5 ms·

Ex-S.F. fire commissioner with fractured skull after metal pipe attack

97 points by nailer 4y ago

headshotz 4y ago
[flagged]
- doodlebugging 4y ago
  Since we already have the 2nd Amendment then it should be obvious to you that you are mistaken. With that in mind, what are your more reasoned thoughts about how to solve the problems in San Francisco? Deep thinking is encouraged here as I don't live there, have never been there, probably will never visit, but still would like to understand cause, effect, and solutions for things that people who live there see as problems. I too would see many of these things as problems if they were occurring in my neighborhood.
  - rationalist 4y ago
    I don't think 2A is the answer here, but I just wanted to point out: "having" something in the Constitution doesn't mean anything when local politicians, courts, and police restrict it.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      2A is Federal Law, so local government can't restrict it. If you think local government has been violating it for years, then it doesn't mean what you think it means, according to the current very-right-wing Supreme Court, which has recently struck down unconstitutional gun laws.
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        > local government can't restrict it Local government isn't supposed to be able to restrict it. But in practice, it often takes a really long time before unconstitutional laws get declared as such by a court.
      - rationalist 4y ago
        The Supreme Court doesn't just go through the books of places and strike-through laws they don't agree with. The law has to be used against someone and it has to be appealed through multiple levels and then the Supreme Court has to be petitioned to review it. It takes a lot of money and time, and many people are just going to settle in the lower courts. Places have had unconstitutional laws on the books for a long time before someone had a case that made it to the Supreme Court. For every case that you do hear about, there are cases that don't make it for whatever reason and you don't hear about. I am definitely not a legal scholar, so if any facts in my comment are wrong please let me know.
        doodlebugging 4y ago
        I believe you are correct and you have identified part of what is broken or frequently abused in our political system. Unfortunately there are only two parties and they seem to focus on all the things that piss off the other guys so much that they are each more than willing to advocate for and attempt to pass new laws that clearly are unconstitutional knowing that if they can maintain control of enough of the process that those laws can be in force for a long time and may bolster their position over that term. Citizens need to be more informed about the whole legislative process, their rights and their responsibilities etc. Voting should be mandatory and more than two parties should be in the process. Somehow we have to make this work or we are all pawns.
    - doodlebugging 4y ago
      Kinda reminds you of how the other amendments are treated doesn't it? Seems to depend a lot on what's socially okay in your region whether it is speech, privacy, religion, etc.
      - notch898b 4y ago
        [flagged]
        doodlebugging 4y ago
        I think this is related to the way firearms are defined in the code. An incomplete collection of unfinished parts is no big deal whether it is part of a firearm or a component of ammunition. It is when they are assembled and ready for use that the relevant laws come into play. I may be wrong and that's okay since I am not an expert on any of this. I just hoped to spark a conversation.
  - x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
    > Since we already have the 2nd Amendment then it should be obvious to you that you are mistaken. The 2A is still being infringed across California. SF continues to not grant conceal carry licenses and open carry is illegal.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      Have there been lawsuits challenging those laws?
      - x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
        There are several active lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of many of California's current gun laws. With the recent Supreme Court ruling, they are making excellent progress forward, but are still often stuck in a process hell driven by the politics of the 9th Circuit Court. Details on the most recent ruling of Boland vs Bonta from a couple weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/11wrknm/preliminary_injunction_granted_in_boland_v_bonta/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/11wrknm/preliminary... You may also see a rather lengthy detail of the state of firearms carry in CA: https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_firearms_carry_megathread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_...
    - doodlebugging 4y ago
      I see no reason why concealed carry should be legal anyway. Open carry should be the norm if you are going to allow individuals to bear arms anytime, anywhere as some 2A supporters argue. Of course I am against open carry too since we already pay for city, state, and federal law enforcement operations that should allow all of us to go about our business without fear of being robbed, assaulted, or murdered. Law enforcement though has been militarized and has become a tool of fascists after a couple of generations of careful fear-mongering designed to turn us against each other and thus build a case, first in one area and then expanding nationwide, for everyone to go around armed all the time increasing the likelihood of unstable personalities using their firearms in crimes of passion that otherwise would not have occurred. Open carry and concealed carry create the environment for an increase in firearm crimes while at the same time failing to serve as a deterrent in the hands of untrained citizens.
