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>My story originally happened to run on the same day the New York Times did a piece on the growing problem of shoplifting in the city and the reluctance of loca

>My story originally happened to run on the same day the New York Times did a piece on the growing problem of shoplifting in the city and the reluctance of local law enforcement to police minor thefts. Clearly, this is a trend that will not play well politically and will result in changes sooner rather than later. I found this naive optimism almost hilarious. SF is in no way about to magically get better once voters finally wake up to how terrible their choices have been over the previous decades. The city's disintegration was a long time in the making and is beyond fixable.

smsm42 5y ago
That sounds like American coming to the USSR, seeing a line in from of the bread store and saying "well, it must be some stupid store manager that forgot to order enough bread, he'll surely be fired soon after citizens complain, and everything will return to normal!"
- jjcc 5y ago
  My interpretation would be: voters will never wake up. A more accurate version might be, that statistically voters can not wake up together with some consensus so the problem can be fixed. It's a feature of the system, not a bug. Citizens should accept and live with it.
dude187 5y ago
I wouldn't be so pessimistic as to call it "beyond fixable". It just takes a real effort at restoring law and order, where people who commit crimes know they will be attacked for doing so. That there's an expectation that they will be worse off for committing those crimes than if they were to not do so. A direct juxtaposition of the status quo where most of these people see "not stealing" as a less optimum outcome than "steal something and gain more stuff/money". Granted, that's a tall order, but not a cycle that cities in the US have not had to go through in the past. The hardest part as I see it, is that at it's core it takes a political shift away from the kind of "progressives" that view those committing the crimes as the victims and those being victimized as the "oppressors". The challenge is how to make people wake up and see it before things hit even more of a rock bottom. Not just see it, but vote out those who do not and vote in people who actually make protecting victims of crime as their top priority.

smsm42 5y ago

That sounds like American coming to the USSR, seeing a line in from of the bread store and saying "well, it must be some stupid store manager that forgot to order enough bread, he'll surely be fired soon after citizens complain, and everything will return to normal!"

jjcc 5y ago
My interpretation would be: voters will never wake up. A more accurate version might be, that statistically voters can not wake up together with some consensus so the problem can be fixed. It's a feature of the system, not a bug. Citizens should accept and live with it.

dude187 5y ago

I wouldn't be so pessimistic as to call it "beyond fixable". It just takes a real effort at restoring law and order, where people who commit crimes know they will be attacked for doing so. That there's an expectation that they will be worse off for committing those crimes than if they were to not do so. A direct juxtaposition of the status quo where most of these people see "not stealing" as a less optimum outcome than "steal something and gain more stuff/money". Granted, that's a tall order, but not a cycle that cities in the US have not had to go through in the past. The hardest part as I see it, is that at it's core it takes a political shift away from the kind of "progressives" that view those committing the crimes as the victims and those being victimized as the "oppressors". The challenge is how to make people wake up and see it before things hit even more of a rock bottom. Not just see it, but vote out those who do not and vote in people who actually make protecting victims of crime as their top priority.