The mistake these courts are making is thinking that the punishment is meant for the individual committing the crime ONLY. In fact, it is a deterrent for OTHERS to think twice before attempting a crime. Rulings like this will have a very predictable outcome: drug dealers will read about this or hear about it, and they will proceed to take advantage of it.
This has happened before. One year it was a clean city, then they announced they wouldn't prosecute quality of life crimes like defecating on the street... and the next year you couldn't walk a single block without having to avoid human feces. The amount of short-sightedness in the leadership of that city is astounding! At least don't announce it!
That doesn't explain why those same people were not doing that years prior to that policy change. SF had walkable streets not even 10 years ago, and poop patrol didn't exist and was not needed.
I think not prosecuting is one part of the solution but it needed to be implement alongside a real solution to the root problem. Many people living on the streets have mental issues of all kinds, and not addressing that while simultaneously removing all boundaries when it comes to what they can or cannot do outside, is quite obviously going to create mayhem. The cynical side of me thinks that could be the end goal, but that's a different matter.
Recycling laws changed and plastic bags ceased to be readily available. It's not a change in prosecution that happened, it's a change in the availability of the disposal mechanism.
The homeless have always been there, the poop, the needles, and the other trash was less visible - until the plastic bag bans - now there is no ready disposal mechanism.
I don't know why some people just automatically assume that all problematic behavior was done out of desperation. All stealing is just for loaves of bread to feed a starving family. All street defecation is an act of desperation after a good faith search for a toilet. etc.
Are people angels who only behave badly when horrible circumstances leave them with no options? I just don't understand how someone could believe this. It would seem to take a very sheltered life where ideology takes the place of real human experience.
It can be hard enough to find a toilet as someone monied in a big city with a homeless problem. I imagine the homeless have a harder time. It's not surprising that some poop will inevitably end up in the street as a result.
Just so we’re clear, your argument is that there’s folks out there who, upon needing to take a shit, think “hmm, I could go to a bathroom, but since nobody will prosecute me for taking off my pants and shitting here on the sidewalk, I’ll do that”?
There are certainly people who do bad things because they’re bad people. But yes, on average, people who behave badly are doing so because of limited options, not because they’re really keen on crime.
The majority of homeless people are in the grip of drug addiction. They are already doing something illegal, completely unnecessary, and harmful to themselves because it feels good in the moment. So yes, I do think impulsive public defecation is a thing. People are already shooting up in the streets, why not other stuff too?
If toilets are sometimes inconvenient, by all means add more, but it won't end the problem.
I think if we’re at the point where you think that the majority of homeless people are drug addicts, and that drug addicts are doing something “completely unnecessary because it feels good in the moment”, we’ve bottomed out the conversation.
I had seen some reports that it was a majority. Looking again, I'm seeing more like 30-40% for alcohol and 10-30% for drug abuse. It is very common by almost all accounts.
I am not squeamish about pointing out the nature of self-destructive behavior. I don't think it does anyone any favors to ignore things because we are uncomfortable with perceived implications. We can sympathize with drug abusers and their circumstances while recognizing that they are behaving in a self-destructive and often other-destructive way.
I don’t really SF. Are there public toilets, open storm drains or at least wooded parks for people to use instead?
I’m not a stranger to public defecation, it happens a lot in my country but no one would be so shameless as to actually do it in the middle of a paved street or sidewalk.
> When it's happening in the middle of the sidewalk, I fear that being inconspicuous is not a primary consideration for those doing it.
Yah, I'm not saying being inconspicuous is a goal. I'm saying avoiding being hit by an oblivious SF car while pooping and avoiding being chased by the lot owner who is right there are motivations. On the sidewalk, it's no specific person's problem.
It is clear that the majority are drug addicts. That's known and uncontested. Whether that affects their motivation to find a sanitary place to defecate is maybe up for discussion, but I think it's a good bet that it does.
Drug dealing is different, though. It's not necessarily a choice between homelessness and drug dealing; it might be between living in an SRO, barely getting by, and drug dealing. At some point, there's a threshold where drug dealing has the better outcome, but the situation you're coming from wasn't that bad.
Is it? The comment I replied to above presents the idea that this court decision is bad because it telegraphs to drug dealers that they can get away with existing in the Tenderloin, because the courts have determined that the government can’t preemptively ban then from doing so.
The comment above posits that this removes an effective disincentive and will lead to more drug dealers in the area. My premise is that no drug dealer is factoring in this kind of disincentive at all into their calculus. Studies have shown that even more severe criminal penalties like long-term jail sentences don’t serve as an effective deterrent, because they don’t actually treat the factors that lead to somebody deciding to commit a crime, and once they do, the concept that there may be a harsh penalty if caught isn’t a factor.
I want to agree with you. But I also saw a guy on pissing on the street on San Francisco directly across the street from a public toilet.
An opposite experience was I walked by a woman who was pissing between two parked cars. She apologized when I saw her. I walked by her again about an hour later, and she thanked me for not yelling at her. She said she was peeing in public because she had no access to a toilet.
Defecting outside of a toilet is one thing. Defecating on the middle of a sidewalk is a different thing altogether. It is possible to defecate on a piece of waste paper and throw it away in the nearest garbage. People do it all the time.
I would argue that if such thing was prosecuted they would at least do it somewhere they would not be observed and found out. Maybe moving the problem to alleyways or behind buildings. But that would still likely be better option for general cleanliness.
Could we not have hyperbolic, bad-faith posts like this from people who clearly have no clue about SF and seem to have never even visited?
Your comment on the feces issue is a ludicrous distortion, and your lack of thoughtfulness on the very real constitutional issue with this case is perhaps even more disturbing.
I hope I'm wrong since I want the city to improve, but I haven't visited since mid-pandemic, so it could be outdated. However I can assure you I lived through it.
> The mistake these courts are making is thinking that the punishment is meant for the individual committing the crime ONLY. In fact, it is a deterrent for OTHERS to think twice before attempting a crime. Rulings like this will have a very predictable outcome: drug dealers will read about this or hear about it, and they will proceed to take advantage of it.
This isn't a mistake. This was not law before they committed their offense, and it's a very restrictive ban: this is effectively adding more punishment to a crime after the fact. Worse, there was no legislation to support the ban.
> This has happened before. One year it was a clean city, then they announced they wouldn't prosecute quality of life crimes like defecating on the street... and the next year you couldn't walk a single block without having to avoid human feces. The amount of short-sightedness in the leadership of that city is astounding! At least don't announce it!
Here, the leadership of the city was trying to take action in excess of what the law allowed against these dealers. So who exactly is fucking up here? The leadership of the city?
I thought the DA said crimes wouldn’t be prosecuted. This may be in excess of civil rights but it’s still. If prosecution or jail time.
A charitable view would state: It’s as if the DA is searching for solutions but always lands on the worst possible one which is both illegal and ineffective.
The one benefit to this solution is that it reduces the DA case load, which it looks like is the real goal.
In this case, we're mostly talking about drug dealers who have been prosecuted and convicted-- and ultimately released, no longer living in San Francisco.
The city attorney (not the DA-- another official who handles civil matters for the city rather than criminal ones) sought to keep these people out of the portions of the city where drug dealing is most endemic.
But, this turns out not to be legal-- with no legislative support and with it all being post-conviction, combined with it being large in scope compared to similar civil protective orders.
> The mistake these courts are making is thinking that the punishment is meant for the individual committing the crime ONLY. In fact, it is a deterrent for OTHERS to think twice before attempting a crime.
That's not a mistake they are making, because:
(1) No one was convicted of a crime, so there are no “criminals” involved, and
(2) It doesn't make deprivation of rights without legal basis acceptable that it is done to deter people other than those being immediately deprived of rights.
> Rulings like this will have a very predictable outcome
Yes, and that outcome is “law enforcement will need to charge people with crimes and prove them to the criminal standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ before depriving them of liberty on the basis that they are criminals.”
Their conviction just lacks the interest and attention of San Francisco's DA. The DA's job is to convict them, but he has opted not to. That DA was voted in by the citizens of SF, and it is up to them to change that in the next election, if they desire.
This seems pretty cut and dry. They’re welcome to charge drug dealers with drug dealing and lock them up, which will keep them out of the Tenderloin.
But they can’t just write down a list of names and ban those people from existing in public spaces to short circuit having to go through the due process of charging/convicting them of the underlying crime.
Unpopular opinion, but I actually appreciate enjoying a constitutional right to free movement, and would hate to lose it to yet another "public safety" emergency.
SFC has very-overpowered tools to remove heroin dealers from society, within the due-process framework of criminal law. For them to claim they can't do their job without giving themselves essentially *administrative* powers over peoples' lives, I think that's a false and stupid dichotomy.
> SFC has very-overpowered tools to remove heroin dealers from society, within the due-process framework of criminal law.
Therein lies the problem. The district attorney refuses to seek jail time for drug dealing or most any other offense not involving direct, physical violence. Thus the gambit by the city attorney, who handles the city's civil administrative matters.
The SF district attorney finally published statistics on case disposition. He's long been claiming that his case prosecution rate (as judged by the filing of charges) remains high and comparable to his predecessors. (Note that his immediate predecessor, Gascon, was perhaps the 2nd most liberal district attorney in the country.) But that says nothing about case disposition. It turns out that, as suspected, the percentage of cases resulting in jail time have dramatically dropped over his tenure. In particular, the percentage of criminal cases shunted into pretrial diversion programs has nearly doubled under his tenure. 43% of criminal cases are diverted. But things could be even worse than that because 1) for convictions we don't have metrics on punishments and sentencing, which by most accounts have been significantly softened, and 2) the data says "successful diversion", yet all numbers add up to 100%, so we can either assume that "non-successful" diversions end in convictions, or the definition of "success" is extremely loose. Also note that because diversions don't result in convictions they have less weight on subsequent charges--particularly less weight under this city attorney, by most accounts.
