Crime's definitely a problem here, but parts of this strike me as exaggerated. I live in the Mission, and have for almost 20 years. I don't think crime is noticeably worse. This is also the first time I've heard a claim that crime is a significant reason for stores closing. When I talk with actual business owners, the big reasons are 1) massive rent increases, and b) difficulty finding staff at $15/hr.
Or Lucca Ravioli, just down Valencia Street, closed on the same day. The owner was selling the building, and there's no way anybody could buy the business without having millions to buy the building too. In sum, it was real estate costs: https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/94-year-old-Lucca-R...
I absolutely agree that crime is a problem; I've had 7 bikes stolen over the years. I also agree that the insane rents guarantee people will end up on the streets, and homelessness is comorbid with addictions, which are often fed by crime. But this strikes me as overdramatic. It makes me wonder who funds the organization that produces this.
I've also started to see NRA sponsored youtube channels [1] doing in-depth reporting on San Francisco's problems. It's not a bad documentary actually, but conveniently leaves out the whole NIMBY movement while featuring a real estate agent as a primary source focusing instead on the failures of local (liberal) government.
I fear we're seeing a massive ramp up in propaganda leading up to the 2020 elections. San Francisco will play a prominent role of "look how bad $FOO are at government!".
Wait, but you just admitted it was in depth, and not bad, parent gp said similar, so my question to both gp and you and those that think like this: why does that automatically equate to propaganda? Because it's not 'your side'? Why is the fact that it is a conservative think tank relevant? Evaluate the content on its merits and evidence. The fact that it doesn't cover one angle as extensively as you would have liked doesn't make it propaganda.
I'll answer, as I guess you're addressing me with this (although I'm not totally sure what "parent gp" means).
As I said, the article, which is on a topic where I'm reasonably well informed, seemed at best badly written to me. When an article is a) bad, and b) bad in a way that's convenient to somebody, it's worth asking how it got published.
Personally, I think "evaluate the content on its merits and evidence" is a bad heuristic for general-audience media like this. If somebody is going to cover a topic like "20+ years of the history of San Francisco crime and its economic and social impacts, plus the implications for urban policy" in 1000 words, they're leaving a lot out. This article lacks both an explicit argument and real evidence. It's basically saying, "Trust me, the writer, that I know what I'm talking about."
That can be fine when the person is an expert who works for an organization that is very good at producing solid journalism. But when it's disinformation, propaganda, or just the sort of bias-confirmation piece that many agenda-driven publishers put out, then it can be enormously harmful. So it's absolutely worth asking who paid for the piece to exist.
This reads as very disingenuous given the time the parents posts tok to supply reasons for their argument. Maybe you should evaluate the totality of their posts rather than seizing on a single word that makes you uncomfortable.
I believe that the video presents itself as an informational resource for understanding the social issues of the city, but instead knowingly omits critical information in order to better support the videos real goal - to galvanize a voting base and support an entirely unrelated agenda to the video's actual content.
I believe this qualifies as propoganda because it intentionally paints a different reality, misinforming viewers and potentially causing them to make meaningful decisions against their best interest.
It is a failure of the government to properly deal with the NIMBY movement. There are NIMBY's everywhere but somehow it's only SF where new apartments don't get built. Also isn't "look how bad $FOO are at government!" a perfectly fair argument for against voting for $FOO?
I lived in the Mission 20 years ago and I've seen people get shot in the face in the middle of the day on 24th and it wasn't a big deal. By (my) historical standards the neighborhood is only mildly sketchy these days, I'd be happy to walk anywhere at 3am.
I grew up in Sonoma and lived in San Francisco for three years. I’m near the end of a two month stay in Medellín, Colombia. I’m looking to make the move out of SF permanent. People here ask me why I’d move to a city like Medellín from SF. It’s because there’s less crime, less drug use, less homelessness and less street harassment for my girlfriend.
While I sympathize with your position, this feels a little misleading and lacking in perspective.
I’ve lived all over San Francisco and am now in the Inner Richmond. It’s easily my favorite place I’ve ever lived. Amazing food, easy access to two of the more incredible city parks in the country (Golden Gate and Presidio), and very safe [1]. I’ve gone for many a walk listening to music after midnight with no threat of danger.
Though I’ve never been to Colombia, I’ve been to Tijuana, Mexico City, San José, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Saigon… in none one of those places would I want to walk around with AirPods, take pictures with a nice digital camera, or have my phone out in public for more than a few seconds. There’s simply too big of an income disparity between you and the average citizen.
Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis have the three highest murder rates in the U.S. [1]. If you’re implying the cities I listed have higher rates of murder or violence than Medellin, that is only true of Tijuana. Medellin has a murder rate of roughly 25/100,000 people [2], more than double any of the other cities I listed.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like you lived in one of the more crime-ridden parts of SF (Tenderloin/SoMa/Mid-Market/Mission) while living in a relatively good neighborhood in Medellin (estrato 4 or above from my limited research). If that’s the case, I don’t see how that’s a fair comparison.
And you’re right - I can’t say for sure what Medellin is like because I’ve never been there.
Having lived in Medellin for a few months and currently living in SF I feel like this is a gross exaggeration. While SF certainly has more pronounced problems with homelessness and drugs, Medellin has vastly more violent crime. There are many neighborhoods Medellin I wouldn't dare be in past midnight.
There are definitely parts of Medellín worse than the worst parts of SF. There are also commercial zones in Medellín that are nicer than any commercial zone in SF, and I live near one of them.
Also if you’re in a good neighborhood and not involved in the drug trade, the occurrence of violent crime is very low.
I feel safer in Medellin than in San Francisco. In Medellin harassment and crime is not random. I’ve lived in both cities and currently live in Medellin while frequently traveling to SF for business
You have to deliberately go into the wrong neighborhood and mess with the wrong people.
Every time I’m in SF I’m on edge when I walk in the street.
In Medellin I feel safe walking around with AirPods and iphone out, plus I’m not on defensive mode ready to dodge feces or harassment.
I’m glad to hear you feel safe exposing valuables in Medellin. From looking at your LinkedIn profile though, I noticed two things:
- You’re a board member of a programming school based in Colombia. There’s inherent bias and conflict of interest in sharing your experiences.
- You are fluent in Spanish and appear to be of Latin American descent. I imagine that adds to your relative comfort level when in Colombia.
When I am in the areas near downtown SF, I also feel on edge and weary of my surroundings.
I encourage you to leave SoMa/Tenderloin/FiDi and check out the Richmond, Sunset, Japantown, Potrero Hill, North Beach, Marina, Pacific Heights, Mount Sutro, Presidio, or Golden Gate Park.
I'm struggling to understand why getting catcalled is specific to San Francisco. If you walked down Miami, Atlanta, New York, etc., you feel you wouldn't be catcalled? Why does San Francisco yield a higher catcalling rate?
Yes, she does. The kind of street harassment she experiences in SF: “catcalling me, yelling at me, following me around closely.” She’s also been robbed at gunpoint on Market Street.
I had an interesting experience the other week, as I went to Montreal in Canada. It was still super cold up there, barely getting above freezing this late into the year. Holy hell, the sheer amount of homeless people I saw on the streets, the crazy amount of drug dealers trying to sell me shit, it was next level.
Now, I'm not trying to suggest it's any better or worse than San Francisco. It's bad for the simple reason that Montreal is in this climate zone where it's fucking COLD for 50% of the year.
Anyway, the point I'm getting at is, I had always been under the assumption that San Francisco, (and Oakland) were unique in the temperate climate that enabled the insane amounts of homelessness you see here. Instead what I've just come to realize, it's 110% SF's policies that have enabled this culture.
If its a problem in Montreal, a place where no one should ever be allowed to sleep outside because, quite honestly, they would die, then they too lack the proper policies to deal with it.
For SF to ever fix this problem, they have to first admit that it's not OK, and for all of us here in Hacker News though it seems obvious to us, it's clearly not obvious to the city.
I generally agree with reduced sentences, if any at all, for minor offences.
Once someone becomes a 3+ time offender, it is worth removing them from the street. The majority of cases are caused by a tiny number of people who do it serially because they can.
In Berkeley there's a woman on the streets who has a long history of assaults and property crimes. She obviously doesn't have the mental health care she desperately needs, but I feel the local government is giving up its legitimacy by keeping her on the streets and being all "surprised Pikachu" when she whacks a stranger over the head with a tree branch.
> I feel the local government is giving up its legitimacy by keeping her on the streets
That's generally how I feel when government looks away regarding crime. When you give up the monopoly on violence, you're walking down a dangerous path. Citizens have entrusted the government with law enforcement, but they will return to taking care of that themselves if the government doesn't want the job any more, and I don't see any possibility of that being a good thing.
Have you read Ghettoside? That's pretty much the case it makes about crime in poor African American neighborhoods: governments have done a bad job catching violent offenders there, so people living there take justice into their own hands and perpetuate the problem.
