7 ms·

Czech news crew in SF covering APEC robbed at gunpoint while filming

102 points by impish9208 3y ago

zephrx1111 3y ago
Socialism country is pretty safe actually. Nobody, except government, has the privilege to rob people.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
  I would wager fewer people are murdered by police too.
epicureanideal 3y ago
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- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
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  - TMWNN 3y ago
    >"It's Gotham City" says the anti-SF part of HN. Fitting, given that the best description of Gavin Newsom (former SF mayor, now CA governor) that I've heard is that he looks like the mayor of Gotham City.
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    Gotham is less cartoonishly shitty than SF.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
      Notably, the shit
    - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
      Do you live in SF? Have you ever read Batman?
      - nvader 3y ago
        Not the op, but I do, and I have. Today, on my way walking home, I hear at an intersection, "flick, flick, flick". I look around, and I see three separate individuals have lit their lighters, and are taking drags from glass pipes. They weren't even in one group co-smoking, it was legitimately a poisson variable that sampled to n=3 in that 5 second interval at that spot.
        femiagbabiaka 3y ago
        Gotham is when homeless person do drugs
        recursive 3y ago
        That's part of it. Regular car break-ins and robberies down the block from the gleaming HQs of some big companies are another. Hm, what else?
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Fun fact: Gotham City is in New Jersey.
  - SllX 3y ago
    I hear that IRL too, not just on here (actually never seen that here myself), even from people who work for the City government. Like I used to be the one complaining about the downturn the City was taking and now most of the people I know who were much more optimistic have gone past my own pessimism by a country mile. So I mean… Gotham City might be a meme, and it might be not entirely accurate, but it’s for sure a mood people are feeling in the City.
    - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
      Considering the gang violence and high rates of larceny that plagued SF's most popular neighborhoods such as the Mission until the 2010's, I feel like things are not that bad in most parts of the city now, and are trending in a positive direction, COVID excluded. If someone wasn't in the City at that time, of course they wouldn't know that, and they might feel like things are worse than ever now. But it wouldn't be true. But even then, SF wasn't Gotham City, and it's also not now. SF suffers from specific issues: political corruption (Ed Lee's administration is responsible for so much of SF's current blight), homelessness, and theft. Those problems are the same as every city in the US right now, even the conservative ones. We need to solve them, for sure. But alluding to Gotham City and memeing about a billionaire with anger issues and a penchant for beating up homeless people to swoop in is how we get people spraying homeless encampments with bear mace. Not really effective.
      - SllX 3y ago
        Yeah well I don’t get the comparison either, I mean I agree that it is a bit of hyperbole. Gotham City at least has Batman and we don’t have the Joker or The Riddler, but you’re making an intellectual argument against a mood when the city both feels like and is in decline and it isn’t just the crime that has people down although that’s the most visible face of it. The Mission might be doing a bit better compared to 20 years ago, but three things: 1) neighborhoods concentrated around Market Street feel a lot worse, like the feeling in the TL spreading both northeast to the Embarcadero and southwest towards the Castro worse. 2) The City today is different than the City 20 years ago, as in who is living here and in the workforce is different. People retire, their sheltered kids that barely knew anything except the street outside their door and the route to school grew up and started living on their own with a bunch of roommates or whatever (if they moved out, plenty of them haven’t, a lot of my old schoolmates aren’t doing so great) and people moved in, like a lot of people moved in between 2000 and 2020 and you can see it on the Census. 3) Depending on where you were in the City ten years ago, things were definitely looking on the up and up. Mid-Market was never exactly great, but when new construction was going up and new businesses were entering the area, it felt a lot better than it does now. Now it feels like it’s as bad or worse than 20 years ago, and as I covered in point 2, not everybody here is either going to remember or have been here 20 years ago. EDIT: Meant to include another point but I forgot. Another major difference between now and basically anywhere 20 years ago too is that 20 years ago, little 0.3MP camera phones were starting to just barely come onto the market. Nowadays everybody has a 4K camera that can capture CD-quality audio so you can hear in HiFi the guy screaming in the background while playing back your vacation in SF. There has been a substantial shift both in the resolution in which we can capture information that’s leagues above what you would have heard from friends at the Office who lived in different neighborhoods and the sheer low latency bandwidth with which we can transmit it. You can just about doomscroll SF car break-in TikToks as your 9-5 if that’s your jam.
  - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
    At least Gotham City has someone working to fix things