To those who say that less jail time is good, I would point out a fallacy in the common criminal justice reform narrative. If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe. (Unsurprisingly by that metric we look alot like other Anglo countries, modulo crime rate.) IOW, what was extreme about the U.S. was the duration of jail sentences (i.e. severity), not the rate at which we used jail time for penal purposes. That fallacious narrative is leading us down a perverse, equally extreme road--we're swinging from extreme amounts of jail time to no jail time. Just another manifestation of a classic American dynamic, I guess. Neither the people nor their institutions are very good at modulating their behavior--it's all or nothing with us.
> The district attorney refuses to seek jail time for drug dealing or most any other offense not involving direct, physical violence.
To the extent that's true, the solution is to replace the DA. The DA not prosecuting the way other city leaders would like does not empower those leaders to assume dictatorial power and impose arbitrary punishment without due process.
surely at this point the problem runs deeper than just a single DA, and it's safe to assume that the entire government apparatus as a whole is rotten with corruption? you really think that just replacing one single public servant is going to cause any kind of dramatic shift for things over there?
I agree the most appropriate solution to this particular aspect of the problem is to replace the DA. The recall is actually scheduled for next month, but the city attorney initially sought these injunctions over 18 months ago. I was addressing what seemed like a point of confusion regarding the roles of the district attorney and city attorney, and providing some context regarding how things are playing out. I don't think any official in the city wants to bring back 1980's LA-style gang injunctions. But the district attorney is an elected, independent office whose policies are exacerbating an already extreme situation. He simply will not budge, and the mayor believes it would be counterproductive to use the city's purse strings to "punish" the office financially.
While Boudin can't be faulted for all the contributive policy problems, over 1300 people have died from drug overdoses over the past two years (his tenure began January 2020) and the rate is increasing. It's a humanitarian crisis with a legitimately astonishing body count which city hall is trying to get a handle on despite the Board of Supervisors' political paralysis and denial, and the District Attorney's counterproductive, ideologically extreme policies.
It's a rare, extreme situation where it's not hyperbole to say that practical matters of life-and-death are bumping up against abstract principles. And it should go without saying that it's not helpful to point out that "the city" (as an abstract entity) is reaping what it sowed. The city is slowly coming to that realization, and unwinding those horrible policies to the extent it can will take time, especially in the context of democratic governance, while in the meantime the body count is accelerating. In such situations it's not uncommon for the law to give some temporary allowance for dealing with exigent, extreme situations with clear outcomes that are undeniably horrible (i.e. it's not a matter of, say, racking up a monetary debt for bad finances, or losing a few prosecutions--we're talking daily deaths). And in that sense the strategy of seeking injunctions isn't as objectionable as it might seem on its face. We should be careful about applying a national policy lens on a very local matter. The folly and hubris of applying abstract, nationally-framed narratives to local matters is part of how city ended up in the situation it has.
> I agree the most appropriate solution to this particular aspect of the problem is to replace the DA. The recall is actually scheduled for next month, but the city attorney initially sought these injunctions over 18 months ago
Irrespective of timeline, “we don't like the way the elected prosecutor is doing his job” does not justify “so we are going to deny people their rights without due process as an end run around the criminal justice system.”
> it's not uncommon for the law to give some temporary allowance for dealing with exigent, extreme situations
There is no “exigent, extreme citcumstance” without clear legal process that doesn't involve ignoring people's due process rights. The California DoJ has supervisory authority over all criminal prosecution in the State and may intervene, positively or negative, in any criminal matter. That is the course of remedy for a crisis attributed to defective prosecutorial decisions, not imposing broad loss of liberty on the basis of supposed crimes without criminal process.
> We should be careful about applying a national policy lens on a very local matter
The prohibition on public officials denying people rights without due process required by the federal and state constitution isn't a “national policy lens” that is inapplicable to “very local matters”.
> The prohibition on public officials denying people rights without due process required by the federal and state constitution isn't a “national policy lens” that is inapplicable to “very local matters”.
Arguably these injunctions aren't too different from spousal abuse or harassment restraining orders, ignoring some technical legal issues regarding scope and cognizable claim. There is process--whether it's "due process" is the question. Certainly there seems to be greater due process than gang injunctions, which are constitutional under current Supreme Court precedent, as the requested injunctions were on named individuals with a history of drug dealing that would need to be satisfactorily shown in court. Compare to gang injunctions, which AFAIU merely required a showing that a particular person was in an enjoined gang. From opinion synopses, the injunctions seem to have been rejected primarily because of their scope--geographic area encompassing important regional government services, and excessive duration. The appellate opinion, contrasting with the trial court, says this specifically--"we are not prepared to hold that a stay-away order could never be a potential remedy...."
I won't dispute that as an end-run around the DA (i.e. but-for the DA, everybody agrees the proper course of action would be to seek an injunction specifically as part of conviction), it's barely defensible, if at all. But the fact the city is seeking them is not evidence of a fundamental shift in San Francisco city official's criminal justice reform efforts writ large. Yet that's exactly what Boudin will claim and is claiming as part of his campaign to defeat recall--that everybody but him is committed to meaningful reform, and all those opposing him (especially those supporting his recall) wish to return to the tough-on-crime policies of decades past.
If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe. (Unsurprisingly by that metric we look alot like other Anglo countries, modulo crime rate.) IOW, what was extreme about the U.S. was the duration of jail sentences (i.e. severity), not the rate at which we used jail time for penal purposes. IOW, what was extreme about the U.S. was the duration of jail sentences (i.e. severity), not the rate at which we used jail time for penal purposes. That fallacious narrative is leading us down a perverse, equally extreme road--we're swinging from extreme amounts of jail time to no jail time.
Are you able to cite this? Per the World Prison Brief the US leads the way in incarceration rate, so I'm not sure how to square that with your claims.[1]
Per the World Prison Brief:
- The Highest in Europe on that chart is Turkey, at just over half of the US rate (368 vs 629 per 100k).
- It's not clear what "Anglo country" is referring to specifically but if we look at CANZUK for comparison, we can see the next highest rate of the entire group is Australia at 165. I'm not sure how that's comparable. You mention modulo Crime rate but for example Canada has more total crimes per 1000[2] than the US, just less violent crime. It's not as easy as an off the cuff answer because there are so many different cultural factors even between former British colonies in regards to laws that the data will generally skew wildly.
> so I'm not sure how to square that with your claims.[1]
? If the US puts X/100000 people in prison per year, and country B puts 1.1X/100000 people in prison per year... but the US imprisons people for 5x as long, then the US incarceration rate would be 4x higher, even though country B puts people in prison more often.
>Therein lies the problem. The district attorney refuses to seek jail time for drug dealing or most any other offense not involving direct, physical violence.
I’m not really clear how this restraining order helps what you’re describing. Do you support the ability of the police to impose jail time in a way that circumvents the (elected) prosecutor’s office?
>If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe.
This is factually wrong. It entirely hinges on extremely warped interpretation of data that can only be generated by a person or organization that starts with a desired version of reality and works backward to justify that position.
Out of curiosity, in general do you view yourself as somebody that could at some point —in any way whatsoever— piss off a cop? I’ve noticed that people that advocate for longer jail sentences and does the whole “humans won’t adjust their behavior unless every cop gets a rocket launcher and a teleporter to send criminals directly to prison forever” bit answer “No.”
> I’ve noticed that people that advocate for longer jail sentences
I'm a bit confused. I read the above poster as advocating for shorter prison sentences, but not to overcorrect in making the change. Did you misread the person you're replying to?
How do you interpret this point (and subsequent paragraph) from the post I was responding to?
> To those who say that less jail time is good, I would point out a fallacy in the common criminal justice reform …
At another part in that post this person brought up issues with lack of prosecution (which by definition means less jail time) and diversion (ditto).
So… in your estimation the author was… advocating for more people to go to jail but also supporting the idea of shorter sentences while pointing out that people that say that advocating for shorter sentences means to fall for a fallacy?
This poster wants to point out that the push for less jail time is the result of a fallacy, but thinks it’s good??
Did you read the post I responded to? What did you think was trying to be expressed?
The context of this discussion is deterrence of drug dealing in a city with
a legitimate substance abuse mortality emergency--in other words, where any marginal deterrence effect, such as slightly reduced drug availability, might directly translate to double-digit saved lives over the course of a single year. And one aspect of this issue (apropos the injunction rejected by the appellate court) is that the city has an elected DA who is ideologically opposed to any incarceration for non-violent offenses. (And to be clear, in his view drug dealing is non-violent, even when carrying a gun and creating an implicit threat of violence--which I don't necessarily find unfair, just trying to be clear that few if any arrested drug dealers face the threat of incarceration under Boudin as a prosecutorial policy matter.) While I think politics has begun to corrupt Boudin, I actually think he's an atypically sincere, honest (though trending down--politics
corrupts), principled person, and I agree in principle with
most of his policies. However, because there's effectively no incarceration for this class of offense, when drug dealers are arrested they're typically back out on the same corner in a couple days. Over and over and over again--not hyperbole. (This is part of the reason why SF police have mostly stopped arresting dealers. Just part, though--I'm not apologizing for the SF police departments larger diligence issues.) Note that because Boudin is a principled person in this regard, he laudably refuses to abuse pretrial detainment when he has no intention to seek incarceration, much to the frustration of a system that sadly relied so heavily on that abuse before.
