Woah, I've seen that dude by Leavenworth and GG Ave, I think. Damn, I walk around there casually not knowing there's dudes who have gone and killed multiple people just chilling out.
Well, he's also a Vietnam vet. So he has probably killed a lot more than two people, but the majority of it was state sanctioned if that makes you feel more at ease?
> The fact that there's a bunch of killers there...
Converting
"One man who went to jail for killing (or maybe merely being involved with the killing of... the article doesn't make it clear) two people during a robbery forty-two years ago and was released early after fifteen years behind bars due to demonstrated good behavior, and has -as far as _we_ know- never killed (or been involved in the killing of) anyone since."
into
"there's a bunch of killers [in the TL]"
is _definitely_ you getting your undergarments in a twist.
Why is that messed up? Do you feel the same about army vets? How about ones who have been dishonorably discharged? I would also be curious what you feel about Rambo, the movie? Do you identify with the sheriff or the vet?
I haven't watched Rambo. Well, I feel differently about army vets as a total population than civilian killers.
But perhaps there is a difference to the way we perceive the world. I'll ask you a question in turn and tell you how I feel.
Imagine there are two hypothetical groups of people. One is a group of people who will punch you for "looking at them funny". The other is every world heavyweight champion. The latter has punched more people in the head than the former. Is the second group (far more punching performed overall) or the first group more preferred by you to walk by at 1 AM at night?
In the spirit of fairness, I will answer my question first. For me, I would actively avoid the first group and not be concerned by the second group.
> ...I feel differently about army vets as a total population than civilian killers.
How about military combat vets who were involved in killing in unspecified circumstances in the civilian world?
> I haven't watched Rambo.
You should. It's a good movie. The later ones (and most especially the most recent one) are dumb action movies, but the original is pretty good.
> One is a group of people who will punch you for "looking at them funny". The other is every world heavyweight champion.
I would trust the first group to act less erratically than the second. It's well-documented fact that getting hit in the head as much as boxers (and pro football players) do fucks you up, and makes you violent and erratic.
After serving 15 years in San Quentin. I get the feeling you’re sharing but what would you prefer? The article does not paint a particularly rosy view of this man’s life, nor does social security amount to much money, per the article.
Side note on the money aspect: San Francisco spends approximately as much on homelessness per vagrant as it costs to house an inmate for the same length of time in San Quentin, where per-prisoner costs are also notoriously high. Inmates are ineligible to receive Social Security.
He paid his debt to society and has a felony record. Now he's staying out of trouble. What more do you want? Guy's in a wheelchair. You want him to starve in the street?
> Gets more in aid than some get paid in a month WORKING?
From the article:
> [Chavez is] barely getting by with his $1,100 monthly social security payments and subsidized housing in the Tenderloin.
Unless the article is misrepresenting the source of the funds, his income is solely Social Security payouts. That's money that every living American is entitled to after they reach a certain age, or meet a few other eligibility requirements. Chavez already paid in to Social Security earlier in his life. Now he is receiving that money back, as promised by the Federal government.
Unless your suggestion is to claw back that entitlement for folks who are convicted of felony manslaughter or murder charges, then his income is immaterial.
Keep in mind, the description was only "he committed a brutal robbery that left two men dead". That can include anything from "Chavez shot two men in order to steal from them" to "Two robbers were shot to death in the course of an attempted robbery while Chavez survived".
But, let's take as granted the worst possible interpretation. Ok: you don't accept that his debt has been paid. What would you suggest? Honestly curious.
Which is why justice and the judicial system is not really intended to facilitate revenge. Also, for the fullccontext
>(...)serving in Vietnam when opposing soldiers ambushed and killed his commanding officer. Returning home to San Francisco at age 22 in the early 1970s, he can still recall how the trauma led to a burgeoning heroin addiction that he supported by shoplifting.
He killed the 2 people in 79 and is now 70 years old and in a wheelchair.
What would you propose to do with him instead? And are we denying that he could have benefited from assistance and intervention to deal with that trauma and reintegrate into society? Back to "fuck the vets"?
> Annual cases of theft in San Francisco are down 33% from where they were in 2017, according to San Francisco police data, but a national retail security survey found that shoplifting was at an all-time high in 2020, costing the industry an estimated $61.7 billion. Such crimes are part of what’s led 80% of San Franciscans to feel increasingly unsafe, according to a survey from the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.
The other part is articles like this, that find a way to make it seem like people are especially at risk even though crime is at a historic low.
This article isn’t talking about individuals, though. What would be the disincentive to retail stores reporting theft? There are presumably insurance benefits even if they don’t think the police will recover it or apprehend someone.
Reporting comes at a cost to the store. They've got to have their personnel working on it, possibly managerial staff, and they've got a lot of other things to do, and staffing shortages, etc. If reporting doesn't result in police actions that reduce future theft, it seems like it's a waste.
If retail theft is as endemic as reporting would seem to indicate, I don't know how they could get insurance for 'petty' theft anyway, so a police report isn't likely to be useful. Likely their business insurance has higher deductibles anyway, so it's more useful for major theft or damage, not for smaller claims.
And if retail theft was daily occurrence, how much would you charge as insurer to insure against it? Less than the damages? I think if you started to offer that sort of business there would be lot and lot of takers.
Retail stores generally were the first to give up:
1) reporting takes time at the staff level, significant time. Which they have to pay for, compounding the losses. I’ve seen security footage, and in some cases it was literally constant. They’d need full time staff just to call the police and report, assuming the cops would even show up if they did that.
2) they can write off the stolen inventory at 100% anyway, and most of them are self insured against this stuff. ‘Shrinkage’ is a normal business operating cost anyway, it’s the scale of it at some of these locations that is nuts.
Anecdotally, I was at a Best Buy in the east bay picking someone up. Not a bad area. And one of the fire alarms went off on an emergency exit and I saw someone dart out with something. The staff member just reset the alarm, sighed, and continued helping me. No attempt to do anything else. I asked what was going on and they said shoplifting, and that it happens all the time.
Last year I was picking up a small generator at a Home Depot in San Jose - not a bad area - and they had to go into a locked area to get it - they said that was because people would load up a cart with generators and tools and just walk out with them. Nothing they could do, and it was a daily occurrence so now they keep things locked up.
> The staff member just reset the alarm, sighed, and continued helping me. No attempt to do anything else.
It has been my understanding that for like at _least_ fifteen, twenty years major retailers have had a "Do not attempt to physically stop shoplifters." policy. The opinions I heard were split on whether it was to protect against an injury suit file by the thief if he were injured during the detention, or having to pay a _ton_ if an employee got seriously injured during the detention. (Source: talking to friends who worked on the floor for major retailers at the start of the century.)
TBH, it smells like both to me.
Anyway, all this is to say that retailers haven't been _physically_ restraining thieves walking out of their stores for quite some time... but that doesn't _necessarily_ mean that they've stopped reporting the thefts. (Indeed, the SF Mayor's Office's crowing about retrieving items from Retail Theft Rings suggests that -at minimum- a subset of the affected retailers _do_ report thefts.)
I'd think HQ would want a police report for missing stock, otherwise they're going to think you took it yourself. It'll be a useless online police report, but you have a # to reference about missing stock XYZ.
How do you conclude that crime is at a “historic low” from that? Comparing cases from police data is only half of the story, as a ton of crime isn’t reported in San Francisco, as any theft less than $1k isn’t prosecutable.
