> Outside the Ross store on Market Street Friday evening, shoppers queued up to enter the store. It's one way the store is trying to reduce rampant theft by limiting the number of people inside the store at any given time.
Lived there for nearly a decade, and I've seen my fair share: drug addicts (yes, plural) rolling in the streets in their own feces; people (yes, plural) with open, festering wounds, begging for money; had a psychotic homeless man throw a bicycle at me; followed someone down the street in SOMA, watching as they systematically peered into car windows with a crowbar in their hand; had an unintentional standoff with a man in Van Ness station whom I encountered while he was fleeing from an attack on the platform with an 8-inch butcher knife (a fireman leapt onto him and I kicked away the knife). I chased down someone who snatched an iPhone from a lady on the street (in retrospect this was not my smartest moment, but I did get the phone back).
Bad as all of that was, I never saw something like this. SF is like the beginning of a Batman movie.
(Sorry for the word vomit. I'm just now realizing how many absolutely insane things happened to me when I lived in SF. I had blocked many of these things out! Some folks will think I'm exaggerating, but if anything, I'm understating these stories.)
Yeah, I get why people have other impressions: media reports. But local media is under severe financial pressure, and negative news about city crime is both eyeball-grabbing and cheap to report. And right-wing national media has had it in for San Francisco for more than 25 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values
That being said, paid media pushes about SF being a hellscape are usually connected to a current political campaign; either to preemptively immunize the city from big spending on some crime initiative with big-pocketed contractors, or to elevate or destroy some candidate for public office.
I assume this is London Breed's office begging for the reactionary vote. Imagine thinking 60 shoplifters are a major danger to the city of San Francisco.
The data on shoplifting is highly unreliable. Most victims don't file official police reports because it's largely a waste of time. The large nationwide chain retailers do have accurate data on loss rates internally but they don't release it.
That blog post doesn't show that retail thefts were not a reason to close SF Walmart.
The guy found out that in 2017 Walmart decided to close some stores and concluded "aha! closing SF store has nothing to do with rampant and obvious theft but it was part of that program to close stores".
Except the program ended in 2020 and SF store closing was in 2121. It's right there in text supposedly "proving" it's not because theft.
Plus Walgreen explicitly said it's because theft.
There's willful ignorance involved in parsing this information to conclude that it's not theft.
This is 100% valid, but unless you can explain why there'd be a change in the rate of reports it's hard to explain the consistent decline in shoplifting police reports over the course of the last decade.
The curious thing is that I've lived in two places now where I see two competing takes: crime is lower than it ever has been, and crime is much more visible to the average person. It always forks into these kinds of discussions where folks roll out stats that don't match people's testimony and there's some mention that all media is conservative and thrives on this kind of news.
I'm not really ready to settle for either of those takes. They both seem wrong. Is there anything else that could create both of these outcomes?
You can't have reliable stats when your government completely ignores some crimes, redefines them as noncrimes, doesn't send the police, doesn't arrest, drops charges immediately, or gives you a slap on the wrist instead of a proper sentence.
There are however ways that don't depend on the government. For instance, videos of looting. I've seen a riridulous number of looting videos from LA and SF (and other crimes too). No other state produces so much video of criminal activity from random observers.
Where are you getting your more reliable stats? Consider that “the official stats aren’t reliable” does not imply “therefore any stats that support my favorite narrative are more reliable.”
What are the actual rates of confirmed stores closing? What were they in previous decades? What are other factors -- a pandemic hurting downtown traffic, for example -- that might affect those closures? Can we compare the rates of restaurants closing to the rates of retail stores closing across the years to see if retail stores are closing at a higher rate than restaurants?
And to be clear, I don't see either side of the debate doing that research. I'm not pointing fingers. I'm just saying we should follow the data.
1) You're not seeing a full feed of all video that gets shot; you're seeing what various media outlets choose to share.
2) Humans being humans, we're more primed to grab video when we're seeing other videos, so you'd expect the distribution not to reflect the ground truth.
I am aware that I won't convince you, but I also need to point out that at least one of the articles I linked to shows stats from adjacent jurisdictions with different laws and charging protocols which don't support the "more crime in SF" thesis.
I said this elsewhere, but the flaw in the “but the data shows a decrease” type of thinking when it comes to crime is that it doesn’t take into account:
- How low these rates have to go to feel “safe”
- The impact singular novel and particularly violent events has on safety psychology
It’s one thing to have high rates of discrete shoplifting. But even just one daylight smash and grab is enough to rattle people.
The other thing it doesn’t take into account is that the stats are the product of:
1) Crimes that are actually reported to the police
2) The subset of the above that the police accepts a report on and chooses to tell us about
It seems obvious at first glance that those numbers are highly dependent on a bunch if things, and there’s plenty of ways the final number would get divorced from a close coupling with the “actual” real world number.
Or said a different way. Taking that as an argument has as a premise that you trust the police, which seems incompatible with other parts of the same open conversation we’re having about all this.
I think this is absolutely correct on both counts. It is obvious that people don't feel safe or David Sacks (you may recall him from what's currently happening on Twitter) wouldn't have been able to successfully fund the Boudin recall.
But we're engineers. It behooves us to step back and be rational about what the data tells us instead of deciding that data that contradicts our emotions is false.
Agreed. But analysis of data requires context, and good baselines.
And point (1) of my list is based off of not just a general feeling, but comparing it to cities who are touted as being “safe”. And their numbers are incredibly low.
I've lived on the edge of the mission for about a decade (and grew up in Oakland and Albany). Do I think SF is extremely dangerous? Honestly not at all, violent crime is not a major issue here - and it feels safer in most of the city than it did when I was growing up. But I've also seen folks walk into the CVS/Walgreens on mission multiple times and just nonchalantly fill backpacks - and I wouldn't leave a coffee cup in my car. Property crime is extreme here in a way I haven't experienced anywhere else. It doesn't bother me as much as it bothers other people, but I do think it matters - and I think it's very hard to collect clean, comparable data on this stuff given differences in measurement and all the incentives at play. We def have a property crime problem.
There’s a sort of violence that happens when your home or vehicle is broken in to. Or when you witness that store getting ransacked. Or when you hear about a friend that gets robbed at knifepoint.
