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Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)
- slater 8y agoFrom June/July
- microbial 8y agoso?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- metildaa 8y agoDoes BART have unlimited liability for the actions of others? Probably not. Should BART have more security at problem stations? Sure. Most of this sounds like a failure of the local police though, transit security is generally not going to handle reporting assault and theft, as those are the jurisdiction of the municipality where the crime occured.
- tdumitrescu 8y agoAFAIK bart police are actual peace officers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_Police_Department https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_Polic... I remember i used to see ads of theirs years ago, prominently displaying their 150K starting salary. Anecdotally, i agree that riding bart has felt sketchier the past few years. I generally ride from SF to Lake Merritt or 12th St Oakland.
- Judgmentality 8y ago> prominently displaying their 150K starting salary I thought that seemed high, but they are still paid quite well. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Bart-Police-Officer-Salaries-E13156_D_KO5,19.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Bart-Police-Officer-Salarie...
- olivermarks 8y agoThere are lots of BART security job vacancies, probably because no matter how high the salary it would be a very dangerous job. This is similar to the social situation in NYC when the Guardian Angels were formed, but what is extraordinary is how wealthy the bay area is today compared to 1980's New York area... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_Angels
- nradov 8y agoLaw enforcement is not even on the top 10 list for most dangerous jobs. I suspect there must be other reasons for the high vacancy rate. http://time.com/5074471/most-dangerous-jobs/ http://time.com/5074471/most-dangerous-jobs/
- JetSpiegel 8y agoThis statistic might be completely different on BART officers only.
- glennpratt 8y ago~$105k based on 1 response, that doesn't seem like much data. The linked job posting shows: > Pay Rate $4,986.87/Month (Base Salary - While in Academy) $5,651.79/Month (Base Salary - Upon Academy Completion)
- masonic 8y agoNot counting overtime, holidays, benefits, or pension. $150K represents the median cost to employ.
- tdumitrescu 8y agoJust going by my memory of what they advertised. Here's a TSV with some public salary data from 2012:https://gist.github.com/shabbychef/5915640 https://gist.github.com/shabbychef/5915640
- BurningFrog 8y agoI think crimes on Bart are the jurisdiction of Bart police. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_Police_Department#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit_Police_...
- diogenescynic 8y agoAnd all they do is give parking tickets. I’ve never seen them inside a train in 8 years.
- ummonk 8y agoI wonder how much of that is due to the conviction of the officer who shot Oscar Grant.
- ryanmonroe 8y agoIf someone decides not to be a police officer because they aren't allowed to shoot unarmed civilians in the back while they're being held face down on the ground, BART is safer without them.
- ummonk 8y agoI'm talking about when someone decides not to confront potential criminals because they might get sent to prison for killing someone when they accidently usetheir pistol instead of a taser. Look, I'm no fan of the police, and often find myself in disbelief when police officers are acquitted (or not indicted) for what can only be described as murder. But the Oscar Grant shooting was clearly a mistake, and whether or not the officer should have been convicted, that kind of conviction will definitely put a damper on officers' willingness to confront people.
- ryanmonroe 8y ago> I'm talking about when someone decides not to confront potential criminals because they might get sent to prison for killing someone when they accidently usetheir pistol instead of a taser. I mean, same idea. If a police officer is not confident they can dependably discern the difference between a gun and a taser, BART is definitely safer without them.
- SllX 8y agoBART police are sworn California law enforcement, same as SFPD or Oakland PD. Only difference is their jurisdiction is BART so technically they should be enforcing the law. That said, I’m down for making any change to this status quo that sees them actually enforcing the law and public order, or a different responsible PD altogether.
- thatswrong0 8y agoYeah, BART police is a joke. I don’t remember ever seeing a BART police officer riding a train with me. I rarely see them in stations. Getting in and out without paying almost seems easier than paying. SF and Oakland officers never stroll through stations, which is so obviously wrong from a public safety standpoint, yet it seems to be policy. Then again I rarely see SF police officers walking the streets as it is. Yet we just kind of let it happen. Not sure what to do to fix it.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoGuns. Every citizen should be armed. /s But really people all just need to show up at city council meetings and demand better.
