Video shows San Francisco police watching as burglary unfolds | Hacker News Reader

Video shows San Francisco police watching as burglary unfolds

sfchronicle.com

62 pointsdrewbug0165 comments

Last year people argued that property rights don't matter and lives are more important. It seems the SFPD is following that practice.

Wait what? Burglaries are violent crimes. How is it protecting lives to allow violent crime to happen? We're not talking about shoplifting here.

There is a reason this is happening in SF. The residents asked for less police intervention.

Who in SF asked for the police to stop intervening in violent crimes?

The messaging was for the police to intervene less in non-violent crimes. I don't know of anyone that actually wanted the police to stop intervening in violent crime. Can you cite some non-fringe figure that asked for the police to stop intervening in violent crime?

That's a trick question. Every SF politician is a fringe figure.

> Burglaries are violent crimes. How is it protecting lives to allow violent crime to happen?

Depends where you live. In the US robbery is a violent crime, but burglary is generally considered a non-violent property crime.

What are they supposed to do? The DA won’t prosecute. The police does not want the risk of being called racists. And the population keeps voting for the leaders who perpetuate this. At some point, it becomes hard to make a case that local population does not want things to be this way.

This is good. It means we can recover some of the spending by cutting the police budget. After all, if the police will not enforce, then we can just not have them. We can substitute them with lower paid unarmed people in cars with blue or red lights who go around with flashlights.

The police budget is at $650+ million. I think I could cut that by a $100 million this year using these techniques. I’m willing to do it for 25% of one year’s worth of savings.

If you will increase it to 30%, I can also ensure that the substitutes are trained to say the same things publicly. That way you get the same outcome for less spending.

Well, that's all sounds good if the crime keeps happening to "other" people. But what if criminals start coming near your neighborhood? Then what?

Well clearly then the police will stand around doing nothing. Might as well pick people with a lower salary to stand around and do nothing.

>We can substitute [police] with lower paid unarmed people in cars with blue or red lights who go around with flashlights.

That's still police. You don't need lethal force to do police work, ya know?

That is part of joke, monseigneur.

Forgive me; text is a poor vehicle for subtle irony.

Imagine doing a high risk, low(ish) paid job where every action you do is now scrutinised and certain politically motivated groups are actively trying to defund you. No wonder they don't feel compelled to intervene.

Not to mention the prevalence of guns. Would you exchange some small arms fire with a few burglars in order to protect someone else’s product?

SF has banned guns for all practical matters.

And how much has that affected access to guns?

The correct response to that is to stop paying them then. You end up with the same result, but at least they're not wasting money at the same time.

I honestly think that people with this attitude should be made to live in a city without police.

...and locked in there.

In any other job you'd be fired immediately for that kind of behavior. Why are cops different?

Because of union.

The only union republicans support.

Is that a surprise? It's one of the few major unions that is not outright antagonistic to Republican policies and goals.

Republicans see cops as defending them from the outcome of failed liberal policies. Even rich liberals tacitly acknowledge this by hiring their own private police, while they seek to reduce the efficacy of "the public option".

It is, especially when many try to push for a union with sound reasoning and etc.

Then, the 10 biggest unions in US are like the worst, most unethical, most corrupted organizations in the country.

You make it sound like there is absolutely no reason for this whatsoever on the side of the police.

It's also not really high risk when compared to other jobs which people perceive as more "normal", it 22nd in the US: https://www.facilities.udel.edu/safety/4689/

Average pay is 67k: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewdepietro/2020/04/23/polic...

What other jobs offers that many protections against often times obvious misconduct yet still always "feels" under attack? If a nurse injects the wrong medicine, they are gone. There is no national outcry that nurses are under attack. The extreme opposition against police reform is extremely ridiculous.

> If a nurse injects the wrong medicine, they are gone.

Um...I don't work in healthcare, but my union includes some, and they definitely try to protect members who get in trouble irrespective of the circumstances.

There is a procedure for investigating someone who is accused of mistreating the vulnerable, that ends in putting people on a banned list, (if not prosecuted, etc) and the union has a guide to the minutiae of what someone under investigation is legally required to answer.

That's not the same as "injecting the wrong medicine", but wouldn't an honest mistake be considered less serious than neglect or abuse usually? I don't know, just guessing.

One thing that seems to be happening right now, is that nurses are being paid way less than market rates; there are ads for like $200+ per hour, but the regular employers don't match that.

