"adopting so-called zero bail policies allow repeat offenders to get out quickly and commit new crimes."
I don't think this is actually true. At least, it's never been shown to be true in any statistically significant way. It gets repeated because it "feels true"
They've already arrested several of these people. And they'll get more of them.
There are lots of cases in Seattle. Like this guy who was arrested and released 18 times for shoplifting in Seattle over 15 months. And it takes a lot to get arrested for shoplifting in Seattle, so I can only imagine how many thefts a single person was able to achieve.
> Davison said her office has compiled a list of 118 people who together have generated more than 2,400 police referrals for misdemeanor charges in the past five years, all related to theft, trespassing, assault and weapons violations. While King County Jail generally declined to book people for non-violent offenses during the pandemic, Davison said jail officials have agreed to book up to 20 of the people targeted by this enforcement.
So here you have 118 people that have been arrested 20 times, or four times a year, over five years. They never do time, rarely show up for court, and are just released back out to victimize more people. It's a broken system.
It's not just property crime either. There was a shooting in Seattle where innocent by-standers were shot, including a child, in a gunfight between two young men. They were later found to have been arrested 65 time prior despite being very young. And yet they were free to just roam around.
> According to court records, Tolliver has been arrested 44 times, convicted of one felony, 18 gross misdemeanors, and one misdemeanor. Records show Tolbert has been arrested 21 times, convicted of three felonies, and 12 gross misdemeanors.
... if only there was some warning they were dangerous to the public.
The people that commit these opportunistic crimes is statistically small. You can't make valid conclusions either way. "feels true" is just as good as any conclusion. People that make shoplifting their career will continue to do what they know. No bail makes it so much easier, at some point it just doesn't matter if they get caught.
The issue is that we want all criminals prosecuted to the max but we don't want to pay to house them. This has caused overcrowded jails. Even now the prison system is so full that the governor has to figure out how to fix it. Imagine, if everyone has to post bail. It's not going to work.
When I read things like this, part of my brain begins analyzing how effective they were at their caper, I do the same thing with serial killer podcasts and I'm never planning on killing or robbing, but maybe I'll write a book someday.
For being organized they were very unorganized. Could've easily walked out with 5x as much in half the time, at least from the video I watched.
Just saying, again I'm not a crook just have an over active imagination.
Honest question, is there any evidence that Republican politicians are more effective at fighting crime? Or are you just saying that’s the public’s perception?
Democrat politicians sometimes bend over backwards to make themselves seem ineffective at fighting crime or sympathetic to criminals, while Republicans rarely if ever do. Prosecutors are sometimes an elected position, so it is plausibly relevant.
We need to do better than prison for drug addiction and delusional mental illness. Need to make a statewide facility to provide tented area for drug addicts to be removed from cities and suburbs. They can leave the facility after they have recovered from drug addiction or severe delusional mental illness.
> We need to do better than prison for drug addiction and delusional mental illness. Need to make a statewide facility to provide tented area for drug addicts to be removed from cities and suburbs.
That’s exactly like a prison, but probably with unconstitutionally poor conditions by design, not better than a prison, and probably unconstitutional mechanisms for sending people into them as well.
Better than prison (demonstrated, repeatedly) for dealing with addiction and related crime is funding community treatment for substance use disorders, with studies consistently showing both crime reductions and criminal justice cost savings of several multiples of the marginal funding devoted to drug treatment.
But “tough on crime” via greater criminalization makes an easier political soundbite, even if its manifestly worse at actually dealing with crime.
typically they're asking to actually lock people up with high cash bails and non lenient sentences. keeping the criminals off the streets does work even if the bycatch injustice can be intolerable.
> keeping the criminals off the streets does work [citation needed]
One of the primary features of incarceration is that the crime has already been committed. A person is described as a criminal because they've already committed a crime, not because they are likely to do so again in the future.
Yes, jailing folks for doing crimes is likely to keep them from committing crimes out on the streets, and also to intimidate would-be criminals from committing crimes lest they are imprisoned for them. But if you keep imprisoning every kind of criminal, you're just creating job openings for more criminals out there, and plenty of folks willing to fill those voids. You've also got all the problems with prisons bursting at the seams. I don't believe that mass incarceration is really beneficial, overall, for the morale of a populace. You wind up with ugly stuff like organized crime and drug cartels operating with impunity from behind bars, too: great recruiting grounds.
Note Kamala Harris was a prosecutor. Joe Biden started his 2020 campaign at a firehouse in Pennsylvania so he's definitely a champion of first responders who has said he would "refund the police."
If the crime is something like wage-theft (were businesses don't pay workers for hours worked) or attempting to overthrow the government, then no, but if the crime is feeding the homeless or seeking an abortion after being raped, then yes.
IMHO not only that, there is even historical precedent of what is unfolding before our eyes.
The mechanics:
1) while states (or countries) may differ in what they call a crime and in how they decide upon codifying it, how to police crime is almost always decided on the local level.
