Nothing will change. I was attacked in Christmas ‘21 in the Tenderloin, right after walking out of the KFC/Taco Bell on Eddy. Two cop cars drove by me and did nothing. It was only due to an ambulance finishing a run at Sutter and spotting me that I didn’t bleed out on the suitcase.
I have video, proof of damages physical and financial, eyewitnesses and the info of the men who attacked me. SFPD will not arrest them because Boudin refused to prosecute. New DA has not gotten back to me despite repeated attempts.
I wanted to build a life and have my family in SF, to contribute and make it the city I believe it to be, but I refuse to put people I love in that situation. I’ve left for Estonia and couldn’t be happier.
I don’t know your case, but it’s also possible that the police won’t make an arrest because police in America tend to go on low-key strike when a liberal prosecutor is elected, and then loudly proclaim that the DA is undermining the rule of law.
That articles raises all sorts of "selectively including information to push a narrative" red flags.
Eg, one police officer interviewed says:
> “I made two arrests two days in a row one week, and both turned into paperwork clusterfucks,” the former officer said. “When you’ve accumulated two or three use-of-force complaints in a week, you’ll say: ‘I just need to stop. I need to stop doing this.’”
The article later interprets it as "police officers opposed to the consent decree that McGinn negotiated [engaged] in underpolicing".
Which is technically accurate, but also... The article implies this is political retaliation, as in "we'll let people commit crimes, that will teach you", while the interviewed officer's reported experience is "when you get reprimanded and asked to fill time-consuming paperwork every time you do X, at some point you stop doing X". (Or you keep filling the paperwork, and therefore spend less time patrolling and responding to calls.)
Don't get me wrong, police brutality is a thorny problem and police often actively resists solving it. But when there's a tradeoff, if you act like the tradeoff only has one side and the other is that the people whose jobs you're trying to regulate are lazy corrupt assholes, you're not going to make a lot of progress on solving the problem.
They are not being forced to fill out that paperwork on their own time, it is part of their work shift for which they are compensated. I can think of no other occupation where an employee can refuse to fill out paperwork or refuse to do some other tedious task just because they don't like it and not get fired.
I always do my required paperwork but I admit I must have lost some money because I "forgot" some of my expense reports.
I also admit that a large part of why I often just walk during lunch breaks at clients instead of eating sometimes ridiculously good lunches might be because I hate collecting those papers/digital notes and have to force them into the accounting system at work.
Don't underestimate the dread of certain kinds of paperwork for certain kinds of people.
These "use-of-force complaints" didn't file themselves you know. Citizens actually spent their own time filing them (in addition perhaps to being subjected to the use of force), so you can't just dismiss them as an one-sided/asymmetric nuisance.
And while the officer's stance is not an outright "we'll let people commit crimes, that will teach you", it certainly comes close to "policing our style, or none at all".
This has happened in Minneapolis. Since George Floyd police in Minneapolis have effectively stopped doing their job. When one of their own is treated by the law like anyone else would be they retaliate by refusing to work. Police feel entitled to be free of genuine consequence for their actions. For example, police commit more domestic violence on average than non-police and rarely get arrested for it.
Seem that such corruption starts very innocuously. I remember police officer acquaintances saying being a cop means you can always use that fact to never get a speeding ticket. I never felt that they were shady people I think they are likely decent people with a difficult job, but something about that fact did sort of bothered me. I would like to think that a police officer driving very dangerously or even drunk would not being to get away with it that easily.
This would probably be a lot more rare if the Camden NJ option of "fire and replace the whole department" were invoked for underperformance and/or corruption.
Also politicians pass laws that citizens need to abide —they have specific carve outs for themselves allowing them to skirt laws (such as trading on insider information for members of Congress).
When they are treated like anyone else i.e. people who do not enforce the law they act like anyone else i.e. don't enforce the law, why would you expect anything else?
Ah yes, "I had an expectation that I could beat the hell out of people with no consequence when there was no call for violence." defense.
No one is complaining when a cop uses force, they are complaining when a cop goes out of their way to murder, torture, and beat the shit out of normal citizenry who often put up little to no fight.
Obviously it was hyperbole. Instead of addressing the essence of the point made you counter with this. Your response says much about how strong the argument you responded to is.
One should expect to live in a society in which police are not immune from breaking the law. When they mete out non judicial punishment then they should be held accountable for it in the same way I would be held accountable.
Depends on one's definition of punishment. I for one don't consider any use of force to be a punishment. The police's use of force to apprehend a suspect in crime or to prevent a crime in progress is not a punishment, IMHO. I'd rather live in a society that agrees with this so I don't live in SF or Minneapolis.
Obviously no one is saying force should never be utilized by the police. Are you unable to understand or imagine a police force functioning in such a way that they use reasonable force to apprehend suspects and don’t beat with impunity those that are already in custody? Police in Minneapolis murdered a suspect and the response to the offending officers being convicted by a jury was to stop doing their job and you appear think this is a reasonable response.
It is disheartening that you appear to be so willing to go along with with whatever police do all in the name of safety. Do you really view the world in such a way that you can’t comprehend having a police force that does it’s job without beating suspects who are already in custody?
Obviously we are listening to different people because people say just that in this very same thread. Also I don't see Escadrones de la Muerte being a problem in Minneapolis or anywhere in the US for that matter, so what extrajudicial punishment you are taking about if you don't mind my asking?
It appears to be you, who claimed that the police actions should be judged just like everyone else's here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35452473
Everyone else cannot really use force to arrest suspects and using force to prevent crime in progress is a very complicated matter for regular citizens too.
You do have a capacity for missing the point and context. The “this” in my first sentence referred to what someone said. Specifically police pulling back when challenged. No reasonable person thinks police should never use force and no one is declaring otherwise. Police doing illegal things with impunity is what people are decrying. Are you deliberately being obtuse?
> Everyone else cannot really use force to arrest suspects and using force to prevent crime in progress is a very complicated matter for regular citizens too.
In most states, anybody can use force to arrest criminals,
Of course the devil is in the details. I wouldn't risk my own neck by attempting a citizens arrest in a place like SF, because I think the prosecutors/etc there would be more interested in making an example out of me for daring to care, than punishing the actual criminal. Evidently the police of SF feel similar.
"suspects" != "criminals".
And we had just recently seen what happened to a gentleman who merely filmed such an arrest[1] of such a suspect, have not we? So yes, technically you can use force and do a citizen arrest if you don't care about consequences.
Actually, one should expect to live in a society where you do not get randomly stabbed and die in the street. This means that the spirit of law should reflect the necessity that arresting criminals gets higher priority than prosecuting cops.
In fact, by treating the two as the same, you commit a deep injustice, because a violent action does not get judged the same as its violent reaction.
This means that the spirit of law should reflect the necessity that arresting criminals gets higher priority than prosecuting cops.
I don’t think you understand the implications of what you just wrote. I thank you for stating this because it means we are in complete agreement. When a cop breaks the law they are in fact a criminal and, as you just stated, prosecuting criminals gets a high priority.
We agree. Criminals ought to be prosecuted. I’m glad you are in favor of prosecuting police who break the law.
So there's a tradeoff. Are you saying you would rather live in a high crime state, with tech founders being stabbed to death, than let them have their way?
It should be expected to have a police force that enforces the laws while not allowing police to mete out non judicial punishment. It’s possible for police to do their job without needing to beat whomever they want, whenever they want, without fear of prosecution.
> It should be expected to have a police force that enforces the laws while not allowing police to mete out non judicial punishment.
This is, actually, completely impossible. A very simple example: an active shooter situation requires an immediate non judicial punishment. Therefore, the laws need explicit carve-outs for cops.
Good, I agree. Then you may also agree that your original statement
> When one of their own is treated by the law like anyone else would be they retaliate by refusing to work
was incorrect: if you were going to be arrested for killing an active shooter, then you would not do it. And it would be wrong to charaterize this as a retaliation, as it is a rational decision.
You are good at missing the point. Clearly what is being talked about are things like beating suspects after they are in custody. We are not talking about justified use of force that police are legally allowed to do. If I was filed beating a handcuffed person I’d be arrested and prosecuted. The same does not usually apply to police.
Please read what is written in the context it is written in.
> Clearly what is being talked about are things like beating suspects after they are in custody.
Pure invention, if you want to restrain your context then use precise language not a large variety of hyperboles like "It’s possible for police to do their job without needing to beat whomever they want, whenever they want."
In the end, I will sum up this discussion from my POV: you view cops broadly as criminals waiting to get caught (they are domestic abusers after all!) and if I were one I would never want to police your neighborhood.
I suspect this all comes from you living a sheltered life, and because your view of police and, especially, of criminals is informed by TV shows. And yes, "gotcha!", those aren't the same, no matter how many screenwriters enjoy subverting expectations.