- masonic 8y agocity council meetings No city council has any authority over BART or law enforcement on BART. (Technically, any officer who happens to be in BART and witnesses a crime could make an arrest -- sworn officers have statewide jurisdiction.)
- rdtsc 8y agoWonder how it compares with other systems like these in Europe or say Japan. Do police patrol there. Wonder if there is another way to fix this. Say figure out why does crime even become an option at all. Lack of jobs, opportunities, etc.
- rleigh 8y agoThe UK has the British Transport Police. They are a branch of the police force dedicated to policing the railways. You won't normally see them on trains, but they have offices in most big stations and if there's trouble then it'll get sorted out on the next stop. Normally you only see the police visibly present when there's a football match or other big event on, and the regular police are also there to deal with the crowds. Seeing trouble is a rarity though. Nowadays most stations have ticket barriers so it reduces the type of person who might dodge the fare. And most people know how to behave.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lacker 8y agoI was especially surprised when that gang of 50 people stormed a Bart and robbed a bunch of passengers and nobody was ever arrested. I don’t know if it’s the Bart police at fault or the Oakland police but it sure seems like law enforcement is weak on the Bart.
- brandonmenc 8y agoGood lord, someone is going to get fed up and pull a Bernie Goetz if that's the sort of thing happening.
- louisswiss 8y agoVery rarely see police on the Tube in London (or in Berlin, Lisbon, Milan or Barcelona for that matter). Still little crime (other than pickpockets) and practically no violent crime. Seems to me like the problem is probably bigger than just failings in law enforcement.
- xvedejas 8y agoI have heard it said that BART is still safer, despite these recent crimes, than walking the streets that BART travels under.
- notyourwork 8y agoSuppose it depends on what street you are referencing.
- ransom1538 8y agoIf you take BART and ride into Oakland -- you are on your own. There is no one that will protect you. My next door neighbor was assaulted. She was brutalized. Sigh. It was bad. THEN she went home, reported it with police. This is where it gets weird. The people that assaulted her -- armed with her ID card went to her APARTMENT -- luckly she was somewhere else with her parents. The people that brutalized her ransacked her apartment without care of being caught. The detective on the case was really awesome from Oakland PD. He talked with me since I saw one of the guys leave the apartment. He mentioned: "She is lucky". Unfortunately, he explained, there is no way to prosecute these guys unless there is camera evidence.
- chaostheory 8y agoI feel that surveillance in the form of Little Sister (https://medium.com/@chaostheory/little-sister-14bf095d3441 https://medium.com/@chaostheory/little-sister-14bf095d3441) will be even more prevalent if not ubiquitous. Decent megapixel cameras now can be bought for about $25. Between the crime that you mentioned and the rise of petty crimes such as package theft, many people are willingly putting Amazon's and Google's eyes both inside and outside of their homes.
- nodesocket 8y agoThis ideology of inaction, or "nothing" we can do about it, is a phenomenon unique to the bay area. I used to live there, and it is one of the reasons I left. Criminal activity is not pursued, bad behavior is not penalized. I'm sure there are many reasons, but I suspect a big factor is that police and politicians are afraid of cracking down due to the political fallout and backlash. There is a palpable disdain for police officers there. The ironic thing is the people who are mostly likely voters and taxpayers are the ones who are fed up with the crime and leaving.
- pteredactyl 8y agoYea I'm in SF not sure how long I'll last. It's a cess pool. Criminals have more rights than children. There was a crazy homeless guy who would shit everyday in front of a school in Bernal. The police couldn't do anything about it. You are completely right about the fear of political fallout for wanting to uphold the law. It's sad.