The survey of retailers is much more reliable a data point, and it says the exact opposite of what you claim.
The felony threshold in California is $950. In Texas it's like $2,500. Below that theft is a misdemeanor which typically means they're eligible for incarceration of up to one year. It's pretty difficult to prosecute people that the cops don't arrest.
There is no point in insuring against a predictable cost of doing business. An insurer would simply charge a premium equal to the expected amount of theft, plus a margin for their profit and the (small) risk they are taking. For the many retail stores where insurance doesn't make sense, filing a police report is just extra wasted time and effort if it won't result in any tangible results.
The correct answer is - it would be prohibitively expensive to get insurance for shoplifting, so shops don't have any. They just take the hit as "shrinkage".
This was exactly what was predicted after the a bunch of public officials started stating their intention to no longer prosecute crimes.
They said people will stop reporting crimes because there is no point, and then people will point to the reduction in reported crime as proof that crime is down.
It turns out people stop reporting when they no one will get prosecuted and the cops won't do anything because they know there is no point in arresting criminals.
What do you mean, they “know there’s no point in arresting criminals”? The point is that it’s their job. They literally get paid to do it. If my employer pays me for a certain amount of work and decides to only use half of it, I don’t thereafter get to only do half the work because there’s “no point” in doing the rest.
"Chief Anthony Batts listed exactly 44 situations that his officers will no longer respond to and they include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism. He says if you live and Oakland and one of the above happens to you, you need to let police know on-line."
Okay, and what’s their excuse for that? Again, they’re literally paid to respond to those crimes. What is the point of police if they’re ignoring reports?
That's the whole point of the system. Your reports are ignored, but when it hurts the bottom line of someone actually important, then:
"Breed has repeatedly promised to catch the perpetrators and even incentivized residents with up to $100,000 rewards for information leading to arrests."
There’s a budget, and they prioritize certain crimes. I feel it’s how police departments are run everywhere. My home was burglarized some years ago. The police in Utrecht will not come if you call them, it’s an insurance case. However, in my case I was at home, and there was a fight. In that case, it’s not just burglary, but home invasion, and when my partner called, police arrived with three cars in about 5 minutes.
Sure, but the claim here isn’t that police don’t have the budget to respond. It’s that they’re not bothering to do their jobs because they think it’s “pointless”.
I would actually love for police to harass thieves even if prosecutors, in the end, would refuse to prosecute them. If nothing else, many criminals are dumb; they might do something dumb while interacting with police and either get prosecuted for that, or get put down on the spot.
However, the problem of prioritization by police is exactly that. Police could be doing any number of things; if the outcome of arresting someone is nothing happens, literally any other remaining work, including the kind that could be expanded a lot - e.g. patrolling - becomes higher priority. But ofc Seattle police for example is so under-staffed that they have trouble with 911 calls and sexual assault investigation backlog.
That appears to be an article from 12 years ago, and the quote is about downsizing in the police department. I feel like I'd need to see a citation that this policy is still in effect before I could even begin the consider the real issue about whether this is just maneuvering in a political battle or an actual lack of proper funding to be able to handle those crimes.
The point is that the police departments face constraints (budgetary, management, laziness, etc.) such that many crimes and police reports simply are not investigated at all.
Some first hand examples: The four times my car was stolen, no investigation or arrest, including the one time I even was able to give them the name of one of the people who did it.
Usually they don't explicitly announce these policies because they are unpopular, but every police department has some threshold beyond which they do nothing.
Management and laziness aren’t really “constraints”. Police know they can simply refuse to perform the job they’re ostensibly paid to do — and not only will there be no consequences, but people will even demand they get more money.
There's more work for police departments to do than there is time to do it all. Arresting shoplifters gets deprioritized when everyone knows they'll all be immediately released.
Living in SF, I experience someone shoplifting from Walgreens at least once a month. Many things require calling someone to unlock an item. (Target has locks on $20 pants!)
> So you support the state housing them at taxpayer expense
Describing prison as "housing at taxpayer expense" is... one way of putting it.
I think they should be given a choice: go to jail or get a job and 2 months of state funded housing. If you go back on the streets because you didn't want to work, then police will pursue every public nuisance, public urination, shoplifting, etc. charge and send you to jail. If you're mentally ill you're forcibly committed. If you're a drug addict, you're forced to go to rehab or go to jail.
Otherwise these people will never learn to be decent members of society (you know, people that don't steal and shit on the streets - the bar is on the floor).
A lot of these people don't want to go into shelters because those shelters have no drug use/no alcohol policies. But I say the state should not be supporting their drug habits with taxpayer dollars.
There seems to be a proclivity in the states to solve social issues by diving headfirst into a dystopian nightmare, instead of learning from somewhere else.
That aside, jails are more expensive than simple housing. Just house them regardless. It's way cheaper.
Ironically, another commenter has pointed out that the USSR did not tolerate this kind of behavior (and neither does China). I suppose in that case having the "socialist commies take over", as you put it, would be an improvement over the status quo when it comes to homelessness.
The important difference is that in the article you linked, the actual act of not working/not being productive is a crime on its own.
While the parent comment describes a scenario where the person is punished for an actual crime, and they get (in addition to the default option of serving time in prison) an option to remediate it by getting housing assistance and being able to demonstrate they can hold a job.
While i can see the parallels you were trying to draw, that one crucial difference makes a fundamental difference.
I suspect the practical application is far more likely to be more similar than the idealized vision OP has, with the primary difference being how selective it is applied (to everyone vs those who already slipped up once). Abuse will be the same, though.
Okay, fine, I'll assume you're a decent person who's heart is in the right place.
The vast majority of homeless people suffer from mental illness, and have come from broken homes - experienced severe childhood trauma.
These are people who, mostly, never had a chance. This is the key point. They were dealt a truly garbage hand in life, and no amount of 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' is going to change that.
They need care, they need education, they need homes. They need people to invest years of work into their rehabilitation.
And, in pretty much any developed country, providing that is roughly equivalent in cost to what we currently spend punishing them.
The state is paying the cost of homelessness, but it is doing so in a fashion that both fails to solve the problem and makes the quality of life for these people even worse.
> These are people who, mostly, never had a chance. This is the key point. They were dealt a truly garbage hand in life
Have you talked to any of them? Most of the ones I've talked to don't want anything to do with work. Yes, work on its own is not enough to rejoin society. But work is a prerequisite for rejoining society. It is necessary but not sufficient. If you don't want to work you cannot rejoin society.
At some point you need to assert some tough love and force them to do things they don't want to do. Like work. Or not drink/do drugs.
> At some point you need to assert some tough love and force them to do things they don't want to do. Like work. Or not drink/do drugs.
Your thinking is essentially the tough on crime mentality: Blindly lock people up until they behave the way you want them to. That's how the US ended up with the largest per capita prison population in this solar system and absolutely fucking nothing to show for it.
Tough on crime has failed. Spectacularly so. I wonder for how many more decades one can keep running in the wrong directions with fingers in their ears, telling themselves that approach will start working any day now.
Worse, your proposed punishment may actually constitute an improvement in living condition to the people you're trying to punish ("Off to free meals and a warm bed I go!"). Are you really willing to spend lots of money imprisoning people to give them what you could have given them for way cheaper, just so you can tell yourself you're "punishing" them? At that point one might as well stop pretending one has anyone's best interests in mind and admit to pettiness.
