[waihtis]

The uncomfortable answer which no one wants to speak about is that an overtly liberal policy doesn't translate to the best possible society, or necessarily even an acceptable one, regardless of how well off the city or state is.

Compare San Francisco to somewhere like Singapore, and ask yourself where would you rather live - and if the freedoms available in SF are worth the trade offs. BTW I'm not taking a stance here as I live in neither location.

[astrange]

The SFPD just refuse to do work because they know refusal will cause people to blame it on "overtly liberal policy" and give them even more funding to do no work.

(In the 70s they also once bombed the mayor's house when they didn't like him.)

[wing-_-nuts]

I don't own a gun, but honestly, if I lived in a place like this, I would try to get a concealed carry license, and frankly if that didn't work I'd probably carry anyway.

In civilized society, you make a pact with the state. They have a 'monopoly on violence' and in exchange, you and your property are protected. That pact seems to be broken in SF, and to a lesser extent in CA at large. People should do what they need to in order to keep themselves safe. If that means a gun? So be it.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

The county is notorious for not giving out concealed carry licenses. Only a local business owner who has been robbed multiple times before would qualify essentially.

[Asparagirl]

Not anymore! California became a CCW “shall issue” state (instead of “may issue”) last June, under NYSRPA v Bruen. There’s a backlog of people applying, but it’s finally possible. https://calmatters.org/guns/2023/03/california-concealed-car...

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

TIL. Thank you for sharing this with me.

[gmassman]

While I agree with your sentiment, the problem with gun ownership in a place like SF is the risk of manslaughter charges. Shooting someone committing a property crime may be seen as justifiable from the eyes of the property owner, but not in the eyes of the law. Unfortunately you’re best off just letting yourself get robbed, or moving away if you don’t want to accept the risks of living with an ineffectual local government.

[wing-_-nuts]

Your probably right, it's probably better just to move. The only time I could ever see myself shooting someone is if my life is in danger, though where I'm from a shotgun loaded with rock salt used to be a common deterant against theft

[collegeburner]

perverse how the places where you probably need a gun most, it's hardest to get.

i pray i never need it but i'm glad to live in a place that's not without its problems, but where i can at least defend myself and my property.

also @JumpCriscross since his comment is dead: that's silly, you shouldn't make a threat you aren't willing to follow up on. more importantly "warning shots" are a really good way to cause collateral damage. might be you shoot through a wall. plus your eye is on the threat so it's irresponsible to shoot elsewhere bc you aren't actually evaluating what's there and what's behind it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> shooting someone committing a property crime may be seen as justifiable from the eyes of the property owner, but not in the eyes of the law

One can fire non-lethal rounds, and aim around a person (or into the ground), instead of at them. I'm not a believer in urban gun ownership. But there are ways to responsibly be one and benefit from it without putting others' lives or your own freedom at risk. (Counterfactual: pulling a gun on a criminal is a good way to have a criminal pull a gun on you.)

[Workaccount2]

What do the police have to do with the fact that prosecutors and DAs aren't filing charges and judges aren't handing out meaningful punishments?

"Oh look, Ricky is stealing again, should we bother arresting his aggressive angry ass again for the 7th time this year? Nah."

[astrange]

They should do their job they're paid for. Do you get to just not do your job when you don't feel like it?

[CTmystery]

Is this actually true? I remember seeing SFPD post stuff on twitter like, "13th time this perp has been brought in, still no charges". They were getting the same guy over and over. It could have been a one-off, but I suppose they were using their platform to show that they _were_ working, and it was a policy of no teeth that let the perpetrators get off easy.

Edit: found the tweet: https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/133728051660988416...

Do you have evidence for the claim that cops in SF stopped working because they didn't like the DA?

[HDThoreaun]

No one is being honest in this debate. I would not take either sides word. I don't live in SF, but a similar city and the police use the same rhetoric while they refuse to do anything except sit in their car all day. No one trusts the police to accomplish anything here because they've been silent striking since covid began and I would not be surprised if the same was happening in SF. The DA is also a shit show though, it's not like you can point to any one person or action and in good faith say "here's the problem"

[mint2]

Here another fun example of the sf police refusing to work — only this one has a happy ending - they actually face consequences.

An la times article said: “ San Francisco police officers Kevin Lyons and Kevin Sien have been temporarily suspended after they were arrested last year in connection with the destruction of evidence. They’re accused of destroying credit cards, identification records and suspected methamphetamine discovered in the luggage of a person staying in a hotel.