  - infamouscow 4y ago
    Here's an idea: what if SF's DA applied the same prosecutorial discretion to anything that looks remotely like self-defense for 30 days. Simply as an experiment to see if there would be a precipitous decrease in crime.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      A drop in crime, after ignoring all the shooting murders?
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        A classic purge scenario. Crime might indeed be lower after.
  - pieix 4y ago
    The 2nd Amendment was in practice not honored in California until June 2022 when the Supreme Court ruled in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. SF still didn't issue its first concealed carry permit until January 2023.
    - doodlebugging 4y ago
      I didn't know this about concealed carry. Thanks for that. Concealed carry or open carry is not the answer though. It clearly doesn't work as a deterrent in places where it is available as crimes still occur in broad daylight against victims who one could assume have a high probability of being armed. In fact, it is more common now that one would be shot in a road rage incident by some coward with a gun than it has been in the past.[0] [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/us/road-rage-shootings-guns-texas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/us/road-rage-shootings-gu...
- 1101010010 4y ago
  This is the way. Carry concealed, get trained and know your legal rights and responsibilities post-Bruen
das-hinterland 4y ago
What is it going to take to admit that The City has a problem? Because the collective denial and doubling down on our failed policies clearly isn't working.
- wahern 4y ago
  A commenter on the SF Chronicle page made an interesting argument: the city should return to at-large elections for the Board of Supervisors. Even though a significant majority of the city roughly agrees the city needs stricter enforcement of the laws, it can't quite get there. Citywide elections typically result in center or right-of-center (in relative SF terms) winners; for example, the most recent left-of-center mayor in SF was Art Agnos, 1988-1992. But a majority of the Board of Supervisors is now left of center; district neighborhoods are too susceptible to pandering and cheap promises. Unlike the rest of the country, for most of its history San Francisco has had at-large elections for the board. It's only in the past 20 years that we've had district elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Supervisors#Election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Supervi...
JPKab 4y ago
[flagged]
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Are you implying that the state of sf laws is due to people on the right wing? Do you think the current sf gov is a right wing one?
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    GP is unclear. It seems they are saying the left is like the right with their attachment to their respective dogma. The reader has to assume the SF govt is left wing.
    - JPKab 4y ago
      Correct. I wasn't as clear as I should have been but you are exactly right. Dogmatic homeless advocates are extremely similar to Evangelical activists: They refuse to allow facts to penetrate their belief system. My mother became a drug addict when I was 3 years old and was homeless and drug addicted until she died in 2015 of an overdose. In the process of trying to help her I became very active in working with the homeless specifically in the Washington DC area and then in Denver. When you actually spend a lot of time and shelters and you're trying to get people to be self-sufficient you start to realize that the advocates who insist that they be given housing without having to give up drugs are absolutely ideologues who care nothing about facts or outcomes. It's a religious crusade to them and it's easy for people like me who grew up in borderline cults to recognize it. It's like a formula of behavior you see. There's a non-zero chance that the evil pieces of garbage that beat this man in the head with a pipe or the guys who stabbed crazy Bob to death were getting fentanyl and free needles provided to them with San Francisco taxpayer funds. I don't mean that the SF government was giving them fentanyl I mean that they were purchasing fentanyl with SF government funds provided to them.
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        I’m really sorry to hear that. The amount of suffering in the US makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t know what the solution is but clearly ignoring it isn’t working.
23B1 4y ago
It'd be great if this discussion didn't death-spiral like the last one. You can argue about the causes and the effects all you want, but unless you're doing something about it – either moving away, getting involved in policy, or volunteering at a soup kitchen – it's all just more ineffectual, angry talk... the same empty 'someone should do something' talk that has kicked this can down the road for decades now.
- abeyer 4y ago
  > volunteering at a soup kitchen Great on you if you are... but doesn't exactly solve issues of people being attacked with metal pipes, no?
  - 23B1 4y ago
    My point is simply that talk is cheap – and this problem exists because that's all anyone does about it.
    - notch898b 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - rationalist 4y ago