It's quite clear to me that the application of your ideas has given this headline, so I'm comfortable ending this discussion on this note: I hope that your anti-cop views are eliminated ASAP through the voting booth.
The Supreme Court agreed that police departments can go out of their way to only hire stupid people, and refuse to hire people who are smart enough to do the job well.
This isn't just limited to intelligence. Police departments will not hire people who will do the job properly, and they'll force out the people who maintain high ethics. That's why people say there's a systemic issue with policing in this country.
That is plain wrong. From your article the rationale for the police department was the following:
> New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
This is visibly not about "refusing to hire people who are smart enough to do the job well", but
> a rational way to reduce job turnover
Furthermore, since they interviewed only people who score higher than 20, where 21 is said to be equivalent to an IQ of 104, then those aren't stupid people.
Finally, I will say that the conspiracy theory that police departments are pro-crime and try do their best to do their job the wrong way seems out of touch with reality.
A great many police are not anti-crime when it comes to one of their own. For instance, police engage in domestic violence at a higher rate than the general population and are rarely arrested for it. Police violence, and we are talking about excessive violence, is well documented and so is the fact that they rarely go to jail for it. We are talking about police committing crimes and not violence committed lawfully while doing their job.
In case you aren’t aware, people can only hold a couple of jobs and one time and it’s ok for them to critique policies and actions of people in jobs they don’t have or ever intend to have. I can criticize a politician’s performance even though I don’t ever intend to become one. There is nothing illogical or hypocritical about this.
in a democracy, if you point the finger at something and come to a bad conclusion, and then demand a ridiculous, unworkable solution, it is my duty as a fellow citizen to inform you and other voters that you are extremely wrong! That's what I'm trying to do. There's actually no super policeman hiding out there that can do what you say, and guarantee that across a population of over 300 million people there will never be violent interactions between the police and the citizenry. It is insane to suggest that.
Clearly you are incapable of a reasoned, nuanced discussion on this topic. You should try reading what has been written dispassionately. No is suggesting that there should never be a violent interaction between police and suspects. Clearly the discussion at had deals with police doing things like torturing suspects (read about Chicago police and death penalty cases there), and beating apprehended and subdued suspects.
You are taking what is written and applying an interpretation that clearly is not intended or made. You act as if those wanting reform seek out the most extreme, nonsensical standards. You are unreasonable in your responses. I hope for you that you may one day learn and understand logic and nuance.
They did that in Camden I believe. You got less crime ("I was right!" you say) and more complaints about police violence, more altercations ("Oh no! I wasted 10 years!" says you if you tried it). It turns out that freshman police are really gung ho and more likely to chase criminals down and beat them up, while veterans are more likely to sit back and wait for backup. If your problem was the police acting violent with impunity, then this doesn't solve the problem. You can punish them, and then you are at square one again.
“A tradeoff” is certainly a strange way of phrasing it. It could also be said that they’re holding hostage the safety of the public in order to get their way.
I'm not going to be gaslit into thinking that desiring to live in a community without human excrement on the streets or random stabbings, via increased policing is 'licking the boot' or 'smoking crack'.
I think it would be better to simply replace those cops, return to community policing, make the police department a 4 year degree program, and ban all that silly "warrior" training and displays of things like Punisher logos.
I don't think "let them hold us hostage by refusing to work" is the right answer.
Even when police make arrests, they are back on the streets. Any rational police officer is bound to wonder, why make the arrest in the first place that only puts them at risk if nothing after them will actually be done.
"Why am I putting out this wildfire? A new one is just going to start later. It's pointless to fight these fires when year after year they just keep coming back".
It's the job they chose and trained to do. If they don't like it, they can get a new job.
Someone is starting these fires. The police go in and take care of it, the DAs literally release them with zero or nearly zero consequences to the offender and the next day (often literally) they are starting "fires" again.
We are human, not machines, we are not idealized automatons.
"year after year"? People have gotten arrested and then released to commit more crimes with a turnaround of less than a day. It'd be fantastic if they all got even 1 year in prison. A better analogy would be that there's no sense wasting a small handheld fire extinguisher on a large wildfire.
What kind of alternative do you imagine? A world where the police arrest every criminal once and they're done?
There are few jobs on Earth where you fix everything once and it stays fixed forever. Almost everyone is working to keep a type of entropy at bay. Doctors help people get healthy who get sick again, I fix outages that will get caused again, and police need to arrest people who do crimes and will get released again.
I expect there to be a consequence given for breaking the law. That's the "radical" alternative I imagine. Instead we get a release directly after offense.
If you go see a doctor to help you get healthy, and you feel better right after, but the very next day you're sick with the same condition, do you think the doctor really helped?
> police in America tend to go on low-key strike when a liberal prosecutor is elected
It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with demoralization. Most cops simply want to do their job and not consistently be undermined or called liars.
If you're suggesting that there's a bit of militarization in modern policing I'm not going to argue with you. At some point police departments went from being keepers of the peace to aggressive enforcement units. Many departments even have and utilize surplus military equipment. Personally I'd rather have more Andy Griffith and less Stacey Koon.
However that's not what I meant in terms of undermining. If a DA undermines the work of the police force they are supposed to support that has negative consequences on the actions of the policing body. This would happen regardless of whether or not the policing body were true peace keepers or aggressors. I would argue that in fact the DAs actions affect the PD-types-we-like more than the bully types.
The job of the DA isn't to support the police department.
A DA needs to allocate resources towards cases that are significant to the community, aligned with the desires of the people who voted the DA into office.
I have a boss who doesn't always "support" what I think should be done. And that's fine, because he has different goals that he tries to communicate to my team, but in the end, he answers to his boss. I don't have the full picture on why he makes decisions, how he allocates budgets etc. I just have insights from what he tells me and what I see.
But I'm a professional, and I don't get my feelings hurt when my boss tells me to do something different, or to do something I don't agree with. Yet cops are just different. In the US they get kid glove treatment when they break the law, either from fellow cops or the courts. They get idolized by TV shows as the only thing keeping people safe when they do little to actually prevent crime. And they continue to claim being underfunded, overworked, under appreciated and under constant threat of death at the hands of "civilians", since they tend to break communities into three categories (perps, civilians, and cops).
It’s hilarious that progressives refuse to blame homeless people or addicts for any kind of personal failings (it’s the system!) while simultaneously blaming police personally, saying they’re “quiet quitting”. Is it about systems or not?
Prevention is deservedly mentioned first. Prosecution is not mentioned at all, though the last point could be read as a veiled rebuke of those who believe it's a primary goal.
"The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it."
There's plenty for police to do in preventing, protecting, and investigating, even if no prosecution occurs. The problem with US policing (and the associated justice/prison systems) is that these original principles have been completely replaced by a punitive and largely anti-community attitude or approach. And it doesn't work. Just as higher medical costs don't correlate very well with better health outcomes, intensive policing and imprisonment as they're practiced here do not lead to better public safety. Sometimes it's not enough to do more of what you're already doing, and a paradigm shift - by it's nature something that can feel very scary and might even produce worse results in the short term - is necessary.
Knowledge of prosecution is part of the prevention though - some would say it is the most important part, since police can’t physically be everywhere preventing crime.
If you just remove prosecution from the equation of policing, without making any other changes, you won’t be left with a better system but a worse one.
> Knowledge of prosecution is part of the prevention though
Agreed. To be clear, I think a blanket refusal to prosecute is a terrible idea. I was responding to a specific question - "why bother arresting" - in a context where arrest would have been easy and at least locally beneficial.
> If you just remove prosecution from the equation
Nowhere close to anything I suggested or implied. I was merely pointing out that successful prosecution is not the only or even primary purpose of policing. My interlocutor's implication that we can only continue policing with a focus on prosecution or give up on policing at all is a pernicious false dichotomy. We can police differently. Prosecution is a part of that, but only when alternatives have been tried and failed.
>Prosecution is a part of that, but only when alternatives have been tried and failed.
We don’t disagree, but so far humanity as a whole has been unable to find as efficient prevention method as prosecution. Indeed it would be a better society which could abandon the measure without negative repercussions.
When most people don’t do their jobs, they get disciplined, I don’t understand why cops get a pass. SFPD has a hard job but « passed in front of someone who got stabbed and did nothing » should get your pay auto-docked.
Given that in SF the liberal prosecutor was, in fact, undermining the rule of law and de facto legalized stealing, I'm inclined to side with the cops here. Cops don't prevent crime, they only catch criminals after the fact. If the DA doesn't charge them, then all arresting does is give them a day off. I wouldn't arrest people either if I knew they wouldn't be charged.
The DA, Chesa Boudin, prosecuted various crimes at the same or higher rate than his predecessor.
Over the last 7 years, arrests by sfpd have gone down. This includes before the election of the prosecutor that "legalized stealing" (how?).