- pfarnsworth 8y agoMy coworker was sexually assaulted on the BART, on the East Bay side of the tracks. A group of youths started sitting around her, took off her headphones, groped her, took her picture several times with them groping her, laughed and then left after terrorizing her for 10 minutes unabated. There was nothing she could do, she is a tiny, attractive Asian female sitting by herself and no one stepped in to help her (to be fair, who would risk themselves by stepping in against a large group of youths). She contacted the police, but they said there was nothing they could do and frankly they couldn't have cared any less. She never took the BART again, and moved to the peninsula. There's nothing stopping criminals from victimizing you except the law of large numbers, meaning your only protection is dumb luck these days, and not the police. And if it happens to you, the police largely won't do anything about it.
- Bud 8y ago"These days"? So there was some magical protection against criminals in the past, which no longer exists?
- closeparen 8y agoYes, it was called the criminal justice system. At some point along the way we decided to have a minimal police force and prosecute only the most obvious and heinous crimes, letting all kinds of “low level” stuff like this become effectively consequence-free.
- Bud 8y agoSources on when "we" decided that and on the actual reduction in numbers of police, please.
- jeffdavis 8y agoMaybe they should issue more concealed carry permits in bay area counties. It's wrong for the police to simultaneously neglect your protection and also prevent you from protecting yourself.
- anothergoogler 8y agoI don't want somebody shooting for any reason on the BART.
- SllX 8y agoI don’t think anyone does, but I think that is besides the parent’s point.
- wyclif 8y agoI don't either, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let some scummy BART thief rob and assault me when I have a concealed carry permit.
- darpa_escapee 8y agoAgreed. I don't want to be caught in the cross-fire between a criminal and a layman trying to be a hero.
- stickfigure 8y agoI know this sounds crazy, but I'd be willing to tolerate a modest number of bystander deaths if it meant a dramatic uptick in the number of criminal deaths. There can't be that many criminals. The steady-state equilibrium might be safer than the current regime, which is that criminals can assault (and kill) with little risk to themselves. Of course I'd like my chance of death-by-bullet to be zero. But for whatever reason, that doesn't seem to be an option on the table.
- darpa_escapee 8y ago> I know this sounds crazy, but I'd be willing to tolerate a modest number of bystander deaths if it meant a dramatic uptick in the number of criminal deaths. I'm of the opinion that it's better for a criminal to walk free than for an innocent person to be punished or killed for something they have nothing to do with.
- fareesh 8y agoI read a lot of anti-police and criminal apologist rhetoric from that part of the world. Granted I may have some sort of selection bias or sampling bias, but it really does not surprise me to see this take place. It seems to me that there are certain political movements that you can't really criticize publicly for a variety of reasons, who have - through political pressure, rendered the policing power of the state to be largely ineffective. Unrelated to the Bay area: in a region with similar politics - Portland Oregon, I was watching some YouTube videos where some very obnoxious black clad youth were attacking and threatening cars passing to the area. One elderly driver was asked to "go back to North Carolina". It was unlike anything I had ever seen before - and frankly shocking to see in a first world country. This kind of thing routinely happens here in India when there is unrest - police are told to stand down for political reasons when there are violent protests. I imagine that a similar kind of politics have taken hold in some of these areas. I believe Oakland is also the place where a college campus was attacked by the same extremist group. From what I remember reading of the incident, the city's Mayor asked the police not to establish law and order, and they essentially watched on while it happened. I watched a young lady participating in an interview wearing a "Make Bitcoin Great Again" hat get pepper sprayed by one of these miscreants. Is there a reason why this group has not been designated a terrorist threat?
- ryanmonroe 8y agoHow is this story related to these political movements you're describing? The events in the article seem like the usual robberies, unrelated to any political cause.
- fareesh 8y agoLike I said it seems like the local governments in both these places which share the same politics, are involved in actively holding back the local police force from doing their jobs. Is it not reasonable to hold the local government responsible for safety on the train? Given their track record for asking the police to be hands off, isn't the prevalence of unchecked crime in trains, crime on campuses and crime on the streets consistent with that track record?