        Are those links working for anyone else?
        notch898b 4y ago
        links are fixed above. My bad!
      - junofan 4y ago
        Tough video.
      - lambdasquirrel 4y ago
        I think the problem is that folks in SF have become too desensitized to crazy things like this. It’s a special sort of crazy in the U.S. where on the right, you’ve got folks who seem okay not setting hard boundaries on not-okay levels of violence because it conflicts with their political ideology, and… on the left you also have folks not setting hard boundaries on not-okay levels of crime and violence because doing so would conflict with their narrative of things. I worked in a soup kitchen as a teen. This ain’t a soup kitchen problem.
snarkerson 4y ago
Remember the good old days of Dirty Harry movies where a 44 solved these kinds of problems?
- maxwell 4y ago
  California is now one of only four states with laws prohibiting open carry and requiring a permit for concealed carry. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2023/04/06/which-states-allow-the-permitless-carry-of-guns-infographic https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2023/04/06/wh... In 1971, the only state without a concealed carry ban was Vermont. https://legislature.vermont.gov/statutes/constitution-of-the-state-of-vermont/#:~:text=Article%2016 https://legislature.vermont.gov/statutes/constitution-of-the...
  - 1101010010 4y ago
    California also does not honor nor grant concealed carry permits to non-residents, which is one reason I'll never visit again.
    - maxwell 4y ago
      Vermont won't issue them even for residents, since their constitution prohibits the state from involvement with firearm restrictions. Note the violent crime rate in Vermont was the third lowest of any state as of 2020, after Maine and New Hampshire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
      - 1101010010 4y ago
        Both open carry and concealed carry are legal without a permit in Vermont, which is the model for how States should behave in reverence to the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
      - caeril 4y ago
        Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all share some other interesting commonalities you're not allowed to talk about. We argue about policy all the time, but policy is downstream of other things.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Are any cities safe? Most cities have neighborhoods that outsiders are discouraged from visiting. SF just has a weird dynamic where those neighborhoods become the entire city once the sun goes down and 99% of people board up their windows and doors. Checking violent crime rates in SF vs, say, Boston, Boston is actually a tiny bit higher (6 vs 5 per 1,000 residents). (Source: neighborhoodscout.com)
- jcpsimmons 4y ago
  This isn’t a “weird” dynamic anymore. Have you been to Baltimore lately? Los Angeles? They are third world.
justinclift 4y ago
> FBI data shows violent crime in San Francisco is lower compared with most other large U.S. cities ... Weren't people giving stats for the Bob Lee article(s) saying pretty much the opposite?
- pg_1234 4y ago
  San Francisco seems to have massive sociopolitical pressure to not officially report crime.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Having reported crime in SF after I was burgled via forced entry I can say first hand that it is arduous and the only reason I went through with the process is for insurance reasons. I do not trust those statistics at all. People who value their time more than the goods they were deprived of may decide that it simply isn't worth reporting. Every officer I talked to made sure to tell me that they weren't going to do anything about it, that there was no hope of getting my stuff back, and that I should avoid wasting everyone's time. If I didn't have a rather expensive laptop stolen I wouldn't have bothered. I was required to wait for police to arrive and they took over 8 hours arriving at 5am and all they did was tell me in person they were not going to do anything and they were clearly upset that I actually went through with the report and made them visit. One of the offices that a friend worked at had a homeless person enter the lobby and start harassing people. They called the police who then reprimanded the reception and told them that the homeless person has their rights and does not have to leave, they informed the homeless person that he was under no obligation to leave which made it even more difficult for the office staff to remove him which they were unable to do. Women had to be escorted in and out of the office for the rest of the day while a random homeless person hurled abuse at them. It was all extremely unpleasant. Kate Steinle was a friend of a friend and she was randomly shot and killed by a homeless person on Pier 14 not far from where I was living in SF. The accused was acquitted due to lack of evidence. A senseless killing of a kind lady for which there will be no justice. I did not have much respect for SF police but after living there for some time I have even less respect for them now. This mess is part of their refusal to do their job, maybe that's due to a political diktat but it has been in place for so long now it seems that the current crop of police officers are totally ok with this status quo. I guess everyone who wasn't has already left the force.
gotoeleven 4y ago
The real tragedy would be if this provoked a backlash against san francisco's unhoused plumber community.
readthenotes1 4y ago
I feel like Tim Powers is writing all the news out of San Francisco nowadays.