Chesa specifically complained about this a few times, trying to work with sfpd on why they were simply bringing less criminals to his office.
The common argument is that the police were doing as they promised: the union came out hard against Boudin during his election, and then held public safety hostage until the public finally recalled Boudin.
I know you were contrasting arrest with prosecution, but "only arrest" is still an idea that shouldn't be put forward even in that context. A cop's job is to preserve public safety. Sometimes that does and should mean arrest, whether or not that arrest leads to prosecution. More often it should mean prevention. That might just mean being visible as a deterrent. It might mean intervening to arbitrate or de-escalate a situation before it leads to a criminal act. It might mean investigating suspicious activity. It might mean helping a desperate person find the aid they need before their desperation turns into criminality. The possibilities are almost endless. If police did their job according to Peel's original principles, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind that the DA's actions are irrelevant.
You are stuck in the normal paradigm of cop arrests criminal -> criminal goes away for several years. But there is a middle step, DA prosecutes criminal, that went missing in SF. So instead, it's, cop arrests criminal -> DA refuses to prosecute -> criminal back on streets tomorrow. So really it is the DA that is responsible for 99% of the crime prevention effect of arresting criminals. Would you do your job if you knew that no one else on your team was doing theirs? That's what you are asking the cops to do.
> A cops job is only to arrest criminals, if they are prosecuted should not be their concern.
Police departments don't have enough resources to arrest every criminal, so they should try to maximize their effectiveness and avoid wasting what resources they do have by deprioritizing arrests of criminals who they know won't be prosecuted.
"A cop should risk his life to effect an arrest, even if that act will be immediately undermined by the prosecutor and will have no measurable difference on society."
Are you saying they shouldn't value their own lives, but instead behave as instruction-following robots.
Cops aren’t really risking their lives. Statistically they’re more likely to die of Covid than they are of trying to arrest someone. They have armor in their uniforms, carry multiple manners of debilitating a person from multiple ranges. This puts them at a massive advantage compared to your average homeless person or impoverished criminal, who likely can’t even afford a gun.
I don’t know what you mean here. I’m not trying to be stupid, I just have no idea what you’re trying to get at. I don’t see what either point has to do with my statement.
The idea that police officers are in constant danger of coming home in a body bag is copaganda. Police work is one of the safer occupations. We don't idolize the guys/gals who pick up our trash, but they have higher death rates.
As a developer, I would get pretty upset and demoralized if someone came and periodically reverted all my commits. Imagine if I actually had to risk my life to make those "commits"?
It's not hard to see why they stay in the car and keep driving if the arrests don't even lead to prosections.
Frankly, if your commits were being loudly criticized as harming/killing people then you have no right to sulk off and stop doing your job because they were reverted. And it also doesn’t excuse you to feel entitled to remain employed while you stopped doing your job. If you felt that way, quit so someone who is willing to do the work can get hired.
Additionally, being a cop is a pretty safe job! It’s not even top 10 most dangerous jobs. Most injuries are because of the cops own traffic violations or, more recently, Covid.
> Frankly, if your commits were being loudly criticized as harming/killing people then you have no right
No, my commits are perfectly fine, as are the vast majority of my peers' code. Only an extremely small number of complaints are generated, across a number of commits many magnitudes larger -- and not all of those complaints are of equal merit.
> If you felt that way, quit so someone who is willing to do the work can get hired.
Unfortunately, recruiting is down across most (maybe all) major cities. Maybe the would-be recruits see it differently than you -- with nothing to stake -- do?
Unfortunately, your commits aren’t fine, very likely you are covering for your murdering peer and deserve equal criticism for doing so. It’s well known that cops that fight corruption in the police force end up forced out, institutionalized under false pretenses, or straight up executed by other cops. This leaves the only police remaining the corrupt ones, either perpetuating corruption first hand or second handedly watching it go down and not doing anything.
Unfortunately, the matter of fact is, the police force decide to stop enforcing laws when they’re criticized for problems the police force caused. It’s childish. Police steal more money than actual amounts of theft in the country through civil forfeiture. Police are more likely to commit domestic violence. Police hired defense to argue that they don’t have any obligation to protect individuals or intervene in crime, instead of punishing cops who shirk their work. And then when any cops are critiqued the entire force stops doing their jobs and blames the critics for it.
I'm going to steer this conversation back on track, and not chase down these non-facts you're asserting.
The question is: why aren't police making as many arrests (commits). And the answer I'm proposing is: because DAs are reverting their work.
They are not reverting their work only in the cases of supposed police misconduct, so your counterpoint about bad commits is a diversion from the point. The DAs are not doing their job because they believe, frankly, that criminal justice as constructed cannot work. They don't believe a lot of crimes should be prosecuted even. For example, in DC something like 60% of gun possession cases are dropped. In Chicago and Philly it's higher than 90%. That has nothing to do with police brutality (bad commits) [0]
(And btw, these are the same people who think guns should be banned flat out)
What that means is the PM (district attorney) has the developers working on a product they have no intention of shipping (actual justice). Police are people too, and nobody is going to do purposeless work. You wouldn't at your job, and neither would they at their much more dangerous and stressful job. Nor is anyone in a great rush to sign up for this job, despite offered salaries being very high right now.
Police misconduct is a distraction from this point, unless you think 90% of gun possession charges were generated abusively -- which would be a completely innumerate claim.
If we're going with the developer metaphor, it's more like you're making a bunch of low quality PRs that aren't adding any value to the product and the maintainer is choosing not to merge some of them.
It's more like you're a pre-2012 glibc contributor who's making a bunch of high quality PRs that would add significant value to the product but Ulrich Drepper is choosing not to merge most of them for no good reason.
That's a extremely naive way to look at police. But if you think the police do "high quality" anything then you're probably not the kind of person who could be persuaded otherwise.
Is there even a single cop working in SF right now that was hired when there wasn't a liberal prosecutor? I want to say no. This is not some recent development that caught a force full of good ol' boys off guard.
Yep same here. Estonia is a dream compared to Bay Area even with the cold winters and old Soviet buildings (which means lots of cheap rent btw). San Francisco has a powerful marketing and promotion engine - and yes it really is a gorgeous city in the late summer - but the weather otherwise is pretty miserable - almost as cold and rainy as Seattle
I'm sure - given the option - any US west coast tech startup would much prefer to operate in some quaint old town in Eastern Europe with the cafes etc. and no need to hassle with a car. Unfortunately the venture community infrastructure / legal etc. is stuck on west coast - and AI is only reinforcing that
I'm sure Eastern Europe is great, but if you want to remain in the US there are many other great places to live in the Midwest and American South. You do need a car, which is fine or even desirable for many people (like me).
I agree. There's dozens of fantastic little cities in the USA, so many to explore. SF sucks, to be sure. Which is sad, because it didn't used to~~and has potential :( ! LA is great (unless you like to complain about traffic). But there's so so many options, and with remote work you should be fine. If your company has to be based in Silicon Valley tho for the Imperial Credits, then--whaddayagonnado? I guess.
I could only give places that pique my interest and seem good to me. But I don't know what you need specifically. I recommend you get on wikipedia and search a bunch of little places across multiple states, and also search google for things like, "Best towns to live in USA", or "greenest cities to live in USA", or "most outdoorsy cities to live in USA" to start getting lists and knowing more. That's how I started learning about it.
I also really enjoyed learning about all the little places, and it's a bonafide research rabbit hole if that's your sort of thing: weather, taxes, sports, politics, culture, economy, transport, food, history, lifestyle, geography. There's such variety and distinctness! I mean, you can cut the pie anyway you like and I bet there's somewhere in the US to suit you.
You’re getting downvoted but this is a real thing: for instance, in Belfast, almost everybody is white, so if you’re not white, you’re probably gonna feel a little bit uncomfortable in some places. Just like if you’re white and you go live in the suburbs in Abu Dhabi maybe you’re gonna feel a little bit uncomfortable because you know you’re not part of the dominant race. This is just the unfortunate reality of humans as we are stupidly tribal and racist inherently.
People moving into Forsyth over the last decade are transplants from up north and other parts of Atlanta are part of the “professional class” as the population has grown. They are the “college educated white suburban” group that have completely different attitudes than the people who have been in Forsyth forever.
Yeah, I mean there’s definitely crazy people in LA but they’re not all crazy homeless mentally ill vagrant criminals on the streets late at night sometimes the crazy people are the people you meet in a bar: the crazy Asian girl who you happen to a few seats from, who is drunk, starts slurring at you then when you ignore her slaps you out of nowhere, and has to be taken away by her friends. The bartender apologizes… but that would be assault If a guy did it…girls get away with that shit, with a shrug: “she’s drunk” as if it makes it okay, when it doesn’t. Not a good lesson for people. Or the crazy white who starts chatting to you while you’re playing pool, who’s trying to pretend he knows you but has no clue and starts rambling saying he’s spreading rumors to ruin peoples reputations in China, in Thailand, in Australia.
