Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cassieramen 3276 days ago
I moved to SF from New York a couple years ago. A huge difference in the homeless populations for me has been the aggressiveness of the SF homeless. I can't recall a single time in New York where a homeless person got in my face or yelled at me or anything of the like. Since being here I've had a full cup of (hopefully) soda thrown on me and been yelled at from a 3ft range multiple times. It's a surreal experience. I'm not sure what led to cultural difference.
2 comments

Bad politics, bad public policy, bad policing.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-new-york-became-safe-f...

NYC used to be worse than SF is now.

"Bryant Park, in the heart of midtown and adjacent to the New York Public Library, was an open-air drug market; Grand Central Terminal, a gigantic flophouse; the Port Authority Bus Terminal, “a grim gauntlet for bus passengers dodging beggars, drunks, thieves, and destitute drug addicts,” as the New York Times put it in 1992."

NYC's "solution":

"In sum, a diverse set of organizations in the city—pursuing their own interests and using various tactics and programs—all began trying to restore order to their domains. Further, in contrast with early sporadic efforts like Operation Crossroads, these attempts were implemented aggressively and persistently. Biederman, for example, worked on Bryant Park for 12 years. When Kiley was struggling to restore order in the subway, he had to withstand pressure from powerful opponents: the New York Civil Liberties Union, the mayor’s office (which had suggested bringing portable kitchens and showers into the subway for the homeless), the police commissioner, and the transit police. In fact, it was after the transit cops resisted Operation Enforcement, Kiley’s first effort to restore order, that he hired Bratton.

By the early 1990s, these highly visible successes, especially in the subway, had begun to express themselves politically. Better than any other politician, Rudy Giuliani understood the pent-up demand for public order and built his successful 1993 run for mayor on quality-of-life themes. Once in office, he appointed Bratton, who had orchestrated the subway success and understood the importance of order maintenance, as New York’s police commissioner.

Under Bratton, the NYPD brought enormous capacities to bear on the city’s crime problem—particularly Compstat, its tactical planning and accountability system, which identified where crimes were occurring and held local commanders responsible for their areas. Giuliani and Bratton also gave the force’s members a clear vision of the “business” of the NYPD and how their activities contributed to it. In short, a theory previously advocated largely by elites filtered down to—and inspired—line police officers, who had constituted a largely ignored and underused capacity."

History has not been especially kind to Bratton, Compstat, and broken-windows policing.
Any references for further reading on that?

From what I've seen, there are a lot of confounding factors in the studies that both back up and refute broken-windows policing. It can be hard to tell what actually works.

Objections aren't so much suggesting that it doesn't work, but that it was unjust, and New York should have been kept as it was in the 80s because the human cost of the cleanup was so high.
Objections, in particular to Compstat but also to broken windows, are that they don't work.
The PABT hasn't really changed that much, at least on the lower levels.
It was somewhat challenging to find good information online on crime at the PABT, but I found a few things that give some indication of how it has changed over time.

Between extrapolations from https://www.panynj.gov/corporate-information/pdf/10-board-me... and this New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/11/nyregion/as-port-authority... it seems that crime at the Port Authority Bus Terminal has decreased by a factor of ten from 1983 to 2013/2014. This seems to be consistent with everything else I have found on the subject, eg statistics in http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/06/nyregion/bus-terminal-addi... which suggest an even greater reduction in robberies specifically.

I would appreciate it if anyone can find better data or spot-check these numbers against other reports, because of course an order of magnitude is very large.

What would happen if you threw a cup of soda on someone in NYC or Boston, Trenton or Baltimore? I think you'd learn very quickly not to do that. Cultivating a culture where that sort of response by the person on which soda is thrown is frowned upon certainly doesn't help.
A homeless woman spit on me in SOMA a few months ago for no apparent reason. Just walked up to me squawking like a bird and spit on me. Probably was on something.

My immediate reaction was to jump out of my chair and aggressively move towards her - I'm actually not sure what I would've done next because it all happened so quickly. Probably shoved her? That seems like a legitimate response to someone walking up and spitting on you. Thankfully I was with a few friends and they restrained me before I could do anything and the woman ran away unscathed.

The entire experience left me so confused. I am legitimately concerned that if I had shoved her I would've been considered the 'bad guy' here be the absurd SF hyper liberals and could've ended up in jail been fired if my employer found out.

What are you supposed to do in this situation? There needs to be some sort of disincentive to this behavior but it seems like the way things are in SF it's actually socially acceptable behavior.

I guess NYC and SF have more in common than we realized.

We have our own spitting lady: http://nypost.com/2017/04/24/notorious-spitting-lady-loses-i...

In many southern tech cities corning someone and yelling at/assaulting them with unknown fluids is a great way to get shot. We recently hired a CA transplant to the dev team and he was shocked how many of us carried.
Do you feel like your life is threatened when someone throws a cup of liquid at you?
If I'm cornered by a crazy man who's shouting and dousing me - if it hits me in the face, quite literally inoculating me - with God knows what? Even here in duty-to-retreat Baltimore, you'd have a hard time calling that other than self-defense.
Not relevant to the parent comment but in places like the UK where acid attacks aren't uncommon, that can be a concern.
Acid attacks are incredibly uncommon in the UK
For anyone curious about the rate, these articles https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/04/27/acid-at... https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/z4dy43/why-acid-attacks-h... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4462016/Two-acid-att... suggest that (on average) there is more than one attack per day in London alone.
In other cities I think the government has your back. The SF police will not respond not a non violent encounter because the court system heavily sympathizes with non violent offenders in SF, to the point where they don't even prosecute. I am at a loss as to what I, as an individual, can do to curb the aggressive behavior.
Use pepper gel?