12 ms·

S.F. police announce dozens of arrests in crackdown on retail theft

59 points by jseliger 4y ago

timr 4y ago
> Outside the Ross store on Market Street Friday evening, shoppers queued up to enter the store. It's one way the store is trying to reduce rampant theft by limiting the number of people inside the store at any given time. What a dystopia SF has become.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wpietri 4y ago
  Is that based on any personal experience, or just news reports? I've been living here 20+ years and it seems about like it always has been.
  - fundad 4y ago
    Police begged Apple to include an iPhone kill switch because “Apple-picking” was a massive problem.
  - timr 4y ago
    Lived there for nearly a decade, and I've seen my fair share: drug addicts (yes, plural) rolling in the streets in their own feces; people (yes, plural) with open, festering wounds, begging for money; had a psychotic homeless man throw a bicycle at me; followed someone down the street in SOMA, watching as they systematically peered into car windows with a crowbar in their hand; had an unintentional standoff with a man in Van Ness station whom I encountered while he was fleeing from an attack on the platform with an 8-inch butcher knife (a fireman leapt onto him and I kicked away the knife). I chased down someone who snatched an iPhone from a lady on the street (in retrospect this was not my smartest moment, but I did get the phone back). Bad as all of that was, I never saw something like this. SF is like the beginning of a Batman movie. (Sorry for the word vomit. I'm just now realizing how many absolutely insane things happened to me when I lived in SF. I had blocked many of these things out! Some folks will think I'm exaggerating, but if anything, I'm understating these stories.)
BryantD 4y ago
- wpietri 4y ago
  Yeah, I get why people have other impressions: media reports. But local media is under severe financial pressure, and negative news about city crime is both eyeball-grabbing and cheap to report. And right-wing national media has had it in for San Francisco for more than 25 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    That being said, paid media pushes about SF being a hellscape are usually connected to a current political campaign; either to preemptively immunize the city from big spending on some crime initiative with big-pocketed contractors, or to elevate or destroy some candidate for public office. I assume this is London Breed's office begging for the reactionary vote. Imagine thinking 60 shoplifters are a major danger to the city of San Francisco.
- nradov 4y ago
  The data on shoplifting is highly unreliable. Most victims don't file official police reports because it's largely a waste of time. The large nationwide chain retailers do have accurate data on loss rates internally but they don't release it.
  - johndhi 4y ago
    The fact that a number of Walgreens in SF literally closed their doors because of shoplifting in recent years suggests the numbers ain't great.
    - 1253 4y ago
      https://48hills.org/2021/10/no-walgreens-isnt-closing-stores-because-of-shoplifting/ https://48hills.org/2021/10/no-walgreens-isnt-closing-stores...
voakbasda 4y ago
Too little, too late, SF. The damage from the last few years of relative anarchy will not be undone by a few arrests. Get back to me when you stop people from rampantly shitting on the streets.
- NullPrefix 4y ago
  Sir those are two different issues. Let us be clear, no one is arresting street shitters.
  - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
  - tamaharbor 4y ago
    Perhaps they should.
  - voakbasda 4y ago
    They are part of the same issue: dereliction of duty by the people in charge of the city, complacency by the population that keeps those asshats in power, and willful ignorance (denial) by everyone involved about how hostile the city has become compared to anywhere else in the country.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Drop a piece of trash on the interstate in the middle of nowhere and you can be fined $500 or more. Defecate in front of a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco and you get a pass. Strange world we live in.
notlukesky 4y ago
SF voters have a habit of voting for pro-crime government. Being anti-crime is a losing political proposition. After all Dirty Harry from the 1970s was set in SF.
- mcrad 4y ago
- fundad 4y ago
  Not very pro-crime to promote 60 arrests.
  - abakker 4y ago
    It is if the needed number is more like 600. Or 6000. Without knowing the base rate, 60 is just headline bait.
  - timr 4y ago
    How about the part of the story where half of those arrested were given pre-trial diversion?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
godzillabrennus 4y ago
I lived a couple of blocks from Salesforce tower before the pandemic and found the entire city had lost a ground war to homeless drug addicts. There was a break in at the Walgreens in the area one night and I spotted some of the crooks hauling cylinders out of the shattered windows while others were mixing stuff over a fire on the sidewalk. I called the cops and the emergency response operator literally told me “what do you want us to do about it?” I replied “something?”. A guy I knew who rented me office space, who also ran a small business with street access, and is from the area, thought this was an okay response because they stole from a big company, he felt it was a victimless crime. So, while I’m glad to see this is happening I’m doubtful any real change will come to San Francisco till there is real economic harm that befalls the community. Basically, when the Detroit 2.0 story comes to town.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  > the entire city had lost a ground war to homeless drug addicts As a former homeless drug addict, it's less of a war and more of a massacre. Despite the fox news-ass propaganda you see on HN all the time almost no one chooses to be out there like that. When I see folks down like that I think what has been done to them not what are they doing to me. This isn't them taking actions against you, this is the consequences of our policies; chickens home to roost shit. If you can't tolerate it then you must fight to change it.