But even with such nutcases, who you can safely ignore, because they’re just out of their heads clearly, I really like LA.
I find the street people in LA are not as dirty or aggressive as the worst street people in San Francisco. It’s like a Street people in LA still see you is kind of kin. But the street people in San Francisco: you guys are on two sides of divide like you’re from different worlds.
I remember Street people from both cities but I can’t remember like the specific places. I just recall that during the day, San Francisco is a lot worse than LA. More street people more aggressive, more dirty.
This was pre-pandemic, though, so maybe things have changed a lot. Hopefully for the better in all aspects!
Much more likely to die or be seriously injured in a car accident. People get shot and stabbed in Midwestern cities too.
Not to say there aren’t great places to live in the rest of the US. Aside from the sometimes idiotic politics at the statehouse I’ve been fine living in Ohio, for example.
Well let's not trivialize accidents either. They're still unnecessary and they can be intentional. Off the top of my head the number of road rage incidents involving violence is around 100/200 per year and stabbings are around 1,000. Road rage numbers are increasing as well.
In terms of probability of getting hurt, car crashes dwarf being stabbed so a flight to safety that requires more driving is almost surely increasing your odds of being harmed. Likely the numbers are underreported as well. But headlines get attention. Family of four t-boned in an intersection by a drunk driver just doesn't get the clicks that CTO stabbed in San Francisco does.
Not saying this is wrong, but it's kind of misleading the same way electoral college maps are misleading. People moving to the south working in tech aren't moving to the vast areas that are plagued with issues. They're moving to metros like Austin, Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, etc., which are on par with life expectancy in California in that map.
fair enough ... or Miami ... you're still talking about states where there's lively debate about banning books, banning abortion, putting the 10 commandments and creationism in every classroom (and guns), making it effectively legal to shoot certain people or run them down with your car ... places with not-great schools and health care and culture, with cops and 'community orgs' dedicated to keeping certain people in their place. if you're a tech company and want to attract the best and brightest without regard for color or creed, women, lgbtq, people who think and look different, it's an issue, even if it's in a comparative island of receptivity.
> making it effectively legal to shoot certain people or run them down with your car
> cops and 'community orgs' dedicated to keeping certain people in their place
Come now, that's as exaggerated as saying coastal states have no law enforcement anymore and have taxpayer-funded abortion factories. If there is such a thing as drinking Fox News koolaid, what you're saying is the MSNBC equivalent.
Do you spend a lot of time in the South? I live in a Deep South state as an immigrant and visible ethnic minority. People of different races get along very well here. I used to live in a major coastal metropolis that had BLM signs on every other lawn but effectively zero black people actually living in those neighborhoods. Here? Effectively zero BLM signs, but black and white and other races rubbing shoulders as neighbors every day.
For the past few decades, if you asked black professional athletes what city they were most likely to face overt racism in, it was Boston, not a Southern city.
I hear you, I don't live in South but I know people who do, and I see a lot of the mentality of, shoot first, ask questions later, and it goes exponential where someone who looks different is involved
I don't disagree that people should keep cooler heads all around. Perhaps it's the miserable humid heat that drives all that behavior (and it's been observed all around the world that hot weather is correlated with more murders).
Your two anecdotes, by the way, show no evidence that the people involved were of different races.
point taken, there's definitely racism, anti-Asian violence, militias and Proud Boys and idiots in the North. The totality of circumstances and history and socioeconomics and state-sponsored nonsense and fundamentalist nonsense and gun culture just hits a little different in the South.
Why Estonia of all the places? I'm assuming you guys were in the situation to choose whenever you wanted to move. Western Europe, Signapore, Australia, Switzerland? Why Estonia?
Most of those places you mention are relatively hostile to (foreign) startups, Estonia in comparison tries to encourage foreigners to open companies there.
How open is it to foreign workers on, say, 12-month contracts? Not that it's something I'm looking for right now but knowing it might be a possibility in a few year's time would be encouraging.
They have a specific digital nomad visa in addition to other visa types. I came on an ordinary visa some years ago (American citizen working in tech) and found it quite easy to get visa and bank stuff sorted, that said I was employed by their government.
Very easy to get a short term employment residency for 12 months. You can always convert to the more traditional D Visa if you decide you’d like to stay.
Low taxes, efficient administration, easy visa, high personal safety (except in case of war), a good marketing as well, and almost all services are now natively in English (living in Estonia for 10+ years, and it wasn't the case before).
Article 5 says that in case of an armed-attack of a member of NATO, that other countries have to provide help. Each member of the alliance then decide, about how much help, when and how at their own discretion.
It doesn't necessarily mean that Washington would attack Moscow, and vice-versa or that they would be war outside "disputed" territories.
If tomorrow they have to choose between saving Tallinn or San Francisco, they'll make some choices, but not irrational ones.
The main TV channel in Russia openly threatens of an hybrid-scenario like in 2014 in Ukraine where they sent soldiers without bearing insignias or flags (so officially it was not an attack).
Let's say Estonia is in a situation in some way similar to North Korea vs South Korea.
Very peaceful and nice country inside but with a risk of getting into a dangerous military situation and some support guaranteed by the US and other allies if things goes bad.
The ambassadors of both countries kicked out each other in harsh ways, the customs don't collaborate together anymore, etc.
No panic, but still good to keep in mind, just in case.
If you listen to someone like Stoltenberg speak, you will find that he is very clear about NATO's commitments. No "each country would decide how much help", that kind of thing comes mostly from the German speaking circles.
No recent U.S. President wanted to pull out of NATO. The Clinton campaign falsely claimed that Trump did, but he just wanted other countries to pay the agreed upon 2% commitment. And it looks like it worked.
Technicalities don't mean much, Russia will make its move not based on technicalities but on the perceptions of other countries' response. Currently the front runners for the next US admin from the GOP side are openly from the "we'll give Russia anything, Putin good" camp so yes, Estonians and other Eastern Europeans are rightly concerned.
The Russians aren't gonna necessarily come across the border militarily. The Russians are gonna do what they did in Ukraine.
I'm not sure I would risk a nuclear war over some place which is the suburbs of St. Petersburg"
Unless I misunderstand, I already see the speech: "we saved millions of Americans thanks to my mastermind diplomacy, we send our prayers to all our allies, good luck!"
At least in Tallinn, most people speak some English. I met a surprising number of Estonians that were fluent too. There seemed to be a love affair with New York City, I saw New York pizza and clothes advertised everywhere in Tallinn.
Very far, you don't need to speak Estonian unless you plan to work as a local job position that requires doing customer support (such as shop-keeper). In such case (or policeman, lawyers, doctors, etc), it's mandatory to learn the language, and there is a special police that checks if you can speak and write in Estonian (Keele Inspektsioon).
This is done for a good reason, it's to make sure that everybody can get a good service and to protect Estonian heritage and culture (otherwise imagine older people, if their doctor can't speak with them).
You can fully live and work without speaking a single word in Estonian.
It's totally normal here to speak English.
Even at the cinema, movies are in English, subtitled in Estonian and Russian.
When you go to shop, many products actually have labels in English (or in German).
Estonian is a difficult language, Estonians know about it.
A bit generalising, but to get the idea:
Estonians don't want to speak Russian, Russians can't speak Estonian well.
So you have this society fragmented in half.
So overall, everybody settles for the easiest language that doesn't upset anyone: English (and German as a fallback).
It's easy to find schools in English too.
Even the tax board speaks to you in English, all the website for public services ( https://www.eesti.ee/ ) is all in English, even all the laws are officially translated in English ( https://www.riigiteataja.ee/ )
To IT foreigners, the country is very welcoming and very very easy-to-settle in my opinion.
To other foreigners, it's not true, because it's considered stealing jobs, bringing criminality, etc (basically same stuff that you have to prove when applying for an H1-B in the US)
To get a flat, real estate agents all speak English.
They won't get offended if you speak only English, it's normal for them.
Telecom companies speak English.
All apps (taxi, food delivery) are in English, because most startups and apps are not made for the local market as its too tiny.
From a political perspective, the country is now pushing more and more English; they'd prefer that you learn English than Russian.
So some shops are even removing Russian, and some administration now addresses you in 3 languages: [Estonian, then in English, and then Russian] (whereas before it was [Estonian, then Russian, and then English]).
The country is very well managed and organised, main issue with the country is:
- Darkness (coldness is fine, but half of the year you essentially live in the dark, almost like if it is always night). Summer is awesome though because you get day and sun almost all the time.
- A really unstable neighbour country on the East (it's not totally impossible that a war could break-out, though unlikely at the moment).
