources on when "we" decided that and on the actual reduction in numbers of police, please.

Yeah, BART police is a joke. I don’t remember ever seeing a BART police officer riding a train with me. I rarely see them in stations. Getting in and out without paying almost seems easier than paying. SF and Oakland officers never stroll through stations, which is so obviously wrong from a public safety standpoint, yet it seems to be policy. Then again I rarely see SF police officers walking the streets as it is.

Yet we just kind of let it happen. Not sure what to do to fix it.

Wonder how it compares with other systems like these in Europe or say Japan. Do police patrol there. Wonder if there is another way to fix this. Say figure out why does crime even become an option at all. Lack of jobs, opportunities, etc.

The UK has the British Transport Police. They are a branch of the police force dedicated to policing the railways. You won't normally see them on trains, but they have offices in most big stations and if there's trouble then it'll get sorted out on the next stop.

Normally you only see the police visibly present when there's a football match or other big event on, and the regular police are also there to deal with the crowds.

Seeing trouble is a rarity though. Nowadays most stations have ticket barriers so it reduces the type of person who might dodge the fare. And most people know how to behave.

Weird, because I see them on a regular basis and I've lived here a long time. How often do you actually ride BART?

I used to ride it every day for my commute (which was for.. 3 years?). Now it’s only a couple times a week.

Maybe it’s just the stations I frequent. Still, compared to a place like NYC, it’s a joke. No wonder delinquents raid entire train cars.

  Getting in and out without paying almost seems easier than paying

It is. There's lots of surveillance video showing dozens of riders jumping turnstiles per minute.

Fixing it is easy. Arrest and prosecute criminal behavior. California won't do it though. It's only a matter of time till some of the larger tech companies decide that the Bay Area is too far gone and start leaving.

What makes you think the people who make these sorts of decisions are exposed to any of this?

Exactly this. The big tech companies use their own buses. Most of their employees are affluent enough to own a car or Uber for other destinations.

When people stop taking jobs in these areas. Not sure how long that will take. I do remember reading how the American Medical Association canceled their conference in San Francisco due to the homeless issues. https://abc7news.com/medical-association-cancels-san-francis...

The HN demographic skews male, and I suspect a lot of the men who are big fans of public transport here fail to appreciate how unsafe many women feel on those systems.

Yes. There’s a reason that Japan created a new term “Chikan” to describe gropers on trains. It’s exceedingly common. Recent reports, suggest that almost every woman who has used a underground in Japan regularly has been groped at some point.

I asked the women in Japan who I know well enough, and they confirmed this.

Japan tries to combat this with female only carriages.

I was recently talking to a woman in the US about this, she suggested that it was also quite common in the US. So perhaps, there’s just a more public discussion about this in Japan.

I’d love to see statistics on this, if anyone has them.

Groping is certainly an issue in Japan, but much less so than in the past. MOJ stats show around 8K cases/year in the sixties and seventies, with that dropping to ~1.5K by 1990 and ~1K in recent years. (Anecdotally it's probably dropped even more than that, as one would expect more cases went unreported in the 60s than today.)

Stats: e.g. http://www.moj.go.jp/content/001178520.pdf

Side note: according to an article I read at some point, women-only train carriages have apparently not noticeably affected statistics on groping cases. (Which is not to suggest they're not worthwhile for other reasons.)

Yeah, there was a recent Twitter survey on this issue by an SF Examiner reporter:

https://twitter.com/FitzTheReporter/status/10620929010002042...

Wired also mentioned that women in NYC pay on average $26-50/month extra for safer means of transit:

https://www.wired.com/story/nyc-public-transportation-pink-t...

The April 22nd attack was the thing that drove me to pull the trigger on my plans to leave the bay area. I was not going to live in a place where the local authorities were unwilling or unable to keep me safe to that degree.

I'm glad that now, finally, the victims of that might be getting some justice

If BART wants its ridership to feel safe they need two things: increase officer presence (and prosecute vigorously) and two add cameras all over their properties. No fake pretend cameras. Deter and prosecute violators. Looking the other way when things happen, slaps on the wrists, etc., don’t work.

I think BART is shy because at least there is one incident of manslaughter by one of their officers. On the other hand not having officers also leads to death and assuaults of passengers and loss of ridership.