97 points by nailer 4y ago

headshotz 4y ago

[flagged]

doodlebugging 4y ago
Since we already have the 2nd Amendment then it should be obvious to you that you are mistaken. With that in mind, what are your more reasoned thoughts about how to solve the problems in San Francisco? Deep thinking is encouraged here as I don't live there, have never been there, probably will never visit, but still would like to understand cause, effect, and solutions for things that people who live there see as problems. I too would see many of these things as problems if they were occurring in my neighborhood.
- rationalist 4y ago
  I don't think 2A is the answer here, but I just wanted to point out: "having" something in the Constitution doesn't mean anything when local politicians, courts, and police restrict it.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    2A is Federal Law, so local government can't restrict it. If you think local government has been violating it for years, then it doesn't mean what you think it means, according to the current very-right-wing Supreme Court, which has recently struck down unconstitutional gun laws.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      > local government can't restrict it Local government isn't supposed to be able to restrict it. But in practice, it often takes a really long time before unconstitutional laws get declared as such by a court.
    - rationalist 4y ago
      The Supreme Court doesn't just go through the books of places and strike-through laws they don't agree with. The law has to be used against someone and it has to be appealed through multiple levels and then the Supreme Court has to be petitioned to review it. It takes a lot of money and time, and many people are just going to settle in the lower courts. Places have had unconstitutional laws on the books for a long time before someone had a case that made it to the Supreme Court. For every case that you do hear about, there are cases that don't make it for whatever reason and you don't hear about. I am definitely not a legal scholar, so if any facts in my comment are wrong please let me know.
      - doodlebugging 4y ago
        I believe you are correct and you have identified part of what is broken or frequently abused in our political system. Unfortunately there are only two parties and they seem to focus on all the things that piss off the other guys so much that they are each more than willing to advocate for and attempt to pass new laws that clearly are unconstitutional knowing that if they can maintain control of enough of the process that those laws can be in force for a long time and may bolster their position over that term. Citizens need to be more informed about the whole legislative process, their rights and their responsibilities etc. Voting should be mandatory and more than two parties should be in the process. Somehow we have to make this work or we are all pawns.
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
    Kinda reminds you of how the other amendments are treated doesn't it? Seems to depend a lot on what's socially okay in your region whether it is speech, privacy, religion, etc.
    - notch898b 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - doodlebugging 4y ago
        I think this is related to the way firearms are defined in the code. An incomplete collection of unfinished parts is no big deal whether it is part of a firearm or a component of ammunition. It is when they are assembled and ready for use that the relevant laws come into play. I may be wrong and that's okay since I am not an expert on any of this. I just hoped to spark a conversation.
- x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
  > Since we already have the 2nd Amendment then it should be obvious to you that you are mistaken. The 2A is still being infringed across California. SF continues to not grant conceal carry licenses and open carry is illegal.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Have there been lawsuits challenging those laws?
    - x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
      There are several active lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of many of California's current gun laws. With the recent Supreme Court ruling, they are making excellent progress forward, but are still often stuck in a process hell driven by the politics of the 9th Circuit Court. Details on the most recent ruling of Boland vs Bonta from a couple weeks ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/11wrknm/preliminary_injunction_granted_in_boland_v_bonta/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/11wrknm/preliminary... You may also see a rather lengthy detail of the state of firearms carry in CA: https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_firearms_carry_megathread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CAguns/comments/vlnrrw/the_rcaguns_...
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
    I see no reason why concealed carry should be legal anyway. Open carry should be the norm if you are going to allow individuals to bear arms anytime, anywhere as some 2A supporters argue. Of course I am against open carry too since we already pay for city, state, and federal law enforcement operations that should allow all of us to go about our business without fear of being robbed, assaulted, or murdered. Law enforcement though has been militarized and has become a tool of fascists after a couple of generations of careful fear-mongering designed to turn us against each other and thus build a case, first in one area and then expanding nationwide, for everyone to go around armed all the time increasing the likelihood of unstable personalities using their firearms in crimes of passion that otherwise would not have occurred. Open carry and concealed carry create the environment for an increase in firearm crimes while at the same time failing to serve as a deterrent in the hands of untrained citizens.
- infamouscow 4y ago
  Here's an idea: what if SF's DA applied the same prosecutorial discretion to anything that looks remotely like self-defense for 30 days. Simply as an experiment to see if there would be a precipitous decrease in crime.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    A drop in crime, after ignoring all the shooting murders?
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      A classic purge scenario. Crime might indeed be lower after.
- pieix 4y ago
  The 2nd Amendment was in practice not honored in California until June 2022 when the Supreme Court ruled in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. SF still didn't issue its first concealed carry permit until January 2023.
  - doodlebugging 4y ago
    I didn't know this about concealed carry. Thanks for that. Concealed carry or open carry is not the answer though. It clearly doesn't work as a deterrent in places where it is available as crimes still occur in broad daylight against victims who one could assume have a high probability of being armed. In fact, it is more common now that one would be shot in a road rage incident by some coward with a gun than it has been in the past.[0] [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/us/road-rage-shootings-guns-texas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/us/road-rage-shootings-gu...
1101010010 4y ago
This is the way. Carry concealed, get trained and know your legal rights and responsibilities post-Bruen

