[native_samples]

Do they realize though?

I was recently on holiday in Europe. We did a boat tour and there were some Americans on the boat, from LA and New York. At lunch their discussion turned more or less immediately to violent crime, their fear of it and the sudden increase in it. What caught my attention the most though was their explanation: it was, we were told, due to insufficient funding for prisons causing prisoners to be released early.

I was quite surprised by this because of threads I'd seen on HN like this one, and because I'd read about the Portland riots, but didn't say anything. Afterwards I found the articles talking about the recall of the LA DA. No mention of prison funding levels was to be found.

The table didn't talk politics explicitly, but I wonder if those people were sufficiently left wing that they'd voted for these policies and were now trying to explain the results as having different causes.