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  It’s hardly unique to SF. Memphis, TN: https://www.adweek.com/tvspy/memphis-news-crew-robbed-at-gunpoint/ https://www.adweek.com/tvspy/memphis-news-crew-robbed-at-gun... Chicago, IL: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/chicago-tv-news-crew-robbed-gunpoint-while-reporting-robberies-univision/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/chicago-tv-news-crew-robbed... Qatar: https://au.news.yahoo.com/female-tv-reporter-robbed-live-on-air-at-football-world-cup-213057928.html https://au.news.yahoo.com/female-tv-reporter-robbed-live-on-... London: https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/lifestyle/bbc-reporter-robbed-during-live-broadcast-in-london/amp/ https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/lifestyle/bbc-reporter-robbed-... This is why we shouldn’t make public policy off anecdotes.
  - timeon 3y ago
    The difference is 'at gunpoint'. London and Qatar links are about cases when someone just run away with the bag or sneaked items from the bag. Memphis, Chicago and this SF incident - all were at gunpoint. I can easily imagine that one can be robbed in Prague as well. At gunpoint? Unlikely. These guns were probably not legal. But thing is that when legal guns are omnipresent, obtaining illegal one is easier.
    - ceejayoz 3y ago
      That’s a national issue with guns, though. Again, hardly unique to SF.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        No, it isn’t this is a cop out. Guns are allowed in every US state yet not every town in the US has high rates of gun violence nor robberies.
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        > not every town in the US has high rates of gun violence Every town in the US has a high rate of gun violence if you compare it to the rest of the developed world. America's overall homicide rate is 7x that of other high-income OECD nations, and gun homicides are twenty five times higher. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26551975/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26551975/ "Ninety percent of women, 91% of children aged 0 to 14 years, 92% of youth aged 15 to 24 years, and 82% of all people killed by firearms were from the United States."
- monero-xmr 3y ago
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- TMWNN 3y ago
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  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
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    - happytoexplain 3y ago
      You should consider that you're imagining enemies. For example, I have never been to SF nor have I lived on the West coast. I have no feelings about it and I have no interest in defending it as some kind of stand-in for my politics. Some people downplay the crime as an unsubstantive retort to another commenter, and some relative-statistics-based defenses are dishonest, misleading, or at least not holistic. I find this attitude infuriating, and in the worst cases I believe that it's essentially antithetical to civilization and progress. Safety and community are values that should be passionately embraced and viciously defended. It's hard to overstate how strongly I feel about it. And yet I flag politically petty, antagonistic, or unnecessarily provocative posts like yours, the parent, and the GP. There is just as much social-politics-motivated irrationality on the anti-SF side. I believe the US, on the whole, has a sickness that manifests in being too hateful of criminals. I think fairness is essential in treating criminals, and that we should devote far more than we do to addressing the root causes of crime, rather than just focusing 100% on being "tough on crime". However, I also believe these ideas should never be carried to the extent of minimizing the victims or downplaying the fact that to rob somebody is to terrorize them and erode a community. You can be balanced, curious, self-bettering, and passionate at the same time. You should consider that people are not one-dimensional, and might say something in one post that puts them into a bucket in your head that they don't belong in. You and those who agree with you do not have a monopoly on the qualities you are lauding HN for.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
        My post wasn't petty or antagonistic, it's basically stating a fact from observed behavior. Judging people by their behavior is not putting anyone in a bucket. I get you think you're being a voice of reason here, but you seem to have misunderstood the point I was making as much of what you say is irrelevant. I can't stop you from being petty and antagonistic yourself by flagging comments that don't need to be flagged, but I would ask you don't interact with/reply to me again in the future.
- deleted 3y ago
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hyggetrold 3y ago
https://archive.is/bDgRG https://archive.is/bDgRG
deleted 3y ago
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cactusplant7374 3y ago
This has happened in Guayaquil too. More than once I think. It's really hard to bust up the gangs once they are entrenched.
- xarope 3y ago
  Guayaquil, where I saw armed guards (with rifles/shotguns?) at shopping mall entrances.
  - cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
    The 24 hour Jack in The Box in the Tenderloin (SF) had 2 armed guards. Around the corner, crack dealers openly sold rocks.
dmoy 3y ago
> The city has a clear message for would-be thieves, Cretan said: “The police will arrest you, and the (district attorney) will charge you.” What is the clearance rate for robbery in SF? Here in Seattle our homicide clearance rate isn't even 50%, let alone robbery.
dieselgate 3y ago
This was originally meant as a reply to a now-deleted comment about "don't leave things in the car" Kind of funny tangent: both a friend and I now live out of state but are from the Bay area. We've met up a few times in SF and on two separate occasions he got smashed/grabbed with my car parked right beside. He's still somewhat conspiratorial about me being the vandal.
- Ajay-p 3y ago
  Clarification: I thought comment could not be deleted from HN. Has this policy changed?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Comments can be edited and deleted for a short period of time after posting.