> As I passed them, I noticed another racial reality. It wasn’t only Brandon and the other young men in the cellblock who were black. So was everybody in the courtroom—not just the judge, but the court reporter, the bailiff, and the juvenile prosecutor. So was the police officer who had arrested Brandon, not to mention the police chief and the mayor. Even the building we were in—the H. Carl Moultrie I Courthouse, named after the city’s first black chief judge—was a reminder of the African American influence on D.C.’s legal system.
> This wasn’t my first time in an all-black D.C. courtroom, but something—probably my anger at the Martin Luther King speech—made the reality stand out that day. When I got back to my office, I continued the racial tally. I had been to the detention facility that would be Brandon’s new home more times than I wanted to count, and I knew that all the guards there were black, too. The city council that wrote the gun and drug laws Brandon had been convicted of violating was majority African American and had been so for more than twenty-five years. In cases that went to trial, the juries were often majority black. Even some of the federal officials involved in D.C.’s criminal justice system were African American, including Eric Holder, then the city’s chief prosecutor.
> In September 2014, the Sentencing Project issued a report comparing the attitudes of whites and blacks regarding crime and criminal justice policy. It found that when Americans were asked, “Do you think the courts in this area deal too harshly or not harshly enough with criminals?” more whites (73 percent) than blacks (64 percent) said “not harshly enough.” Media coverage of the report emphasized what the Sentencing Project called “the racial gap in punitiveness.” But the fact that almost two-thirds of blacks displayed such punitive attitudes received little notice. How could it be that even after forty years of tough-on-crime tactics, with their attendant toll on black America, 64 percent of African Americans still thought the courts were not harsh enough?
One of the ways we “otherize” African Americans is by denying that, just like white people, they want secure neighborhoods. And because they disproportionately live in poor neighborhoods, they are disproportionately affected by crime.
It’s california, CCW permits are May-Issue (I.e., very rare) and open carry is banned. It’s less likely that assaulting random civilians will get you shot there than in, say, Texas.
A) Deterrents don't work very well, rarely work at all with desperate people, and far less with people who have mental issues.
B) if you end up in a conflict it's always better to run. It's safer for you than to escalate. In sane countries failing to run can invalidate any claim of self-defense. Thus, you'd find yourself on the hook for "armed assult".
Even if you state or country is crazy enough to have a "stand your ground" law, you are always better served by running away or de-escalating by other means.
Your ego might be hurt, but that is rarely fatal :)
Acting like the parent poster suggested shooting random homeless people as a solution for homelessness is disgusting.
Defending yourself from a person who hits you in the head with a hard object is reasonable (at least in the rest of the world outside of California), shooting too.
I've wondered if what San Francisco needs is a Rudy Giuliani type mayor. Someone to come in a shake up the status quo with valid right leaning polices when it comes to crime.
Rudy Giuliani certainly deserves a lot of credit for cleaning up New York City--as US Attorney when he dismantled the Mafia. Whether his policies as mayor were effective is highly debated.
Agreed. But it's not like the current policies, some of which include blatantly not enforcing laws, are working.
Giuliani was also a prolific mayor when it come to building housing.
I don't think any right leaning or even centrist political candidate in SF could withstand the inevitable smear campaign that far leftist groups would organize against them.
Left wingers are very much in support of housing. It seems like you've come here to grind a political axe. In general it's better to make good arguments in your first comment rather than reveal them in striptease fashion.
I've only donated and voted for liberal candidates. Also, my comment explicitly said 'leftists' which is different than liberals. Argument was also in direct response to a comment. Good day to you~
The US crime rate went down when Rudy was mayor, because in part the population age bubble of the baby boomers among others got older. Crime rates went down all over the us, conservative or liberal mayors.
A thing that also happened with the police doing almost certainly illegal frisking of people on the street in nyc was that they disproportionately were doing this to minorities - this is hugely damaging to our democracy. I think conservatives are mostly white people and they don't see it happening to them,or if it did rarely they were treated better because they are probably white. If you are a young black man and this happens many times it really hurts your psyche, makes you mad.
> I think conservatives are mostly white peoples and they don’t see it happening
It should be noted that while “minorities” (i.e. black and Hispanic people) were disproportionately targeted by stop and frisk, 53% of hispanic people polled supported the program (similar to the 57% of white people who supported it). Indeed, 25% of black people polled supported the program: https://www.blackenterprise.com/nypd-stop-and-frisk-poll-rac.... When you account for the fact that people who vote are older and more conservative than the general public answering polling questions, it’s quite probable that a significant majority of Hispanic voters and a large minority of black voters supported the program. It’s disrespectful to all those people to say that only white people could support the program.
