From Politico: San Francisco district attorney could lose his job in blow to national movement
From Politico:
SAN FRANCISCO — District Attorney Chesa Boudin is a leader of the national movement for criminal justice reform. He could soon become a cautionary tale about its vulnerabilities.
A well-funded recall campaign looks poised to unseat Boudin next week. Its outcome will echo across midterm elections, shaping the elected officials who determine how alleged crimes should be prosecuted amid the nation’s oscillating debate over public safety.
“There’s no question that if the recall in San Francisco will be successful, it will be the playbook going forward nationally for those who want to roll back criminal justice reform,” said Anne Irwin, whose California-based organization Smart Justice has spent money to defend Boudin and elect other progressive prosecutors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin#MismanagementReport
New York Magazine has an article explaining that San Francisco is actually a lot more conservative than its stereotype indicates.
Substack writer Susan Reynolds crunches the numbers and shows that over 75% of felony firearms cases dismissed, discharged, or diverted under SFDA Chesa Boudin.
SF Gate has an article where a former co-worker defends Chesa against the recall.
Mother Jones debunks a bunch of myths about the narratives flying around.
Charles Jung is the executive director of the California Asian Pacific American Bar Association and he writes about why he supports the recall.Report
This is part of the nationwide battle over police reform.
Regardless if how much information people have about police abuse, police are still a politically potent force regardless of the partisan environment.Report
It’s also about the AAPI community in San Francisco, though. You shouldn’t erase them so quickly.Report
People are generally either unable or reluctant to make connections which might question their foundations or comforting assumptions. A woman I know is quite capable of acknowledging that systematic racism and police brutality are things but unwilling to admit that any of the cops she knows personally could do such things.Report
A very good point that police reform SHOULD
find a natural constituency among liberals and small government types but it requires an actual willingness to reject the hysteria about OUTTACONTROL CRIME.
Kicking in doors and busting perps is a perennial vote getter.Report
reject the hysteria about OUTTACONTROL CRIME.
It helps if there is not a “who are you going to believe… me or your lyin’ eyes?” situation going on at the same time.
For example, the AAPI community in San Francisco has some legitimate gripes and pretending they don’t will not result in greater trust for “reform” on their part.Report
That doesn’t explain how all progressives in all cities are struggling.
We can add Los Angeles progressive DA George Gascon who is facing a recall funded by the police union and their allies, and Rick Caruso leading a “Get Tough On OUTTACONTROL CRIME” campaign against liberal Karen Bass.Report
I don’t know if I would go that far to state that all progressives in all cities are struggling. The very easy California recall procedure needs to be reformed. Without this recall, I think it would have been easier for Boudin to win reelection in a few years under normal reelection circumstances.
I would also point out, like I always do, that people love to stereotype the very complex nature of San Francisco or urban politics.Report
That doesn’t explain how all progressives in all cities are struggling.
It might explain why progressives in cities in which crime is going up are struggling.
But you’d have to believe that crimes are going up rather than deny that crimes are going up.Report
Has there ever been a time in any city in which crime HASNT gone up?
Can you point to one and explain the electoral result?Report
Yes. There have been times in cities where crime has gone down.
Do you want me to find you a link demonstrating this? Would you be okay with me linking to the crime section of the wikipedia page for “Stop and Frisk” again?Report
So then progressive policies on policing must have been very successful.
Were they?Report
I don’t know whether “Stop and Frisk” counts as a progressive policy.
Does it?Report
Stop & Frisk is the perfect example, of how even as crime had a strong decline over a period of decades, progressive policies have never enjoyed popular support. Not even in ostensibly liberal cities like New York.
So the assertion that Law N Order is popular entirely or even mostly due to an increase in crime is not supported by actual evidence.