The sort of violence one doesn't experience, but hears rumors about. The sort of violence one reads about in articles that have a paragraph explaining why all of the statistics are deceptive because they disregard people's perceptions.
Wow, I'm really surprised I hasn't heard about this before. Part of me wants to believe that the new reporting system accidentally refiled every historical report or something, but if that was the case, you'd think someone involved would have been willing to say that in response to a question.
That doesn't explain the decline in shoplifting reports over the last decade. Presumably if all stores had been doing whatever that Target was doing (and I note that the store in question dropped back down to normal levels the following month), the overall rates would have been three times as high... and dropped at the same rate over the course of a decade.
Trying to interpret trends in garbage data is a fool’s errand, and the store dropped to “normal levels” presumably because it stopped reporting incidents.
Too little, too late, SF. The damage from the last few years of relative anarchy will not be undone by a few arrests. Get back to me when you stop people from rampantly shitting on the streets.
They are part of the same issue: dereliction of duty by the people in charge of the city, complacency by the population that keeps those asshats in power, and willful ignorance (denial) by everyone involved about how hostile the city has become compared to anywhere else in the country.
Drop a piece of trash on the interstate in the middle of nowhere and you can be fined $500 or more. Defecate in front of a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco and you get a pass. Strange world we live in.
SF voters have a habit of voting for pro-crime government. Being anti-crime is a losing political proposition. After all Dirty Harry from the 1970s was set in SF.
I lived a couple of blocks from Salesforce tower before the pandemic and found the entire city had lost a ground war to homeless drug addicts. There was a break in at the Walgreens in the area one night and I spotted some of the crooks hauling cylinders out of the shattered windows while others were mixing stuff over a fire on the sidewalk. I called the cops and the emergency response operator literally told me “what do you want us to do about it?” I replied “something?”. A guy I knew who rented me office space, who also ran a small business with street access, and is from the area, thought this was an okay response because they stole from a big company, he felt it was a victimless crime.
So, while I’m glad to see this is happening I’m doubtful any real change will come to San Francisco till there is real economic harm that befalls the community. Basically, when the Detroit 2.0 story comes to town.
> the entire city had lost a ground war to homeless drug addicts
As a former homeless drug addict, it's less of a war and more of a massacre. Despite the fox news-ass propaganda you see on HN all the time almost no one chooses to be out there like that. When I see folks down like that I think what has been done to them not what are they doing to me. This isn't them taking actions against you, this is the consequences of our policies; chickens home to roost shit. If you can't tolerate it then you must fight to change it.
No, I'm not going to here today, but I will explain why.
On HN every concrete suggestion must be an absolute fortress of a comment: flawlessly argued and meticulously sourced. Especially an in-this-context radical position like "don't blame the homeless for their situation" will have any exposed detail picked at, and that interaction will be read as discrediting the policy itself rather than a reflection on the context where we're having the conversation.
So here is the point I am making: letting people suffer and die in poverty in the center of one of the largest engines of wealth generation in history is wicked. Blaming them for it is monstrous. There are many policies this view could lead you to and I spend a lot of time working towards them with others who are working towards them. But that isn't here! Here I am just trying to get people to see the humanity in the people on the street.
I didn't realise he was robbed by all of the homeless people, actually I'm rather impressed now that I know that. Was it purposeful? How does one get robbed by so many people?
You can't vandalize HN like this here. Since you've posted quite a few flamewar comments in other threads too, I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to do that with.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> letting people suffer and die in poverty in the center of one of the largest engines of wealth generation in history is wicked. Blaming them for it is monstrous.
Thank you for reminding of the larger context in which the dehumanization of our fellow brothers and sisters occurs. The state is failing to care for its weakest due to 50 years of unfettered accumulative greed and individuals hearts’ have hardened as a psychological coping mechanism against an inability to help.
This in the season of charity and good will, no less.
I’ve always thought it disturbing that the center of wealth has such poverty but doesn’t California and San Francisco spend the most tax payer money on the homeless? Hundreds of millions? Can’t hundreds of millions prevent this? Are they really letting them suffer and die? And why can’t the taxpayer funded police stop a crime on Walgreens? That question hasn’t been answered
Government creates this problem by making it impossible to build more housing. Government can’t fix the problem without addressing the cause. It’s just a jobs program for government workers and a complete failure.
> this was an okay response because they stole from a big company, felt it was a victimless crime.
I wonder if Walgreens thought about hiring their own security guards. It seems to make sense to pay for your own security, right? I assume insurance factors into that decision.
There are a lot of people who don't have much empathy for big companies. They would characterize them as soulless profit making machines that squeeze employees and consumers as much as they can, pollute the commons, homogenize the culture, warp politics, regulatory capture, unfair competition, inhumane, etc.
Private security guards can't do much more than "observe and report". In order to have any real impact they would have to hire moonlighting police officers, and those are expensive.
Insurance is not a factor. Large retailers don't carry insurance policies for shoplifting and minor vandalism.
Security guards legally could do more than observe and report, but for understandable reasons (liability and pay, I assume) it is the policy of large stores not that do so.
Moonlighting police officers are better trained and cost a lot more money. But it still makes sense to me for the stores to spend this money, as opposed to taxpayers paying for more police in an effort to prevent and/or interdict these property crimes at these stores, something the police force was never designed to do, nor is legally obligated to do.
You've got to be kidding. How can it possibly make sense to expect retailers to pay more for security instead of having the police actually do their jobs?
If a city has descended so far into anarchy that taxpayers think that crime prevention and interdiction isn't worth spending money on then that city is ultimately doomed. The retailers are just going to leave and online purchasing will become the only option for most consumers products. The profit margins on laundry detergent and baby formula are just too low to cover a high level of private security.
I brought up in-store security because the police force is not designed to prevent property crimes in progress, which is what the top-post I replied to seemed to be talking about. There are places that do this. I agree it is far less than ideal.
I guess ultimately it's up to the voters in San Francisco and/or California to agree on how to address this? I did see that their police force may be under-sized compared to other cities. It seems they would need to agree to hire more police and court personnel, and build more jails, which would require raising taxes, or cutting some other services. There may be lots of people opposed, given the already high taxes and disagreement over related social problems and policing in general.
It's interesting how many people who do not live in San Francisco are so offended by what is happening there. It's always been a dynamic place, and still is, for better and worse.