I personally think the program is unconstitutional. But there is a real danger in assuming that “minorities” have liberal policy views. Their voting with democrats because of certain key issues obscures the large representation of conservatism within minority groups. People tend to pretend like black conservatives don't exist, but almost as many black people consider themselves conservative (22%) as white people who consider themselves liberal (24%). Hispanics, meanwhile, are evenly split between conservatives, moderates, and liberals: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245813/leans-conservative-liber....
Views on marijuana legalization are a good example: https://www.people-press.org/2014/04/02/section-2-views-of-m.... 55% of whites, 60% of blacks, but only 43% of hispanics believe marijuana should be legal. Twice as many hispanic people (39%) and slightly more black people (23%) support jail time for minor marijuana possession, as compared to white people (19%). (Remarkably, Hispanics as a group support jail time for minor possession at higher rates than Republicans as a group.)
Likewise with mandatory minimums, 30% of whites, 33% of blacks, and 41% of hispanics view reducing mandatory minimums for drug crimes to be a "bad thing." Hispanics are much closer to republicans (45%) than to democrats (29%) on that measure, even though hispanics overwhelmingly vote Democrat. You see similar results with the death penalty, with almost half of hispanics supporting it, and a third of black people.
In SF, there is major organized crime. It’s very obvious. I remember that during my first year in SF, a travel bag was found with a man mutilated inside.
I live in a cheap studio in the Mission to save on rent. The things I see remind me of my childhood in South America. I just wonder when the kidnappings will start.
Also, even professionals have lost all respect for the city. People with a six figure salary urinating on the streets, why?
It’s really the wild dogs that drove the point home to me. I used to jog on Folsom early in the morning, but after a near run-in with a pack of a half dozen hungry, aggressive dogs (a few chihuahuas, some terrifying pit bulls, and a very angry shiba inu)I have switched to running on a treadmill. SF has gone down hill fast.
There are basically zero public restrooms there. If you need to pee, what exactly else are you supposed to do? Tough it out for the 1.5 hours it takes to ride a bus 5 miles back to your apartment?
Kinda, yeah. There used to be more public restrooms (not least in every bart station) but they shut them down after September 11 for 'security reasons' and have never been able to figure the problem out since. Sure, you could hide a bomb in a public toilet, but on the other hand that's probably the least-bad place for an explosion to occur if someone ever decides to do that.
If you don't have public toilets, then drunk people are gonna relieve themselves in alleys and the like. That's just a fact of life, not a moral issue.
I used to go running in the early morning near Dolores Park. I remember a period of about six weeks when the entire row of cars there parked overnight would reliably have their windows broken every morning. I also struggle to remember ever seeing an SFPD officer patrolling this neighborhood (two blocks from a major police station) on foot.
> I also struggle to remember ever seeing an SFPD officer patrolling this neighborhood (two blocks from a major police station) on foot.
Footbeats have been cut back from pretty much all police incl. in Europe.
Policing(even moreso with reduced personnel) is more reactive than preventative. Getting from A to B and dealing with issue in B is generally quicker and safer by vehicle than having somebody run to B and then dealing with issue. Limited energy stores etc.
It's hot even reactive, when it comes to property crime. Police don't respond to property crimes below a Grand Theft threshold; they just have you file a police report online, and that is only used for insurance purposes.
It looks to me like a great deal of this is rooted in the homeless issue in San Francisco, which is directly related to the very high cost of housing in SF.
Studies show that simply building more housing of any kind whatsoever helps alleviate the problem, even if you build more luxury housing. Lack of affordability is tied to straight up lack of availability. (Seems easy enough to infer that lack of availability should be directly to tied to incidence of homelessness as well.)
Low level crime slowly becomes a drain on the entire neighborhood. Theft, vandalism, taking a crap in the street, it all adds up. Eventually the police will find a way to reduce such crime, or citizens will start building gated enclaves and hiring guards, creating the burbclaves that Neal Stephenson warned us about.
Going to be there next week. Lived there twenty years ago. Haven't spent much time in the city since. All I hear is horror stories. I hope everything is ok? I was going to try to break in my new hiking boots after work each day. Any suggestion on safe places to walk with my pack on? I'm camping in Montana the following week.