Even in the best of times, even with perfect political instincts, progressives like Boudin and Gascon would be unpopular.Report
Like the alleged but non-existent link between crime and homelessness, the rate of “increase” in crimes in San Francisco is at best misleading:
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-2021-crime-data-released-16807034.phpReport
Oh, the crimes I was thinking of were “homicide” and “car break-ins” and that whole “shoplifting” thing.Report
Report
I suppose the question is now whether getting to a place where a business owner says “it is now worth reporting this to the police” is a goal worth striving for.
Because I can see a cheerful and happy storekeeper saying “this crime wasn’t worth reporting to the police”.
And I can see a hopeless and despondent storekeeper saying the exact same thing.Report
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/06/crime-economy-republicans-dictate-media-narrative/Report
I think our tolerance for crime has gone down more than crime has gone up.Report
Except as already noted, a lot of what passes for crime is not actually criminal behavior that can be – or should be – prosecuted by the DA after an actual arrest by police.
What has happened is that some people in some cities have decided that the regular public sightings of fellow citizens in economic distress – i.e. homeless – are not something they want to see because they fear becoming those people. So rather then agitate politically for the well known, albeit expensive – solutions to homelessness, they clutch at the figurative pearls of crime.Report
For a libertarian guy who allegedly thinks the police cannot be trusted, you sure seem to have an ax to grind against the city that elected one of the most progressive DAs in the country.
Chessa Boudin is not perfect and he can come across as defensive in interviews. I disagree with his campaign tactic to state that the recall is the work of dark money from right-wing billionaires even if some of it is. He has had some self-owns with crime against Asian-Americans who represent 34 percent of the population of San Francisco.
I generally agree with this piece that states the pushback against urban progressives is more about homelessness than anything else: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/los-angeles-mayor-election-san-francisco-boudin-recall-progressives-crime-homelessness.html
The big issue here is that homelessness and mental illness are not crimes. However, homelessness is the product of several decades of cascading policy failures including the seemingly unbreakable power of NIMBYs to enforce BANANAs. This is only slowly being chipped away and we have a decades long backlog of housing demand in California/the United States. There are other cascading failures to. Unfortunately, the best policies on homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness are seemingly the toughest sells.Report
What is a BANANA? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that term before and google is not being helpful.Report
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near AnyoneReport
Got it, thank you.Report
Thank you, never heard that one before.Report
I sometime like to add “s***holes” to the end so it becomes BANANAS for the extra sting from the NIMBY boomersReport
Chessa Boudin is not perfect and he can come across as defensive in interviews. I disagree with his campaign tactic to state that the recall is the work of dark money from right-wing billionaires even if some of it is. He has had some self-owns with crime against Asian-Americans who represent 34 percent of the population of San Francisco.
Why do you hate Chesa so much? Why are you putting so much energy into attacking him instead of defending him?
In any case, I’m pretty sure that Chesa’s attempts to reform the police have failed and we’re stuck with his change of focus away from petty quality-of-life crimes that, sadly, impact the quality-of-life of many in his district.
I do not believe that the police can be trusted and I believe that, seriously, they need to be reformed stem-to-stern.
But I also look at stuff like the car break-in thing, the shoplifting thing, and the whole thing where he described Vicha Ratanapkadee’s alleged murderer as experiencing a “temper tantrum”.
I certainly understand how even someone just a little bit to the left might conclude “you know what? We’d be better off with any given person picked by London Breed than we are with the current knucklehead.”
Do you think that London Breed doesn’t have good judgment? I admit, I’d agree that the whole masking thing shows that her judgment isn’t that great…Report
You are playing that same sad game pointed to by a LOT of folks here and in links springing from this a dozens of other articles and comments. The DA CAN”T reform the police because the DA doesn’t control the police. The DA can ONLY reform prosecution of the crimes submitted to the DA’s office. so if the police don’t make arrests, the DA is actually quite helpless to effect change. And as noted in the Slate article Saul linked to, homelessness (which you cheekily allude to as quality of life crimes) is not actually prosecutable. Its solutions are NOT something the DA can deal with, no matter how progressive he or she is.
