A major point that this article is making is that all these statistics are misleading because stores and individuals have systematically stopped reporting most property crime incidents as it's worthless effort because nothing gets done about the reports.
Data-driven decisions don't work if you have really bad source data.
This seems strange to me though. How does one collect on insurance without it being reported to the police? Are businesses and individuals just eating the cost or are adjusters just writing out checks without a police report?
The article points out that businesses are eating the cost until they can't tolerate it any more, then they're leaving. The example cited was that of Walgreens closing 17 stores in San Francisco because of shoplifting related losses.
Does insurance pay out for shoplifting? Do store owners even buy that insurance? Can you even get that insurance in SF? What are the deductibles? What happens to your rates when you make a claim?
I could see for big ticket retailers (jewelry, etc) insurance against theft makes sense, but CVS? When people steal $100 worth of makeup?
There is "commercial crime insurance" (separate from general business insurance) but I can't imagine an underwriter staying in the San Francisco market. And a large retailer like CVS, Walgreens, or Target would almost certainly be self-insured.
Are you using “self-insured” as a euphemism for “just eats the losses”? Because it’s not really insurance if there’s no risk pooling, and a large retailer is a single entity—who are they pooling risk from? Individual stores? That would make sense only if they are franchises.
They may not be pooling risk, but they may be hiring actuaries to look at their past losses compared to similar businesses, and setting aside a reserve to cover expected future risk.
That’s basically what self-insured is. Large employers offer health insurance but they aren’t pooling risk with other companies, they just pay all expenses.
Insurance is meant to protect against catastrophic loss. If a loss isn’t catastrophic, it’s often cheaper to just pay for the loss yourself.
"Does insurance pay out for shoplifting?" <- Yes and no. If you file a claim to the insurance company they will probably pay out. But they are trying to turn a profit too - if you are filing too many claims in a specific area they will just drop you.
Insurance pays out for theft even without a police report as long as it is a specific event (very common e.g. for shipping, where sometimes it isn’t even known in which country the theft happened). I have never heard of a policy covering “shrinkage”.
Any kind of meaningful coverage for shoplifting can't be dependent on having police reports. Under normal circumstances it is the shoplifting you don't know about that causes losses.
I suspect that stores do not have insurance for shoplifting, but perhaps someone with first hand knowledge could weigh in.
I don’t have first hand knowledge but I would bet all my Bitcoin that retailers do not have “shoplifting insurance”. There seems to be a common but deeply flawed belief that businesses can and do insure against literally every bad thing that could ever happen to them. Anyone with personal experience dealing with health or dental insurance should be well aware that insurance companies are in the business of covering (and paying out) as little as possible and there’s no reason to believe this dynamic is any different for a corporate customer.
Under normal circumstances, insurance protects against unlikely but catastrophic events (health insurance in the US is a weird exception). Even if shoplifting insurance exists, I can’t imagine how it would be cheaper than just eating the loss.
You will never in a million years find an insurance carrier to underwrite a policy that covers shoplifting in Union Square. If you do, please let me know, I want to short the hell out of their stock.
Retail stores expect some baseline amount of theft. For an individual, theft is a rare, unexpected, maybe even insurable event. Not so for stores. They expect theft. You don't generally insure against things you expect to happen.
They don't collect because the level of shoplifting is so high that collecting on insurance would be financially a net negative due to premium increases.
In addition to the point about under-reporting, which was already made here, the drop in tourists and commuters may also be masking a rise in crime in the data. To understand this, you first have to realize that crime is typically overstated in destination neighborhoods, because visitors to the neighborhood are not counted in the denominator of most crime statistics, which are calculated by dividing the number of incidents by the number of permanent residents. Given two neighborhoods with identical official crime rates, the one with more daily visitors actually has a much lower true rate.
But in a year where the visitors fell off a cliff, you could have a drop in the number of incidents, which would show a decrease in crime in the official stats, even if there was actually an increase in the true rate of crime.
>So I’d suggest that part of the reason reported incidents have decreased is that stores don’t bother. They aren’t reporting shoplifting to the police because nothing happens. They just hope their employees don’t get punched and the losses balance out.
Interesting proposition. Given that existing leases are not affected, do you mean that owners would rather take a tax loss than potentially be locked into a lower rent?
Many landlords are highly leveraged and reducing the monthly rent by even 10% would reduce the on paper value of the property to such an extent to put the property into negative equity.
Pretty sure that is wrong, though. What really strikes me is the large amount of informal, typically illegal public sales stalls on sidewalks downtown and in the Mission. There is a sudden boom in stolen goods with all kinds of detergents and soaps and personal care products available for pennies on the dollar. This is very clear evidence of a boom in stolen goods and one possible route to establishing some control over the situation.
It is important to keep the whole social context in mind. Next door San Mateo county has much more serious enforcement and around 2500 incarceration beds available most times. San Francisco has huge political struggles over all police activities and around 250 incarceration beds available most times. People need to decide what they actually want and provide the resources to get there but so far that is not what is happening.
Every Target in San Francisco now has reduced hours.
As of this weekend, the Target in the Stonestown Galleria's hours have been cut back to 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. because of an uptick in retail theft.
It's due to "a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents," said spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo.
"For more than a month, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores, similar to reports from other retailers in the area," said Harper-Tibaldo.
Can anyone comment on why San Francisco’s debate became so nasty? Is it just re-trenching the tech vs. long-term tenant fight? Or is there a new dynamic?
We just got through this debate in New York City through our mayoral primary. Neither “side” won. But the process has so far produced two lead candidates who acknowledge the problem, pledged to focus on public safety and at the same time be mindful of the racial inequities of the NYPD’s recent past.