    - klyrs 3y ago
      2 hours, and replies prevent deletion.
- jmharvey 3y ago
  The DA treats anything less than automobile burglary as not worth their time. The way the law is written, smashing the window of a car and taking the contents is simple vandalism and theft (not as serious as burglary) unless there's evidence the car is locked. If the car owner testifies at trial that the car was locked, then that's evidence. But ~no one visiting SF is going to come to town to testify at a trial, especially when trial dates can move around somewhat unpredictably. So a criminal can operate with relative impunity if they only ever break into tourist cars. So, how do they identify tourists? Apparently they look for wheels that aren't curbed properly. Curbing your wheels is one of those things most people learn for their driver's test and never think about again, but if you live in a place where you're frequently parallel parking on steep hills, it becomes second nature. (Also, it's one of the few things SFMTA will issue a parking ticket for.) So thieves target cars that are parked on a hill but don't have their wheels curbed. I'm guessing you curb your wheels, and your friend doesn't.
boguscoder 3y ago
The amount of clickbaity “news” around miraculous metamorphosis of SF into safe, clean and wholesome city overnight is staggering. Ironically my Czech friend was reposting something about city getting rid of criminal activity right before I sent him this link
ink 3y ago
Boy this really doesn’t help SF’s image. Glad they’re okay, though. As a local, and like the article mentions, I feel embarrassed and somehow responsible for stuff like this. It’s so sad to me that they came here with an open mind to see what SF is really like and this happens.
- randombits0 3y ago
  Of course you are not personally responsible but Jefferson said “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” With the current political circumstances in free fall, you’d think we would have hit “enlightenment” by now. It can’t be long!
  - GauntletWizard 3y ago
    Tell me, comrade, have we achieved it ? Is this full Communism yet?
infamouscow 3y ago
We're watching social Darwinism take place before our very eyes. Hats off to the news crews documenting all of this.
indus 3y ago
Waiting for our own Batman to emerge. - We got the billionaires who lack superpowers. - We got the complex persona of tech loving traumatized brotherhoods. - We got the real-time deductive capabilities of AirPod + Whisper APIs
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  At this point I'll gladly accept Anduril bots circling the city streets and shooting nets and stun darts at miscreants.
- crotchfire 3y ago
  > Waiting for our own Batman to emerge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_norton
forgingahead 3y ago
The press conference from Gavin Newsom is also pretty incredible to watch, based on these snippets: https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1724093441519341573 https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1724093441519341573 https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1724168673076605034 https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/17241686730766050... Why are locals defending this? Don't you feel you have a right to a clean and safe city and community to live in, all the time, instead of just when fancy people turn up? Especially given your tax and cost-of-living burdens? Is this just an information problem? If SF destitution defenders actually had lived experiences in other global, world-class cities, which are clean, safe, and good to live in, they wouldn't be so forgiving of this? Or is it cognitive dissonance and just circular, SF is the best so SF is the best?
- deleted 3y ago
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- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  There is political support for clearing homeless encampments, but some elected judge decided that they cannot force them off the street until there is shelter space. At which point you reach the current impasse. How do you get enough shelter space? By building more. San Francisco is faced with two options: 1. Allow open-air drug markets, mass homelessness, rampant and organized property theft, and mass defecation on the streets, OR 2. Building more housing If you know anything about San Francisco, you know that they will NEVER allow more housing to be built, no matter how egregious the alternative is. Too many people have too much equity and rent income that depends upon their self-inflicted housing shortage. Even their so-called "socialist" members of the board of supervisors are multi-millionaire landlords.
  - mleonhard 3y ago
    This is correct. San Francisco, and the whole SF Bay Area, has a staggering housing shortage. People earning minimum wage cannot afford housing and must move to cheaper areas and lose their community relationships. So more of them turn to crime. Here's a video on the topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_inequality_harms_societies https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Coming from Eastern Europe, which used to be dangerous in the days following the fall do communism, and coming to the US, the richest country in the world, you expect it to be safer than your poor European country. The reality however is very different.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The US barely squeaks into the top 10 richest countries (GDP per capita), and even during the worst days of post-Communist chaos I doubt there was ever a case of a camera crew getting robbed at gunpoint in Prague.
  - ozr 3y ago
    This simply isn't true. Looking at the IMF numbers in 2023, the US is number 7. Every country ahead of the US has something that is massively distorting their GDP per capita. Tax havens, nationalized oil, etc.
- mplewis 3y ago
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  - SenAnder 3y ago
