[inigyou]

What was the vandalism?

Sometimes you see trains with graffiti on one side and a stern duct-taped paper notice offering a reward for turning in whoever drew the graffiti to the police. Which is retarded, it's just paint. They seem to have stopped doing those notices now.

If you think graffiti is vandalism I don't care. If they were smashing the windows then it actually matters.

[pclowes]

Lol, no it was not just graffiti. I dont mind graffiti nearly as much as say:

- open drug use (literally smoking crack on the bus) - screaming threat of violence to everyone one around - purposefully urinating or defecating on the seats. - literally lighting things on fire - deliberately smashing glass at bus stops (somehow very endemic in SF)

I do think graffiti is a public notice of: “this is a place you can treat poorly and behave terribly in with no consequence”

Some graffiti I think is quite artistic and a sincere cultural contribution, but most on the sides of buses are more of the bathroom stall variety.

[inigyou]

I don't think you need fare gates to stop those things. You need police to arrest them. On one visit to Berlin, someone insulted a bus driver and the bus waited 10 minutes for the police to come and arrest him.

Just as importantly, you need to stop arresting people who aren't doing those things. Otherwise there's no differential and no reason not to do them.

> I do think graffiti is a public notice of: “this is a place you can treat poorly and behave terribly in with no consequence”

I think that's only true in authoritarian regimes. The kind of place where all crimes are considered fatally bad, resulting in no differential. Otherwise, if there's graffiti but no feces on the sidewalk, it signals that you can paint graffiti, but you can't defecate on the sidewalk. You see the difference?

[pclowes]

I don’t think you appreciate how hard it is to get arrested and how ineffective it is when a DA won’t prosecute crimes. Like yes in a more perfect and just society, this would not be a problem.

In fact, most cities can operate just fine without barrier-esque fare gates. However, when you are trying to pull a city out of a societal doom loop, you need to do what you can when you can.

I think it would blow your mind if you knew the types of crimes a criminal can commit and be released.

[inigyou]

The USA has 25% of the world's prisoners. I don't think it has a problem with not enough policing.

[pclowes]

This still feels like a good faith discussion so I’ll engage.

The US does over incarcerate on average. There is clearly a problem there! The solution is not abdicating prosecution and the rule of law to make up for it in “progressive” cities.

Taking the Iryna Zarutska case as an extreme example, I don’t think anyone would argue that the killer should have been on that train. He should have been imprisoned/involuntarily committed a long time ago.

It is not progressive or empathetic to allow predators to with severe mental or drug issues with long histories of violence to repeatedly prey on a specific community regardless of the national incarceration rate.

Having people who come across as crazy or violent on public transportation makes the average citizen vote for the very policies that produce over incarceration (or defund public transportation) because they look around and their lived experience is that there are not enough police or bad people in jail and that the taxpayer dollars are wasted on public transportation because it becomes a cesspool of crime and drug use.

If you want to lower incarceration and you want people to use public transportation, it must be clean and orderly and socially sustainable.