- Taxes may raise in order to fund the current war in Ukraine and balance the government budget.
but otherwise it's a really good place to live and raise a family.
I used to live in Tallinn as well (American expat) and echo basically everything rvnx says here. Some of the older people from the Russian community speak only Russian, but you're much more likely to encounter this in Narva (east) than in Tallinn. Estonians are also well aware that they are a tiny country with a difficult language so if you're not permanently settling, there is little expectation of learning more than a few words of Estonian. Super easy to navigate the bureaucracy (if you can even call it that), file taxes, etc.
One thing of note, with the caveat it's been a few years since I lived there (although I stay closely in touch with friends and visit often... actually I am typing this from my airbnb in Tallinn) -- you might get some looks if you're brown or black. From my experience this is mainly from older people and it's pretty benign, but it's not the most cosmopolitan place and most people of color you see are "students" for visa purposes who have been there for many years and work for gig startups delivering food or driving Bolt (Uber equivalent). I never felt unsafe or anything, but there were a few uncomfortable moments during my time there as a person of color.
Estonia is on a short list of places I'd consider moving to to found a company if the US weren't an option. My top three would probably be Singapore, Israel and Estonia. Of the three, Estonia is the most budget-friendly.
A major problem as I see it is a lack of nuanced policy. Currently in America it seems that you can either have police brutality and criminalized homelessness or you can have non-enforcement. What we really need is to prosecute crime but without tolerating police brutality or making laws designed to punish the poor.
You have pointed out the essential part of the policing problem. Anytime police are given genuine punishments for excessive force the entire department’s response is to stop doing their job.
Another problem I see is that in some cities (mine) people see racism at any attempt to alleviate the crime problem in lower income areas. I used to use the public transit system but it is now filled with drug users and people who enjoy terrorizing others. Police do nothing about it partially out of a fear of being called racist.
For whatever reason I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.
> I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.
My childhood friend's dad was a cop in a riot of historic significance in my country.
Protesters greatly outnumbered the police, and they threw stones and pushed them into a corner. Shots were fired, nobody died. They really thought they were going to be stoned to death because of all the anger. The few dozen cops left the event with PTSD and a handful never worked again.
As an individual policeman there is very little you can do about an agitated crowd who starts chanting.
So while a harsh reaction to police brutality is understandable, every single policeman carries the recent collective history of violence and knows they could be the subject of retribution. So the healthy thing for them, as an individual, is to not engage, because previously only potential perpetrators would engage in violence, but with enough heat, even bystanders may. Maybe the non-racist cops can't hide behind a collective, when entering a public conflict, as well as they could before.
In the U.S. my sense is that police do not fear retribution by the public. They fear only being held accountable in the same way the public is held accountable. Police mete out non judicial punishment all the time and are almost never arrested for it. They fear being held to the same standard as non police.
1. Laws and adherence to laws are required for a society to function.
2. Policing is necessary to enforce the law.
3. Policing, as a job, sucks. It's the tedium of TSA + the rare but lethal risk of being in a combat zone.
4. Policing, as a job, is made worse by politicians abusing it as a panacea, where other, less politically- and financially-palatable solutions would be more appropriate. Trained mental health professional intervention, drug programs, etc. Instead, cops are put in situations they shouldn't be.
The issue is thus not that police fear being accountable in the same way the public is held accountable. It's instead two-part:
A. Police feel they are owed a different sort of accountability than the public, both in service to and as a reward for doing a job the public doesn't want to do.
B. Effective police work requires a different sort of accountability than the public, as criminals doesn't operate in a vacuum and exploit known police limitations.
C. The most effective police work, for both police and the community, is deterrence -- the prevention of crime from even happening, by simple virtue of police presence. Deterrence requires respect and/or fear, and impoverished people without economic opportunity and living in communities where might makes right aren't deterred by gentle policing.
All of the above are contradictory with civil rights (and also with themselves).
Ergo, the appropriate level of accountability for policing is "what gets the job done, with the resources the city/state/federal government are prepared to invest in it."
Which makes it a multi-variable optimization problem.
Clearly, SF's current values are not producing an acceptable result.
I don’t disagree with the essence of your point. I suppose I fall further to the side of accountability than you do. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people not be beaten once arrested. That people not be met with violence for exercising their rights. Perhaps I’m naive and what I seek is some sort of utopian Star Trek society that is completely unreasonable to expect.
A lot of cops went to the ju-jitsu gym I used to go to. They assumed that I was an ally so to speak and were quite candid and about beating suspects. The whole system is rotten. Part of the problem is your point 3. The number of guns in the country makes it prudent for police to treat every encounter as if they could be shot. I imagine that alone puts quite a lot of stress on the mental health of police officers.
I'd say that it's always bad for people to be beaten once arrested. Or with violence for exercising their rights.
But I'd put the "optimal" (in the efficiency and good-social-outcomes sense, as distinct from a morally good-bad action perspective) amount at >0.
A credible threat of violence by police is a powerful deterrent. Especially to people who don't see the world in more nuanced light.
If someone like that is afraid of the police and so doesn't commit a crime, then everyone wins -- the potential perpetrator (who isn't exposed to the criminal justice system), the victim(s) (who don't have a crime committed against them), the police officer (who doesn't have to be in that situation and can focus on better parts of the job), and society as a whole (who save the substantial cost of dealing with all of the above: incarceration, rehabilitation, salary, lost productive economic activity).
The more nuanced discussion that tends to get lost in the weeds is "How do we simultaneously allow police latitude to do the job we want them to do, while also ensuring that latitude isn't disproportionately employed against minorities or political out-groups?"
In other words, police may need to crack a few hard heads. But those shouldn't be statistically-over-representative person of color heads.
Of course, fold in that economic situation is also racially biased, as a consequence of historical inequities, and actually accomplishing statistically-fair policing seems intractable. :(
But at the end of the day, people getting stabbed isn't good for anyone.
Even from an anti-police perspective, it builds support for "hard policing" policies among the general public, and eventually an election swings someone they support into office.
--
There was another comment in here that asserted that cops commit domestic violence more often than the general public.
Which immediately made me think "Why?"
Obviously, the acceptable amount of domestic violence is zero, but (if those statistics are true) there's something causing police officers to commit it more frequently than the general public.
It's probably partly that policing selects for "tough" people, by virtue of the work...
... but it also speaks to cumulative trauma caused by the job, and the effects of that.
You can't watch humans be shitty to each other, repeatedly, without it changing you. :(
It feels like we need a more complete lifecycle than "police for life," that includes cycling through various related components, some of which provide an opportunity for healing.
E.g. also stints helping defense and prosecuting attorneys, legal defense funds, partnering with mental health professionals, EMS, fire/rescue, etc.
I agree with what you wrote and largely agree with it. It’s a tricky situation and I don’t pretend to know of any realistic solutions. I’m a keyboard warrior spreading the gospel against illegal police violence. Such voices are needed if we are to keep excessive police violence from being normalized and accepted. Voices are too needed in support of police. Extreme outcomes on either side of this issue are bad.
I wasn't sure if you were the OP of that tidbit or not.
But yeah, to me, if I see police officers are 2-4x more likely than the general public to engage in domestic violence, that engages my curiosity about the job rather than the people.
You don't pick bad apples at a reliable 2-4x rate across the entire country.
And so much police reform (when it happens) seems to start and stop with the individuals. 'Find the officers who are doing bad things and apply more consequences to them,' etc.
Part of the solution, to be sure, but IMHO we should look equally closely at what all these super-offenders have in common -- the same job!
"How can we change the policing job to one that doesn't cause its employees to perpetrate domestic violence and employ excessive use of force at greater rates than the general public?" is a question I don't see much.
As an analogy, farmers commit suicide at far higher rates than the general public. Yet somehow I doubt it would fix the problem to identify only the suicidal farmers and just help them. The root cause is the stress and challenges of the profession, shared by all, even if it only ends tragically for a subset.
> As an individual policeman there is very little you can do about an agitated crowd who starts chanting.
You can kneel with protestors.
A cop tried this at a BLM protests I was at, which was peaceful including when the cops inexplicably arrived in riot gear. His buddies yanked him back and we never saw him again.
So you're right, very little cops can do when the system selects for bad behavior.
Police say that's the reason, but as you noted in the first paragraph, they're willing to manipulate the public for their own ends: why trust them on this motivation?
What consequences do they have from perceived racism that they fear it so much? Again as you noted, they are rarely punished for anything at all. They also do a lot of pretty unambiguous racism without apparent concern over this.
> For whatever reason I get the sense that police are either extremely violent or extremely passive.
It's both, and the reasons are interrelated. Passivity in some areas protects their right to do violence in others. Public fear of crime, avoidance of public spaces, these are results that benefit them institutionally. What incentives do they have for not working towards that result?