That compromise doesn’t exist in SF. The political space for it to exist doesn’t exist. There is a refusal to admit the problem on one hand. And a vilification of the incumbents as idiots, or worse, in bed with the criminals, on the other.
This is admittedly regional chauvinism, but I think New Yorkers are just fundamentally more pragmatic. Maybe it comes from everyone taking the subway. I don’t know, but we just seem less likely to drive an ideology right over a cliff. Up to the edge, maybe, but not over.
> front runner for NY DA intends to not prosecute minor offenses
Bragg is a far cry from Boudin. He is, as a former prosecutor, leading in a field that had Boudinesque candidates, e.g. those with zero prosecutorial experience.
I would actually highlight him as an example of the sort of compromise that seems lacking in San Francisco.
Since the root causes are not, and will not be addressed, I predict the pendulum will simply swing too far in both directions.
The root cause being the federal laws governing involuntary committal for mental healthcare and lack of federal resources for mental healthcare which is super pricy for obvious reasons. In addition are widening income/wealth gap and the temperate climates exacerbate the issue in some places more than others.
So the solution at the state and city levels is to use police to push people that are likelier to cause problems around so they are not comfortable being around, and incarcerating them and keeping them in the system for various offenses.
Then the police and politicians get heat for being prejudiced or biased or unfair, and they relax the rules, and then the problems return, and people will complain about thefts and property crime and etc until it gets bad enough that there is once again political will for a crackdown, and rinse repeat.
Note that I am not saying there are not legitimate prejudices and biases that need to be addressed in the police/judicial system, nor that society should let minor offenses go and make police think about the political ramifications of every interaction they have.
> The root cause being the federal laws governing involuntary committal for mental healthcare and lack of federal resources for mental healthcare which is super pricy for obvious reasons.
I do think this is the root cause of the shoplifting examples in the article. Stealing handbags from Niemen Marcus is, I think, unrelated to mental health issues.
I know, but that is the pendulum swinging too far trying to correct for perceived prejudices by the police/judicial system. Which I think are rooted in expecting police to be able to deal with mental health issues as if they have the tools to address the crisis.
I don’t think street homelessness (and so closing the mental hospitals) can explain everything. The brazen shoplifters and car thieves don’t appear to be predominantly street people.
While I fully support measures to close the inequality gap and also to improve access to mental health care, I don’t think these things adequately explain why crime has surged. Specifically, access to mental healthcare and crime haven’t deteriorated so significantly in the last ~5 years commensurate with the crime surge.
On the other hand, broad and flat-footed anti-police sentiment has increased and has manifest as either explicit depolicing policies or unofficial pressure on police officers in the field to avoid routine stops and other preventative policing efforts, as well as pressure on DAs to be seen as “soft on crime” (not intending any sort of disparagement with this term). Which isn’t to say that police don’t need reform—I’m one of the 90% of Americans who think some kind of reform is necessary, but perhaps something a little more sophisticated than “defund the police” is in order (better training for police officers, weaken police unions, increase protection in vulnerable communities while increasing funding to other social services, etc)?
As for whether the pendulum will swing too far against crime, when was the last time that happened in SF? I suspect SF’s robust corps of progressives have successfully prevented the pendulum from swinging even to the center for the last decade or two.
I started writing a long comment about criteria for involuntary commitment... but then realized that it's probably not bipolar schizophrenics who do the shoplifting.
That is not the flow I am trying to illustrate. The flow is that some people find the use of police, jail, and our other judicial/penal systems today to be less than desirable for dealing with certain circumstances and people, but then trying to fix it without the proper solution (since there is no solution at the local level) results in a situation where shoplifting and property crime no longer have consequences which creates an opportunity for bad actors to proliferate.
I predict the pendulum will simply swing too far in both directions.
Yup. People alive today look back the three strikes law and think “how could the voters ever wanted that?”.
But you live long enough and the the cycles start to emerge. If crime gets bad enough in the cities you’ll see a repeat of the 70-90s where law and order was priority #1.
The upper and middle castes can be pragmatic about the symptoms when the disease does not touch them.
Whether SF or NYC, inequality and racial segregation have increased, corporations build glass and steel temples of capitalism, billionaires treat the world as their lab and playground, and even the middle class hoards the world's production and labor resources from the comfort of their couches, advantages all accumulated over centuries of exploitation, colonization, slavery, genocide and ecological debt that the poor and future generations will have to pay back.
But to keep things simple, let's just consider the "anarchy" in light of where SF and NYC (shining lights on the hill of liberalism) rank in the dimension of racial segregation:
> let's just consider the "anarchy" in light of where SF and NYC (shining lights on the hill of liberalism) rank in the dimension of racial segregation
Sorry, is the argument that public safety can’t exist in a desegregated city?
Defending the current state of San Francisco on the basis of not being as racially segregated on one measure as New York City sort of implies that it’s one or the other. If that’s not the implication, it’s irrelevant.
Is there evidence that supports this against the more likely causes, e.g., rich people just want to live around other rich people, people of any SES prefer to live around those who are culturally similar (and culture correlates with race in America), etc? In other words, I don’t think we have to resort to mustache-twirling caricatures to explain an increase in racial segregation.
I agree with you that inequality and “socialism for the rich” are real problems, but I don’t think they adequately explain the 5-year crime surge across the country, specifically inequality didn’t increase commensurate with this surge in the same time period.
Most likely this is the result of our flat-footed “defund the police!” rhetoric that manifest as either explicit de-policing policies or else as unofficial pressure on police to reduce preventative policing practices like routine stops. I don’t think anyone disputes this correlation even if they don’t subscribe to the causation hypothesis.
With respect to racial segregation, I know ordinary liberals and moderates are generally on board with increased integration but I’m not sure how that will hit the I-oppose-race-mixing-but-in-a-woke-way crowd, particularly in SF?
