I Was Robbed in San Francisco While the Cameras Rolled | Hacker News Reader

I Was Robbed in San Francisco While the Cameras Rolled

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192 pointsrawgabbit371 comments

In early 2020, before lockdown, I visited San Francisco as a tourist with my wife. We took a wrong turn at a book store and wound up on a street covered in feces. The next street was fine. Then on the next, we watched a homeless woman shoot up on the street. Then a supercar pulled into a garage.

I'm not the best traveled, I'll admit, so I can't compare SF to foreign cities. I'm a simple hillbilly from the Southeast, but I lived in NY for a time and I've visited most of the big cities in the US.

This was my third time in SF. Every time I've visited, since 2016 or so, I've collected another story like this.

The homeless are way more aggressive than they are in Chicago or Texan cities. The feces. The crime.

Now people are moving away. The author is in denial. San Francisco has nice weather and beautiful hills, but it is a really expensive shithole. A really, really expensive shithole.

Now look at the leadership in the city, and ask yourself, who is responsible for this?

I'm so glad I chose to live in Texas, but at this point I'd move to the Detroit area before San Francisco. At least the rent is good there.

In any case, the census data shows I'm not alone. I just hope the Californians moving to Texas don't vote for the same laws that made San Francisco such a hole.

Also, I've always refused to move to Silicon Valley, despite working in tech. I don't regret it.

SF's areas of poverty are mixed in with the highly visited areas and aren't really getting gentrified. Its easy to make a wrong turn. When you lived in NY did you go north of 110th st or further east then williamsburg?

I've lived in both SF and north of 110th street in NYC. I frequently visit tough parts of Bedstuy. There is absolutely no comparison - the worst parts of SF is much more dangerous than the worst parts of NYC. Expensive shithole is an appropriate description.

A google search says in 2019 there were 41 murders in sf and 99 in brooklyn. though idk where to find crime by neighborhood. seems pretty equal when you account for population

Murder is not the only crime. I, and a bunch of my friends, have been attacked (punched, followed home, etc) by homeless people in SF. This has never happened to any of us anywhere else, and we are a group who travels a lot to a lot of cities, including internationally. I didn't report it to the police when I was sucker punched in the stomach by a homeless guy who ran away afterwards, because I barely saw him and what would the police do? It would just be a waste of my time. Another friend was beaten so badly he had to go to the hospital, but the police did nothing after he reported it.

What point are you trying to make here? What is any cop going to do anywhere in that situation? You need to be aware of where to go and where not to.

2019 Kings county - Aggravated Assault - 9,221

2019 SF - Aggravated Assault - 2,514

https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/indexcrimes/...

https://sfgov.org/scorecards//public-safety/violent-crime-ra...

SF has an abundance of shit, for sure, but it's nowhere near as dangerous as NYC. From my own experience, I concur that "in New York, trouble finds you."[0]

[0]https://youtu.be/agvzE91Xfek?t=77

Strong disagree, in fact I'd say that apart from Bayview, all of SF is safe, there's just lots of property crime, which I'll grant is shitty. North of 110th St? All of Manhattan's been safe for some time now. 110th St isn't even a little iffy. There are parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx that are no-go zones that have no comparison in SF. If you want screwed up, you have to go to Oakland (and boy is it... Oaktown does it all).

The Bishop of Oakland was robbed at gunpoint while walking near the Paramount Theatre just this past Saturday.

> Also, I've always refused to move to Silicon Valley, despite working in tech. I don't regret it.

It’s much nicer, if you can stand suburbia, and more technology oriented than SF, which used to simply be the Valley’s bedroom community.

> This was my third time in SF.

> Also, I've always refused to move to Silicon Valley

> The author is in denial.

> it is a really expensive shithole

I'm always amazed by people who have visited a place a few times as a tourist and think "I'm qualified to shit on people who choose to live here". What makes you think you have any say in the situation?

SF has massive neighborhood diversity as far as living situations go. Yeah, the downtown and tourist areas suck. So what? That's the case in a ton of cities. I've lived in a neighborhood here for 7 years that has low crime, no shit on the streets, and is generally a great place to live.

Yeah, we've got a shit DA right now which hurts the city with increased petty crimes. We'll turn it around eventually.

I lived in San Francisco for 15 years, and it’s getting pretty nasty in some places. When ever I meet someone who’s visited San Francisco, almost without exception, they comment on the homeless problem. The problem is SF is so bad you can’t help but comment on it because you’ve likely never experienced anything like it elsewhere in the USA. Who wants to visit a city where the first thing you experience is aggressive panhandling and streets covered in poop?

>What makes you think you have any say in the situation?

He doesn't have a say, but that doesn't mean he can't have valid opinions as an outsider with a more unbiased perspective.

To be clear I've lived in SF Bay Area for 10+ years and I've also traveled extensively/lived in other world class cities.

SF really is a more expensive shithole. It doesn't mean there aren't any charms but anyone who doesn't acknowledge SF's shortfalls vs. other top cities is in complete denial.

Being an outsider has nothing to do with being unbiased. Those are entirely orthogonal. And frankly, that commenters bias was pretty evident, regardless.

Because we walk around our own cities for YEARS and see less of this then we do on a random walk on a single day.

SF is a very densely populated place, so that shouldn't be a surprise (if you live in NYC, I don't believe you).

Lots of people have visited SF as well as more densely populated places both in the US and elsewhere.

So have I - and downtown SF is worse (in terms of littering, human excrement, aggressive panhandling, street crime) than the problematic parts of NYC, DC, Philly and Baltimore, worse than densely populated capitals in Latin America or East Asia or Eastern Europe. It's better than Indian cities but that is a very low bar for one of the world's richest cities.

I sort of doubt that you've spent much time in the most problematic parts of DC/Philly/Baltimore. Their peers are Chicago, New Orleans, and St. Louis. Not remotely SF.

Just curious, what are you doing to turn it around? I don't think it's fair to use the collective "we" in this case unless you're actively working to solve these problems. Otherwise it comes off as incredibly dismissive.

Voting, contributing to campaigns, some volunteering around prop times. Though I'll admit I haven't done much around the recall of our DA outside of donating. I should be doing more there.

I'm also active in my neighborhood in my own way, trying to get people together for events (think trivia, bar game tournaments, etc). Though of course this has limited during covid.

I think your comment is kinda rude, though. Even if all I was doing was voting, I think I'd still qualify to talk on the issues. Anything more is gatekeeping.

I simply asked, didn't suggest you weren't doing things. Please read my comment carefully--I specifically tried to be careful not to imply anything. I asked because I think participating locally is the only real answer, so kudos.

Have the candidates you voted for won any of the elections? Or would your candidates have done differently than the currently elected officials?

Many people blame government but think their own representation is fine.

California has huge problems with affordable housing and homelessness but their left-leaning residents and politicians seem ineffective against the problem. One would think that left-leaning governments would solve these problems more effectively.

For example, why is the governor of California issuing refunds of a surplus budget when throes of mentally ill and drug addicted citizens swarm the streets with no effective assistance or clean area to defecate? It is appalling to say the least.

Some of my candidates I've supported have won. Some I've liked once in office, some I haven't. Some I've voted for again, some I've voted out. Can't win them all. Just have to keep trying.

Sorry my efforts aren't good enough, I guess?

> SF has massive neighborhood diversity as far as living situations go. Yeah, the downtown and tourist areas suck.

The fact that you needed to say that says a lot. While describing most cities of the world, most third world country cities of the world, you would never even mention the word feces, much less defend its presence on the streets.

And in most cities I haven't had to bribe a cop, like the one time I went to Mexico.

And in most cities I haven't heard the result of an acid attack outside of my hotel lobby, like one of the times I've visited London.

I'd take feces over those examples any day. And yet, I'm not going to shit on those places, because I was a tourist. I get that some places, especially some tourist and downtown areas, are more dangerous than others. And I get that my tourist experience doesn't necessarily reflect the day-to-day of normal residents.

Comparing acid attacks in London to San Francisco's problems is like comparing plane crashes to car crashes. The former is worse per occurrence and gets more attention, but the latter is much, much more common and so worse overall.

You've missed my point entirely.

My point is that just because I heard an acid attack outside my hotel in London, it does not make me qualified to criticize London or those who choose to live there.

Just as someone who visited SF a few times and saw some feces (etc) is not qualified to criticize SF or those who choose to live here.

Right, but if you heard an acid attack outside of your hotel three visits in a row, it’d be a different story.

I’ve spent six years in the Bay (SF and Berkeley), and the unfortunate truth is that the feces, homelessness, and public drug use have become prominent features of today’s SF.

Yes but then you ask people you know whether xyz thing is common, and it turns out the tent cities are permanent, and in fact everyone runs into people who need psychological help each day.

Nobody will tell you that London has an acid attack problem. I've lived here for years and heard about it maybe once on the news. Everyone will tell you SF has an issue with homelessness/mental health, and they've seen it with their own eyes.

> My point is that just because I heard an acid attack outside my hotel in London, it does not make me qualified to criticize London or those who choose to live there.

Yes it does. People are allowed to have opinions and express them. I've never been to SF, but I can just tell from what I've seen on sites like this that I would hate it. You can feel otherwise and that's fine, but other people will judge SF for their inaction on issues like ubiquitous homelessness.

"The fact that you needed to say that says a lot. While describing most cities of the world, most third world country cities of the world, you would never even mention the word feces, much less defend its presence on the streets."

Actually, you might ... I distinctly remember the unaddressed stray dog problem in Buenos Aires (circa 2006) which was not confined to any particular neighborhood or area and resulted in a more feces per block than I have ever seen in San Francisco.

I remember a similar but less pronounced problem in Granada (Spain) where I lived for several months in 2008.

Ive lived in SF for years. It’s exactly like this

It’s not just downtown, It’s not like this in any cities at all

Get out more, and stop living in denial.

Yeah, I lived in the Tendernob neighborhood of SF for almost 10 years. I’d always pass by a lot of what you’re talking about...

- At one point I did a lot of walking there and to keep myself entertained I started tracking PPM (poops per mile)

- one day I walked by a woman peeing between two cars, and she noticed me & apologized. Later I walked back that same route and saw her again. She thanked me for not yelling at her, as she had no where else to go :(

- one day while walking to work, a guy facing away from me pulled down his pants and leaned over. I had to dodge what he launched out the backside. It was maybe the most disgusting thing I’d ever seen.

- I gave a beer to a homeless guy, and he chugged it & threw the can into the street. I asked him why he didn’t put it in the trash can right next to us, and he explained that he didn’t want the tiny Asian women who forage for recyclables to get stabbed by the needles in the trash cans, and that one of them would be along to get the can shortly. Sure enough, less than 5 minutes later, a woman pushing a shopping cart full of cans walked by, picked up the beer can, and continued on.

I've peed in a bush in SF. I didn't want to, but that's what happens when you have humans with bladders and zero public restrooms.

I tried to not pee in the bush. I asked around, went to a few grab and go restaurants, a gas station, but none had a public bathroom. My only option was to wait in line and pay cover to get into a bar, wait in line at the high end restaurants in the area, drive across town to Denny's for a cheaper pee, or drive 45 minutes to a saner city. I peed all over that bush, with a grin, as a fuck you to the idiocy of whoever decided to force me, and everyone else, to do it.

My trick is to walk into a random shop, drop some change in the tip jar, and then ask to use the restroom. I’ve never been turned down. Sure, I don’t want to pay to pee, but they have to clean it at their own expense, so I don’t mind chipping in.

Hotels, hospitals and restaurants with long waiting lines.

The S.F bathroom problem is that heroin addicts go into bathrooms, they lock the door, they pass out, and die or have a psychotic break and break everything they can or smear shit all over the walls and then the store is liable for the wrongful death or they have to clean it up.

The bathroom problem is because there is a ban on charging for toilets, nothing more, nothing less.

Most businesses would be happy to have another (minor) profit center, and most people would be happy to pay. There used to be lots available for a small fee. Instead, we get no public toilets at all because it is illegal to charge, and businesses decline to operate them at a loss. Your description is of the symptom, not the cause.

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

If they had a charge for using the toilets, that would keep severely mentally ill homeless people and junkies from using them, so you are partially right.

...just as they are kept from using them now, along with everyone else, too.

True. In fact...

An elderly woman got evicted from the Tendernob apartment building that I lived in. Every night around 5p, she’d walk into the building, right past security, and into the bathroom. She’d lock the door and spend the entire night in there.

Australia here, Sydney. I would have assumed free public toilets are a government service, like they are here, in parks and train stations and dotted through the inner city on main streets. Are there no public toilets in the US?

The majority of toilets in the US, and all of the nice/good/clean ones, are on private property (businesses, et c). Any that are free to use for all get quickly destroyed.

California (the topic) has some of the highest taxes in the US, but some of the lowest levels of government services provided.

Hmm thanks. That's not good!

I have never had trouble finding a toilet in the 30 or so states I've been to. But I've never been to the west coast, so maybe things are different out there.

Fascinating. Looks like the original motivation for the campaign was the fact that loose change was required as payment, and not really any highbrow philosophy beyond that? This should be an easily solvable problem by now (though judging by the number of quarter-only parking meters around I’m not so sure).

That's fine as long as everyone recognizes this as a conscious, intentional, decision to put the waste in the streets/foliage. Pooping isn't a choice, after all.

Holy Mother, the US put men in the moon but couldn't build some public toilets and now their streets are minefields? Now a small step for man can be just a big mess to clean later.

Calling this "the US" is incorrect. SF is not "the US" and hardly reflects the country in most ways, though carries a ridiculous amount of influence.

> - I gave a beer to a homeless guy, and he chugged it & threw the can into the street. I asked him why he didn’t put it in the trash can right next to us, and he explained that he didn’t want the tiny Asian women who forage for recyclables to get stabbed by the needles in the trash cans, and that one of them would be along to get the can shortly. Sure enough, less than 5 minutes later, a woman pushing a shopping cart full of cans walked by, picked up the beer can, and continued on.

There's something unsettling about this story that I can't quite put my finger on.

Like why didn't he just leave the can next to the trash can? I've saw trash cans in Germany with bottles ringed around them and was told that it was to make it easier for people that collected the deposits.