  - bbkane 4y ago
    Could you please go into more detail? Specific policies and their consequences and how you would change them?
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      No, I'm not going to here today, but I will explain why. On HN every concrete suggestion must be an absolute fortress of a comment: flawlessly argued and meticulously sourced. Especially an in-this-context radical position like "don't blame the homeless for their situation" will have any exposed detail picked at, and that interaction will be read as discrediting the policy itself rather than a reflection on the context where we're having the conversation. So here is the point I am making: letting people suffer and die in poverty in the center of one of the largest engines of wealth generation in history is wicked. Blaming them for it is monstrous. There are many policies this view could lead you to and I spend a lot of time working towards them with others who are working towards them. But that isn't here! Here I am just trying to get people to see the humanity in the people on the street.
ilaksh 4y ago
I think it's a more difficult set of problems than people realize. It does seem like the enforcement has been strangely lax but I believe it's not just an attitude problem but also partly a logistical problem. There are too many desperate and criminals for the system to handle. Because of the economic situation and inequality, lack of sufficient public housing and support as well as cultural retrogressions driven by that, etc. This is not to try to excuse the total out of control situation but just to suggest that there are deep societal issues at least compounding the poor management. Having said all of that I believe if store owners were authorized to use deadly force under some circumstances then much of the crime spree would go away. The underlying societal issues would still be there though, just less obvious.
monero-xmr 4y ago
There are many extremely awful things that have been normalized in SF that are not normal in most (all?) large American cities. For example: Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk. High chance of having your car window smashed and car contents stolen. Retail stores putting ever more items behind lock and key. Women feeling unsafe walking alone in many areas of the city after dark. Public parks full of criminal element that make walking through it a high-stress, high-alert situation. All of this results in a high level of general anxiety and makes it an unpleasant place to live or even visit. Anyone who still lives in SF, I feel extremely bad that this is your life. It’s extremely sad.
- jorts 4y ago
  Which public parks are full of criminal element?
- tptacek 4y ago
  Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark. But the other ones, having lived in San Francisco for a couple years and visited semifrequently afterwards, do feel sort of distinctively west coast. Certainly the reported normalization of daylight retail store robberies seems pretty abnormal! Later Oh, my god, people, yes, I am referring to what’s normal in North America, not Europe. I assumed that was obvious but, whatever, I’m not here to defame Antwerp.
  - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
  - demindiro 4y ago
    > Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark. At least here in Antwerp this is not normal at all, even though there is apparently a pretty big mafia who like making grenades explode. In fact, I can't recall visiting any city, even in other countries, where this is considered "normal".
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
It’s interesting to me that private citizens and businesses in some places can reliably expect that the law won’t protect them but can also reliably expect the law to prosecute them if they defended themselves with the force that the law does. I think this illustrates that the monopoly on “legitimate” violence held by the state comes with a very clear obligation to either use that monopoly or allow others to use violence, otherwise people will see the state as having abdicated its fundamental duty.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  That seems to suggest that folks who have goods stolen from their stores would be justified in using violence to stop the thieves? Though the police doing it for them would be better? I don't see property crimes like shoplifting as justifying violence (armed robbery, sure, but not five-fingering stuff). Does it raise insurance rates for retailers? Sure. Does that raise prices for honest shoppers, yes also. So it's crappy, but attacking the thieves doesn't pass a proportionate response sniff test for me.
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Violence is an absolute requirement for the existence of law. If you have a law saying “you can’t do X” there needs to be some system that enforces the law. Law enforcement cannot exist without actual violence or the threat of violence. I believe what you’re really asking is if law is justified, since it requires violence against people breaking it. Edit: fwiw there is a somewhat extreme libertarian ideology that holds exactly this so you wouldn’t be alone
  - DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
    What is your proposed mechanism of enforcement of laws against robbery?
  - analyte123 4y ago
    What if someone was stealing your property? Let’s say a week or two of income worth. You would just let them walk away with it?
johndhi 4y ago
I also hate the smell and look and fear of spending time in SF. However, does anyone know what the solution really is? We assume it's more police and more charges brought by the DA. I'm not sure the data supports that incredibly well. It would be nice if we took half a percent of the tech money generated in the last decade and built a world class crime reduction program. Maybe a facility (unlike prison) where you don't get educated by career criminals...
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yeah as you suspect the data supports anything but. Carceral responses to crime increase crime, and this has been extensively studied and concretely known for decades. If police solved or prevented crime american cities would be the lowest-crime places in the world. We keep doing this for other reasons, not to decrease crime.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I agree that Carceral responses along are not a sufficient solution, at least not without resorting to extremes that would be untenable in the US. The real problem is loss of social trust and individuals unable or unwilling obey social norms. Once social trust is lost, it is very difficult to restore it.
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  I don’t think they really want to solve the problem. They just want to keep giving money to friends and family to “try to solve the problem”.
- kjksf 4y ago
  San Francisco budget is $14 billion. Of which $672 million is for "solving" homelessness. Austin City budget is $1.3 billion. Yes, half of Austin budget is spent by SF on homelessness alone. Money is not the problem. SF is already getting gigantic chunk of tech money. They just demonstrated, year over year, that the only thing they are extraordinarily good at is wasting this money. What we need is to fire ever single government worker and rebuild the government from scratch. And yes, I know that this is utterly delusional proposal, which is why SF will continue spending like Saudi Prince on crack and SF streets will continue to be lined up with homeless people.
simonbarker87 4y ago
I visited SF in 2014 and hated it. I’ve been to many large cities around the world and can absolutely say it is the worst I’ve been to. Certainly there are worse parts of other cities but as a general level of crappiness, SF wins by a mile. I don’t understand how people live there, I don’t understand why there is no help for the homeless addicts and mentally ill people roaming the streets. I don’t know the history of the city (not American) that has lead to where it is but I do know that I never, ever want to go back there. And that is based on 2014, it seems it has got a lot worse since.
- nradov 4y ago
  SF does offers more help to homeless addicts and mentally ill people than most other local governments in the region. Ironically, this attracts more of them to the city. And just by offering help, they can't legally force people to take it. There is certainly plenty of graft, waste, and stupid policy in the SF homeless-industrial complex. The city government is highly dysfunctional. But any real solutions will have to be implemented at least at the state level.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Why at the state level? Why should people in other areas of California be burdened with poor decisions by a particular city? San Francisco has created conditions that encourage vagrants to flock to the city by simultaneously not enforcing the law and “supporting” the homeless with vast funds paid out to many inefficient non-profits. Add to this a lax policy toward camps and it is no wonder there are huge problems there. I don’t blame the vagrants for going there. Cities try to encourage growth in cities by making it attractive to employers. Why not discourage growth of vagrants by making it unattractive to break the law and camp out on sidewalks?
solaarphunk 4y ago
The amount of mental gymnastics residents (voters) of SF do to normalize the narrative of property crime, along with the horrific state of affairs for mental health and drug addiction, is absolutely wild. Especially given the amount of lip service given to broader social issues in almost every social setting. It is one of the most apathetic and deeply hypocritical situations in America I've ever seen.
verdenti 4y ago
vondur 4y ago
Will those who are arrested actually be prosecuted? That’s the big issue we have in Los Angeles county is the prosecutor declining to file charges.
guerrilla 4y ago
It's sad to see that when this topic comes up, there's so little interest in addressing the causes of these problems rather than simply treating the symptoms. It's especially concerning that people who otherwise present themselves as liberal and libertarian are in favor of such authoritarian policies in this area, especially when all evidence suggests that that simply makes the problem worse. It seems like there's no space for welfare, healthcare and social work, just violence.
wiseleo 4y ago
I actively avoid San Francisco, except perhaps Ocean Beach area, despite living in close proximity. That city lost its appeal. Retail theft needs to be curtailed. We have the technology for this.