“Go to work or go to jail” is antithetical in a country that emphasizes freedom.
They probably don’t want to work cuz working low wage jobs is a shit experience and are one bad day from losing their job and becoming houseless again.
> I think they should be given a choice: go to jail or get a job and 2 months of state funded housing
Can you elaborate on the "get a job" part? I don't think most employers would be lining up at the door to hire people who presumably have no recent work history but would either need to be paid enough to be able to afford bay area housing within two months or have to be fired after they're unable to show up to work due to being incarcerated. This just sounds like "throw them all in jail" but with extra steps to try to maintain the moral high ground.
As slavery is constitutional in USA I wonder if starting some sort of gulags might make sense. Send these people to work there for their sentences. Thus provide value. Minimise the cost of housing in some ways too.
What a harsh response, taken alone. I agree that in general, crime must be punished. But how about also looking at the root of the problem? Homelessness, education, mental and physical well-being, etc.
This is an article from February 2022 by the pro SF DA Boudin SF Standard. Boudin has now been recalled and the excellent new DA Brooke Jenkins has started cleaning house. It will take some time - there are still lots of people openly selling stolen retail merchandize on the streets and the cartel drug dealers are still openly selling Fentanyl in open air drug markets - but the tide is slowly turning.
Remember how everyone piled on Boudin for working to get his parents released? Turns out Jenkins is doing the same thing for Mayor Breed's brother. Meanwhile Jenkins withdrew over a dozen drug cases because she felt that Boudin overcharged those people. If you really believe cronyism will turn the tide, I've some oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you.
Did you read the article? Yeah she's stepped back from the case and asked the state AG to do Mayor Breed a solid. More or less the same exact thing that people tried to flog Boudin for doing (his parents were part of the Weather Underground).
Meanwhile Ms. Tough-on-Crime Jenkins is claiming Soft-on-Crime Boudin overcharged a number of drug cases… which seems to run counter to the narrative being pushed of her being tough on drug crime.
Swipes like that are badly against the site guidelines. Did you not see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260180? I don't want to ban you but if you keep this up, we're going to have to.
Jenkins has recused herself from the SF Mayor's brother murder sentence reduction case. There will be another election in the fall for the SF DA so Jenkins is in electioneering mode this summer as well as cleaning house. Boudin hasn't indicated if he is going to attempt to be campaign to be reelected - he has a lot of local progressive support.
Jenkins is also making sure to see it through by trying to hand it off to the stat AG. She should've never been involved in the first place. Jenkins doesn't have much to worry about as she's pretty clearly just a mouthpiece for Breed – it's why one of Breed's people was there to oversee Jenkins' first all hands meeting with DA staff.
In a sane world Boudin wouldn't have a chance at re-election, but it seems like there are enough anti-Boudin folks who want to run that he may actually have a chance.
@inferiorhuman I suspect your position is on the progressive side of the spectrum. I don't think Jenkins is 'just a mouthpiece for Breed'. She was the former lead hate crimes prosecutor under the permissive Boudin in the DA office before resigning due to lack of progress. She is very focused on destroying the cartel drug dealers in SF, and doesn't spend much time on prosecuting substance abuse victims.
I remember being in SF in 2016 and there were whole city blocks that were barricaded and the gangs ran checkpoints. There were clearly stolen goods behind the checkpoint and drugs as well.
I recall me and a few co-workers going to eat right next to one of these checkpoints. Open needles, could buy drugs right there at the entrance. The restaurant was nice, a niche pizza place. You could order 20-30 kinds of different meats on a neapolitan style pizza. We walked out of the restaurant to a fully nude woman, giving head to a man. Another nude woman near by and a pimp looking at us. We just turned and walked around them.
This is San Francisco I remember.
Having wandered all over SF Oakland, and the Bay Area generally… It is the most dystopian place I can imagine. It’s a cultural rotten to its core in many ways. Yes, the art, the passion, it’s beautiful. But the people and city have lost the humanity, ironically enough.
I'm not disputing your personal recollection, just adding another data point, but I have lived in SF since 2013 and have never experienced anything like that.
SF native, worked and socialized in the Tenderloin, live in East Oakland currently, and I agree. This sounds a lot like the guy who complained on r/oakland that government is a wild racket and that they're enforcing street sweeping restrictions without actually sweeping the streets. Lots of people pointed out their blocks are getting swept. Turns mechanized street sweepers aren't effective against the type of debris that the guy was complaining about.
People love to vent their hot air and thump their chest at their excited discovery that San Francisco is a grimy city. Guess what. Noted junkie and author Jack Kerouac was complaining about the winos on third street back in the 50s. Claims about the death of San Francisco are generally overrated.
Anecdotally I watched the street sweeper go by my kitchen this morning.
I have been renting a music rehearsal space at Hyde and Eddy since 2013, and lived in the city since 2010. I have never seen this as described. However, there’s a good chance what you have seen might be a few different things that appeared like that. For one, Larkin between Ellis and Eddy can look like this (also at there often at The Chairman when there was a brick and mortar there).
I think a lot of people are frogs in a pot with regards to their city deteriorating, while some definitely exaggerate because we also do just get cranky as we get old.
But the 1950s standard of dirty and the 2020s standard of dirty are very different. Disposable heroin needles and piles of plastic garbage simply weren’t a thing, although SF has always had a reputation as rife with opiate usage.
I lived in Portland. I loved the city, but over the span of a couple years, it was obvious seeing the progression of the grime. I lived a bit outside the city where it was nothing but green gardens and blackberry bushes free for the picking, and pockets of downtown had homeless camps. It quickly ramped up to the bushes being full of filthy plastic garbage, crusty addicts planting themselves outside stores all over downtown, lines of tents, and more.
Dirty cities 70 years ago smelled of piss and had smashed glass. Dirty cities today have all that and more. Our standards shifted.
> I think a lot of people are frogs in a pot with regards to their city deteriorating
Boiling the frog is more than a little ridiculous when you consider that I was replying to someone who'd claimed gangs have barricaded whole blocks of San Francisco and that this is why the city's lost its humanity.
As for Portland, it too has been dirty and grimy since forever. I think a lot of the Portlandia crowd forget how industrial and rough (and how tolerant of neo nazis) it used to be. To be fair that cult (and the perpetrator of the largest bioterror attack on US soil) wasn't in Multnomah County.
I have so many stories like this. It was so pervasive.
I used to take the ferry from Alameda (great place to live btw) to SF every day. Every other day there was a (I presume homeless) woman who would stand at the entrance screaming at people getting off the ferry. On more than one occasion a person would run, and this screaming woman would chase them down the street.
Later I’d often see this homeless woman sleeping in yerba buena gardens. Once caught her doing yoga (I think).
Same ferry terminal, a homeless man was smearing his own poop all over the door to get in. Me and the other passengers just looked at him and then each other. A cop came up and we all looked at her, she said “not my job”. So we all waited watching this guy rolling in his own excrement. Eventually the ferry doors unlocked, but no one went to the ferry until some of the crew opened the door from the inside. We all them walked over / around this homeless man. His excrement on many of our shoes.
It's sad that we've ceded the Tenderloin to being a known unsafe part of the city, but, well, it largely stays in there, for better or worse, and most everyone knows better than to be in that part of the city. (Seriously, gangs running checkpoints?)
