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> The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them w

by wahern 5y ago

> The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them with a more-conservative hard on crime set of leaders. Or, you know, simply replace people like Boudin with pretty much any of their opponents in the last election cycle, "tough on crime" or not. It's very difficult to express how radical Boudin is. It's difficult to say this without seeming hyperbolic, because the term has been abused to death a 1000x over by conservative outlets. But he's basically a Marxist, with both the intelligence and ambition to institute radical policies popular in the American Marxist community.[1] Here's Boudin in 2009 defending Chavez and his constitutional reform removing term limits: "Chavez for Life? There are at least three reasons why the world should congratulate Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on his recent success abolishing term limits", https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/ [1] With apologies to Marxists who also think Boudin's policies are too extreme and imprudent.

iammisc 5y ago
The conservatives are right though. normal liberals are so afraid of agreeing with a conservative that they happily will vote for the destruction of their own neighborhood. Boudin is not a sudden deviation from the norm. SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave.
- wahern 5y ago
  > SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave. That sounds suspiciously like a slippery slope kind of argument. But slippery slope arguments are rhetorical slights of hand. In the realm of public policy, you can usually stop a slippery slope any time you want. And I have no doubt that if the SF electorate understood what Boudin's precise policies would be, Boudin absolutely would not have won. Having lived in SF for the better part of two decades, IME SF politics is not at all like it's portrayed in the national media. But let's see what happens with the recall. I have exceptional disdain for Boudin precisely because I believe he'll do (and is doing) damage to otherwise constructive and productive criminal justice reform movements. Those movements aren't just composed of liberals. Republicans have supported and helped to pass sentence reductions in Congress.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    You said in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27718636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27718636) that you don't oppose his reforms. I really can't understand your viewpoint at all.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - wahern 5y ago
      I generally neither oppose nor support more lenient sentencing as typically proposed in liberal discourse. I think the criminal justice reform movement exaggerates the effects of, e.g., structural racism, particularly as they relate to the finer details of the law and public policy. (IMO structural racism is far more consequential as it relates to economic opportunity, but that's the area least susceptible to legal remediation.) So if, for example, a DA wants to have a policy letting all first time non-violent offenders walk, then so be it. I don't think it'll make a difference one way or another. For the same reason I don't think prosecuting such first time offenses was particularly consequential by itself in terms of creating a criminalized underclass of poor minorities, I don't believe that abstaining from such prosecutions would result in substantial changes in behavior--i.e. more theft. OTOH, there are qualitative boundaries. If you quite literally remove the threat of jail or other serious repercussions regardless of number of offenses, then at the end of the day marginal effects will absolutely dominate. Unlike most crimes of violence, property offenses are principally crimes of opportunity--sociologically speaking, it's far easier to become a serial thief than a serial murderer. At some point the threat of material repercussions is too remote, and so a sizable subset of people will begin taking the opportunities to violate relatively weaker norms regarding inviolability of property. For example, take parking tickets. Parking tickets and towing fees can be a huge, even life-changing, setback for the poor. But what do you think will happen if we tell people that, while we'll still ticket unauthorized parking, failure to pay those tickets would never result in any other consequence--no enforced payment, no wage garnishment, no suspended license? Illegal parking isn't exactly morally reprehensible. It'll skyrocket. But compare that to if you say that material consequences are suspended until the 4th offense? Are a flood of people going to go out and start to park illegally? Probably not. Why change your behavior when after 3 times you're back to the status quo ante? (To be clear, I don't deny that the latter will still see some marginal effects, but it's not the kind of thing I'm going to get worked up over as matter of politics. I'll be happy to let it play out in good faith, if that's what the majority wants, and then discuss policy once we can see the concrete results.)
perl4ever 5y ago
If you're not going to argue with his specific points about Chavez, then you shouldn't, in my opinion, throw it out for the mere purposes of smear-by-association. In other threads, I've seen people attack him for his parents, which also is really wrong, both in terms of blaming him for his parents' actions and in terms of letting people make wrong assumptions about what they were. In order to find out who Boudin is, I read the Wikipedia page at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin I can see how people can disagree with some of the things he's done and blame him for various things. But it's also clear from reading it that he's been honestly trying to reform things, and many of the things he's done don't at all require you to be some sort of extremist, Marxist, whatever, to think they are reasonable. Some of the reforms have been echoed in other places recently, too.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  You shouldn’t attack someone for their parents but how they react to their parents. Boudin has always claimed that his murderer parents are the ones who were somehow wronged. Whereas other children of much worse parents, like Adolf Eichmann, have fully repudiated the acts of their parents.
  - perl4ever 5y ago
    His parents were convicted of felony murder. That is not a violent crime per se. I think if you just say "murderer" it is dishonest by omission, but I doubt "felony murder" is widely understood either without an explanation. I think most people are like "oh, felony murder, yeah, obviously those durn liberals have reduced murder to a misdemeanor in most cases, must have been really heinous to be a felony". And every time I see someone bring it up regarding Boudin, I assess them as a particularly nasty propagandist who for some reason doesn't care about their personal credibility. I'm not saying that his father should or shouldn't be released from prison, but the sentence clearly was a lot longer than many actual murderers get, like for instance the guy who killed George Floyd. I don't think I need to read extensively about the events and trial for it to be obvious that at the time, it was about terrorism, and so they were being punished for being part of a group of terrorists. One may agree or disagree with it for political reasons, but it's not at all the same sort of thing as the ordinary murders in SF that people are blaming on Boudin now. It's not universally agreed that felony murder should be a thing at all, although people of all types generally salivate at using it against their political enemies as for example after the Jan. 6th events.