2) An overwhelming number of cities is run by democrats (or left-of-center parties in western countries)
3) often on such a long timescale that the GOP (or right-of-center parties) has significantly scaled down operations or even stopped nominating candidates altogether. NYC and CA come to mind.
4) While the right certainly has its weak-spots with its clerics (say, smearing some government responsibilities as „socialist“ while a sane mind could call them conservative as well or … just sane) the left certainly has issues with their clerics. Specifically in this case: smearing enforcing the law as racist (while a sane mind would call public safety a social welfare which disproportionately benefits the poorest).
The historical precedent:
It was the American city which, ruled by democrats for decades, became synonymous with crime in culture, evidenced by countless songs, TV-series and movies (or anti-american propaganda by the soviets) of the 1970s and 1980s).
Crime became so unbearable, American city dwellers started voting another party for the first time in decades (NYC and LA come to mind), spawning a political shift into other western countries as well (London, Milan, Marseille, Hamburg, Frankfurt etc).
The “racist” smearing happened back then (in the US it was search and frisk ridiculed as racist despite most performing officers being of the same ethnicity; in Europe its people like Scholz with “racist” skeletons in their closet from their days in local government).
But unlike racism what actually did happen was that people felt safe enough that they moved back into cities effectively ending decades of urban sprawl and starting the great renaissance of urban centers.
And I want to point out that voting GOP (or conservative in other countries) nationally wont fix crime locally. Rather treating our civic duties to actually engage in local elections.
Urban voters, while often overarching on (inter-) national democracy issues are making a mockery of their own governance standards locally when the mayorship effectively gets decided by whom the democrats (SF, PS, SPD, SPÖ, Labour, …) nominate.
This would be fine if they weren't otherwise busy trying to write their own religious beliefs into law across the nation.
Personally, I like the freedom that a low-crime society brings; and would love to vote for a politician who understands this and is committed to bringing crime down, by harsh punishments if necessary.
The fact that 9 times out of 10, the same politician is also trying to enact intrusive big government control over people's medical decisions make this very difficult to do.
Listen, I'm pro-choice too for early pregnancies, but the framing of all abortion as strictly a medical choice like it's taking an aspirin seems very reductive.
Sure, but we are discussing how to address crime focused on luxury L.A. retailers during a time of historic economic inequality, massive inflation, and large numbers of jobs lost or threatened due to automation -- so being reductive seemed like the right thing to do.
Funny enough there's a correlation between income inequality, rising rents, homelessness, and Rising crime.
it's almost as if people could easily afford a home, food, some leisure activities, and their monthly bills they find they have enough and don't need to turn to crime.
Numerous terrible tragedies have beset Black communinities since the Civil Rights era, and some of the worst have consisted of Thug Lyfe men, absent or abusive fathers, abandoned single mothers and their babies, and gangs being the best source of community for young boys and girls alike. The proposed final solution to this was just to kill them off before they had the temerity to be born, which has been the leading cause of death among Black Americans. It does not seem to have had the desired effect so far.
Harsh punishments, such as "the beatings shall continue until morale improves", are really not the pathway to a low-crime society. A low-crime society is one where people enjoy their lives and don't have wants or needs which can be best filled by turning to crime, especially the violent kinds.
The ruling parties have codified some really idiotic stuff into their platforms. It's a miserable situation for independents, moderates, and centrists.
Live-streaming on social media is causing problems where people will live stream and plan an event like this.
Should live-streaming without moderator approval on social be banned? On Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. Yes. We have seen so many issues where live streamers cause riots or commit serious crimes.
It needs to be regulated. If they want to regulate crypto, they need to regulate live streams.
Surely what's key to enabling such occurrences is using some form of communications to co-ordinate the participants? Whether or not the event is live-streamed seems, to me at least, very secondary. Happy to be corrected if there's some aspect I'm ignorant of but the money is in the goods, the participants are not doing pay-per-view on the video stream.
I guess there's an argument that live streams encourages others ? Well if that's significant it's not the "live" bit that matters, it's the ability to make a video of the event available to those who are interested relatively soon after the event, good luck putting a cap on that unless your name is Xi.
> And just this summer, “flash robs” in Maryland, Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere took the joyous spirit of flash mobbery and turned it toward dark ends.
> Earlier this month, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter ordered 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday curfews for minors after a string of flash mob attacks by young people who used email and social media to organize violence, police said. ...
> On Aug. 17, CNN reported on a flash mob in Maryland that suddenly assembled to rob a 7-Eleven. Surveillance footage from the store shows several dozen teens pouring into the store and cleaning it out like locusts in a field. ...
> Flash rob: When the concept of the flash mob is applied to petty larceny.
That was when BART security shut off its underground cell phone service to try and break the ability to organize via phones.
My mom sold men's clothing at Macy's in the sleepy city of Manchester, NH and (circa 1990) one day after she left a whole family came in and the father distracted the sales clerk while mom and the kids cleaned out a few rows of suits. The security guard came running but they were already gone when the clerk realized what happened.