- corndoge 8y ago"Sibia caught a glimpse of a revolver in the man’s waist, and let go. The assailant slipped out just as the train doors closed behind him, he said." I was under the impression that concealed carry permits are extremely difficult to get in the vast majority of California?
- SllX 8y agoDepends on the County. I think in the majority of counties it is relatively easy, but in the counties that people mostly live, not so much. San Francisco and LA County in particular make it nearly impossible.
- wahern 8y agoIt's effectively up to sheriff of the county wherein the applicant resides. The sheriff in San Francisco County wouldn't grant a permit if your life depended on it, not unless you're rich or famous. IIRC the sheriff in at least one rural county granted them as a matter of course out of principle, as if to spite the SF sheriff. As you say, in general rural sheriffs grant them much more liberally than urban sheriffs. It helps if you know the sheriff or can be vouched for by someone the sheriff is familiar with. I imagine that in rural counties many middle-aged adults are only 1 or 2 degrees separated from the sheriff, anyhow, which suggests that rural and urban sheriffs are more alike then you'd think, especially if you exclude the two extremes; but the vast majority of people in urban areas will be too far removed from the sheriff's social circle. California's county-devolved permitting policies probably aren't quite as unequal and arbitrary as they superficially seem.
- rayiner 8y agoCriminals don’t bother to try and get permits.
- userbinator 8y ago"If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns."
- microcolonel 8y agoWhen you alienate the holders of the monopoly on force, and erase avenues of accountability: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. A vocal minority of the public in the Bay Area seem to openly resent the police and make them unwelcome, and the silent majority don't push back. This is what happens when the police (and the truth) are made unwelcome. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholding-surveillance-videos-of-crime-to-avoid-stereotypes/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...
- diogenescynic 8y agoI’m a big dude, 6’2” and broad shouldered, and even I regularly feel unsafe on BART. I’ve seen tweakers spit on women and attack them, I’ve seen out of their mind bums screaming racist slurs at people in their face, and yet I’ve never seen cops do anything about it. Likewise, I even see BART employees at that window open the disabled stall and emergency exit for homeless people and tweakers to get into BART. If they’d just keep the people out who aren’t paying, they’d fix most of the issues but they don’t even bother. Although, I have seen more cops lately patrolling BART stations (Montgomery and Embarcadero during business hours...) but never seen them in the trains.
- jackcosgrove 8y agoIt seems like the Bay Area is going through what New York City went through in the 1970s and 1980s.
- lwhalen 8y agoAll of California is a victim-disarmament zone. The criminals arm themselves freely, the strong have free reign over the weak, but the law-abiding citizen is prohibited from carrying a weapon that makes them, in a fight, the equal of any criminal or strong-man who wants to harm them.
- twblalock 8y agoThis is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding. People don't want to take public transit if they will fear for their lives, or be surrounded by drug addicts and mentally disturbed people yelling at and spitting on other passengers. BART trains and stations are like this on a regular basis; Muni has the same problems but not as bad. I've seen this kind of thing happen on Caltrain late at night also, but much less often. I have never, ever seen it happen in London or anywhere in Japan. It's easy for people in the Bay Area to believe this is what all public transit is like, unless they have experienced better systems elsewhere. Why would they want to use it, or pay for it with their tax money? It's safer to take your own car, or an Uber. I'm a big fan of public transit, especially trains, but it's just never going to be improved in the Bay Area if people don't feel safe.
- umanwizard 8y agoI don’t have the numbers to back this up, but I strongly suspect that if the true cost of driving (both in terms of environmental destruction and massive land use and construction cost for roads and parking lots) were reflected in the price of cars or gas, people simply wouldn’t be able to afford the luxury of a private commute, and mass transit systems would be able to compete even without any public funding at all.
- closeparen 8y agoSure, but you are describing a situation in which commuters are strictly worse off. It’s unlikely they will vote for that. Remember also that existing transit links are beyond fully saturated. It’s not really possible for people to switch to transit en masse before the decades it takes us to build bus terminals and train tunnels have elapsed. No public transit system has the slack to absorb the Bay Bridge drive-alone traffic, let alone 101 or 280. People physically won’t fit into the vehicles. There are decade-scale projects to address that, and I support them, but I don’t expect to see their fruits during my working life. Anyone working now is going to be retired by the time a second Transbay Tube starts passenger service, assuming we vote to fund it right now.