The commonly held belief is that drug dealers, especially street-level, are basically fungible and quickly replaced. There's clearly truth to that. But now this belief is being tested to the extreme. It's also true, as any student of economics would tell you, that there's always some marginal effect to a policy, even a crappy one; the real question is the magnitude of the effect. (And to avoid muddying the equity waters, I'm ignoring the fact that the threat of incarceration provides leverage when trying to get street-level dealers to flip; FWIW, I do agree coerced plea deals is a legitimate problem, but notably also an issue where scope and severity matter, not simply nominal existence of an incarceration threat.) Usually in public policy debates we stick to qualitative aspects rather than quantitative, justifiably or not. But Boudin's radical anti-incarceration policies has made SF a fascinating experiment where the precise magnitude (whether as deterrence or simply as removing a criminal temporarily from the population) could make a signifiant difference; it's the only relevant question left, at least in the short-medium term.
The present situation in the city is a difficult one for Boudin, politically speaking. It's becoming clear (at least to me) that Boudin is hiding behind the ambiguity in incarceration statistics. I also think this must be
willful, because Boudin is also committed to shorter incarceration sentences for violent crimes, so he clearly understands there's a meaningful,
consequential distinction between some jail time and none. (FWIW, I support a lighter sentencing policy for violent offenses, and if this were his only
policy I'd be glad someone with the backbone--or at least intransigence--of Boudin were in office. Most other viable SF district attorney candidates would have a similar policy, at least nominally, but might not have the wherewithal to follow through to the same extent.)
Almost everyone agrees that incarceration rates (i.e. per capita rates) are
too high, at least at a national level. (I haven't found good per capita
incarceration rates for San Francisco specifically, but almost certainly
it's substantially below national levels, and likely has been for awhile
given San Francisco has been at the forefront of criminal justice refo...
>The context of this discussion is deterrence of drug dealing in a city…
No. It literally is not.
This article is about:
“CA Appeals Court Rules San Francisco Cannot Ban Tenderloin Drug Dealers”
Subject: California Appeals Court
Verb: rules (against)
Object: San Francisco(/SFPD)
What has happened in this news article was an accounting of how multiple courts in California have ruled that this injunction violated people’s rights. The SFPD suffered an embarrassing loss because they tried some absolutely bonkers loophole-building as part of a petulant tantrum, and multiple courts struck it down for good reason. That’s what the article is literally about.
You would like drug dealing to be the topic, or overreach by prosecutors (but not police), or a weird bad-faith equivocation with protections for abused spouses, or some abstract concept of what’s mathematically optimal or acceptable for jail populations.
However, the article about how multiple courts have ruled that the silly baby attempt at Judge Dredd was unconstitutional is about… how multiple courts have ruled that the silly baby attempt at Judge Dredd was unconstitutional.
Anyway, you can buy fentanyl in prison! Or order it off the dark web and get it sent to your mailbox. I am assuming you know this, which means your request for a wild expansion of police powers, despite courts ruling that is terrible for human rights, is something that you would advocate for anyway.
> So… in your estimation the author was… advocating for more people to go to jail but also supporting the idea of shorter sentences while pointing out that people that say that advocating for shorter sentences means to fall for a fallacy?
The author likes to write opaque walls of text. But in subsequent comments, it's become very clear that he is saying:
* The US sends a similar number of people to jail as other jurisdictions, but is an extreme outlier on sentence length. He's provided (weak) factual support for this, and I find this point believable-- not an idea to outright reject like you have.
* The US has a political system that tends to drastically overcorrect on problems, especially in individual locales.
* Sentence lengths should be reduced, but this doesn't mean jail should be eliminated or deterrence effects should be completely lost.
Which is pretty close to my initial read.
I'll admit some motivated reasoning on my part: I'm uncomfortable with the US's incarceration rate but have also been uncomfortable with excessive use of prosecutorial discretion in places like SF to basically ignore a huge fraction of "quality of life" crime. The author proposing a lens to look at this which could lead to policy that reduces the incarceration rate but doesn't give up on petty crime is appealing-- it's just time to think about whether it's true.
The author has now written literally thousands of words that boil down to “I think the cops should be able to put those 28 people in jail even if the DA disagrees.”
What he hasn’t addressed (I think, I haven’t read every tome he’s posted) is that this DA is who the people of SF voted for.
When people complain about “prosecutorial discretion” without talking about campaigning and voting for another DA, it’s common to hear loads of drivel that boils down to “I know the people of this city want these prosecution policies, but I disagree with them. Rather than try to change minds, I support a unilateral transfer of power to a group that says they have my approved ideology.”
The problem with that line of thinking is that it puts the cops above the electorate in terms of influence. It’s a terribly slippery slope, but it’s very common in America.
“Freedom and liberty means that the police arrest people that I don’t like! Even if society in general doesn’t want the police to have that much power, who cares? I, Supreme Understander, am more worthy and human than them!”
Edit: Oh wait the author did respond to another poster that brought up replacing the DA or seeking a remedy from the state. Sounds like they would like that, but for whatever 700-word reason it’s important to shift unilateral power to the police either way. Just in case.
> The author has now written literally thousands of words that boil down to “I think the cops should be able to put those 28 people in jail even if the DA disagrees.”
* I don't think he's said quite that
* I don't agree with what he's said entirely. I believe civil injunctions have a place in law enforcement, but they need to be used carefully. I suspect you support them in some circumstances, too.
* Even if he did say that, it doesn't invalidate the rest of what he said. It's worth looking at rates of admission to prison vs. prison terms to better compare US jurisprudence to the rest of the world.
> When people complain about “prosecutorial discretion” without talking about campaigning and voting for another DA
I think these people are looking forward to voting for another DA and advocating for other policy approaches being used by DAs.
BTW, prosecutorial discretion makes me super uncomfortable for other reasons. Often it means the good-ole-boys club being immune to prosecution for offenses. Sometimes its use is conducive to justice and the rule of law, and a whole lot of time it's not. At least here it is being used in ways that are not reinforcing power structures.
> “Freedom and liberty means that the police arrest people that I don’t like! Even if society in general doesn’t want the police to have that much power, who cares? I, Supreme Understander, am more worthy and human than them!”
Parodying someone else's point and extending it to hyperbole is not conducive to productive discussion, but it's great as a tool to mock people.
Do you believe that the author supports the restraining order against the 28 people?
If no:
Why are they posting?
If yes:
Do you believe that the author supports the restraining order but does not expect or want it to cause any of these people to go to jail in the case that they need to access healthcare, treatment, employment or otherwise fully lawful resources within the Tenderloin?
What do you think* is the outcome that the author seems to want, out of your careful reading of these posts?
If your answer is “I refuse to believe the author has any desired outcome because it would be indecorous of me to take them seriously at face value“ then… okay. A strategic conversation killer doesn’t erase what people advocate for and explain away. It’s not some high brow checkmate.
> * Even if he did say that,
Lol. I just wanted to say that to how you began this thought. Seems like you might agree with me about what he’s saying! Anyway, back to the rest of the quote:
> it doesn't invalidate the rest of what he said. It's worth looking at rates of admission to prison vs. prison terms to better compare US jurisprudence to the rest of the world.
Why? Because the author brought it up in support of some ridiculous expansion of police power to jail people that haven’t committed a crime?
I am intellectually responsible for chasing down every patently silly interpretation of data because… why? This person is using every trick possible to try to justify giving the police power above elected officials and I’m fully aware that they have decided that a narrow definition of “extreme” coupled with a very narrow focus is a useful tool. I’m not clear why anybody should be expected to chart out this quixotic version of “reason” that’s so obviously flawed.
“Prison isn’t so extreme based on this 20 minutes of research I did after stating my predisposed opinion, therefore cops should be given a whole new type of power to jail people that the city doesn’t want to jail.” is something worth entertaining… why?
> BTW, prosecutorial discretion makes me super uncomfortable for other reasons. Often it means the good-ole-boys club being immune to prosecution for offenses.
What is the difference between prosecutorial discretion and the direction that would be afforded to police officers? As far as I can tell, in this situation the difference is the social and political ideology espoused by one group (the DA’s office which was elected by the city) and another (1,500 officers with a $600,000,000 annual budget with very little accountability).
This entire conversation is simply about power and who wants to allocate it to. The author of the previous posts is advocating for power to be allocated to the police rather than the electorate (the DA), on ideological grounds of “that’s what I want.”
> Parodying someone else's point and extending it to hyperbole is not conducive to productive discussion, but it's great as a tool to mock people.
Hiding behind politeness in order to strip others of their basic human rights is considerably uglier than making a joke that actually maps 1:1 to what the author supports.
“I reject your appeal about basic human rights like due cause, a right to a trial, and protection against illegal search on the grounds that you said a mean thing!” is another hilariously American thing that some intellectually uncurious people say (in whatever words they can summon, of course)
You're completely declining to talk about the thing that I'm actually talking about, and instead inserting words into his and my mouth.
I don't know if it's because you don't understand what I'm saying, or are just choosing to be mean. I don't really agree with the other guy, but I don't think you've read him correctly, either.
To try one last time, and constrain it:
* If the US admits people to prison a comparable rate as countries with better outcomes, but keeps them there longer
* Perhaps the correct solution is to put the same number of people in prison, but keep them there for shorter times
* Policies that instead divert and prevent putting people in prison in the first place are not the ideal intervention to be more similar to these model countries.
* Because then we would be putting fewer people in prison for too long, instead of the right number of people in prison for the right length of time.