59 points by jseliger 4y ago

timr 4y ago

> Outside the Ross store on Market Street Friday evening, shoppers queued up to enter the store. It's one way the store is trying to reduce rampant theft by limiting the number of people inside the store at any given time. What a dystopia SF has become.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wpietri 4y ago
Is that based on any personal experience, or just news reports? I've been living here 20+ years and it seems about like it always has been.
- fundad 4y ago
  Police begged Apple to include an iPhone kill switch because “Apple-picking” was a massive problem.
- timr 4y ago
  Lived there for nearly a decade, and I've seen my fair share: drug addicts (yes, plural) rolling in the streets in their own feces; people (yes, plural) with open, festering wounds, begging for money; had a psychotic homeless man throw a bicycle at me; followed someone down the street in SOMA, watching as they systematically peered into car windows with a crowbar in their hand; had an unintentional standoff with a man in Van Ness station whom I encountered while he was fleeing from an attack on the platform with an 8-inch butcher knife (a fireman leapt onto him and I kicked away the knife). I chased down someone who snatched an iPhone from a lady on the street (in retrospect this was not my smartest moment, but I did get the phone back). Bad as all of that was, I never saw something like this. SF is like the beginning of a Batman movie. (Sorry for the word vomit. I'm just now realizing how many absolutely insane things happened to me when I lived in SF. I had blocked many of these things out! Some folks will think I'm exaggerating, but if anything, I'm understating these stories.)

BryantD 4y ago

wpietri 4y ago
Yeah, I get why people have other impressions: media reports. But local media is under severe financial pressure, and negative news about city crime is both eyeball-grabbing and cheap to report. And right-wing national media has had it in for San Francisco for more than 25 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_values
- pessimizer 4y ago
  That being said, paid media pushes about SF being a hellscape are usually connected to a current political campaign; either to preemptively immunize the city from big spending on some crime initiative with big-pocketed contractors, or to elevate or destroy some candidate for public office. I assume this is London Breed's office begging for the reactionary vote. Imagine thinking 60 shoplifters are a major danger to the city of San Francisco.
nradov 4y ago
The data on shoplifting is highly unreliable. Most victims don't file official police reports because it's largely a waste of time. The large nationwide chain retailers do have accurate data on loss rates internally but they don't release it.
- johndhi 4y ago
  The fact that a number of Walgreens in SF literally closed their doors because of shoplifting in recent years suggests the numbers ain't great.
  - 1253 4y ago
    https://48hills.org/2021/10/no-walgreens-isnt-closing-stores-because-of-shoplifting/ https://48hills.org/2021/10/no-walgreens-isnt-closing-stores...

voakbasda 4y ago

Too little, too late, SF. The damage from the last few years of relative anarchy will not be undone by a few arrests. Get back to me when you stop people from rampantly shitting on the streets.

NullPrefix 4y ago
Sir those are two different issues. Let us be clear, no one is arresting street shitters.
- TreeRingCounter 4y ago
- tamaharbor 4y ago
  Perhaps they should.
- voakbasda 4y ago
  They are part of the same issue: dereliction of duty by the people in charge of the city, complacency by the population that keeps those asshats in power, and willful ignorance (denial) by everyone involved about how hostile the city has become compared to anywhere else in the country.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Drop a piece of trash on the interstate in the middle of nowhere and you can be fined $500 or more. Defecate in front of a sidewalk cafe in San Francisco and you get a pass. Strange world we live in.

notlukesky 4y ago

SF voters have a habit of voting for pro-crime government. Being anti-crime is a losing political proposition. After all Dirty Harry from the 1970s was set in SF.

mcrad 4y ago
fundad 4y ago
Not very pro-crime to promote 60 arrests.
- abakker 4y ago
  It is if the needed number is more like 600. Or 6000. Without knowing the base rate, 60 is just headline bait.
- timr 4y ago
  How about the part of the story where half of those arrested were given pre-trial diversion?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