If there are that many needles it sounds like more needle disposal receptacle are needed

For me, it's all about the jarring contrasts in a fleeting encounter between distant social classes. The guy's homeless along with thousands of others in one of the richest and most technologically advanced regions of one of the world's richest countries. Actively throwing litter into the street comes off as antisocial, until it's revealed to be motivated by empathy for his fellow destitute community members. That woman spends her waking hours collecting empty cans and avoiding needle-stick injuries on the streets of a city in which other people who aren't so different from her spend their time rearranging electrons in very specific ways that entitle them to safe and secure housing, as well as food, drink, and information imported into their homes from across the world.

Friend of the family was on her way to her HS Prom at City Hall at night with a few friends. Dressed to the nines, going to have a great time under the rotunda with her class.

A homeless guy came up to her and put something wet on her arm, directly in front of city hall. It was a lot of acid. She spent the next few days in the hospital recovering/surviving a very bad trip. She still deals with flashbacks, years later and doesn't go out at night. It was an assault, not violent, but much worse all the same.

It used to be just a 'don't go out after sundown' thing in SF. But now it's pretty much all hours of the day anywhere near Civic Center for women.

This sounds so implausible, I don't even know where to start.

First, LSD isn't the kind of a drug homeless people usually do. It has no addictive potential, and it doesn't give you a high. It isn't a "fun" drug, as opposed to the typical heroin/meth/etc. stuff those people do.

Second, LSD is usually distributed in the form of paper tabs. Why would they be wet?

Third, getting high from just skin contact, especially on your arm, is something I cannot find as possible after some googling. The only skin-contact-related use case I've found online is some people putting it on their eyes for faster absorption, but it is not the same as arm skin at all.

I am not accusing you of lying, I honestly believe that you are telling the story you were told by the friend of the family exactly as is. But I have a feeling that the reality was a bit different from what you have described, and I bet I can guess what it was.

My theory: she went to prom, did acid for the first time with her friends there, it ended up being too much and too intense, she got hospitalized, and then she made up that story for her parents. After all, who is gonna be able to track down and find a random non-descript homeless person?

> This sounds so implausible, I don't even know where to start.

Perhaps you should not have then.

I'm not lying, she's not either. Comments like these are why women find it hard talk about their assaults; they are not believed, mostly just accused.

Thanks for the comment.

> Comments like these

Like what? Questioning very hard to believe story?

Despite your incredulousness, I maintain my account's truthfulness.

Thank you for your comment.

>Comments like these are why women find it hard talk about their assaults

How does it have anything to do with women? My arguments would stay exactly the same, regardless if the person in question was a man or a woman or neither. In my eyes it isn't about women lying, it is about high schoolers making up excuses in front of their parents to get out of consequences of irresponsible drug/alcohol usage.

And I even explicitly said that I don't think you were lying, you were truthfully retelling a story you were told. I just doubt the source.

I have explicitly listed factual problems I see with this story. None of which had anything to do with the person in question, but rather the physical properties of the drug and the fact that LSD isn't the kind of a drug that homeless people typically use.

I am addressing factual things, while you simply snark me and segway into a "believe female survivors of sexual assault" argument. Quite literally nothing is similar about those two things, and conflating them as even remotely similar only does injustice to assault survivors and their traumatic experiences.

This was a very good analysis. A fourth point is that drug users rarely give away their hard earned drugs to strangers.

Op is so ridiculous. At start I thought it was burning acid so yeah that would be pretty bad. But your comment made me understand it was about lsd and lol no way this is true.

Have you been to Detroit? The blight and violent crime are are far beyond San Francisco. Less feces and needles though.

"The homeless are way more aggressive than they are in Chicago or Texan cities. The feces. The crime."

So where do homeless people go to the bathroom in Chicago and Texas?

In SF most businesses won't let homeless people (ie. obviously poor people and/or people with severe mental issues) use their bathrooms, and even if they did, most of the city closes down at night, so there's nowhere to go.

SF has some public bathrooms, but they're very few and far between, and if you're homeless, possibly suffering from mental issues and/or on drugs or drunk you're not going to be going on long treks through the city just to use a bathroom.. not to mention that sometimes you just have to go immediately (and the need can be exacerbated by being sick or drunk or on drugs).

So, again, where are these people supposed to go?

Another thing that’s not obvious about the public bathrooms is they aren’t safe. You go in, close the windowless door, do your business, and open it up to find someone standing there waiting to rob you.

In Texas they use restrooms at fast food places, gas stations, and Starbuckses like everyone else out on the town and in need of a pee. Failing that, the one in the local mall. Not having bathrooms available to the public is a problem of SF's own invention.

> So where do homeless people go to the bathroom in Chicago and Texas?

San Francisco has, even by California standards, an unusual lack of an aggressive policy of pushing the homeless out of places where they are visible to economic elites. So, if you are reasonably well-off person, you are more likely to see all of the things that go along with homelessness in SF than elsewhere. (SF also devotes unusual resources to dealing with the impacts of homelessness, but the net result and the frustration it causes for economic elites that are usually the power that directs local politics shows why most cities prefer to spend resources hiding homelessness rather than dealing with it.)

I'm also a non resident, but with connections in SF. Thus I've been there maybe a month of my life. It's the strangest place I've ever been to:

- I would reliably meet someone who was talking to themselves, out loud, every day. Not an exaggeration. I think my combined count of seeing this in my other 40 years is something like 5.

- A guy pooped in front of me. Just pulled his pants down, revealing more pants, pulled those down, then pooped. Didn't seem to care.

- I bought too much to eat at a Mexican place. As I was paying at the till, a barefoot lady walked in shouting something incoherent, went to my leftovers, and poured them into a plastic bag she was carrying. Then she left.

- Parks that are full of homeless people. Tent cities right in the middle of town.

- All this is mixed in with stunning views, beautiful homes, and normal looking parks.

It's not normal, something needs to be done about the awfulness.

Sounds like someone (with a random handle and a 20-minute-old account) who spent ten minutes in the Tenderloin and thinks they're an authority on the entire Bay Area and California in general.

I'm pretty sure there are awful terrible neighborhoods in Dallas and Houston and other places in Texas, too. Let's not be absurdly reductive.

Nor does this have anything at all to do with people moving out of SF, of course: that's being driven by economic forces and the fact that the workers in question now have the freedom to work remotely from anywhere in the world, including all the various places where real estate costs 50-80% less than in SF.

Anecdata is andecdata. I've visited SF a ton for work/business and for tech events and never see anything that I haven't already seen in Boston, LA, DC, any major city. I've always had a great time in SF. It's beautiful, especially at night, usually pretty decent weather, great food, lots of cute girls (everyone disagrees?), a fun place to hike around especially compared to the flat midwest. I don't know if I'd pay what it takes to live decently there, but I'm always happy to travel to SF.

>I just hope the Californians moving to Texas don't vote for the same laws that made San Francisco such a hole.

History repeats, you can count on it with certainty.

> I'm so glad I chose to live in Texas ...

People love to pretend that right-wing politicians and policies of mass incarceration make us safer.

Turns out big cities can have high crime rates regardless of their state's politicians and policies.

Houston's violent crime rate is 1,095 per 100,000 population, compared to 715 for San Francisco.

The crime rate is higher in Houston than Chicago.

Memphis has a higher property crime rate than San Francisco or Chicago.

The safest city in Texas is Plano, with a violent crime rate of 149 per 100,000. The safest city in California (and in the entire US) is Irvine, with a violent crime rate less than half of that.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Houston is controlled by progressive Democrats. Plano is more even but voted for Biden by a 9 point margin, hardly representative of "right-wing politics".

Plano, like many Texas cities, is racially diverse, while Irvine has hardly any black population at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvine,_California#Demographic...

When I lived in India I saw the following...the image will always stay with me and has really changed me. In Bangalore (Koramangala) where I was living was an area filled with very rich people (like western standards rich) who had massive houses, security guards, huge walls and literally right across the street was a garbage dump with people living in it. Was heartbreaking.

> The police officer said he was glad to have the license plate number but that robbery is so low-profile in the courts right now that even if they did catch him, without video proof, the thieves would be let go within a day or so.

So, the thieves go on to steal more - which adds up to costing victims hundreds of thousands of dollars whilst the thieves probably get a few thousands selling it to fences and second hand.

I'm a fairly left leaning, liberal person but this is the kind of stuff a decent city should crack down on - lots of small thefts does far more damage to society than a single bank robbery.

at least with a bank robbery you aren't personally at a loss as all of your money is FDIC insured. And the cops take it seriously enough to do something about it so those committing the crime are more likely to be caught and forced to stop doing so for 10-30 years.

Is anybody else getting tired of the constant stream of inflammatory posts ragging on San Francisco or the Bay Area? I feel like I've been seeing one every one or two days that make it to the top of HN.

These types of posts just seem to fit into this ongoing narrative that SF (and relatedly, silicon valley), are all falling apart due to poor governance. It's beginning to feel like a strong echo chamber in here. What really irks me though is on this and the recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27241085 the associated comments and discussion don't really seem to have any real substance to them, and seem to revolve around one side saying "I visited and it is horrible!!!" vs the other side saying "I visited and it isn't horrible!!!".

This type of pure anecdotal arguing irks me because I really do love Hackernews as a source of interesting and rational discussion, and keeping ourselves to that standard would be super amazing, especially with complex topics like this one. Homelessness and crime in SF are not single cause topics, (it's not just bad governance that causes them) and the tech exodus does not mean the city is dying.

Well when police end up killing someone, it's usually anecdotal now isn't it?

If the anecdote is representative of some kind of trend, then it's worth examining because the 'visceral reality' of these crimes are better understood.

Having 7K in camera gear robbed in broad daylight by rando's in a Honda gives us a hint of understanding of what's happening.

Aside from the 'Justice System changes' and COVID, we may very well be entering a kind of new phase in social culture.

The thought of such a thing happening many decades ago, before massive increase in crime in the 1960's would have shocked people. They had different kinds of 'bad things' then.

This kind of brazen crime should be very, very rare in regular, civilized places.

Yeah its tiring to see the negativity. Ill share my thought that's likely to attract some negative attention...

I think it's interesting this shows up a lot on tech discussion site. I see it here, I see similar sentiments on reddit too. Some of it I'm willing to bet is based in insecurity. Sf and the bay area is where a lot of the best work, hardest to get jobs are, prestigious companies exist and compensation is highest. There's people who are to scared to take the risk and move, or scared to see that they can't cut it and aren't as good or smart as they think they are. So they do things like convince them selves they don't want to be in SF, they repeat the ideas there's to much crime, its to liberal, the col is to high. Then shit post on the internet about it. We end up with these discussions not based in reality.

“We end up with these discussions not based in reality.”

I can assure you that these discussions, while anecdotal, are in aggregate largely based in reality.

I’m very liberal and enjoy some aspects San Francisco provides (mostly related to me being a lifelong skateboarder and surfer). I spent four of the last ten years in Berkeley and two in San Francisco.

That said, I would not want to move there again. Everything (save a few hole-in-the-wall restaurants) is overpriced for the quality.

The public drug use is insane, and itself a public health issue (there were more deaths from overdoses than from covid last year). Needles are everywhere. It’s sad to see people caught up in the grips of addiction every time you leave your porch. People scream to themselves all night.

Crime is rampant and largely unpunished. Anecdotally, last month my friend and his gf were robbed in broad daylight by a car-full of people. Literally had their entire car ransacked at knife point. Many companies (Walgreens) are literally closing down and citing the lack of prosecuted crime as the reason.

Housing prices are tremendous, especially when factoring in the house size and proximity to above issues.

Again, none of these issues are related, at all, to insecurity. I have a high-paying job in FAANG and regularly ignore recruiters at other FAANG companies in SF not because of some personal insecurity, but because my current QoL is far better than a raise in SF would bring. Many of my friends in similar situations/incomes as myself have left for the same reasons.

SF is certainly not the apocalyptic war zone some conservatives claim it to be, and living there isn’t all that terrible. But it’s not hard to see why flight out of the city is such a common occurrence. And it has nothing to do with insecurity. Many people approaching the midpoint of their careers simply want to settle down somewhere more affordable with less stressful externalities.

If you went to sf, lived there and decided its not for you and you moved on with your life then your not the people I'm talking about. This thread is filled with people who went on a trip or saw some articles online and now need to keep comparing sf to their southern or mid west hometown or random places in asia and declare how horrible it is. Of course there's valid reasons to not live in a city, its a different lifestyle. I moved out of sf too, the density and everything that comes with it wasn't really for me.

Other cities have problems too, you don't see constant articles about Seattle, or NYC. https://www.news10.com/news/ny-news/nypd-shootings-up-166-fu... How come no ones writing large rants about how NYC is an overpriced cesspool?

To be fair, "New York is dying" is a big editorial cottage industry that's been around for decades, people in SV are just less aware of it. It's definitely active now.

Which is kind of my original point, these tech commentary sites are focused on sf and the bay area. If there was genuine curiosity in how cities function I would think there would be more diversity in the cities we talk about. But there seems to be a bias towards negative sf bay area news, I think some it is driven by insecurity.

Well, just hide or flag the story and read something happier and more substantive, like uh...Windows vs Mac, spaces vs tabs, Emacs vs Vim, China vs US, C vs Rust, bash vs python etc.

More seriously, I found the stories on this page pretty shocking and interesting, I didn't know it was anything like that in SF. Sydney here, pretty safe at night in most areas, ...and we have (free) public toilets.

I agree with you there's a lot of anti SF content floating around these days. Just wanted to point out that in this article the author does go on to say he loves SF and thinks any uptick in crime will inevitably be countered. In that respect I felt it was a little different from the rhetoric you mentioned.

Maybe the goal it to get people to actually research the choices and show up to vote. I'm tired of the hit articles but also of the politicians stalling any changes.

People are rightfully upset and impassioned about issues that directly affect their daily lives. I'm pretty pissed off my local politicians have proceeded to kick the can down the road on the same issues articles were being written about 10 years ago. My 'progressive' councilmember ignores my emails asking about when the bike lane network they planned a decade ago is getting implemented in our district, and seemingly I have zero recourse beyond pounding sand because this was supposed to be the transit oriented candidate (big lie, more status quo, and now they are an incumbent and likely there for years).