Lyons and Sien allegedly told staff that cataloging the evidence would take too long and instead disposed of the credit cards and IDs in a shred bin and flushed the drugs down a hotel toilet, according to state court criminal complaints.”

It’s a story mentioned here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-03/twenty-p...

[yadaeno]

This is not true from my experience. I’ve been the victim of a crime in SF and while they are severely understaffed they were very cooperative and willing to help.

[baremetal]

I'm sure the defund the police rhetoric helped.

[nicolas_t]

I'd use Japan (Tokyo), Taiwan (Tai Pei) or Hong Kong (prior to 2014 and the CCP becoming increasingly authoritarian) as examples instead of Singapore. Singapore is extreme and I think other cities that are less extreme are actually nicer to live in (having either lived or spent time in all 4)

[re-thc]

There's too much focus here (the discussion) on the law itself.

The cities you mention have a different culture. It's ingrained into you as a kid. It's "less liberal" in the sense that the wider society doesn't accept these values. The media, your family and friends and other parts of the environment are a lot more effective than the law.

[nicolas_t]

That's a good point, I think group pressure is definitely a factor there. Just as an example, it would be inconceivable for someone who knows he's sick not to wear a mask when going to work because of the social pressure and opprobrium around those actions.

On the other hand, I also know that in general in any of those countries, the consequences for something like shoplifting are a lot stronger than they would be in most western countries.

[nradov]

In Taiwan the homeless rate is very low because having a homeless relative is shameful. Affluent people do whatever it takes to ensure that no one in their extended family is out on the street in order to save face, even if they don't particularly like those relatives. No such culture of family responsibility exists in the US.

As an island nation, Taiwan also has a somewhat easier time preventing narcotics smuggling. Whereas the mainland Chinese Communist Party has covertly targeted the USA for "Opium War 2" by tacitly allowing the smuggling of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels.

[otreblatercero]

What's there on the other side(the US)? Mexico does not have a fentanyl problem here, maybe there are some American cartels over there in the US which are not being put on the spotlight because... who knows.

[wing-_-nuts]

An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law. Look at major cities across the country. Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad. This isn't 'liberal policies', this is corruption and ineptitude.

[dragonwriter]

> Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad.

Your impressions are, bluntly, wrong.

LA and San Francisco have the 32nd and 37th highest violent crime rates out of the top 100 largest cities in the US, and the 72nd and 7th in overall crime rates. Homelessness, driven by lack of development combined with the the attraction and generation of concentrated wealth is a real California statewide problem (though there are plenty of non-California cities with serious problems, NYC is nearly as bad as LA, and far worse than San Francisco, in terms of population share that is homeless.)

[isubkhankulov]

"homeless and crime" are usually associated with property crime such as larceny.

SF is 4th highest in the United States for larceny rates. Note that larceny is the most frequent type of property crime per the FBI.

[thefourthchime]

There is a high degree of "blueness". I live in Austin, which is very blue, but not so blue that we didn't criminalize public tent living and enforce it. Dallas and Houston are "blue", but far less than Austin.

The West Coast cities, LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle are much more liberal than most "blue" cities.

[mustacheemperor]

Dallas and Houston are two cities with higher violent crime rates than San Francisco, so some array of reasons has Austin better off than both.

Regardless, I live in SF, and love it here, for way more reasons than the tech scene (it's actually a coincidence I live here as far as my job goes). I really hope we can improve this situation, regardless of the relative scale compared to other cities. It seems like part of a national problem.

[all2]

> An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law.

But hasn't the hue and cry been "defund the police"? We heard it as far back as the mostly peaceful protests that ravaged major US cities across the US in 2020-21. And it's been the chant of mostly left-leaning politicians and organizations.

[green_man_lives]

1. Police have never been defunded. San Francisco PD budget is up 5% from 2019. This is similar to every other city in the US (LAPD has $250M more in funding after George Floyd).

2. "Defund the Police" usually means diverting money away from reactive policies (policing) to proactive policies (community initiatives that prevent people from falling into abject poverty to begin with). You can claim that "defund the police" is bad optics, but honestly the US is such a far gone police state that "liberals" could have picked any rallying cry and it would have been weaponized.

3. The reason you see police forces doing less even though they have more funding is because they are using the narrative that they were "defunded" (recall this never happened) as a bargaining chip for police unions to negotiate with lawmakers for less oversight and more funding.

4. There is no correlation between police funding and crime rates. Police only show up AFTER a crime has been committed, and anyone who has dealt with police firsthand knows how much they love to drag their feet:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2022/03/31/preven....

5. This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state. While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.