Based on my ten years in the TL, and my roaming all over the district at all hours of the day and night, "checkpoints" is almost certainly the wrong word for what lettergram is describing.
Let me translate what lettergram mentions:
> ...whole city blocks that were barricaded...
The sidewalks on some blocks in the TL were occupied with tents, chairs containing people, people sitting on the sidewalks, the occasional cluster of "street markets" (aka: combination flea market and stolen-goods-market), and -sometimes- people grilling with charcoal grills.
> ...the gangs ran checkpoints.
This one requires a bit of explanation:
In the heart of the TL, some corners have drug and/or sex salesmen advertising their wares to passersby. Some streets will have clumps of salesmen, and some corners and section of sidewalk will be crowded, simply because a whole lot of folks in the neighborhood socialize outside... so they're hanging out on the sidewalks. (Why not hang out in parks? Because the cops will push them back into the TL so that they don't make tourists, techies, and other such milquetoast folks uncomfortable.)
Never, _ever_ have I run into anything remotely like a "checkpoint". Crowded sidewalks? Sure! Folks doing more than hawking wares at me as I pass by, unimpeded by anything other than folks that are on the sidewalk minding their own damn business? No way.
The crowds and dealers certainly can be intimidating (and were definitely so for me for my first few months in the neighborhood)... but once you figure out that they don't behave like they're portrayed in the movies... that they're disinterested in starting shit and are just out there hanging out and running a business, you treat them like any other salesman hawking his wares.
> we've ceded the Tenderloin to being a known unsafe part of the city
That's its reputation, sure. It is the site of the city's open-air drug and sex markets.
Based on my time in the neighborhood, I've come to the conclusion that the City acknowledges that these sorts of things _will_ be sold, and that it's better to have an arrangement with the sellers and other "market participants" that ensures that everyone works together to prevent the violence that can often happen when such markets are pushed deep underground.
Because these are open-air markets, if the City wished to, they could drive by every day, rolling up dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and customers. I see the patrol cars rolling by on a regular basis, and _everyone_ who has been in the area for more than a few weeks can spot the folks that would be rolled up. They don't... and -as far as I've seen- have no intention of doing so.
> that they're disinterested in starting shit and are just out there hanging out and running a business, you treat them like any other salesman hawking his wares.
I wish i could share this with more folks. The idea that these people are somehow hardened criminals that will knife anyone is such bullshit. They just want to be left alone for the most part.
Sometimes people will use a knife against other people, yes. Those articles you linked to provide no evidence to believe that the reported stabber is a customer of a Tenderloin dealer.
Agreed. The TL is mostly drug dealers and drug users and is for the most part not as unsafe as the pearl clutchers would have you believe. I've worked in neighborhoods where the indigent folks tend to be more outwardly mentally ill and that was far more hair raising on a day to day.
Man, the drive-by downvotes are weird. I can't remember if the site settled on (officially or otherwise) a "Downvotes indicate disagreement" or a "Downvotes indicate violation of site rules and regulations" policy, but if they settled on the former, that's quite a shame.
Some of the most interesting and informative conversations I've ever had have been with people who held opinions that were as opposed to mine as they could possibly get.
And -in truth- the core of your comment (Folks just want to get on with their lives.) is broadly applicable to _most_ big boogeymen... child snatchers, street thugs, terrorists (domestic or otherwise), etc, etc, etc. In the overwhelming majority of cases, folks simply don't want to start shit, and -when made by Officials- claims to the contrary are nearly always attempts to increase the power and/or wealth of that official and/or their cronies.
The sidewalks on some blocks in the TL were occupied with
tents, chairs containing people, people sitting on the
sidewalks, the occasional cluster of "street markets" (aka:
combination flea market and stolen-goods-market), and -
sometimes- people grilling with charcoal grills.
I think that's being far too generous. There are blocks that are literally barricaded, but it's the cops who've barricaded themselves into their station on Valencia.
> there were whole city blocks that were barricaded and the gangs ran checkpoints.
lol, which favela and pizzeria? I can only think of Una Pizza Napoletana being in a slightly sketch spot. Montesacro's on 6th Street, but that's pinsa.
I don’t recall unfortunately, co-worker was the one who brought us there. Not sure if it was even know for pizza or not, tbh. Had pistachio prosciutto pizza though, which was pretty good.
I lived in SF from 2014 to 2020. Lived in Soma, the Mission, and the Haight. I saw a lot of really sad and disturbing things but I never saw or heard of a whole city block being barricaded by gangs of criminals. Where was that?
Some people have a blasé attitude towards shoplifting/shoplifters: "Why are you defending rich companies?" This assumes that the company just eats the loss. How much of those shoplifting losses are passed onto your average consumer I wonder? If shoplifting is subsidized by everyone else, does this relationship make it an unofficial social program?
If that were true then Im fine with this kind of unofficial sales tax to support people who are in desperate enough circumstances to be compelled to shoplift.
It doesn’t add up to me. Raising prices to account for shoplifters punishes poor people the hardest and reduces social mobility; poor people cannot save. Less social mobility makes it so that only people coming from privileged backgrounds control the destiny of poor people, thus never really fixing any issue.
I'm as liberal as the next person when it comes to our handling of the downtrodden, but this is nonsense.
The victims of shoplifting are other poor people. After all, stores will gladly leave an area and leave other poor people with nowhere to get their goods.
>The victims of shoplifting are other poor people. After all, stores will gladly leave an area and leave other poor people with nowhere to get their goods.
Not sure I follow... this would only be true if shoplifting losses exceeded profits which seems remarkably unlikely to be the case.
Can't tell if this is just bait to dive into the alternative facts that often come up when people try and pretend rampant shoplifting has nothing to do with why stores are closing their branches in major cities... or if you truly don't realize the margins these stores operate on.
Assuming you just don't know, having people filling garbage bags with goods in broad daylight will sink a store.
It's not just the goods stolen, it's the staff that cleans up, it's the anti-shrinkage measures they bring in, it's the safety risk every time something like this happens...
For a long time in an attempt to stay PC, companies refrained from admitting it was a theft problem, but now it's too far gone to pretend:
Definitely not bait! (At least, not intentionally, I'm not from the US and the above article is my only context for the problem of store closure relating to theft).
I've read your article and it doesn't actually provide evidence that supports your claim (that those additional costs related to theft are what drove the closure), it just says that Walgreens cited theft as their reason for closing the store.
The article even includes a quote from the Mayor contradictory to your point, who suggests Walgreens may have had other reasons for the closure.
“When a place is not generating revenue and when they’re saturated – Walgreens has a lot of Walgreens locations all over the city – I do think there are other factors that come into play,"
You admittedly have no context, yet you want to refute the obviously plainly stated fact from the source of the closures themselves with the word of the mayor who is highly incentivized to downplay crime in the city? Really?
Walgreens stated years ago:
"To help combat this retail theft, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment. This is primarily a result of our participation in the city’s 10B program to hire off-duty SFPD officers to have a presence in our stores"
Yet you're juggling semantics to imply somehow theft is causing them to close the stores, but the cost of the theft... somehow doesn't factor in? Do you think they just feel morally bad about the shoplifters?
–
Honestly this is a tired topic. For years Walgreens wouldn't even admit that theft played any role at all because they didn't want to get dragged into local politics, but even they had their breaking point.