Have a strict code of conduct, enforce it vigorously, train officers properly and educate riders via station and in car infation systems.

Otherwise it risks going into a service death spiral.

  one incident of manslaughter by one of their officers

If you're referring to Oscar Grant[0], the verdict was involuntary manslaughter, but I thought it was clearly murder (with, perhaps, questionable sanity) -- Grant was fully subdued and not resisting when he was shot.

Ironically, the sentence of IM plus the gun enhancement meant more prison time than Voluntary Manslaughter alone would have.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Oscar_Grant#Closin...

Obviously they need better training --they should not accidentally shoot people/suspects under control. They could make more use of K9 units to neutralize suspects as well --much as they do in Germany.

We should demand more from their security forces as well as from the public both.

I’m a big dude, 6’2” and broad shouldered, and even I regularly feel unsafe on BART. I’ve seen tweakers spit on women and attack them, I’ve seen out of their mind bums screaming racist slurs at people in their face, and yet I’ve never seen cops do anything about it. Likewise, I even see BART employees at that window open the disabled stall and emergency exit for homeless people and tweakers to get into BART. If they’d just keep the people out who aren’t paying, they’d fix most of the issues but they don’t even bother. Although, I have seen more cops lately patrolling BART stations (Montgomery and Embarcadero during business hours...) but never seen them in the trains.

It seems like the Bay Area is going through what New York City went through in the 1970s and 1980s.

It does sound a lot like The Warriors.

Not really. Check the violent crime stats before making such claims.

Uhhh not even close.

Given our overall expenditures on BART, would it cost so very much to ramp up security presence to a level that would prevent at least 90% of these offenses?

BART is a critical resource in the Bay Area. It has to be safe and reliable to be useful. I feel like we've spent 95% of what is needed, but haven't gone above the 75% yield threshold.

By stopping free rides the enforcement will pay for itself and the empty cars will make everyone happier.

Same is true for San Francisco.

Criminals have more rights than children.

Or taxpayers...

If we are to have a functional civilization we must remain open but also learn how to say no to unacceptable behavior.

Especially the egregious. Like you see everyday. People littering, shooting up and shitting on the sidewalk.

Meanwhile our legislators are passing laws to limit the amount of restaurants in certain neighborhoods. Or trying to ban companies from having their own cafeterias.

It's the ideology of 'sounding good'.

Empiricism needs to take its place.

You're the second person I've seen to say "Criminals have more rights than children"

Where do you get your talking points from?

Criminals can drive, vote, sell their labor, enter contracts, and are free to travel without legal emancipation.

From myself. I mentioned it once before in this HN post (if that's what you're referring to)

I can't speak for the above commenter, but in a way street people in SF really are more free than employed people. If I were to break into a car and steal stuff I'd get jailed and released a couple days later, or even the same day. But I'd probably get fired. Whereas someone with no job would get jaled and released with no real consequences. Because the city refuses to enforce many crimes (basically, anything short of significant violence) beyond catching and releasing, the only thing keeping people in line are their employers and peers. And if someone doesn't have a job and their peers don't care about committing crimes, then a whole bunch of stuff becomes de-facto legal.

I agree. I try not to think about it. Or what I could do for myself and the community with my tax dollars. Instead of sending them 5000 miles away to DC. What a joke.

Also not to mention, if you were jailed for some reason, you'd get fired and probably fined $10,000. If you don't have the money: Well, Welcome to the streets!

People are so ego-invested in this absurd and hysterical reality. I don't get it. I will say it seems to be reinforced every minute through our tv media.

For example, sometimes when I speak with someone hysterical (80% of SF and some of my family now) they'll calm down and we'll have an open rational (non-ideological) dialogue. After, I think to myself 'ok it's not all lost'.

Then I see them again and they're back to the hysteria. It's like a robot who forgot their programming.

It seems to be a similar sort of addiction as Candy Crush. Hysteria is a kind of entertainment, always easily accessible.

I haven't thought of it that way. That's a good one. It seems to tie into fear porn.

This sounds like the symptoms of a death spiral to me. BART doesn’t have enough money to police its cars and stations. They get sued for failing to provide security, resulting in even less money for policing...

However, I’m not sure whether it’s actually true that BART is low on funds.