If your goal is to simply remove "undesirables" from the view of the public then police are a great tool, but if our conception of justice is that crude then we might as well return to the code of Hammurabi.

If the goal is to reduce violence and crime overall, then police are not the best tool for the job. Preventative measures must be taken to keep people from getting to the mental state that causes them to commit crimes.

[s1artibartfast]

Where are you getting your numbers? This link [1], says budget was cut 15% in 2020, 11% in 2021, and 11% in 2022.

This link [2] says police headcount is down 25% from 2017.

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/new-report-sfpd-short-8...

https://missionlocal.org/2023/03/police-staffing-crisis-san-...

[green_man_lives]

https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

Police budget was lowered in 2020, that's from a decrease in tax revenue though, not ideological.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/breed-orders-departments...

It was also increased back to normal levels in 2022.

[uejfiweun]

> While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.

Well, quite frankly, they deserve that outcome a lot more than guys like Bob Lee. I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes

[green_man_lives]

> I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm.

This is some Hammurabi thinking. It's not about protecting "Osama Bin Laden" (although justice should be blind and not paywalled), it's about ensuring that our system produces fewer Osama Bin Ladens.

To steelman your point, let's say that police are 100% necessary in society and the more police the better. In this universe the police never cause collateral damage and are always 100% in the right.

In this world, even if you lock up every "Osama Bin Laden" you are still putting the police officers in harm's way. They are using their bodies to ensure that the Bob Lee's of the world can keep on innovating.

To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means. If society is a machine that produces Osama Bin Laden's as a byproduct, isn't it in everyone's best interest to reduce the rate at which we produce Osama Bin Laden's? Especially the police who put themselves in harms way?

[all2]

> To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means.

Conversely, increase the number of officers. This will cause the incidence per officer to fall.

There are places in the world that have done this. For example [0], where the populous has been deputized in order to quell violent crime.

[0] https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2023/04/03/ecuadors-...

[uejfiweun]

I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line. You see this in places like Singapore that are extremely safe yet have much lower incarceration rates. As for the police obviously it’s unfortunate that they get put in harms way, but it is kinda what they signed up for, to an extent. An over focus on cop safety leads to situations like Uvalde.

If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.

[wing-_-nuts]

'defund the police' has literally only been uttered seriously within the blm movement. Even the most progressive of politicians knew it was dead on arrival.

[telotortium]

Sure, they may have known that "defund the police" couldn't last, but during the summer of 2020, progressive politicians took it seriously enough in public (much of it due to BLM). We got CHAZ in Seattle, Antifa trying to burn down federal buildings and police stations, and progressive DAs (e.g., Chesa Boudin) at the time decided to severely reduce the penalties that they would pursue for even serious crime. A few cities even got around to attempting to redirect funding from police to social workers and the like. Progressive politicians continued to take "defund the police" seriously until the fall, when it was clear that the issue had turned an easy election for Biden into a close election that he was at significant risk of losing. All of this indicated to criminals that law enforcement would be much lighter, which is why crime skyrocketed during that time and has continued to stay elevated until this day

[neoromantique]

Sometimes it helps to read more than just a slogan before commenting on issues. "defund the police" does not mean that there shouldn't be policing, it means that more attention needs to be brought into preventive measures and community building, so that you don't NEED the excessive police force that helps stirring the violence.

[intalentive]

Selective non-prosecution and non-enforcement of the law is a liberal policy. You see it with Soros-sponsored DAs and you see it with immigration. What is a “sanctuary”? Somewhere you don’t have to worry about the consequences of breaking federal immigration law.

[jacquesm]

You can have 'overtly liberal policy' without becoming like San Francisco, and you can have conservative policy without becoming Singapore. Those are outliers.

[amrocha]

Singapore has social housing and minimal unemployment so maybe once SF gets there we can have this conversation.

[intalentive]

I think they have a different drug policy too.

[amrocha]

Nobody is turning to drugs because they're left destitute on the streets in Singapore

[MisterBastahrd]

SF's problem isn't liberal policies. It's the lack of them. The homeless problem is a prime example. Gentrification, NIMBYism, and a lack of affordable housing aren't "liberal."

[ideamotor]

A lot of selfish libertarians in Austin think they are liberal, too. Hmm.

[Hamuko]

Is San Francisco more liberal than major European cities?

[blackshaw]

Another comment in this thread said:

> Since I moved [to SF], I have seen people break into cars (numerous times), fill suitcases with products from Target and Walgreens and leave without paying, casually smoke meth in a crowded bus, empty their bladder and bowels in the middle of the sidewalk, etc. all of this brazenly and in broad daylight.