    The US is #10 in the world in PPP-adjusted social spending per capita, at $9734. The Czech republic is #25, at $5799: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we... Edit: To compare further: By median PPP-adjusted income, the US is #2, at $46k, while the Czech Republic is #26, at $21k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income By homicide rate, the US is #53, at 6.8, while the Czech Republic is #184, at 0.4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... Let this be a lesson on the importance of economy for a people's well-being.
    - 3y ago
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
Turns out, a full about-face on tolerance for crime in the city wasn't enough to deter the more determined criminals. Given how frequent this occurs, and how there appear to be a few very prolific thieves, it's obvious that even low-effort police sting operations would reduce property crimes by a significant amount. It's a shame then that the police in SF have no interest in doing their jobs.
- ozr 3y ago
  The police are interested in doing their jobs. They are not allowed to by a local government that will harangue them for trying, and district attorneys that won't prosecute or push for meaningful jail time.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
    SFPD is actually more useful and chill than most major city police departments. APD in Austin doesn't actually do much. Property crimes are not responded to at all, but they pretend to occasionally about 48 hours later. If you want personal safety, your only option is to conceal carry and defend yourself because the police have a long call backlog, morale is terrible, and are critically underfunded and understaffed by over 150 officers.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  The police is mostly controlled by the city. It's not very clear who controls the city.
  - ZoomerCretin 3y ago
    The police are rarely controlled by anyone but themselves. Even MPD, who murdered George Floyd and faced protests and riots calling for reform, was able to successfully resist any form of accountability. They simply stopped responding to calls in all of the districts represented by the councilmembers calling for reform, and made sure to tell whoever happened to call them.
cjtrowbridge 3y ago
Welcome!
qkhhly 3y ago
Welcome to SF!
dmix 3y ago
I remember getting robbed in SF on my 2nd time visiting and we waited for 4hrs for the police to show up and the bar owner being mad we called them, before we gave up. Never got a call back from the police either.
- hurryer 3y ago
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  - dmix 3y ago
    Disregarding petty crime is how SF became SF. It's the opposite of Manhattan's broken window theory, not only is it not properly enforced it's dismissed out of hand as unimportant and outsiders are told to accept it like it's a local custom.
  - piva00 3y ago
    Robbery is a violent crime, it shouldn't be a "waste of police time" to report violent crimes... No matter the value of the belongings, that's secondary, the fear and violence shouldn't be tolerated. Can't really tell if you were being sarcastic.
    - ryukoposting 3y ago
      They aren't being sarsarcastic. The felony threshold for theft in CA is $950, raised from $450 in 2020. According to accounts from multiple friends living in SF, most theft below the felony threshold is totally ignored.
      - happytoexplain 3y ago
        Sarcasm applies to subjectivity ("wasting valuable police time"), not objectivity ("more than $950"). The use of the exact number implies they are being sarcastic (though they should have made that more clear).
    - uoaei 3y ago
perihelions 3y ago
- "The camera equipment was valued at US$18,000 (S$24,500) and San Francisco Mayor London Breed has promised the city will help replace it, according to the newspaper." Through what legal mechanism is this a thing a SF mayor can legitimately do? To make a discretionary gift of city money to a favored crime victim?
- 4death4 3y ago
  It would be pretty irresponsible for the city government not to have some budget for good will items like this. It’s not about making a favored victim whole. It’s about preventing a news crew going back to their country and saying “hey, we wanted to air a story on X, but we were robbed so we’re doing a story on SF crime instead”
  - perihelions 3y ago
    I assume the city is ethically barred from offering gifts of that type, and that the reporters are ethically barred from accepting any.
    - 4death4 3y ago
      Why would you assume either of those things? There is no conflict of interest for the city here. The journalists, maybe, but such a conflict would be tenuous.
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
        Would it be legal for the mayor to make a gifts to reporters conditional on positive coverage? To invent an example: write a positive story, get a red curb parking pass. Write a negative story, we take the pass away. It seems like that ought to be illegal. Since the quid pro quo might be implicit and hard to prove, ethics rules in other contexts sometimes ban gifts entirely. In my view, there are enough other factors going on here that this doesn’t look very corrupt. Nevertheless, I expect those reporters are probably now debating how negative a story they have to write to avoid the appearance of impropriety!
rdtsc 3y ago
> Officials in San Francisco raced to clean up city streets, squelch crime and burnish the city’s reputation before world leaders arrived this week, treating APEC as a critical opportunity to tell a new story. Clearly the citizens should figure out a way to have a constant stream of world leaders visiting for various reasons. If they can set up an event every month, they should be in good shape.
cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
This is why it's stupid to live or visit California. Criminals can rob you at gunpoint, but law-abiding citizens aren't allowed to defend themselves. I'd rather be in Austin and conceal carry.