Yes, I am declining to talk about theoreticals that serve no purpose other than to distract from the core issue:
GP wants the cops to be able to arrest and jail people
despite what the electorate has voted on.
The author has in various posts brought up: their interpretation of jailing statistics in a generalized way, the concept of restraining orders for abusive spouses (this is supposed to be equal to banning a person from a large portion of a city), prosecutorial overreach, the imminent overdose deaths that the cops are already framing as being the DA’s fault, and so on.
You will notice that each and every supposed carefully-reasoned chain of logic ends with “The cops should have the power to arrest and jail people despite the representative of the electorate or policies voted on by the majority.”
I understand that you would prefer that this conversation were about abstract mathematical concepts of jailing. That is a fantastic way to abstract away the human cost of allowing cops the ability to arrest and jail people without them having due process. It definitely makes the idea of sacrificing the concept of basic human rights seem more palatable.
So let’s try this again: Use your math concepts of jailing to justify giving the police unilateral power to jail people despite the policies voted on by the people of San Francisco (or not!) If that’s not interesting to you, then I would refer you to the OP, which was about the SFPD seeking the ability to put 28 individuals in jail if spotted on the wrong street.
I decline your invitation to entertain nonsense philosophical or mathematical conjecture to avoid talking about the SFPD’s failed attempted power grab.
Which again, is the topic of the article and the subject of my conversation on this topic.
You specifically rejected a point. I responded to talk about that point. Now you want me to defend everything someone else has said.
> So let’s try this again: Use your math concepts of jailing to justify giving the police unilateral power to jail people despite the policies voted on by the people of San Francisco (or not!)
Again, this is so far over the line. It's not something I've talked about. Indeed, no one except you is talking about arbitrary police powers to jail, as far as I can tell, but instead talking about the appropriateness of civil orders.
I don't really want to talk about civil orders, because my answer is: it's complicated! I do think civil restraining orders are often good, which are a power of the police to jail if you go certain places or near certain people. One that covers a 50 block area to prevent broad sets of possible criminality is probably bad. But that has never been what I've been talking about in this thread.
You talked on the other topic, which I responded about, and you've refused to talk about any more.
What is the exact thing you are trying to achieve here? Are you trying to convince people? Are you trying to make yourself feel good by making other people feel bad? I had hoped to share ideas and really discuss, instead of being lambasted for other peoples' words.
> I’m not really clear how this restraining order helps what you’re describing. Do you support the ability of the police to impose jail time in a way that circumvents the (elected) prosecutor’s office?
There are absolutely better policies. The injunctions are an act of desperation in the face of a mounting death toll.
> > If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe.
> This is factually wrong. It entirely hinges on extremely warped interpretation of data that can only be generated by a person or organization that starts with a desired version of reality and works backward to justify that position.
Care to point out how its factually wrong. (EDIT: I said person years, but I meant per capita. But if you're even the least bit charitable it's the same thing.) For the record I'm not reciting some Heritage Foundation policy paper. In fact, I discovered this factoid on a whim as it occurred to me that the incarceration rate metric was ambiguous. In doing so I found only a single partisan research paper, which hasn't seem to garnered any attention. I also went back into some criminal justice literature I've read over the years and was also surprised to see this gap--plenty of scholars have pointed out issues with the severity of U.S. sentencing, but don't seem to have given much analysis to this particular aspect of the data. I also have a formal legal education and likewise don't remember anyone pointing out this distinction--professors and law students alike never seemed to appreciate that there might anything meaningful about the details of the popular metric, probably because for the past 20 years the narrative regarding the need for criminal justice reform has been largely universally accepted across the political spectrum, at least in academia--there was no disputing that too many people were in jail.
Prison admittance data exists, however, from various primary government sources in both the U.S. and Europe; it just hasn't been assembled properly for convenient, comparative consumption. If I was a paid researched I would absolutely spend the time to assemble it properly and make the case. Instead I spent one night on it and, well, I can't even say I was convinced of anything--it's just a simple matter of numbers. If you give a moments thought, the metric is problematic, and when you look at the admittance numbers there's simply nothing to seriously dispute. There's inconsistency regarding whether pretrial detainment is included in various statistics--for many, it seems to be included, but I can't confidently say that's true for all the sources I found. That said, countries, like France, have pretrial detainment rates similar to the U.S; and even in the most pessimistic scenario least favorable to the U.S., admittances couldn't even begin to create a gap of the size the U.S. has regarding per capita--at best a fractional difference, not large multiples!
It's also entirely intuitive and sensical when you stand back and look at things. Consider that in most countries, especially in Europe and the Americas, murder has a maximum penalty of 20 years jail time. In the U.S. life sentences are not uncommon. And consider the effect of things like three-strikes laws, which during the 1990s and early 2000s could turn a serious of felonies into life sentence. Or drug laws--if someone spends a year in the U.K. for a drug offense (not a real figure), but 5 years in the U.S., it's not at all surprising that per capita incarceration for drug offenses would be 3-5x greater in the U.S. even when both the U.K. and the U.S. have the same jail sentencing rate for drug offenders.
When judging per capita (which is absolutely the metric used in all public policy discussion numbers, and absolutely the one used for the infamous 7x outlier statistic), the incarceration rate is undeniably horri...
There’s a whole lot of text without any citations.
>There are absolutely better policies. The injunctions are an act of desperation in the face of a mounting death toll.
My question was simple yes or no. Can you take another crack at answering this? (repeated below)
> Do you support the ability of the police to impose jail time in a way that circumvents the (elected) prosecutor’s office?
As for this…
> Care to point out how its factually wrong.
Nope, not my job. If you haven’t bothered to cite literally any sources other than walls of text about how you understand things better than everybody else, I doubt my efforts to educate you would be considered.
I pointed out that you are factually wrong because you posted some factually wrong nonsense. I did not do that for your benefit. I did that for the benefit of genuinely curious people that might read your ridiculous screed and mistake verbosity with understanding or cleverness.
Anyway I asked two yes or no questions and got nothing but some Dickensian-length mental gymnastics in response.
1. Yes or no, do you support the ability of the police to put people in jail in a way that circumvents the elected district attorney?
2. Yes or no, do you view yourself as somebody that could at some point —for any reason whatsoever— piss off a cop?
> 1. Yes or no, do you support the ability of the police to put people in jail in a way that circumvents the elected district attorney?
No. But an injunction doesn't put these people into jail. Let me flip it around: do you support restraining orders for abusive spouses if not part of a criminal conviction for abuse? Obviously it poses some dilemmas, but do you oppose the entire notion categorically?
> 2. Yes or no, do you view yourself as somebody that could at some point —for any reason whatsoever— piss off a cop?
I'm very respectful of cops, partly because I grew up in an environment where cops arrested people around me, including family, and cops were to always be avoided. I learned to 1) fear cops (e.g. avoid unnecessary contact, keep excessively polite when approached, hands at 10-2 if pulled over, etc), but also 2) avoid doing all the shit and anything tangentially related which people around me did to get arrested. On my paternal side most of the men--excepting myself, a cousin, and a nephew--have been to jail, several on convictions (i.e not merely pretrial detainment). Objectively speaking I'm not at all at the same risk as many other populations of men; OTOH, I have far more direct experience with the system than the vast majority of people otherwise in my risk cohort. More importantly, I have far more direct experience living in the types of violent environments which unfortunately necessarily require the intervention of law enforcement (regardless of whether that intervention is too heavy handed or not), and understand that there are unavoidable trade-offs to be made when it comes to maximizing the safety of communities. And the hyperbolic, metaphorically-pearl-clutching attitude regarding liberty issues, expressed at least numerically largely by activists which have no such experience--either with community or police violence--nor face even a substantial risk of that experience is... bothersome. Communities experiencing that violence tend to have more nuanced and complicated opinions, especially when they're facing concrete choices with potentially immediate consequences; when there are no direct consequences to policy choices, people tend to become more extreme and ideological.
> No. But an injunction doesn't put these people into jail.
Literally lol. What are you talking about? If the cops are able to arrest you on sight, that means they take you to jail on sight without you having to have committed an actual crime. That is literally the intent of this injunction. The SFPD huffed and puffed about their inability to secure a conviction so they tried to reduce the burden of proof to justify a “crime” has been committed to “a cop saw you on the wrong street.”
It is a blatant and shameless attempt at a power grab, nothing less.
Serious question: Where do you think the police take people after arrest?
Anyway, so for question 1 your answer is “Yes.”
As for question 2, your answer is “No.”
Your entire view of this situation is that you support police power overreach because you don’t think it’ll be used against you. It’ll only be used against criminals and bad guys! And you could never even be mistaken or accused of that because you’re just so gosh darn polite to the cops (a sign that you’re more intelligent and a more productive member of society than anybody that could _ever_ be targeted by police.)
Third yes or no question: Do you work in law enforcement?
This sort of huffy propaganda tends to come directly from cops and the sycophants that tend to surround and idolize them.
Starting from scratch (again), in 20 minutes of quick searching here's some
sources for you. I'm documenting this just as much for my own benefit as
yours. Usually I feel it's pointless to get too quantitative on HN as it's not the proper forum, and anyone seriously interested could find out for themselves, but since you accused me of lying, and in case someone else accuses me of lying in the future...