When you look at things as they are, the question is really has the DA in San Fran prosecuted the people he promised to prosecute for the crimes he said he would? from our East it appears he has . . . .Report
Great comment. Please don’t call the city, San Fran.Report
Above, I’ve got a link to how he’s treating felony firearms cases. Maybe guns aren’t a big deal in San Francisco. They’ve only recently been in the news so maybe it’s unfair to focus on those.
There’s stuff like the lead-up to the tragic wrongful death of Hanako Abe at the agency of someone who had multiple plea deals and was walking around free. Or driving, I guess.
There is also the whole issue of him being *SERIOUSLY* tone-deaf. He’s had some major gaffes and just replacing him with someone identical who knows how to talk about crime as if the victims aren’t merely being whiny would be a step up.Report
A plea deal for 5 years of time already served and parole . . . which is of course not what the criminal in question deserved for property crimes I suppose.
That aside – if we are going to recall politicians for being tone deaf there’s an entire Republican Administration that served from 2017-2021 that should have been recalled. . . .Report
Oh, yes. Trump.
Man, San Fran must be in dire straits indeed to have the reason to keep Chesa around is Trump.
For what it’s worth, Trump was given as a reason to oppose the school recalls back in February.
I imagine that it will work here as well as it did there.
Early turnout is, apparently, low. That’s good news, right? It’s the republicans most likely to show up early, right?Report
According to the article Jaybird linked, he was arrested three times for auto theft and twice for burglary between June 2020 and the fatal accident on December 31st. He had at least five felony arrests while on parole after his plea deal.
Q: How many second chances do repeat felony offenders get in San Francisco?
A: As many as it takes.Report
To me, to the extent there’s a larger story here, it’s that the ability to achieve police reform is really contingent on maintaining the perception (which is hopefully an accurate one) that it is not going to come at the expense of basic law and order. The progressive prosecutor model has always been a questionable path to achieving that given the limits on what these offices can do, and the fact that it really dodges the hard work of policymaking.Report
I think the basic problem that Chessa Boudin and other progressive DAs and activists have is that a lot of people do not like visible disorder and their approach to criminal justice reform requires voters putting up with a lot of visible disorder. in San Francisco, you really can’t avoid seeing the sort of visible disorder created by homelessness and its related issues. These tend to be especially focused in the Tenderloin and SOMA neighborhoods. Other parts of the Bay Area like Oakland can also have a lot of visible disorder but it tends to be rarer. SF is really the focus of it in the Bay Area.
I think this is something that European social democrats get a lot more than the Anglophone Left. They know that you need to maintain a basic look of peace and order to get most citizens to go along with the program. The Anglophone left tends to be too much in love with the spirit of rebellion (TM) and believes that having the homeless and other people at the margins of life be in your face to the comfortable will drive the comfortable to have “there but for the grace of God go I” rather than drive them to the right despite all historical evidence to the contrary.
A progressive society needs to be a lawful and orderly society. People find shoplifters and turn style jumpers annoying enough. They aren’t going to like the more obnoxious forms of visible disorder. So if you want people to take transit rather than drive than transit needs to be free of people blasting music, having drag out fights, or making a scene of themselves in other ways.Report
This is a great comment about the nature of lefty cultural politics.
Another problem is that all social program solutions take time to work and actually need to be fully implemented. It’s great and correct to want to treat homeless people with dignity and help but it can takes years to get someone off the street at times nor do all the problems just stop. A DA or any one figure in the gov can only do so much or nothing in some cases. Addressing societal problems is hard and slow.Report
Another problem is that all social program solutions take time to work and actually need to be fully implemented
Can you ever say “this program failed”? Like, will you always be in a place where it would have worked if only we gave it another couple billion dollars and another two years?Report
Absent a counterproposal what else can one do? The problem still exists whether we throw resources at it or not. I presume we’re all in favor of a resolution.Report
Sure, but we want a solution that works, not one that simply satisfies an ideology while painting over problems.Report
No Oscar, we want solutions that work but without having to spend “OUR” tax dollars on them. if “someone else” pays for them we are fine.Report
Oh, yes, that too!Report
Agreed, but the only way to see if it’ll work is to put it into action. The left has tried progressive DAs, which raises the cockles of Jaybird and his fellow travelers. The right has tried tossing everyone in the clink, which raises the cockles of the left. Maybe someone ought to start talking.Report
Ackshully, the right hasn’t tried tossing “everyone” in the clink.