You can readily find a million and one talking heads claiming that Walgreens closed because of anything but theft because admitting they closed due to theft is admitting there's a problem when poor people rob "rich corporations"... and some people just hate that idea.
Won't do anything to change the fact that Walgreens themselves have finally admitted the actual cause.
I think it is interesting that you so quickly recognise that the Mayor would have an ulterior motive to shift blame and/or responsibility yet seem unwilling to engage in the possibility that Walgreens would do the same for similar reasons.
Walgreens closed something like 700 stores while actively insisting it had nothing to do with the theft, I think it's interesting you think they'd need to lie about closing 5 more.
>“They knew it was a crime before they did it, and they did it anyway. So what we have to help them do is examine why.”
This kind of naivete is plaguing so many leaders. If only criminals could examine themselves and introspect their actions, then they would understand! It's like people forget that we are still essentially animals, and when the reward of opportunity outweighs the risk of punishment, there is slim chance that the moral mind will prevail. Even slimmer if the person in question does not have a foundation of morality guiding them.
Restore morality and revamp the idea of punishment to actually be a deterrent in the 21st century and these things will go away. Unfortunately we are inundated with weakness to a degree that we consider morality as undefinable and punishment a faux pas. "Punish a criminal? How unacceptable. Who are you to say what is right and wrong?" It seems we'd rather society fray apart into nothing than re-establish any kind of order.
It is a fundamental question of the nature of man. People are fundamentally evil and need to be thought to do good. Religions including Christianity have a way to address that but what is a secular society's way to address this?
If you disagree with this please let me know why. Most people are raised to believe they are fundamentally good which causes a lot of harm and suffering. Challenging that preconception and learning to do good is the best way to defeat evil and let justice and equality prevail for all in my opinion.
Secular society has been so busy deconstructing the concept of God and religion, on the premise that it's useless if it's not provably true, to come up with an adequate replacement for the positive things God and religion provided. They seem either completely disinterested or completely incapable of the task.
What evidence do you have for "People are fundamentally evil".
Personally I have found it useful to get new acquaintances to tell me their opinions on this one. A lot of the rest of their behaviour can then be inferred.
Like all of history and the cruelties of modern society in any country. Even toddlers have been shown to be selfish,racist and cruel towards other toddlers before they can even speak a word. If you can't find relevant research I would be glad to oblige tomorrow.
> Restore morality and revamp the idea of punishment to actually be a deterrent in the 21st century and these things will go away.
This would be much more effective if we start with crimes of educated, wealthier segments of the population. Starting the "Operation Restore Morality" with the poorest sections of the public is where things come off as hollow.
Elite corruption seems like an entirely separate problem to street crime. I don't see why we wouldn't want to solve both, nor why there should be any "you first" here.
Literally everybody I know would want to see both street crime and elite corruption addressed. Are you advocating for addressing one of them but not the other?
I know my friends and family very well, so… yes? Certainly well enough to know that they do not subscribe to the extreme fringe idea that we need to solve elite crime before we can prosecute shoplifters.
By the way, the branch of my family that would count as poor are uniformly much more conservative than I am.
If you're making 6 figures and breaking the law because you're greedy, you should go to jail before the desperate unemployed street kids living one day at a time, risking their lives and freedom to make rent and buy groceries.
But stealing $10,000 worth of product from your local corner store is worse than embezzling $10,000 from a megacorp. And aren't most of these thieves using their ill-gotten gains to pay for drugs, not rent or groceries?
Because going after the vulnerable first in your quest for restoration of morality as a solution to societies problems seems like just another way to punish the poor/ lower classes.
Elite corruption is also directly responsible for creating circumstances that foster street crimes.
I think it comes down to "leadership by example". If your boss comes in an hour late to work each day, are you going to turn up on time? Similarly, if you're poor, and see privileged rich people getting away with (albeit different) crimes, are you going to make yourself poorer and shy away from crime due to morality?
I would think that people care more about things that directly affect them rather abstract financial crime and high level wrong doing. Low level administrative corruption like government officials "fast tracking" applications if you pay them off, doctors asking for "extras" to operate on you and your kids being mugged or stabbed on the way to school affects people's lives in a way that Nancy Pelosi's insider trading probably doesn't.
> "Punish a criminal? How unacceptable. Who are you to say what is right and wrong?" It seems we'd rather society fray apart into nothing than re-establish any kind of order
We live in a society where the rich and elites - the ones running our governments and corporations, are all greedily exploiting and cheating the entire populace. They’re all getting away with it too, with ever increasing wealth gaps and wages that don’t match inflation.
So, when people display such ire for low level petty theft by people with nothing in their lives, and claim they’re the ones “fraying apart society” - I find it hard to take seriously.
>people with nothing in their lives...[are]...the ones “fraying apart society”
You misread. The ones who are letting society come apart are all of us who let ourselves be apathetic enough to be deceived by people who think a total lack of morality is the way to run society.
To the rest of your response, my post could be generalized to any social level. No need to whatabout wage gaps and inflation. Everything I said applies there too: lack of morality and lack of deterring punishment.
If you truly believe that lack of morality is the issue, then we should immediately start prosecuting rich/elite corruption. It harms everyone, it eats away at societal wealth and trust, and leads further to facism.
> We live in a society where the rich and elites - the ones running our governments and corporations, are all greedily exploiting and cheating the entire populace.
this is just a plain old run of the mill conspiracy theory.
reality unfortunately is never black and white, and that’s because modern societies are extremely complex systems:
What’s the conspiracy theory? You’ve literally just linked to the Wikipedia article about socioeconomic mobility (which I never argued can’t exist) and an incomplete income inequality dataset. Neither of which disprove that the elites are exploiting the poor.
It's easy to cheat and exploit people when they constantly cheat and steal from one another. Such behavior becomes the norm, and bad behavior by elites is perceived as in line with convention. Maybe getting a handle on street crime could help break this norm, and free up popular mindshare for engagement on more-abstract structural issues.
Most would say the same of politicians and elites who are constantly robbing us. Worryingly, in public discourse, it’s expected and accepted that they will do so.
So, is it /really/ just the poor crime that creates this culture?
It takes significantly more effort to constantly catch hundreds of small time unknown criminals versus the handfuls of elites in the public limelight or government positions.
"Restore morality and revamp the idea of punishment to actually be a deterrent in the 21st century and these things will go away."
If's funny to say that after admitting that we're animals driven by instinct.
Making morality and punishment a priority won't change a thing when people have to choose between making rent/eating lunch/buying meds or committing crimes. The easiest way to prevent criminality, is feeding people, housing, healthcare, and education on a longer timeline.
Also people tend to underestimate punishment and overestimate rewards, especially desperate people, people everywhere are routinely risking years of jail for a hundred dollars.
Animals, or at least most mammals and birds, can be trained. Human animals that haven't been trained with a morality system or something effectively similar have only a relatively straight-forward cost/benefit analysis as their decision calculus.
Most humans have a morality system to the extent that they'd rather starve to death than engage in cannibalism, for example. It requires more effort, but they can also be socialized to endure reduced access to drugs in exchange for not stealing.
171 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadIf I was family of the two killed men I would be furious.
Yeah, that's messed up.
Is this really so hard to understand?
Like is the trope of the Vietnam vet with PTSD alien to you?