Incarceration rates per 1000000 in 2018/2020 (couldn't find 2019). This is basically percentage of population incarcerated (either at any one moment or at any time during the reporting year, depending on source and details), the metric almost universally used in public discourse. Sources: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html
* England & Wales: 141/130
* United States: 698/664
* Texas: 891/840
* California: 581/549
Note the above admittance numbers do not include pretrial detainment AFAIU; excessive pretrial detainment is a very real problem in the U.S., at least. The U.S. numbers mostly exclude sentences served in local jails (i.e. less than 12
months), but I think do include less-than-one-year equivalent sentences in
England & Wales. However, If you look at the pre-trial graph for Texas at
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/TX.html, which incidentally also
includes local jail (not prison) post-conviction confinement numbers, it could only hypothetically double the admittance numbers if we assume worst case. Not nothing, but still a far cry from the huge incarceration rate metric gap.
You can find additional numbers for various European countries at
http://www.elpueblodigital.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/SPA...
(admittance tables from page 95) and
https://wp.unil.ch/space/files/2021/04/210330_FinalReport_SP...
(admittance tables from page 97). Interestingly, the England & Wales numbers
therein seem to double count pre-conviction and post-conviction
admissions of the same prisoner for the same offense, which seems to be how
they arrived at an almost double total admittance rate of 215/100000 in 2019,
which likely accounts for England & Wales being in the top 25% of EU
countries by admittance rate (see elsewhere in that report). That seems
problematic--perhaps related to definitional treatment of common law vs
civil law d...
> However, If you look at the pre-trial graph for Texas at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/TX.html, which incidentally also includes local jail (not prison) post-conviction confinement numbers, it could only hypothetically double the admittance numbers if we assume worst case.
“Maybe it’s double, *shrug* that supports my data-based opinion because that’s how I choose to interpret the importance of the difference between 1x and 2x.”
That was certainly a lot of words about England and wales!
> But ultimately it can't effect my point as it couldn't remotely account for the sheer magnitude difference in incarceration rate in the US, and fundamentally is a matter of sentence severity--longer incarceration durations creating a larger total incarcerated population, which is precisely my point.
This is precisely the opposite of the point you attempted to make at the beginning of this conversation.
Why was it so important to point out that the prison problem isn’t that extreme and that people are falling for a fallacy yesterday, but not today?
In either case, I’m not going to spend any more time trying to debate one of the many methods you’ve used to justify handing cops more power than the DA.
It’s a great distraction from “What I want is to give the power to arrest and jail people to the police over the elected officials tasked with due process. I want to do this even more than I want to replace the DA or seek remedy from the state, because I believe that police should fundamentally have this power to protect us from hippie prosecutors in the future.”
But, uh, I don’t have a short attention span. I haven’t forgotten what we’re actually talking about here. Good job with some funfacts about England and Wales though!
> I’m not really clear how this restraining order helps what you’re describing. Do you support the ability of the police to impose jail time in a way that circumvents the (elected) prosecutor’s office?
Absolutely not, but when the courts and the police can’t act together, you can understand why the police reach desperately for some sort of enforcement — any enforcement.
A few months ago I drove through the area and it’s ridiculous. It’s a real life recreation of hamsterdam from The Wire, with all the problems that existed in the show. So many people nodding face down on the sidewalk that genuinely look like dead bodies.
Is that what progressive and empathetic drug law looks like? There are certain drugs like weed where the main risk 15 years ago was the legal risk. But the main risk for heroin isn’t the legal risk, it’s the risk that you find yourself face down nodding out on a sidewalk in the tenderloin from fentanyl. Not enforcing reasonable drug laws is good for who? The drug users? No. The drug dealers? Who cares. The city? No.
Parole already says they can’t associate with known criminals it they can’t just say people can’t go the the park. It’s an overreach to ban people from a public space on the basis that it’s high crime.
Why would that be an overreach? If they were known gang members, banning them from wearing certain colors during their parole seems prudent as well. As far as I’m concerned, any variable that could increase their chance of being involved in criminal activity while out on parole, should be restricted by terms of their parole - or don’t let them out on parole.
The root cause issue is that there is zero criminal consequence to selling drugs in the TL. I mean, it's an open air drug market, and any attempt to change that would likely be met with protests for the usual various reasons.
>The SFPD declarations did not show that any of the defendants has been convicted of selling drugs, possessing drugs for sale, or violating any pretrial stay-away orders.
This is hilarious. It’s literally insane that the SFPD or a halfway-smart DA would think that this would work.
How exactly was this supposed to work? These 28 people could just be arrested on sight? Aside from giving the cops a little dopamine boost by dispensing a ridiculous overreach of power, how would this actually stop the flow of drugs?
If I were one of these big bad drug dealers that terrified the SFPD so badly that they had to beg for extra power to fuck with me more, I’d maybe just sell drugs right outside the arbitrary border. Or just sell drugs to somebody that lives in the TL and is down to resell. Or disregard the order and continue selling drugs wherever. Or set up a drop system.
The police are the biggest crybabies in the world and I’m glad they didn’t get to tremble their liddle-widdle frowns and get to arbitrarily arrest people that haven’t been convicted of a crime.
74 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadThis has happened before. One year it was a clean city, then they announced they wouldn't prosecute quality of life crimes like defecating on the street... and the next year you couldn't walk a single block without having to avoid human feces. The amount of short-sightedness in the leadership of that city is astounding! At least don't announce it!
I think not prosecuting is one part of the solution but it needed to be implement alongside a real solution to the root problem. Many people living on the streets have mental issues of all kinds, and not addressing that while simultaneously removing all boundaries when it comes to what they can or cannot do outside, is quite obviously going to create mayhem. The cynical side of me thinks that could be the end goal, but that's a different matter.
The homeless have always been there, the poop, the needles, and the other trash was less visible - until the plastic bag bans - now there is no ready disposal mechanism.
Are people angels who only behave badly when horrible circumstances leave them with no options? I just don't understand how someone could believe this. It would seem to take a very sheltered life where ideology takes the place of real human experience.
There are certainly people who do bad things because they’re bad people. But yes, on average, people who behave badly are doing so because of limited options, not because they’re really keen on crime.
If toilets are sometimes inconvenient, by all means add more, but it won't end the problem.
I am not squeamish about pointing out the nature of self-destructive behavior. I don't think it does anyone any favors to ignore things because we are uncomfortable with perceived implications. We can sympathize with drug abusers and their circumstances while recognizing that they are behaving in a self-destructive and often other-destructive way.
But until we make it reasonably possible for them to not poop outside, maybe we shouldn't assume it's all inevitable.
I’m not a stranger to public defecation, it happens a lot in my country but no one would be so shameless as to actually do it in the middle of a paved street or sidewalk.
A lot of time this would put you in a street, or in a private parking lot where ownership would be trying to chase you off.
> public toilets
Relatively few.
> wooded parks
Just a few. Not close to everywhere homeless congregate.
When it's happening in the middle of the sidewalk, I fear that being inconspicuous is not a primary consideration for those doing it.
Yah, I'm not saying being inconspicuous is a goal. I'm saying avoiding being hit by an oblivious SF car while pooping and avoiding being chased by the lot owner who is right there are motivations. On the sidewalk, it's no specific person's problem.
The comment above posits that this removes an effective disincentive and will lead to more drug dealers in the area. My premise is that no drug dealer is factoring in this kind of disincentive at all into their calculus. Studies have shown that even more severe criminal penalties like long-term jail sentences don’t serve as an effective deterrent, because they don’t actually treat the factors that lead to somebody deciding to commit a crime, and once they do, the concept that there may be a harsh penalty if caught isn’t a factor.
An opposite experience was I walked by a woman who was pissing between two parked cars. She apologized when I saw her. I walked by her again about an hour later, and she thanked me for not yelling at her. She said she was peeing in public because she had no access to a toilet.
Your comment on the feces issue is a ludicrous distortion, and your lack of thoughtfulness on the very real constitutional issue with this case is perhaps even more disturbing.
This isn't a mistake. This was not law before they committed their offense, and it's a very restrictive ban: this is effectively adding more punishment to a crime after the fact. Worse, there was no legislation to support the ban.
> This has happened before. One year it was a clean city, then they announced they wouldn't prosecute quality of life crimes like defecating on the street... and the next year you couldn't walk a single block without having to avoid human feces. The amount of short-sightedness in the leadership of that city is astounding! At least don't announce it!
Here, the leadership of the city was trying to take action in excess of what the law allowed against these dealers. So who exactly is fucking up here? The leadership of the city?
A charitable view would state: It’s as if the DA is searching for solutions but always lands on the worst possible one which is both illegal and ineffective.
The one benefit to this solution is that it reduces the DA case load, which it looks like is the real goal.
The city attorney (not the DA-- another official who handles civil matters for the city rather than criminal ones) sought to keep these people out of the portions of the city where drug dealing is most endemic.
But, this turns out not to be legal-- with no legislative support and with it all being post-conviction, combined with it being large in scope compared to similar civil protective orders.
That's not a mistake they are making, because:
(1) No one was convicted of a crime, so there are no “criminals” involved, and
(2) It doesn't make deprivation of rights without legal basis acceptable that it is done to deter people other than those being immediately deprived of rights.
> Rulings like this will have a very predictable outcome
Yes, and that outcome is “law enforcement will need to charge people with crimes and prove them to the criminal standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ before depriving them of liberty on the basis that they are criminals.”
But they can’t just write down a list of names and ban those people from existing in public spaces to short circuit having to go through the due process of charging/convicting them of the underlying crime.
SFC has very-overpowered tools to remove heroin dealers from society, within the due-process framework of criminal law. For them to claim they can't do their job without giving themselves essentially *administrative* powers over peoples' lives, I think that's a false and stupid dichotomy.
Therein lies the problem. The district attorney refuses to seek jail time for drug dealing or most any other offense not involving direct, physical violence. Thus the gambit by the city attorney, who handles the city's civil administrative matters.