In traditional residential neighborhoods it’s still ok. It’s the tenderloins, SoMA, areas of the mission, etc., that have above average street crime. In the residential neighborhoods it’s petty theft, car break-ins and such. Nothing to worry about, but if you live there it can weigh on you after a while.
> it’s petty theft, car break-ins and such. Nothing to worry about
Why are people so chilled-out and blasé about having their things taken or damaged? Are you genuinely not bothered about the destruction due to a political belief about property or do you think it's unavoidable? It doesn't happen in most places - it doesn't have to be that way.
I think they meant that it wouldn't be an issue if you're a visitor and just looking to hike through the area. It's obviously not a good thing, but if I don't live there, I don't have a car to get broken into, so it's not a worry for me to be in that area vs. somewhere where I might get assaulted.
I grew up on the east coast. My inclination has always been: don't leave valuables in cars, especially not visibly so. Keep your stuff in sight and typically on your person. Here in SF, I often see people leave laptops on tables as they go to coffee shop bathrooms and I think, "wow, that person is crazy". (Even though I have never seen their laptops be stolen.) And it wasn't SF that did that to me.
Where are people from that they don't feel they have to be vigilant of opportunistic property crime? I disagree that it doesn't happen everywhere, just that the amount or frequency varies with the place.
I live by a similar mindset, but I do not think it should be like this. It feels like shit, that I have to think of other humans with such a distrust and fear. I'm very envious of homogenous cultures like Japan where you can leave a bike unlocked outside of a store you're shopping at without it being stolen within 10 minutes.
Cars are broken into without even without any valuables in view. There is a common technique for breaking into Teslas, for example, such that the rear side window is broken to gain immediate access to the trunk release. Teslas get broken into on sheer speculation.
Rental cars are frequent targets, so much so that rental car companies remove exterior distinguishing characteristics like labels and license plate frames.
During the day you will be 100% safe. After like 10PM there are a few places downtown that you maybe don't want to walk around alone but honestly if you can ignore homeless people shouting stuff at you the odds of getting robbed or anything are very low.
I walked around SF a lot as a visitor and didn't feel in danger. It was a shocking experience to the abject poverty and the homeless shooting heroin right there on a main street. I was only out and about during daylight though.
I've banned this account because, as we've told you repeatedly before, you're not allowed to use HN as place for ideological battle, and that's basically all you've been doing.
No, that's not because we favor racist mayors. It's because HN needs to be protected against people who only want to use it to advance agendas and fight enemies. If we don't protect it, those things will soon engulf everything else, the same way fire does.
I have no opinion about the grandparent account one way or the other. But are you implying that the original article was NOT "ideological", "advancing agendas" and "fighting enemies"?
If this kind political article is legitimate for this site (and I would argue that it is, given that it touches on the daily experience of many HN contributors), shouldn't it also be legitimate to take the other side of the political debate?
Many articles posted to HN have a political dimension. We don't exclude them because if we did, the site would become less intellectually interesting. The idea of HN is to optimize for what's intellectually interesting. Moreover, it's impossible to define "political" precisely. Basically everything is political somehow.
On the other hand, unmoderated political discussion soon becomes flamewar. We can't allow that either because if we did, flames would consume the site and destroy the community. And that would also be less intellectually interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
So we allow the topics, but try to prevent the hotter discussions from taking their natural course into, basically, war and rage. We want to avoid the latter not primarily for ethical reasons, but because it leads to informational heat death, which is boring. How to handle this? Lots of ways, but also: badly. We do an uneven job of it and don't know how to do much better. Pretty much any thread that gets into these topics makes me cringe. It's shocking and painful how awful people are to each other when they're sure they're right. Curiosity, incidentally, doesn't come with that certainty.
We try to ensure that articles with political overlap have at least some angle that isn't purely political, and that they contain substantial new information. That provides fiber, if you like, to slow down thought processes. This supports better discussion, or at least not such awful discussion.
Another thing we do is urge people not to post comments that abandon curiosity in order to fight enemies. It's not actually so hard to tell these apart. Any comment with a glimmer of curiosity has a tentative quality that remains open to new information and what others have to say. Why wouldn't it? Curiosity, by listening, may get gratified. This is very different from battle comments, which weaponize language and emotion (on the internet, that means snark) in the service of what the commenter feels is worth fighting for. For curiosity, it's important to remain open; for battle, it's important to fasten your armor, cede nothing, and be closed. Once you've triumphed over evil, maybe you can open up again. Battle may be important, but it's inimical to curiosity. Curiosity is the one thing we're trying to optimize HN for, so we moderate against battle no matter what it's for or against.