I can’t speak for anyone besides myself, but growing inequality implies more poverty (more poor people, poor people get poorer, etc). So if poverty begets crime and (growing) inequality begets poverty, then inequality begets crime. There may also be other vectors through which inequality begets crime as well.
Maybe it’s possible to have a kind of inequality where the rich get richer without the poor getting poorer (although I suspect it would just mean that the purchasing power of a dollar falls even though the poor have as many dollars as they had before) but in practice in America I think we have the kind of inequality where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (and more numerous).
Hmm, interesting. Any idea how the picture looks at the 5-year or 10-year trend (year over year clouds just be an anomaly)? What about the degree of poverty (we could have fewer poor people but they could be getting poorer)?
From [2] it looks like poverty has been going up and down staying within 10-15% range for the past 50 years.
I'm sure it's possible to construct a measure which will show that poverty went up - as it's equally possible to show the opposite - but either will mostly likely be overfitting, i. e. hand-picking data to prove the desired point.
fairness matters. Especially as this is a shared planet. Rich people should not be able to monopolize it, nor monopolize political power, have better criminal justice, be treated as better people, and then leverage this monopoly to make people work for them for the lowest possible wage and extract all the value from that labor as "their" profit.
What if one argued that some enslaved people in 1850 Georgia were better fed than before they were kidnapped from Africa. All ok then?
And why should rich people complain if there were a revolution and they were relegated to the middle class? The middle class of 2021 live longer and have better healthcare than the kings of even 100 years ago. What rights does anyone have to anything? By what reason doed anyone have a claim to injustice?
You guys would be more convincing if you were willing to acknowledge that progress has been made. Anyone that has studied history, or even just been alive for a few decades, knows that this is not the worst time ever. The constant catastrophizing rhetoric just discredits you.
And you'd be more convincing if you hadn't just said, "You didn't phrase your argument in a way that suited me, therefore I am going to ignore the problem you just raised."
It's not the worst time ever. There, I said it. Happy? Now, are you going to say "'Not the worst time ever' can still be pretty bad and in need of fixing"?
Chesa and his predecessor Gascon were not just trying out the “let’s not put people in jail” to see if it works, this is a core tenant of their political beliefs and if the population at large has to pay a price, so be it. This is not a slight adjustment to the justice system, this is a “burn it down and build something else” approach - an attempt to dismantle a system, they claim, is built on systemic racism. If a couple of law-abiding citizens get run over and killed by a repeated offender in a stolen car, then that’s a sacrifice Chesa is willing to make.
So to answer your question, there is no compromise because compromise would be admitting failure - that these policies don’t work. And also admitting that putting some people in jail is a net benefit to society.
When poverty, homelessness, and desperation increase, so does crime and theft. And these politicians are correct in that we cannot jail our way out of this problem.
Not jailing people doesn't work but neither does jailing them. At least one of these policies doesn't waste money, incarcerate people, and puts the responsibility on the store owners.
The entire debate is a bunch of rich, privileged tech bros who invaded our home, and then did nothing but whine and moan.
I don't move to Austin or Miami, or some other dump, and spend all of my time bitching about the rednecks. No, I stay my hippy ass in Oakland where I belong, and I love it. It's heaven. I know everybody on my block, even the homeless people.
If you can't do the same, that's fine, the bay isn't for everyone. Please leave.
> Can anyone comment on why San Francisco’s debate became so nasty?
Because it's related to the issue of race, and this is one of the most difficult subjects to discuss and has been so for many decades. If anything, the debate became worse.
I think it’s difficult because some people are deliberately poisoning the well of civil discourse in the name of “social justice” (e.g., canceling anyone who doesn’t share their exact viewpoint).
As a not-American, what is the racial aspect? This is a legitimate question, I only know about SF from HN, and this is the first time I've seen a reference to race.
> That compromise doesn’t exist in SF. The political space for it to exist doesn’t exist. There is a refusal to admit the problem on one hand. And a vilification of the incumbents as idiots, or worse, in bed with the criminals, on the other.
In "The Three Languages of Politics" Arnold Kling classifies three basic perspectives that can become central in a person's mind in such a way that expressions of the other perspectives are incomprehensible. The perspectives are described through axis of 1) oppressor-oppressed, 2) civilization-barbarism, 3) freedom-coercion. In the original article the author describes social media communication on the part of government staff that highlights the oppressor-oppressed without acknowledging other perspectives. Similarly people victimized by or by witnessing crime or crime-hype may find civilization-barbarism the most salient perspective. Without a consideration for all axis a productive conversation is unlikely.
New York city has a large republican area: Staten island.
While SF and cities like it vilify incumbents, they also vilify the opposition. In my city of Portland, no one will consider electing a republican because they have constructed strawman as to what a republican will be like (forgetting that the last Gop mayer of Portland was loved).
New York had a republican only 20 years ago.
LA was also revived by a republican mayor.
There's a pattern.
Sorry for being so blunt, but at some point we need to name the problem.
My pet theory is that all people of good will should vote for republicans in New York and for democrats in Alabama. This way reasonable middle-ground centrist candidates will be elected.
I think the Koch dynasty corruption plus the Dinkins ineptitude and a tough on mob crime (which the city was tired of) helped Giuliani win the mayorship. NYC isn’t republican by nature, but the hands of the constituency were tied.
Bloomberg was in the middle and now Deblasio/Wilhelm’s tenure will likely propel a moderate Democrat into office who promises to bring order back to the city.
SF could learn from that but it doesn’t happen. SF is very ideological do instead of admitting mistakes progressives keep doubling down. At some point the constituency will say enough! But SF keeps surprising me.
Brown was corrupt but at least crime was dealt with. Everyone since Brown has been on the ideological bandwagon and won’t admit to mistakes and keep on doubling down on ineffective and detrimental policies.