Converting
"One man who went to jail for killing (or maybe merely being involved with the killing of... the article doesn't make it clear) two people during a robbery forty-two years ago and was released early after fifteen years behind bars due to demonstrated good behavior, and has -as far as _we_ know- never killed (or been involved in the killing of) anyone since."
into
"there's a bunch of killers [in the TL]"
is _definitely_ you getting your undergarments in a twist.
But perhaps there is a difference to the way we perceive the world. I'll ask you a question in turn and tell you how I feel.
Imagine there are two hypothetical groups of people. One is a group of people who will punch you for "looking at them funny". The other is every world heavyweight champion. The latter has punched more people in the head than the former. Is the second group (far more punching performed overall) or the first group more preferred by you to walk by at 1 AM at night?
In the spirit of fairness, I will answer my question first. For me, I would actively avoid the first group and not be concerned by the second group.
How about military combat vets who were involved in killing in unspecified circumstances in the civilian world?
> I haven't watched Rambo.
You should. It's a good movie. The later ones (and most especially the most recent one) are dumb action movies, but the original is pretty good.
> One is a group of people who will punch you for "looking at them funny". The other is every world heavyweight champion.
I would trust the first group to act less erratically than the second. It's well-documented fact that getting hit in the head as much as boxers (and pro football players) do fucks you up, and makes you violent and erratic.
From the article:
> [Chavez is] barely getting by with his $1,100 monthly social security payments and subsidized housing in the Tenderloin.
Unless the article is misrepresenting the source of the funds, his income is solely Social Security payouts. That's money that every living American is entitled to after they reach a certain age, or meet a few other eligibility requirements. Chavez already paid in to Social Security earlier in his life. Now he is receiving that money back, as promised by the Federal government.
Unless your suggestion is to claw back that entitlement for folks who are convicted of felony manslaughter or murder charges, then his income is immaterial.
_Is_ that your suggestion?
But, let's take as granted the worst possible interpretation. Ok: you don't accept that his debt has been paid. What would you suggest? Honestly curious.
>(...)serving in Vietnam when opposing soldiers ambushed and killed his commanding officer. Returning home to San Francisco at age 22 in the early 1970s, he can still recall how the trauma led to a burgeoning heroin addiction that he supported by shoplifting.
He killed the 2 people in 79 and is now 70 years old and in a wheelchair.
What would you propose to do with him instead? And are we denying that he could have benefited from assistance and intervention to deal with that trauma and reintegrate into society? Back to "fuck the vets"?
I’m going to tell him I was framed.
The other part is articles like this, that find a way to make it seem like people are especially at risk even though crime is at a historic low.
If retail theft is as endemic as reporting would seem to indicate, I don't know how they could get insurance for 'petty' theft anyway, so a police report isn't likely to be useful. Likely their business insurance has higher deductibles anyway, so it's more useful for major theft or damage, not for smaller claims.
This is differ if you have rare theft of high price items.
1) reporting takes time at the staff level, significant time. Which they have to pay for, compounding the losses. I’ve seen security footage, and in some cases it was literally constant. They’d need full time staff just to call the police and report, assuming the cops would even show up if they did that.
2) they can write off the stolen inventory at 100% anyway, and most of them are self insured against this stuff. ‘Shrinkage’ is a normal business operating cost anyway, it’s the scale of it at some of these locations that is nuts.
3) a number of larger chains just gave up and pulled out of the worse areas, and made very public statements about it and why. [https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/wireStory/theft-plagued-walgre...]
Anecdotally, I was at a Best Buy in the east bay picking someone up. Not a bad area. And one of the fire alarms went off on an emergency exit and I saw someone dart out with something. The staff member just reset the alarm, sighed, and continued helping me. No attempt to do anything else. I asked what was going on and they said shoplifting, and that it happens all the time.
Last year I was picking up a small generator at a Home Depot in San Jose - not a bad area - and they had to go into a locked area to get it - they said that was because people would load up a cart with generators and tools and just walk out with them. Nothing they could do, and it was a daily occurrence so now they keep things locked up.
Pretty sad frankly.
It has been my understanding that for like at _least_ fifteen, twenty years major retailers have had a "Do not attempt to physically stop shoplifters." policy. The opinions I heard were split on whether it was to protect against an injury suit file by the thief if he were injured during the detention, or having to pay a _ton_ if an employee got seriously injured during the detention. (Source: talking to friends who worked on the floor for major retailers at the start of the century.)
TBH, it smells like both to me.
Anyway, all this is to say that retailers haven't been _physically_ restraining thieves walking out of their stores for quite some time... but that doesn't _necessarily_ mean that they've stopped reporting the thefts. (Indeed, the SF Mayor's Office's crowing about retrieving items from Retail Theft Rings suggests that -at minimum- a subset of the affected retailers _do_ report thefts.)
I'd think HQ would want a police report for missing stock, otherwise they're going to think you took it yourself. It'll be a useless online police report, but you have a # to reference about missing stock XYZ.
The survey of retailers is much more reliable a data point, and it says the exact opposite of what you claim.
It absolutely is, the cops and the DA just choose not to give a shit.
You think insurers offer it? How much do you think it would cost?
They said people will stop reporting crimes because there is no point, and then people will point to the reduction in reported crime as proof that crime is down.
It turns out people stop reporting when they no one will get prosecuted and the cops won't do anything because they know there is no point in arresting criminals.
"Chief Anthony Batts listed exactly 44 situations that his officers will no longer respond to and they include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism. He says if you live and Oakland and one of the above happens to you, you need to let police know on-line."
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/suffer-these-crimes-in...
Guess what happens when you fill in a form online? Maybe it turns in to an entry in a database, but that might be the end of it.
Eh, this part is dubious. They have no duty to protect, and no duty to respond to a crime.
> What is the point of police if they’re ignoring reports?
Lots of people asking this question lately. It's a good one.
"Breed has repeatedly promised to catch the perpetrators and even incentivized residents with up to $100,000 rewards for information leading to arrests."
However, the problem of prioritization by police is exactly that. Police could be doing any number of things; if the outcome of arresting someone is nothing happens, literally any other remaining work, including the kind that could be expanded a lot - e.g. patrolling - becomes higher priority. But ofc Seattle police for example is so under-staffed that they have trouble with 911 calls and sexual assault investigation backlog.
Some first hand examples: The four times my car was stolen, no investigation or arrest, including the one time I even was able to give them the name of one of the people who did it.
Usually they don't explicitly announce these policies because they are unpopular, but every police department has some threshold beyond which they do nothing.
Describing prison as "housing at taxpayer expense" is... one way of putting it.
I think they should be given a choice: go to jail or get a job and 2 months of state funded housing. If you go back on the streets because you didn't want to work, then police will pursue every public nuisance, public urination, shoplifting, etc. charge and send you to jail. If you're mentally ill you're forcibly committed. If you're a drug addict, you're forced to go to rehab or go to jail.
Otherwise these people will never learn to be decent members of society (you know, people that don't steal and shit on the streets - the bar is on the floor).
A lot of these people don't want to go into shelters because those shelters have no drug use/no alcohol policies. But I say the state should not be supporting their drug habits with taxpayer dollars.
"Couldn't find work."
There seems to be a proclivity in the states to solve social issues by diving headfirst into a dystopian nightmare, instead of learning from somewhere else.
That aside, jails are more expensive than simple housing. Just house them regardless. It's way cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)
While the parent comment describes a scenario where the person is punished for an actual crime, and they get (in addition to the default option of serving time in prison) an option to remediate it by getting housing assistance and being able to demonstrate they can hold a job.