It seems like there is only a solution presented when there is already a plan for who the contract will go to, when it comes to everything from treating the mentally ill or sheltering homeless to building transit and funding local schools. I'm sick of having a public government that works to enrich the private few, and abandon its mandate of serving the public in the process. I don't blame others for feeling the same and posting on these issues on discussion boards. I certainly find solidarity visiting these threads.

I think a big part of the SF hate is that it's ostensibly a liberal place, when it's really a conservative city. It has horrible housing policies and isn't actually racially equal when you look at the wealth distribution within the city. I think SF's external perception makes it a target for vitriol from right wing people on the internet.

SF has lots of problems to be clear, especially on the east side of the city.

What about it (other than some choice outcomes) makes it a "conservative city"? Is it political policies? If so, can you name some? Is it the mentality of the residents? If so, what are some of those conservative mentalities?

If it's just the outcomes you're talking about, what are some "liberal cities" with better outcomes that you compare against? I'd be interested in what those liberal cities are and how their outcomes differ.

It's heavily resistant to change. It's really difficult to build new housing for example due to nimbyism. Many people are trying to remove the parklets and slow street programs. There is simply no progress in this city. It is literally conservative. I think you look at places like Miami and south Florida, they are a lot better at building new housing because they have vastly different policies. The really hip areas are definitely expensive, but a house is still generally attainable in the greater south Florida area.

I think SF wants itself to be perceived as an amazing place full of progress and inclusivity when it's really not that at all. It makes progress on civil rights only because the people of SF don't have to sacrifice anything to allow that to happen. But the second you want to change anything where they'd have to sacrifice for the collective good they fight tooth and nail. It's not all SF residents, but many are like this. You can hear it when the BoS accepts public comment.

SF is objectively poorly managed. It's not just anecdotal. Follow the money and see where it leads...

Personally I see the posts as a strong dose of red-pill happening here on NH as people wake up from their starry-eyed honeymoon with the city by the bay. From what I've seen, it's not just people saying "I visited and it sucked". It's people also saying "I lived there for 10+ years and it really has gone downhill".

People were willing to tolerate the politics and move there for a job. For awhile, it's okay. You're making two to three times what any of your peers are making right out of school, you're single so the rent and living situation is tolerable. You could hit Off the Grid and catch up with a few friends from the job you left 2 months ago, Uber back to Latin American Social club and get trashed on 1 3/5th margaritas, try to meet some random people at Elbow Room and then end up at Rock Horror in the Clay theatre after you didn't get a spot at the pinball machine. You walk back to coworker's rooftop over on nob hill, hit a pre-roll, and then obviously get roped into closing out Yamasho. Roll into work at 11:37am the next day just in time for catered chicken and waffles and then go interview 2 prospective new grads that your 12 person recruiting team has procured.

And then you grow up a little more. You want more space. You find a partner. You have to start thinking about schools and the type of community you want to actually help bring kids into the world. The trash and feces becomes more than just a nuisance, it's a glaring symptom of the endemic and it stares you in the face every morning as you go to work. All the fun just.. stops.. there's a global pandemic. Everyone elsewhere caught up to you in salary because you didn't want to commute 2 hours every day to work at FAANG. The FED pumps billions into the economy and your salary doesn't budge. All in all your 900 sq ft first floor apartment starts to feel really small for $3600/mo especially on top of a 13% state tax, 4% food "mandate", 1% "health tax" and general inflated retail prices across the board. Your politics mature.

I'm not saying you're wrong to be liking the area--I did for many years too and do miss it time to time. But don't just dismiss these posts as "inflammatory". The narrative is real. I even know VCs who've moved away from the area. While the issues of homelessness and crime aren't "single cause", they're also not unsolved problems in other areas. That's the point. SF, for a "world class" city, is doing an utterly terrible job of managing its population, providing resources to keep bodies off the streets, provide usable transportation, etc. Why does the city need an additional 1.5% gross receipts tax to help deal with homelessness? Because all the money is tied up in pension funds.

There's a saying: a democracy functions until the electorate realize they can vote themselves money directly out of the treasury. Couple that with rotten post-modern identity-based equity politics and you've got a recipe for a city constantly in a fiscal crisis ripe with corruption and unable to police actual crime because, quite literally, most of the well-meaning numb-sculls said "we don't want to police crime". The established landowners? "Fuck yours I got mine."

Anyway, I don't know what to say if you're tired of reading red-pill comments. Either ignore them (hit the [-] button) and participate in other threads, or help work out solutions? "I'm tired of hearing that" isn't really an answer/solution (it's not even an anecdote to the contrary). People leaving SF, while they might be giddy in the moment, probably are just as frustrated or annoyed having to make the move as you might be hearing about it. It's bittersweet for me, at least (although maybe more so because I'm a freakin' foodie).

I wrote this comment not because I enjoyed leaving or want to shit on SF or throw gas on the fire. I wrote it because it's sad to live through a city with so much potential turning out to be a corrupt "shit hole" (to use what seems to be the colloquial term nowadays) and ultimately coming to terms with the reality that SF is, like its iconic bridge, ultimately gilded. It doesn't have to be like that, and yet, with a collection of some of the brightest minds I've ever met, no real progress is made. Quite conservative for a liberal city, if you really think about it.

> they're also not unsolved problems in other areas

There aren't a lot of areas like SF - nice weather cities with support in place. In such areas, this is not a solved problem (Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, SF, ...). Basically everything in this entire thread can be said for Seattle or Vancouver just with reduced scale.

This is also increasing in LA as well, stories of how bad Venice Beach is now. Though not sure how SD is faring.

The entire west coast can probably be written off in terms of having the same problems of homelessness and inequality, just to differing degrees. It's far from an SF-only issue.

> The trash and feces becomes more than just a nuisance

Don’t forget the dirty needles

Bad governance is possible and even if you win 90 percent of the vote, it doesn’t mean you are governing well but it does mean you are governing to your constituents priorities. Obviously if people actually were bothered about these issues they wouldn’t continue to vote the same people in. Locals actually want this to happen, but indirectly just as a side effect of their other higher priorities. They are willing to make the sacrifices needed to allow people to stay out of jail, not be prosecuted for small crime, not be prosecuted for drugs, trespassing, not ruin people’s lives with criminal records. They allow people freedom to be a little bad. It’s just unfortunate that this kindness actually multiplies the people that want to receive this kindness. Where are people going to, we’ll the place that doesn’t kick them out, tell them to move their tents, doesn’t prosecute them, let’s then have freedom to do drugs. It’s not bad governance, it’s just different governance. And now anyone who doesn’t like that governance has to just leave, politicians get even more votes than ever before, and this validates that they have had the right priorities all along. Long story short the city gets exactly what it’s citizens want, it may not be perfect but I’m the trade offs are desirable. Personally , I come from Seattle, city with a large homeless population and I went to Portland Oregon and I was shocked how much homeless there are camping on the sidewalks of Portland, and just how it felt like I was surrounded by mentally ill people. It sounds like San Francisco is the same and for people like me that doesn’t feel like a dying city, it feels like a dead city, just inhabited by those who have accepted it as is. No doubt there are some nice outskirts or nice areas, but the threat you feel with unpredictable people constantly around isn’t something I’m at all used to and would never want at that level.

It was my last day in SF after a semester-long internship, and I decided to take photos around downtown. I was passing through Union Square on my way home when I saw a guy weaving through traffic, with two people chasing after him and yelling at him to give something back.

I instinctively started booking it after him, caught up to him in the middle of a food truck area, grabbed him by his hoodie collar, and pinned him down while I waited for the pursuers to catch up. It turns out he ran out of their shoe store with a pair that he was trying on. While I was holding him down, I realized that I still had my camera in my hand, and I instinctively took photos during the whole ordeal [1].

Between this episode and others I’ve seen or heard about (buckets of literal shit in the streets, friends-of-friends getting mugged in broad daylight, sometimes right outside their apartments), SF is really low on the list of places I want to live in.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/BrtlSaPAMNG/

Nobody comes to live in SF because of those things you experienced. They come for the sweet VC money, jobs at Facebook and Google. And likewise, criminals come because that money exists there too.

There is VC money in NYC, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle, and I can work at Google or Facebook from most of those cities. I will never move to SF in the condition it is in, and I'm sure many other people feel the same. These opportunities exist elsewhere.

So... why did the people move to SF? To step in poop? Those jobs exist elsewhere, but not at the numbers they exist at in SF and the surrounding area. Most young people who move to The Bay Area would then end up moving to SF because it's the closest "real" city.

I'm a "young person" who chose not to move to the Bay. The market will eventually even out based on the policy and perception of a given city on generational-timescales. SF didn't become tech/VC capital overnight, and it won't decline over night either. It will decline one junior or midlevel dev at a time going to one of the cities I mentioned or Austin/Miami/etc.

Except that jobs don't go where young people are... Young people go where jobs are, and they tend to want to live in cities as well. For example, see the TV show Friends. As bachelors and bachelorettes, they lived in the city for dating, social life, etc, but by the finale they moved out of the city to settle down.

Actually, research shows that this effect is mixed, and even in support of "smart and creative" jobs following highly educated people [1,2]. Granted, this is in Europe and I don't see any mention of age demographics in a light skim of the paper, but I'd take this over Friends (frankly, I'd take many things over Friends).

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00343404.2016.1...

"Distinguishing between the smart sector and the main sector, the data support jobs follow people and not people follow jobs (as suggested by the aggregate analysis). In the smart sector, the effect appears to be large. In the main sector, the effect seems to be smaller and less precisely identified."

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-30/do-jobs-f... - article version summarizing the paper.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/u-s-mille...

You don't have to trust Friends. You can just Google this yourself or trust your instincts. But barring that, it's well established that younger people tend towards cities.

As for jobs following people or not, your article points out that it's a chicken and egg thing, and that high talent people may attract jobs, but they also beget more jobs.

In The Bay Area, throw in startup culture and VC/Angel funding and you add more fuel to the fire.

YC's stated reason for moving from Boston to Mountain View was actually because the investors were in CA.

You could say that initially maybe it was talent from the top local schools (Berkeley, Stanford), and semiconductor research, that attracted the VCs here. Then it created jobs from companies seeking those VCs, but today, in the current state, people are coming here for the jobs. It's a feedback loop but I wouldn't put most people's ambitions for moving to SF being the quality of life offered in the city itself.

Rather than arguing aimlessly in this thread I'll rephrase threwawasy1228's thesis and my rebuttal: San Francisco is going to be in decline because of lowering quality of life (poop on streets, crime, etc) repelling some talent.

My rebuttal: These were never the reasons attracting people to come to SF in the first place. It was the availability of jobs, opportunities, and VC money and startup networking. If these things disappear, perhaps due to remote work opportunities, then yes SF would tend to decline due to the loss of local advantages. Otherwise, as long as these attractors exist it's going to keep the area a hot-spot. Of course, SF's rent isn't going to rise forever. Eventually it will reach equilibrium where enough people like threwawasy1228 will decide it's not worth the job/opportunity and this cooling down will be hailed as the "end" or "decline" of SF.

Doing god's work! It's crazy that people can be so deluded to think that actually having enforcement against such victimization is somehow negative.

What you did was illegal.

Additionally, that's a misuse of "instinctive".

I know my photographic rights; I was in public on public property photographing someone else on public property, which is legal in the US [1]. The only illegal happening here was theft on the part of the thief. I realize that you’re probably not based here if you think otherwise.

I’m a photographer and a distance runner and I’m good enough at both to have made money off of them. Both reactions were instinctive.

[1] https://www.acludc.org/en/know-your-rights/know-your-rights-...

> grabbed him by his hoodie collar, and pinned him down

I was referring to the battery.

> I’m a photographer and a distance runner and I’m good enough at both to have made money off of them. Both reactions were instinctive.

The experiences and training you have had post-birth have no bearing on your innate human instinctual responses, which are shared in common with all members of your species, including the ones that aren't runners or photographers. It is likely you meant "subconscious" or perhaps "automatic".

Citizens in California are allowed to make a citizen's arrest including use of reasonable force.

1 - https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/penal-code/837/#3.1

> Citizens in California are allowed to make a citizen's arrest including use of reasonable force.

For a misdemeanor (as the shoplifting described in this case appears to be), only if the arrested party actually committed the offense and it occurred in the arresting party’s presence (for a felony, the terms are somewhat looser.)

As the description clearly indicates that the offense did not occur in the poster’s presence and he wasn’t even aware of the offense until after using force to restrain his victim, he committed both battery and false imprisonment by violence, the latter of which is a felony offense, and the former is at a minimum a violent misdemeanor.

What do the courts mean by "in the presence?" Although they have not had occasion to elaborate much, they have said that the crime must have been "apparent to the senses," but that this requirement should be interpreted "liberally." Thus, it will be satisfied if the citizen was aware of circumstances from which he could reasonably infer that a crime was occurring in his presence

- https://le.alcoda.org/publications/files/CITIZENSARREST.pdf

I think this would qualify as committing the crime "in the presence" of the above commenter. Running away is part of the theft and that was done in the presence of the commenter.

> What do the courts mean by "in the presence?"

Even the most liberal definition doesn’t include the arrestor being only aware of the crime after the arrest (even the looser felony citizen arrest rules require both knowledge of the offense and reasonable belief that the arrestee committed it, as well as, as in the misdemeanor case, actual guilt.)

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree here. I think it is perfectly obvious that if you witness theft taking place then the crime is taking place "in your presence".

I judged the given probability P(crime | guy being chased in the streets & SF) as much higher than chance, which is what led me to yield to instinct.

I realize that I was over my head considering the guy was much bigger than me and I had no way of knowing if he was armed or not, but I sleep better at night knowing I did what I could to act as a decent human being.

Citizen’s arrest is not illegal in CA: https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/penal-code/837/ Considering the guy was almost a foot taller than me, I was pinning him down with only a fraction of his body weight.

My usage of instinct, something that I did subconsciously and without thinking, is covered under several dictionary definitions and examples [1-3].

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/insti... [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/instinct [3] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/instinct

Instinct has more meanings than just the strict biological one that you are referencing. Perhaps you need a grammar class and not just biology classes?