At this point I say bring someone like Willie back.
It has become more and more difficult in the bay area to speak plainly about socioeconomic issues and the homelessness/mental health crisis without triggering the Antiracist Elect. For a growing segment of interlocutors, most everything bad or negative going on in society is because white people. This makes productive discourse fraught at best, usually impossible.
Note that while I do specify the bay area here, it's only for the purposes of this comment. It's quite obviously spreading to other places. The moral madness of social media is slowly but steadily spilling out into every day society.
As I told a European techie at a conference twenty-odd years ago, New York includes its suburbs. If New York were just Manhattan, things might be different.
Over here on the other coast, I focus on littering in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, though related to the broad-daylight wide-open sales and use of heroin and crack combined by the police retreating from walking through the park to only standing behind barricades near the arch.
I posted a couple videos on it here: https://joshuaspodek.com/pride-destroyed-the-park-washington.... I've picked up litter every day since 2017, starting from an environmental motivation, but as a resident since the 90s with civic duty, safety and crime have become important.
We can solve that overnight by legalizing the selling of drugs to adults. Require a (free) registration to be able to buy, prohibit the selling to minors, require that all shops selling it have pamphlets with addiction guidance and pom, no more drug dealers, no more selling to kids.
Legalizing drugs at best reduces the black market/removes some of the danger. There are still plenty of black market weed dealers in states with legal recreational use. For that matter, there are still people selling cigarettes in a black market, Eric Garner was killed for doing this.
i mean i get it, but if you've ever walked into the CVSs off mission no amount of data driven evidence is going to convince you not to GTFO of there as soon as possible.
I mean, these are the same people that thought the Boogaloo boys were right-wingers, and not just lefties LARPing as what they thought a right-wing militia looked like.
(The idiots that plotted to kidnap that governor were all rabidly anti-Trump, for example, and boogaloos have worked hand-in-hand with BLM)
The entire area has Stockholm Syndrome; SF and the surrounding area is overly expensive, overly crowded, over hyped, intellectually confused, exhausted and completely spent as quality places to live. Southern California too. Anywhere fashionable is wreaked by over population and the Karens they contain.
That's interesting. I'd accept my statement being a class attack, but racist? You've not met a very diverse set of Karens - they observe no boundaries of gender, or "race" - they are simply intolerant and self important. Regardless of their origin.
What I am not seeing discussed in all the hubub about SF shoplifting is the impact of organized crime.
There is a well-developed fencing process for this kind of thing: goods are stolen by individual thieves or groups; fenced to black-market warehouses; then redistributed to individual sellers, who either hawk in flea markets or to local businesses, or ship the goods in bulk to other areas. It's been this way for years. Gangs of bicycle thieves used to roam the entire Bay Area (probably still do) with this model—I believe they were affiliated with some L.A. groups as well—and more than one group was busted on state charges in the last decade or two.
Anyway, the people running the stolen goods warehouse intermediaries are committing felonies, regardless of whatever proposition or do-good D.A. people are huffing about. Where are the detectives? Where are the prosecutors? Where is the state of California?
I'm British so I'm not fully equipped to understand in terms of the state law or effects on the ground, but isn't there plausible deniability for the aggregators that sell goods from individual shop lifters? If the retribution on the individual is negligible, why would they provide evidence against the folk exchanging money for stolen goods, there seems to be no motivating factor to do so.
You could increase punishment for folk buying the goods, but I'm not sure what negative ramifications that might have, e.g. you're second in chain buying a stolen phone.
Maybe I don't understand, but it all seems a bit bonkers to me.
The law doesn’t work like this. The police will simply ask you ‘where do you think all these second hand items are coming from?’ and if you can’t explain they’ll say that you aren’t taking reasonable care to find out.
Yes and No. No, if one bought three Neiman Marcus shirts from such a source.
Yes, if one has bought many shirts, bags, laptops from these people; even in this case, prosecutors don't go after the fencers(middlemen) directly. They bust the small guys, who flip for plea deals. Then these 'thieves' wear the wire and sell stuff to these fencers; this is how prosecutors collect solid evidence to convict fencers.
But for criminal prosecution the fault should be proven beyond any reasonable doubt. IANAL, but proving beyond any reasonable doubt a person knew the item he's buying was stolen is more difficult than not.
My understanding is that they just have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you did not take enough care because that’s an offence by itself. You have a civic duty to think if something may have been stolen. They don’t have to prove what you were intending to do.
Is that correct? That is true for certain very specific types of crime like money laundering, where bankers are expected to prove to themselves that the source of funds is legitimate. I don't believe such requirements apply to literally everyone, as such supply chain investigations can be arbitrarily expensive.
I believe it's correct. They're not expecting normal people to do supply chain analysis, but they are expecting people who see a ton of second hand drug-store products in a bag in a dodgy warehouse run by someone who doesn't really seem like a drug-store distributor to say 'wait a second that might be not 100% legitimate'.
It's not an unusual concept in common law. It's like manslaughter - you can have had absolutely not intention whatsoever to kill or harm someone, but still be held responsible for their death because you weren't careful enough.
The widespread practice of scalping has boosted sites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. While not a “random person” per se,[a] you don’t know if that good you’re buying isn’t stolen. Some scalpers, however, will show you the store receipt to prove it’s a genuine scalp(?), and to allow you to return it if it’s defective.
[a]: They are a person you don’t know, but it’s not like a flea market where you can’t read reviews before handing over the money
> isn't there plausible deniability for the aggregators that sell goods from individual shop lifters?
Quite right, and penetrating this "I dunno" defense is part of building a criminal case against the high-level traffickers. It's the job of the District Attorney (local), the Attorney General (state), and their teams of investigators; that is, the detectives. To do this they can surveil, pressure arrestees for lower-level crimes, penetrate organizations with undercover agents, and even tap phones and computers—pretty much anything you've seen in an American T.V. show, which is often dramatized but not always as far from the truth as you'd think.