> Walgreens has security guards, they can't do anything physical.
I think this is store policy, not the law.
> Shoplifting is a crime as it is a form of larceny or theft. Different states may refer to shoplifting in different ways, but a shop owner who suspects someone of shoplifting may detain them until law enforcement arrives if the shop owner has reasonable proof of the crime - either the owner/manager, a loss prevention associate or another employee personally saw the individual take or conceal an item or the store has surveillance showing the taking of an item. Any detention, however, must comport with any store policies and state law. [0]
It is my understanding that they can make a citizens arrest and physically detain the shoplifter if they wanted to. Walgreens and other large companies choose not to do this.
Understood. That's probably how we got to the current situation, given that large stores don't want to have to deal with the liability of thousands of employees having to make these decisions.
We have these large anonymous cities and companies, at a scale where personal reputation has become less and less relevant. If we can't rely on enough people voluntarily following the rules do we need different rules, or different enforcement? The police are not currently obligated to stop a crime in progress. They can't be everywhere at once. Should we change that? Or maybe try to electronically enforce the rules, tracking people, cameras, etc?
I understand these thefts are upsetting to people, but how far as a society do we go? Hasn't there always been a certain amount of crime? Is there more of this kind of crime today, per-capita, than in the past, or are we just more exposed to it?
This sounds exactly like arguments some people use when talking about current was in Europe. What if the thief pulls out nukes? you get a very dangerous situation for both. You don't want Ukrainians get hurt but you also don't want Ukrainians to hurt invading soldiers. Do you see the moral problem here?
Having Walmart hire private security is bad for both Walmart, the people they would hire and the society.
For Walmart it's obviously a cost, probably higher that the cost of goods stolen.
For the private security: they are literally risking their lives and they are probably not paid a lot. Shop owners get beaten up and sometimes killed when defending their stores.
For the society: we don't want privatized violence.
What is the security guard supposed to do when some big dude (or worse: a group) starts stealing stuff?
Get in a fight? What if they hurt the thieves? It's an assault and they could end up in jail for that.
And in SF the police doesn't bother to arrest thieves because D.A. was refusing to charge them.
So what would even be the point of e.g. detaining the thieves?
Those are all valid points, about store security guards.
Some of what you said applies if the police are doing this work, also - the costs (to society), violence (putting police in harms way to protect store items), the d.a. (and lack of jail space for thieves). Not an easy problem to fix.
I think it's a more difficult set of problems than people realize. It does seem like the enforcement has been strangely lax but I believe it's not just an attitude problem but also partly a logistical problem. There are too many desperate and criminals for the system to handle. Because of the economic situation and inequality, lack of sufficient public housing and support as well as cultural retrogressions driven by that, etc.
This is not to try to excuse the total out of control situation but just to suggest that there are deep societal issues at least compounding the poor management.
Having said all of that I believe if store owners were authorized to use deadly force under some circumstances then much of the crime spree would go away. The underlying societal issues would still be there though, just less obvious.
There are many extremely awful things that have been normalized in SF that are not normal in most (all?) large American cities. For example:
Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk.
High chance of having your car window smashed and car contents stolen.
Retail stores putting ever more items behind lock and key.
Women feeling unsafe walking alone in many areas of the city after dark.
Public parks full of criminal element that make walking through it a high-stress, high-alert situation.
All of this results in a high level of general anxiety and makes it an unpleasant place to live or even visit. Anyone who still lives in SF, I feel extremely bad that this is your life. It’s extremely sad.
Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark.
But the other ones, having lived in San Francisco for a couple years and visited semifrequently afterwards, do feel sort of distinctively west coast.
Certainly the reported normalization of daylight retail store robberies seems pretty abnormal!
Later
Oh, my god, people, yes, I am referring to what’s normal in North America, not Europe. I assumed that was obvious but, whatever, I’m not here to defame Antwerp.
> Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark.
At least here in Antwerp this is not normal at all, even though there is apparently a pretty big mafia who like making grenades explode.
In fact, I can't recall visiting any city, even in other countries, where this is considered "normal".
Sorry, most of these are not normal in big cities in the developed world, e.g. Scandinavian countries or Western European countries (I only have personal experience with these outside the US).
You're being down-voted for some odd reason. This response is very accurate with regards to the types of crime that happen in most major cities.
EDIT: Having read the additional comments I understand that the perspective is those in US cities versus other locations in the world. The crime being described is common in major US cities.
My suspicion with Japan is that they commit large numbers of their population -- who would be homeless -- into shadowy psychiatric hospitals. Which I think is worse.
I've never experienced this once in Texas cities like Austin or DFW. Neither have any of my friends. Less experienced with Houston, and it's generally less safe, but never a problem in the weeks I've spent there either. I was worried Austin was on the cusp of such problems a year or two ago when the mayor implemented SF style policies, but those have been rolled back and things are mostly back to normal.
Austin is extremely safe and barely even qualifies as a "large" city. Outside of downtown DFW is like a huge extended suburb, and listen to the way residents there talk about their downtown. Houston is a much better comparison and does deal with similar problems.
> I was worried Austin was on the cusp of such problems a year or two ago when the mayor implemented SF style policies
Every underpass was filled with tent cities and trash. Downtown was covered with urine and there were protests that got out of control. Very little of that now.
Maybe if you watch the news rather than leaving your house, this is what you would think.
The encampments just got moved, they still exist. The cops left behind a ton of garbage too that was otherwise mostly handled by the homeless when the city was distributing garbage bags. Protests never got serious here at all, so curious what gave you that impression.
I do live here. I don't watch local news, I'm telling you my own observations, which may differ from your part of town. I don't live downtown, but my friends that do did observe protests turning violent on their block(localized,not in mass) and that's why they no longer live downtown.
There are many areas of DFW that are not safe. Perhaps if you don't leave Preston Hollow, Highland Park or Mckinney.. But, there are many parts of the city that I wouldn't want to be on a Friday night (and definitely not my wife and kids). I lived in a decent area and there were frquent break-ins on North East Dallas. Had a double homicide down the street about a month before we relocated to Europe. But, you can keep telling everyone how friendly it is. I know better.
It is truly awful that one of the most powerful centers of wealth generation in the world also cultivates an environment where people can have nothing and be treated as less than human because of it, then be personally blamed for their reaction to that state. We should not have normalized that.