Programs like Stop N Frisk, no-knock raids, and militarized policing very specifically targeted only THOSE people.
Which, IMO, are why they are always so popular.Report
Not only my cockles, but the cockles of all of the Republicans and secret Republicans in San Francisco.
Sadly, I can’t find any exit polling for the recall itself.
Looks like we’ll have to wait until after sundown to see what happened.Report
“the cockles of all of the Republicans and secret Republicans in San Francisco.”
More importantly.
From what I read he’s going to be out of a job soon. It’ll be interesting to see if the reaction is just backlash or if any thought will be put into the job.Report
Maybe he’ll still pull it out. He did well in a couple of polls three weeks ago.
If he keeps his job, this will overturn a handful of narratives.Report
The dude abides.Report
The kicker is that fixing homelessness isn’t a one approach problem, because people become homeless for a variety of reasons.
Mental health, substance abuse, family strife*, un/under employment relative to the cost of living, etc.
Some are easier to fix than others, but each requires a different approach.
Best approach I’ve seen so far is cities buying up old hotels, giving them a bare bones renovation so they are livable, and moving the homeless into them, while also making social services available to the residents in the hotel.
And hey, if you magically deal with your homeless problem, the city has real estate it can sell.
*Usually gay/trans kids kicked out of the family home.Report
I’m all for that.
I think Lee hit the nail on the head above. No one wants to see this sh*t on the streets, so this both solves that problem and gets these people the help they need. It’s really kind of a no brainer.Report
I think the issue beyond the tax bill is that a lot of the people who need help won’t take it if offered. So there has to be a certain measure of coercive pressure to get people to take the help. Even the Nordic countries have a decent sized population that likes life on the rough or is to far gone to accept help.Report
True, but what is the percentage of the homeless population that is wholly unable or unwilling to take the help to get back on their feet? Is that a number small enough that the facade of order is maintained?Report
When it comes to the really hard cases of addiction or mental incapacity I get the sense that the people most interested in doing something are probably, and not totally without justification, also the most squeamish about using the level of coercion that might be necessary to actually work. Conversely the people most willing to use coercion are also probably least open to paying for programs generally and willing to be inhumane in ways that are themselves counter productive.Report
We should be squeamish about giving the gov the tools to use that level of coercion.
Misuse of these legal tools is deeply scary and they beg for misuse. The USSR used to do something like this against political opponents.Report
The government already has the coercive tools it needs, as long as it can wrap it up as a criminal matter.
The problem is that once it’s a criminal matter, no one wants to spend money on the medical care necessary to help people. Because everyone in detention is a Bad Person(TM) who truly deserves to be in there and needs punishment while they really think about what they’ve done.Report
Why should insanity be a criminal matter when 10% of the country has some flavor of mental illness?
Calling it a criminal matter seems like the wrong tool.Report
It is the wrong tool, but it’s the tool we already have, and a tool a large number of people think is perfectly fine to use for the mentally ill who can’t have the decency to conform their behavior to expected norms in public.Report
And it does work, splendidly just as advertised.
The only rub is that the the very same people who bitterly complain about the guy living in a tent behind the motel, show up to bitterly complain about using the motel to house the guy. Or complain about having to pay taxes to provide rent vouchers, or whatever.