"I was referring to the battery."

Fuck off.

Home (or storefront) invasion is a violent act. Theft is a violent act. We (all of us) have a duty to respond - with violence if necessary.

We need more good people like (psychomugs) in San Francisco and he deserves our thanks.

Petty theft is not violence; violence is crime against a person's body. The only violence that happened here was the guy attacking the thief.

In almost all cases, escalating a relatively minor crime into physical violence against a human being is the wrong move, and needlessly increases the risk in a situation.

Grab the wrong person by accident? In a lot of states that might endanger your own life if the person decides to defend themselves.

Escalating to violence over simple objects (property) is to have priorities out of whack.

PS: be nice. I will not fuck off.

Play armchair critic with your hypothetical scenarios all you want, but the objective outcome of this ordeal was preventing a bad actor from getting away with a legally and morally unjust act. The only thing violated was his pride by getting caught by someone a full head shorter and probably >50lbs lighter than him.

> I know my photographic rights

Taking the photos was probably not illegal.

Citizen’s arrest in California is legal for a misdemeanor (e.g., shoplifting as in your case) only when the arrestee is both factually guilty and committed the crime in the arresting person’s presence; whether or not the first part is true, by your description the second is not and you committed both battery and false imprisonment, possibly felony (by violence or menace) in the latter case.

Thankfully, it sounds like the officers involved didn't apply such unusual laws in order to irreversibly damage someone's life when they were stopping a thief. Punishing people for trying to do good things while ignoring thieves and vandalizers would be a fantastic way to cause a breakdown in civil society and a dissolution of trust in the law and government.

There were no officers involved, the guy just left while taunting the victims that he’d come back to their store another day.

Even with video proof, there's a good chance that Chesa would drop all charges anyway.

At this point, Chesa Boudin might as well give the thieves a pat on the back and congratulate them for their enterprising spirit.

Why would you say that and not: the cops in San Francisco have an agenda, and that agenda is getting rid of Chesa. They have this agenda because he charged a few of them with crimes.

The cops are going around blaming Chesa for every problem, while simultainously having one of the worst clearance rates in the country.[1][2]

Also, organized crime might be responsible for the shoplifting, which wouldn't really fit the Chesa/Prop 47 narrative.[3]

>To prosecute, the district attorney has pursued aggregated charges for multiple petty theft incidents by the same person, such as a recent case of stolen scooters.

[1] - https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/This-is-how-the-pa...

[2] - https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/clea...

[3]- https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/Out-of-co...

Can't a person go to supreme court in that case?

No. The legal system doesn't work that way.

>My story originally happened to run on the same day the New York Times did a piece on the growing problem of shoplifting in the city and the reluctance of local law enforcement to police minor thefts. Clearly, this is a trend that will not play well politically and will result in changes sooner rather than later.

I found this naive optimism almost hilarious. SF is in no way about to magically get better once voters finally wake up to how terrible their choices have been over the previous decades. The city's disintegration was a long time in the making and is beyond fixable.

That sounds like American coming to the USSR, seeing a line in from of the bread store and saying "well, it must be some stupid store manager that forgot to order enough bread, he'll surely be fired soon after citizens complain, and everything will return to normal!"

My interpretation would be: voters will never wake up. A more accurate version might be, that statistically voters can not wake up together with some consensus so the problem can be fixed. It's a feature of the system, not a bug. Citizens should accept and live with it.

I wouldn't be so pessimistic as to call it "beyond fixable". It just takes a real effort at restoring law and order, where people who commit crimes know they will be attacked for doing so. That there's an expectation that they will be worse off for committing those crimes than if they were to not do so. A direct juxtaposition of the status quo where most of these people see "not stealing" as a less optimum outcome than "steal something and gain more stuff/money".

Granted, that's a tall order, but not a cycle that cities in the US have not had to go through in the past. The hardest part as I see it, is that at it's core it takes a political shift away from the kind of "progressives" that view those committing the crimes as the victims and those being victimized as the "oppressors".

The challenge is how to make people wake up and see it before things hit even more of a rock bottom. Not just see it, but vote out those who do not and vote in people who actually make protecting victims of crime as their top priority.

SF District Attorney Chesa Boudin ran for office in November 2019 focusing his campaign on ending mass incarceration with restorative justice models, rather than punitive incarceral methods.

Since then crime in SF has absolutely exploded, fuelled by proposition 47 which reduced stealing less than $900 day to a misdemeanor. Add in a massive opioid crisis and the result is a rapidly growing crisis of shoplifting, petty theft, home invasions, carjacking and general armed thuggery.

The rapidly growing homeless population ( half US homeless are in California with migrants arriving daily) makes the situation worse with drug dealers preying on the vulnerable. I lived in San Francisco for close to 25 years and am now 50 miles north. I'll be in the city tomorrow. I have never seen it this bad, or seen so many predators watching and waiting to strike.

It's still a beautiful place, but you really need to keep your wits about you and stay aware at all times.

It seems like a group of 10 concerned citizens could get together and steal $9000 per day from Chesa Boudin until he realizes this is a bad policy.

The politicians would find a way to charge you for it, because the law in the USA is applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner. If you're not a political opponent of them, they'll let the law operate (or not) as it normally would. If you're a political opponent, they'll scour the laws to find something to get you with, or at least prosecute you until you're bankrupt even knowing they won't convict.

See also:

"By the people" by Charles Murray

"Three felonies a day" by Harvey Silverglate

How’s that working out in practice in San Fran?

It needs to be a decentralized protest effort where the risk is shared. 100 individual actors stealing $899 of stuff from his garden over the course of a year and disappearing into the night until he gets the message. Would air to great effect on Fox news.

Unfortunately the political right is unbelievably bad at protest efforts.

Oh he absolutely knows it's bad policy, however he also knows it wins votes from people in San Francisco.

The problem is a large numbers of voters in SF don't realize it's bad policy, and maybe a bigger problem would be why are district attorneys elected positions in the first place?

Even if they weren't, people would elect a Mayor on a progressive no-prosecuting-crime platform who'd then hire an awful DA…

The problem isn't with the position of DA, it's with "progressive" voters.

I consider myself liberal, but I agree with you, the California/SF branch of progressivism are extremely toxic.

Much of the platform is based on feelings and ideology instead of facts and problem solving, but it manages to even be worse than the right wing counterpart somehow because it comes served with a side dish of "holier and smarter than thou!"

Plenty of "holier than thou" to go round on both sides of the political spectrum.

I think there’s a lot of Californians voting in bad policy to curtail gentrification.

I’ve seen the logic used by many in SF.

I had to think about that for a second. It kinda makes sense and works. If you make SF an awful enough place, companies might finally start to consider leaving.

Can someone who lives in SF chime in and tell us why you voted for Mr. Boudin?

Knowing what I know about bay area politics, I bet half the people who voted for him will say that crime in San Francisco is not the district attorney's fault and blame Regan for closing down the mental hospitals in the 70s.

I live just outside San Francisco city limits and everything is peaceful, because the criminals know that the laws are enforced here. It's that simple. Encountering homeless people shitting in front of me, or screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs at 2 a.m or whatever was a regular occurrence in S.F. I thought about homeless people every day in S.F. I don't think about homeless people at all where I live now.

The homeless budget in S.F is $300 million dollars a year. That employs a lot of people! Where I live now it's not a whole lot and yet there is no homeless problem.

I think it's partially a positive feedback loop. I'm not sure how to solve the problem.

But it probably goes: SF spends a lot of money on services for the homeless, so lots of homeless people keep going there to get those services. Other places don't spend any money on services for the homeless, so the homeless people leave.

If every place spent a little bit on services for the homeless, there would be just a few homeless everywhere instead of lots of homeless in a few places and no homeless in other places. But that would require coordination to ensure nobody free-rides and just lets other places take on the homeless.

$300 million is a lot though. I've worked on construction projects building ~250 unit apartment buildings that had budgets of $25 million. It seems like you could just build actual housing for most of the homeless with that kind of budget. (Of course that would require SF to allow housing to be built).

What would all those city employees who work in the homeless industry do if there wasn't a 300 million dollar budget? They wouldn't be able to afford to live in the city.

I think a lot of San Francisco's problems come from too much tax money. They have a $12.3 billion dollar budget. That's more than some small European countries! The city collects an enormous amount of taxes from all the tech money and needs to do something with it so they get the big idea that they are going to try and fix all social problems with the universal and only solution to all problems: more money.

> But it probably goes: SF spends a lot of money on services for the homeless, so lots of homeless people keep going there to get those services. Other places don't spend any money on services for the homeless, so the homeless people leave.

That's really not a realistic view of the situation though. Pretty much everywhere in the US, _all_ major cities at the very least, have "services for the homeless".

I think the problem lies a lot in the "progressive" idea that people claiming "homeless" somehow classifies for a privileged status. They setup a "homeless class" of people that don't have to work, and get paid to do so. The worse they act, the bigger the "problem" is according to their "caretakers" and the only outcome they can expect is to get an even _bigger_ payout.

In most major cities, shelters require a certain code of conduct. Those that don't abide by it get ousted, suffer the cold of winter, and buck up and man up and deal with it. In SF, they just camp out in the nicest of areas, people cry "hey there's some victims!" and they get an even bigger reward for their degeneracy. People that think they're helping stop some sort of cycle are literally just working at creating the feedback loop.

I didn't vote for him but remember the time around when he was elected. There was distractive conversations brought up by the progressives around his main rival, Suzy Loftus. I believe the mayor appointed her interim DA right before the election and the progressives called foul, thinking that she was choosing an incumbent that would go on to win the actual election. This combined with a low turnout and an election decided by less than 200 votes resulted in a win for Boudin.

The alternative would be that they believe it is good policy and they're willing to accept some increase in crime. Not saying I necessarily agree or accept that the policies are necessarily causing an increase in crime, but I do think it's worth pointing out that this is a possibility. (that imo is not unlikely)

You are right it is a possibility, I actually think "incarceration rate" may actually be this alternative benchmark you suggested.

Now the question is do voters realize that benchmark can be artificially lowered by terrible policies that don't help anyone other than make some people "feel good"? We can literally make all crimes legal and we'd end up with an incarceration rate and prison population of zero.

In my social circle, which includes co-workers and families, this is explicitly stated, and it's rationalized with "they deserve more than they have, so if it takes crime to get them more, that's just in my book".

I think it's more likely than you expect, at least on the very vocal group that is aggressively pushing the overton window on our views on the social contract.

Next time you should ask them "do you think the all victims of those crimes deserved their fate as well?"

I try not to be aggressive when I engage in these conversations and instead focus on positive solutions based on finding out why they believe what they believe, instead of contrarian “in your face” sort of takes. They aren’t effective in my experience.

Read “the righteous mind” by Jonathan Haidt. Great audiobook too.

The current crop of California politicians are extremely noisy on Twitter and social media congratulating themselves on how great everything is but are very well protected from ordinary people. Another villain is the supervisor for Venice Beach in LA, a former bucket list tourist destination and now a massive homeless encampment. Supervisor Bonin refuses to talk to his constituents. People are getting very angry... https://vimeo.com/532718306

Many cases are dropped by Boudin's office for insufficient proof, so police has to release suspects. All Boudin needs to do is to not drop that one case involving him.

What's the max punishment if he does pursue it?

Crime has exploded across the US since the start of COVID, not just SF. So I'm not convinced Chesa is to blame. Which isn't too say I'm a big fan of his either.

Homelessness is indeed a problem, but according to the biannual survey, most of the unhoused are from the bay area. This suggested the crisis is the result of skyrocketing rents and the steady disappearance of SROs. Yet another thing we can thank Nimbys for.

Shoplifting does appear to be a real issue, although it's unclear why it's so much worse in SF. Proposition 47 is statewide after all.

I was born and raised in SF. Crime was much much worse in the 80s and 90s. Not saying we don't need changes, but it isn't a post apocalyptic hellhole... Yet.

The biannual survey point in time counts of homeless across California are so wildly inaccurate and skewed there have been grand jury investigations and findings in counties such as California. There is a giant 'homeless industrial complex' that essentially operates on a model of the ore homeless to 'serve' the more money they ingest, buying motels at way over market rate as 'homes' for the seriously mentally ill and substance abuse casualties as if this will magically solve their issues. Bus therapy and general migration to where the grass is greenest is fueling this, along with very lenient drug law.

I think the elephant in the room is the mental health crisis. You don't notice the person walking by you who lives in their car. You notice the person who is shoeless in traffic and screaming. We elected to close our mental health treatment facilities and turn these people out to the street to fend for themselves. Then when they deny offered treatment or shelter we claim they did it through their own volition and allow them to die on the sidewalk in confusion and poor health. This is the reality.

There are only 6000 psych beds in all of California right now, but the state has spent 13 billion over the last 3 years on 'homeless'. Far more will be spent this year but the problems are getting worse.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/audit-california-track-h...

It's baffling how short we are on the services we need in the richest state in the richest nation. LA county alone is anticipated to have over 100,000 homeless in the next few years. That's the population of Burbank. They aren't exactly sure how much over as they couldn't do the annual count this year, but COVID related job loss and expiring benefits should be of no help.

There's one huge issue here though, especially for a nation as liberty focused as the US. Many of the mentally ill, especially at higher levels of severity, do not seek nor desire treatment.

How would one balance the issue of disrupted mental health, with clear impediments of decision-making, against violations of personal liberty, such as with forcible commitment.

Ideally we would look at things analytically. If you've been hit by a car and are unconcious and unable to consent to treatment, you are still treated. It should be that if you are mentally ill and unable to consent to treatment, you should still be treated. If one day I lose my mind and I am on my own on the street, I would hope that I would get taken to treatment rather than be allowed to die on my own.

It's time we put virtue signalling aside when it comes to medical treatment. If someone is experiencing hypothermia and not in the right state of mind, we don't allow them to strip off their clothes in confusion even if that is the natural stress response to hypothermia, we hold them down and get them warm and well. If your friend is drunk and belligerent, you keep them home where they can sober up safely instead of letting them wander into traffic, even if they try and wrestle away. We should do the same for those suffering from mental illness, who due to their illness are in no state to care for their wellbeing, and we should do what we can to treat them until they are in the right state of mind.