102 points by impish9208 3y ago

zephrx1111 3y ago

Socialism country is pretty safe actually. Nobody, except government, has the privilege to rob people.

cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
I would wager fewer people are murdered by police too.

epicureanideal 3y ago

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femiagbabiaka 3y ago
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- TMWNN 3y ago
  >"It's Gotham City" says the anti-SF part of HN. Fitting, given that the best description of Gavin Newsom (former SF mayor, now CA governor) that I've heard is that he looks like the mayor of Gotham City.
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  Gotham is less cartoonishly shitty than SF.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 3y ago
    Notably, the shit
  - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
    Do you live in SF? Have you ever read Batman?
    - nvader 3y ago
      Not the op, but I do, and I have. Today, on my way walking home, I hear at an intersection, "flick, flick, flick". I look around, and I see three separate individuals have lit their lighters, and are taking drags from glass pipes. They weren't even in one group co-smoking, it was legitimately a poisson variable that sampled to n=3 in that 5 second interval at that spot.
      - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
        Gotham is when homeless person do drugs
        recursive 3y ago
        That's part of it. Regular car break-ins and robberies down the block from the gleaming HQs of some big companies are another. Hm, what else?
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Fun fact: Gotham City is in New Jersey.
- SllX 3y ago
  I hear that IRL too, not just on here (actually never seen that here myself), even from people who work for the City government. Like I used to be the one complaining about the downturn the City was taking and now most of the people I know who were much more optimistic have gone past my own pessimism by a country mile. So I mean… Gotham City might be a meme, and it might be not entirely accurate, but it’s for sure a mood people are feeling in the City.
  - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
    Considering the gang violence and high rates of larceny that plagued SF's most popular neighborhoods such as the Mission until the 2010's, I feel like things are not that bad in most parts of the city now, and are trending in a positive direction, COVID excluded. If someone wasn't in the City at that time, of course they wouldn't know that, and they might feel like things are worse than ever now. But it wouldn't be true. But even then, SF wasn't Gotham City, and it's also not now. SF suffers from specific issues: political corruption (Ed Lee's administration is responsible for so much of SF's current blight), homelessness, and theft. Those problems are the same as every city in the US right now, even the conservative ones. We need to solve them, for sure. But alluding to Gotham City and memeing about a billionaire with anger issues and a penchant for beating up homeless people to swoop in is how we get people spraying homeless encampments with bear mace. Not really effective.
    - SllX 3y ago
      Yeah well I don’t get the comparison either, I mean I agree that it is a bit of hyperbole. Gotham City at least has Batman and we don’t have the Joker or The Riddler, but you’re making an intellectual argument against a mood when the city both feels like and is in decline and it isn’t just the crime that has people down although that’s the most visible face of it. The Mission might be doing a bit better compared to 20 years ago, but three things: 1) neighborhoods concentrated around Market Street feel a lot worse, like the feeling in the TL spreading both northeast to the Embarcadero and southwest towards the Castro worse. 2) The City today is different than the City 20 years ago, as in who is living here and in the workforce is different. People retire, their sheltered kids that barely knew anything except the street outside their door and the route to school grew up and started living on their own with a bunch of roommates or whatever (if they moved out, plenty of them haven’t, a lot of my old schoolmates aren’t doing so great) and people moved in, like a lot of people moved in between 2000 and 2020 and you can see it on the Census. 3) Depending on where you were in the City ten years ago, things were definitely looking on the up and up. Mid-Market was never exactly great, but when new construction was going up and new businesses were entering the area, it felt a lot better than it does now. Now it feels like it’s as bad or worse than 20 years ago, and as I covered in point 2, not everybody here is either going to remember or have been here 20 years ago. EDIT: Meant to include another point but I forgot. Another major difference between now and basically anywhere 20 years ago too is that 20 years ago, little 0.3MP camera phones were starting to just barely come onto the market. Nowadays everybody has a 4K camera that can capture CD-quality audio so you can hear in HiFi the guy screaming in the background while playing back your vacation in SF. There has been a substantial shift both in the resolution in which we can capture information that’s leagues above what you would have heard from friends at the Office who lived in different neighborhoods and the sheer low latency bandwidth with which we can transmit it. You can just about doomscroll SF car break-in TikToks as your 9-5 if that’s your jam.