In Melbourne, we have a special police force (protective services officers) to patrol train stations at night.

The anti-authoritarian in my dislikes them, but by all accounts (especially from my female friends), they're actually great. Their mandate is only to stop violence and disorderly behaviour, and they're actually super chill. Ticket inspection and fare evasion isn't part of their purview, which means they're not just armed ticket inspectors. I've had lost of friendly conversations with them while waiting for the train. Compare this to Sydney, where they post full fledged police officers with drug dogs at train stations, which is straight up fascist.

The PSOs are also really great at helping out with medical emergencies. I actually see them applying first aid more often than I seem them arresting people.

I know that HN is generally an anti-police crowd, and I have no idea what the financial implications would be for getting something like that on the BART (in Melbourne there's generally 2 officers at each station), but they do generally make the train stations a lot safer at night. I don't want to wade too deep into the gun control debate, but it also helps that petty criminals in Australia don't have guns. Unless you're involved with organised crime, there's almost chance you'll be a victim of gun violence here.

I don’t like the police any more than you do, but calling police presence in train stations “straight up fascist” cheapens the term.

When you call every slightly authoritarian policy “straight up fascist”, nobody will take you seriously when you denounce actually fascist regimes.

Having police with drug dogs, posted at train stations to catch random people with personal quantities of drugs is straight up fascist in my opinion.

Drug use crosses socioeconomic lines, yet drug dogs at train stations (targeted in the poorer suburbs too) ends up unfairly targeting poor people (who are often minorities), especially as wealthier people tend to drive rather than take public transport. Send some drug dogs through the bank offices on a Friday evening and see how much coke you find. Instead they're busting poor people for having a gram of weed on them.

Personally, I'd rather that they didn't have drug dogs at all, they tend to victimise users rather than actually stop the root cause of the "problem" (I'm not a fan of drug prohibition at all), i.e. the dealers and the traffickers. Drug traffickers aren't going to be transporting commercial quantities of drugs on the train, they're going to be driving cars. Drug dogs are also generally ineffective and respond more to their handlers signals than actually detecting drugs by scent and are therefore susceptible to their handlers biases, further victimising minorities.

I smoke pot, and don't like the idea of being targeted at train stations because I smoked a spliff the night before while wearing the same sweater. FYI I am not 'poor' and I do have a small fleet of my own cars, but people with a small quantity of money behind them a) also like to smoke drugs on occasion and b) also do use public transport.

Edit: I realize that sounded a bit snide, apologies. I think my point is that it's not so much a fascist thing, and I agree with the GP that calling the draconian drug policies fascist does detract from the legitimately scary/quasi-fascist things that are going on. I fear that the more we misconstrue these kinds of arguments, the harder it will be to make progress.

I guess calling it all-out fascist is perhaps a hyperbole. But it's creeping authoritarianism.

To me though, having police posted with dogs at train stations just looks especially authoritarian. Police dogs (whether drug dogs or attack dogs) are primarily a tool for intimidation.

I agree with you tbh. Considering the tremendous false positive rate with sniffer dogs too, I find the use of them especially hard to justify as anything other than intimidation.

Got to remember though that when police do big operations like that, they may also often be looking for one specific target/individual, but have to use a blanket approach to apprehend them. So while you may be caught up in the "random" checks, they may just be using it as a facade to catch a truly dangerous person.

I've never seen a single police officer at a Sydney train station before and especially not with dogs.

The problem is that nuance and understatement are not taken seriously either. Fascist isn't an ideal term due to its theoretical complexity, but it's less of a mouthful for most people than 'authoritarian', and informal conversation should have some room for approximation, metonymy, and so on.

I do see the point you're making, but conversely intensely oppressive and authoritarian regimes tend to get that way by degrees. It's hard to say where exactly the threshold of severity is, and by the time everyone agrees on it that usually means it was passed some time ago, and it's now too late to reverse by conventional means.

> full fledged police officers with drug dogs at train stations, which is straight up fascist.

Hmm. Is it the dogs that make them fascists? The uniform?

Yeah you shouldn't talk to the police and all that but going straight to fascism seems a bit hyperbolic.