The SF district attorney finally published statistics on case disposition. He's long been claiming that his case prosecution rate (as judged by the filing of charges) remains high and comparable to his predecessors. (Note that his immediate predecessor, Gascon, was perhaps the 2nd most liberal district attorney in the country.) But that says nothing about case disposition. It turns out that, as suspected, the percentage of cases resulting in jail time have dramatically dropped over his tenure. In particular, the percentage of criminal cases shunted into pretrial diversion programs has nearly doubled under his tenure. 43% of criminal cases are diverted. But things could be even worse than that because 1) for convictions we don't have metrics on punishments and sentencing, which by most accounts have been significantly softened, and 2) the data says "successful diversion", yet all numbers add up to 100%, so we can either assume that "non-successful" diversions end in convictions, or the definition of "success" is extremely loose. Also note that because diversions don't result in convictions they have less weight on subsequent charges--particularly less weight under this city attorney, by most accounts.
To those who say that less jail time is good, I would point out a fallacy in the common criminal justice reform narrative. If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe. (Unsurprisingly by that metric we look alot like other Anglo countries, modulo crime rate.) IOW, what was extreme about the U.S. was the duration of jail sentences (i.e. severity), not the rate at which we used jail time for penal purposes. That fallacious narrative is leading us down a perverse, equally extreme road--we're swinging from extreme amounts of jail time to no jail time. Just another manifestation of a classic American dynamic, I guess. Neither the people nor their institutions are very good at modulating their behavior--it's all or nothing with us.
To the extent that's true, the solution is to replace the DA. The DA not prosecuting the way other city leaders would like does not empower those leaders to assume dictatorial power and impose arbitrary punishment without due process.
While Boudin can't be faulted for all the contributive policy problems, over 1300 people have died from drug overdoses over the past two years (his tenure began January 2020) and the rate is increasing. It's a humanitarian crisis with a legitimately astonishing body count which city hall is trying to get a handle on despite the Board of Supervisors' political paralysis and denial, and the District Attorney's counterproductive, ideologically extreme policies.
It's a rare, extreme situation where it's not hyperbole to say that practical matters of life-and-death are bumping up against abstract principles. And it should go without saying that it's not helpful to point out that "the city" (as an abstract entity) is reaping what it sowed. The city is slowly coming to that realization, and unwinding those horrible policies to the extent it can will take time, especially in the context of democratic governance, while in the meantime the body count is accelerating. In such situations it's not uncommon for the law to give some temporary allowance for dealing with exigent, extreme situations with clear outcomes that are undeniably horrible (i.e. it's not a matter of, say, racking up a monetary debt for bad finances, or losing a few prosecutions--we're talking daily deaths). And in that sense the strategy of seeking injunctions isn't as objectionable as it might seem on its face. We should be careful about applying a national policy lens on a very local matter. The folly and hubris of applying abstract, nationally-framed narratives to local matters is part of how city ended up in the situation it has.
Irrespective of timeline, “we don't like the way the elected prosecutor is doing his job” does not justify “so we are going to deny people their rights without due process as an end run around the criminal justice system.”
> it's not uncommon for the law to give some temporary allowance for dealing with exigent, extreme situations
There is no “exigent, extreme citcumstance” without clear legal process that doesn't involve ignoring people's due process rights. The California DoJ has supervisory authority over all criminal prosecution in the State and may intervene, positively or negative, in any criminal matter. That is the course of remedy for a crisis attributed to defective prosecutorial decisions, not imposing broad loss of liberty on the basis of supposed crimes without criminal process.
> We should be careful about applying a national policy lens on a very local matter
The prohibition on public officials denying people rights without due process required by the federal and state constitution isn't a “national policy lens” that is inapplicable to “very local matters”.
Arguably these injunctions aren't too different from spousal abuse or harassment restraining orders, ignoring some technical legal issues regarding scope and cognizable claim. There is process--whether it's "due process" is the question. Certainly there seems to be greater due process than gang injunctions, which are constitutional under current Supreme Court precedent, as the requested injunctions were on named individuals with a history of drug dealing that would need to be satisfactorily shown in court. Compare to gang injunctions, which AFAIU merely required a showing that a particular person was in an enjoined gang. From opinion synopses, the injunctions seem to have been rejected primarily because of their scope--geographic area encompassing important regional government services, and excessive duration. The appellate opinion, contrasting with the trial court, says this specifically--"we are not prepared to hold that a stay-away order could never be a potential remedy...."
I won't dispute that as an end-run around the DA (i.e. but-for the DA, everybody agrees the proper course of action would be to seek an injunction specifically as part of conviction), it's barely defensible, if at all. But the fact the city is seeking them is not evidence of a fundamental shift in San Francisco city official's criminal justice reform efforts writ large. Yet that's exactly what Boudin will claim and is claiming as part of his campaign to defeat recall--that everybody but him is committed to meaningful reform, and all those opposing him (especially those supporting his recall) wish to return to the tough-on-crime policies of decades past.
Per the World Prison Brief:
- The Highest in Europe on that chart is Turkey, at just over half of the US rate (368 vs 629 per 100k).
- It's not clear what "Anglo country" is referring to specifically but if we look at CANZUK for comparison, we can see the next highest rate of the entire group is Australia at 165. I'm not sure how that's comparable. You mention modulo Crime rate but for example Canada has more total crimes per 1000[2] than the US, just less violent crime. It's not as easy as an off the cuff answer because there are so many different cultural factors even between former British colonies in regards to laws that the data will generally skew wildly.
[1] https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_popul...
[2] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Canada/Uni...
? If the US puts X/100000 people in prison per year, and country B puts 1.1X/100000 people in prison per year... but the US imprisons people for 5x as long, then the US incarceration rate would be 4x higher, even though country B puts people in prison more often.
I’m not really clear how this restraining order helps what you’re describing. Do you support the ability of the police to impose jail time in a way that circumvents the (elected) prosecutor’s office?
>If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe.
This is factually wrong. It entirely hinges on extremely warped interpretation of data that can only be generated by a person or organization that starts with a desired version of reality and works backward to justify that position.
Out of curiosity, in general do you view yourself as somebody that could at some point —in any way whatsoever— piss off a cop? I’ve noticed that people that advocate for longer jail sentences and does the whole “humans won’t adjust their behavior unless every cop gets a rocket launcher and a teleporter to send criminals directly to prison forever” bit answer “No.”
I'm a bit confused. I read the above poster as advocating for shorter prison sentences, but not to overcorrect in making the change. Did you misread the person you're replying to?
> To those who say that less jail time is good, I would point out a fallacy in the common criminal justice reform …
At another part in that post this person brought up issues with lack of prosecution (which by definition means less jail time) and diversion (ditto).
So… in your estimation the author was… advocating for more people to go to jail but also supporting the idea of shorter sentences while pointing out that people that say that advocating for shorter sentences means to fall for a fallacy?
This poster wants to point out that the push for less jail time is the result of a fallacy, but thinks it’s good??
Did you read the post I responded to? What did you think was trying to be expressed?
The commonly held belief is that drug dealers, especially street-level, are basically fungible and quickly replaced. There's clearly truth to that. But now this belief is being tested to the extreme. It's also true, as any student of economics would tell you, that there's always some marginal effect to a policy, even a crappy one; the real question is the magnitude of the effect. (And to avoid muddying the equity waters, I'm ignoring the fact that the threat of incarceration provides leverage when trying to get street-level dealers to flip; FWIW, I do agree coerced plea deals is a legitimate problem, but notably also an issue where scope and severity matter, not simply nominal existence of an incarceration threat.) Usually in public policy debates we stick to qualitative aspects rather than quantitative, justifiably or not. But Boudin's radical anti-incarceration policies has made SF a fascinating experiment where the precise magnitude (whether as deterrence or simply as removing a criminal temporarily from the population) could make a signifiant difference; it's the only relevant question left, at least in the short-medium term.
The present situation in the city is a difficult one for Boudin, politically speaking. It's becoming clear (at least to me) that Boudin is hiding behind the ambiguity in incarceration statistics. I also think this must be willful, because Boudin is also committed to shorter incarceration sentences for violent crimes, so he clearly understands there's a meaningful, consequential distinction between some jail time and none. (FWIW, I support a lighter sentencing policy for violent offenses, and if this were his only policy I'd be glad someone with the backbone--or at least intransigence--of Boudin were in office. Most other viable SF district attorney candidates would have a similar policy, at least nominally, but might not have the wherewithal to follow through to the same extent.)
Almost everyone agrees that incarceration rates (i.e. per capita rates) are too high, at least at a national level. (I haven't found good per capita incarceration rates for San Francisco specifically, but almost certainly it's substantially below national levels, and likely has been for awhile given San Francisco has been at the forefront of criminal justice refo...
No. It literally is not.
This article is about: “CA Appeals Court Rules San Francisco Cannot Ban Tenderloin Drug Dealers”
Subject: California Appeals Court Verb: rules (against) Object: San Francisco(/SFPD)
What has happened in this news article was an accounting of how multiple courts in California have ruled that this injunction violated people’s rights. The SFPD suffered an embarrassing loss because they tried some absolutely bonkers loophole-building as part of a petulant tantrum, and multiple courts struck it down for good reason. That’s what the article is literally about.
You would like drug dealing to be the topic, or overreach by prosecutors (but not police), or a weird bad-faith equivocation with protections for abused spouses, or some abstract concept of what’s mathematically optimal or acceptable for jail populations.
However, the article about how multiple courts have ruled that the silly baby attempt at Judge Dredd was unconstitutional is about… how multiple courts have ruled that the silly baby attempt at Judge Dredd was unconstitutional.