This is a genuine question; I'm trying to separate possible FUD from the truth here. I lived in NYC 20 years ago, and you're not describing anything different.
I lived in SF for almost a decade, until about 2017. OP is not exaggerating. I just made a post where I outlined some (not all!) of the things that actually happened to me, and they're pretty much a recitation of OP's list.
I lived there (apt at 5th and Mission and office near the Caltrain station) until a few years ago and many friends still do (although quite a few have left). All OP's comments seem reasonable.
I currently live in SF and have lived in NYC. In all honesty it's not all that different. I think the main difference is the weather and number of shelter beds. There are many times a year when being outdoors in NYC isn't possible, so they have more shelter beds and more use of those beds. In SF that dynamic doesn't exist. Other than that, it's the same in my experience.
Also lived in both. It's absolutely different, but it depends on the neighborhood. I'd say that SF's average level of horribleness (when I left in 2017) was about the same as the bad parts of Harlem or the Bronx, or the area around Penn Station / PABT. But sure, if you go to the burb/bougie parts of SF, like West Portal, or even Pac Heights, then it's very different from SOMA or Civic Center. Just like SoHo is very different from East Harlem.
But it's gaslighting to pretend that the two are equivalent. New York is unquestionably better, overall (for starters, the police in NYC will typically actually do something when property crimes are being committed in the open air, which is more than I can say for SF.)
New Yorker here too. Finally got to see the fabled valley last year and spent 2 days walking SF.
Parts of it are just like NYC before the cleanup to turn it into a tourist destination. Chinatown and area around it absolutely reminded of late 80s/early 90s in NY. Has that vibe.
Parts of it -- here is looking at you Pacific Heights -- are just completely off the scale amazing. I would move in a heartbeat to PH if I could afford it, crime be damned. (Looked pretty damn safe too, btw.)
tldr; it ain't a "shithole" if you are rich (like everywhere else). far from it.
As mentioned, many of these are very common in other large cities (EDIT: fine, in the US). I'm going to call out this one because its frequently mentioned and seems harder to tackle than the other problems:
> Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk.
What is the solution to this? Round them up and put them in jail? Bus them to another city? Forcibly enroll them at a mental health facility? Improving housing costs somehow? Free housing for the homeless? Maybe walk-in drug clinics?
Some of these solutions sound inhumane. Others appear to be politically impossible at the scale needed. So what's the solution and why are the people who live there against it?
Many other large cities handle this well, so it seems to pretend there aren't solutions? I've spent recent time in London, New York, and Bangkok -- as well as a number of smaller cities -- and there's nothing like what I saw in SF.
“The Special One-Time Assistance (SOTA) program provides one year’s full rent up-front for eligible Department of Homeless Services (DHS) clients to move within or outside New York City.”
So, NYC gives homeless people a year of rent anywhere those people think they’ll be able to make it work, including NYC. And the program seems to save the city money.
“SOTA is only provided to households whom DSS has determined will likely have the future ability to pay the rent once they no longer have the SOTA grant to cover their rent.”
That sounds like a very high bar for people in the situation of needing rent coverage and especially if they have mental illness and/or drug addiction. Note that busing people to another city appears to be a separate program.
So, from what I've heard when I was 'visiting' tenderloin: there used to be a lot of vets who came in SF after the Vietnam war (heard that from a Vietnam veteran btw, so it might be a bit of a perception bias), and they basically were accepted. This brought more vets/homeless, and with them drugs to 'treat' PTSD, and this started a feedback loop.
Sounds exactly like Seattle. Ever since Police powers have been taken away. Crime has drastically gone up.
I grew up here and when nobody knew about Seattle. It was a awesome place to live. Now, not such a good place. You add yearly 1+ month of forest fire smoke to the mix. It doesn't leave to much left.
Even according to SPD’s own crime reporting dashboard[0], incidents have not gone up drastically in the last two years like you are implying, and this year’s numbers look like they are trending back down to 2018 levels. Seattle’s issues also certainly didn’t start two years ago, anyone who has lived here has known about things like 3rd being extremely sketchy. Hell, even back in 2011 that was a thing. It’s certainly far from new. Problems have certainly gotten worse in the last two years but let’s not sit here and pretend the city was roses and unicorns before 2020.
And how, exactly is it Seattle resident’s fault that there’s smoke now?
It’s interesting to me that private citizens and businesses in some places can reliably expect that the law won’t protect them but can also reliably expect the law to prosecute them if they defended themselves with the force that the law does.
I think this illustrates that the monopoly on “legitimate” violence held by the state comes with a very clear obligation to either use that monopoly or allow others to use violence, otherwise people will see the state as having abdicated its fundamental duty.
That seems to suggest that folks who have goods stolen from their stores would be justified in using violence to stop the thieves? Though the police doing it for them would be better? I don't see property crimes like shoplifting as justifying violence (armed robbery, sure, but not five-fingering stuff). Does it raise insurance rates for retailers? Sure. Does that raise prices for honest shoppers, yes also. So it's crappy, but attacking the thieves doesn't pass a proportionate response sniff test for me.
Violence is an absolute requirement for the existence of law. If you have a law saying “you can’t do X” there needs to be some system that enforces the law. Law enforcement cannot exist without actual violence or the threat of violence.
I believe what you’re really asking is if law is justified, since it requires violence against people breaking it.
Edit: fwiw there is a somewhat extreme libertarian ideology that holds exactly this so you wouldn’t be alone
And then imagine that it happens week after week after week.
“It’s just money”, some people say, but it’s the money that person is trading hours, days, years of their life for. It keeps them away from their family. It pays for their kids’ medical expenses. It pays for the meager savings they save up by skipping meals so they can take their family on a small vacation once per year.
Well, in the case of personal property, I would, yes - it's insured? It'd have to be something pretty important for me to feel like attacking the thief, unless they were threatening me or my family. I sympathize with retailers getting robbed repeatedly, and obviously that'd make you angry, potentially desperate, (and I expect judges might be more sympathetic if they resorted to violence), but what I'm sensing in this thread is a "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" approach to rule-breaking, which I can't get on board with. Self-defense can be proportionate, or not - shooting someone who shoved you is not going to pass that test in most courts.
