If what you say is true, what police officers are refusing to do is their job. And it's not that different than many other jobs out there. They're not elected officials, it's not their job to legislate or choose who to prosecute.
When you arrest the same person over and over again and they are just let out by the DA, you may just not arrest that person again.
You aren't refusing to do your job, you're listening to an elected official that has more power than you do.
Do you have any criticisms to direct at the DA, or do you agree with their actions?
Maybe if we treated cops like people with jobs, we'd be able to hire some that work.
Great, so everyone agrees the current approach doesn't work. Now we need to come up with a better solution.
Option 1 is to throw these repeat offenders in jail and consider the situation fixed.
Option 2 is to take the money that we are paying the cop that now refuses to arrest anyone and instead pay someone who is willing to work with this repeat offender and help get them a home, job, treatment, or whatever else they need to stop living life like this.
Police that refuse to do their job because the DA's office is politically indoctrinated are not helping anything. It's almost immature. Police have unions and associations, political connections (even today), connections with the press (even today), so we're not talking about some powerless sector of society.
The mature response is for SF police to do its job (because if we do the math, it is also wasting the time of criminals), and have its organizational arms make a stink about it in the public space. Publish statistics and weekly 'wtf DA?' blog posts. I mean it's the 21st century.
The original line of argument was that crime went up because punishments went don't. This implicitly is built on the belief that criminals are rational actors responding to a changing incentive structure. We can therefore reduce crime by changing the incentives again so that crime is a less attractive option. There is no reason why that change needs to be the reintroduction of harsh punishments. We can also change incentives by reducing the positive benefit of crime by making sure people's basic needs are satisfied.
I am living a comfortable life, all of my basic needs are satisfied, and I have never stolen anything. But if I could just walk into a store, grab things and walk out with the knowledge that I was not going to be punished for it in any way, I absolutely would. Why wouldn't I? Because it's "wrong"? I'm sorry but the world doesn't work that way. If I didn't, someone else would.
That's a pretty cynical view of human nature that I don't share.
> But if I could just walk into a store, grab things and walk out with the knowledge that I was not going to be punished for it in any way, I absolutely would.
I absolutely wouldn't. I mean, zero-consequence thefts seem to be a true state of affairs for many places like pharmacies in SF, and yet I don't feel any desire to walk into a Walgreens and start walking out with stuff without paying. Sure, I'm pretty comfortable financially, and that's a factor. But I would have to be pretty hard-up financially, like "I'm going to be out on the streets if I don't steal" levels of hard-up, to consider stealing at all, let alone habitually (and I'd still feel guilty about it). And I frankly can't blame people in that position; in many cases society has failed them, so I can't fault them for ignoring society's rules.
> Why wouldn't I? Because it's "wrong"?
Yes! Laws only work because people agree that they're a good idea in general, even if we may not agree with every individual law. I agree with laws around theft because I think it's shitty to deprive someone else of something that's theirs. Maybe it's a little muddier in the "personalization" aspect when we're talking about goods for sale owned by a huge corporation, but massive, ongoing, consequence-free theft from a particular store means that store is eventually going to shut down, and deprive regular people from jobs and their livelihoods. I wouldn't want that on my conscience.
> I'm sorry but the world doesn't work that way. If I didn't, someone else would.
Ah, yes, the "if I'm not an asshole, someone else will be, so I might as well just be an asshole and reap undeserved rewards" anti-morality play. That's reprehensible; I strongly suggest you re-evaluate your approach to being a human.
You remind me of the dude who made that one bike comic. If someone stole something you own, you'd be happy because "society failed them"? I assume you've never actually been victim of or even witnessed any kind of crime, because you'd probably change your mind if you did.
>Laws only work because people agree that they're a good idea in general
No, laws are created because most people think they're a good idea, they work because they are enforced. A law that is not enforced is a law that effectively does not exist.
>Ah, yes, the "if I'm not an asshole, someone else will be, so I might as well just be an asshole and reap undeserved rewards" anti-morality play. That's reprehensible; I strongly suggest you re-evaluate your approach to being a human.
The only reason you don't agree with this is because you're not surrounded by other people reaping undeserved rewards. It's very easy to say "I would never do that!" in an environment where nobody else does it. Have you ever heard of "looting"? Because that's literally what I described in action. If people know for a fact they can get away from stealing from a store, there will be no shortage of people willing to do it. If you'd stand there and watch while everyone else gets their free stuff, knowing the store will be cleaned out by the end of the day regardless, good for you, but your own morality does not change the facts.
Society doesn’t owe you anything; you owe society.
These are the same thing. There is one decision, either commit crime or don't. There are positive and negative incentives on each side.
>For example, stealing comes with the inherent reward of gaining whatever it is you stole. You don't need to be homeless and starving to want more money or physical goods.
Sure, but if you are homeless and starting your motivation to steal go up because that money represents a greater marginal improvement to your life. Would you disagree with that?
>But if I could just walk into a store, grab things and walk out with the knowledge that I was not going to be punished for it in any way, I absolutely would. Why wouldn't I? Because it's "wrong"? I'm sorry but the world doesn't work that way. If I didn't, someone else would.