godzillabrennus 4y ago

I lived a couple of blocks from Salesforce tower before the pandemic and found the entire city had lost a ground war to homeless drug addicts. There was a break in at the Walgreens in the area one night and I spotted some of the crooks hauling cylinders out of the shattered windows while others were mixing stuff over a fire on the sidewalk. I called the cops and the emergency response operator literally told me “what do you want us to do about it?” I replied “something?”. A guy I knew who rented me office space, who also ran a small business with street access, and is from the area, thought this was an okay response because they stole from a big company, he felt it was a victimless crime. So, while I’m glad to see this is happening I’m doubtful any real change will come to San Francisco till there is real economic harm that befalls the community. Basically, when the Detroit 2.0 story comes to town.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
> the entire city had lost a ground war to homeless drug addicts As a former homeless drug addict, it's less of a war and more of a massacre. Despite the fox news-ass propaganda you see on HN all the time almost no one chooses to be out there like that. When I see folks down like that I think what has been done to them not what are they doing to me. This isn't them taking actions against you, this is the consequences of our policies; chickens home to roost shit. If you can't tolerate it then you must fight to change it.
- bbkane 4y ago
  Could you please go into more detail? Specific policies and their consequences and how you would change them?
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    No, I'm not going to here today, but I will explain why. On HN every concrete suggestion must be an absolute fortress of a comment: flawlessly argued and meticulously sourced. Especially an in-this-context radical position like "don't blame the homeless for their situation" will have any exposed detail picked at, and that interaction will be read as discrediting the policy itself rather than a reflection on the context where we're having the conversation. So here is the point I am making: letting people suffer and die in poverty in the center of one of the largest engines of wealth generation in history is wicked. Blaming them for it is monstrous. There are many policies this view could lead you to and I spend a lot of time working towards them with others who are working towards them. But that isn't here! Here I am just trying to get people to see the humanity in the people on the street.

ilaksh 4y ago

I think it's a more difficult set of problems than people realize. It does seem like the enforcement has been strangely lax but I believe it's not just an attitude problem but also partly a logistical problem. There are too many desperate and criminals for the system to handle. Because of the economic situation and inequality, lack of sufficient public housing and support as well as cultural retrogressions driven by that, etc. This is not to try to excuse the total out of control situation but just to suggest that there are deep societal issues at least compounding the poor management. Having said all of that I believe if store owners were authorized to use deadly force under some circumstances then much of the crime spree would go away. The underlying societal issues would still be there though, just less obvious.

monero-xmr 4y ago

There are many extremely awful things that have been normalized in SF that are not normal in most (all?) large American cities. For example: Mentally ill people in high-traffic areas that openly use drugs and defecate on the sidewalk. High chance of having your car window smashed and car contents stolen. Retail stores putting ever more items behind lock and key. Women feeling unsafe walking alone in many areas of the city after dark. Public parks full of criminal element that make walking through it a high-stress, high-alert situation. All of this results in a high level of general anxiety and makes it an unpleasant place to live or even visit. Anyone who still lives in SF, I feel extremely bad that this is your life. It’s extremely sad.

jorts 4y ago
Which public parks are full of criminal element?
tptacek 4y ago
Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark. But the other ones, having lived in San Francisco for a couple years and visited semifrequently afterwards, do feel sort of distinctively west coast. Certainly the reported normalization of daylight retail store robberies seems pretty abnormal! Later Oh, my god, people, yes, I am referring to what’s normal in North America, not Europe. I assumed that was obvious but, whatever, I’m not here to defame Antwerp.
- TreeRingCounter 4y ago
- demindiro 4y ago
  > Three of these things are pretty normal in big cities --- having your car broken into (it was unbelievably bad back in the days where car stereos were valuable), having the soap locked up at the Walgreens, and feeling unsafe after dark. At least here in Antwerp this is not normal at all, even though there is apparently a pretty big mafia who like making grenades explode. In fact, I can't recall visiting any city, even in other countries, where this is considered "normal".

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

It’s interesting to me that private citizens and businesses in some places can reliably expect that the law won’t protect them but can also reliably expect the law to prosecute them if they defended themselves with the force that the law does. I think this illustrates that the monopoly on “legitimate” violence held by the state comes with a very clear obligation to either use that monopoly or allow others to use violence, otherwise people will see the state as having abdicated its fundamental duty.

blacksmith_tb 4y ago
That seems to suggest that folks who have goods stolen from their stores would be justified in using violence to stop the thieves? Though the police doing it for them would be better? I don't see property crimes like shoplifting as justifying violence (armed robbery, sure, but not five-fingering stuff). Does it raise insurance rates for retailers? Sure. Does that raise prices for honest shoppers, yes also. So it's crappy, but attacking the thieves doesn't pass a proportionate response sniff test for me.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Violence is an absolute requirement for the existence of law. If you have a law saying “you can’t do X” there needs to be some system that enforces the law. Law enforcement cannot exist without actual violence or the threat of violence. I believe what you’re really asking is if law is justified, since it requires violence against people breaking it. Edit: fwiw there is a somewhat extreme libertarian ideology that holds exactly this so you wouldn’t be alone
- DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
  What is your proposed mechanism of enforcement of laws against robbery?
- analyte123 4y ago
  What if someone was stealing your property? Let’s say a week or two of income worth. You would just let them walk away with it?

