I trust the New York Times more than I trust some random blogger:
> At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable.
You trust the New York Times quote of a Walgreens PR guy at face value with no fact checking and no analysis over "some random blogger" who does fact checking and analysis for a living.
Also in that article you'd find statements from the director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, the head of the investigations bureau at the San Francisco Police Department, a member of the board of supervisors, and the author himself.
Then you could read the dozens of major news sources that ran this story, a similar story right here about Target, the numerous anecdotes about crime in SF, and the DA's publicly announced policy.
It's quite well established that crime in SF is costing Walgreen's and other retailers a lot of money. Is that the only reason those stores closed? Perhaps not, but I see no cause to doubt that it was a factor.
>The Chronicle analyzed Police Department incident report data from January 2018 through April 2021. [...] The data shows that shoplifting rates dipped at the start of the pandemic, when many stores shut down, and have since recovered to just below pre-pandemic levels.
Is sampling bias potentially at play here? If you know that calling the police wouldn't do anything, why would you bother reporting it?
Because the local elected government officials stopped prosecuting incident of theft under 1000 dollars. You can steal 350k worth of goods a year and not worry about going to jail. Guess which political party implemented that policy, guess which party those shoplifters will vote for?
> Guess which political party implemented that policy, guess which party those shoplifters will vote for?
The DA election was non-partisan, but in any event the lion's share of Democratic endorsements went to Loftus, not Boudin. Most of Boudin's Democratic endorsements came from out-of-state, and weren't from national office holders. His biggest endorsers were Bernie Sanders (I) and the Green Party. Boudin only won in the 3rd round of instance run-off voting, though he was the top vote-getter in the first two rounds. See https://ballotpedia.org/District_Attorney_election_in_San_Fr...
Also, interestingly, by the 3rd round the conservative votes split almost equally between Boudin and Loftus. Boudin won because of name recognition and mindshare regarding criminal justice reform. (Also, look at campaign money. Boudin led the pack--he has some very big benefactors, none of whom are mainstream Democrats, AFAIU.) Unfortunately, voters tend to vote based on one-liners, without understanding candidates' substantive policies, so many people who were "pro reform" ended giving a vote to Boudin even though they probably wouldn't have if they understood precisely what Boudin had planned.
Finally, to be clear, the only elected government official in the city openly supporting these policies is Boudin. His two allies on the Board of Supervisors have quietly slinked away. Most other city officials, especially the Mayor, have been vocally opposed to and critical of Boudin's policies from day 1. That said, he still receives a ton of support in the media, including from the SF Chronicle as well as commentators on KQED (NPR affiliate), unfortunately. (I'm a KQED member and donor, and SF Chronicle subscriber.) The narrative is that the evidence doesn't show any causation wrt his policies, though the narratives typically use straw men to "debunk" the anti-Boudin claims. To be fair, I don't tend to support or oppose these types of reforms because causation is indeed rather tenuous, but when you're the only city in a huge metropolitan region promising no jail time for these offenses, guess where all the criminals go to commit their crimes?
I'm surprised you didn't just blame the GOP, since that seems to be so popular these days. I mean our president just blamed the gop for the defund the police nonsense.
In reality, anyone can see that only one party wields any power in CA. And we all know the policies Boudin favors are more favored by one party over the other.
At some point, we need to be honest with ourselves.
Only one party has consistently and unequivocally condemned policies like boudins.
While I would love it for the democrat establishment to also denounce his policies and talk about how awful they are as much as conservatives, the fact remains that even once they do, they'll be late to the party and will have tolerated it for far too long.l
> The local government officials stopped because it's a california-wide law.
No, its not. Prop. 47 is a state law, but while it reduces the category of offense for some thefts, it doesn't require nonprosecution or no police response. That's a DA and/or police policy choice, and it’s not one every other place in the state does the way SF does.
There is no social reason. chaos and destruction is the human normal without civilization to stop them. Increasingly we have been happily destroying those things which make a civilization, such as the ability to enforce and make laws, our public art and symbols, our values, even our history. We have come to be a nation that loathes itself and we are reaping the consequences.
This is certainly a valid take, as espoused by Hobbes. John Locke famously took the other side - humans are honorable and nobel creatures.
What is your life experience that makes you prefer one over the other? They both seem equally valid, depending on ones choice of available amplified evidence.
Both are correct. Most humans are honorable, but the damage done by the few who are not is so disproportionate in scale to their numerical strength that a society is lost if it does not aggressively bring its worst impulses to heel.
The universe tends toward disorder. Order requires many times more effort than disorder.
An orderly society requires many times more people to buy in to its precepts than the number of disorderly people needed to make a bad society. Once a small segment of a society no longer buy in, disorder follows fast.
My life experience is one where I have confronted the fact that the universe itself is quite terrible. Disease, death, destruction are all inherent parts of a universe that depends on the increase of entropy in order to provide us with the fleeting pleasures of life.
Two experiences bring me here.
Firstly, losing several children before birth made me realize that the universe is not some happy place filled with goodness. By its nature, it tends toward destruction and disorder. The byproduct of such things is suffering and it is omnipresent. Like entropy, overcoming suffering (which is permanent and the normal state of things) requires the expenditure of energy and effort and even then the results are localized and fleeting. Sometimes, by sheer luck, spontaneous bursts of order arises as when all the particles in a fluid in Brownian motion once in a while align in their trajectories. But, suffering and disorder is normal and happen without reason. Only order and goodness and beauty need reason and effort to occur in a prolonged state.
Secondly, my visit to my parents home country as a five year old. Going from a pretty safe suburb in America to the abject squalor of that place, with death and sickness all around and poverty everywhere made me understand that the good society we have in america is abnormal in the grand history of the universe. Good society takes effort and is easily destroyed.
Humans and our behavior do not escape from this system of chaos. It is only through constant expenditure of energy that life itself is able to impose order on small parts of our universe.
Human society is no different. We have been handed down how to use energy to have a good society by generations upon generations of humans who have succeeded in doing so and whose processed has been homes by natural selection. Our current technocratic society has little trouble accepting Darwinian natural selection producing life saving instincts, while simultaneously rejecting the notion that cultural tradition has been similarly honed by natural selection for human survival.