It is always funny to me when someone admits they have no morals and think that means no one else has morals. There have been studies that show most people don't operate this way. For example, a majority of people will try to return a lost wallet and that percentage goes up when the amount of cash in the wallet increases[1]. How do you explain that?
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-00...
No. I never claimed that nobody has ever committed a crime due to being poor or homeless. All I'm saying is that the claim that solving homelessness and poverty would also solve crime is objectively wrong.
"How do you explain that?"
So that doesn't map onto anonymously stealing from a store which many people, if not most people, would do if there were guaranteed to be no criminal or social consequences. Empirically the correlation between income and shoplifting wasn't that high, last I checked. And studies of people cheating show it is more common than not, last I checked. Almost everyone eats meat, despite the knowledge it's morally reprehensible, simply because it's still within the Overton Window for now. Eating meat is more morally reprehensible than shoplifting, the only reason people do the former and not the latter is social acceptability.
By design, people are intrinsically selfish creatures. Any motivations that present as altruistic are either cultural mind viruses, disingenuous virtue signalling, or strategies (such as popularity and recognition seeking) we unconsciously selfishly employ to improve happiness (proximate reason) and genetic fitness (underlying reason).
Even when using stunted amoral analysis of human behavior, who cares what's the reason people are justifying moral acts?
It’s an absolute joke and it is typical black and white American policy making that’s causing this situation to be far worse than it needs to be.
I think what we need to do is to reintroduce short-term but painful punishments (a day in the stocks, public caning, etc) for moderately severe offenses. Some people need more than just a slap on the wrist to change, but don't deserve to have their life ruined forever by a 30-year jail sentence. Physical pain and public shaming have worked well for millions of years (literally) they still work today in many countries, and they are far more compassionate than a long jail sentence. Humans are just another animal species, sometimes animal incentives are what we need.
That's certainly not everyone, but I suspect if we were to deal with the subset that is "misunderstood" in a more productive way, SF crime would be a lot more tractable.
We used to know how to deal with these people, and many countries still do. Corporal punishment and public shaming have been the go-to solutions for millions of years. We should bring them back. You can make a criminal deeply and viscerally regret their crime, without destroying their life.
People have a hard time with the idea that caning or standing on the street with a sandwich board detailing your crime can be the empathic answer. Better than letting you hurt others, and letting the crime harden you until you need harsher responses.
> Like serial shoplifters, first-time drunk drivers, non-violent drug dealers…
Then non-violent drug dealer has to mean someone selling something that can't kill or seriously injure you. Fentanyl dealers might as well be selling arsenic and should be treated accordingly.
Why work 20 days a month and make a modest living when you can steal and rob 3 days a month, fence on the 4th, and live in relative luxury?
Throwing people in jail doesn't help with crimes of despair, but it does help with such calculated crime, because it suddenly is no longer worth it.
I don't think you realize that you are agreeing with me.
There are benefits to committing crime.
There are benefits to not committing crime.
There are downsides to committing crime.
There are downsides to not committing crime.
These all come together to help influence a person's decision. We can impact that decision by tweaking any one of these 4 results. Yes, increasing the penalties for crime is one way to address it, but we can have the same influence be decreasing the benefit of committing crime or increasing the benefit of not committing crime. I happen to think that is the morally superior choice because the result is fewer people in jail and the US already jails more people per capita than any other country.
Without punishment, the benefit of stealing $1000 is roughly $1000.
Again, I'm not talking about crimes of desperation, I'm talking about "I want $shiny_expensive_thing and stealing it/stealing for it is going to be an easier way to get that than working for it".
>Why work 20 days a month and make a modest living when you can steal and rob 3 days a month, fence on the 4th, and live in relative luxury?
What if that modest living takes 10 days of work instead of 20. Do you think that will impact the number of people who turn to crime?
2) If the modest living takes 10 instead of 20 days, it will reduce the number of crimes, but not to a level where it would be ok to just ignore without enforcement. And once your 10 days (or many times 10 days) of honest work disappear in one criminal act, and you see that crimes pay and aren't punished, you'll also be tempted to go the easy way.
It also doesn't matter what the punishment is or isn't, most people aren't going to steal a bike off the street. Most people have morals. Most people don't want to view themselves as a bad person. Most people require some sort of personal justification before they steal something. Desperation is a strong justification. Societal unfairness is a strong justification. The lack of punishment can't be used justify the crime from a moral perspective so it won't impact the way most people behave. It will only impact the people at the margins who were already open to committing crime.
We should reintroduce short-term but painful punishments (a day in the stocks, public caning, etc) for moderately severe offenses. Some people need more than just a slap on the wrist to change, but don't deserve to have their life ruined forever by a 30-year jail sentence. Physical pain and public shaming have worked well for millions of years (literally) they still work today in many countries, and they are far more compassionate than a long jail sentence. Humans are just another animal species, sometimes animal incentives are what we need.
For a different analogy, at a startup, the pm changes the requirements every so often, therefore the engineers are fine to play foosball all day?
The problem was the DA was letting people off even though they were breaking said laws.