I don't know if there is an analogy with police officers, but maybe they can do private security?

There is nothing wrong with a union standing by its members. But do nurses investigate themselves? The police does. Can you get banned from the police? They get rehired all the time in a different department. How many nurses get fired when testifying or speaking out against other nurses? Happens to cops all the time. Christopher Dorner himself as well as the manhunt should be enough evidence that something is seriously wrong.

> but wouldn't an honest mistake be considered less serious than neglect or abuse usually?

I'm sorry if I wasn't more clear but I'm not talking about honest mistakes but neglect and/or abuse. Of course mistakes can happen.

All of those happen regularly. Many nurses quit after a serious allegation and the hospital never reports it to the state board for PR and liability reasons. Then they move to a new hospital/assisted living facility/etc and do the same thing again.

Just as well, I know multiple cases in my area where a hospital has tried to fire or destroy a nurse’s career over speaking out against a practice or staff member. I think you would be very surprised how much misconduct happens in the medical field without accountability (although, there is still more accountability than against police).

That is quite shocking to hear honestly. Thanks for the insight.

Sometimes I get downvoted for mentioning this on HN - but somewhere I read the facile seeming comment that the reason we underestimate the impact of medical errors is because there is no billing or procedure code for "oops, killed the patient".

I briefly worked for a health insurer, and got the impression that everything revolves around the standard codes. And HEDIS and NCQA and stuff.

Police usually make 3-4x what teachers do and policing in general is a pretty low risk job. In fact, it's probably the best ratio between risk and pay you can get without a college degree.

Perhaps the officers are aware of the legal ramifications of past incidents:

https://www.courthousenews.com/san-francisco-settles-suit-ov...

https://www.courthousenews.com/former-cop-charged-with-mansl...

I wouldnt do my job either If I wasnt allowed to shoot people whenever I felt like it.

People get what they vote for

no one voted for the police to boycott their own jobs. Some officers may think the paperwork isn’t worth it or are doing it in protest but it’s not what people voted for.

No, but maybe they went to city meetings to protest new prison construction in their area, so the government now needs to find ways to keep the number of people in jail low.

Alright there seems to be a major disconnect here. How does stopping a burglary become impossible if there aren't enough prisons (NOT jails, the two are different).

It seems like a total non-sequitur to me.

Police don't really stop crime, they investigate after the fact. Stopping comes as a side-effect of the government prosecuting criminals and making it not worth it to repeat offend.

> Some officers may think the paperwork isn’t worth it or are doing it in protest but it’s not what people voted for.

But it is. I spent all of 2020 listening to daily edicts on this subject from privileged HR winos in my SF company, while they endorsed riots, and publicly supported criminal trials where it turns out that nope, the criminal was actually the bad guy.

Radical chic is temporarily fashionable. It helps make the laptop class feel "they're all in this together" while they're getting care packages of aromatic candles and weekly Calm sessions. But then it's in your backyard and its a problem.

Getting rid of Chesa Boudin will not fix this problem, because SF policy is "we don't want this", but if you ask what they do want, it's the same stuff they've been pushing for decades.

I find it highly dubious that any HR endorsed riots, I have never heard of an HR department or really anyone endorse violence. At most I have heard that people understood the frustration. Right to protest yes lots support it, riots and violence never by a major person or hr type. I also find when people post that someone endorsed violence, such as top democrats endorsed it, it’s actually they endorsed the right to protest and condemned violence.

Edit: in the briefly posted and then deleted reply to my comment, it was shown to be 100% the case the comment was conflating “we support the right to protest but condemn any violence” with “we support violence”

In fact the comment even said: ‘Every company in the Bay Area was "making a statement" on BLM events that were characterized exclusively by massive vandalism and violence.’

Why yes they were making statements, but not in support of violence, they were making statements condemning violence. I work for a Bay Area company, and our ceo like pretty much all companies said “we support people’s right to protest but are against any violence.”

> I find it highly dubious that any HR endorsed riots

People who denied the fact that many BLM protests turned into riots, and then still used their company to platform their public supported them are... numerous in HR in silicon valley.

I bet most of those didn't study history. Otherwise they would recognize a lot of similarities between BLM and the Red Guard in the Maoist revolution.

不好意色。那個看法沒有養。I don’t know if HN supports hanzi so those might be boxes.

Anyway, unfortunately that opinion is wrong, having studied that time period I would definitely say a different political organization has far more similarities to the red guard. And the similarities I see go well beyond demanding unquestioned loyalty and being anti-science.