- 8y ago
- toomanybeersies 8y agoIn Melbourne, we have a special police force (protective services officers) to patrol train stations at night. The anti-authoritarian in my dislikes them, but by all accounts (especially from my female friends), they're actually great. Their mandate is only to stop violence and disorderly behaviour, and they're actually super chill. Ticket inspection and fare evasion isn't part of their purview, which means they're not just armed ticket inspectors. I've had lost of friendly conversations with them while waiting for the train. Compare this to Sydney, where they post full fledged police officers with drug dogs at train stations, which is straight up fascist. The PSOs are also really great at helping out with medical emergencies. I actually see them applying first aid more often than I seem them arresting people. I know that HN is generally an anti-police crowd, and I have no idea what the financial implications would be for getting something like that on the BART (in Melbourne there's generally 2 officers at each station), but they do generally make the train stations a lot safer at night. I don't want to wade too deep into the gun control debate, but it also helps that petty criminals in Australia don't have guns. Unless you're involved with organised crime, there's almost chance you'll be a victim of gun violence here.
- bhengaij 8y agoChalk it up to a person living life in a cozy office to call cops with drug dogs fascism. If you knew what fasicsm is and people who suffered it (my maternal grandfather) did, I can bet you wont ever use that word again. I don't like a lot of current political leaders either but the way eyeball and click hungry media uses this term and the regular audience eagerly laps them up is disgusting.
- umanwizard 8y agoI don’t like the police any more than you do, but calling police presence in train stations “straight up fascist” cheapens the term. When you call every slightly authoritarian policy “straight up fascist”, nobody will take you seriously when you denounce actually fascist regimes.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoHaving police with drug dogs, posted at train stations to catch random people with personal quantities of drugs is straight up fascist in my opinion. Drug use crosses socioeconomic lines, yet drug dogs at train stations (targeted in the poorer suburbs too) ends up unfairly targeting poor people (who are often minorities), especially as wealthier people tend to drive rather than take public transport. Send some drug dogs through the bank offices on a Friday evening and see how much coke you find. Instead they're busting poor people for having a gram of weed on them. Personally, I'd rather that they didn't have drug dogs at all, they tend to victimise users rather than actually stop the root cause of the "problem" (I'm not a fan of drug prohibition at all), i.e. the dealers and the traffickers. Drug traffickers aren't going to be transporting commercial quantities of drugs on the train, they're going to be driving cars. Drug dogs are also generally ineffective and respond more to their handlers signals than actually detecting drugs by scent and are therefore susceptible to their handlers biases, further victimising minorities.
- eqdw 8y agoThe April 22nd attack was the thing that drove me to pull the trigger on my plans to leave the bay area. I was not going to live in a place where the local authorities were unwilling or unable to keep me safe to that degree. I'm glad that now, finally, the victims of that might be getting some justice
- dokein 8y agoThis is, I think, partially the result of decriminalization. When a vocal sub-population says "oh no, but poor people have no agency, and therefore no choice but to commit crime / evade fares, etc. and we should be more lenient" this is the result. And the people who suffer the disproportionately are the working class who rely on public transit. Even if BART doesn't have enough officers, spending a few thousand to put up high-def cameras so some other PD can kick open these assailants' doors and arrest them would help significantly.
- nicoburns 8y agoEvading fares is one thing. Assaulting people us a whole other matter!
- geerlingguy 8y agoIt doesn't seem quite that bad in St. Louis, but the Metrolink has a lot of similar characteristics. Just the fact that all the platforms are open (there are no turnstiles, so you don't even need to pay a cent to board a train or lurk on a platform, any time of day) seems like a major contributing factor. And in my recent rides, maybe 1/5 times would there ever be a person checking tickets. It's definitely a chicken-and-egg problem here—nobody wants the lines expanded if their only experiences are dodgy and slow at best. And it doesn't help that the local news seems to highlight all the public transit crimes on a weekly basis (especially on slower news weeks).