By our own hubris in deciding to undo lots of traditional behavior and values just because, we now find ourselves once more lost, trying to explain to ourselves why this is happening. But we miss the obvious because we don't want to see, which is that the squalor we are currently in is a byproduct of having thrown away and ignoring the results of the very process that gave us the thing we valued.
Edit: reworded some things
Edit2: I'll also add that none of what I said makes me think most humans are not noble or dishonorable. To the contrary, my religious convictions teach me that human beings are naturally driven towards the creator of the universe, who is the source of all order. Most humans are still mostly drawn to that. It's just that when we abandon that drive and refuse to acknowledge it, then the marginal change in our behavior is enough to tip the fragile scales of order into the direction of chaos.
That is to say, even though most humans are good, and no one can be perfect, there are varying degrees of perfection. no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough
Edit3: the two philosophies are not equally valid. Mine, which acknowledges our universes fallen nature and tendency toward eventual absolute chaos, is backed by empirical observation.
What makes you believe that your experience is representative of others? Or, for that matter, how do you know you aren’t just reinforcing your own presuppositions with how you process information, ie confirmation bias?
Fwiw, it’s not a particularly interesting argument to say “my experience has taught me this so this is the way it is.” What if you’re just wrong, have you considered that? I spend most of my time thinking I’m probably wrong - it’s the best way to become less wrong over time.
My observation of the universe is subjective. Nowhere did I imply it wasn't
What I did state is that there is a difference between the school of thought saying human nature is inherently good and the one saying humans are predisposed to evil. Because we can observe human nature and it does not seem oriented towards good. All people do evil things from time to time including myself. Some do evil that is disproportionate to the average though.
I have considered if I'm just wrong. Have you considered if I may be right?
Nowhere have you offered any argument against what I believe. You just asked pointed questions. I directly responded to a post literally asking me for what experiences I had that led me to my beliefs. I gave an accurate accountings focusing mainly on my subjective experience.
And your response is not to disagree with my conclusions but to attack the fact that I just provided the very experiences demanded of me...
If that were the best argument I could make against someone, I'd reconsider my own beliefs
My personal belief is that it's not meaningfully true or false to talk about human nature, as if we can simplify the complexity of contextual behavior into a single boolean variable.
At various points, I have believed that human nature tends towards the bad. As I've gotten older, I realize that people sometimes behave in good ways in bad situations; they sometimes behave poorly in situations where it would be easy to do the right thing. The same person could do both, within a 10 minute span. Heck, I even believe that people's behaviors would change if the simulation could be rewound and replayed.
Human interaction is so complex. If you expect me to behave poorly because you're in a bad mood right now, and I live down to your expectations, how should we interpret it? I don't believe it says anything generalizable about either of our natures - we could simply be having a series of bad days that makes it more difficult to act nobly.
If one of your key beliefs so colors your view of your fellow humans, it's probably a very limiting belief. For me, I don't think there's much value or truth in predisposing myself to negativity by projecting it forward. Especially when there's no real benefit to doing so.
I think there is a social reason. It only takes a small number of people acting destructively to create chaos, even if the vast majority of people are law abiding. When society refuses to deal with people acting destructively, that is a social reason for the chaos we are witnessing.
This uptick in crime seems to be happening in cities like SF and Seattle that practice “restorative justice”. As far as I can tell it simply amounts to being soft on crime by not having city attorneys actually charge and sentence criminals, and by changing the priorities of the police department. The net result of removing consequences is that there’s no deterrent and so criminals will repeat crimes and other criminals are encouraged. It’s all so obvious and predictable but “social justice” advocates have nevertheless been able to weaken the criminal justice system in this way at the expense of the law abiding portion of society. In the last couple months shoplifting incidents in the Bay Area have become a lot more brazen - like the theft of tens of hundreds of thousands in goods from luxury stores in broad daylight. The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them with a more-conservative hard on crime set of leaders.
> The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them with a more-conservative hard on crime set of leaders.
Or, you know, simply replace people like Boudin with pretty much any of their opponents in the last election cycle, "tough on crime" or not. It's very difficult to express how radical Boudin is. It's difficult to say this without seeming hyperbolic, because the term has been abused to death a 1000x over by conservative outlets. But he's basically a Marxist, with both the intelligence and ambition to institute radical policies popular in the American Marxist community.[1] Here's Boudin in 2009 defending Chavez and his constitutional reform removing term limits: "Chavez for Life? There are at least three reasons why the world should congratulate Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on his recent success abolishing term limits", https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/
[1] With apologies to Marxists who also think Boudin's policies are too extreme and imprudent.
The conservatives are right though. normal liberals are so afraid of agreeing with a conservative that they happily will vote for the destruction of their own neighborhood.
Boudin is not a sudden deviation from the norm. SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave.
> SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave.
That sounds suspiciously like a slippery slope kind of argument. But slippery slope arguments are rhetorical slights of hand. In the realm of public policy, you can usually stop a slippery slope any time you want. And I have no doubt that if the SF electorate understood what Boudin's precise policies would be, Boudin absolutely would not have won. Having lived in SF for the better part of two decades, IME SF politics is not at all like it's portrayed in the national media. But let's see what happens with the recall.
I have exceptional disdain for Boudin precisely because I believe he'll do (and is doing) damage to otherwise constructive and productive criminal justice reform movements. Those movements aren't just composed of liberals. Republicans have supported and helped to pass sentence reductions in Congress.
I generally neither oppose nor support more lenient sentencing as typically proposed in liberal discourse. I think the criminal justice reform movement exaggerates the effects of, e.g., structural racism, particularly as they relate to the finer details of the law and public policy. (IMO structural racism is far more consequential as it relates to economic opportunity, but that's the area least susceptible to legal remediation.)
So if, for example, a DA wants to have a policy letting all first time non-violent offenders walk, then so be it. I don't think it'll make a difference one way or another. For the same reason I don't think prosecuting such first time offenses was particularly consequential by itself in terms of creating a criminalized underclass of poor minorities, I don't believe that abstaining from such prosecutions would result in substantial changes in behavior--i.e. more theft.