by wahern 5y ago

iammisc 5y ago

The conservatives are right though. normal liberals are so afraid of agreeing with a conservative that they happily will vote for the destruction of their own neighborhood. Boudin is not a sudden deviation from the norm. SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave.

wahern 5y ago
> SF and other progressive cities have been on the path of electing these kind of radicals for many years. Boudins election was ultimately the result of not heeding the warnings many pundits gave. That sounds suspiciously like a slippery slope kind of argument. But slippery slope arguments are rhetorical slights of hand. In the realm of public policy, you can usually stop a slippery slope any time you want. And I have no doubt that if the SF electorate understood what Boudin's precise policies would be, Boudin absolutely would not have won. Having lived in SF for the better part of two decades, IME SF politics is not at all like it's portrayed in the national media. But let's see what happens with the recall. I have exceptional disdain for Boudin precisely because I believe he'll do (and is doing) damage to otherwise constructive and productive criminal justice reform movements. Those movements aren't just composed of liberals. Republicans have supported and helped to pass sentence reductions in Congress.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- perl4ever 5y ago
  You said in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27718636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27718636) that you don't oppose his reforms. I really can't understand your viewpoint at all.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wahern 5y ago
    I generally neither oppose nor support more lenient sentencing as typically proposed in liberal discourse. I think the criminal justice reform movement exaggerates the effects of, e.g., structural racism, particularly as they relate to the finer details of the law and public policy. (IMO structural racism is far more consequential as it relates to economic opportunity, but that's the area least susceptible to legal remediation.) So if, for example, a DA wants to have a policy letting all first time non-violent offenders walk, then so be it. I don't think it'll make a difference one way or another. For the same reason I don't think prosecuting such first time offenses was particularly consequential by itself in terms of creating a criminalized underclass of poor minorities, I don't believe that abstaining from such prosecutions would result in substantial changes in behavior--i.e. more theft. OTOH, there are qualitative boundaries. If you quite literally remove the threat of jail or other serious repercussions regardless of number of offenses, then at the end of the day marginal effects will absolutely dominate. Unlike most crimes of violence, property offenses are principally crimes of opportunity--sociologically speaking, it's far easier to become a serial thief than a serial murderer. At some point the threat of material repercussions is too remote, and so a sizable subset of people will begin taking the opportunities to violate relatively weaker norms regarding inviolability of property. For example, take parking tickets. Parking tickets and towing fees can be a huge, even life-changing, setback for the poor. But what do you think will happen if we tell people that, while we'll still ticket unauthorized parking, failure to pay those tickets would never result in any other consequence--no enforced payment, no wage garnishment, no suspended license? Illegal parking isn't exactly morally reprehensible. It'll skyrocket. But compare that to if you say that material consequences are suspended until the 4th offense? Are a flood of people going to go out and start to park illegally? Probably not. Why change your behavior when after 3 times you're back to the status quo ante? (To be clear, I don't deny that the latter will still see some marginal effects, but it's not the kind of thing I'm going to get worked up over as matter of politics. I'll be happy to let it play out in good faith, if that's what the majority wants, and then discuss policy once we can see the concrete results.)

perl4ever 5y ago

If you're not going to argue with his specific points about Chavez, then you shouldn't, in my opinion, throw it out for the mere purposes of smear-by-association. In other threads, I've seen people attack him for his parents, which also is really wrong, both in terms of blaming him for his parents' actions and in terms of letting people make wrong assumptions about what they were. In order to find out who Boudin is, I read the Wikipedia page at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin I can see how people can disagree with some of the things he's done and blame him for various things. But it's also clear from reading it that he's been honestly trying to reform things, and many of the things he's done don't at all require you to be some sort of extremist, Marxist, whatever, to think they are reasonable. Some of the reforms have been echoed in other places recently, too.

spoonjim 5y ago
You shouldn’t attack someone for their parents but how they react to their parents. Boudin has always claimed that his murderer parents are the ones who were somehow wronged. Whereas other children of much worse parents, like Adolf Eichmann, have fully repudiated the acts of their parents.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  His parents were convicted of felony murder. That is not a violent crime per se. I think if you just say "murderer" it is dishonest by omission, but I doubt "felony murder" is widely understood either without an explanation. I think most people are like "oh, felony murder, yeah, obviously those durn liberals have reduced murder to a misdemeanor in most cases, must have been really heinous to be a felony". And every time I see someone bring it up regarding Boudin, I assess them as a particularly nasty propagandist who for some reason doesn't care about their personal credibility. I'm not saying that his father should or shouldn't be released from prison, but the sentence clearly was a lot longer than many actual murderers get, like for instance the guy who killed George Floyd. I don't think I need to read extensively about the events and trial for it to be obvious that at the time, it was about terrorism, and so they were being punished for being part of a group of terrorists. One may agree or disagree with it for political reasons, but it's not at all the same sort of thing as the ordinary murders in SF that people are blaming on Boudin now. It's not universally agreed that felony murder should be a thing at all, although people of all types generally salivate at using it against their political enemies as for example after the Jan. 6th events.