das-hinterland 4y ago

What is it going to take to admit that The City has a problem? Because the collective denial and doubling down on our failed policies clearly isn't working.

wahern 4y ago
A commenter on the SF Chronicle page made an interesting argument: the city should return to at-large elections for the Board of Supervisors. Even though a significant majority of the city roughly agrees the city needs stricter enforcement of the laws, it can't quite get there. Citywide elections typically result in center or right-of-center (in relative SF terms) winners; for example, the most recent left-of-center mayor in SF was Art Agnos, 1988-1992. But a majority of the Board of Supervisors is now left of center; district neighborhoods are too susceptible to pandering and cheap promises. Unlike the rest of the country, for most of its history San Francisco has had at-large elections for the board. It's only in the past 20 years that we've had district elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Supervisors#Election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Board_of_Supervi...

JPKab 4y ago

[flagged]

thatguy0900 4y ago
Are you implying that the state of sf laws is due to people on the right wing? Do you think the current sf gov is a right wing one?
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  GP is unclear. It seems they are saying the left is like the right with their attachment to their respective dogma. The reader has to assume the SF govt is left wing.
  - JPKab 4y ago
    Correct. I wasn't as clear as I should have been but you are exactly right. Dogmatic homeless advocates are extremely similar to Evangelical activists: They refuse to allow facts to penetrate their belief system. My mother became a drug addict when I was 3 years old and was homeless and drug addicted until she died in 2015 of an overdose. In the process of trying to help her I became very active in working with the homeless specifically in the Washington DC area and then in Denver. When you actually spend a lot of time and shelters and you're trying to get people to be self-sufficient you start to realize that the advocates who insist that they be given housing without having to give up drugs are absolutely ideologues who care nothing about facts or outcomes. It's a religious crusade to them and it's easy for people like me who grew up in borderline cults to recognize it. It's like a formula of behavior you see. There's a non-zero chance that the evil pieces of garbage that beat this man in the head with a pipe or the guys who stabbed crazy Bob to death were getting fentanyl and free needles provided to them with San Francisco taxpayer funds. I don't mean that the SF government was giving them fentanyl I mean that they were purchasing fentanyl with SF government funds provided to them.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      I’m really sorry to hear that. The amount of suffering in the US makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t know what the solution is but clearly ignoring it isn’t working.

23B1 4y ago

It'd be great if this discussion didn't death-spiral like the last one. You can argue about the causes and the effects all you want, but unless you're doing something about it – either moving away, getting involved in policy, or volunteering at a soup kitchen – it's all just more ineffectual, angry talk... the same empty 'someone should do something' talk that has kicked this can down the road for decades now.

abeyer 4y ago
> volunteering at a soup kitchen Great on you if you are... but doesn't exactly solve issues of people being attacked with metal pipes, no?
- 23B1 4y ago
  My point is simply that talk is cheap – and this problem exists because that's all anyone does about it.
  - notch898b 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - rationalist 4y ago
      Are those links working for anyone else?
      - notch898b 4y ago
        links are fixed above. My bad!
    - junofan 4y ago
      Tough video.
    - lambdasquirrel 4y ago
      I think the problem is that folks in SF have become too desensitized to crazy things like this. It’s a special sort of crazy in the U.S. where on the right, you’ve got folks who seem okay not setting hard boundaries on not-okay levels of violence because it conflicts with their political ideology, and… on the left you also have folks not setting hard boundaries on not-okay levels of crime and violence because doing so would conflict with their narrative of things. I worked in a soup kitchen as a teen. This ain’t a soup kitchen problem.