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
  At least Gotham City has someone working to fix things
ceejayoz 3y ago
It’s hardly unique to SF. Memphis, TN: https://www.adweek.com/tvspy/memphis-news-crew-robbed-at-gunpoint/ https://www.adweek.com/tvspy/memphis-news-crew-robbed-at-gun... Chicago, IL: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/chicago-tv-news-crew-robbed-gunpoint-while-reporting-robberies-univision/ https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/chicago-tv-news-crew-robbed... Qatar: https://au.news.yahoo.com/female-tv-reporter-robbed-live-on-air-at-football-world-cup-213057928.html https://au.news.yahoo.com/female-tv-reporter-robbed-live-on-... London: https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/lifestyle/bbc-reporter-robbed-during-live-broadcast-in-london/amp/ https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/lifestyle/bbc-reporter-robbed-... This is why we shouldn’t make public policy off anecdotes.
- timeon 3y ago
  The difference is 'at gunpoint'. London and Qatar links are about cases when someone just run away with the bag or sneaked items from the bag. Memphis, Chicago and this SF incident - all were at gunpoint. I can easily imagine that one can be robbed in Prague as well. At gunpoint? Unlikely. These guns were probably not legal. But thing is that when legal guns are omnipresent, obtaining illegal one is easier.
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    That’s a national issue with guns, though. Again, hardly unique to SF.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      No, it isn’t this is a cop out. Guns are allowed in every US state yet not every town in the US has high rates of gun violence nor robberies.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        > not every town in the US has high rates of gun violence Every town in the US has a high rate of gun violence if you compare it to the rest of the developed world. America's overall homicide rate is 7x that of other high-income OECD nations, and gun homicides are twenty five times higher. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26551975/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26551975/ "Ninety percent of women, 91% of children aged 0 to 14 years, 92% of youth aged 15 to 24 years, and 82% of all people killed by firearms were from the United States."
monero-xmr 3y ago
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TMWNN 3y ago
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- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
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  - happytoexplain 3y ago
    You should consider that you're imagining enemies. For example, I have never been to SF nor have I lived on the West coast. I have no feelings about it and I have no interest in defending it as some kind of stand-in for my politics. Some people downplay the crime as an unsubstantive retort to another commenter, and some relative-statistics-based defenses are dishonest, misleading, or at least not holistic. I find this attitude infuriating, and in the worst cases I believe that it's essentially antithetical to civilization and progress. Safety and community are values that should be passionately embraced and viciously defended. It's hard to overstate how strongly I feel about it. And yet I flag politically petty, antagonistic, or unnecessarily provocative posts like yours, the parent, and the GP. There is just as much social-politics-motivated irrationality on the anti-SF side. I believe the US, on the whole, has a sickness that manifests in being too hateful of criminals. I think fairness is essential in treating criminals, and that we should devote far more than we do to addressing the root causes of crime, rather than just focusing 100% on being "tough on crime". However, I also believe these ideas should never be carried to the extent of minimizing the victims or downplaying the fact that to rob somebody is to terrorize them and erode a community. You can be balanced, curious, self-bettering, and passionate at the same time. You should consider that people are not one-dimensional, and might say something in one post that puts them into a bucket in your head that they don't belong in. You and those who agree with you do not have a monopoly on the qualities you are lauding HN for.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
      My post wasn't petty or antagonistic, it's basically stating a fact from observed behavior. Judging people by their behavior is not putting anyone in a bucket. I get you think you're being a voice of reason here, but you seem to have misunderstood the point I was making as much of what you say is irrelevant. I can't stop you from being petty and antagonistic yourself by flagging comments that don't need to be flagged, but I would ask you don't interact with/reply to me again in the future.
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hyggetrold 3y ago