- grogenaut 8y agoHaving gotten a failure to pay ticket on metro the first time I ride for not understanding the system I can tell you it's quite steep $90 in 2000. And it only takes the officers about four stops to walk the whole train. That's a lot of rides without a fare ticket to pay for the one penalty ticket. Also you can often get tickets from other riders. I get asked for my stubs every time I'm in town
- Fins 8y agoWait, I was told here so many times that SV is the best place to live if you want to get anywhere in life, and that people who do not take public transit are mean evil nature-hating bourgeois pigs. /s Interesting that a couple comments that deal with the problem have already been downvoted to death.
- nradov 8y agoThe HN demographic skews male, and I suspect a lot of the men who are big fans of public transport here fail to appreciate how unsafe many women feel on those systems.
- new299 8y agoYes. There’s a reason that Japan created a new term “Chikan” to describe gropers on trains. It’s exceedingly common. Recent reports, suggest that almost every woman who has used a underground in Japan regularly has been groped at some point. I asked the women in Japan who I know well enough, and they confirmed this. Japan tries to combat this with female only carriages. I was recently talking to a woman in the US about this, she suggested that it was also quite common in the US. So perhaps, there’s just a more public discussion about this in Japan. I’d love to see statistics on this, if anyone has them.
- fenomas 8y agoGroping is certainly an issue in Japan, but much less so than in the past. MOJ stats show around 8K cases/year in the sixties and seventies, with that dropping to ~1.5K by 1990 and ~1K in recent years. (Anecdotally it's probably dropped even more than that, as one would expect more cases went unreported in the 60s than today.) Stats: e.g. http://www.moj.go.jp/content/001178520.pdf http://www.moj.go.jp/content/001178520.pdf Side note: according to an article I read at some point, women-only train carriages have apparently not noticeably affected statistics on groping cases. (Which is not to suggest they're not worthwhile for other reasons.)
- et-al 8y agoYeah, there was a recent Twitter survey on this issue by an SF Examiner reporter: https://twitter.com/FitzTheReporter/status/1062092901000204289 https://twitter.com/FitzTheReporter/status/10620929010002042... Wired also mentioned that women in NYC pay on average $26-50/month extra for safer means of transit: https://www.wired.com/story/nyc-public-transportation-pink-tax-gender-gap/ https://www.wired.com/story/nyc-public-transportation-pink-t...
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoI'm sure that some other people have run into this scam on BART but I had it happen a few years ago. Right before the doors close at the SFO BART stop headed to Milbrae, a guy runs on all out of breath yelling and pleading for money to get a ticket for his sick daughter. He's a war vet and needs to get her to the hospital in Travis but they won't let her on the plane for some reason etc...Does this till the Milbrae stop and I assume gets on going back and does it again. When I told him I'd help him if he could just produce his mil-ID or VA-ID he came over and flashed a wad of 50's and 100's and threateningly said "I don't need to show you shit." Then went back to his histrionics. Obviously this wasn't an attack, or illegal but it was pretty brazen, as it was in front of everyone and he didn't even seem to care that everyone saw his huge wad of cash. Most of the people I see doing illegal stuff on BART (and even on WMATA here in DC) don't really seem to think anyone is going to stop them and they seem to be right most of the time.
- theNJR 8y agoHa, I had a guy similar to this today on the SFO airtram going from the rental car drop off to the terminal. He got on at International A and got off at the next stop. Like your guy, he was pleading for money for his daughter. He had a very long back story, including the fact that a police officer already gave him $17 (and referred to the cop by name). Lots of unnecessary detail like that, trying to make it seem more plausible. Everyone ignored him. He got off then jumped on the train going the opposite direction. I wonder how much he makes a day.
- twblalock 8y agoIt happens all the time.