> That seems to suggest that folks who have goods stolen from their stores would be justified in using violence to stop the thieves?
I’d be happy with a store owner not being liable for injuries if they tackle someone who is trying to steal from their store and the thief ends up getting hurt.
I don’t think they should be able to start blasting thieves with a gun but you should be able to use some reasonable amount of force. Let a judge decide whether it was reasonable or not.
If you were a shop owner, would you be willing to risk a fight with a homeless person over a few 10's of dollars of goods? How much do you think an ER visit would cost? A gun takes away that risk, but brings others.
This is an incredibly naive view of the world. Violence is, whether you like it or not, the absolute apex power, from which all other power is derived.
Laws only hold power because if you break them, someone will forcefully put you in jail, and hurt you if you try to escape. If your punishment is a fine rather than jail time, someone will forcefully remove money from your bank account or valuable items from your house, and they will use force and potentially hurt you if you don't comply.
I might not agree with shooting shoplifters in the back but if the police won't investigate and stop even organized shoplifting (they're boasting about doing this just very recently, hence the article) at some point you have to be allowed to open up some level of enforcement and use of violence to the public, because otherwise bad behaviour is rewarded. Maybe you beat them up or publicly humiliate them, which is often seen in less developed countries. But I'd much prefer the police just enforce the law, and retain their monopoly on violence.
Also interesting to note that all the major retail chains commit wage theft at least comparable to their losses to retail theft, and workers can reliably expect that the law won't protect them from that.
You got a take on that one? What has the state abdicated there and what should their or our response be?
I notice the 'violence' disappeared from this response. Vigilante justice only for the homeless, not people in nice suits?
> the monopoly on “legitimate” violence held by the state comes with a very clear obligation to either use that monopoly or allow others to use violence
It is unclear to me what vigilante justice against wage theft would look like, that wouldn’t be just like “shooting into a crowd”, hitting some number of bystanders who are blameless- but I encourage you to figure out what a moral form of it would look like!
It was your suggestion that people be allowed to use violence if the state didn't use it. Why do I need to think of moral ways for that violence to be applied?
Taking matters into your own hands in terms of wage theft might include demanding payment with the threat of violence, or forcibly taking what you are owed. I think both of these would be morally justified.
The main difference between defending yourself and property and wage restitution is one is proactive to prevent the harm, and the other is retroactive.
Given that the harm has already taken place in the case of wage theft, I think there is at least some duty to attempt to use the existing legal processes.
The people who are stealing wages are easy to find after the fact and their crime leaves a paper trail. If the homeless person leaves the area with the property you’ll likely never see them again.
Also major retail chains participate in "dead peasant" insurance schemes. They buy high dollar life insurance policies on their employees and cash in when they die, giving nothing to the family.
> It’s interesting to me that private citizens and businesses in some places can reliably expect that the law won’t protect them
The courts have ruled that there's no obligation for the police to protect and serve [0]. The police have always shown up after a crime is committed, they weren't designed to be everywhere all the time.
It is legal for someone to protect themselves, with violence if necessary, isn't it? There are many laws allowing self-defense, castle doctrine, etc. Someone defending themselves may have to prove themselves in court, especially if they killed someone, but that seems fair enough. Lots of people legally defend themselves and their property every day.
What do you think we need to change? Should we expect the government to prevent violence? Should we have more police, cameras, drones, minority report, etc so that hopefully the police can prevent everybody from stealing from big stores?
EDIT: Walgreens could have security guards on hand and direct them to detain shoplifters, basically a citizens arrest, but they choose not to do so.
> I think this illustrates that the monopoly on “legitimate” violence held by the state comes with a very clear obligation to either use that monopoly or allow others to use violence, otherwise people will see the state as having abdicated its fundamental duty.
That part after the 'or' is quite sloppy as written. It's unclear if you are merely warning that vigilante justice may follow if the police don't do their job-- a truism; arguing for citizen's arrest that follows the same (or more stringent) basic procedures as police use; or whether you are attempting to rationalize expansion of violence to everyday citizens as those citizens see fit to protect their property.
>> private citizens and businesses in some places can reliably expect that the law won’t protect them but can also reliably expect the law to prosecute them if they defended themselves with the force that the law does
"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
I also hate the smell and look and fear of spending time in SF. However, does anyone know what the solution really is?
We assume it's more police and more charges brought by the DA. I'm not sure the data supports that incredibly well.
It would be nice if we took half a percent of the tech money generated in the last decade and built a world class crime reduction program. Maybe a facility (unlike prison) where you don't get educated by career criminals...
Yeah as you suspect the data supports anything but. Carceral responses to crime increase crime, and this has been extensively studied and concretely known for decades. If police solved or prevented crime american cities would be the lowest-crime places in the world. We keep doing this for other reasons, not to decrease crime.
I agree that Carceral responses along are not a sufficient solution, at least not without resorting to extremes that would be untenable in the US.
The real problem is loss of social trust and individuals unable or unwilling obey social norms. Once social trust is lost, it is very difficult to restore it.
San Francisco budget is $14 billion. Of which $672 million is for "solving" homelessness.
Austin City budget is $1.3 billion.
Yes, half of Austin budget is spent by SF on homelessness alone.
Money is not the problem.
SF is already getting gigantic chunk of tech money.
They just demonstrated, year over year, that the only thing they are extraordinarily good at is wasting this money.
What we need is to fire ever single government worker and rebuild the government from scratch. And yes, I know that this is utterly delusional proposal, which is why SF will continue spending like Saudi Prince on crack and SF streets will continue to be lined up with homeless people.
I visited SF in 2014 and hated it. I’ve been to many large cities around the world and can absolutely say it is the worst I’ve been to. Certainly there are worse parts of other cities but as a general level of crappiness, SF wins by a mile. I don’t understand how people live there, I don’t understand why there is no help for the homeless addicts and mentally ill people roaming the streets. I don’t know the history of the city (not American) that has lead to where it is but I do know that I never, ever want to go back there.
And that is based on 2014, it seems it has got a lot worse since.
SF does offers more help to homeless addicts and mentally ill people than most other local governments in the region. Ironically, this attracts more of them to the city. And just by offering help, they can't legally force people to take it.
There is certainly plenty of graft, waste, and stupid policy in the SF homeless-industrial complex. The city government is highly dysfunctional. But any real solutions will have to be implemented at least at the state level.