What consequences do they have from perceived racism that they fear it so much?
When the white liberals (like me) of my city unite with poor people of color and decry an action of the police it does affect them. They are human and criticism does affect them. It especially affects them when the whole city is up in arms over something they do. Mostly white liberals in my city don’t think about policing issues until something egregious happens. My experience is that when the whole city is up in arms about their actions then police respond like a petulant child by refusing to enforce the law.
Public fear of crime, avoidance of public spaces, these are results that benefit them institutionally. What incentives do they have for not working towards that result?
I grew up in the Canal Zone in Panama and remember the time during Noriega when he and the U.S. were opposed to each other. I remember the way I had be when dealing with Panamanian police during that time. Even though I was a white American I had to be very careful when dealing with them. I feel the same way around American police as I did when I dealt with police of a dictatorship.
My experience in America is that it is considered suspicious if a group of people are just hanging out outside. Four black kids walking together in my neighborhood would have the police called on them. We are, in essence, a nation of building dwellers who only go outside for the purpose of getting into a vehicle to drive to another building. It is as you say a situation that benefits police.
We don’t really have civil rights in the U.S. because police can, with impunity, fuck you up for exercising them.
No. I live in the area and there are places near Lake Street that police simply won’t go to unless it’s a violent crime in progress. One councilman from south Minneapolis, before George Floyd, mentioned that in his district police took their time to respond to calls and when they did show up told people to thank their councilman. They didn’t like his calls for greater police accountability and this was done in retribution. There are links in the comments regarding how police hold cities hostage when they are held accountable.
It makes sense, I think in this case a "middle ground" position is actually a legitimate opposition to both sides.
The rightward view of american policing is basically they're functioning as intended but are not powerful enough to achieve their desired effect and must be reinforced to succeed.
The leftward view is that they're functioning as intended, the violence and fear they cause is success, and so the entire thing must be dismantled.
The "centrist" view is I think something like the goal of policing is good & correct but the system is malfunctioning and must be adjusted. Neither side will agree with that: the right doesn't agree that it's malfunctioning (except so far is that it's held back from achieving its goal) and the left doesn't agree that its goal is just.
I think “right” and “left” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Are you talking about people in power, or are you talking about people on Twitter and a perception advanced by sensationalist news sources? I ask because at a national level this description doesn’t seem to match the policies being enacted (and a lot of people on Twitter are pretty vocally unhappy about it.) Everything else seems to vary greatly on a city-by-city level.
More individual self-identification yes. There are effectively no leftists in power in the US, the democrats mostly have what I've described as the centrist position. There is a lot of space to their left in terms of possible policy, but no one in a position to affect it seriously proposing it, afaik.
The problem is they get treated as if they're a member of the opposite side, not a third viewpoint. I can't count the number of times I've been called a Nazi and a communist in the same day.
FWIW, coming from the far left here, I don't really consider either of these positions "opposite" me but they are both clear opponents to my vision of meaningful change.
There's no neutrality or inherent virtue in a centrist position: it's a side like any other and you don't get credit just for inhabiting it. That doesn't make anyone calling you a nazi or communist justified in doing so or correct in their assessment. But it does indicate that neither considers your stance a compromise or allied position in relation to their own.
There's also no value in being an extremist either, you're not a significant member of any party that would lead to change in this country, nor will any of your goals come to fruition, you are outnumbered heavily and it looks like thankfully that will be the case for the remainder of my lifetime.
I find that I must act in alignment with my moral values to the best of my understanding and ability. It's not up to me to discover or calculate the "value" of those results, and that's not any part of my motivation.
I don't know what it would be like to select political goals based on their likelihood in the face of such incredible violence and injustice as we create. I'm grateful I can't lathe my soul in such a way. Seems chill though.
Not too long ago, advocating for gay marriage was considered an extremist position, but that eventually passed. On the other side, advocating for the illegality of abortion even for a child rape victim would be considered an extreme position in most of the US even though it is the current law in several states.
The Overton window can move surprisingly quickly, and policies which you consider extremist now won't be in a decade.
What fraction of people have to agree with something before it isn't extreme? Support for marriage equality among Americans was as high as 25% even back in 1990, if XKCD is to be believed.
Given the current state of voters, ranked choice seems like the best way to break the logjam by creating situations where palatable-to-all get elected over loved-by-most-hated-by-many.
Ranked Choice Condorcet. Instant Runoff is a band aid for the most glaring failing of the plurality system, but it doesn't actually support moving away from the two party system. Most places that have adopted IRV seem to have mitigated its failings by having multiple election stages, but we'd be better off with a voting system that directly chooses the winner from the entire field of candidates (when that's possible).
The downside of high-plurality systems is the lack of voter knowledge, especially without the historical press function.
I'd support that if it were coupled with multiple-choice position forms that were required to be filled out by each candidate, covering core issues and options. That is, no free response, not-an-answer answers.
Given the type of candidates that tend to occupy the low plurality spots, I'd say that problem is there regardless.
But yes, I totally agree with your proposal. I can even see it helping with cutting through all the boilerplate verbiage candidates are having to use to pay respects to various things, and return some focus on actual policies.
Vote Smart tried to do something similar... but the effective end result was that few candidates wanted to go on the record. https://votesmart.org/for-candidates/
Which is a shame, because "knowing what you're voting for" seems like a critical component of democracy, and campaign ads are useless (and expensive).
I meant ranked choice can be the least worst way of conducting democratic elections.
Individual results will still rightly depend on voters. You can blunt the attraction of extremism, but hearts and minds need shifting before voters will take a fundamentally different approach.
Posts such as this are sociologically amusing, "meta-heuristic" and the like. Using prepackaged terms to disparage people and dismiss them, without actually having to think objectively and consider opposing viewpoints. Also interesting how the choice of language completely outs people, as the extreme right/left adhere 100% to their respective terminologies, to signal membership and loyalty to their group. This post is a good example.
> it seems that you can either have police brutality and criminalized homelessness or you can have non-enforcement
NYC shows you can have broken policies AND do a better job on homelessness.
NYPD brutality, stop-and-frisk, broken windows, "it's Giuliani time" -- the cruelty of the NYPD is long-standing and well-documented.
Yet, NYC has done a massively better job directly addressing homelessness than SF.
SF's vaunted liberalism is largely for show. This is where a homophobic psychopath murdered the mayor and supervisor and was hailed as a hero by many residents. This is where massively corrupt machine politicians like Willie Brown feathered their nests. This is a city with some of the worst-managed public housing in the country, and neighborhoods like Hunter's Point awash in toxic chemicals.
This is a relatively tiny city with economic inequality and effective segregation outpacing cities many times it's size.
Just because they've elected a progressive DA here and there (and then recalled them LOL) doesn't change the ugliness underneath.
I only entered this comment section to watch the trash fire, and without making any observation on any other aspect of your comment (or any other for that matter) but - the Milk assassination was, what, almost 50 years ago? Surely that can’t be terribly dispositive of what the city is today.
(I do think there’s probably an indication there about the attitudes of “old San Francisco” - but how much of that generation is left at this point?)
> 50 years ago? Surely that can’t be terribly dispositive of what the city is today
It's relevant because at the time, like today, SF was seen as exhibit A of liberalism run amok, and yet couldn't unite against a homophobic assassination of their own elected officials.
Now, the zeitgeist insists that SF's broken homeless policies come from misplaced liberal compassion as opposed to a long history of neglect and corruption, which was particularly acute toward hispanic and black communities.
That’s what progressives in SF would say they are doing - with the stipulation that moderate amounts of theft, violence, and disorder are simply part of being marginalized, so criminalizing those behaviors is inherently oppressive.
>SFPD will not arrest them because Boudin refused to prosecute. New DA has not gotten back to me despite repeated attempts.
The same is happening in Philadelphia too. Its sad, because the city was on the upswing in the first half of the 2010's and making a lot of progress on reducing crime. Then a new DA came in and did a complete 180. Now its worse than ever. Look up videos of "Kensington, Philadelphia" on Youtube. Its like Mad Max these days.
I drove through Kensington twice during my last visit to Philadelphia this past year. It seemed to me a conscious decision by the city to have one open air market that they couldn’t control but at least manage. Sacrifice Kensington and contain the violence and drugs everywhere else.
I live in Philly. "Mad Max" is really pushing it and slightly offensive. It is still, like, society over here. Up until last year my gf worked everyday at a school in Kensington. She was never attacked by raiders or whatever. People everywhere have lives and are doing the best they can with what they've got.
Citizens can press civil charges, but the power to prosecute someone for jail time is reserved for the government. And the local and state governments, not the federal govt.
DAs are elected, so notionally, Boudin, the DA for SF, is representating the will of the people by not prosecuting criminals deemed to be "low level crimes".