While i can see the parallels you were trying to draw, that one crucial difference makes a fundamental difference.
Hell, no one in their right might would want to hire you, because they wouldn't want to get hit with the same label and end up in your place as well.
The vast majority of homeless people suffer from mental illness, and have come from broken homes - experienced severe childhood trauma.
These are people who, mostly, never had a chance. This is the key point. They were dealt a truly garbage hand in life, and no amount of 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' is going to change that.
They need care, they need education, they need homes. They need people to invest years of work into their rehabilitation.
And, in pretty much any developed country, providing that is roughly equivalent in cost to what we currently spend punishing them.
The state is paying the cost of homelessness, but it is doing so in a fashion that both fails to solve the problem and makes the quality of life for these people even worse.
Have you talked to any of them? Most of the ones I've talked to don't want anything to do with work. Yes, work on its own is not enough to rejoin society. But work is a prerequisite for rejoining society. It is necessary but not sufficient. If you don't want to work you cannot rejoin society.
At some point you need to assert some tough love and force them to do things they don't want to do. Like work. Or not drink/do drugs.
Your thinking is essentially the tough on crime mentality: Blindly lock people up until they behave the way you want them to. That's how the US ended up with the largest per capita prison population in this solar system and absolutely fucking nothing to show for it.
Tough on crime has failed. Spectacularly so. I wonder for how many more decades one can keep running in the wrong directions with fingers in their ears, telling themselves that approach will start working any day now.
Worse, your proposed punishment may actually constitute an improvement in living condition to the people you're trying to punish ("Off to free meals and a warm bed I go!"). Are you really willing to spend lots of money imprisoning people to give them what you could have given them for way cheaper, just so you can tell yourself you're "punishing" them? At that point one might as well stop pretending one has anyone's best interests in mind and admit to pettiness.
They probably don’t want to work cuz working low wage jobs is a shit experience and are one bad day from losing their job and becoming houseless again.
Can you elaborate on the "get a job" part? I don't think most employers would be lining up at the door to hire people who presumably have no recent work history but would either need to be paid enough to be able to afford bay area housing within two months or have to be fired after they're unable to show up to work due to being incarcerated. This just sounds like "throw them all in jail" but with extra steps to try to maintain the moral high ground.
https://sfist.com/2022/07/28/state-ag-refuses-da-jenkins-req...
https://www.davisvanguard.org/2022/07/regardless-of-what-da-...
Did you read the article? Yeah she's stepped back from the case and asked the state AG to do Mayor Breed a solid. More or less the same exact thing that people tried to flog Boudin for doing (his parents were part of the Weather Underground).
Meanwhile Ms. Tough-on-Crime Jenkins is claiming Soft-on-Crime Boudin overcharged a number of drug cases… which seems to run counter to the narrative being pushed of her being tough on drug crime.
What game are YOU playing?
What did Jenkins ask of the AG, apart from asking them to take the case?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Swipes like that are badly against the site guidelines. Did you not see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260180? I don't want to ban you but if you keep this up, we're going to have to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Jenkins has recused herself from the SF Mayor's brother murder sentence reduction case. There will be another election in the fall for the SF DA so Jenkins is in electioneering mode this summer as well as cleaning house. Boudin hasn't indicated if he is going to attempt to be campaign to be reelected - he has a lot of local progressive support.
In a sane world Boudin wouldn't have a chance at re-election, but it seems like there are enough anti-Boudin folks who want to run that he may actually have a chance.
I recall me and a few co-workers going to eat right next to one of these checkpoints. Open needles, could buy drugs right there at the entrance. The restaurant was nice, a niche pizza place. You could order 20-30 kinds of different meats on a neapolitan style pizza. We walked out of the restaurant to a fully nude woman, giving head to a man. Another nude woman near by and a pimp looking at us. We just turned and walked around them.
This is San Francisco I remember.
Having wandered all over SF Oakland, and the Bay Area generally… It is the most dystopian place I can imagine. It’s a cultural rotten to its core in many ways. Yes, the art, the passion, it’s beautiful. But the people and city have lost the humanity, ironically enough.
People love to vent their hot air and thump their chest at their excited discovery that San Francisco is a grimy city. Guess what. Noted junkie and author Jack Kerouac was complaining about the winos on third street back in the 50s. Claims about the death of San Francisco are generally overrated.
Anecdotally I watched the street sweeper go by my kitchen this morning.
It could also be the case that your accustomed to it? Or perhaps it’s gotten worse?
This restaurant was in the Tenderloin in 2016. Can’t speak to your experiences, but this was a pretty near daily occurrence.
But the 1950s standard of dirty and the 2020s standard of dirty are very different. Disposable heroin needles and piles of plastic garbage simply weren’t a thing, although SF has always had a reputation as rife with opiate usage.
I lived in Portland. I loved the city, but over the span of a couple years, it was obvious seeing the progression of the grime. I lived a bit outside the city where it was nothing but green gardens and blackberry bushes free for the picking, and pockets of downtown had homeless camps. It quickly ramped up to the bushes being full of filthy plastic garbage, crusty addicts planting themselves outside stores all over downtown, lines of tents, and more.
Dirty cities 70 years ago smelled of piss and had smashed glass. Dirty cities today have all that and more. Our standards shifted.
Boiling the frog is more than a little ridiculous when you consider that I was replying to someone who'd claimed gangs have barricaded whole blocks of San Francisco and that this is why the city's lost its humanity.
As for Portland, it too has been dirty and grimy since forever. I think a lot of the Portlandia crowd forget how industrial and rough (and how tolerant of neo nazis) it used to be. To be fair that cult (and the perpetrator of the largest bioterror attack on US soil) wasn't in Multnomah County.
https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2017/06/portland_in_the_1...
I used to take the ferry from Alameda (great place to live btw) to SF every day. Every other day there was a (I presume homeless) woman who would stand at the entrance screaming at people getting off the ferry. On more than one occasion a person would run, and this screaming woman would chase them down the street.
Later I’d often see this homeless woman sleeping in yerba buena gardens. Once caught her doing yoga (I think).
Same ferry terminal, a homeless man was smearing his own poop all over the door to get in. Me and the other passengers just looked at him and then each other. A cop came up and we all looked at her, she said “not my job”. So we all waited watching this guy rolling in his own excrement. Eventually the ferry doors unlocked, but no one went to the ferry until some of the crew opened the door from the inside. We all them walked over / around this homeless man. His excrement on many of our shoes.
So many times…
Let me translate what lettergram mentions:
> ...whole city blocks that were barricaded...
The sidewalks on some blocks in the TL were occupied with tents, chairs containing people, people sitting on the sidewalks, the occasional cluster of "street markets" (aka: combination flea market and stolen-goods-market), and -sometimes- people grilling with charcoal grills.
> ...the gangs ran checkpoints.
This one requires a bit of explanation:
In the heart of the TL, some corners have drug and/or sex salesmen advertising their wares to passersby. Some streets will have clumps of salesmen, and some corners and section of sidewalk will be crowded, simply because a whole lot of folks in the neighborhood socialize outside... so they're hanging out on the sidewalks. (Why not hang out in parks? Because the cops will push them back into the TL so that they don't make tourists, techies, and other such milquetoast folks uncomfortable.)