OTOH, there are qualitative boundaries. If you quite literally remove the threat of jail or other serious repercussions regardless of number of offenses, then at the end of the day marginal effects will absolutely dominate. Unlike most crimes of violence, property offenses are principally crimes of opportunity--sociologically speaking, it's far easier to become a serial thief than a serial murderer. At some point the threat of material repercussions is too remote, and so a sizable subset of people will begin taking the opportunities to violate relatively weaker norms regarding inviolability of property.
For example, take parking tickets. Parking tickets and towing fees can be a huge, even life-changing, setback for the poor. But what do you think will happen if we tell people that, while we'll still ticket unauthorized parking, failure to pay those tickets would never result in any other consequence--no enforced payment, no wage garnishment, no suspended license? Illegal parking isn't exactly morally reprehensible. It'll skyrocket. But compare that to if you say that material consequences are suspended until the 4th offense? Are a flood of people going to go out and start to park illegally? Probably not. Why change your behavior when after 3 times you're back to the status quo ante? (To be clear, I don't deny that the latter will still see some marginal effects, but it's not the kind of thing I'm going to get worked up over as matter of politics. I'll be happy to let it play out in good faith, if that's what the majority wants, and then discuss policy once we can see the concrete results.)
I just feel like you've made a lot of comments against him without being specific on what reforms are going wrong.
Here, for instance, you are talking about all sorts of generalities and abstractions and hypothetical situations. But your comment could be written exactly the same no matter who was in office and what they were doing.
Here, you paint a picture of a hypothetical line that is crossed, which is all very well, but does this really describe what has happened in SF? None of it appears to be firm statements about what has happened and who it could be attributed to.
Someone who lives in SF may have the context that I don't. And it may not be worth your while to provide it. But I'm curious, because I can at least imagine getting a job offer in the bay area and wonder whether/how much of the stuff I read is true.
Bail reform is something that's been happening in a number of places, I believe. And it sounds logical to assess the threat to the community instead of arbitrary cash bail, even if implementation is fraught.
> But slippery slope arguments are rhetorical slights of hand. In the realm of public policy, you can usually stop a slippery slope any time you want.
Literally all my life experience would seem to disagree.
Like take CRT which everyone is mad about now. I told people about it when I was in middle school and the same people against it today didn't believe me then
Anyway, I'm not some kind of policy wonk. I'm not a politician.
I'm just a guy and it seems to me the slippery slope is real. Maybe others don't see it because we've already hit bottom
CRT went mainstream because many people equivocate CRT with a belief in, e.g., structural racism. Thus, opposition to CRT is now equated by those on the left to a denial of structural racism. The existence of structural racism has been accepted (at least tacitly) by most of American society for generations, which makes CRT on its face seem unobjectionable to non-academics on the left.
While I vehemently disagree with actual CRT scholarship because of its race essentialism and rejection of objectivity, it's kind of pointless to take that stance in regular discourse. It's not possible to explain to people that the concept of structural racism predates CRT by at least a decade[1], longer if we don't require literal usage of the phrase "structural racism". MLK, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and many other writers were exploring structural racism long before the CRT school assembled. More generally, bifurcation of social analysis into structural and cultural began in the 19th century. (EDIT: There's another vein to CRT related to postmodern structuralism--which is not the same "structuralism" as discussed in earlier race scholarship or generally understood in mainstream sociology. CRT mixes and attempts to synthesize those distinct ideas.)
Similarly, CRT on the right has been thoroughly equivocated with Marxism and other radical theories. But Tucker Carlson is talking out his butt because actual Marxists have been scornful of CRT since at least the 1990s. Alot of the lexicon of CRT comes from Marxist discourse, but so what? Libertarianism arose from the American Anarchist movement and would still use a similar lexicon but for self-conscious scrubbing of its language. (The one thing CRT clearly shares with Marxism is belief in a categorical, singular cause of oppression--white supremacy in the case of CRT, class conflict over control of the means of production in Marxism.)
"CRT", like many things, has become another empty label thrown around in the culture wars.
Honestly this shows the problem with many in america today.
Someone says they disagree with X. Instead of finding out what they think about X, instead people will decide that conservatives hate X, and then use the worst arguments made by conservative commentators as a strawman.
Moreover, even though there is wide agreement X is bad, since some conservatives dont have the right reasons, more energy is expended mocking conservatives than combatting the actual policy.
If you're not going to argue with his specific points about Chavez, then you shouldn't, in my opinion, throw it out for the mere purposes of smear-by-association.
In other threads, I've seen people attack him for his parents, which also is really wrong, both in terms of blaming him for his parents' actions and in terms of letting people make wrong assumptions about what they were.
In order to find out who Boudin is, I read the Wikipedia page at:
I can see how people can disagree with some of the things he's done and blame him for various things.
But it's also clear from reading it that he's been honestly trying to reform things, and many of the things he's done don't at all require you to be some sort of extremist, Marxist, whatever, to think they are reasonable. Some of the reforms have been echoed in other places recently, too.
You shouldn’t attack someone for their parents but how they react to their parents. Boudin has always claimed that his murderer parents are the ones who were somehow wronged. Whereas other children of much worse parents, like Adolf Eichmann, have fully repudiated the acts of their parents.
His parents were convicted of felony murder. That is not a violent crime per se.
I think if you just say "murderer" it is dishonest by omission, but I doubt "felony murder" is widely understood either without an explanation.
I think most people are like "oh, felony murder, yeah, obviously those durn liberals have reduced murder to a misdemeanor in most cases, must have been really heinous to be a felony".
And every time I see someone bring it up regarding Boudin, I assess them as a particularly nasty propagandist who for some reason doesn't care about their personal credibility.
I'm not saying that his father should or shouldn't be released from prison, but the sentence clearly was a lot longer than many actual murderers get, like for instance the guy who killed George Floyd.
I don't think I need to read extensively about the events and trial for it to be obvious that at the time, it was about terrorism, and so they were being punished for being part of a group of terrorists. One may agree or disagree with it for political reasons, but it's not at all the same sort of thing as the ordinary murders in SF that people are blaming on Boudin now.