Citizens don’t get to decide whether to press criminal charges; only the government can decide that. They may take the victim’s request into consideration, but that’s the extent of it.
Not sure what is going on in SF. But in Baltimore they would have been arrested and chargeg. Sure the city might drop the charges if the police bungle the investigation purposely or due to incompetence. But people are arrested and charged.
Did Boudin specifically refuse to prosecute the men who stabbed you, or did the police simply refuse to arrest them claiming as an excuse that Boudin will not prosecute?
Did the lawnmower specifically chop off your hand, or did you simply refuse to stick your hand in it claiming as an excuse that the lawnmower would chop it off?
> SFPD will not arrest them because Boudin refused to prosecute
It was explained to me a few times that it wasn’t supposed to be an issue. The police will just as eagerly do their job and arrest criminals. But that never made sense to me. What happened in your case seems a lot more likely. What would be the point in going through all the trouble arresting a suspect if there is a good chance charges will just be dropped.
Why should police care whether the DA brings charges? Their job is to arrest people committing crimes. Besides, even Boudin would charge violent criminals. Your story sounds like a clear case of police not doing their jobs.
those fast food places are the site of regular drug deals -- hard drugs, all the time. The police do not know if you are a customer or what .. its an ugly situation.
What would it take for it to change? Really? It is never too late to change.
But right now, the SF tech travel agents here and in the comments section are going to have a hard time at pitching that the city is 'safe' for them and now have to admit that it has gotten worse.
But maybe we should start with identifying the 'problem' which has something to do with 'who' is running those streets and seeing if there is a patten in other cities in the US...
I personally think the issue is that SF residents are like the frog in the boiling pot. Things only get a tiny, incrementally bit worse year by year. We get immune to the changes and begin to accommodate things we never would have in decades past.
I’m worried that there’s going to be a massive collapse of the tax base long before any serious reform attempts.
The problem is that the people saying those sorts of things also tolerate police brutality and oppose addressing the poverty issues that are behind much crime.
Articulating the problem is political suicide in San Francisco and in most other progressive leaning cities as well. People pretend to not notice and or attribute the crime to other variables. It is impossible to fix a problem you won’t even identify, or have been gas lit out of being able to recognize.
I just want to know why do people let the current status quo be in SF? I mean hearing cases like these makes you lean to the right even though you disagree with them, but when you look what the left is doing, you are left with no alternative..
This became a "right" thing when the Democratic Party--or more succinctly, the people they put on the ballots in liberal cities--have moved so hard to the left that they are unrecognizable to normal classically liberal Americans like myself. When these folks are running in the general election, they say all the right things to keep the votes from normal traditional Democrats who appear to have no idea who they're actually voting for. Once they're in, they go completely radical and do so relentlessly. Some of these DAs appear to be the worst, most evil, least-caring public officials I've ever observed in my life.
I'm familiar with that argument--but my suspicion is the whole "Dem cities are havens of crime" trope, is masking the true issue--in effect creating partisan polarization that distracts and outrages folks, in place of actual clarity, and results that shift the status quo in a more favorable direction (which, by virtue of such change not occuring, seems reasonable to conclude that said change must be imposing on some powerful interest--but what interest that could be, that wants there to be crime, I cannot fathom).
The data in SF is pretty clear (https://www.sfdistrictattorney.org/policy/data-dashboards/ , "District Attorney Actions on Arrests Presented" for example), and as the trend appears to be everywhere else, arrests are down and rates of charges filed are similar or even higher. In the SF case rates have been higher in the last two years than all of the previous data there back to 2011. Similar story in LA where filing rates did not appreciably change.
It's partisan but only because of the state of the parties. Democrat-run Austin Texas used to be heaven in the 1970s and 80s. Then radicals took over and somehow got elected and now you have a total sh*tshow.
So then you are aware that what passes for “left wing” in US politics is considered moderate in the rest of the developed world, i.e. Western Europe, Scandinavia, Canada.
Yet virtually all these countries have far better outcomes than us on most social issues, including violent crime and rehabilitation.
On the specific issue of policing, the left wing of American politics, takes an extremely strong stance on the minimalization of the role of police. Yes, this is in spite of generally being more economically right than most European countries left wing parties.
I hope against hope that you aren't acting in bad faith, because I'd hate to see discussion on HN further degrade into oversimplified sound bites.
Roughly 8 years ago.
Trying not to politicize this, but the deliberate act of not prosecuting certain crimes has been a movement driven by the left in recent years. And it's not going well for society at large.
However, I work in the physical security space (eg: cameras, video AI, access control, etc.).
Overall, it does not feel like actual crime rates are down, but there are many things that are simply going unreported. Thus, the stats might look better, but they are not always a representation of reality.
As one example, loss prevention departments have always been busy, but they could usually get a response from the police. Now you have retail theft gangs/rings openly walking out with thousands of dollars of product, getting into a stolen vehicle, driving off, and police more or less just not even returning a phone call in many areas.
This is not everywhere at this point, but a lot of major metropolitan areas are seemingly observing significantly increased "petty" crimes, which are going unreported and unresponded to.
Crime trends are well below the late 80's early 90's peak, but are significantly up since covid, which is a reversal of the trend downwards we have seen.
People generally are uncomfortable with crime being up 50% in 3 years, even if it's still down 30% from 1991.
Numbers are nationwide. My city's crime rates have doubled since March 2020. SF could be an outlier, but based on the melancholia in this thread, people may just not be reporting crime as much any more in SF.
Underreporting seems like a huge problem, even here with our blooming crime rate. I've had to call the police twice since covid, once because by house caught a stray bullet from a car chase/shootout, and the cops said that the only people who bothered to report were myself and the elementary school down the street. The folks in the other house that took rounds had no desire to interact with the police.
When a city is overwhelmingly Democrat, as most cities are, you'd expect them to elect Democrats. But the people who get in office are actually leftist radicals.
It's a weird social phenomenon. Groups based on trait X will tend to choose the most radical and forceful members for trait X as their leaders. To the point where trait X is actually warped beyond recognition.
Nothing really changed from a right leaning perspective. It’s been my perception that not putting all sorts of criminals in jail has become a left leaning thing over the last decade or so.
The push to shut down private prisons, especially in California for example.
By proxy that made it a right leaning thing.
I’ve heard my more right wing friends suggest that a big Democratic donor has been specifically backing DAs who do this type of thing. I have no references for it at all, but I know that Desantis even mentioned it in the press while discussing the Trump charges in NY.
Shutting down private prisons without replacing them with public prisons leaves you more limited on your capacity to convict people and keep them off the street though.
I would support a law that outlawed private prisons and provided funding for replacing/nationalizing them. I think that many on the left would support that.
See, that's the thing about crime stats: they only tell you successful convictions. They do not factor in police inactivity, people not reporting, police not filing, plea bargains to misdemeanors, DAs not prosecuting, cases getting dismissed.
Homicides however mean a cadaver is involved, and that can't be policy-washed: it is there in the morgue on file with the medical examiner.
I don’t believe that is the case. I don’t think the police have been particularly “Johnny-on-the-spot” regarding the situation but I also don’t get the impression they’re actively stonewalling me.
Is that how it works? I thought if a victim wanted to press charges, then police process it and the process starts. I understand in some places the police won't let tourists / non-locals press charges against locals--effectively giving locals a carte blanche to abuse/assault/harass outsiders however they want with zero repercussions, an implicit impunity they nevertheless seem to understand and most definitely actively exploit sadly, tragically and abusively--particularly if, and exacerbated by, language barriers--i.e, if you're a non-local victimized by a local who doesn't speak their language in such a place, like Taiwan, the locals feel pretty confident no one can touch them (tho I haven't heard of that happening in the USA)...what's the prosecutor got to do with it? Isn't it a police decision?
> I thought if a victim wanted to press charges, then police process it and the process starts.
In the US, victims can’t press criminal charges; only the government can.
> what's the prosecutor got to do with it? Isn't it a police decision?
Usually, it’s both. Ideally, the prosecutor decides whether to prosecute, but if the police never pass information along to the prosecutor, the decision is effectively being made by the police.
I think you are correct but the DA office usually decides whether or not to proceed to court. It could be the DA has given the police "don't bother us with XYZ because we cannot go to court" and so the police don't bother either. Perhaps available jailspace is being triaged and that type of crime will ultimately be given a slap on the wrist so it's a waste of resources. I'm not in California but the news often has stories about California's jail overcrowding situation and having to early release criminals to make space.
„Conservatives who think people will grow out of it, or that observable declines in quality of living or public safety will have an impact, don't get it.