snarkerson 4y ago

Remember the good old days of Dirty Harry movies where a 44 solved these kinds of problems?

maxwell 4y ago
California is now one of only four states with laws prohibiting open carry and requiring a permit for concealed carry. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2023/04/06/which-states-allow-the-permitless-carry-of-guns-infographic https://www.forbes.com/sites/katharinabuchholz/2023/04/06/wh... In 1971, the only state without a concealed carry ban was Vermont. https://legislature.vermont.gov/statutes/constitution-of-the-state-of-vermont/#:~:text=Article%2016 https://legislature.vermont.gov/statutes/constitution-of-the...
- 1101010010 4y ago
  California also does not honor nor grant concealed carry permits to non-residents, which is one reason I'll never visit again.
  - maxwell 4y ago
    Vermont won't issue them even for residents, since their constitution prohibits the state from involvement with firearm restrictions. Note the violent crime rate in Vermont was the third lowest of any state as of 2020, after Maine and New Hampshire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_violent_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
    - 1101010010 4y ago
      Both open carry and concealed carry are legal without a permit in Vermont, which is the model for how States should behave in reverence to the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
    - caeril 4y ago
      Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all share some other interesting commonalities you're not allowed to talk about. We argue about policy all the time, but policy is downstream of other things.

phendrenad2 4y ago

Are any cities safe? Most cities have neighborhoods that outsiders are discouraged from visiting. SF just has a weird dynamic where those neighborhoods become the entire city once the sun goes down and 99% of people board up their windows and doors. Checking violent crime rates in SF vs, say, Boston, Boston is actually a tiny bit higher (6 vs 5 per 1,000 residents). (Source: neighborhoodscout.com)

jcpsimmons 4y ago
This isn’t a “weird” dynamic anymore. Have you been to Baltimore lately? Los Angeles? They are third world.

justinclift 4y ago

> FBI data shows violent crime in San Francisco is lower compared with most other large U.S. cities ... Weren't people giving stats for the Bob Lee article(s) saying pretty much the opposite?

pg_1234 4y ago
San Francisco seems to have massive sociopolitical pressure to not officially report crime.
- cjbgkagh 4y ago
  Having reported crime in SF after I was burgled via forced entry I can say first hand that it is arduous and the only reason I went through with the process is for insurance reasons. I do not trust those statistics at all. People who value their time more than the goods they were deprived of may decide that it simply isn't worth reporting. Every officer I talked to made sure to tell me that they weren't going to do anything about it, that there was no hope of getting my stuff back, and that I should avoid wasting everyone's time. If I didn't have a rather expensive laptop stolen I wouldn't have bothered. I was required to wait for police to arrive and they took over 8 hours arriving at 5am and all they did was tell me in person they were not going to do anything and they were clearly upset that I actually went through with the report and made them visit. One of the offices that a friend worked at had a homeless person enter the lobby and start harassing people. They called the police who then reprimanded the reception and told them that the homeless person has their rights and does not have to leave, they informed the homeless person that he was under no obligation to leave which made it even more difficult for the office staff to remove him which they were unable to do. Women had to be escorted in and out of the office for the rest of the day while a random homeless person hurled abuse at them. It was all extremely unpleasant. Kate Steinle was a friend of a friend and she was randomly shot and killed by a homeless person on Pier 14 not far from where I was living in SF. The accused was acquitted due to lack of evidence. A senseless killing of a kind lady for which there will be no justice. I did not have much respect for SF police but after living there for some time I have even less respect for them now. This mess is part of their refusal to do their job, maybe that's due to a political diktat but it has been in place for so long now it seems that the current crop of police officers are totally ok with this status quo. I guess everyone who wasn't has already left the force.

gotoeleven 4y ago

The real tragedy would be if this provoked a backlash against san francisco's unhoused plumber community.

readthenotes1 4y ago

I feel like Tim Powers is writing all the news out of San Francisco nowadays.