Why at the state level? Why should people in other areas of California be burdened with poor decisions by a particular city? San Francisco has created conditions that encourage vagrants to flock to the city by simultaneously not enforcing the law and “supporting” the homeless with vast funds paid out to many inefficient non-profits. Add to this a lax policy toward camps and it is no wonder there are huge problems there. I don’t blame the vagrants for going there.
Cities try to encourage growth in cities by making it attractive to employers. Why not discourage growth of vagrants by making it unattractive to break the law and camp out on sidewalks?
The amount of mental gymnastics residents (voters) of SF do to normalize the narrative of property crime, along with the horrific state of affairs for mental health and drug addiction, is absolutely wild. Especially given the amount of lip service given to broader social issues in almost every social setting. It is one of the most apathetic and deeply hypocritical situations in America I've ever seen.
It's sad to see that when this topic comes up, there's so little interest in addressing the causes of these problems rather than simply treating the symptoms. It's especially concerning that people who otherwise present themselves as liberal and libertarian are in favor of such authoritarian policies in this area, especially when all evidence suggests that that simply makes the problem worse. It seems like there's no space for welfare, healthcare and social work, just violence.
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[ 186 ms ] story [ 757 ms ] threadWhat a dystopia SF has become.
Bad as all of that was, I never saw something like this. SF is like the beginning of a Batman movie.
(Sorry for the word vomit. I'm just now realizing how many absolutely insane things happened to me when I lived in SF. I had blocked many of these things out! Some folks will think I'm exaggerating, but if anything, I'm understating these stories.)
I assume this is London Breed's office begging for the reactionary vote. Imagine thinking 60 shoplifters are a major danger to the city of San Francisco.
The guy found out that in 2017 Walmart decided to close some stores and concluded "aha! closing SF store has nothing to do with rampant and obvious theft but it was part of that program to close stores".
Except the program ended in 2020 and SF store closing was in 2121. It's right there in text supposedly "proving" it's not because theft.
Plus Walgreen explicitly said it's because theft.
There's willful ignorance involved in parsing this information to conclude that it's not theft.
I'm not really ready to settle for either of those takes. They both seem wrong. Is there anything else that could create both of these outcomes?
There are however ways that don't depend on the government. For instance, videos of looting. I've seen a riridulous number of looting videos from LA and SF (and other crimes too). No other state produces so much video of criminal activity from random observers.
What are the actual rates of confirmed stores closing? What were they in previous decades? What are other factors -- a pandemic hurting downtown traffic, for example -- that might affect those closures? Can we compare the rates of restaurants closing to the rates of retail stores closing across the years to see if retail stores are closing at a higher rate than restaurants?
And to be clear, I don't see either side of the debate doing that research. I'm not pointing fingers. I'm just saying we should follow the data.
1) You're not seeing a full feed of all video that gets shot; you're seeing what various media outlets choose to share.
2) Humans being humans, we're more primed to grab video when we're seeing other videos, so you'd expect the distribution not to reflect the ground truth.
I am aware that I won't convince you, but I also need to point out that at least one of the articles I linked to shows stats from adjacent jurisdictions with different laws and charging protocols which don't support the "more crime in SF" thesis.
So it goes.
- How low these rates have to go to feel “safe”
- The impact singular novel and particularly violent events has on safety psychology
It’s one thing to have high rates of discrete shoplifting. But even just one daylight smash and grab is enough to rattle people.
1) Crimes that are actually reported to the police
2) The subset of the above that the police accepts a report on and chooses to tell us about
It seems obvious at first glance that those numbers are highly dependent on a bunch if things, and there’s plenty of ways the final number would get divorced from a close coupling with the “actual” real world number.
Or said a different way. Taking that as an argument has as a premise that you trust the police, which seems incompatible with other parts of the same open conversation we’re having about all this.
But we're engineers. It behooves us to step back and be rational about what the data tells us instead of deciding that data that contradicts our emotions is false.
And point (1) of my list is based off of not just a general feeling, but comparing it to cities who are touted as being “safe”. And their numbers are incredibly low.
So, while I’m glad to see this is happening I’m doubtful any real change will come to San Francisco till there is real economic harm that befalls the community. Basically, when the Detroit 2.0 story comes to town.
As a former homeless drug addict, it's less of a war and more of a massacre. Despite the fox news-ass propaganda you see on HN all the time almost no one chooses to be out there like that. When I see folks down like that I think what has been done to them not what are they doing to me. This isn't them taking actions against you, this is the consequences of our policies; chickens home to roost shit. If you can't tolerate it then you must fight to change it.
On HN every concrete suggestion must be an absolute fortress of a comment: flawlessly argued and meticulously sourced. Especially an in-this-context radical position like "don't blame the homeless for their situation" will have any exposed detail picked at, and that interaction will be read as discrediting the policy itself rather than a reflection on the context where we're having the conversation.
So here is the point I am making: letting people suffer and die in poverty in the center of one of the largest engines of wealth generation in history is wicked. Blaming them for it is monstrous. There are many policies this view could lead you to and I spend a lot of time working towards them with others who are working towards them. But that isn't here! Here I am just trying to get people to see the humanity in the people on the street.
It is difficult to maintain empathy for individuals who rob and assault you and your family.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Thank you for reminding of the larger context in which the dehumanization of our fellow brothers and sisters occurs. The state is failing to care for its weakest due to 50 years of unfettered accumulative greed and individuals hearts’ have hardened as a psychological coping mechanism against an inability to help.
This in the season of charity and good will, no less.
I wonder if Walgreens thought about hiring their own security guards. It seems to make sense to pay for your own security, right? I assume insurance factors into that decision.
There are a lot of people who don't have much empathy for big companies. They would characterize them as soulless profit making machines that squeeze employees and consumers as much as they can, pollute the commons, homogenize the culture, warp politics, regulatory capture, unfair competition, inhumane, etc.
Insurance is not a factor. Large retailers don't carry insurance policies for shoplifting and minor vandalism.
Moonlighting police officers are better trained and cost a lot more money. But it still makes sense to me for the stores to spend this money, as opposed to taxpayers paying for more police in an effort to prevent and/or interdict these property crimes at these stores, something the police force was never designed to do, nor is legally obligated to do.