Another thing we do is down-regulate indignation however we can. Indignation is the strongest force on the internet, including on HN, and the most hostile to curiosity. Perhaps you think we shouldn't, because indignation has some value? Don't worry; no matter what we do, it will always be the biggest force here. Human nature plus internet equals indignation.
Lastly, another thing we do is ban accounts that use HN primarily for battle. Note that word primarily; it's there because of an empirical observation. Accounts that post curiously about lots of different things and occasionally get into a political argument are fine. Maybe we have to ask them not to cross the line into unkindness—but we wouldn't ban them for that. Accounts that primarily use HN to fight opponents are a different species. The first are net positive even if they occasionally burn some health points. The second are net negative, and not in a small way—in a curiosity-based ecosystem, they're an invasive species. This has turned out to be a fair and at least partially objective distinction that is suitable for moderation. If you watch closely what we do when we ban accounts for political battle, it should be clear that this is the test being applied. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Because it's super important for political reasons that San Francisco be seen as failing. It's the same phenomenon as perception of the national economy: if you don't like who's in power, you think the economy is poor.
My grandmother in law just sold her place in SF after living there since the 60s.
7 of 9 offers were from Chinese nationals looking to park their money. Full cash, no inspection, no contingency and of course never visited by the potential buyer.
Market forces and demand are not necessarily about a desire to live there.
I don't think anyone can claim one way _or the other_ on this issue. Once you live in a place that is being used in some part to park mainland Chinese money, like I currently _do_, you really start to wonder why there aren't readily available statistics on this problem.
I don’t know enough to make a declaration. But I do know that she was renting the downstairs (it was a 2 unit apartment) for the past decade to the same people. Once this is a ghost house, no one will live there, thus one rental off the market. Is some demand artificially constrained?
Which of the high-crime areas have rent control? What would the crime look like if the market had let the rents rise? It's my intuition that people rarely commute 1hr in bumper to bumper traffic to smash windows.
The older northern parts of the city have the highest rent control ratio. These are not high crime parts of the city. So there’s no correlation.
What you do see in the high crime areas is a large homeless population - who of course don’t have any rent to pay. I can’t imagine higher rents making the homeless problem any better?
I believe a large amount is attributable to the homeless (or near homeless) population. Everything around them exploded out of their range, and this is the only power they feel they have to not get priced out or feel any semblance of personal power.
Only 50% of the homeless in San Francisco have been in the city for more than 10 years. Housing prices play a role but don't tell the full story.
When looking at the homeless who are still on the street, they're there because they refuse to go to shelters. The vast majority who are on the streets are there because of mental health issues or drugs. The visible aspect of homelessness has much more to do with us failing to provide adequate mental healthcare and a failed war on drugs than with housing prices.
>“We could be keeping them and be giving services while they’re in jail,” says Fabbri. “It could really be effective.
>we’re not solving our problems when we pretend low-level crimes aren’t important.
Those two facts are the crux of the issue. Prisons do not rehabilitate criminals; they just restrain them. Couple that with the fact it costs, on nationwide average, $84 per day to incarcerate someone and the average petty criminal steals less than $84/day and you end up with an uncomfortable conclusion. That conclusion is that it would be cheaper to offer government-funded total coverage crime insurance than it is to arrest the criminals.
A daily theft of $84 per day has much more than $84/day of cost in terms of corrosion of social trust. A government payout cannot fix that - heck it makes it worse.
That is a big "if", of course.
And I thought the initial idea was to have the gov't pay the losses of the victims of thefts, without incarcerating the thieves. As though that would eliminate the victimization.
> Prisons do not rehabilitate criminals; they just restrain them.
I think it's worth pointing out that, while that's certainly true of most if not all of the US prison system, it's not necessarily the case that incarceration is never rehabilitative.
As an example, Allan Beats, who has run the specialty sci-fi shop Borderlands Books, just closed down his adjoining cafe. He was clear about the problems, and crime doesn't come up: http://borderlands-books.blogspot.com/2019/04/borderlands-ca...
Or Lucca Ravioli, just down Valencia Street, closed on the same day. The owner was selling the building, and there's no way anybody could buy the business without having millions to buy the building too. In sum, it was real estate costs: https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/94-year-old-Lucca-R...
I absolutely agree that crime is a problem; I've had 7 bikes stolen over the years. I also agree that the insane rents guarantee people will end up on the streets, and homelessness is comorbid with addictions, which are often fed by crime. But this strikes me as overdramatic. It makes me wonder who funds the organization that produces this.