It's not universally agreed that felony murder should be a thing at all, although people of all types generally salivate at using it against their political enemies as for example after the Jan. 6th events.
I don't know, it depends on the person. Some people have heard of COINTELPRO, and also have eyes and ears and see how political the definition of "terrorist" always is.
If you are a patriotic person, you likely have noticed and disagreed that for political reasons people who work on national defense are sometimes equated with terrorists.
The point of calling someone a terrorist is generally to imply a lot of associated things without specifically lying. If it were worse than accurate specifics, people wouldn't substitute it.
I have heard of COINTELPRO but don’t see how that has anything to excuse people who killed two police officers to rob $2 million from an armored truck. Kathy should have never seen the outside air and Chesa should never have been elected with his supportive comments about them.
Well that’s just wrong, Kathy Boudin was driving the truck when they killed the police officer. These people were a complete menace and if you hire a DA who makes excuses for terrorists/murders you get the results you get.
>Well that’s just wrong, Kathy Boudin was driving the truck when they killed the police officer
She was waiting in a getaway vehicle at a different location from where the guards were killed by the people actually doing the robbery.
It seems like you are playing with ambiguous statements. If you disagree with any of my statements about the facts, could you please be specific and explain where your information comes from.
You're more familiar with this than me, so I wish you would be less ambiguous and give more context.
The people who were killed to rob the armored truck were the guards, not the police officers. The officers stopped them trying to get away. If I'd read about that, I'd forgotten. So I resolved the apparent inconsistency by assuming you meant the guards.
Now in the page about the robbery, I see the section titled "Car swap and second gunfight": (although, "This section does not cite any sources")
So, after reading that, I would definitely not argue that 20 years in prison was too much. She may not have actually shot anyone, but I agree, was complicit. I don't think it was obviously too short a sentence, because of, like I said before, George Floyd's killer getting ~20 years.
But Gilbert isn't out. And I don't see (ctrl-F) what exactly he did. I can't judge Chesa Boudin if he has made some argument to defend his father unless I were to read it.
Since Gilbert didn't make a defense at trial, and Kathy Boudin plea-bargained, is it possible to say what specific actions they were imprisoned for?
There is a quote: "Our goal is to see that these people, who have contempt for society and have shown no remorse, will never see the streets of society again"
This seems to underline it was a political judgment, not about what was done, but about what they might do in the future. That doesn't make it arbitrary or incorrect, but it is about something other than the physical actions of those involved.
If you want to talk about why Kathy Boudin shouldn't have been released, that seems external to the topic of what Chesa Boudin has said or done that is unacceptable or reprehensible. It wasn't him that made that decision, was it? It seems like it should be moot now anyway. Surely the ongoing issue is his father?
You started this sub thread with “His parents were convicted of felony murder. That is not a violent crime per se.”
I hope you now have the facts to see that Chesa Boudin is pleading for clemency for a terrorist murderer. That is not the kind of person who should be a DA! That is the job of a defense attorney, and Chesa would have been a great candidate for the SF Public Defender’s office. But when you hire a criminal apologist to be the city’s prosecutor you get predictably disastrous results.
By 2009 Venezuela had already seen explosive amounts of crime and other ill effects of Chavismo--by neglect and absence of more normative policies, if not a direct consequence of the policies themselves. And Chavez had already revealed himself to have an amoral personality much like Donald Trump, one whose primary ambition was self aggrandizement. IMO the only way one could defend Chavez at that point (and almost nobody in the international arena did, including most European and American Socialists) was to be a true Marxist ideologue.
Why does Boudin maintain such exceptionally lenient policies wrt property crime, even more than those proposed in other cities, and even when suspects are multiple repeat, even professional offenders? Given that Boudin seems highly intelligent and sincere, I must conclude it's because he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights. Which isn't to say he would reject them outright in all cases, but that he sees private property rights principally as a tool of oppression, and so has no compunction jettisoning them if he feels that the harm done to minority communities in defending those rights outweighs the risk of capitalists walking away with their ball. Which also is pretty much the only way one could have honestly--albeit naively--defended Chavez.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that view, at least intellectually. But I'm nowhere arrogant enough to believe anything good would come of imposing such radicals views. And as someone with a legal education, I think it's particularly unethical of him to use his particular office to impose such views. There are few schools of thought, Marxism and offshoots being the most well known, that believe such reforms can be effective without deep and abiding support within the broader society. Boudin is a modern day American revolutionary, and not necessarily in a good way IMNSHO. Our politics is already far too extremist, and only getting worse.
I recognize that he comes from a family that espouses similar beliefs. (Not just his parents, but his guardians and their circle of friends as well.) But I see no reason to speak to that--his own expressed views, personal and as an office holder, far more directly reflect his thinking.
It's possible to have been lukewarm towards Chavez, not so much because you're keen on Marxism, but because you weren't entirely sure about the opposition being genuinely pro-democratic.
I don't think you have to be particularly left-wing, let alone Marxist, to look back at history and see that fighting democratic movements because they were labeled as Communist or Marxist may not have been the right approach.
You compare Chavez to Trump. What if instead of having an election, Trump's opposition had forcibly removed him when it was clear impeachment was going nowhere? Some people would have made a sincere case for the negative consequences of that even if they opposed Trump.
>he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights
I think this accusation needs more support, surely Boudin constantly does things that imply private property rights.
It's not boudins heritage that people attack him over. He has publicly praised his parents for their attacks and portrayed himself as the ultimate victim of their prosecution.
Details seem to be lacking on the Wikipedia pages for his parents. Did the bombings injure anyone? How were his parents involved, and how did he defend their actions?
It just says (on David Gilbert's page) "Most Weather members were not prosecuted and did not serve time in prison, despite having been sought by the police for years; police misconduct led to the dropping of many charges (see: COINTELPRO)"
Everybody's heard of COINTELPRO, right?
Every thread like this, the anti-Boudin stuff sounds like the sort of propaganda they did back in the day.