She talked frequently with the security guards about the problems they faced: one was run over by a car by an escaping shoplifter. They weren't allowed to fight back under any circumstance because Macy's could be sued by anyone who was attacked by a security guard.
has an excellent description of an organized shoplifting network in New York City in the 1970s that would sometimes steal goods from delivery trucks behind shops and then fence them at stores in Harlem. (It's a great book, it has descriptions of street life and police corruption that are right out of KRS-One's albums like Criminally Minded.)
I worked at a Tower Records 24 years ago, and being in a college town, we had a high level of theft, perhaps not so organized.
We had no security guards, although we did have a Loss Prevention specialist who would visit on occasion, so basically it was up to clerks and managers to detect any shoplifting.
Of course we were absolutely forbidden from pursuing anyone beyond our front door. Yet, while I was employed there, at least one clerk rushed outside and tackled a thief, recovering the goods. He was roundly praised, but I felt that was a bad idea, because he'd violated policy and could've gotten himself and the store in a lot of trouble.
Being a CD store, we had shelves chock full of high-value, high-demand, small and concealable merchandise. I can't remember the exact nature of our anti-theft measures, but they were minimal. Tower soon went out of business anyway, so perhaps they simply didn't care anymore.
Law enforcement works on statistics and psychology. We do not have nearly enough police or prisons to prosecute dramatically more people. And the US is already the most incarcerated country; this “just build more jails” reasoning seems as suspect as “the solution to having the highest rates of gun violence is more guns”.
I don't have to speculate; that would be your department. There are records. What happens after they are arrested is that they're released to the same communities they attacked previously.
Bingo. This is the real issue. DAs are refusing to prosecute, so criminals are back on the street within hours or days of being arrested.
It's so bad that cops in Southern California try very hard to find evidence that will allow them to hand a criminal over to the feds -- because federal prosecutors will actually prosecute, but state prosecutors will not. (Source: I'm friends with a cop in socal who specializes in theft crime rings)
We need to throw out these inept district attorneys and never elect such people again. A bigger question: how did they get elected en-mass in the first place?
This is a trope but one poorly founded in fact. For example, Chesa Boudin was recalled in SF for his supposed unwillingness to prosecute, but in fact conducted sting operations to target exactly this sort of organized crime:
It's extremely easy for cops to do nothing and then blame the prosecutor when people complain, giving themselves significant leverage over the political process with the headache of electoral accountability. There are a lot of bent cops to go round.
Recall that an executive administrator of the San Jose police union was arrested earlier this year for running a fentanyl dealing operation out of the police union HQ.
> how did they get elected en-mass in the first place?
It's a reaction to unjust laws, for-profit prison systems, lack of police accountability, and high rates of recidivism from not treating the cause of lots of crime.
Your link does not say they are in jail. Furthermore, the CDRC search [1] does not show any inmates with the names from the article in the California system, so what made you think they are in jail exactly?
Crime is down, overall. I don't think we should make laws or changes based on the rare event like this.
But the real prevention is "make living your life possible for everyone". People whose needs are met don't generally go on risky crime sprees like this.
Make housing, healthcare, and food affordable. Give childcare, support education. Crime will plummet.
Decades ago in Eastern Europe (don't know about now), shops were set up so that all goods were behind counters. When you wanted to buy something, you paid at the register in front, then showed the receipt to the clerk at the appropriate counter. I've wondered whether that arrangement was to prevent theft or to increase employment.
Luxury goods will always be targeted cuz of how effective Marketing of luxury goods has become. If you convince the chimp troupe diamonds are magical, a large part ot what you end up spending on is securing your diamonds in vaults of ever growing complexity.
I used to think abortion was a solved issue, everyone agreed child labor was bad, we wouldn't have to worry about hurricanes, etc.
This timeline hasn't exactly proven stellar so far.
You're right though - California did a good job restricting guns. Until that gets overturned (which at this point, I think it will). On the other hand the reason California is so for gun control was originally to prevent the Black Panthers from marching with guns (seriously - gun control in California is deeply racist in origin).
Given all this I just think we'll get there and we'll get there faster than we expected, and we'll all have to pretend to be shocked and then it will become normal.
At this level of coordinated force, you just make sure you steal the gizmo that removes the dye pack while you're there. Though they probably already have dozens of such devices.
It's not an accident that the cops don't stop this...crime grows wherever law enforcement stops, and they's been playing this game for hundreds of years.
I've lived here for years and years; a year long dent isn't something that would change a lot of things, even if it is a pleasant and agreeable trend.
For a greater picture check out unemployment, unfilled municipal employment, homelessness. For extra credit check out the ever increasing number of citations for squatting and trespassing.
Right? Cops have been in on crime since cops existed.
That said, the number of cops were need to prevent stochastic thefts like this is far, far too many. Cops are not the answer here, fixing the reasons people turn to crime is.