I am not going to name any names, if any come to your mind that is purely on you.

You're being manipulated by the police. They're purposely allowing crime to happen so they can point at it and say "this is what happens when you don't support your police".

Rather than seeing this as police corruption, you're falling for their propaganda.

Any proof to support that accusation?

The article in question.

"Defund the police!" "ACAB"

Crime increases

"Fucking police"

The police weren't defunded, they didn't have staffing cut.

If the police are sitting there watching a crime happening, and aren't doing anything about it, they should be fired. Of course, they can't be fired because their union won't let that happen.

The correct response here is indeed "Fucking police".

Put yourself in the shoes of an honest, hardworking police man/woman for the past 2 years and tell me honestly what you would do in their situation. I know I would either have already left or be biding my time looking for an exit.

https://archive.md/h8u1a

Experts seems to be awfully late to what every John Doe has already figured out, it's easy to be called an expert when there's zero accountability for the expert's advice. If you constantly get stuff wrong, then your opinion is as good as some random person walking the streets.

If police unions defend officers from all accountability...surprise! They're not accountable to anyone. This means they don't engage when they don't want to and engage with unreasonable force whenever they feel like. We've got the worst of both worlds: cops who both shoot civilians with impunity and don't engage with criminals

>If police unions defend officers from all accountability...surprise! They're not accountable to anyone. This means they don't engage when they don't want to and engage with unreasonable force whenever they feel like. We've got the worst of both worlds: cops who both shoot civilians with impunity and don't engage with criminals

This is hyperbole.

It's really not. Sure it doesn't happen every single time but cops very often turn a blind eye to crime, even violent crime, and they often shoot innocents or worse and get away with it.

Defending employees, even when they do shitty things, is literally the entire point of unions.

What other union defends the right of their employees to commit crimes?

You know what happened to the longshoremen unions that organized to facilitate crimes by their members? That's right, they were declared as a criminal enterprise under RICO and every single member of the union was guilty of a crime.

The situation in question doesn't involve violence: three dudes grabbed some merchendise from a cannabis shop. From the cop's perspective it's a lose-lose situation: some of the burglars may turn out career criminals and attempt to avoid arrest by any means possible, because getting arrested would reveal some other crimes, and the cop would have to use force or a gun, possibly killing a burglar. The media would predictably paint the cop as a merciless thug and the actual thug as a saint, riots would follow, legislators would further handicap police. The cop wisely decided that it's better to stay aside and engage only if things turn really violent.

SF has a cognitive dissonance right now: it doesn't want crime, but it doesn't want to punish criminals, so when criminals come uninvited, SF can't decide what to do.

Alright. So for this to be dangerous to the cop, the criminal has to react violently to any risk of arrest. In that case, how would the criminal react to the inhabitants coming out? In any case, it seems reckless not to arrest them as it would risk someone's life.

Also, career criminals very rarely use violence to resist arrest. That is something that inexperienced or impulse criminals do. Any career criminal knows that using violence against the police will end up in a worse outcome than getting caught.

I would be interested to see a story where a criminal, in the comission of a crime, initiated deadly force against a policeman and was painted as a saint after their death or injury, leading to riots. This happens almost every day and no one cares about it.

The point is police cannot tell the future.

They will have to wait for a violent event to happen first before doing anything.

Police is safe, SF voters get what they vote for, and thieves get goods. Win win win.

They don't have to predict the future. In any case they are protecting life.

The point of unions is to ensure that the workers, as a whole, are treated fairly. You know, wages, benefits, working conditions, etc. Many unions have negotiated consequences with employers for shitty things. Now, it's true unions usually enforce some rules and procedures to prove the employee did the shitty thing, but that just seems good in general.

Courts have consistently found that police do not have an obligation to prevent crime. It's not hyperbole, it's standard operating procedure

What do they have an obligation to do? Paychecks generally come with some sort of hard requirement.

Certainly they should have an obligation to not let a crime happen in front of them, yet do nothing about it.

In other words: "damned if you do, damned in you don't".

> If police unions defend officers from all accountability...surprise!

Lots of unions try the same and are far less effective; police unions are not inherently powerful, they are granted power by the fact that the citizenry in the US worships military and paramilitary forces and grants undue deference to them, particularly, in regard to this issue, in selecting the civilian political leaders to whom police are nominally accountable.

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