I'm definitely in agreement here that there is that threshold, but what I'm not so clear about is where that threshold lies. It's one of those things which I feel the boundary is nothing but grey. However, one area where I think might be relatively easy would be the case of crime + health. Rather than jail, forcible internment in said mental health facility might be a better alternative.

On an aside, it's funny how "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" had such an impact on mental health treatment, and how mental health institutions were viewed.

Walgreens has closed over 17 stores due to increased shoplifting. It is 400% higher than the national average in SF. It’s higher in SF because the repercussions are much lower because SFPD doesn’t even bother looking. Look at the reaction to the theft of the camera. The police said the DA need video evidence, eyewitnesses don’t matter anymore, even with a picture of the car. The criminals are free to commit crimes consequence-free.

While I'm sure shoplifting is a concern, where I lived (around Market/Van Ness) there were 4 or 5 Walgreens stores within a 3 block radius. And several CVS, Safeway, Whole Foods and many other smaller independent ones on top of that. And I (and everyone I know) still ordered everything on Amazon. A couple of them have since closed, and it was long overdue IMO. Shoplifting or not there was no way they were all profitable.

It' easy to find video online of thugs hopping over the counters of shops in San Francisco, hitting shop assistants and strolling out with armfuls of merchandise. They know they will not be caught or punished, so a lot of stores are just closing.

People in affluent areas of SF seem oblivious to all this and keep voting - and donating - to the political class who tell them everything is finally going great... and they assume this is true. https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/walgreens-and-cvs-stores...

https://youtu.be/CLbvtRIo3i8

My friend owns a Shoppers Drug Mart in Toronto. They employ the same strategy there too. In areas with high foot traffic they have a lot of stores close by to make it hard for anyone else to start a business in the area. It ends up being more overall profitable because they take all the sales in that area leaving it harder for newer competitors to operate profitably.

ABC stores in Honolulu employ the same strategy. There are mutilple ABC stores on the same block sometimes.

I was born and raised in SF as well. SF is beginning to look and feel like late 80’s/early 90’s SF. Increase in hate crimes against Asians. Car break-ins. Burglaries. Fewer people on the streets.

I think part of what is happening is that criminals refocused on residents because there aren’t tourists around to prey on anymore.

Chesa Boudin made it worse. No more bail so people accused of crime are free to sometimes commit more crime. $950 and below shoplifting is now a misdemeanor.

Walgreens doesn’t even report the shoplifting anymore. They just closed stores. 13 and counting.

SF does look a little cleaner now than a few months ago. The tent city at City Hall is hidden behind a fence. The tents in other parts of town tend to be clustered in alleys instead of along main streets. Still far fewer people walking around than before. Interestingly, the Marina looks as rich and lively as ever unlike many other parts of SF.

The City feels dead. SF Chinatown looks and sounds more like Oakland Chinatown now. Quieter. Far less car traffic and traffic noise. Easier to find parking. Few tourists. Mostly locals.

Well, the pandemic and economic depression have certainly exacerbated things. I also doubt that tourism in most places in California will really resemble pre-quarantine times until at least June 15th.

Yes. The economic downturn definitely was another major cause. There was increased crime even in the suburbs. However, that crime was mostly car break-ins, catalytic converter thefts, garage break-ins, package thefts. Violent crime doesn’t seem to have increased much unlike in SF and apparently other big cities.

Fair, but a lot of the anecdote details you mentioned aren't really attributable to the increase in violent crime. As mentioned elsewhere, Walgreens closing might be caused by economic downturn impacting a business strategy of market saturation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27273139 and second child post).

The city also feels dead because tourism everywhere in the U.S. is currently dead. SF Chinatown is most definitely not comparable to the state of Oakland Chinatown:

https://abc7news.com/man-shot-killed-in-broad-daylight-oakla...

Oakland's homicide rate is skyrocketing, but so are its housing prices. Goes to show that in the Bay Area as a whole, crime and desirability of living often fail to correlate. SF's problem might simply be people don't want to live in a dense area during a societal shutdown.

I probably wasn’t clear enough. I think there has been an increase in property crime in the suburbs but their violent crime rate doesn’t seem to have increased as much as it has in the cities.

Violent crime has increased in the cities based on statistics that I have read.

Walgreens is probably multifactor but it is guaranteed that the shoplifting hurt badly.

Yes the cities are dead partly due to lost of tourism. However, it isn’t only that. Commercial real estate occupancy rates are worse than during the dot com bust.

Real estate is multifactor. Real estate is booming everywhere in the Bay Area possibly with the exception of SF, not just Oakland.

I think the problem ailing cities is density. East Bay real estate booming while SF prices declining is possibly effect and cause. A tiny apartment in a dense city is not a great place to be in during a quarantine. And correct, the end to all of those commercial real estate leases means much less money going into the economy. New York and other big cities are facing the same doom-and-gloom narrative:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/opinion/New-York-San-Fran...

So yes, SF's crime issues are a pervasive problem. But the current decline ultimately all come down to economic factors and simple geography. Maybe Boudin has exacerbated things, but he has been in office for a minute compared to the past decade of spiraling property crime in the city.

half US homeless are in California with migrants arriving daily

crime in SF has absolutely exploded

These don't seem to be reflected in easily googleable stats

https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1400&fn[]=2...

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

Devil’s advocate: a lot of crime in San Francisco isn’t reported. For example, the case mentioned in the article.

The case mentioned in the article was reported. Reported != solved. If you called the police and they wrote it down, that's really all it takes to get counted.

The crime in the article was reported. From the article:

The police officer said he was glad to have the license plate number but that robbery is so low-profile in the courts right now that even if they did catch him, without video proof, the thieves would be let go within a day or so.

No, the officer didn't take action based upon what they saw, but it's reasonable to conclude that a police report was filled out for this incident.

It would be entirely reasonable for the cops to file a report, but I would not make the assumption that they did.

Reasons cops file reports include:

An intention to investigate the crime

The victim requests a report for an insurance claim

In this case they know it’s a hard crime to investigate. Based on the articles I’ve read, it seems thieves in SF often use stolen cars, so even the plates may not be that helpful. Moreover we have serious crimes like attempted murder and illegal gun possession in SF going un-prosecuted, so the cops cannot assume an arrest could lead to anything at all.

Additionally filing a report with little hope for an arrest makes the precincts numbers look bad. Those numbers will get reported in neighborhood association meetings, and those association people (I’m one of them) can be a real pain in the ass to the politicians (i.e. the boss’s boss’s boss).

It’s just not a good incentive structure and if we were going to do a clean redesign IMO the politicians and cops should have as little control over the official statistics as possible.

Those are all fair points. I was thinking that the photographer would have asked for a report for insurance purposes, but maybe that isn't a great assumption.

The article mentions his conversation with the police, so assume it was reported.

Not necessarily. At least here, when a police officer tells me they don't have the resources to go after something, they don't even ask for any of my details (nor seem to care) so it's hard to imagine they're recorded.

Is crime in San Francisco reported in a lower percentage than in other places? That sounds weird, why should?

When the data supports your views – "here, look at this".

When the data doesn't support your views – "it isn't reported correctly anyways".

This is standard online discourse.

Sure, the data might be bad. That's a sensible objection - I think the question it raises is 'what's your data'. Like, what are you devil's advocating, on what basis. The 'quality of data' question applies universally.

Thanks for actually linking to stats. I've been to San Francisco, it's not as bleak as the anecdotes folks constantly try to put on it. One of my favorite cities to visit.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/audit-california-track-h...

There are all sorts of stats and data out there. finding accurate information is very hard. Most counties have HMIS systems but many are not well maintained which tends to lead to very inaccurate data reporting.

There is also the issue that the moment a person arrives in California and sits on the pavement they are considered a 'resident' by many of the data capture folks, many of whom are pursuing ideological agendas.

There are all sorts of stats and data out there

That's true, do you happen to recall the sources of the ones you cited?

I really appreciate this post. This is exactly why I thumb through HackerNews comments. From the look of it, CA has ~26% of the nation’s homeless population.

The idea that the majority homeless Californians are 'migrants' from out of state is largely upper class propaganda promoted to avoid discussion of downward mobility caused by high land prices.

The problem could be solved by repealing proposition 58 and 13, establishing a state board of commisioners to reappraise all land at the state level at present market valuations, and replacing sales taxes with distributive land taxes. But property owners obviously don't want to hear that and would prefer to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

"Where does California's Homeless Population Come From?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

> As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood.

> L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.

> In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

> Data about migration to California from other states among the housed population showed that the largest group of transplants to the state were actually college-educated professionals

> “I hear a lot of people complain that the homeless people are all from ‘somewhere else,’” wrote Ms. Kroger of Stockton, a lifelong Californian. “I think it might raise empathy and compassion if it turns out that the majority of the people who have been displaced are from the very communities in which they are now trying to survive on the streets.”

'The idea that the majority homeless Californians are 'migrants' from out of state is largely upper class propaganda promoted to avoid discussion of downward mobility caused by high land prices'.

This, like so much of the political data wars over SMI, SA & transients, is partially true in coastal California.

The reality is usually found in non politician friendly audits such as the Sonoma county grand jury findings or the recent California wide audit.

https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/state-auditor-releases...

http://sonoma.courts.ca.gov/sites/all/assets/pdfs/general-in...

California has huge numbers of vehicle living transients who understandably migrate from colder and hotter climes across America, half the US homeless according to the recent audit.

The bigger issue locally in California is migration from places like Redding down to the bay area, encouraged by the street grapevine about prop 47 lack of law enforcement, rich pickings and relaxed drug rules. In San Francisco drug dealers are commuting in from the central valley with Meth and Fentanyl, the current core are Hondurans.

The best way to find out what is really going on is to talk to homeless people, ask them where they are from, talk to local emergency response crews and find out about HUD oversight of Continuum of Care, who in turn are supposed to provide oversight of the CDC. I strongly recommend taking politician and 'non profit' pr and stats with a strong pinch of salt...

I've always thought that an honestly useful product would be some kind of theft deterrent device that you either attach to your car, or attach to your camera equipment, and it detects the car window getting smashed or the tripod getting moved out of range of a beacon in the owner's pocket.

If triggered it should spray a combination of fart spray, glitter, pepper spray, honey, flour, feathers, ink, in all directions. [EDIT: let's take out the pepper spray, see comments]

As a bonus it would also be useful against towing people who try to tow without contacting the owner, but the primary use case would be thieves.

I've seen so many companies making dash cams and things of the like, but considering SF does nothing even given evidence, it's time to actually spray the perpetrator with something nasty and embarrassing.

Traps to defend property are very illegal.

Why would this be a trap? They're free to run, they will just look like a glittering sticky chicken and smell like shit.

Booby traps are illegal if designed to cause bodily harm. It's not so cut-and-dry when it's something merely annoying, like a glitter bomb, though I would definitely not want to be the manufacturer trying to defend that in court.

Pepper spray, whose purpose is to cause bodily harm, was included in the list of ingredients, so the described booby trap would, indeed, be a prohibited “intended to cause bodily harm” one. (Actually, not only do the general laws on booby traps come into play, but using pepper spray other than in immediate self-defense in California is a crime.)

I realize that. That's why I said "annoying", not "less-than-lethal", and used glitter as an example.

Hm, okay, so let's take the pepper spray out then. Ink, honey, feathers, flour, glitter, fart spray.

Any that would cause bodily harm, or be argued to cause it, definitely.

The fart spray and glitter bomb, would be interesting to see how it would be interpreted. I wouldn’t want to be the test case for it!

Non-lethal traps like what he's proposing are legal and surprisingly commonplace. A ton of banks have dye packs hidden inside wads of cash that explode after a bank robber makes off with the money. There's also anti-vandal paint that coats the hands of anyone trying to climb it with a slippery greasy paint.

Even the popular myth that a fire alarm pull station will stain your hands with ink is based on an actual product. High schools with a string of false alarms will sometimes put a marking compound on the handle that is indelible and changes to a bright color when someone tries to wash it off their hands.

Spraying a thief with fart spray and glitter is not illegal.

You're thinking of Mark Rober's famous glitter bombs - https://youtube.com/watch?v=a_TSR_v07m0

Oh yes, the first two are right from those. Add some more nasty stuff, productize it, install it in cars.

Booby traps are mostly illegal. The macro solution to widespread poverty and petty theft is not found in doing petty mean things to impoverished thieves, despite the fun youtube videos that result.

I wouldn't call it a booby trap. It's just spraying them with some stuff. They can run. They'll just look ridiculous and smell nasty and hopefully learn a lesson.

A micro solution to protect my own property would be nice until the macro solution people get their act together.

Also, same for tow trucks. They should call the number on the dashboard -- which does the least damage to the car and saves the most peoples' time, and is therefore the optimal solution -- before attempting to tow or they're in for a nice fart.

This is rich person thinking. Somebody who's willing to smash your car window for a camera really doesn't care if you "embarrass" them for a few minutes.

But surely it's better than standing like a sheep and letting your property get stolen?

Skunks don't hurt but people sure do fear them and the unpleasantness that may ensue if you mess with them.

I mean, I'm all for fixing poverty but I'm still going to want to protect my stuff in the mean time. In fact it's because I'm not rich and I can't afford to replace all my property. If I was a billionaire I couldn't care less about a $5K camera system but I'm not.

As i was getting a flu shot, i saw a lone young guy enter a Walgreens near oakland with an empty duffel bag intent on stealing a few hundred dollars in deodorant and face cream. As he proceed to use his arms to shovel the first batch in, the security guard, one or two employs and a bystanders just started shaming him. "Dont do it!!", "Please no!!", "you can still walk out!!". They were screaming at him at the top of their lungs for 10 second from both ends of the aisle... and it worked! it was surreal but with the empty bag, He walked out distraught. The security guard let him pass out. I couldn't believe it, but he just could not take having so many people screaming at him for it and carry it out .. i guess he just felt too guilty. maybe if he had'nt gone alone he would have had the strength to continue which is why i see people operate in groups.

Wouldn't believe it could happen before i saw it. "criminals are so desperate these no point" is not something i buy anymore, they clearly aren't always fully sold on what their doing, especially if young and any little thing could be enough for them to turn back.