Never, _ever_ have I run into anything remotely like a "checkpoint". Crowded sidewalks? Sure! Folks doing more than hawking wares at me as I pass by, unimpeded by anything other than folks that are on the sidewalk minding their own damn business? No way.
The crowds and dealers certainly can be intimidating (and were definitely so for me for my first few months in the neighborhood)... but once you figure out that they don't behave like they're portrayed in the movies... that they're disinterested in starting shit and are just out there hanging out and running a business, you treat them like any other salesman hawking his wares.
> we've ceded the Tenderloin to being a known unsafe part of the city
That's its reputation, sure. It is the site of the city's open-air drug and sex markets.
Based on my time in the neighborhood, I've come to the conclusion that the City acknowledges that these sorts of things _will_ be sold, and that it's better to have an arrangement with the sellers and other "market participants" that ensures that everyone works together to prevent the violence that can often happen when such markets are pushed deep underground.
Because these are open-air markets, if the City wished to, they could drive by every day, rolling up dealers, pimps, prostitutes, and customers. I see the patrol cars rolling by on a regular basis, and _everyone_ who has been in the area for more than a few weeks can spot the folks that would be rolled up. They don't... and -as far as I've seen- have no intention of doing so.
I wish i could share this with more folks. The idea that these people are somehow hardened criminals that will knife anyone is such bullshit. They just want to be left alone for the most part.
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/man-dead-after-tenderloi...
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/4-stabbed-in-tenderloin-...
https://www.kron4.com/news/sf-man-stabbed-in-tenderloin-in-c...
Some of the most interesting and informative conversations I've ever had have been with people who held opinions that were as opposed to mine as they could possibly get.
And -in truth- the core of your comment (Folks just want to get on with their lives.) is broadly applicable to _most_ big boogeymen... child snatchers, street thugs, terrorists (domestic or otherwise), etc, etc, etc. In the overwhelming majority of cases, folks simply don't want to start shit, and -when made by Officials- claims to the contrary are nearly always attempts to increase the power and/or wealth of that official and/or their cronies.
https://sfist.com/2022/07/27/sfpd-mission-station-doubles-do...
lol, which favela and pizzeria? I can only think of Una Pizza Napoletana being in a slightly sketch spot. Montesacro's on 6th Street, but that's pinsa.
However if the choice is between paying extra v/s throwing people in prison Im not ok with the latter.
The victims of shoplifting are other poor people. After all, stores will gladly leave an area and leave other poor people with nowhere to get their goods.
Not sure I follow... this would only be true if shoplifting losses exceeded profits which seems remarkably unlikely to be the case.
Assuming you just don't know, having people filling garbage bags with goods in broad daylight will sink a store.
It's not just the goods stolen, it's the staff that cleans up, it's the anti-shrinkage measures they bring in, it's the safety risk every time something like this happens...
For a long time in an attempt to stay PC, companies refrained from admitting it was a theft problem, but now it's too far gone to pretend:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/15/walgreens-cl...
Even so, I read it. I don't see how it shows what you claim (that the facts on which GP's theory is based are incorrect).
I've read your article and it doesn't actually provide evidence that supports your claim (that those additional costs related to theft are what drove the closure), it just says that Walgreens cited theft as their reason for closing the store. The article even includes a quote from the Mayor contradictory to your point, who suggests Walgreens may have had other reasons for the closure.
“When a place is not generating revenue and when they’re saturated – Walgreens has a lot of Walgreens locations all over the city – I do think there are other factors that come into play,"
Walgreens stated years ago:
"To help combat this retail theft, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment. This is primarily a result of our participation in the city’s 10B program to hire off-duty SFPD officers to have a presence in our stores"
Yet you're juggling semantics to imply somehow theft is causing them to close the stores, but the cost of the theft... somehow doesn't factor in? Do you think they just feel morally bad about the shoplifters?
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Honestly this is a tired topic. For years Walgreens wouldn't even admit that theft played any role at all because they didn't want to get dragged into local politics, but even they had their breaking point.
You can readily find a million and one talking heads claiming that Walgreens closed because of anything but theft because admitting they closed due to theft is admitting there's a problem when poor people rob "rich corporations"... and some people just hate that idea.
Won't do anything to change the fact that Walgreens themselves have finally admitted the actual cause.
I think it is interesting that you so quickly recognise that the Mayor would have an ulterior motive to shift blame and/or responsibility yet seem unwilling to engage in the possibility that Walgreens would do the same for similar reasons.
This kind of naivete is plaguing so many leaders. If only criminals could examine themselves and introspect their actions, then they would understand! It's like people forget that we are still essentially animals, and when the reward of opportunity outweighs the risk of punishment, there is slim chance that the moral mind will prevail. Even slimmer if the person in question does not have a foundation of morality guiding them.
Restore morality and revamp the idea of punishment to actually be a deterrent in the 21st century and these things will go away. Unfortunately we are inundated with weakness to a degree that we consider morality as undefinable and punishment a faux pas. "Punish a criminal? How unacceptable. Who are you to say what is right and wrong?" It seems we'd rather society fray apart into nothing than re-establish any kind of order.
If you disagree with this please let me know why. Most people are raised to believe they are fundamentally good which causes a lot of harm and suffering. Challenging that preconception and learning to do good is the best way to defeat evil and let justice and equality prevail for all in my opinion.
This would be much more effective if we start with crimes of educated, wealthier segments of the population. Starting the "Operation Restore Morality" with the poorest sections of the public is where things come off as hollow.
By the way, the branch of my family that would count as poor are uniformly much more conservative than I am.
This type of article may help you understand:
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2012/jun/05/why-working-...
If you're making 6 figures and breaking the law because you're greedy, you should go to jail before the desperate unemployed street kids living one day at a time, risking their lives and freedom to make rent and buy groceries.
Elite corruption is also directly responsible for creating circumstances that foster street crimes.
We live in a society where the rich and elites - the ones running our governments and corporations, are all greedily exploiting and cheating the entire populace. They’re all getting away with it too, with ever increasing wealth gaps and wages that don’t match inflation.
So, when people display such ire for low level petty theft by people with nothing in their lives, and claim they’re the ones “fraying apart society” - I find it hard to take seriously.
You misread. The ones who are letting society come apart are all of us who let ourselves be apathetic enough to be deceived by people who think a total lack of morality is the way to run society.
To the rest of your response, my post could be generalized to any social level. No need to whatabout wage gaps and inflation. Everything I said applies there too: lack of morality and lack of deterring punishment.
this is just a plain old run of the mill conspiracy theory.
reality unfortunately is never black and white, and that’s because modern societies are extremely complex systems:
https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_th...
So, is it /really/ just the poor crime that creates this culture?
If's funny to say that after admitting that we're animals driven by instinct.
Making morality and punishment a priority won't change a thing when people have to choose between making rent/eating lunch/buying meds or committing crimes. The easiest way to prevent criminality, is feeding people, housing, healthcare, and education on a longer timeline.
Also people tend to underestimate punishment and overestimate rewards, especially desperate people, people everywhere are routinely risking years of jail for a hundred dollars.
Most humans have a morality system to the extent that they'd rather starve to death than engage in cannibalism, for example. It requires more effort, but they can also be socialized to endure reduced access to drugs in exchange for not stealing.
And who ends up paying for it, in the end? Not faceless corporations, I can promise you that.