"The 1981 Brink's robbery was an armed robbery and three related murders committed on October 20, 1981, which were carried out by six Black Liberation Army members: Mutulu Shakur, Kuwasi Balagoon, Solomon Bouines (Samuel Brown), Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, Edward Joseph, and Cecilio "Chui" Ferguson;[1] and four former members of the Weather Underground, now belonging to the May 19th Communist Organization, consisting of David Gilbert, Judith Alice Clark, Kathy Boudin, and Marilyn Buck.[2]"
It’s true SEattle is so crime friendly that my local Walgreens has more people going though the free shit line than they can process at the register. I don’t really understand how they make any money with losses that high
The police immediately release anyone who gets caught for streaking small value items. It seems security guards are there to prevent major security issues, not catch thieves.
> Also, this is about SF, not SEA.
Same problem in both states and cities - socialists driving everything into the ground.
A lot of these pharmacy stores are setup such that the checkout is offset from the entrance/exit probably because most of the money comes from the pharmacy. It also means that shoplifters just go straight out carrying whatever they can grab and at least in my area they aren’t even trying to be discrete
Stop them from doing what? The police won't prosecute. Security guards are private citizens and do not have an unlimited right to just grab other people and detain them. If the stolen goods are inside, say, a backpack, they also do not have the ability to search that backpack.
You can only have security guards if the state backs them up. The state is not backing them up.
> Security guards ... do not have an unlimited right to just grab other people and detain them. If the stolen goods are inside, say, a backpack, they also do not have the ability to search that backpack.
Not unlimited rights. They can use reasonable (and solely nonlethal) force to detain shoplifters that they have probable cause are shoplifting and even search them (for instance, their backpacks) for such goods. You need to read up on California Penal Code 490.5.
They cannot punish them, but they can prevent them from leaving with items they don't own.
there was a similar lack of data around the claims by bay area Walgreens stores. and Walgreens was closing stores at similar or even faster rates in other locations, with no mention of theft.
I live in SF, see shoplifting every time I go out. So the claims are real. Gets fierce 30 minutes before closing at the local Walgreens.
Most of the incidents are not reported to police, so the data simply can't be correct. Also, they would need an employee working at each store full-time just to file police reports. Then the police would ignore it since it's under the limit, I believe $950.
Sounds like you're one of those Snopes pinheads who think everything can be debunked.
And you can blame Kamala "and I haven't been to Europe" Harris for this too. She was a DA here from 2004-2011, when the US' largest crime lab fiasco happened, with 1,000 DNA cases spoiled.
Reporting is actually less common than you think for property crimes. None of my neighbors or friends report package thefts, car breakins, etc. For one the police can take hours to respond if they show up at all, especially in cities that are very understaffed like Seattle. Another angle is that insurance claims are simply not worth it because deductibles are high enough and in the end you’ll face higher premiums. And if the police are never going to investigate or arrest someone (or if the city attorneys just release the criminal), what’s the point? For businesses they have similar considerations of the tradeoffs. Here’s an example of a Seattle area grocery chain that had stopped reporting crimes: https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-o...
Probably not because there is no value in having employees write meaningless reports and pay them to do it. Seattle PD straight up won’t show up, no matter how much you try, feel free to submit the online I’ve been robbed form if you need it for insurance
I see you haven't come across the internal processes at large retail operations. They straight up don't care if SPD shows up, because this is about reducing loss from employee theft.
If the reports are being generated in sufficient detail to inform Target's decision making, they are almost certainly being reported to the police. Because I'm sure Target CCs the police on reports that are for internal consumption (they certainly claim to in the article.)
83 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343
https://citationsneeded.medium.com/news-brief-organized-crim...
> At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...
Then you could read the dozens of major news sources that ran this story, a similar story right here about Target, the numerous anecdotes about crime in SF, and the DA's publicly announced policy.
It's quite well established that crime in SF is costing Walgreen's and other retailers a lot of money. Is that the only reason those stores closed? Perhaps not, but I see no cause to doubt that it was a factor.
I trust neither, by default.
Many people point to Prop 47 which “reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950”
Some also point the finger at DA Chesa Boudin for his low “charging rates”: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra...
Basically if you shoplift in SF the benefits outweigh the costs.
Or that the sf crazies aren't being even crazier post lockdown and causing more of the mentioned security incidents.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-shoplifting-ris...
Is sampling bias potentially at play here? If you know that calling the police wouldn't do anything, why would you bother reporting it?
If you don’t record it, it isn’t happening, as it were.
The DA election was non-partisan, but in any event the lion's share of Democratic endorsements went to Loftus, not Boudin. Most of Boudin's Democratic endorsements came from out-of-state, and weren't from national office holders. His biggest endorsers were Bernie Sanders (I) and the Green Party. Boudin only won in the 3rd round of instance run-off voting, though he was the top vote-getter in the first two rounds. See https://ballotpedia.org/District_Attorney_election_in_San_Fr...
Also, interestingly, by the 3rd round the conservative votes split almost equally between Boudin and Loftus. Boudin won because of name recognition and mindshare regarding criminal justice reform. (Also, look at campaign money. Boudin led the pack--he has some very big benefactors, none of whom are mainstream Democrats, AFAIU.) Unfortunately, voters tend to vote based on one-liners, without understanding candidates' substantive policies, so many people who were "pro reform" ended giving a vote to Boudin even though they probably wouldn't have if they understood precisely what Boudin had planned.
Finally, to be clear, the only elected government official in the city openly supporting these policies is Boudin. His two allies on the Board of Supervisors have quietly slinked away. Most other city officials, especially the Mayor, have been vocally opposed to and critical of Boudin's policies from day 1. That said, he still receives a ton of support in the media, including from the SF Chronicle as well as commentators on KQED (NPR affiliate), unfortunately. (I'm a KQED member and donor, and SF Chronicle subscriber.) The narrative is that the evidence doesn't show any causation wrt his policies, though the narratives typically use straw men to "debunk" the anti-Boudin claims. To be fair, I don't tend to support or oppose these types of reforms because causation is indeed rather tenuous, but when you're the only city in a huge metropolitan region promising no jail time for these offenses, guess where all the criminals go to commit their crimes?
Dallas
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2019/04/11/dallas-county-district-a...
Los Angeles
https://abc7.com/george-gascon-los-angeles-district-attorney...
Seattle
https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-policymakers-untouchabl...
