4 ms·

A lot of city residents need to come to terms with the fact that some of these progressive criminal justice reforms may need to be adjusted a bit, given that we

A lot of city residents need to come to terms with the fact that some of these progressive criminal justice reforms may need to be adjusted a bit, given that we now have years of evidence of their effects. And/or: We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc. "The beatings shall continue until morale improves" isn't an effective approach to anything, especially since if the victims of such hostile policies actually rise to the occasion, they are typically not rewarded by having their lives work better. Instead, policymakers go "Oh, beatings worked! Let's do more of that!" (Hard eyeroll)

sylens 3y ago
Notice I am not advocating for a complete reversal of these reform-based approaches - I said they need to be adjusted a bit. It is unlikely anything is done 100% correctly on the first attempt, and we are seeing firsthand that there needs to be some further disincentive for so brazenly committing crimes of theft in these areas
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Notice how I opened with "And/or".
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  It's so weird to me how Oregon, for example, tried to adopt Portugals policies on drugs, but seemingly stopped reading at "legalize" and didn't implement anything like mandatory rehab if it's found you need it.
StephenSmith 3y ago
The long term strategies you suggest almost certainly are the long-term answer. But that's just it, those solutions may take years. San Francisco may not last that long.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Yeah, let's put off trying to implement actual ("long-term") solutions because we are in a crisis. Then make new excuses next year for how we still can't afford to think long-term because our problems are so bad right now.
- labcomputer 3y ago
  The trouble is that they’ve been putting off long-term solutions for a very long time, at least 30 years. The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The second best time is today.
paulcole 3y ago
> make a car-optional lifestyle more viable You are more optimistic than I am. I’m 40, have never driven a car, and grew up in a very rural part of the country, went to college in the suburbs, and now live in a pretty urban area. A lot of people say they want a car-optional lifestyle, but most really really don’t. If you make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, the vast majority of people will make up a new excuse for why it won’t for them. “I have to carry… The kids need to… My job is… It takes too long…”
localplume 3y ago
[dead]
vasco 3y ago
> The beatings shall continue until morale improves Sure beatings don't improve morale, but since we're not talking about improving the morale of thieves, but rather about making theft a losing proposition, I think the point is not as invalid as you frame it. Unless your point is that there's no advantage in creating consequences for crime because you don't think negative consequences have a deterring effect, which is not something I agree with. Surely you have been put in time-out by your parents or gotten a toy taken away which illustrated this point for you.
- secstate 3y ago
  Not sure if you either remember being a kid and/or have kids of your own, but negative consequences are almost always inferior to positive consequences, or simple reframing. That doesn't mean there should be no negative consequences ever, life is hardly so black and white. But a discipline system built primarily on negative consequences has troubling relationship costs that only become obvious much later down the line. Parenting via negative consequences is actually very similar to industrial externalities. Sure, there are results right now, but the cost of those results will devastate the environment 10, 20, 100 years from now.
- scoofy 3y ago
  We're talking about people looking at $1,500+/month rent with multiple roommates... if they're lucky, for the rest of their lives. That is not offering people a future. There is no viable path to prosperity. There is no path for lower-class folks to achieve a private residence with a spouse. When these people increase productivity, rents will capture that wealth. Why should people play by these rules? A tiny condo in SF is over 10x median income before taxes... and we have a very high median income. The entire system of intentional real estate shortages we have is effectively a cartel. It's a zero-sum game, which is extractive by nature. We need housing for lower-middle class people. We need housing for poor people. We need people to have a future to lose. We need people to have a path to build wealth. Right now, in most liberal urban areas, we just don't. We make up every excuse in the book to preserve the faux-utopia for the incumbent homeowners who set up the system decades ago and have all literally become multi-millionaires from it.
Aunche 3y ago
Interesting how you're characterizing enforcement of property crime as "beatings", and not stealing things as "morale".
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  The OP assumes people are stealing to alleviate financial duress caused by inflation. If that's accurate, then giving people relief in a way that doesn't encourage them to intentionally be failures and doesn't make it someone else's responsibility to pay for their needs is the optimal solution.
  - Aunche 3y ago
    Stealing alleviates one's personal duress at the expense of someone else's. If they instead worked a real job, they would at least be providing at $18/hr, SF's minimum wage, of services to their community. SF already spent over a billion dollars on housing alone. People should ensure that is prudently spent rather than asking for even more.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Years ago, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, working a full-time minimum wage job wouldn't cover rent in the cheapest dive I could find listed for San Francisco. At that time, a room in an SRO was like a thousand dollars a month in SF. I've said many time that I believe California is the dumping ground for homeless people across the nation. California has something like 12 percent of the US population and 25 percent of the US homeless population and a high percentage of chronically homeless. I was responding to a comment that opens with You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on - although the problem may be worse in San Francisco. The comment wasn't about San Francisco per se and my reply was not about San Francisco per se. The nation as a whole needs to address certain things. San Francisco likely cannot solve this alone, no matter how draconian they are willing to be. People go there for the weather, among other things. That's not a factor policy can resolve.
david38 3y ago
Right, because all these brazen thieves have a right to do that because housing is expensive.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  No. They don't have any such right. But if you design a world where it's more punishing to play by the rules than to break them, some people will break them. That's just reality.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    Thus, punishing breakage of the rules more severely would lead to fewer people breaking the rules. As per your reasoning, to reduce crime we have to make breaking the rules more punishing than abiding by them.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      If you go far enough down that path, you get a world where people break them anyway and get better at covering up and more people look the other way. Prohibition did not put a stop to people drinking. It just helped make organized crime rich and powerful as ordinary people continued to drink, didn't want to die from bathtub gin being poisonous and crime lords were the only reliable source of safe alcohol.
      - frumper 3y ago
        Buying alcohol illegally didn't cause your neighbor hundreds of dollars in property damage, unless you count drunk driving.
        DoreenMichele 3y ago
        They prohibited alcohol on the theory that men would stop beating their wives. Furthermore, giving enormous amounts of money and power to organized crime had knock-on effects, none of which were good.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc. Yes, but that won't solve all our problems. We have to distribute out the hot places to live, we can never make enough affordable housing if everyone wants to live in a few select cities. Having lived in Europe, I don't thing they have figured it out either (except for the car-optional lifestyle).
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  If you solved all our problems, they would magically be replaced by new ones. "Oh, I'm so bored. It is a tragedy!" "My orgasms aren't as fantastic as porn movies imply everyone else has. It's not fair! Whatever shall I do?" Etc. But, I mean, some kinds of problems are better to have than others.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc. > "My orgasms aren't as fantastic as porn movies imply everyone else has. It's not fair! Whatever shall I do?" Ok, you are self reflective. What next?
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      Nope. My point is I'm not trying to solve all of our problems and framing it like I am is as ridiculous as some rando on the internet accusing me of not enjoying sex as some kind of bizarre cheap shot.
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Unless that is a shaggy dog, then I don't get what it is doing in your comment. Yes, affordable housing, we need it. No, no one has a clue on how to achieve it (except maybe stop having children like in Japan or maybe become a city state like Singapore and have the government sell to everyone in the middle class an affordable flat).