I’ve lived in the southeast, the Bay Area, and Europe. The Bay Area is my favorite, but every time I go back to visit I’m just astonished — is this what the residents really want (well, SF more specifically)? I can see people agreeing with the group-think in public to fit in, but in the private of the voting booths they still vote for representatives and policies they know are going to destroy the city? It’s mind-blowing to me. Are we so split on issues to the point where we can’t have clean, safe, healthy, well-educated cities anymore?
Things that seem paradoxical and totally inexplicable like the one you mentioned, do have good (but not necessarily intuitive) explanations, but it takes a while to wrap your head around it. Its not even particularly obscure, leftism has been treated philosophically since centuries, often with astonishing foresight (eg Burnham). Check out Twitter & Substack, start with Yarvin and people associated with that sphere, and you shall be enlightened.
Boudin specifically declared in your case he would not prosecute? Did he leave a record of his reason? Or did the SFPD just say he would? SFPD went on holiday to make him look bad, so the difference is important.
I should be clear it was his office (I’ve never talked to the man), not him, where I encountered the most trouble. SFPD at least feigned caring about my situation but repeatedly pleaded their hands were tied, that they could arrest but the men would end up back on the street in days.
The new DA’s office has made a lot of promises but there’s been no substantial progress. Their continued increasing rates of prosecutions on violent crimes gives me a bit more hope that they’re truly battling through an immense backlog - but I’ve simply run out of patience and energy to fight the system in order to compel them to simply do their jobs.
I think the case against Boudin would be made if the police made the arrests and the DA did in fact refuse to prosecute. Maybe there would have been that case.
During Boudin’s admin, I struggled to ever talk to anyone. I was able to confirm they had all the info I had collected and the various reports the police I had done. They did seem oddly interested if I felt there was a possibility I instigated the attack (I was assaulted seconds after walking out the door).
Since Boudin left, they have been much more responsive and have intimated they well get to my case. I just haven’t seen any action yet - but they have been far easier to communicate with.
If the police are not arresting, they were the ones who made the decision not to prosecute… not the DA. They may blame the DA, but really they just didn’t want to do the paperwork.
The prosecution and the arrest are independent. In particular, the DA can charge someone with a crime and then get the police to arrest them because they’re a flight risk, a danger to the community, or they don’t show up for court dates.
Why did you just trust the police? They could be telling the truth but they could also be lying. And in either case they did not even bother to try. If they do not investigate and hand the case to the DA's office how would the DA be able to press charges?
Their accusation against Boudain could be correct but they could just as well be lazy and blame it on what the DA's office may or may not do in the future.
And, notably, the police had a pattern of lying about Boudin because he was trying to crack down on police misconduct. This led to absurd scenes such as the DA forced to rent a U-haul truck and rely on the assistance of federal agencies to transport seized stolen goods, and arrest a suspect after the bust of a major car burglary ring: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SFPD-didnt-stop-Quick...
The police achieved their objective of getting Boudin replaced by a DA who would let them continue to act with impunity. As you seem to have experienced yourself, fighting (non-Police) crime does not seem to have changed much.
In a broader sense, and without delving in to politics, administrative and resource constraints require District Attorneys to set priorities and guidelines to determine which matters to pursue. It is an ugly side of the criminal justice system I witnessed firsthand.
DA's have a budget and a limited number of assistant attorneys. They have to manage their office's caseload, and keep cases they do pursue moving through the pipeline. Even then, they must compete with the priorities of the judiciary and individual judges to reduce their caseload and keep cases moving.
It was not uncommon for judges to periodically advise prosecutors, public defenders and other key defense attorneys to convene a forum for the expeditious resolution of cases (essentially a fire sale with lots of bartering) to lessen their load and improve their KPIs.
So I think it is fair to say, Chesa Boudin, in his capacity as managing attorney responsible for setting his office's prosecutorial discretion policy, refused to prosecute the case. No different from any other prosecutorial discretion decisions made by countless prosecutors around the country daily.
How would the DA even be able to press charges if the police do not investigate at all because they claim that the DA will not press charges? The DA does not go round investigating criminal cases, they rely on the police for that. It was clearly the police who dropped the case, not the DA. Maybe the police have given up because they are correct in that the DA will not do anything, but they could just as well be blaming the DA for their own prioritization issues.
Given that the police did not bother to investigate there is no wonder the DA did not "press charges". I do not really get the grand parent post. Police investigation happens before any charges are pressed. So no matter how incompetent the DA is I do not see how they could possibly be to blame here.
Because if the DA says he won't prosecute certain crimes, why would the police bother to arrest someone that will be released on no cash bail. Why would they risk themselves or being in a situation where they need to use force and come under public scrutiny?
In many of these cities, these DAs are propped up with insane campeign funds, get elected, and refuse to charge, or push for no bail, so someone gets arrested for a felony, they end up back on the street the next day. Just read some of the cases where some people are arrested over and over and keep reoffending before their trial date.
The "certain crimes" that the DA said he would not prosecute are, in his words, "Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc.".
It's a bit of a leap from there to conclude that attempted murder would not be prosecuted.
It's a different DA, but the current Manhattan DA (who appears to be from the same school of thought as the one under discussion), upon taking office in January 2022, issued a written policy memorandum which stated that his office will stop prosecuting, among other things, trespass, jumping the turnstiles, and driving without a license or on a suspended license; and further downgraded burglaries and drug cases, in some cases from what the text of the law classifies as a felony down to a misdemeanor.
Does it say anywhere on that memo that attempted murder would not be prosecuted? Of course not. Do these policies generally increase the feeling of lawlessness in the jurisdiction? Yes. Might that precipitate higher degrees of lawlessness? You be the judge.
You're making a "broken windows" argument here, which may or may not be true. But what I was discussing was a different question: Whether the DAs in question classified stabbing / attempted murder among those crimes not to be prosecuted. And I have not seen any evidence that they have.
People have trouble disentangling the problematic behavior of the police and the consequences of prosecutorial discretion.
The OP's argument is likely that the police didn't arrest an attacker because they knew that the DA wouldn't do anything. There is the plausible alternate explanation that the police were engaged in a bad-faith work stoppage or slow down. The third explanation--nonunique to DA--is that the police were overworked or incompetent.
The third explanation is the only one that makes sense. SF police haven't done their jobs before or after Boudin either. The Tenderloin has had open crime for decades, and that didn't change just because there was a new DA.
They are not mutually exclusive either. It could have been all three. Let me also add that morale is an issue. The police have been taught to value their work in a certain kind of way (chase the bad guy, lock him up, get rewarded), but the world is changing. A lot of these cops feel betrayed by new political positions like "don't arrest for theft," and they legitimately start to wonder what is the point of doing a difficult and dangerous job if they don't have support in their own (I cringe) chain of command? For an external observer it seems like this should not prevent police from e.g. arresting people for murder, but it really has an impact on outcomes.
You can go ahead and call and try to get something done. I spent two years on it and was stonewalled by both the PD and the DA’s office.
It’s incredible when there are so many stories of the police doing nothing and statistical evidence of the previous DA not prosecuting cases, that you choose to, at best, accuse me of being imprecise with my terminology or, at worse, claim that I’m lying about one of the most traumatic events of my life.
I don't think they're accusing you of lying; I think what they're saying is that your expectations (and blame) are misplaced: the police are not empowered to make arrest decisions based on how likely they think the DA is to prosecute. The fact that they're making those decisions extralegally suggests that they were playing political hot potato to sink a DA they don't like.
(It's worth noting that Boudin was recalled nearly a year ago, and so perhaps the SFPD will have discovered the will to cooperate with the new DA.)
In the US, The police are so empowered and do it all the time. I am unsure why gp thinks otherwise. They are not required to nor do they simply get arrest warrants in every case they think they have probable cause. Anything else would be silly. They would get an arrest warrant, arrest, it would get dismissed without charges at the initial hearing a day later.
If the DA is involved already or they know the office policy,
Cops will not get an arrest warrant if the DA is not going to back them.
If DA is not yet involved they may do it for various reasons, but again, they usually aren't going to touch it if they know the DA won't back them. They have too much to do to be that passive aggressive.
As for the other part,
Whether individuals can get arrest warrants actually varies from state to state, though it is very uncommon no matter what.
After being arrested, you press charges against them
You know, folks get charges without being arrested - and folks get arrested without getting charged. These two aren't actually connected.
It isn't just that, but you - the private citizen - aren't really the one that determines whether or not someone gets charges against them. Sometimes, if you won't testify, they won't follow through. This happens in Domestic violence situations. But other times, they simply don't take the case to court or they take the case to court even if the victim doesn't want it.
I have video, proof of damages physical and financial, eyewitnesses and the info of the men who attacked me. SFPD will not arrest them because Boudin refused to prosecute. New DA has not gotten back to me despite repeated attempts.
I wanted to build a life and have my family in SF, to contribute and make it the city I believe it to be, but I refuse to put people I love in that situation. I’ve left for Estonia and couldn’t be happier.