I'm surprised you didn't just blame the GOP, since that seems to be so popular these days. I mean our president just blamed the gop for the defund the police nonsense.
In reality, anyone can see that only one party wields any power in CA. And we all know the policies Boudin favors are more favored by one party over the other.
At some point, we need to be honest with ourselves.
Only one party has consistently and unequivocally condemned policies like boudins.
While I would love it for the democrat establishment to also denounce his policies and talk about how awful they are as much as conservatives, the fact remains that even once they do, they'll be late to the party and will have tolerated it for far too long.l
No, its not. Prop. 47 is a state law, but while it reduces the category of offense for some thefts, it doesn't require nonprosecution or no police response. That's a DA and/or police policy choice, and it’s not one every other place in the state does the way SF does.
What is your life experience that makes you prefer one over the other? They both seem equally valid, depending on ones choice of available amplified evidence.
The universe tends toward disorder. Order requires many times more effort than disorder.
An orderly society requires many times more people to buy in to its precepts than the number of disorderly people needed to make a bad society. Once a small segment of a society no longer buy in, disorder follows fast.
Two experiences bring me here.
Firstly, losing several children before birth made me realize that the universe is not some happy place filled with goodness. By its nature, it tends toward destruction and disorder. The byproduct of such things is suffering and it is omnipresent. Like entropy, overcoming suffering (which is permanent and the normal state of things) requires the expenditure of energy and effort and even then the results are localized and fleeting. Sometimes, by sheer luck, spontaneous bursts of order arises as when all the particles in a fluid in Brownian motion once in a while align in their trajectories. But, suffering and disorder is normal and happen without reason. Only order and goodness and beauty need reason and effort to occur in a prolonged state.
Secondly, my visit to my parents home country as a five year old. Going from a pretty safe suburb in America to the abject squalor of that place, with death and sickness all around and poverty everywhere made me understand that the good society we have in america is abnormal in the grand history of the universe. Good society takes effort and is easily destroyed.
Humans and our behavior do not escape from this system of chaos. It is only through constant expenditure of energy that life itself is able to impose order on small parts of our universe.
Human society is no different. We have been handed down how to use energy to have a good society by generations upon generations of humans who have succeeded in doing so and whose processed has been homes by natural selection. Our current technocratic society has little trouble accepting Darwinian natural selection producing life saving instincts, while simultaneously rejecting the notion that cultural tradition has been similarly honed by natural selection for human survival.
By our own hubris in deciding to undo lots of traditional behavior and values just because, we now find ourselves once more lost, trying to explain to ourselves why this is happening. But we miss the obvious because we don't want to see, which is that the squalor we are currently in is a byproduct of having thrown away and ignoring the results of the very process that gave us the thing we valued.
Edit: reworded some things
Edit2: I'll also add that none of what I said makes me think most humans are not noble or dishonorable. To the contrary, my religious convictions teach me that human beings are naturally driven towards the creator of the universe, who is the source of all order. Most humans are still mostly drawn to that. It's just that when we abandon that drive and refuse to acknowledge it, then the marginal change in our behavior is enough to tip the fragile scales of order into the direction of chaos.
That is to say, even though most humans are good, and no one can be perfect, there are varying degrees of perfection. no need to let perfection be the enemy of good enough
Edit3: the two philosophies are not equally valid. Mine, which acknowledges our universes fallen nature and tendency toward eventual absolute chaos, is backed by empirical observation.
Fwiw, it’s not a particularly interesting argument to say “my experience has taught me this so this is the way it is.” What if you’re just wrong, have you considered that? I spend most of my time thinking I’m probably wrong - it’s the best way to become less wrong over time.
What I did state is that there is a difference between the school of thought saying human nature is inherently good and the one saying humans are predisposed to evil. Because we can observe human nature and it does not seem oriented towards good. All people do evil things from time to time including myself. Some do evil that is disproportionate to the average though.
I have considered if I'm just wrong. Have you considered if I may be right?
Nowhere have you offered any argument against what I believe. You just asked pointed questions. I directly responded to a post literally asking me for what experiences I had that led me to my beliefs. I gave an accurate accountings focusing mainly on my subjective experience.
And your response is not to disagree with my conclusions but to attack the fact that I just provided the very experiences demanded of me...
If that were the best argument I could make against someone, I'd reconsider my own beliefs
At various points, I have believed that human nature tends towards the bad. As I've gotten older, I realize that people sometimes behave in good ways in bad situations; they sometimes behave poorly in situations where it would be easy to do the right thing. The same person could do both, within a 10 minute span. Heck, I even believe that people's behaviors would change if the simulation could be rewound and replayed.
Human interaction is so complex. If you expect me to behave poorly because you're in a bad mood right now, and I live down to your expectations, how should we interpret it? I don't believe it says anything generalizable about either of our natures - we could simply be having a series of bad days that makes it more difficult to act nobly.
If one of your key beliefs so colors your view of your fellow humans, it's probably a very limiting belief. For me, I don't think there's much value or truth in predisposing myself to negativity by projecting it forward. Especially when there's no real benefit to doing so.
https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts...
Or, you know, simply replace people like Boudin with pretty much any of their opponents in the last election cycle, "tough on crime" or not. It's very difficult to express how radical Boudin is. It's difficult to say this without seeming hyperbolic, because the term has been abused to death a 1000x over by conservative outlets. But he's basically a Marxist, with both the intelligence and ambition to institute radical policies popular in the American Marxist community.[1] Here's Boudin in 2009 defending Chavez and his constitutional reform removing term limits: "Chavez for Life? There are at least three reasons why the world should congratulate Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on his recent success abolishing term limits", https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/
[1] With apologies to Marxists who also think Boudin's policies are too extreme and imprudent.
Boudin is not a sudden deviation from the norm. SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave.
That sounds suspiciously like a slippery slope kind of argument. But slippery slope arguments are rhetorical slights of hand. In the realm of public policy, you can usually stop a slippery slope any time you want. And I have no doubt that if the SF electorate understood what Boudin's precise policies would be, Boudin absolutely would not have won. Having lived in SF for the better part of two decades, IME SF politics is not at all like it's portrayed in the national media. But let's see what happens with the recall.