It's the fact that drug dogs at train stations unfairly target poor people and minorities for possession of personal quantities of drugs (traffickers don't take the train), despite rates of drug use being fairly consistent across socio-economic borders. Drug dogs are also generally also inaccurate and respond heavily to their handlers signals, and are therefore susceptible to their handlers biases. They're basically a tool for creating probable cause for a search (although in New South Wales, apparently refusal to consent to a search is also probable cause, go figure).

So yes, it's the dogs that make them fascist.

I see your point about drug dogs on trains adversely impacting poor people, but what does that have to do with fascism?

The fact that Fascism doesn't mean Fascism any more and is now synonymous with whatever flavour of authoritarianism the speaker wants it to mean.

Police acting like the armed anti-violence guards they should be is pretty low on the objectionable list that people have with police I would imagine.

Does BART have unlimited liability for the actions of others? Probably not.

Should BART have more security at problem stations? Sure.

Most of this sounds like a failure of the local police though, transit security is generally not going to handle reporting assault and theft, as those are the jurisdiction of the municipality where the crime occured.

AFAIK bart police are actual peace officers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_Polic... I remember i used to see ads of theirs years ago, prominently displaying their 150K starting salary.

Anecdotally, i agree that riding bart has felt sketchier the past few years. I generally ride from SF to Lake Merritt or 12th St Oakland.

> prominently displaying their 150K starting salary

I thought that seemed high, but they are still paid quite well.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Bart-Police-Officer-Salarie...

There are lots of BART security job vacancies, probably because no matter how high the salary it would be a very dangerous job. This is similar to the social situation in NYC when the Guardian Angels were formed, but what is extraordinary is how wealthy the bay area is today compared to 1980's New York area... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels

Law enforcement is not even on the top 10 list for most dangerous jobs. I suspect there must be other reasons for the high vacancy rate.

http://time.com/5074471/most-dangerous-jobs/

This statistic might be completely different on BART officers only.

~$105k based on 1 response, that doesn't seem like much data. The linked job posting shows:

> Pay Rate

$4,986.87/Month (Base Salary - While in Academy) $5,651.79/Month (Base Salary - Upon Academy Completion)

Not counting overtime, holidays, benefits, or pension. $150K represents the median cost to employ.

Just going by my memory of what they advertised. Here's a TSV with some public salary data from 2012:https://gist.github.com/shabbychef/5915640

I think crimes on Bart are the jurisdiction of Bart police.

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

And all they do is give parking tickets. I’ve never seen them inside a train in 8 years.

I wonder how much of that is due to the conviction of the officer who shot Oscar Grant.

If someone decides not to be a police officer because they aren't allowed to shoot unarmed civilians in the back while they're being held face down on the ground, BART is safer without them.

I'm talking about when someone decides not to confront potential criminals because they might get sent to prison for killing someone when they accidently usetheir pistol instead of a taser.

Look, I'm no fan of the police, and often find myself in disbelief when police officers are acquitted (or not indicted) for what can only be described as murder. But the Oscar Grant shooting was clearly a mistake, and whether or not the officer should have been convicted, that kind of conviction will definitely put a damper on officers' willingness to confront people.

> I'm talking about when someone decides not to confront potential criminals because they might get sent to prison for killing someone when they accidently usetheir pistol instead of a taser.

I mean, same idea. If a police officer is not confident they can dependably discern the difference between a gun and a taser, BART is definitely safer without them.

  accidently use their pistol instead of a taser

In the situation, with Grant fully subdued and compliant, Mehserle had no business using either.

It was similar to the Rodney King beating in the sense that after King was fully subdued and compliant, Koon and Powell continued to hit him.

The BART police are afraid of being falsely accused even when they are in the right, because of the legacy of the Oscar Grant case, so they are overly timid about confronting criminals.

The police were wrong in the Oscar Grant case, but the consequences for public safety have been very negative as a result of the public reaction.

This implies it's rational to fear for your freedom as a law-abiding person on the basis that a true criminal was convicted. That makes no sense. By that logic we should be against letting police arrest these robbers anyway, because if they did, all of the non-criminal commuters would refuse to enter BART for fear of being charged with robbery.

No, it does not imply that.

This statement

> The BART police are afraid of being falsely accused even when they are in the right, because of the legacy of the Oscar Grant case

is not accurately summarized by this statement?

> Law-abiding people are afraid of being falsely accused, because of the fact that a true criminal was convicted

What part is incorrect?