https://archive.is/bDgRG https://archive.is/bDgRG

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cactusplant7374 3y ago

This has happened in Guayaquil too. More than once I think. It's really hard to bust up the gangs once they are entrenched.

xarope 3y ago
Guayaquil, where I saw armed guards (with rifles/shotguns?) at shopping mall entrances.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
  The 24 hour Jack in The Box in the Tenderloin (SF) had 2 armed guards. Around the corner, crack dealers openly sold rocks.

dmoy 3y ago

> The city has a clear message for would-be thieves, Cretan said: “The police will arrest you, and the (district attorney) will charge you.” What is the clearance rate for robbery in SF? Here in Seattle our homicide clearance rate isn't even 50%, let alone robbery.

dieselgate 3y ago

This was originally meant as a reply to a now-deleted comment about "don't leave things in the car" Kind of funny tangent: both a friend and I now live out of state but are from the Bay area. We've met up a few times in SF and on two separate occasions he got smashed/grabbed with my car parked right beside. He's still somewhat conspiratorial about me being the vandal.

Ajay-p 3y ago
Clarification: I thought comment could not be deleted from HN. Has this policy changed?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Comments can be edited and deleted for a short period of time after posting.
  - klyrs 3y ago
    2 hours, and replies prevent deletion.
jmharvey 3y ago
The DA treats anything less than automobile burglary as not worth their time. The way the law is written, smashing the window of a car and taking the contents is simple vandalism and theft (not as serious as burglary) unless there's evidence the car is locked. If the car owner testifies at trial that the car was locked, then that's evidence. But ~no one visiting SF is going to come to town to testify at a trial, especially when trial dates can move around somewhat unpredictably. So a criminal can operate with relative impunity if they only ever break into tourist cars. So, how do they identify tourists? Apparently they look for wheels that aren't curbed properly. Curbing your wheels is one of those things most people learn for their driver's test and never think about again, but if you live in a place where you're frequently parallel parking on steep hills, it becomes second nature. (Also, it's one of the few things SFMTA will issue a parking ticket for.) So thieves target cars that are parked on a hill but don't have their wheels curbed. I'm guessing you curb your wheels, and your friend doesn't.

boguscoder 3y ago

The amount of clickbaity “news” around miraculous metamorphosis of SF into safe, clean and wholesome city overnight is staggering. Ironically my Czech friend was reposting something about city getting rid of criminal activity right before I sent him this link

ink 3y ago

Boy this really doesn’t help SF’s image. Glad they’re okay, though. As a local, and like the article mentions, I feel embarrassed and somehow responsible for stuff like this. It’s so sad to me that they came here with an open mind to see what SF is really like and this happens.

randombits0 3y ago
Of course you are not personally responsible but Jefferson said “The government you elect is the government you deserve.” With the current political circumstances in free fall, you’d think we would have hit “enlightenment” by now. It can’t be long!
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  Tell me, comrade, have we achieved it ? Is this full Communism yet?

infamouscow 3y ago

We're watching social Darwinism take place before our very eyes. Hats off to the news crews documenting all of this.

indus 3y ago

Waiting for our own Batman to emerge. - We got the billionaires who lack superpowers. - We got the complex persona of tech loving traumatized brotherhoods. - We got the real-time deductive capabilities of AirPod + Whisper APIs

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
At this point I'll gladly accept Anduril bots circling the city streets and shooting nets and stun darts at miscreants.
crotchfire 3y ago
> Waiting for our own Batman to emerge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_norton

forgingahead 3y ago

The press conference from Gavin Newsom is also pretty incredible to watch, based on these snippets: https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1724093441519341573 https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1724093441519341573 https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1724168673076605034 https://twitter.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/17241686730766050... Why are locals defending this? Don't you feel you have a right to a clean and safe city and community to live in, all the time, instead of just when fancy people turn up? Especially given your tax and cost-of-living burdens? Is this just an information problem? If SF destitution defenders actually had lived experiences in other global, world-class cities, which are clean, safe, and good to live in, they wouldn't be so forgiving of this? Or is it cognitive dissonance and just circular, SF is the best so SF is the best?

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ZoomerCretin 3y ago
There is political support for clearing homeless encampments, but some elected judge decided that they cannot force them off the street until there is shelter space. At which point you reach the current impasse. How do you get enough shelter space? By building more. San Francisco is faced with two options: 1. Allow open-air drug markets, mass homelessness, rampant and organized property theft, and mass defecation on the streets, OR 2. Building more housing If you know anything about San Francisco, you know that they will NEVER allow more housing to be built, no matter how egregious the alternative is. Too many people have too much equity and rent income that depends upon their self-inflicted housing shortage. Even their so-called "socialist" members of the board of supervisors are multi-millionaire landlords.
- mleonhard 3y ago
  This is correct. San Francisco, and the whole SF Bay Area, has a staggering housing shortage. People earning minimum wage cannot afford housing and must move to cheaper areas and lose their community relationships. So more of them turn to crime. Here's a video on the topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_inequality_harms_societies https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

Coming from Eastern Europe, which used to be dangerous in the days following the fall do communism, and coming to the US, the richest country in the world, you expect it to be safer than your poor European country. The reality however is very different.

resolutebat 3y ago
The US barely squeaks into the top 10 richest countries (GDP per capita), and even during the worst days of post-Communist chaos I doubt there was ever a case of a camera crew getting robbed at gunpoint in Prague.
- ozr 3y ago
  This simply isn't true. Looking at the IMF numbers in 2023, the US is number 7. Every country ahead of the US has something that is massively distorting their GDP per capita. Tax havens, nationalized oil, etc.
mplewis 3y ago
[flagged]
- SenAnder 3y ago
  The US is #10 in the world in PPP-adjusted social spending per capita, at $9734. The Czech republic is #25, at $5799: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_welfare_spending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we... Edit: To compare further: By median PPP-adjusted income, the US is #2, at $46k, while the Czech Republic is #26, at $21k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income By homicide rate, the US is #53, at 6.8, while the Czech Republic is #184, at 0.4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... Let this be a lesson on the importance of economy for a people's well-being.
  - 3y ago