I have exceptional disdain for Boudin precisely because I believe he'll do (and is doing) damage to otherwise constructive and productive criminal justice reform movements. Those movements aren't just composed of liberals. Republicans have supported and helped to pass sentence reductions in Congress.
So if, for example, a DA wants to have a policy letting all first time non-violent offenders walk, then so be it. I don't think it'll make a difference one way or another. For the same reason I don't think prosecuting such first time offenses was particularly consequential by itself in terms of creating a criminalized underclass of poor minorities, I don't believe that abstaining from such prosecutions would result in substantial changes in behavior--i.e. more theft.
OTOH, there are qualitative boundaries. If you quite literally remove the threat of jail or other serious repercussions regardless of number of offenses, then at the end of the day marginal effects will absolutely dominate. Unlike most crimes of violence, property offenses are principally crimes of opportunity--sociologically speaking, it's far easier to become a serial thief than a serial murderer. At some point the threat of material repercussions is too remote, and so a sizable subset of people will begin taking the opportunities to violate relatively weaker norms regarding inviolability of property.
For example, take parking tickets. Parking tickets and towing fees can be a huge, even life-changing, setback for the poor. But what do you think will happen if we tell people that, while we'll still ticket unauthorized parking, failure to pay those tickets would never result in any other consequence--no enforced payment, no wage garnishment, no suspended license? Illegal parking isn't exactly morally reprehensible. It'll skyrocket. But compare that to if you say that material consequences are suspended until the 4th offense? Are a flood of people going to go out and start to park illegally? Probably not. Why change your behavior when after 3 times you're back to the status quo ante? (To be clear, I don't deny that the latter will still see some marginal effects, but it's not the kind of thing I'm going to get worked up over as matter of politics. I'll be happy to let it play out in good faith, if that's what the majority wants, and then discuss policy once we can see the concrete results.)
Here, for instance, you are talking about all sorts of generalities and abstractions and hypothetical situations. But your comment could be written exactly the same no matter who was in office and what they were doing.
Here, you paint a picture of a hypothetical line that is crossed, which is all very well, but does this really describe what has happened in SF? None of it appears to be firm statements about what has happened and who it could be attributed to.
Someone who lives in SF may have the context that I don't. And it may not be worth your while to provide it. But I'm curious, because I can at least imagine getting a job offer in the bay area and wonder whether/how much of the stuff I read is true.
Bail reform is something that's been happening in a number of places, I believe. And it sounds logical to assess the threat to the community instead of arbitrary cash bail, even if implementation is fraught.
Literally all my life experience would seem to disagree.
Like take CRT which everyone is mad about now. I told people about it when I was in middle school and the same people against it today didn't believe me then
Anyway, I'm not some kind of policy wonk. I'm not a politician.
I'm just a guy and it seems to me the slippery slope is real. Maybe others don't see it because we've already hit bottom
While I vehemently disagree with actual CRT scholarship because of its race essentialism and rejection of objectivity, it's kind of pointless to take that stance in regular discourse. It's not possible to explain to people that the concept of structural racism predates CRT by at least a decade[1], longer if we don't require literal usage of the phrase "structural racism". MLK, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and many other writers were exploring structural racism long before the CRT school assembled. More generally, bifurcation of social analysis into structural and cultural began in the 19th century. (EDIT: There's another vein to CRT related to postmodern structuralism--which is not the same "structuralism" as discussed in earlier race scholarship or generally understood in mainstream sociology. CRT mixes and attempts to synthesize those distinct ideas.)
Similarly, CRT on the right has been thoroughly equivocated with Marxism and other radical theories. But Tucker Carlson is talking out his butt because actual Marxists have been scornful of CRT since at least the 1990s. Alot of the lexicon of CRT comes from Marxist discourse, but so what? Libertarianism arose from the American Anarchist movement and would still use a similar lexicon but for self-conscious scrubbing of its language. (The one thing CRT clearly shares with Marxism is belief in a categorical, singular cause of oppression--white supremacy in the case of CRT, class conflict over control of the means of production in Marxism.)
"CRT", like many things, has become another empty label thrown around in the culture wars.
[1] See pp4-5 of this 1964 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Bulletin: https://25thandclement.com/~william/links/pdf/SDS_Bulletin-1... It was the earliest use of the literal phrase I could find on JSTOR.
I didn't mention Marxism.
Not sure why you felt the need to
Honestly this shows the problem with many in america today.
Someone says they disagree with X. Instead of finding out what they think about X, instead people will decide that conservatives hate X, and then use the worst arguments made by conservative commentators as a strawman.
Moreover, even though there is wide agreement X is bad, since some conservatives dont have the right reasons, more energy is expended mocking conservatives than combatting the actual policy.
In other threads, I've seen people attack him for his parents, which also is really wrong, both in terms of blaming him for his parents' actions and in terms of letting people make wrong assumptions about what they were.
In order to find out who Boudin is, I read the Wikipedia page at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin
I can see how people can disagree with some of the things he's done and blame him for various things.
But it's also clear from reading it that he's been honestly trying to reform things, and many of the things he's done don't at all require you to be some sort of extremist, Marxist, whatever, to think they are reasonable. Some of the reforms have been echoed in other places recently, too.
I think if you just say "murderer" it is dishonest by omission, but I doubt "felony murder" is widely understood either without an explanation.
I think most people are like "oh, felony murder, yeah, obviously those durn liberals have reduced murder to a misdemeanor in most cases, must have been really heinous to be a felony".
And every time I see someone bring it up regarding Boudin, I assess them as a particularly nasty propagandist who for some reason doesn't care about their personal credibility.
I'm not saying that his father should or shouldn't be released from prison, but the sentence clearly was a lot longer than many actual murderers get, like for instance the guy who killed George Floyd.
I don't think I need to read extensively about the events and trial for it to be obvious that at the time, it was about terrorism, and so they were being punished for being part of a group of terrorists. One may agree or disagree with it for political reasons, but it's not at all the same sort of thing as the ordinary murders in SF that people are blaming on Boudin now.
It's not universally agreed that felony murder should be a thing at all, although people of all types generally salivate at using it against their political enemies as for example after the Jan. 6th events.