> Since then crime in SF has absolutely exploded.

This is sort of misleading. Burglaries, motor vehicle thefts, and homicides went up, but all other crimes went down. Specifically in the case of homicides, there were 7 more compared to 2019.

> I have never seen it this bad.

Crime is still at an all time low in SF. The rate of crimes has roughly remained static for the better part of two decades. The increased number of homeless just makes it more visible.

> Burglaries, motor vehicle thefts, and homicides went up, but all other crimes went down.

...but other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

Murders don't just disappear, they are almost universally reported and investigated. Burglaries and car thefts need a police report to make an insurance claim.

For crimes like assault though, if the police convince the victim that reporting it is pointless, it doesn't show up in the stats. Anecdotally, this is what I have heard is happening.

You don’t suppose this is passive resistance by the police to all the scrutiny they’ve been receiving? Start telling people that the system is all backed up and their hands are tied?

> Anecdotally

hmm...

Right, anecdotally. The police don't keep stats on how often they tell crime victims to not file a report, so it's hard to get good data. If you look around on the internet, or ask people you know in SF, you will get stories.

It's funny how SF has turned into a daylight sociological experiment.

Remove enforcement of several crimes and see it have areas reminiscent of 3rd world countries in a matter of years.

(But don't expect this to be in any sociological studies, scholars will still blame "lack of education", "lack of opportunities", etc, while those have a role to play, the major factor that changed here is pretty obvious)

> see it turn into a 3rd world country in a matter of years

This is just a wild thing to claim.

How is it not? You have ultra rich living above and driving around people living in tarps on the street just like what you see in corrupted "third world" places around the world. It is so demoralizing living near a homeless encampment and seeing how people live every day for years, and seeing nothing done to improve their situation. No other first world country I know is like that. First world countries have governments that support their citizens even at the lowest rung of the ladder. What we have is a third world oligarchy, where politicians listen to powerful people looking to personally enrich themselves first and foremost, and if something happens to help the common man rather than hurt them it is usually happenstance, or highly diluted from the original aim to the point of being inconsequential. There's only action when there is profit motive. It's corrupt.

Last time I was in France (Lyon, a few years ago), there was quite a number of homeless people camping out in the parks. Is France also a third-world country?

I agree that the homeless situation is bad. I don't think blanket claims that other "first world" countries handle it much better are necessarily true, unfortunately.

One (or a couple of) cities don't represent the whole country, naturally.

These were probably either recent migrants ("refugees" for lack of a better term) or Roma camps (which are not today's problem). They could as well just be homeless, sure (depends on the park, location, etc). Mostly, they are the result of progressive policies gone unchecked as well.

But are these in the same quantity/concentration and causing as much trouble and being as aggressive as the ones in SF?

How bad are the banlieues?

They have several problems but not necessarily homelessness.

> One (or a couple of) cities don't represent the whole country, naturally.

Very true. Neither does San Francisco, of course.

> But are these in the same quantity/concentration and causing as much trouble and being as aggressive as the ones in SF?

Absolutely not. My point was that San Francisco's problem is not obviously that it's in a "third-world country".

Those homeless in France have better healthcare and mental health treatment opportunities than I do working full time.

There are many people (both in the US and in the world in general) who could quite honestly say the same thing about the homeless in San Francisco... This does not make their situation particularly wonderful, in either case.

It's amazing what happens when the cops are in open revolt against a DA that is finally holding them accountable.

This argument is a joke. Boudin is not pressing charges. The DA is entirely the problem here.

Well the problem is that if you only change these policies in one place and don’t follow through on the rest of the chain it’s going to be a disaster.

And the interesting thing is, the laws are even still more draconian than in Western European countries, booking processes more traumatic, prison terms longer, prison conditions an order of magnitude worse, and supervised release much more onerous.

And yet Western Europe doesn't suffer anything even close to San Francisco's crime levels.

Probably because the police actually investigate cases in Western Europe.

They won’t investigate petty thefts. Bike theft is almost legal in Italy. But they will file a report every time.

> the laws are even still more draconian than in Western European countries

Theft is effectively legal in SF. Is it in those places?

> booking processes more traumatic

Subjective nonsense.

> prison terms longer, prison conditions an order of magnitude worse, and supervised release much more onerous.

In SF, theft does not receive "prison terms".

It isn’t half, maybe 25%? I crunched the numbers awhile ago and it was something like 2X California’s population share, which is about 12%.

Yes, it's estimated to be 26.73% in 2019 [1].

[1] https://www.usich.gov/tools-for-action/map/#fn[]=1400&fn[]=2...

'About 150,000 people experiencing homelessness live in the state, including about half the country’s estimated 211,000 residents living unsheltered on the streets or in vehicles.'

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/audit-california-track-h...

My opinion is that this is a national problem and we should revert back to a new version of JFK's 1960's model for HUD

John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham who wrote "the book" on mass incarceration, has been at pains to point out that crime (and particularly violent crime) has risen uniformly, across the country, in both "red" areas and "blue", and the rise cannot be attributed to "progressive prosecutors", or really any particular policy intervention.

Someone else mentioned that crime is at an all time low in SF, who is wrong?

As a foreigner, though a frequent watcher of American crime shows: what exactly is a misdemeanor, and why is it bad that stealing is one? What changed when it was reclassified?

The short answer is that misdemeanors are crimes that aren't that bad (e.g., trespassing), and felonies are crimes that are really bad (e.g., kidnapping). Felonies carry stricter sentences than misdemeanors. By saying that stealing up to $950 worth of product per day is only a misdemeanor, a lot of the deterrent effect goes away.

And besides that, I've heard many times recently [1] that police and/or courts do not enforce misdemeanor property crimes at all. So it's not just that it's only a fine but rather that there are believed to be no consequences at all.

I don't understand why. I hear talk about "priorities". Perhaps it's true that it's not "worth" enforcing these because the people responsible don't have any money to pay fines. But on the other hand, I don't think police actually got defunded, so if they've de-prioritized a major chunk of their job, what are they doing instead? I have basically no idea. Extra public safety things during the pandemic? It'd be nice to think they're doing a better job closing felonies but I haven't heard any evidence of that. Are they sitting around doing nothing? I almost hope they are; my more pessimistic take is that they now can really spend extra quality time harassing minorities...

[1] meaning it seems widely believed, correctly or not

In this case a misdemeanor for the theft of less than $950 is handled with a ticket and fine. There is no jail time and they go free after the ticket is handed over.

How can you make those causation statements so confidently?

Prop 47 was passed 2014. The opioid crisis has been going on forever. People are using these stories to fuel their political biases.

Crime across the US is up. In Denver, car thefts and break ins were common to the point where police didn’t even show up. I was involved in a head on collision and the cops said it would be 4 hours before a unit would arrive. After waiting 3 I called and was told “just get the other drivers information” (like I hadn’t already) and leave. I couldn’t leave, obviously. I quickly moved away from the city to another state. I’m still out $23,000 for my vehicle because insurance wouldn’t pay without a police report. Crime is up all over America.

Some Maps and statistics to confirm or refute one’s perception about San Francisco:

https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime

https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

https://www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/sanfrancisco

I should add that I am not a US citizen nor I live in the US. I live in a 10 million inhabitants south American capital, where Tv reports on crimes of all sorts committed every day. I, however, have not been robbed in the last twenty five years. Sometimes personal experiences do not reflect geography and statistics.

Edit: comment line.

I'm sure it's skewed because of the Internet, but between Twitter and Hacker News it sounds like San Francisco is basically Somalia now.

Most people I know who didn't see the writing on the wall and get out 2-3 years ago is looking for the exit fast. I only hope they understand when they leave that they voted for this outcome, over and over.

I live in SF, and the comments you've seen on HN are accurate.

It's not Somalia, but there's always the potential for escalation to violence on the street, in stores and near ATMs - I've seen it.

I wouldn't allow any of my family to walk alone anywhere.

You're shadowbanned btw.

People love to hate San Francisco. Even before this current news cycle of pretty crime there were constant negative articles about sf.

I decided to stop going there back in 2015. It was embarrassing to bring a friend from Argentina to the city and have her regard it in the same light as the worst parts of Buenos Aires (that she had seen, anyway). It doesn't sound to me like things have improved...

I’m not taking offense wt your statement, but do want to say: You are being unkind to Somalia. I’m serious.

The perception of Somalia is skewed heavily by western news for the simple reason that the Somali people rebuffed the attempted invasion by US & UK proxy forces. (Guessing you most Americans don’t know that even happened.)

Somaliland isn't somewhere I would want to live, but I would pick it over the Bay Area. With an arrangement with the tribal elders, one would be safe, and property crimes like this would be dealt with by a judge. Unlike in SF.

Fair enough. I don't actually know that much about Somalia other than the (probably outdated) impression that it's a place that literally has no government.

Somaliland is an autonomous region seeking to break away from the larger Somalia and get international recognition as an independent nation. From what I hear, it is a relatively peaceful and orderly place

As a person whose family is from East Africa, saying that you would literally live in Somalia over the Bay Area is really goofy.

There's a GDP per capita of ~250 bucks, the 4th lowest in the world. Even if you lived in some western enclave of Mogadishu, your quality of life would be so much lower that it's incomprehensible. You think the poop in the streets in the Bay Area is annoying? In Somalia 1/3 of people have to defecate in the open. 50% of people don't have access to a basic water supply. The government is still trying to contain Al-Shabab--bombings and skirmishes still happen. As a westerner, especially if you're white, you'd live in constant risk of being kidnapped for ransom.

I don't like the bay area either, but at least keep the criticism tethered to reality. Somalia isn't Syria or Venezuela, you probably wouldn't be murdered but it would be a very dangerous situation.

https://www.unicef.org/somalia/water-sanitation-and-hygiene

A US Service member was dragged dead through the streets in '94 in celebration of defeating a UN peace keeping mission to ease an on-going famine, and those images were broadcast all over the world.

It's easy to underestimate just how powerful that image is in shaping perceptions, and rightfully so: a lot of violence has been done to us citizens by thugs and pirates using the the lawlessness in Somalia as cover.

The pirates didn't start the practice of abusing lawlessness. After the civil war and the breakdown of the state, fishermen from other countries would illegally trawl the waters off the Somali coast and industrial waste was being dumped by foreign opportunists. Just one instance involved 600 drums of radioactive waste from Europe and the US. This exacerbated the problem by reducing the fish supply further.

Eventually, this led to violent clashes where Somali fishermen would take over ships in the area illegally for ransom. This quickly became the piracy industry as we know it.

Never left the Palisades, have you? SF has tons of property crime but much less of the violence you'd find in hellholes like St. Louis, Missouri or Baltimore, Maryland.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

The thing about high murder rates, at least in American cities, is that it's mostly gangs fighting each other over selling drugs. If you're not part of the drug trade, your odds of being murdered are not that much greater than anywhere else (stray bullets are a concern).

Property crime, on the other hand, affects a much broader swath of the population.

Ok, so SF doesn't have the same amount of murder as the most rough and ugly ghettos in the Western World? That's good and true, but I'm not sure it helps make an argument.

The difference is in the level of violence. The property crime is ubiquitous in SF, but it's largely crimes of opportunity. Having something stolen when nobody is looking is very common while being mugged (at knifepoint or gunpoint) is quite rare. I once directly confronted a would be bike thief and he merely walked away. I would not recommend such confrontation in other cities where the possibility of violence was greater.

The difference is more stark.

In St. Louis and Baltimore it's crime inside the ghetto - very violent.

In SF it's homeless, semi-homeless and jerks stealing from the upper middle class who have an odd view on community and crime.

It’s just Hacker News confirmation bias. San Francisco has roughly the same level of property crime per capita as Toronto, Canada.

I’ve lived next to golden gate park and the presidio for close to 5 years and they have never been anything but clean, beautiful and well maintained.

I have never seen any crime in my neighborhood first hand. I often walk at night to enjoy some fresh air and have never felt unsafe.

The city really changes greatly depending on where you are. So when I see the comments that blanket everything together as a giant failure it seems a bit unfair.

This is in contrast to other cities like Seattle where many parks are a mess and the streets haven’t been paved since 1925.

SF has many large problems, but it also still has immense natural beauty and glorious areas. All is not lost

https://recallchesaboudin.org/

They just elected him a year ago. He didn't change since then. He promised to do exactly what he did - release criminals from jails to the streets, reduce policing and de-emphasize small crime enforcement. This is exactly what is happening now. Why would anybody want to recall him for doing exactly what they elected him to do?

> Why would anybody want to recall him for doing exactly what they elected him to do?

Because people thought that what he promised to do was good until they saw firsthand the consequences of it.

But do they? I'm still not sure they actually do.

What's the point? His policies are what the local population were asking or even begging for. Even if the recall is successful, you will just get you a carbon copy. He is not using his position of power to abuse a powerless electorate, so why not let the local experiment go on?

Even if you are against it, you should still want that experiment to continue right? Otherwise you would get people claiming that x policy wasn't actually tried for real and that y opposition made it fail before it could bear fruits. NYC went bankrupt right before it came back and reached one of it's peaks. And maybe hitting the bottom of the barrel was what it needed.

I visited Orange County and west Pasadena this month; both were free from homeless and it was wonderful. Then I spent time in LA and Long Beach and the homeless made the experience very unsafe and disgusting. Now that I have kids, I will not be returning to places that tolerate the drugs, crime, and poop on the street the homeless bring.

The homeless are bums and should be treated as such. Too many benefits and too much sympathy are given to them, and this results in places becoming hellish to live for normal people.

My CA home, in Sunnyvale, is about 40 miles south of SF. I never go up to SF anymore, and I won't take meetings there. People who visit from out of town ask to go up to the city, and I won't take them. My life and personal safety is more important.

I admire Jefferson (the man whose camera was stolen) for being so gracious about it. But he shouldn't blame himself.

This is nonsensical. San Francisco's crime problem doesn't extend to the peninsula.

It mostly does not. San Jose still has deep trouble with homeless camps, that is getting worse (and more widespread) year by year, so I imagine crime will get worse - thought not as bad as in SF, most Valley municipalities aren't as insane as the shining beacon of insanity in San Francisco, neither their inhabitants would likely tolerate these levels of craziness for long.