Anyway, you can buy fentanyl in prison! Or order it off the dark web and get it sent to your mailbox. I am assuming you know this, which means your request for a wild expansion of police powers, despite courts ruling that is terrible for human rights, is something that you would advocate for anyway.
The author likes to write opaque walls of text. But in subsequent comments, it's become very clear that he is saying:
* The US sends a similar number of people to jail as other jurisdictions, but is an extreme outlier on sentence length. He's provided (weak) factual support for this, and I find this point believable-- not an idea to outright reject like you have.
* The US has a political system that tends to drastically overcorrect on problems, especially in individual locales.
* Sentence lengths should be reduced, but this doesn't mean jail should be eliminated or deterrence effects should be completely lost.
Which is pretty close to my initial read.
I'll admit some motivated reasoning on my part: I'm uncomfortable with the US's incarceration rate but have also been uncomfortable with excessive use of prosecutorial discretion in places like SF to basically ignore a huge fraction of "quality of life" crime. The author proposing a lens to look at this which could lead to policy that reduces the incarceration rate but doesn't give up on petty crime is appealing-- it's just time to think about whether it's true.
What he hasn’t addressed (I think, I haven’t read every tome he’s posted) is that this DA is who the people of SF voted for.
When people complain about “prosecutorial discretion” without talking about campaigning and voting for another DA, it’s common to hear loads of drivel that boils down to “I know the people of this city want these prosecution policies, but I disagree with them. Rather than try to change minds, I support a unilateral transfer of power to a group that says they have my approved ideology.”
The problem with that line of thinking is that it puts the cops above the electorate in terms of influence. It’s a terribly slippery slope, but it’s very common in America.
“Freedom and liberty means that the police arrest people that I don’t like! Even if society in general doesn’t want the police to have that much power, who cares? I, Supreme Understander, am more worthy and human than them!”
Edit: Oh wait the author did respond to another poster that brought up replacing the DA or seeking a remedy from the state. Sounds like they would like that, but for whatever 700-word reason it’s important to shift unilateral power to the police either way. Just in case.
* I don't think he's said quite that
* I don't agree with what he's said entirely. I believe civil injunctions have a place in law enforcement, but they need to be used carefully. I suspect you support them in some circumstances, too.
* Even if he did say that, it doesn't invalidate the rest of what he said. It's worth looking at rates of admission to prison vs. prison terms to better compare US jurisprudence to the rest of the world.
> When people complain about “prosecutorial discretion” without talking about campaigning and voting for another DA
I think these people are looking forward to voting for another DA and advocating for other policy approaches being used by DAs.
BTW, prosecutorial discretion makes me super uncomfortable for other reasons. Often it means the good-ole-boys club being immune to prosecution for offenses. Sometimes its use is conducive to justice and the rule of law, and a whole lot of time it's not. At least here it is being used in ways that are not reinforcing power structures.
> “Freedom and liberty means that the police arrest people that I don’t like! Even if society in general doesn’t want the police to have that much power, who cares? I, Supreme Understander, am more worthy and human than them!”
Parodying someone else's point and extending it to hyperbole is not conducive to productive discussion, but it's great as a tool to mock people.
If no: Why are they posting?
If yes: Do you believe that the author supports the restraining order but does not expect or want it to cause any of these people to go to jail in the case that they need to access healthcare, treatment, employment or otherwise fully lawful resources within the Tenderloin?
What do you think* is the outcome that the author seems to want, out of your careful reading of these posts?
If your answer is “I refuse to believe the author has any desired outcome because it would be indecorous of me to take them seriously at face value“ then… okay. A strategic conversation killer doesn’t erase what people advocate for and explain away. It’s not some high brow checkmate.
> * Even if he did say that,
Lol. I just wanted to say that to how you began this thought. Seems like you might agree with me about what he’s saying! Anyway, back to the rest of the quote:
> it doesn't invalidate the rest of what he said. It's worth looking at rates of admission to prison vs. prison terms to better compare US jurisprudence to the rest of the world.
Why? Because the author brought it up in support of some ridiculous expansion of police power to jail people that haven’t committed a crime?
I am intellectually responsible for chasing down every patently silly interpretation of data because… why? This person is using every trick possible to try to justify giving the police power above elected officials and I’m fully aware that they have decided that a narrow definition of “extreme” coupled with a very narrow focus is a useful tool. I’m not clear why anybody should be expected to chart out this quixotic version of “reason” that’s so obviously flawed.
“Prison isn’t so extreme based on this 20 minutes of research I did after stating my predisposed opinion, therefore cops should be given a whole new type of power to jail people that the city doesn’t want to jail.” is something worth entertaining… why?
> BTW, prosecutorial discretion makes me super uncomfortable for other reasons. Often it means the good-ole-boys club being immune to prosecution for offenses.
What is the difference between prosecutorial discretion and the direction that would be afforded to police officers? As far as I can tell, in this situation the difference is the social and political ideology espoused by one group (the DA’s office which was elected by the city) and another (1,500 officers with a $600,000,000 annual budget with very little accountability).
This entire conversation is simply about power and who wants to allocate it to. The author of the previous posts is advocating for power to be allocated to the police rather than the electorate (the DA), on ideological grounds of “that’s what I want.”
> Parodying someone else's point and extending it to hyperbole is not conducive to productive discussion, but it's great as a tool to mock people.
Hiding behind politeness in order to strip others of their basic human rights is considerably uglier than making a joke that actually maps 1:1 to what the author supports.
“I reject your appeal about basic human rights like due cause, a right to a trial, and protection against illegal search on the grounds that you said a mean thing!” is another hilariously American thing that some intellectually uncurious people say (in whatever words they can summon, of course)
I don't know if it's because you don't understand what I'm saying, or are just choosing to be mean. I don't really agree with the other guy, but I don't think you've read him correctly, either.
To try one last time, and constrain it:
* If the US admits people to prison a comparable rate as countries with better outcomes, but keeps them there longer
* Perhaps the correct solution is to put the same number of people in prison, but keep them there for shorter times
* Policies that instead divert and prevent putting people in prison in the first place are not the ideal intervention to be more similar to these model countries.
* Because then we would be putting fewer people in prison for too long, instead of the right number of people in prison for the right length of time.
GP wants the cops to be able to arrest and jail people despite what the electorate has voted on.
The author has in various posts brought up: their interpretation of jailing statistics in a generalized way, the concept of restraining orders for abusive spouses (this is supposed to be equal to banning a person from a large portion of a city), prosecutorial overreach, the imminent overdose deaths that the cops are already framing as being the DA’s fault, and so on.
You will notice that each and every supposed carefully-reasoned chain of logic ends with “The cops should have the power to arrest and jail people despite the representative of the electorate or policies voted on by the majority.”
I understand that you would prefer that this conversation were about abstract mathematical concepts of jailing. That is a fantastic way to abstract away the human cost of allowing cops the ability to arrest and jail people without them having due process. It definitely makes the idea of sacrificing the concept of basic human rights seem more palatable.
So let’s try this again: Use your math concepts of jailing to justify giving the police unilateral power to jail people despite the policies voted on by the people of San Francisco (or not!) If that’s not interesting to you, then I would refer you to the OP, which was about the SFPD seeking the ability to put 28 individuals in jail if spotted on the wrong street.
I decline your invitation to entertain nonsense philosophical or mathematical conjecture to avoid talking about the SFPD’s failed attempted power grab.
Which again, is the topic of the article and the subject of my conversation on this topic.
> So let’s try this again: Use your math concepts of jailing to justify giving the police unilateral power to jail people despite the policies voted on by the people of San Francisco (or not!)
Again, this is so far over the line. It's not something I've talked about. Indeed, no one except you is talking about arbitrary police powers to jail, as far as I can tell, but instead talking about the appropriateness of civil orders.
I don't really want to talk about civil orders, because my answer is: it's complicated! I do think civil restraining orders are often good, which are a power of the police to jail if you go certain places or near certain people. One that covers a 50 block area to prevent broad sets of possible criminality is probably bad. But that has never been what I've been talking about in this thread.
You talked on the other topic, which I responded about, and you've refused to talk about any more.
What is the exact thing you are trying to achieve here? Are you trying to convince people? Are you trying to make yourself feel good by making other people feel bad? I had hoped to share ideas and really discuss, instead of being lambasted for other peoples' words.
There are absolutely better policies. The injunctions are an act of desperation in the face of a mounting death toll.
> > If you compare person prison years, the U.S. is an extreme outlier. However, by prison admittances per year, we're actually not extreme at all, even compared to Europe.
> This is factually wrong. It entirely hinges on extremely warped interpretation of data that can only be generated by a person or organization that starts with a desired version of reality and works backward to justify that position.
Care to point out how its factually wrong. (EDIT: I said person years, but I meant per capita. But if you're even the least bit charitable it's the same thing.) For the record I'm not reciting some Heritage Foundation policy paper. In fact, I discovered this factoid on a whim as it occurred to me that the incarceration rate metric was ambiguous. In doing so I found only a single partisan research paper, which hasn't seem to garnered any attention. I also went back into some criminal justice literature I've read over the years and was also surprised to see this gap--plenty of scholars have pointed out issues with the severity of U.S. sentencing, but don't seem to have given much analysis to this particular aspect of the data. I also have a formal legal education and likewise don't remember anyone pointing out this distinction--professors and law students alike never seemed to appreciate that there might anything meaningful about the details of the popular metric, probably because for the past 20 years the narrative regarding the need for criminal justice reform has been largely universally accepted across the political spectrum, at least in academia--there was no disputing that too many people were in jail.