ZoomerCretin 3y ago

Turns out, a full about-face on tolerance for crime in the city wasn't enough to deter the more determined criminals. Given how frequent this occurs, and how there appear to be a few very prolific thieves, it's obvious that even low-effort police sting operations would reduce property crimes by a significant amount. It's a shame then that the police in SF have no interest in doing their jobs.

ozr 3y ago
The police are interested in doing their jobs. They are not allowed to by a local government that will harangue them for trying, and district attorneys that won't prosecute or push for meaningful jail time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cvccvroomvroom 3y ago
  SFPD is actually more useful and chill than most major city police departments. APD in Austin doesn't actually do much. Property crimes are not responded to at all, but they pretend to occasionally about 48 hours later. If you want personal safety, your only option is to conceal carry and defend yourself because the police have a long call backlog, morale is terrible, and are critically underfunded and understaffed by over 150 officers.
BurningFrog 3y ago
The police is mostly controlled by the city. It's not very clear who controls the city.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  The police are rarely controlled by anyone but themselves. Even MPD, who murdered George Floyd and faced protests and riots calling for reform, was able to successfully resist any form of accountability. They simply stopped responding to calls in all of the districts represented by the councilmembers calling for reform, and made sure to tell whoever happened to call them.

cjtrowbridge 3y ago

Welcome!

qkhhly 3y ago

Welcome to SF!

dmix 3y ago

I remember getting robbed in SF on my 2nd time visiting and we waited for 4hrs for the police to show up and the bar owner being mad we called them, before we gave up. Never got a call back from the police either.

hurryer 3y ago
[flagged]
- dmix 3y ago
  Disregarding petty crime is how SF became SF. It's the opposite of Manhattan's broken window theory, not only is it not properly enforced it's dismissed out of hand as unimportant and outsiders are told to accept it like it's a local custom.
- piva00 3y ago
  Robbery is a violent crime, it shouldn't be a "waste of police time" to report violent crimes... No matter the value of the belongings, that's secondary, the fear and violence shouldn't be tolerated. Can't really tell if you were being sarcastic.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    They aren't being sarsarcastic. The felony threshold for theft in CA is $950, raised from $450 in 2020. According to accounts from multiple friends living in SF, most theft below the felony threshold is totally ignored.
    - happytoexplain 3y ago
      Sarcasm applies to subjectivity ("wasting valuable police time"), not objectivity ("more than $950"). The use of the exact number implies they are being sarcastic (though they should have made that more clear).
  - uoaei 3y ago

perihelions 3y ago

- "The camera equipment was valued at US$18,000 (S$24,500) and San Francisco Mayor London Breed has promised the city will help replace it, according to the newspaper." Through what legal mechanism is this a thing a SF mayor can legitimately do? To make a discretionary gift of city money to a favored crime victim?

4death4 3y ago
It would be pretty irresponsible for the city government not to have some budget for good will items like this. It’s not about making a favored victim whole. It’s about preventing a news crew going back to their country and saying “hey, we wanted to air a story on X, but we were robbed so we’re doing a story on SF crime instead”
- perihelions 3y ago
  I assume the city is ethically barred from offering gifts of that type, and that the reporters are ethically barred from accepting any.
  - 4death4 3y ago
    Why would you assume either of those things? There is no conflict of interest for the city here. The journalists, maybe, but such a conflict would be tenuous.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
      Would it be legal for the mayor to make a gifts to reporters conditional on positive coverage? To invent an example: write a positive story, get a red curb parking pass. Write a negative story, we take the pass away. It seems like that ought to be illegal. Since the quid pro quo might be implicit and hard to prove, ethics rules in other contexts sometimes ban gifts entirely. In my view, there are enough other factors going on here that this doesn’t look very corrupt. Nevertheless, I expect those reporters are probably now debating how negative a story they have to write to avoid the appearance of impropriety!

rdtsc 3y ago

> Officials in San Francisco raced to clean up city streets, squelch crime and burnish the city’s reputation before world leaders arrived this week, treating APEC as a critical opportunity to tell a new story. Clearly the citizens should figure out a way to have a constant stream of world leaders visiting for various reasons. If they can set up an event every month, they should be in good shape.

cvccvroomvroom 3y ago

This is why it's stupid to live or visit California. Criminals can rob you at gunpoint, but law-abiding citizens aren't allowed to defend themselves. I'd rather be in Austin and conceal carry.