If you are a patriotic person, you likely have noticed and disagreed that for political reasons people who work on national defense are sometimes equated with terrorists.
The point of calling someone a terrorist is generally to imply a lot of associated things without specifically lying. If it were worse than accurate specifics, people wouldn't substitute it.
I don't see what that has to do with his parents. As I understand it they weren't even onlookers to the killings.
She was waiting in a getaway vehicle at a different location from where the guards were killed by the people actually doing the robbery.
It seems like you are playing with ambiguous statements. If you disagree with any of my statements about the facts, could you please be specific and explain where your information comes from.
The people who were killed to rob the armored truck were the guards, not the police officers. The officers stopped them trying to get away. If I'd read about that, I'd forgotten. So I resolved the apparent inconsistency by assuming you meant the guards.
Now in the page about the robbery, I see the section titled "Car swap and second gunfight": (although, "This section does not cite any sources")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Brink%27s_robbery
So, after reading that, I would definitely not argue that 20 years in prison was too much. She may not have actually shot anyone, but I agree, was complicit. I don't think it was obviously too short a sentence, because of, like I said before, George Floyd's killer getting ~20 years.
But Gilbert isn't out. And I don't see (ctrl-F) what exactly he did. I can't judge Chesa Boudin if he has made some argument to defend his father unless I were to read it.
Since Gilbert didn't make a defense at trial, and Kathy Boudin plea-bargained, is it possible to say what specific actions they were imprisoned for?
There is a quote: "Our goal is to see that these people, who have contempt for society and have shown no remorse, will never see the streets of society again"
This seems to underline it was a political judgment, not about what was done, but about what they might do in the future. That doesn't make it arbitrary or incorrect, but it is about something other than the physical actions of those involved.
If you want to talk about why Kathy Boudin shouldn't have been released, that seems external to the topic of what Chesa Boudin has said or done that is unacceptable or reprehensible. It wasn't him that made that decision, was it? It seems like it should be moot now anyway. Surely the ongoing issue is his father?
You started this sub thread with “His parents were convicted of felony murder. That is not a violent crime per se.”
I hope you now have the facts to see that Chesa Boudin is pleading for clemency for a terrorist murderer. That is not the kind of person who should be a DA! That is the job of a defense attorney, and Chesa would have been a great candidate for the SF Public Defender’s office. But when you hire a criminal apologist to be the city’s prosecutor you get predictably disastrous results.
Why does Boudin maintain such exceptionally lenient policies wrt property crime, even more than those proposed in other cities, and even when suspects are multiple repeat, even professional offenders? Given that Boudin seems highly intelligent and sincere, I must conclude it's because he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights. Which isn't to say he would reject them outright in all cases, but that he sees private property rights principally as a tool of oppression, and so has no compunction jettisoning them if he feels that the harm done to minority communities in defending those rights outweighs the risk of capitalists walking away with their ball. Which also is pretty much the only way one could have honestly--albeit naively--defended Chavez.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that view, at least intellectually. But I'm nowhere arrogant enough to believe anything good would come of imposing such radicals views. And as someone with a legal education, I think it's particularly unethical of him to use his particular office to impose such views. There are few schools of thought, Marxism and offshoots being the most well known, that believe such reforms can be effective without deep and abiding support within the broader society. Boudin is a modern day American revolutionary, and not necessarily in a good way IMNSHO. Our politics is already far too extremist, and only getting worse.
I recognize that he comes from a family that espouses similar beliefs. (Not just his parents, but his guardians and their circle of friends as well.) But I see no reason to speak to that--his own expressed views, personal and as an office holder, far more directly reflect his thinking.
I don't think you have to be particularly left-wing, let alone Marxist, to look back at history and see that fighting democratic movements because they were labeled as Communist or Marxist may not have been the right approach.
You compare Chavez to Trump. What if instead of having an election, Trump's opposition had forcibly removed him when it was clear impeachment was going nowhere? Some people would have made a sincere case for the negative consequences of that even if they opposed Trump.
>he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights
I think this accusation needs more support, surely Boudin constantly does things that imply private property rights.
What does that mean? What attacks? And what praise?
It just says (on David Gilbert's page) "Most Weather members were not prosecuted and did not serve time in prison, despite having been sought by the police for years; police misconduct led to the dropping of many charges (see: COINTELPRO)"
Everybody's heard of COINTELPRO, right?
Every thread like this, the anti-Boudin stuff sounds like the sort of propaganda they did back in the day.
They didn't like MLK Jr. either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brink%27s_robbery_(1981)
DA Boudin's parents are David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin.
This article also points out that Walgreens has not curtailed their hours. And if it's so bad, why wouldn't Target just hire more security personnel?
> Also, this is about SF, not SEA.
Same problem in both states and cities - socialists driving everything into the ground.
You can only have security guards if the state backs them up. The state is not backing them up.
Leaving with things they did not pay for.
> Security guards ... do not have an unlimited right to just grab other people and detain them. If the stolen goods are inside, say, a backpack, they also do not have the ability to search that backpack.
Not unlimited rights. They can use reasonable (and solely nonlethal) force to detain shoplifters that they have probable cause are shoplifting and even search them (for instance, their backpacks) for such goods. You need to read up on California Penal Code 490.5.
They cannot punish them, but they can prevent them from leaving with items they don't own.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
so, i'm not sure i buy this.
there was a similar lack of data around the claims by bay area Walgreens stores. and Walgreens was closing stores at similar or even faster rates in other locations, with no mention of theft.
I live in SF, see shoplifting every time I go out. So the claims are real. Gets fierce 30 minutes before closing at the local Walgreens.
Most of the incidents are not reported to police, so the data simply can't be correct. Also, they would need an employee working at each store full-time just to file police reports. Then the police would ignore it since it's under the limit, I believe $950.
Sounds like you're one of those Snopes pinheads who think everything can be debunked.
And you can blame Kamala "and I haven't been to Europe" Harris for this too. She was a DA here from 2004-2011, when the US' largest crime lab fiasco happened, with 1,000 DNA cases spoiled.
I had my car broken into twice in SF and never reported it because, nobody cares?
The data capture is terrible.