> You could increase punishment for folk buying the goods
Do you mean the end-purchasers? Conceivably you could get some of the shopkeepers, if you can prove they knew the goods were suspect. But there's nothing criminal about buying household goods at a corner store—all the crime happened on the way there.
Yeah, I'm just posing what could be done if the law regarding low value theft is immutable, if it can't be changed, something else has to give (I haven't got a clue what).
I recently moved from SF to Texas. I walked into a Walgreens for the first time here in TX and thought I was in the Truman show…everything was suspiciously clean, well organized, and friendly. Was this some kind of hidden camera show? Growing up and living in SF had convinced me that all Walgreens were messy and miserable places.
SF -> Florida here. Yes. Publix is a bizarre surreal experience. I was used to buying food at CVS hoping to not step on a needle. If you asked a CVS employee where something is - they roll their eyes and mumble something. At publix, I asked an employee where the peanut butter was - they smiled, asked how my day was, walked me over to the peanut butter. When I checked out they told me the peanut butter was "bogo". I said excuse me? They proceeded to tell me I get another free peanut butter - for absolutely no reason. I fell in love.
Friendliness is another dynamic I’ve been totally surprised by. People waving and saying hi while you’re walking. The McDonalds cashier telling my wife she liked her dress. Kids on the playground seeing my son fall and coming over to help him up and see if he’s okay.
We (myself and my girlfriend) still find it surreal sometimes. We moved to North Carolina and people just… wave, they just wave and say hi and will talk to you. It’s really nice.
I'm driving near my home. I see some teenagers hanging out alone by a river. My immediate thought: "what are they up to..." as I'm used to shenanigans in SF. As I drive by I take a look and...they're fishing...fishing! "Well..." I say to myself, "...what a wholesome activity...good for them"
This is a most ridiculous comparison and anecdote. You fell in love because the cashier let you know peanut butter was buy one get one? Your new home is better than San Francisco because the local major grocery store is better than a pharmacy in SF? Come on.
I am from the American south. The friendliness is almost entirely superficial. Let these people find out you're gay, or liberal, or not a churchgoer ... you'll generally encounter a completely different experience.
They’re aware I’m not a republican voter and don’t go to church, no one has had an issue still. Is it possible things have changed since you left or you’re being fed the media version of it still and choose to see that? I’ve had respectful disagreements over even vaccination here.
What I am relaying to you is based on personal experience growing up in the lower middle class / poor American south. It's still that way when I go back to visit. As far as "the media version" of the American south goes, I have no idea what you're even talking about. Perhaps you're in a high socioeconomic status bubble and you need to drive 45 minutes in any given direction and re-test your conclusions.
At any rate, I live in the bay area now and I very rarely encounter issues with un-friendliness in the contexts mentioned in this thread. The lack of effusive friendliness that I do encounter for the most part is cultural. Which makes sense, as the bay area is extremely diverse culturally.
That contradicts my experience. Generally if you're not a dick and don't try to shovel your vegan stuff into people's throats, noone gives a shit about your views or orientation.
People may not talk to you about politics anymore, but anything else - work, kids, cars - is a fair game.
Chick-fil-A workers make me sad. They seem like they desperately want to scream at somebody but are forced to stuff it down into a fake evangelical pastor smile. I'd rather go somewhere where the low paid workers can at lease let out some of their frustrations via passive aggressiveness.
I still go to Chick-fil-A because the sandwiches are good, but I feel guilty about it afterwards.
Chick-fil-a tends to be staffed be cheerful, productive teenagers when I go there. I’m not religious, and don’t generally like religious corporatism, but Chick-fil-a seems to almost use employment as ministry. They care about being a good place for good kids to make a buck.
TBH I'd be pretty surprised walking into a messy, miserable Walgreen's (or other national chain) store. I've been all around the US and I have yet to encounter a single one like that, but I'll admit the last time I was in SF was ~8-10 years ago.
When you walk into Walgreens in Cupertino, which has just about zero violent crime and just about zero homeless, it's still miserable. Or in Mountain View, Los Altos, Saratoga, etc, which are all cities around 60k in population with a similar smell of density and wealth.
It's the same story in San Jose, which has a bigger population than SF but similar size homeless population.
When you walk into Whole Foods, you get what you expect, whether in Maui, Denver, or SF. Supposedly the Whole Foods in Cupertino is among the largest.
As a non-resident of San Francisco, I have no dog in this fight, but it shows up on my Twitter feed regardless. I was amused by a recent exchange where one user was complaining about the amount of human faeces on the sidewalk, and someone retorted that they'd lived in SF for 15 years and there'd always been human faeces on the sidewalk.
I don't know whether crime in SF has gotten worse or not, but as a resident of a city where people don't defecate on the sidewalk, it boggled my mind a little to see someone apparently advocating for the city on the basis that sidewalk defecation wasn't a new problem.
It boggles my mind that sidewalk defecation only matters as a measure of where one should move, rather than a measure of what is wrong with our culture and society that produces iPhones with the one hand and crushes so many people with the other.
Comments like this are why SF is such a terrible place. Instead of having standards, the bar is lowered and lowered and goalposts are moved to avoid addressing the crime and other issues with the city.
I think quite a lot of tech people really don’t have any understanding that most cities are not like this. I don’t get it because they travel for conferences. Do they never stop and think ‘huh I wonder why it’s different here…’
They do understand. They don't care. SF is a transient place for many. They stay while it is good and leave when it isn't. They never really get invested in the city.
This is the exact opposite of my experience: it’s the techies who want to fix San Francisco and the longtime residents who shriek that nothing is wrong and how dare you even suggest we need to change anything you racist.