Parking tickets are their main thing, true, but I have seen them inside trains. More often, my train is delayed by “police activity” somewhere in the BART system. Because there’s no way to route around most stations, those delays end up cascading through the whole system, no matter where they originate.

Maybe they travel undercover, all the time?

Lol so they travel undercover and never stop any crimes? Seems like an unlikely scenario.

BART police are sworn California law enforcement, same as SFPD or Oakland PD. Only difference is their jurisdiction is BART so technically they should be enforcing the law.

That said, I’m down for making any change to this status quo that sees them actually enforcing the law and public order, or a different responsible PD altogether.

I have heard it said that BART is still safer, despite these recent crimes, than walking the streets that BART travels under.

Suppose it depends on what street you are referencing.

It doesn't seem quite that bad in St. Louis, but the Metrolink has a lot of similar characteristics.

Just the fact that all the platforms are open (there are no turnstiles, so you don't even need to pay a cent to board a train or lurk on a platform, any time of day) seems like a major contributing factor.

And in my recent rides, maybe 1/5 times would there ever be a person checking tickets.

It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem here—nobody wants the lines expanded if their only experiences are dodgy and slow at best. And it doesn't help that the local news seems to highlight all the public transit crimes on a weekly basis (especially on slower news weeks).

Having gotten a failure to pay ticket on metro the first time I ride for not understanding the system I can tell you it's quite steep $90 in 2000. And it only takes the officers about four stops to walk the whole train. That's a lot of rides without a fare ticket to pay for the one penalty ticket.

Also you can often get tickets from other riders. I get asked for my stubs every time I'm in town

How about putting cameras in train?

I will need to ride the BART this Friday and this thread is not giving me much confidence...

If you’re riding during rush hour you will be fine. During the work day (between rush hours) is also okay, but less people around.

Riding early morning or at night is when the real trouble generally happens.

Funny that I'm reading this as I'm riding BART.

My self defense is someone else's responsibility...

Maybe they should issue more concealed carry permits in bay area counties. It's wrong for the police to simultaneously neglect your protection and also prevent you from protecting yourself.

I don't want somebody shooting for any reason on the BART.

I don’t think anyone does, but I think that is besides the parent’s point.

I don't either, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let some scummy BART thief rob and assault me when I have a concealed carry permit.

Agreed. I don't want to be caught in the cross-fire between a criminal and a layman trying to be a hero.

I know this sounds crazy, but I'd be willing to tolerate a modest number of bystander deaths if it meant a dramatic uptick in the number of criminal deaths. There can't be that many criminals. The steady-state equilibrium might be safer than the current regime, which is that criminals can assault (and kill) with little risk to themselves.

Of course I'd like my chance of death-by-bullet to be zero. But for whatever reason, that doesn't seem to be an option on the table.

> I know this sounds crazy, but I'd be willing to tolerate a modest number of bystander deaths if it meant a dramatic uptick in the number of criminal deaths.

I'm of the opinion that it's better for a criminal to walk free than for an innocent person to be punished or killed for something they have nothing to do with.

If criminals are walking free left and right, they will feel less afraid to commit more crimes, including murdering innocents.

> If criminals are walking free left and right

They aren't: conviction rates are high and crime rates are at record lows.

If the criminal kills innocent people all hope is lost in your opinion.

What if that layman isn't trying to be a hero. What if they are just exercising their right to protect themselves or their family?

When the police in a municipality have the monopoly right to posess and use force to protect citizens, then citizens should expect them to actually keep them safe. If they fail in this duty, citizens should have recourse.

Oakland in particular has a very difficult problem prosecuting criminals. The "stop snitching" culture that is prevalent in urban, black communities, combined with historical mistrust of police, translates to no cooperation and no arrests. Criminals aren't being deterred, and are acting with impunity. Probability is on b your side in keeping you safe, until one day you're the unlucky target. You won't be able to defend yourself, the other riders will not help and will pretend to not see you, and you will feel the helplessness that I once felt when I was savagely beaten by several laughing teens in DC next to a metro station. None of them were caught, but the police were sure helpful in telling me that the station I went to was a bad place for white people to go and I shouldn't go there anymore.