- sizzle 8y agoOne more reason not to carry cash unless concealed in a bag or hidden pocket. I'll pay for things with card or phone just to avoid high-pressure pan handling situations like this.
- mc32 8y agoIf BART wants its ridership to feel safe they need two things: increase officer presence (and prosecute vigorously) and two add cameras all over their properties. No fake pretend cameras. Deter and prosecute violators. Looking the other way when things happen, slaps on the wrists, etc., don’t work. I think BART is shy because at least there is one incident of manslaughter by one of their officers. On the other hand not having officers also leads to death and assuaults of passengers and loss of ridership. Have a strict code of conduct, enforce it vigorously, train officers properly and educate riders via station and in car infation systems. Otherwise it risks going into a service death spiral.
- masonic 8y agoone incident of manslaughter by one of their officers If you're referring to Oscar Grant[0], the verdict was involuntary manslaughter, but I thought it was clearly murder (with, perhaps, questionable sanity) -- Grant was fully subdued and not resisting when he was shot. Ironically, the sentence of IM plus the gun enhancement meant more prison time than Voluntary Manslaughter alone would have. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Oscar_Grant#Closing_arguments_and_verdict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Oscar_Grant#Closin...
- mc32 8y agoObviously they need better training --they should not accidentally shoot people/suspects under control. They could make more use of K9 units to neutralize suspects as well --much as they do in Germany. We should demand more from their security forces as well as from the public both.
- dracodoc 8y agoHow about putting cameras in train?
- kaycebasques 8y agoThis sounds like the symptoms of a death spiral to me. BART doesn’t have enough money to police its cars and stations. They get sued for failing to provide security, resulting in even less money for policing... However, I’m not sure whether it’s actually true that BART is low on funds.
- yellowapple 8y agoFunny that I'm reading this as I'm riding BART.
- ridgeguy 8y agoGiven our overall expenditures on BART, would it cost so very much to ramp up security presence to a level that would prevent at least 90% of these offenses? BART is a critical resource in the Bay Area. It has to be safe and reliable to be useful. I feel like we've spent 95% of what is needed, but haven't gone above the 75% yield threshold.
- wolco 8y agoBy stopping free rides the enforcement will pay for itself and the empty cars will make everyone happier.
- pteredactyl 8y agoSame is true for San Francisco. Criminals have more rights than children. Or taxpayers... If we are to have a functional civilization we must remain open but also learn how to say no to unacceptable behavior. Especially the egregious. Like you see everyday. People littering, shooting up and shitting on the sidewalk. Meanwhile our legislators are passing laws to limit the amount of restaurants in certain neighborhoods. Or trying to ban companies from having their own cafeterias. It's the ideology of 'sounding good'. Empiricism needs to take its place.
- admax88q 8y agoYou're the second person I've seen to say "Criminals have more rights than children" Where do you get your talking points from?
- hanging 8y agoCriminals can drive, vote, sell their labor, enter contracts, and are free to travel without legal emancipation.
- pteredactyl 8y agoFrom myself. I mentioned it once before in this HN post (if that's what you're referring to)
- manfredo 8y agoI can't speak for the above commenter, but in a way street people in SF really are more free than employed people. If I were to break into a car and steal stuff I'd get jailed and released a couple days later, or even the same day. But I'd probably get fired. Whereas someone with no job would get jaled and released with no real consequences. Because the city refuses to enforce many crimes (basically, anything short of significant violence) beyond catching and releasing, the only thing keeping people in line are their employers and peers. And if someone doesn't have a job and their peers don't care about committing crimes, then a whole bunch of stuff becomes de-facto legal.
- 8y ago
- projektir 8y agoI will need to ride the BART this Friday and this thread is not giving me much confidence...
- pageandrew 8y agoIf you’re riding during rush hour you will be fine. During the work day (between rush hours) is also okay, but less people around. Riding early morning or at night is when the real trouble generally happens.
- millzlane 8y agoMy self defense is someone else's responsibility...