As a resident of SF, one thing that resonated with me - SF is a gold rush town, not a whole lot different than 1849. People come to SF hoping to strike it rich or just be a little weird and left alone, and with that comes a certain mentality. The city is rough, a little lawless and that still true today. People like the “roughness”.
That’s not saying it hasn’t gotten worse in the last year or two. But it’s never been shiny and clean.
My car was broken into 3 times in two years. This is with NOTHING left out to see. Twice inside my own apartment garage. Once in supposedly upscale Russian Hill area.
Storage unit broken into twice. Homeless guy LIVING in another storage unit. People dropping dookies in the middle of Illinois street during mid day.
Why deal with all this? Even the city has an income tax. Where does that money go? To poop tracking apps? Free shoot-up sites?
Gross mismanagement by weak, ineffective, and “progressive” anything goes ultra left politicians is ruining SF.
>A woman named Michelle Tandler posted a Tweet lamenting that “every single one of my friends is considering leaving SF.” She added that “My friends are scared for their children and their husbands are scared for their wives.”
>And for some reason, Kate Chatfield, who is a senior director on DA Boudin’s staff, thought this would be a good time for a public official to take a shot at a local resident. Chatfield said the “Husbands are scared for their wives,” was right out of the famously racist film, “Birth of a Nation,” which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroes.
This is absolutely insane to me. Someone expresses concern about crime and someone from the DA's office publicly compares them to the KKK? How is that in any way acceptable?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadhttps://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
https://www.crimemapping.com/map/ca/sanfrancisco
Data-driven decisions don't work if you have really bad source data.
I know more than a few cops, and current SOP is to ignore anything that isn’t an immediate threat to life.
I could see for big ticket retailers (jewelry, etc) insurance against theft makes sense, but CVS? When people steal $100 worth of makeup?
Insurance is meant to protect against catastrophic loss. If a loss isn’t catastrophic, it’s often cheaper to just pay for the loss yourself.
I suspect that stores do not have insurance for shoplifting, but perhaps someone with first hand knowledge could weigh in.
But in a year where the visitors fell off a cliff, you could have a drop in the number of incidents, which would show a decrease in crime in the official stats, even if there was actually an increase in the true rate of crime.
>And frankly, lately they haven’t.
Not sure that’s a good metric? It was a problem before Covid hit.
It is important to keep the whole social context in mind. Next door San Mateo county has much more serious enforcement and around 2500 incarceration beds available most times. San Francisco has huge political struggles over all police activities and around 250 incarceration beds available most times. People need to decide what they actually want and provide the resources to get there but so far that is not what is happening.
They also have 3x the security at self-serve registers, one per row, compared to maybe one total before.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/Target-San-Francisco-st...
Every Target in San Francisco now has reduced hours.
As of this weekend, the Target in the Stonestown Galleria's hours have been cut back to 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. because of an uptick in retail theft.
It's due to "a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents," said spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo.
"For more than a month, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores, similar to reports from other retailers in the area," said Harper-Tibaldo.
We just got through this debate in New York City through our mayoral primary. Neither “side” won. But the process has so far produced two lead candidates who acknowledge the problem, pledged to focus on public safety and at the same time be mindful of the racial inequities of the NYPD’s recent past.
That compromise doesn’t exist in SF. The political space for it to exist doesn’t exist. There is a refusal to admit the problem on one hand. And a vilification of the incumbents as idiots, or worse, in bed with the criminals, on the other.
[1] https://www.alvinbragg.com/plans
Bragg is a far cry from Boudin. He is, as a former prosecutor, leading in a field that had Boudinesque candidates, e.g. those with zero prosecutorial experience.
I would actually highlight him as an example of the sort of compromise that seems lacking in San Francisco.
https://www.alvinbragg.com/declination
they make sense.
Contrast that with one of Boudin's policies
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/12/24/da-critics-say-anti-d...
and then think about the drug abuse problem that is prevalent in SF.
The root cause being the federal laws governing involuntary committal for mental healthcare and lack of federal resources for mental healthcare which is super pricy for obvious reasons. In addition are widening income/wealth gap and the temperate climates exacerbate the issue in some places more than others.
So the solution at the state and city levels is to use police to push people that are likelier to cause problems around so they are not comfortable being around, and incarcerating them and keeping them in the system for various offenses.
Then the police and politicians get heat for being prejudiced or biased or unfair, and they relax the rules, and then the problems return, and people will complain about thefts and property crime and etc until it gets bad enough that there is once again political will for a crackdown, and rinse repeat.
Note that I am not saying there are not legitimate prejudices and biases that need to be addressed in the police/judicial system, nor that society should let minor offenses go and make police think about the political ramifications of every interaction they have.
I do think this is the root cause of the shoplifting examples in the article. Stealing handbags from Niemen Marcus is, I think, unrelated to mental health issues.
These people know that you don’t do that in DC without consequences, so they go up to SF.
On the other hand, broad and flat-footed anti-police sentiment has increased and has manifest as either explicit depolicing policies or unofficial pressure on police officers in the field to avoid routine stops and other preventative policing efforts, as well as pressure on DAs to be seen as “soft on crime” (not intending any sort of disparagement with this term). Which isn’t to say that police don’t need reform—I’m one of the 90% of Americans who think some kind of reform is necessary, but perhaps something a little more sophisticated than “defund the police” is in order (better training for police officers, weaken police unions, increase protection in vulnerable communities while increasing funding to other social services, etc)?
As for whether the pendulum will swing too far against crime, when was the last time that happened in SF? I suspect SF’s robust corps of progressives have successfully prevented the pendulum from swinging even to the center for the last decade or two.
Oh, yes.
Yup. People alive today look back the three strikes law and think “how could the voters ever wanted that?”.