I'm not aware of any major European city where this kind of behaviour is tolerated, much less common.

[tazjin]

I can confidently say that pretty much nothing I've heard about SF (haven't spent much time there myself other than passing through) would be tolerated in Moscow. It's unthinkable. The worst thing you run into here would be a drunk guy at night or something like that. Moscow isn't exactly an example of a liberal-leaning city though :)

As for smaller cities in Europe like London or Berlin, they're also still reasonably safe (I didn't like night buses in London but that's about it) and the crazy stuff is mostly contained.

I guess a huge part of this is that most countries over here at least have something resembling a working social system.

[luckylion]

Hamburg just started enforcing that pan-handlers mustn't sit down. They haven't outlawed it, but they're pretty actively trying to not make it a common occurrence in the city center. Tent cities, completely open drug consumption, ignoring theft < 1000€, ignoring car break-ins etc would absolutely not fly here. You might get some of that on a local level in a very progressive district of Berlin, but not in other major German cities. So at least for Germany: yeah, I think it is.

[kristofferR]

That's not liberalism at all, that's just dumbness. You seem to label everything you dislike liberal.

It's dumb to jail homeless and mentally ill people, but it's just as dumb to just stop jailing them without providing them the help they need.

The most liberal cities in the world don't have big homeless and crime problems because help and housing is provided.

[kolbe]

> providing them the help they need.

Statements like this seem to be exactly why people are frustrated with SF's policies. What is the "help they need" that will be sufficient to keep them from being a problem? I've known addicts and schizophrenics, and it's near impossible to fix them, even with an affluent and caring family to support them the whole way. What will an incompetent state actor possibly do that is better, other than just lock them up to keep them from harming others?

[blog0r]

basically the help they need is not becoming homeless in the first place. because the stress of that would make most people insane. once you go a few days without sleep, anyone is going to become psychotic. and then once you’ve been psychotic it just gets worse. so basically they just need basic housing and a place to wash their clothes. if you don’t want to give them that just kill them or stop complaining

[kolbe]

You should submit your new baseless theory about schizophrenia and addition to the AMA. Sounds like you've solved this Nobel-worthy problem.

[luckylion]

> That's not liberalism at all, that's just dumbness.

I don't know, I'm not the judge of that, but it sounds a bit like a very mobile goal post. Usually, "liberal policies" are removing or weakening penalties and enforcement. A liberal drug policy will decriminalize drug use. liberal = tolerant, so liberal policies tolerate a lot more things.

And SF is in many regards more liberal than European cities. Whether it's your preferred kind of liberal politics, or whether it's combined with other effective policies etc, is a different question.

[marvin]

Would it be considered a liberal policy to tolerate someone walking into a store, conspicuously stealing ~$500 worth of goods, yelling, punching, and throwing furniture at anyone who confronts them and then returning the next day to do it again?

To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.

[luckylion]

From where I'm sitting: yes, that would be considered liberal policy. It rejects the individual's responsibility and claims society is at fault for individual delinquency and should tolerate deviance.

> To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.

It does to me, too, that's one of the reasons I moved to the suburbs, and it wasn't anywhere as bad as in SF and other US cities. But I felt that the priorities were backwards and I understood that the majority of people wanted them pushed further in the direction I considered wrong. So I moved, because why stay and suffer if you don't believe in those policies but most of your neighbors do?

[triceratops]

> Usually, "liberal policies" are removing or weakening penalties and enforcement.

Are they? In the US "liberal policies" are also associated with higher taxation and government regulation. So which is it?

[luckylion]

A brand can be associated with multiple things at once. If your question is why they don't want to decriminalize tax-fraud, you'd have to ask them.

[hattmall]

I don't know that it really falls under the normal definition of liberal. But it's certainly the epitome of American neo-liberal ideals. This isn't really the same as liberalism in Europe (yet). The bulk of the general problems in SF and the US can be correlated to the number of mental health beds available. In Europe most countries have a rate of around 120 per 100k. In Asia it's upwards of 300. In the US. It's around 12.

Liberalism in the US heavily resists the usage of asylums and actually helping people in general. In Europe that's not really the case.

[re-thc]

> Compare San Francisco to somewhere like Singapore, and ask yourself where would you rather live

Singapore

[bsder]

Executing people for illegal drugs will almost certainly improve the situation in SF quite dramatically for those left alive afterward.

Thankfully, the US and California are still Democracies for the moment.

Anyone who tries to hold up Singapore as a beacon of "good governance" simply isn't working in reality ...

[waihtis]

We will only know this in a 100 years or so.