Prison admittance data exists, however, from various primary government sources in both the U.S. and Europe; it just hasn't been assembled properly for convenient, comparative consumption. If I was a paid researched I would absolutely spend the time to assemble it properly and make the case. Instead I spent one night on it and, well, I can't even say I was convinced of anything--it's just a simple matter of numbers. If you give a moments thought, the metric is problematic, and when you look at the admittance numbers there's simply nothing to seriously dispute. There's inconsistency regarding whether pretrial detainment is included in various statistics--for many, it seems to be included, but I can't confidently say that's true for all the sources I found. That said, countries, like France, have pretrial detainment rates similar to the U.S; and even in the most pessimistic scenario least favorable to the U.S., admittances couldn't even begin to create a gap of the size the U.S. has regarding per capita--at best a fractional difference, not large multiples!
It's also entirely intuitive and sensical when you stand back and look at things. Consider that in most countries, especially in Europe and the Americas, murder has a maximum penalty of 20 years jail time. In the U.S. life sentences are not uncommon. And consider the effect of things like three-strikes laws, which during the 1990s and early 2000s could turn a serious of felonies into life sentence. Or drug laws--if someone spends a year in the U.K. for a drug offense (not a real figure), but 5 years in the U.S., it's not at all surprising that per capita incarceration for drug offenses would be 3-5x greater in the U.S. even when both the U.K. and the U.S. have the same jail sentencing rate for drug offenders.
When judging per capita (which is absolutely the metric used in all public policy discussion numbers, and absolutely the one used for the infamous 7x outlier statistic), the incarceration rate is undeniably horri...
>There are absolutely better policies. The injunctions are an act of desperation in the face of a mounting death toll.
My question was simple yes or no. Can you take another crack at answering this? (repeated below)
> Do you support the ability of the police to impose jail time in a way that circumvents the (elected) prosecutor’s office?
As for this… > Care to point out how its factually wrong.
Nope, not my job. If you haven’t bothered to cite literally any sources other than walls of text about how you understand things better than everybody else, I doubt my efforts to educate you would be considered.
I pointed out that you are factually wrong because you posted some factually wrong nonsense. I did not do that for your benefit. I did that for the benefit of genuinely curious people that might read your ridiculous screed and mistake verbosity with understanding or cleverness.
Anyway I asked two yes or no questions and got nothing but some Dickensian-length mental gymnastics in response.
1. Yes or no, do you support the ability of the police to put people in jail in a way that circumvents the elected district attorney?
2. Yes or no, do you view yourself as somebody that could at some point —for any reason whatsoever— piss off a cop?
No. But an injunction doesn't put these people into jail. Let me flip it around: do you support restraining orders for abusive spouses if not part of a criminal conviction for abuse? Obviously it poses some dilemmas, but do you oppose the entire notion categorically?
> 2. Yes or no, do you view yourself as somebody that could at some point —for any reason whatsoever— piss off a cop?
I'm very respectful of cops, partly because I grew up in an environment where cops arrested people around me, including family, and cops were to always be avoided. I learned to 1) fear cops (e.g. avoid unnecessary contact, keep excessively polite when approached, hands at 10-2 if pulled over, etc), but also 2) avoid doing all the shit and anything tangentially related which people around me did to get arrested. On my paternal side most of the men--excepting myself, a cousin, and a nephew--have been to jail, several on convictions (i.e not merely pretrial detainment). Objectively speaking I'm not at all at the same risk as many other populations of men; OTOH, I have far more direct experience with the system than the vast majority of people otherwise in my risk cohort. More importantly, I have far more direct experience living in the types of violent environments which unfortunately necessarily require the intervention of law enforcement (regardless of whether that intervention is too heavy handed or not), and understand that there are unavoidable trade-offs to be made when it comes to maximizing the safety of communities. And the hyperbolic, metaphorically-pearl-clutching attitude regarding liberty issues, expressed at least numerically largely by activists which have no such experience--either with community or police violence--nor face even a substantial risk of that experience is... bothersome. Communities experiencing that violence tend to have more nuanced and complicated opinions, especially when they're facing concrete choices with potentially immediate consequences; when there are no direct consequences to policy choices, people tend to become more extreme and ideological.
> No. But an injunction doesn't put these people into jail.
Literally lol. What are you talking about? If the cops are able to arrest you on sight, that means they take you to jail on sight without you having to have committed an actual crime. That is literally the intent of this injunction. The SFPD huffed and puffed about their inability to secure a conviction so they tried to reduce the burden of proof to justify a “crime” has been committed to “a cop saw you on the wrong street.”
It is a blatant and shameless attempt at a power grab, nothing less.
Serious question: Where do you think the police take people after arrest?
Anyway, so for question 1 your answer is “Yes.”
As for question 2, your answer is “No.”
Your entire view of this situation is that you support police power overreach because you don’t think it’ll be used against you. It’ll only be used against criminals and bad guys! And you could never even be mistaken or accused of that because you’re just so gosh darn polite to the cops (a sign that you’re more intelligent and a more productive member of society than anybody that could _ever_ be targeted by police.)
Third yes or no question: Do you work in law enforcement?
This sort of huffy propaganda tends to come directly from cops and the sycophants that tend to surround and idolize them.
Total new prison admittances (i.e. excluding parole violations) per 100000 in 2019 (pre-pandemic). Sources: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/offender-management... and https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf (TABLE 8).
Incarceration rates per 1000000 in 2018/2020 (couldn't find 2019). This is basically percentage of population incarcerated (either at any one moment or at any time during the reporting year, depending on source and details), the metric almost universally used in public discourse. Sources: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2021.html, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html Note the above admittance numbers do not include pretrial detainment AFAIU; excessive pretrial detainment is a very real problem in the U.S., at least. The U.S. numbers mostly exclude sentences served in local jails (i.e. less than 12 months), but I think do include less-than-one-year equivalent sentences in England & Wales. However, If you look at the pre-trial graph for Texas at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/TX.html, which incidentally also includes local jail (not prison) post-conviction confinement numbers, it could only hypothetically double the admittance numbers if we assume worst case. Not nothing, but still a far cry from the huge incarceration rate metric gap.You can find additional numbers for various European countries at http://www.elpueblodigital.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/SPA... (admittance tables from page 95) and https://wp.unil.ch/space/files/2021/04/210330_FinalReport_SP... (admittance tables from page 97). Interestingly, the England & Wales numbers therein seem to double count pre-conviction and post-conviction admissions of the same prisoner for the same offense, which seems to be how they arrived at an almost double total admittance rate of 215/100000 in 2019, which likely accounts for England & Wales being in the top 25% of EU countries by admittance rate (see elsewhere in that report). That seems problematic--perhaps related to definitional treatment of common law vs civil law d...
> However, If you look at the pre-trial graph for Texas at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/TX.html, which incidentally also includes local jail (not prison) post-conviction confinement numbers, it could only hypothetically double the admittance numbers if we assume worst case.
“Maybe it’s double, *shrug* that supports my data-based opinion because that’s how I choose to interpret the importance of the difference between 1x and 2x.”
That was certainly a lot of words about England and wales!
> But ultimately it can't effect my point as it couldn't remotely account for the sheer magnitude difference in incarceration rate in the US, and fundamentally is a matter of sentence severity--longer incarceration durations creating a larger total incarcerated population, which is precisely my point.
This is precisely the opposite of the point you attempted to make at the beginning of this conversation.
Why was it so important to point out that the prison problem isn’t that extreme and that people are falling for a fallacy yesterday, but not today?
In either case, I’m not going to spend any more time trying to debate one of the many methods you’ve used to justify handing cops more power than the DA.
It’s a great distraction from “What I want is to give the power to arrest and jail people to the police over the elected officials tasked with due process. I want to do this even more than I want to replace the DA or seek remedy from the state, because I believe that police should fundamentally have this power to protect us from hippie prosecutors in the future.”
But, uh, I don’t have a short attention span. I haven’t forgotten what we’re actually talking about here. Good job with some funfacts about England and Wales though!
Absolutely not, but when the courts and the police can’t act together, you can understand why the police reach desperately for some sort of enforcement — any enforcement.
A few months ago I drove through the area and it’s ridiculous. It’s a real life recreation of hamsterdam from The Wire, with all the problems that existed in the show. So many people nodding face down on the sidewalk that genuinely look like dead bodies.
Is that what progressive and empathetic drug law looks like? There are certain drugs like weed where the main risk 15 years ago was the legal risk. But the main risk for heroin isn’t the legal risk, it’s the risk that you find yourself face down nodding out on a sidewalk in the tenderloin from fentanyl. Not enforcing reasonable drug laws is good for who? The drug users? No. The drug dealers? Who cares. The city? No.
But then, he won his election, so I guess that's what the people of SF want
This is hilarious. It’s literally insane that the SFPD or a halfway-smart DA would think that this would work.
How exactly was this supposed to work? These 28 people could just be arrested on sight? Aside from giving the cops a little dopamine boost by dispensing a ridiculous overreach of power, how would this actually stop the flow of drugs?
If I were one of these big bad drug dealers that terrified the SFPD so badly that they had to beg for extra power to fuck with me more, I’d maybe just sell drugs right outside the arbitrary border. Or just sell drugs to somebody that lives in the TL and is down to resell. Or disregard the order and continue selling drugs wherever. Or set up a drop system.
The police are the biggest crybabies in the world and I’m glad they didn’t get to tremble their liddle-widdle frowns and get to arbitrarily arrest people that haven’t been convicted of a crime.