But you live long enough and the the cycles start to emerge. If crime gets bad enough in the cities you’ll see a repeat of the 70-90s where law and order was priority #1.
Whether SF or NYC, inequality and racial segregation have increased, corporations build glass and steel temples of capitalism, billionaires treat the world as their lab and playground, and even the middle class hoards the world's production and labor resources from the comfort of their couches, advantages all accumulated over centuries of exploitation, colonization, slavery, genocide and ecological debt that the poor and future generations will have to pay back.
But to keep things simple, let's just consider the "anarchy" in light of where SF and NYC (shining lights on the hill of liberalism) rank in the dimension of racial segregation:
- https://gothamist.com/news/new-yorks-schools-are-still-the-m...
- https://belonging.berkeley.edu/most-least-segregated-cities
- https://belonging.berkeley.edu/roots-structural-racism
- Most major metropolitan areas have become more racially segregated, study shows: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/21/us/housing-segregation-cities...
Sorry, is the argument that public safety can’t exist in a desegregated city?
if anything, the upper castes rely on segregation to feel safer, thereby making things worse.
Most likely this is the result of our flat-footed “defund the police!” rhetoric that manifest as either explicit de-policing policies or else as unofficial pressure on police to reduce preventative policing practices like routine stops. I don’t think anyone disputes this correlation even if they don’t subscribe to the causation hypothesis.
With respect to racial segregation, I know ordinary liberals and moderates are generally on board with increased integration but I’m not sure how that will hit the I-oppose-race-mixing-but-in-a-woke-way crowd, particularly in SF?
Poverty? I would get it. But how the fact that someone is richer than you justifies shoplifting is beyond my understanding.
Maybe it’s possible to have a kind of inequality where the rich get richer without the poor getting poorer (although I suspect it would just mean that the purchasing power of a dollar falls even though the poor have as many dollars as they had before) but in practice in America I think we have the kind of inequality where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (and more numerous).
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...
I'm sure it's possible to construct a measure which will show that poverty went up - as it's equally possible to show the opposite - but either will mostly likely be overfitting, i. e. hand-picking data to prove the desired point.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
Poverty is definitely definitely going down, not up.
What if one argued that some enslaved people in 1850 Georgia were better fed than before they were kidnapped from Africa. All ok then?
And why should rich people complain if there were a revolution and they were relegated to the middle class? The middle class of 2021 live longer and have better healthcare than the kings of even 100 years ago. What rights does anyone have to anything? By what reason doed anyone have a claim to injustice?
It's not the worst time ever. There, I said it. Happy? Now, are you going to say "'Not the worst time ever' can still be pretty bad and in need of fixing"?
Who do you think has been making all the progress to get us to not the worst time ever? You’re welcome, by the way.
So to answer your question, there is no compromise because compromise would be admitting failure - that these policies don’t work. And also admitting that putting some people in jail is a net benefit to society.
All of the evils of the world are caused by non-progressives. Ergo, the darkest blue parts of the map must be the best in all ways.
And the inquisition hasn’t even started yet. That’s going to be one hell of a party.
I don't move to Austin or Miami, or some other dump, and spend all of my time bitching about the rednecks. No, I stay my hippy ass in Oakland where I belong, and I love it. It's heaven. I know everybody on my block, even the homeless people.
If you can't do the same, that's fine, the bay isn't for everyone. Please leave.
What I find hilarious about bay area residents is that they'll say things like this as if it's at all unique to the area.
In reality, knowing your neighbors is common throughout the country
Sometimes I think that authoritarian regime combined with freedom of movement is a potential alternative to democracy.
You don't like it here? You don't live here.
Because it's related to the issue of race, and this is one of the most difficult subjects to discuss and has been so for many decades. If anything, the debate became worse.
In "The Three Languages of Politics" Arnold Kling classifies three basic perspectives that can become central in a person's mind in such a way that expressions of the other perspectives are incomprehensible. The perspectives are described through axis of 1) oppressor-oppressed, 2) civilization-barbarism, 3) freedom-coercion. In the original article the author describes social media communication on the part of government staff that highlights the oppressor-oppressed without acknowledging other perspectives. Similarly people victimized by or by witnessing crime or crime-hype may find civilization-barbarism the most salient perspective. Without a consideration for all axis a productive conversation is unlikely.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17831052-the-three-langu...
While SF and cities like it vilify incumbents, they also vilify the opposition. In my city of Portland, no one will consider electing a republican because they have constructed strawman as to what a republican will be like (forgetting that the last Gop mayer of Portland was loved).
New York had a republican only 20 years ago.
LA was also revived by a republican mayor.
There's a pattern.
Sorry for being so blunt, but at some point we need to name the problem.
Bloomberg was in the middle and now Deblasio/Wilhelm’s tenure will likely propel a moderate Democrat into office who promises to bring order back to the city.
SF could learn from that but it doesn’t happen. SF is very ideological do instead of admitting mistakes progressives keep doubling down. At some point the constituency will say enough! But SF keeps surprising me.
Brown was corrupt but at least crime was dealt with. Everyone since Brown has been on the ideological bandwagon and won’t admit to mistakes and keep on doubling down on ineffective and detrimental policies.
At this point I say bring someone like Willie back.
Note that while I do specify the bay area here, it's only for the purposes of this comment. It's quite obviously spreading to other places. The moral madness of social media is slowly but steadily spilling out into every day society.
Over here on the other coast, I focus on littering in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, though related to the broad-daylight wide-open sales and use of heroin and crack combined by the police retreating from walking through the park to only standing behind barricades near the arch.
I posted a couple videos on it here: https://joshuaspodek.com/pride-destroyed-the-park-washington.... I've picked up litter every day since 2017, starting from an environmental motivation, but as a resident since the 90s with civic duty, safety and crime have become important.