If a city has descended so far into anarchy that taxpayers think that crime prevention and interdiction isn't worth spending money on then that city is ultimately doomed. The retailers are just going to leave and online purchasing will become the only option for most consumers products. The profit margins on laundry detergent and baby formula are just too low to cover a high level of private security.
I guess ultimately it's up to the voters in San Francisco and/or California to agree on how to address this? I did see that their police force may be under-sized compared to other cities. It seems they would need to agree to hire more police and court personnel, and build more jails, which would require raising taxes, or cutting some other services. There may be lots of people opposed, given the already high taxes and disagreement over related social problems and policing in general.
It's interesting how many people who do not live in San Francisco are so offended by what is happening there. It's always been a dynamic place, and still is, for better and worse.
Not saying its right or wrong, but its gotten to that point there.
I think this is store policy, not the law.
> Shoplifting is a crime as it is a form of larceny or theft. Different states may refer to shoplifting in different ways, but a shop owner who suspects someone of shoplifting may detain them until law enforcement arrives if the shop owner has reasonable proof of the crime - either the owner/manager, a loss prevention associate or another employee personally saw the individual take or conceal an item or the store has surveillance showing the taking of an item. Any detention, however, must comport with any store policies and state law. [0]
It is my understanding that they can make a citizens arrest and physically detain the shoplifter if they wanted to. Walgreens and other large companies choose not to do this.
When the fight instinct kicks in you get a very dangerous situation for both.
You don't want the security get hurt but you also don't want the security to hurt the thief.
We have these large anonymous cities and companies, at a scale where personal reputation has become less and less relevant. If we can't rely on enough people voluntarily following the rules do we need different rules, or different enforcement? The police are not currently obligated to stop a crime in progress. They can't be everywhere at once. Should we change that? Or maybe try to electronically enforce the rules, tracking people, cameras, etc?
I understand these thefts are upsetting to people, but how far as a society do we go? Hasn't there always been a certain amount of crime? Is there more of this kind of crime today, per-capita, than in the past, or are we just more exposed to it?
For Walmart it's obviously a cost, probably higher that the cost of goods stolen.
For the private security: they are literally risking their lives and they are probably not paid a lot. Shop owners get beaten up and sometimes killed when defending their stores.
For the society: we don't want privatized violence.
What is the security guard supposed to do when some big dude (or worse: a group) starts stealing stuff?
Get in a fight? What if they hurt the thieves? It's an assault and they could end up in jail for that.
And in SF the police doesn't bother to arrest thieves because D.A. was refusing to charge them.
So what would even be the point of e.g. detaining the thieves?
Some of what you said applies if the police are doing this work, also - the costs (to society), violence (putting police in harms way to protect store items), the d.a. (and lack of jail space for thieves). Not an easy problem to fix.
This is not to try to excuse the total out of control situation but just to suggest that there are deep societal issues at least compounding the poor management.
Having said all of that I believe if store owners were authorized to use deadly force under some circumstances then much of the crime spree would go away. The underlying societal issues would still be there though, just less obvious.
Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk.
High chance of having your car window smashed and car contents stolen.
Retail stores putting ever more items behind lock and key.
Women feeling unsafe walking alone in many areas of the city after dark.
Public parks full of criminal element that make walking through it a high-stress, high-alert situation.
All of this results in a high level of general anxiety and makes it an unpleasant place to live or even visit. Anyone who still lives in SF, I feel extremely bad that this is your life. It’s extremely sad.
But the other ones, having lived in San Francisco for a couple years and visited semifrequently afterwards, do feel sort of distinctively west coast.
Certainly the reported normalization of daylight retail store robberies seems pretty abnormal!
Later
Oh, my god, people, yes, I am referring to what’s normal in North America, not Europe. I assumed that was obvious but, whatever, I’m not here to defame Antwerp.
At least here in Antwerp this is not normal at all, even though there is apparently a pretty big mafia who like making grenades explode.
In fact, I can't recall visiting any city, even in other countries, where this is considered "normal".
EDIT: Having read the additional comments I understand that the perspective is those in US cities versus other locations in the world. The crime being described is common in major US cities.
Context is important...for example in Tokyo this would be highly unusual.
> I was worried Austin was on the cusp of such problems a year or two ago when the mayor implemented SF style policies
Extreme eye rolling here...
Every underpass was filled with tent cities and trash. Downtown was covered with urine and there were protests that got out of control. Very little of that now.
The encampments just got moved, they still exist. The cops left behind a ton of garbage too that was otherwise mostly handled by the homeless when the city was distributing garbage bags. Protests never got serious here at all, so curious what gave you that impression.
This is a genuine question; I'm trying to separate possible FUD from the truth here. I lived in NYC 20 years ago, and you're not describing anything different.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039215
> Public parks full of criminal element that make walking through it a high-stress, high-alert situation
This one is especially laughable, nothing could be further from the truth
Also lived in both. It's absolutely different, but it depends on the neighborhood. I'd say that SF's average level of horribleness (when I left in 2017) was about the same as the bad parts of Harlem or the Bronx, or the area around Penn Station / PABT. But sure, if you go to the burb/bougie parts of SF, like West Portal, or even Pac Heights, then it's very different from SOMA or Civic Center. Just like SoHo is very different from East Harlem.
But it's gaslighting to pretend that the two are equivalent. New York is unquestionably better, overall (for starters, the police in NYC will typically actually do something when property crimes are being committed in the open air, which is more than I can say for SF.)
Parts of it are just like NYC before the cleanup to turn it into a tourist destination. Chinatown and area around it absolutely reminded of late 80s/early 90s in NY. Has that vibe.
Parts of it -- here is looking at you Pacific Heights -- are just completely off the scale amazing. I would move in a heartbeat to PH if I could afford it, crime be damned. (Looked pretty damn safe too, btw.)
tldr; it ain't a "shithole" if you are rich (like everywhere else). far from it.
> Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk.
What is the solution to this? Round them up and put them in jail? Bus them to another city? Forcibly enroll them at a mental health facility? Improving housing costs somehow? Free housing for the homeless? Maybe walk-in drug clinics?
Some of these solutions sound inhumane. Others appear to be politically impossible at the scale needed. So what's the solution and why are the people who live there against it?
