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Comment by navi0 | Hacker News Reader

Minor correction: in 2014, the people of CA passed Prop 47, which reclassified most non-violent property theft crimes as misdemeanors [0]. This change is largely credited with the dramatic increase in shoplifting in SF.

What’s interesting is why SF appears to be the most affected county. It might be because it continues to elect soft-on-crime City Attorneys or that it fails to investigate organized crime rings that then operate with impunity. My favorite example of this is Fremont PD doing SFPD’s job and busting an international auto theft ring mostly operating in SF[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47...

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/31/thousands-of-stolen-l...

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The incarceration rate of SF county is higher than any country or major city in Europe. Persecution ain’t the issue. Lack of housing, healthcare and honourable work is.

Even if you released every prisoner in America, besides the rapists and murderers, the US would still have a higher incarceration rate than Europe. I'm sure the SF specific numbers would tell a similar story.

You can't simply compare European to American incarceration statistics without taking into account that the US is an extremely criminal country for the developed world. And no, this doesn't have to do with universal healthcare or any other hobby horse. America had much higher homicide rates going back to the 18th century, well before modern European welfare states. (Not just the US, the Western Hemisphere in general has always had much higher rates of violent crime.)

The fact of the matter is that we're a violent society. Absent total abolition of prison, we're always gong to have much higher incarceration rates than Europe.

The current US homicide rate is the same as in England in the late Middle Ages. It’s been 5-10x higher than the UK the entire 20th century. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/11217607.0002.206/--deci...

Also, we have had Obamacare for a decade. We have a less complete social safety net than European countries, but people act like it doesn’t exist.

As a counterargument to the claim that Europe is less violent than the United States, especially over a historical period going back to the 18th century: Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process than the total number of murders in the United States for the entire 20th century.

An estimated 12 million Africans were forcibly shipped to the US (and precursors) and they and their descendents enslaved for generations.

Did you forget to count them?

I’m not minimizing the evil of the Nazi murders. Just pointing out the US started out with a fundamental violence problem of incredible scale.

There is a case to be made that war is just legalised murder, but nevertheless in these comparisons the context does not normally include war.

And would you really want to? The US is far from innocent with its use of nuclear weapons, fire-bombing Japan (Truman: "there were more people killed by fire-bombs in Tokyo than dropping the atomic bombs"), Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on.

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong about Nazi Germany, just that, the whilst the death tolls may be either swift or cumulative, it remains the case that all countries are guilty on the war front.

So to repeat: the context is criminality not war, where the distinction is the normally accepted delineation of the two.

I wasn't even including war!

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

> Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

Notice the use of the word "murdered" in the second sentence of the article, as well as throughout the rest.

The context was violence, not criminality. But even if it were criminality, the Holocaust is widely considered a crime against humanity.

> I wasn't even including war!

Maybe you never intended to, but your comment reads:

> Nazi Germany murdered more people in a single named process

Reference to Nazi Germany does not, as you say, necessarily equate to war. However "a single named process" would to most readers be treated as narrowing it down to "a single named process" - World War Two.

The most obvious simple reading of your comment would give the clear impression you meant the war. If that wasn't the intention, if the named process was the wider genocide, or simply the Third Reich, then fair enough. But I'm sure you can understand any misreading.

This is putting the US into a worse spotlight than you think.

If it's possible for a mass murdering nation to become more peaceful than the US then that implies that the US completely failed at dealing with violence. Since you are starting off from a much lower base it should be much easier for your country to take care of the problem.

Edit: As other countries pointed out the US did commit war crimes as well.

Incarceration rate is an invalid indicator. You need to look at the crime rate, the release rate, and the rehabilitation rate.

There are cycles of poverty and culture causing this but the government’s actions turn SF into both a honeypot and an accelerant for crime. It does this by turning a blind eye to crime both in talk and action.

Criminals know that SF is a great place to commit crime. This draws them in from all over and they commit more crime.

The DA is selling the narrative of rehabilitation but the criminals are just taking advantage of it to just commit more crime.

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