If it's anything like the smaller cities in LA county, they probably use the police to push off the homeless across the border. Culver city and santa monica are notorious for this practice.

Judging by the size of the camps and the amount of stuff there, the police is not moving anybody anywhere. Pre-pandemic, there was a cleanup effort every 4-6 months where things went back to the usual within a week or so. Last year, not even that.

Property crime is at least getting common enough in the South Bay to warrant parking lots posting signs warning people to stow their luggage in their trunks. Seems like car break-in culture has spread beyond S.F.

I live on the peninsula also but have no problem going to SF for meetings. What parts of the city do you get asked to meet people in? I drive to BART and ride up to SOMA without a second thought (and I am neither big nor trained in self-defense).

There are a lot of homeless and SF is indeed in shit hole in a lot of areas, but I don't understand people who say they wouldn't visit because it's not safe or whatever.

Looking at crime rate rankings [0], SF is pretty low compared to other US cities both in terms or violant crimes and property crimes. What am I missing?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

You're missing that the data in that page is from 2017, and Chesa Boudin didn't become DA until 2020.

George Gascon,the DA at the time, was also a so-called "progressive DA".

You're "missing" that San Francisco's policies (and to a degree California's as a whole) are always used as political footballs. Whatever the perceived issue is, it's always clearly due to [insert controversial policy and/or politician here, whether the controversy is genuine or imagined] and a sign of why San Francisco is always [the way of the future|an object lesson to others].

I'd really like to see somebody claiming right now that Chesa Boudin's policies and their results are "the way of the future".

Compared to Medellín or Fallujah, it's probably even more safe. But I don't go to these places either. And compared to, say, just going to the beach, going there is much more dangerous, with pretty much zero benefits - even if I don't get mugged (which I most likely won't - I don't have anything valuable on me and I don't look like somebody inviting to be messed with) I will just end up being pissed off about how disgusting it all became. And then there's a risk they break a window in my car just because, if I go in a car. Or I step in somebody's poop. Why would I need all that trouble?

Have you actually been to Medellin?

It's a fairly safe city and even safer than most American cities.

This isn't the city of the 90's Pablo Escobar anymore.

Fallujah is probably doing alright ever since the Islamic State was expelled from there.

In that wikipedia article, sort by "Larceny-Theft" descending. San Francisco is number 2 per capita.

The issue with San Francisco is that, like this author reported, you see so much brazen property crime, in broad daylight with tons of people around, in otherwise upscale and/or touristy areas. Most of the crime in other cities is concentrated in bad neighborhoods (that is pretty much what makes a bad neighborhood bad).

Years ago I was in a packed Starbucks in a somewhat touristy area of SoMa, when a guy came in and pulled a gun on someone working on a laptop closest to the door, just grabbed his laptop (ripping the plug out of the wall socket) and ran, and there were tons of people on the street.

> The issue with San Francisco is that, like this author reported, you see so much brazen property crime [...] in otherwise upscale and/or touristy areas.

This is, in fact, the problem: that crime in SF isn’t as concentrated on the disenfranchised underclass as the elites prefer it to be.

Sort by theft and that's just the reported number. We experienced theft about once a year. Never bothered to report.

If a city stops prosecuting crime, do you think people are:

A) more likely to report crimes, or

B) less likely?

How does this affect crime statistics?

The problem with looking at crime rate statistics is that they only tell you about reported crime levels. If everyone knows that a petty theft, or a mugging, or a minor assault isn't going to be investigated or prosecuted then people stop bothering to report it.

This is referred to as the "dark figure of crime" by sociologists (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_figure_of_crime) which sounds a bit like a description of Batman.

Most people don't file a police report when their $300 bike is stolen yet again or their car is broken into for their phone charger.

Ton of cities? Please, elaborate. Across the world I’ve never felt as dirty and disturbed as I have in SF. No other cities with homeless have ever felt like this.

FYI this type of stuff was happening in SF well before Chesa Boudin. An SF local news crew was robbed (and shot) while reporting in Oakland (https://deadline.com/2019/02/san-francisco-news-crew-robbed-...). More recently an SF news crew was robbed while reporting on car breakins, granted this was during Boudin's tenure.

Maybe Chesa Boudin's policies aren't helping, but whatever we had before wasn't working either, and with the pandemic happening at the same time I think it's unfair to solely put the blame on him due to confounding variables.

I lived in SF for almost 10 years and it seemed like property crime crime was gradually ticking up well before Chesa Boudin. The easy culprit to blame is honestly just massive and growing income inequality. If you really want a solution to the problem, close off SF from the rest of the poor United States, or lower the income inequality.

> FYI this type of stuff was happening in SF well before Chesa Boudin. An SF local news crew was robbed (and shot) while reporting in Oakland

That’s...not an example on anything happening in SF. It’s an example of things happening outside of SF to people working out of SF.

It's pretty close, and many of the criminals commute (for free) from Oakland. But my point still stands, crime (property crime at least) was going up over the last decade (https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/prope... - click Property Crime tab).

There are problems in SF, but they are not new. Not at all.

Everyone who thinks that SF has somehow magically turned into sh*thole in the last N months: no it hasn't.

I've lived in SF since mid-2011 continuously. It's been about the same, give or take.

P.S. It is unfortunate his gear got stollen. Hope the criminals get some justice.

SF voters made their bed and now they get to sleep in it.

As a casual outside observer, it feels like a lot of people are throwing the blame in one direction or another, but while crime may be bad in SF, the level of crime in general is bad in most metro areas in the United States when compared to other developed nations. So there are probably bigger, more fundamental issues at play. SF itself is interesting in that they are so wealthy, and so much power is centralized there, yet it feels like their policy is either ineffective or makes things worse. Like how can a city so rich have things like a feces problem so bad that people make poop maps to track it, and rows of people abusing drugs in bart stations during the day?

It isn't just crime, it seems like there is so much "societal debt," issues that needed to be addressed but were instead kicked down the road. Policy makers are either paralyzed/ gridlocked and cannot even attempt to fix things because they are already in over their head with all the accumulated problems that appear to be festering and getting worse, or they have been captured by powerful interest groups that prescribe selfish policies at the expense of the public. This leads to whatever actual policy happening being something that is akin to releasing a bunch of coyotes to solve the rabbit problem, only then to be left with a coyote problem, escalating up the chain of trying to solve smaller problems while simultaneously introducing larger ones.

The crime, working and middle class insecurity, homelessness, issues with law enforcement, overwhelmed judiciary, captured/ gridlocked legislature, drug abuse, the crisis in mental health, race and demographic changes and whatever else. All of things are big issues, and the United States is dealing with them all at once, causing all of them to cascade into each other and exacerbate everything. It is probably so overwhelming that it is extremely difficult to address in a system that requires elect-ability in the short term. It is probably really hard to get elected on a platform of completing step 1 of a 50 step platform that would take years more than you have to implement. On top of it all, these things can hardly be discussed in when everything is so polarized, everyone is too busy preaching to their base and blaming the other, and they are all pretty much is in a continuous state of whiplash from the spin of news media working in overdrive, who are themselves also fighting for their own existence too. For most people, things probably feel like they have been falling apart for years, decades even, while the well off have hardly noticed a difference at all. I don't even know how you would begin to dissect this situation.

pretty messed up that the cops won't do anything even with a picture of the license plate on the getaway car. thieves know this which is why they continue to rob so brazenly. another consequence of growing wealth inequality. when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose. relatedly, i moved out of sf last year after about 5 years there. i really love the geography and other aspects, but couldn't live comfortably anywhere in the bay area while saving any money even with a $200k/year tech job. who is SF for?

Strange to see this happen at Crissy Field, which is decidedly in the "nicer part" of the city. Car break ins are common at the Palace of Fine Arts (about a mile away from where this incident happened), but most people would consider Crissy Field as a relatively safe place in the city where it's common to let your guard down (unlike at say Union Square).

Is it not an obvious question to ask whether this is really just about "progressive politics" and not actually about "pandemic and lack of social safety net + police unions responding to protests threatening their jobs + insane cost of living?"

I lived in the Noe Valley in 2006-2009 and really loved it. I went back in 2016 and things have changed so horribly. San Francisco is imploding and while the solutions are simple, I don’t get the impression the politicians have the courage to implement them.

SF is a weird city crime wise, lots of property crime and theft. Occasional shootings but nothing like a rust belt war zone city.

San Francisco’s crime is mostly inconvenient for rich people, that’s why it’s in the news.

St. Louis is the 13th most dangerous city in the world but you won’t hear about it.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/243797/ranking-of-the-mo...

Probably just that the contrast is so stark.

The NIMBY cost of living problem is definitely huge add little annoys me more. I do wonder though if that's truly the cause for the high homelessness. Where are the homeless from? Are the from SF or other parts of CA or even came there from other states because of good weather and comparatively soft treatment they receive in SF? Genuine question. I've on several occasions tried to find statistics on this, but failed.

I would imagine they are from all over the US.

"The NIMBY cost of living problem is definitely huge add little annoys me more." it's not hugely relevant to the problem. California is massive, and 99.5% of it's land is available for most kinds of development. Citizens of a community have every right to decide how it should be managed.

Most 'high income / high property prices' places in the US in the world do not have this kind of crime problem - generally it's the other way around.

Gentrification for all it's good/bad elements generally leads to a reduction in crime.

So you are ok with stealing if the victims are "rich"?

No, what I’m saying is on the spectrum of crime in the US it’s insignificant.

Seems almost surreal, coming from a rural state.

I completely understand the California exodus. I strongly hope things turn around and California again becomes a 'golden state'.

There is this documentary called "Seattle is dying" by KOMO news: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw

The situation in this documentary is similar to SF.

Forget it Jefferson, it’s Chinatown, er, San Francisco.

It amuses AND saddens me that a downvoter didn’t get the reference to “Chinatown”, an all time great film

Yes, that seems to be how it is in SF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arss9V3A1VA

Is it possible that, despite good intentions, the policies being implemented there actually have very harmful effects?

Yeah, I think that hits the nail on the head.

The nimby problem, on the other hand, shows how selfish intentions can also lead to very harmful effects.

Spent 5 years there and am not envious of anyone living in the Bay at all.

I actually think NIMBYism isn't a San Francisco specific problem. It was just brought to the forefront because many people decided to move there all of a sudden. But the reality is most popular places have people choosing to protect their property values.

This rings true, although it’s hard to think of cities where the issue has resulted in as much harm as in SF.

These harmful effects are intended. That is the strategy.

Its important to understand why. Your life depends on it.

Why? I mean, you can't tell people their life depends on knowing something and then not tell them.

I suspect they mean that some people in the area have an aligned agenda (not necessarily conspiring, just aligned) of trying to push the tech industry back out of the city, because they resent the gentrification. Can’t speak to the life depends on it part, but I suppose it’s an allusion to the dangers of crime.

I'll bite. Can you please expand on what you mean by this?

I'm not who you are asking but one thing to consider is you can't have a revolution without revolutionary conditions, or put more simply, revolutions don't generally happen when times are going good.

Is there a possibility that sky is blue and water is wet? SF is the place everybody looks at when they want to know what not to do.

The biggest problem is that the Cops 1) hate the DA because he's charging them with crimes, and 2) have a terrible clearance rate, which predates the current DA. They're hoping to drum up the narrative that this is his fault and replace him in a recall election.

To some extent, it's working. Every time you talk to the cops right now, they will tell you that the crime is the DA's fault.

I feel like a lot if it stems from people talking about petty crime like theft as some sort of "cycle". They get tricked into thinking that means you can break it by ignoring it. "Break the cycle, they will stop committing the crime!" With the only voter controlled lever being "don't prosecute crime".

It's like some sort of ridiculous over swing from "tough on crime" that relies on an infantilization of those they wish to "help". Like somehow someone who committed a crime and got punished couldn't know right from wrong, and punishing them for that just somehow reinforces that, and just simply... not punishing them for it helps?

It's such a narrow view that ignores the fact that real people own these stores, actual adults shop there, criminals know that they can just steal free shit without consequence, and all of those sorts of normal people just say "fuck it" and eventually move. Nobody will put up with being a constant victim as some sort of "aid" to the situation, including those that vote for it. The ones that vote for it just don't have enough exposure to the aspects of society they're forcing to take the punishment for this crap. They force others to suffer the punishment for it, in lieu of the criminals they actually _reward_ for doing it.

After decades of "tough on crime" policies, this kind of shit was on the retreat. It objectively helped everyone involved. Sadly I think the real cycle is in people who subscribe their religion against law enforcement eventually legalizing most sorts of victimization, and then leaving when the chickens come to roost. Moving elsewhere to vote in politicians with that same sort of virus like mentality, and leaving behind wastelands that by their logic need this "soft on crime" treatment more than anywhere.

It's like freaking independence day, except instead of "resources" that the alien nomads invade to harvest it's a proper functioning society.

It actually becomes a self reinforcing cycle if staying in prison makes you an even worse criminal than before. A sensible solution isn't not to incarcerate criminals, but to make prisons a place where people can improve - and not just be punished with terrible conditions that make you more violent.

> It actually becomes a self reinforcing cycle if staying in prison makes you an even worse

That's certainly one of the tenants that leads people to believe that removing prison from the equation helps. I think that it relies on the false presumption that going after theft equals prison. They should have the stolen goods taken from them, ideally a financial punishment along the lines of treble damages, and locked up in jail (not prison) as this gets processed.

When it comes to "thug took some goods from store" it shouldn't be a matter of holding them in some sort of "improvement chamber". They need a swift and affirmative punishment and to be left with less than they started with when the process is done.

To clarify, I'm not against the idea of punishment for theft, but humans aren't simple reward maximising bots. IMHO no punishment doesn't work, and also too much punishment doesn't work.

I do not think that the current crime situation in San Francisco appeared by some fluke or an accident. Specific policies were put in place by the progressive government officials and progressive people in San Francisco voted for these policies. I think is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country on what happens when progressive utopia gets voted in.

Which policies?

decarceration, even for repeat violent criminals and no penalties for property crime.