Many other large cities handle this well, so it seems to pretend there aren't solutions? I've spent recent time in London, New York, and Bangkok -- as well as a number of smaller cities -- and there's nothing like what I saw in SF.
https://nypost.com/2019/10/26/nyc-homeless-initiative-sends-...
Would not file this under “handling it well”
So, NYC gives homeless people a year of rent anywhere those people think they’ll be able to make it work, including NYC. And the program seems to save the city money.
“SOTA is only provided to households whom DSS has determined will likely have the future ability to pay the rent once they no longer have the SOTA grant to cover their rent.”
That sounds like a very high bar for people in the situation of needing rent coverage and especially if they have mental illness and/or drug addiction. Note that busing people to another city appears to be a separate program.
We are the boiled frog. Most here seem to think this sort of thing is normal now.
I grew up here and when nobody knew about Seattle. It was a awesome place to live. Now, not such a good place. You add yearly 1+ month of forest fire smoke to the mix. It doesn't leave to much left.
Even according to SPD’s own crime reporting dashboard[0], incidents have not gone up drastically in the last two years like you are implying, and this year’s numbers look like they are trending back down to 2018 levels. Seattle’s issues also certainly didn’t start two years ago, anyone who has lived here has known about things like 3rd being extremely sketchy. Hell, even back in 2011 that was a thing. It’s certainly far from new. Problems have certainly gotten worse in the last two years but let’s not sit here and pretend the city was roses and unicorns before 2020.
And how, exactly is it Seattle resident’s fault that there’s smoke now?
[0]: https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/crime-da...
I think this illustrates that the monopoly on “legitimate” violence held by the state comes with a very clear obligation to either use that monopoly or allow others to use violence, otherwise people will see the state as having abdicated its fundamental duty.
I believe what you’re really asking is if law is justified, since it requires violence against people breaking it.
Edit: fwiw there is a somewhat extreme libertarian ideology that holds exactly this so you wouldn’t be alone
“It’s just money”, some people say, but it’s the money that person is trading hours, days, years of their life for. It keeps them away from their family. It pays for their kids’ medical expenses. It pays for the meager savings they save up by skipping meals so they can take their family on a small vacation once per year.
I’d be happy with a store owner not being liable for injuries if they tackle someone who is trying to steal from their store and the thief ends up getting hurt.
I don’t think they should be able to start blasting thieves with a gun but you should be able to use some reasonable amount of force. Let a judge decide whether it was reasonable or not.
Laws only hold power because if you break them, someone will forcefully put you in jail, and hurt you if you try to escape. If your punishment is a fine rather than jail time, someone will forcefully remove money from your bank account or valuable items from your house, and they will use force and potentially hurt you if you don't comply.
I might not agree with shooting shoplifters in the back but if the police won't investigate and stop even organized shoplifting (they're boasting about doing this just very recently, hence the article) at some point you have to be allowed to open up some level of enforcement and use of violence to the public, because otherwise bad behaviour is rewarded. Maybe you beat them up or publicly humiliate them, which is often seen in less developed countries. But I'd much prefer the police just enforce the law, and retain their monopoly on violence.
You got a take on that one? What has the state abdicated there and what should their or our response be?
> the monopoly on “legitimate” violence held by the state comes with a very clear obligation to either use that monopoly or allow others to use violence
It is clear how someone can plausibly use violence to actually protect themselves and their possessions when the law refuses to.
It is a lot less clear what that looks like in terms of wage theft. Maybe threatening violence and demanding your back pay? Maybe stealing it?
I do think there should be a burden to attempt to use the legal options if one is available.
The main difference between defending yourself and property and wage restitution is one is proactive to prevent the harm, and the other is retroactive.
Given that the harm has already taken place in the case of wage theft, I think there is at least some duty to attempt to use the existing legal processes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate-owned_life_insuran...
It doesn't mean they should have to endure theft, it just means they are taking advantage of their workforce.
The courts have ruled that there's no obligation for the police to protect and serve [0]. The police have always shown up after a crime is committed, they weren't designed to be everywhere all the time.
It is legal for someone to protect themselves, with violence if necessary, isn't it? There are many laws allowing self-defense, castle doctrine, etc. Someone defending themselves may have to prove themselves in court, especially if they killed someone, but that seems fair enough. Lots of people legally defend themselves and their property every day.
What do you think we need to change? Should we expect the government to prevent violence? Should we have more police, cameras, drones, minority report, etc so that hopefully the police can prevent everybody from stealing from big stores?
EDIT: Walgreens could have security guards on hand and direct them to detain shoplifters, basically a citizens arrest, but they choose not to do so.
[0] https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...
That part after the 'or' is quite sloppy as written. It's unclear if you are merely warning that vigilante justice may follow if the police don't do their job-- a truism; arguing for citizen's arrest that follows the same (or more stringent) basic procedures as police use; or whether you are attempting to rationalize expansion of violence to everyday citizens as those citizens see fit to protect their property.
"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
We assume it's more police and more charges brought by the DA. I'm not sure the data supports that incredibly well.
It would be nice if we took half a percent of the tech money generated in the last decade and built a world class crime reduction program. Maybe a facility (unlike prison) where you don't get educated by career criminals...
The real problem is loss of social trust and individuals unable or unwilling obey social norms. Once social trust is lost, it is very difficult to restore it.
Austin City budget is $1.3 billion.
Yes, half of Austin budget is spent by SF on homelessness alone.
Money is not the problem.
SF is already getting gigantic chunk of tech money.
They just demonstrated, year over year, that the only thing they are extraordinarily good at is wasting this money.
What we need is to fire ever single government worker and rebuild the government from scratch. And yes, I know that this is utterly delusional proposal, which is why SF will continue spending like Saudi Prince on crack and SF streets will continue to be lined up with homeless people.
The only long-term viable solution is for people to relocate to locations with more opportunities for unskilled labor and a new market equilibrium.
And that is based on 2014, it seems it has got a lot worse since.
There is certainly plenty of graft, waste, and stupid policy in the SF homeless-industrial complex. The city government is highly dysfunctional. But any real solutions will have to be implemented at least at the state level.
Cities try to encourage growth in cities by making it attractive to employers. Why not discourage growth of vagrants by making it unattractive to break the law and camp out on sidewalks?
Retail theft needs to be curtailed. We have the technology for this.