johndhi 4y ago

I also hate the smell and look and fear of spending time in SF. However, does anyone know what the solution really is? We assume it's more police and more charges brought by the DA. I'm not sure the data supports that incredibly well. It would be nice if we took half a percent of the tech money generated in the last decade and built a world class crime reduction program. Maybe a facility (unlike prison) where you don't get educated by career criminals...

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yeah as you suspect the data supports anything but. Carceral responses to crime increase crime, and this has been extensively studied and concretely known for decades. If police solved or prevented crime american cities would be the lowest-crime places in the world. We keep doing this for other reasons, not to decrease crime.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I agree that Carceral responses along are not a sufficient solution, at least not without resorting to extremes that would be untenable in the US. The real problem is loss of social trust and individuals unable or unwilling obey social norms. Once social trust is lost, it is very difficult to restore it.
epicureanideal 4y ago
I don’t think they really want to solve the problem. They just want to keep giving money to friends and family to “try to solve the problem”.
kjksf 4y ago
San Francisco budget is $14 billion. Of which $672 million is for "solving" homelessness. Austin City budget is $1.3 billion. Yes, half of Austin budget is spent by SF on homelessness alone. Money is not the problem. SF is already getting gigantic chunk of tech money. They just demonstrated, year over year, that the only thing they are extraordinarily good at is wasting this money. What we need is to fire ever single government worker and rebuild the government from scratch. And yes, I know that this is utterly delusional proposal, which is why SF will continue spending like Saudi Prince on crack and SF streets will continue to be lined up with homeless people.

simonbarker87 4y ago

I visited SF in 2014 and hated it. I’ve been to many large cities around the world and can absolutely say it is the worst I’ve been to. Certainly there are worse parts of other cities but as a general level of crappiness, SF wins by a mile. I don’t understand how people live there, I don’t understand why there is no help for the homeless addicts and mentally ill people roaming the streets. I don’t know the history of the city (not American) that has lead to where it is but I do know that I never, ever want to go back there. And that is based on 2014, it seems it has got a lot worse since.

nradov 4y ago
SF does offers more help to homeless addicts and mentally ill people than most other local governments in the region. Ironically, this attracts more of them to the city. And just by offering help, they can't legally force people to take it. There is certainly plenty of graft, waste, and stupid policy in the SF homeless-industrial complex. The city government is highly dysfunctional. But any real solutions will have to be implemented at least at the state level.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Why at the state level? Why should people in other areas of California be burdened with poor decisions by a particular city? San Francisco has created conditions that encourage vagrants to flock to the city by simultaneously not enforcing the law and “supporting” the homeless with vast funds paid out to many inefficient non-profits. Add to this a lax policy toward camps and it is no wonder there are huge problems there. I don’t blame the vagrants for going there. Cities try to encourage growth in cities by making it attractive to employers. Why not discourage growth of vagrants by making it unattractive to break the law and camp out on sidewalks?

solaarphunk 4y ago

The amount of mental gymnastics residents (voters) of SF do to normalize the narrative of property crime, along with the horrific state of affairs for mental health and drug addiction, is absolutely wild. Especially given the amount of lip service given to broader social issues in almost every social setting. It is one of the most apathetic and deeply hypocritical situations in America I've ever seen.

verdenti 4y ago

vondur 4y ago

Will those who are arrested actually be prosecuted? That’s the big issue we have in Los Angeles county is the prosecutor declining to file charges.

guerrilla 4y ago

It's sad to see that when this topic comes up, there's so little interest in addressing the causes of these problems rather than simply treating the symptoms. It's especially concerning that people who otherwise present themselves as liberal and libertarian are in favor of such authoritarian policies in this area, especially when all evidence suggests that that simply makes the problem worse. It seems like there's no space for welfare, healthcare and social work, just violence.

wiseleo 4y ago

I actively avoid San Francisco, except perhaps Ocean Beach area, despite living in close proximity. That city lost its appeal. Retail theft needs to be curtailed. We have the technology for this.