Layman with weapons isn't ideal, but neither is the delusion that the police can keep you safe in an area rife with cultural dysfunction and the young, borderline psyco men who target anyone that looks like they are productive for predation.

> What if that layman isn't trying to be a hero.

Stray bullets don't care about the shooter's intentions.

The ideal is for the firearm to be a threat deterrence.

And that it would not be used.

Seems to me that escalating a situation with firearms increases the chances of a gun being shot.

The counterpoint is the coldwar and the threat being more powerful to the actual gun.

People aren't nation-states who take game theory to its logical conclusion.

Why wouldn't people take game theory to its logical conclusion?

Do you believe people are rational actors?

What about criminals? What about someone who is high, drunk or coming down off of something? What about someone who is mentally ill?

Good points. And the idea of someone carrying immediately conjures up hero shaming. It's sad and hilarious.

It's probably safer to just carry a little extra cash and pay off the robbers..

As long as that's all they want.

I don't think that's a good idea. Seeing you have some cash on hand is a signal that you are more well-of and they might be more incentivized than they were previously to take your bag/wallet/etc. Basically there's no incentive for them to stop at just taking that extra cash when they can take that and whatever else they were planning to.

The trick is to dramatically throw all the cash into the air and run. :)

While you are in an enclosed train car? Good luck getting away.

If someone is robbing you of all your valuables, I don't think that offering them some cash is going to help, they'll still steal all your valuables.

That depends on the context. There is a criminal culture in every country, city, etc. In some parts if you delay or are trying to negotiate you'll be killed.

Just make sure the money has a deadly material that will absorb into the robbers skin rendering them unconscious

San Francisco issuing concealed carry permits!? There’s literally only a handful issued for the entire city. There’s no hope of that changing, short of a SCOTUS ruling.

Maybe we should do absolutely anything other than increasing the number of guns in a crowded, enclosed space.

The more likely it is for criminals to be fatally shot by everyone around them if they try to do anything, the less likely they're going to try --- even if they themselves have a gun, they're going to be outnumbered.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/80rno0/fatal_school...

This is 100% wrong. Not sure if you are joking or just misinformed. Everyone already knows there are tons of guns out there. It doesn't deter crazy crime at all.

That's because it's illegal to carry them pretty much anywhere in public.

Yes, there are tons of guns, but who has them? Legal ownership is rare due to the law. Lawbreakers don't follow the law by definition, so they have guns and you can't change that. There is something to be said for evening things up.

No. Just no. What you’re going to have is a shit load of people with guns firing in close quarters. When the police get there they’ll have no idea who the bad guy is. How about we just make the damn trains more safe instead of advocating for Mad Max Thunderdome?

Among the millions (or hundreds of thousands) of uses of a gun in self defense each year in America, most don't involve shootings.

That has nothing to do with what I was commenting upon. There are no deer or elk to hunt on the BART that I am aware of.

Think of it like having a lot more cops on BART, only with accountability for shooting the wrong guy.

I misread your initial comment as saying that guns have uses besides self defense (which I actually think is true). So my comment probably didn’t make a ton of sense without that context.

I get the logic you are putting down here. But I think you are overlooking the fact that people are panicky and stupid in group settings. Give em all guns and a reason to panic in tight quarters. It doesn’t add up man.

Last I checked -- and I don't feel like googling it so bear with me if it's not true or on shaky ground -- it's generally been found that concealed carriers are less likely to shoot innocent bystanders than cops. So I'd compare the following situations: is having a lot more cops bad? If not, then replacing them with non-police is better, in terms of shooting innocent bystanders. We already have a lot of states where you're allowed to just, like, carry a gun, and it turns out to be no big deal.

I think the better counter-argument is that bad people could carry guns, and have a lot more opportunities to use them. But this is based on the assumption that my first sentence in this post is correct.

Can we not make baseless claims and back up things especially when they involve justification of a fatal weapon?

That logic makes some sense in rural areas where it's a safe assumption that many, if not most, homeowners are armed. Where I grew up, anybody thinking of breaking into a house or even of trespassing had to contend with the very real possibility of being shot at; not only were guns common, but many people kept them loaded and readily accessible.

But in areas where few law-abiding citizens are armed and most people have no inclination to arm themselves, all lax gun laws do is put more guns in the hands of high-risk individuals. In most of the incidents discussed in this thread pepper spray would have been more than sufficient to thwart an attacker, but nobody is carrying that, either.