California already incarcerates 5x more people than any European country, and 10x more than the Nordics:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/CA.html

There are many, many problems in CA, but putting more people in jail is not going to solve any of them.

> California already incarcerates 5x more people than any European country, and 10x more than the Nordics

Well, most European and Nordic countries don't have 13% of the population committing 52% of the violent crime. So this is kind of an unfair comparison.

Why? Immigrants, various ethnic and social minorities, and repeat offenders are overrepresented in Europe's crime stats as well. If anything, Europe tends to have much shorter sentences, so reoffenders can commit more crimes.

Isn’t our crime 5x more? The only way to get the same incarceration rate would be to imprison criminals 1/5th as much as Europeans do.

Or, you know, fix problems earlier down the line so you don't get 5x more crime.

I think the biggest disparity is the lack of any meaningful mental health or addiction treatment, and the law allows people who are out of their mind to refuse treatment and die on the street.

Policies of not prosecuting criminals.

Same as in France:

- Being lenient towards criminals because we need to have empathy towards all humans (real victims being forgotten here);

- Encouraging “deconstruction”, deconstruction of family values, of masculinity, of marriage, of traditional rules, replacement by state-sponsored benefits, which break the social fabric (a human as a free-spinning electron without roots may be healthy and wealthy, but at extremely high risk in case of unexpected event);

- Cult of female employment as their main role in society, which, in positions of power, happens to soften the stance towards criminals and deconstruct structures (hierarchies, things that worked to develop our nations, justice system). I don’t know the ratio for Cali but in France, 76 to 81% graduates of ENM (main school for judges) are female since 1977, and we basically free the criminals because they have compassion for them.

- Immigration and being ostracized when pointing out illegal immigration or rules about it, which leads to unreasoned immigration. Which turns into people with broken social fabric, which means they weigh on state sponsored rescue instead of family.

But the biggest danger about a California is that it impacts the whole rest of the world: they apply their cultural pressure using the soft power that is social media, which puts the sane parts of the world at risk of having the same ideas.

You must not be American, definitely not Californian because the points you make are extremely taboo.

In the US there are probably a handful of feminist-critics who dare to say these things in the mainstream, e.g. Camille Paglia, Christina Hoff Sommers.

What is the intellectual climate like in France? Can someone write what you wrote above in a mainstream newspaper column?

French people consider themselves an exception compared to USA, but stats depict a stunning similarity: Our stats about male/female suicide, court judgements about family, female position in companies, are closeby the US ones, generally within 4%. The whole Western world, despite local specificities, are going through the surprisingly same questions as I’ve raised about California in the main trends, and local trends don’t offset the main direction.

Culturally, France systematically follows US trends with 10 years delay. My theory is that ideas are tested/tuned in US and reproduced with more intensity in Europe, with the additional help that France already has a strong socialist culture (a quarter of its workforce as public servants, tradition of organizing and demonstrating) so there is no counterpoint to the liberal arguments.

So we basically have similar laws to California. We even have a Ministry of Equality, which sound terribly dystopian.

> Cult of female employment as their main role in society, which, in positions of power, happens to soften the stance towards criminals and deconstruct structures (hierarchies, things that worked to develop our nations, justice system). I don’t know the ratio for Cali but in France, 76 to 81% graduates of ENM (main school for judges) are female since 1977, and we basically free the criminals because they have compassion for them.

Hmm, my first reaction to this is that it's just poorly considered sexism. Do you have any evidence that the gender of the judges is contributing greatly to the leniency crisis you seem to be proposing? And plus, it's even possible that there are some problems showing the direction of causation; for example, it could be that electorates/leaders wanting lenient judges tend to perceive female judges as more lenient. I'm naturally very skeptical that the gender of judges could have such a large causal effect.

I looked into this briefly and the two articles that I found quickly were [1] and [2], one of which finds an effect obscenity and death penalty cases in State Supreme Courts and the other which finds an effect only in sex discrimination cases. Neither seems to imply such a sweeping and consequential effect as you do.

And the apparent suggestion that women in position of power in general is causing problems for society seems to be an argument out of the last century. Am I correct that that's what your suggesting, and if so what would be the cause of it? That whole line of reasoning strains credibility in my mind.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/42864001

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1540-5907...

> - Encouraging “deconstruction”, deconstruction of family values, of masculinity, of marriage, of traditional rules, replacement by state-sponsored benefits, which break the social fabric (a human as a free-spinning electron without roots may be healthy and wealthy, but at extremely high risk in case of unexpected event);

This conflates social reform with economic reforms. Many of the postwar welfare states in Europe were instituted by moralistic Christian democratic governments looking to undercut the support that otherwise would've gone towards the communist parties. Certainly benefits rooted in Catholic social teaching such as the family wage have nothing to do with the cultural bogeymen mentioned in the post.

Debit cards given to homeless people with auto deposits every month courtesy of the city, I guess would be one. I think it sounds like a kind, humane policy btw, even though I answered the question. But one that as you can imagine comes with some built in problems.

Edit: I do get that homeless does not equal criminal. But, see broken windows effect.

"Progressive Bad" isn't really the takeaway here. It turns out nuance is important. Questionable policies combined with a complex socioeconomic situation due to decades of perverse incentives isn't, in fact, an optimal strategy of governance.

I think it's hard to argue that the SF government is not comprised of people on the forefront of the progressive agenda. Am I wrong about this? Take a look at Chesa Boudin, for example [1]. All their policies are progressive (their voters would certainly hope so). Are you saying that San Francisco's progressive policies are not the right progressive policies? Which place has the right policies then? Chicago? Their crime rate does not seem much better. Or Chicago also implements wrong progressive ideas?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin

To be honest, I think American progressivism as a whole is a bit compromised as it generally tries to accomplish its goals while first keeping the corporations pleased and second never truly taxing the rich. Further they need to consider the externalities they create. If a city or state is going to implement supportive policies, people from surrounding areas (areas not contributing to the tax base) may choose or be pressured to travel there.

This isn't to say progressivism is doomed in America or we must force socialist policies onto all outlying areas, just that the process of learning how to properly roll out socially responsible policies is still ongoing and one of the major issues is rapidly growing polarization with no interest in nuance.

> it generally tries to accomplish its goals while first keeping the corporations pleased

What goals are compromised to "keep the corporations pleased"? How would these goals be defined if the corporations were not be taken into account?

> and second never truly taxing the rich

You hold "taxing the rich" as some sort of high level independent goal to be done in and of itself. Can you quantify what the lack of funds are that available to SF from not "taxing the rich"? How much is the budget shortfall, and what would this extra budget go to if San Francisco were to "tax the rich"?

What progressive policies would have helped?

Also, San Francisco is pretty much the quintessential example of such policies getting voted in place without challenge. So maybe you could argue that certain progressive policies were enacted that hurt so bad they significantly outweighed those that would have actually made things better. If that's the case, which progressive policies do you feel led to this situation?

Nah I think it's more "progressive needs the counterweight of some moderation and pragmatism" . Just completely ignoring "theft" as a whole category of crime because "you're likely locking up poor people who don't have a choice" is their game. They don't care about whether or not your get robbed, they only care about "poor people put in a harsh place and they didn't have a choice because they had a bad childhood and don't know any better" . How about we still arrest them and rehabilitate them. Instead of killing the police budget, why not rehabilitate and have some outreach to petty criminals. Just letting them run rampant helps no one other than the thief who will most likely end up dead at some point when he/she crosses the wrong person.

I actually don't know if the crime rate in SF is higher than elsewhere, but if it is I think cause is the opposite. It's what happens when capitalism goes unchecked. Cost of living is on the rise while wages are stagnant. Crimes are often committed by people who are desperate. Also there are no facilities for people who are mentally ill, who will go on to commit crimes.

Capitalism isn't what's happening in SF.

NIMBYism, cronyism, inability to build, tons of regulatory red tape to do anything, high taxes, etc. is not capitalism.

All of those may be true, but the bad effects of uncontrolled capitalism most likely also have something to do with the situation.

If you expect people to live by the rules, they should have a honest opportunity to do so. But if all they can get is a job that doesn't even pay for a small room, what are your possibilities to live a honest live?

If you remove punishment, but the only option people have is to break the law to survive, the only outcome to be expected is increased number of crimes.

Those are the opposites of unconstrained capitalism. In unconstrained capitalism you'd have lots of building, building bigger multifamily residences and towers, no zoning getting in the way, little to no taxes, etc.

I doubt that very much: building space is scarce in SF, as a property developer if you have a choice to build an expensive high revenue buidling versus a more affordable building for low income people, what would you choose?

In capitalism there is no driving force to ensure customer desires will or can be met, making profit is what drives it. You need constraints or laws to ensure commercially unattractive needs ar served.

From all the videos I've seen of people robbing stores in San Francisco (and there are a few), none of them looked like people on the brink of starvation stealing food or medicine to avert certain death. They looked like a criminal gang taking expensive items with high resale value in order to make a quick profit. Because that's exactly what they were. They didn't do it because they couldn't survive otherwise. They did it because it's profitable and nobody was going to prosecute them for it.

Yeah. That's the problem. Might not be related at all to the SF housing situation, insane rents and the fact that the US still has no universal health care insurance. You know. Stuff people need to survive and not be homeless.

Was the equipment not insured?

This is the underlying point of theft coverage: the realization that even if police investigate a case, they will likely be unable to get the stolen items back.

Insurance is just a loan that you prepay small amounts for until you make a claim and then repay larger amounts for.

This is what I always ask in these threads. Most homeowners and car insurance policies cover losses from theft in your home or car, minus maybe a deductible. Isn't this exactly the kind of thing insurance is for?

Insurance doesn't make sense for small losses that you can pay for yourself. If you don't like the feeling of paying for stolen things, you could be your own insurance company instead, putting the regular premium into a savings account that you spend only to replace lost items. Over your whole life, it'll average out. Plus you get the advantage of better aligned interests and no profit skimmed off the top.

What insurance is good for is catastrophic costs that will probably never happen in your life but if they do, they'll ruin you. Things like crashing into a million dollar car or having your house burn down.

I hope everyone in this thread talking about feeling unsafe understands they can leave San Francisco. Lived in the Tenderloin for almost 4 years now and this type of discussion always fills my throat with bile. Haven’t posted on HN for a long time but wanted to emphasize how little I think of this rhetoric. “Progressive policies”? Use your words.

@cosmicexplorer I just donated some money this weekend to help tihs kid and her grandmother escape the Tenderloin. Supervisor Matt Haney is in cloud cuckoo land, the local politicians are ideological idiots. This is a disaster for the D party (I'm a registered Democrat).

Kids shouldn't be growing up in streets littered with dead and dying addicts shooting up while drug dealers hover over them. It is an absolute disgrace. https://twitter.com/DTenderloine

https://www.gofundme.com/f/5csnc-moving-expenses?utm_campaig...

A lot of people blame SF's prosecutor but that makes no sense, this is a policing problem. The police is lazy and won't do their job. The police union sees their role as deflecting blame while working as little as possible and collecting their six figure salaries. The reason to defund the police is because they're awful at their jobs, throwing more money after bad won't help.

I know I'll be downvoted here because people already have their police-good progressives-bad narrative all set. But if you actually looked into SFPD's clearance rate you would know they're incompetent.

I would agree with this seeing public statements by LASD (Villeneueva) here in LA and his colleagues in Riverside and Orange Counties, as well as counterparts in police unions, and also unofficial chatter on twitter and elsewhere. It's not so much "progressive policies: lax on crime" vs. a reform prosecutor is in town, and I suspect there is deliberate pullback by the police unions, to let crime increase and get them voted out and replaced by a more cop-friendly prosecutor.

Factor in a not insignificant dose of squeamishness among police rank and file due to the pandemic (not unreasonable since first responders are at a higher risk of exposure) and policing isn't really optimal at the moment; at a time when the current economics foster desperation.

yeah, not seeing how a $950 threshold for felony theft is causing a problem for the theft of $6000 of photography equipment, and I think that sounds like a pretty common limit for most areas.

I think there is a definite element of the cops slow-walking enforcement to make a point and get a DA who they perceive as "having their back".

Policing problem? SF police is explicitly forbidden from arresting anyone for most misdemeanors. Criminals just get a citation, a court date, and are set on their way.

Actually, no, the problem isn't so much with the police as with the district attorney's office. The police can arrest these people, but it's entirely pointless when the DA won't prosecute them and they're back on the street in 24h with no penalty for their crimes whatsoever. I can't blame the police for not even bothering to arrest people they know will be let go immediately.

How is this a remotely justifiable idea? Police are paid to their job, if they're not doing it because of political disagreements that is unacceptable. We the voters determine the policy not them.

Has defunding happened in SF already since the protests? If there has not been a significant defunding, then this is the police failing at the one thing they were hired to do. Why is no one else in the comments section here asking why the police are not responsible for cleaning up this mess but instead it is all the fault of "progressive politicians?"

Honest question, why would police arrest people that won't get prosecuted as a matter of fact. It's effectively not a crime if the AG officially states that he won't prosecute an entire category of crimes. But even if just arrests (followed by immediate release) alone were enough of a disincentive for petty criminals, it would be the police arresting people for the sake of arresting people, for what is effectively not a crime.

The role of the police is not to "punish" in a judicial sense so it's disingenuous to blame the police for not doing the job of the AG. & it's a weird way to deflect the responsability from the population who voted exactly to not allow that "job" to be done.

Police should do their job because we pay them to do it. If they're involved in some kind of work slow down because they don't agree with the prosecutors policies then they're playing a dangerous game with public safety and they should be fired.

My point is that it isn't their job to create laws or decide what is or isn't legal. This is like saying prosecutors should just do their job, and get bad people into prison no matter what pesky judges decide. It's not a slowdown or a conflict, it's the prosecution saying those crimes are defacto legal now. It's very dishonest to pretend it's just "work slowdown".

And btw I probably... Dislike the police more than most, a lot more even. But I also don't like prosecutors. I also think that you have to live with the consequences of whatever policy you want. So you can't basically vote for situations like these to be "legalized" to then scapegoat the police. It's fine to think some property crimes shouldn't be punished, but you have to accept that it leads to stuff like this. Now if that's a good trade-off for SF residents then I honestly don't see the problem.

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