sylens 3y ago

Notice I am not advocating for a complete reversal of these reform-based approaches - I said they need to be adjusted a bit. It is unlikely anything is done 100% correctly on the first attempt, and we are seeing firsthand that there needs to be some further disincentive for so brazenly committing crimes of theft in these areas

DoreenMichele 3y ago
Notice how I opened with "And/or".
ajmurmann 3y ago
It's so weird to me how Oregon, for example, tried to adopt Portugals policies on drugs, but seemingly stopped reading at "legalize" and didn't implement anything like mandatory rehab if it's found you need it.

StephenSmith 3y ago

The long term strategies you suggest almost certainly are the long-term answer. But that's just it, those solutions may take years. San Francisco may not last that long.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
Yeah, let's put off trying to implement actual ("long-term") solutions because we are in a crisis. Then make new excuses next year for how we still can't afford to think long-term because our problems are so bad right now.
labcomputer 3y ago
The trouble is that they’ve been putting off long-term solutions for a very long time, at least 30 years. The best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The second best time is today.

paulcole 3y ago

> make a car-optional lifestyle more viable You are more optimistic than I am. I’m 40, have never driven a car, and grew up in a very rural part of the country, went to college in the suburbs, and now live in a pretty urban area. A lot of people say they want a car-optional lifestyle, but most really really don’t. If you make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, the vast majority of people will make up a new excuse for why it won’t for them. “I have to carry… The kids need to… My job is… It takes too long…”

localplume 3y ago

[dead]

vasco 3y ago

> The beatings shall continue until morale improves Sure beatings don't improve morale, but since we're not talking about improving the morale of thieves, but rather about making theft a losing proposition, I think the point is not as invalid as you frame it. Unless your point is that there's no advantage in creating consequences for crime because you don't think negative consequences have a deterring effect, which is not something I agree with. Surely you have been put in time-out by your parents or gotten a toy taken away which illustrated this point for you.