It's also worth pointing out that in rural areas you're rarely in a situation where you're in physically close proximity to potentially dangerous people. I suspect both urban and rural folks are similarly averse to escalating violence, but there's much more ambiguity in urban environments, which explains why people don't even bother carrying, let alone using, pepper spray in cities, whereas in extremely rural areas people keep loaded shotguns in the corner. That and violence is much less common than we believe, and we actually behave accordingly even though we say that we feel unsafe. The calculus is the same in both urban and rural areas, but the input parameters produce wildly different results.

Even if you were to get the veritable Golden Ticket and land one of the hundred or so CCWs in SF, using your firearm in California, even in self defense, would result in your life being ruined.

Move to a SHALL ISSUE state. I did.

Or perhaps we should make different changes to society that allow citizens in public to be safe without having to carry a gun?

I'm all for this. What changes do you propose, how do you intend on carrying out those changes so that the execution matches the intent, and how can I help?

As a country, take care of your disadvantaged people, the jobless, the homeless, the troubled. Enforce a proper minimum wage, scaled as a proper living wage for a given area. Enact single payer healthcare. Stop persecuting minorities, and end the ridiculous war on drugs. Enact gun control.

In the longer run, abolish (crony) capitalism, abolish lobbying and "campaign donations" (bribes) and break the military-industrial complex. Make the wealthy actually pay their taxes and give back to the society that they built their wealth on top of. Increase equality.

> make the wealthy actually pay their taxes

Sounds like you need to get your facts straight.

> A Pew Research Center analysis of IRS data from 2015, the most recent available, shows that taxpayers with incomes of $200,000 or more paid well over half (58.8%) of federal income taxes

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjK...

They are still paying nowhere near the same portion of their income as those of less advantage are paying. Plus their disposable income is still vastly larger, and they're basically untouched by the regressive costs paid by less fortunate people.

The wealthy should pay more, that is why progressive tax systems exist. They reap the largest benefit of society's goods, by a gigantic margin.

Only 47% of federal revenue is from income taxes though. 34% is from regressive payroll taxes.

Taxes need to be way higher. Federal revenues this year barely cover mandatory spending.

And yet their share of wealth increased.

Percentage of a lowering tax base (Trump's tax cuts) is irrelevant. They need to pay more tax in absolute terms.

There is. Let citizens who want to carry a gun, carry a gun. Herd immunity will protect the rest.

Agreed. You have a right to self-defense.

But I've met people out here who do not believe in self-defense. Somehow in their theoretical mind they believe any form of violence is evil. They also believe people who believe in self defense are evil too.

The lunacy has no end. But my stay here sadly might...

Right to self-defense does not mean a right to use deadly force in every situation. The essence of self-defense is to use only the necessary force to ensure your safety, by incapacitating or immobilizing the assailant, until police arrives or you can make a safe escape.

It is not a license to kill.

The right to self defense means that you have the right to use force, including deadly force, to stop a threat to your life.

In a life or death situation, your last concern should be moderating your force against your assailant to stop the threat.

Only in the case where is is a life or death situation. The vast majority of self-defense situations involve the threat of simple material loss. Just hand it over, your wallet/phone is not worth your life.

If your life is threatened, you use the necessary force to stop the assailant. That may include the use of deadly force, but that threat of deadly force (brandishing a firearm) should absolutely not be the first cause of action.

A lot of people seem to have worked themselves into a paranoid mindset, where every unpleasant altercation is a life or death situation. That is a very dangerous state of mind, and one that results in completely unnecessary loss of life.

Exactly. That's what they teach in most self-defense. Avoid situations at all costs. Run away. Hand over the money. Even if you're carrying or know how to kill with your hands.

I specifically said that use of force is allowed when stopping a threat to your life. Your property is not your life.

> The vast majority of self-defense situations involve the threat of simple material loss

What are you citing here?

It is almost impossible for somebody not politically connected to get a CCW in a blue or purple county.

There WAS one police chief in Contra Costa County that had a shall-issue policy for CCW (after clearing training and background checks). In response to this, the Legislature actually changed the law, disallowing all police chiefs except your city or residence to issue you a CCW.