Also way less crime.
(The idiots that plotted to kidnap that governor were all rabidly anti-Trump, for example, and boogaloos have worked hand-in-hand with BLM)
Yes the biggest demographic problem in these areas is the scourge of conscientious middle-aged White women...
The same thing we post every hour, Pinky: Right-wing Hatred of San Francisco.
Just go to Austin and get over it. Move on with your lives. You people post like 200 articles a day about how San Francisco is dead.
Good. Get out of my home and go back to Texas, Connecticut, or whatever trump-loving dump from which you came.
Yes. Poor people steal from Walgreens and Target. Go cry about it on next-door and twitter, instead of doing something productive with your privilege.
PS: Please take Cyan Bannister and the rest of the billionaire libertarian trophy wives with you.
You're rich and you steal movies with BitTorrent. Y'all ain't innocent.
There is a well-developed fencing process for this kind of thing: goods are stolen by individual thieves or groups; fenced to black-market warehouses; then redistributed to individual sellers, who either hawk in flea markets or to local businesses, or ship the goods in bulk to other areas. It's been this way for years. Gangs of bicycle thieves used to roam the entire Bay Area (probably still do) with this model—I believe they were affiliated with some L.A. groups as well—and more than one group was busted on state charges in the last decade or two.
Anyway, the people running the stolen goods warehouse intermediaries are committing felonies, regardless of whatever proposition or do-good D.A. people are huffing about. Where are the detectives? Where are the prosecutors? Where is the state of California?
You could increase punishment for folk buying the goods, but I'm not sure what negative ramifications that might have, e.g. you're second in chain buying a stolen phone.
Maybe I don't understand, but it all seems a bit bonkers to me.
For buying goods from random people instead of a distributor? No of course not. Any reasonable person would be suspicious.
Yes, if one has bought many shirts, bags, laptops from these people; even in this case, prosecutors don't go after the fencers(middlemen) directly. They bust the small guys, who flip for plea deals. Then these 'thieves' wear the wire and sell stuff to these fencers; this is how prosecutors collect solid evidence to convict fencers.
But for criminal prosecution the fault should be proven beyond any reasonable doubt. IANAL, but proving beyond any reasonable doubt a person knew the item he's buying was stolen is more difficult than not.
It's not an unusual concept in common law. It's like manslaughter - you can have had absolutely not intention whatsoever to kill or harm someone, but still be held responsible for their death because you weren't careful enough.
[a]: They are a person you don’t know, but it’s not like a flea market where you can’t read reviews before handing over the money
Quite right, and penetrating this "I dunno" defense is part of building a criminal case against the high-level traffickers. It's the job of the District Attorney (local), the Attorney General (state), and their teams of investigators; that is, the detectives. To do this they can surveil, pressure arrestees for lower-level crimes, penetrate organizations with undercover agents, and even tap phones and computers—pretty much anything you've seen in an American T.V. show, which is often dramatized but not always as far from the truth as you'd think.
> You could increase punishment for folk buying the goods
Do you mean the end-purchasers? Conceivably you could get some of the shopkeepers, if you can prove they knew the goods were suspect. But there's nothing criminal about buying household goods at a corner store—all the crime happened on the way there.
I guess this particular tactic isn’t an option if you don’t prosecute low level crimes like shoplifting.
I'm driving near my home. I see some teenagers hanging out alone by a river. My immediate thought: "what are they up to..." as I'm used to shenanigans in SF. As I drive by I take a look and...they're fishing...fishing! "Well..." I say to myself, "...what a wholesome activity...good for them"
At any rate, I live in the bay area now and I very rarely encounter issues with un-friendliness in the contexts mentioned in this thread. The lack of effusive friendliness that I do encounter for the most part is cultural. Which makes sense, as the bay area is extremely diverse culturally.
People may not talk to you about politics anymore, but anything else - work, kids, cars - is a fair game.
I want a burger. I Think about the unmotivated and borderline rude cashier I would have to deal with.
Then the smiling and upbeat workers at Chick-fil-A. Well guess it’s chicken yet again.
I still go to Chick-fil-A because the sandwiches are good, but I feel guilty about it afterwards.
So, yeah, I'm with treeman79. I think you're projecting.
It's the same story in San Jose, which has a bigger population than SF but similar size homeless population.
When you walk into Whole Foods, you get what you expect, whether in Maui, Denver, or SF. Supposedly the Whole Foods in Cupertino is among the largest.
Oh. He's delivering my postmates. Make sure to video tape him in case he's casing my $2m condo.
I don't know whether crime in SF has gotten worse or not, but as a resident of a city where people don't defecate on the sidewalk, it boggled my mind a little to see someone apparently advocating for the city on the basis that sidewalk defecation wasn't a new problem.
The most simple explanation that fully explains what’s going on would be the policy of this specific city’s government.
Thus there is no need for mental shenanigans.
That’s not saying it hasn’t gotten worse in the last year or two. But it’s never been shiny and clean.
Storage unit broken into twice. Homeless guy LIVING in another storage unit. People dropping dookies in the middle of Illinois street during mid day.
Why deal with all this? Even the city has an income tax. Where does that money go? To poop tracking apps? Free shoot-up sites?
Gross mismanagement by weak, ineffective, and “progressive” anything goes ultra left politicians is ruining SF.
I left SF. Not coming back.
>And for some reason, Kate Chatfield, who is a senior director on DA Boudin’s staff, thought this would be a good time for a public official to take a shot at a local resident. Chatfield said the “Husbands are scared for their wives,” was right out of the famously racist film, “Birth of a Nation,” which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as heroes.
This is absolutely insane to me. Someone expresses concern about crime and someone from the DA's office publicly compares them to the KKK? How is that in any way acceptable?