secstate 3y ago
Not sure if you either remember being a kid and/or have kids of your own, but negative consequences are almost always inferior to positive consequences, or simple reframing. That doesn't mean there should be no negative consequences ever, life is hardly so black and white. But a discipline system built primarily on negative consequences has troubling relationship costs that only become obvious much later down the line. Parenting via negative consequences is actually very similar to industrial externalities. Sure, there are results right now, but the cost of those results will devastate the environment 10, 20, 100 years from now.
scoofy 3y ago
We're talking about people looking at $1,500+/month rent with multiple roommates... if they're lucky, for the rest of their lives. That is not offering people a future. There is no viable path to prosperity. There is no path for lower-class folks to achieve a private residence with a spouse. When these people increase productivity, rents will capture that wealth. Why should people play by these rules? A tiny condo in SF is over 10x median income before taxes... and we have a very high median income. The entire system of intentional real estate shortages we have is effectively a cartel. It's a zero-sum game, which is extractive by nature. We need housing for lower-middle class people. We need housing for poor people. We need people to have a future to lose. We need people to have a path to build wealth. Right now, in most liberal urban areas, we just don't. We make up every excuse in the book to preserve the faux-utopia for the incumbent homeowners who set up the system decades ago and have all literally become multi-millionaires from it.

Aunche 3y ago

Interesting how you're characterizing enforcement of property crime as "beatings", and not stealing things as "morale".

DoreenMichele 3y ago
The OP assumes people are stealing to alleviate financial duress caused by inflation. If that's accurate, then giving people relief in a way that doesn't encourage them to intentionally be failures and doesn't make it someone else's responsibility to pay for their needs is the optimal solution.
- Aunche 3y ago
  Stealing alleviates one's personal duress at the expense of someone else's. If they instead worked a real job, they would at least be providing at $18/hr, SF's minimum wage, of services to their community. SF already spent over a billion dollars on housing alone. People should ensure that is prudently spent rather than asking for even more.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    Years ago, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, working a full-time minimum wage job wouldn't cover rent in the cheapest dive I could find listed for San Francisco. At that time, a room in an SRO was like a thousand dollars a month in SF. I've said many time that I believe California is the dumping ground for homeless people across the nation. California has something like 12 percent of the US population and 25 percent of the US homeless population and a high percentage of chronically homeless. I was responding to a comment that opens with You're seeing this everywhere. Chicago, Philadelphia, and so on - although the problem may be worse in San Francisco. The comment wasn't about San Francisco per se and my reply was not about San Francisco per se. The nation as a whole needs to address certain things. San Francisco likely cannot solve this alone, no matter how draconian they are willing to be. People go there for the weather, among other things. That's not a factor policy can resolve.

david38 3y ago

Right, because all these brazen thieves have a right to do that because housing is expensive.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
No. They don't have any such right. But if you design a world where it's more punishing to play by the rules than to break them, some people will break them. That's just reality.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Thus, punishing breakage of the rules more severely would lead to fewer people breaking the rules. As per your reasoning, to reduce crime we have to make breaking the rules more punishing than abiding by them.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    If you go far enough down that path, you get a world where people break them anyway and get better at covering up and more people look the other way. Prohibition did not put a stop to people drinking. It just helped make organized crime rich and powerful as ordinary people continued to drink, didn't want to die from bathtub gin being poisonous and crime lords were the only reliable source of safe alcohol.
    - frumper 3y ago
      Buying alcohol illegally didn't cause your neighbor hundreds of dollars in property damage, unless you count drunk driving.
      - DoreenMichele 3y ago
        They prohibited alcohol on the theory that men would stop beating their wives. Furthermore, giving enormous amounts of money and power to organized crime had knock-on effects, none of which were good.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

> We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc. Yes, but that won't solve all our problems. We have to distribute out the hot places to live, we can never make enough affordable housing if everyone wants to live in a few select cities. Having lived in Europe, I don't thing they have figured it out either (except for the car-optional lifestyle).

DoreenMichele 3y ago
If you solved all our problems, they would magically be replaced by new ones. "Oh, I'm so bored. It is a tragedy!" "My orgasms aren't as fantastic as porn movies imply everyone else has. It's not fair! Whatever shall I do?" Etc. But, I mean, some kinds of problems are better to have than others.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > We need to make affordable housing available, make a car-optional lifestyle more viable, etc. > "My orgasms aren't as fantastic as porn movies imply everyone else has. It's not fair! Whatever shall I do?" Ok, you are self reflective. What next?
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    Nope. My point is I'm not trying to solve all of our problems and framing it like I am is as ridiculous as some rando on the internet accusing me of not enjoying sex as some kind of bizarre cheap shot.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Unless that is a shaggy dog, then I don't get what it is doing in your comment. Yes, affordable housing, we need it. No, no one has a clue on how to achieve it (except maybe stop having children like in Japan or maybe become a city state like Singapore and have the government sell to everyone in the middle class an affordable flat).