"Sibia caught a glimpse of a revolver in the man’s waist, and let go. The assailant slipped out just as the train doors closed behind him, he said."

I was under the impression that concealed carry permits are extremely difficult to get in the vast majority of California?

Depends on the County. I think in the majority of counties it is relatively easy, but in the counties that people mostly live, not so much. San Francisco and LA County in particular make it nearly impossible.

It's effectively up to sheriff of the county wherein the applicant resides. The sheriff in San Francisco County wouldn't grant a permit if your life depended on it, not unless you're rich or famous. IIRC the sheriff in at least one rural county granted them as a matter of course out of principle, as if to spite the SF sheriff. As you say, in general rural sheriffs grant them much more liberally than urban sheriffs.

It helps if you know the sheriff or can be vouched for by someone the sheriff is familiar with. I imagine that in rural counties many middle-aged adults are only 1 or 2 degrees separated from the sheriff, anyhow, which suggests that rural and urban sheriffs are more alike then you'd think, especially if you exclude the two extremes; but the vast majority of people in urban areas will be too far removed from the sheriff's social circle. California's county-devolved permitting policies probably aren't quite as unequal and arbitrary as they superficially seem.

Criminals don’t bother to try and get permits.

"If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns."

And yet the countries that make obtaining guns more difficult are still much safer. It’s almost like if you rigorously regulate guns and have strict background checks, you can dramatically reduce gun violence... see Japan or Switzerland as proof where you can still own a gun but they don’t have mass shootings like we do here. And no, mental illness isn’t the issue. We have roughly the same amount of mentally ill as other countries, it’s the easy access to funds that explains the 10x increase in gun violence.

That doesn’t prove anything because those countries were also much safer than the US before they had gun control. https://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/doc... (page 2).

Until 1978, you could buy handguns and automatic weapons in Canada without a license. You could buy rifles without a license until the 1990s. But the gap in US-Canadian homicide rates was the lowest in 1960. And the gap was largest during the first 40 years of the 20th century, before Canada required licensing and background checks.

Australia shows the same pattern. It introduced major gun control in the 1990s. But the gap in US-Australian homicide rates actually shrank after that time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c6/Gu...

Australia didn’t have a single mass shooting after they imposed strict gun control in the 90s. You’re just ignoring the evidence that’s right in front of you. Gun control works—period.

I'm pretty sure my point was also based on the data. And I submit that homicide rate, which is a well-defined metric that accounts for population differences and has been tracked consistently across the world and has been for a long time, is a much better data set than "mass shootings," which is an ill-defined metric that's subject to various confounding factors. (E.g. it fails to account for substitution of gun homicides with other kinds of homicides.)

Gun control may reduce homicide rates somewhat, but the typical justifications for it are just bad statistics. Pointing out that Canada and Australia have gun control and much lower homicide rates, for example, ignores the fact that those countries had much lower homicide rates than the U.S. before gun control as well. Any analysis that ignores that basic fact is complete garbage.

Likewise, there is a correlation between gun ownership rate and homicide rate internationally, but that's driven in large part by the U.S. having so many homicides and so many guns. Gun ownership rates vary dramatically inside the U.S. too, but leaving out a couple of outliers (Louisiana and Mississippi), there isn't much of a correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates within the US: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Househol.... Five U.S. states have lower gun ownership rates than Canada and France, but all have higher homicide rates. Meanwhile, 9 U.S. states have much higher gun ownership rates than Canada and France, but similar homicide rates. If gun ownership rate was a dominant causal factor influencing homicide rates, you'd expect to see much higher correlations among U.S. states.

And even then, correlation is not causation. Higher violence may cause higher gun ownership rates. Or there may be other factors. What distinguishes Iowa from Louisiana, which have similar gun ownership rates but vastly different homicide rates? Or South Dakota and Mississippi, or Oregon or South Carolina, all pairs of states with similar gun ownership rates, but vastly different homicide rates?

Please don't cross into personal attack, regardless of how wrong you think another commenter is.

We've had to ask you this more than once before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Wouldn't it make sense that somebody committing armed robbery on a train quite possibly doesn't need no stinkin' permit to carry a gun.

  concealed carry permits are extremely difficult to get

In blue or purple counties, it's essentially impossible.

From June/July

so?

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