Because lurking behind all the OUTTACONTROL CRIME narratives is usually some class based aesthetic resentment.Report
This is an effective solution, but it still requires a committed revenue stream over multiple years, and it won’t get to fully functional in the time frame most taxpayers would want. It also still has a huge NIMBY component, and has to be pared with effective transit and employment options. Its neither a cheap nor short game.Report
No, but’s it’s effective. And the NIMBY component is lessened, often-times because the hotels are in areas zoned for business, not residential.Report
We are throwing resources at it, to the tune of a Trillion dollars a year or so.
By their nature these issues don’t have a “resolution”.
Fix 90% of the problem and the remaining 10% will remain, appear unsolvable, and the activists will point to it and claim we’re not doing anything.
And that’s basically where we are right now.Report
Quite a bit more than a trillion dollars per year. I assume you’re referring to Rector’s 2012 estimate, but that was ten years ago. It also counted only means-tested programs, while excluding universal programs like public school, Social Security, and Medicare, which are all designed to prevent or mitigate poverty.Report
many social program shave surprisingly easy to measure metrics. Homelessness remediations can be assessed by tracking how many people successfully stay off the streets for 5-10 years. But you have to fund the programs for 5-10 years post intervention which too many cities, states, and even Congress fail to do.Report
Lol. Yeah jay lots of programs fail and should be discontinued. Good programs should get more money. This kind of thing is usually heavily researched and picked over in excruciating details in grant apps.Report
Social work programs also cost money and the best policy for things like homelessness and mental illness and poverty seem to drive many Americans up the wall. It is especially hard to sell this to people in an age of high housing costs/rent and inflation.Report
The carrot is too expensive for the tax payer and the stick is too draconian for the activists.Report
The dynamic that I would say we most lack is a basic consensus about the role of the state between Christian Democrat type parties and Social Democrat type parties, neither of which have ever quite existed here. That’s something that in a lot of other countries goes back to the 1870s and in some cases even before.Report
Also it is probably helpful that a lot of them got to restart to some degree from scratch in 1945, even if those forces predate the war.Report
It’s true that the right in other developed democracies isn’t as intensely anti-statist as the American right is.Report
Well said. I’ll add to that some of these programs have unwanted side effects and also have different impacts on different sub-cultures.Report
The Anglophone left seems to have this sort of cultural politics really worse than the non-Anglophone left for some reason. Not really sure why it exists but it seems to be a bad left over from the Counter-Culture and the long string of electoral defeats that even moderate liberals suffered in the Anglophone world from the 1970s onward. At some point the activist set seems to have thought that since they weren’t reaching their political goals, they might as well just go for cathartic release against the normies and the attitude stuck.Report
Feeling like you are the counter culture is the HOV lane to crazy town. People into being counter to often just want to be different from whatever they perceive the mainstream to be. Which gets the lefty activists who want to keep wherever weird and conservatives who yammer about not being PC when they had a fast food lunch in their truck on the way to a sporting event like that isn’t something everybody else does.Report
I believe the usual activist complaint about this kind of disorder is that it aflicts the comfortable. This is not actually true, it probably afflicts working and middle class San Franciscans more (the ones that remain)Report
The comfy vs the proletariat is one of the worst false binaries and the one the Left in general falls for to our detriment.Report
Its more like comfie normies varyingly defined vs. the wretched of the earth varyingly defined than comfies vs. the proletariat. Outside the Jacobin set, very few on the Left talk about the proletariat anymore.Report
Lee, this was an *AMAZING* paragraph:
A progressive society needs to be a lawful and orderly society. People find shoplifters and turn style jumpers annoying enough. They aren’t going to like the more obnoxious forms of visible disorder. So if you want people to take transit rather than drive than transit needs to be free of people blasting music, having drag out fights, or making a scene of themselves in other ways.
Part of the problem is that it’s an insight that has secondary importance to other values.
You know the part of you that is expecting someone else to call out “privilege” (or worse) in response to that paragraph? Yeah. Those values currently have primacy.Report
Well, can’t both be true?
I mean, remember what John Rocker said?
“”Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark … next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing.”
Whose laws? Whose orders?
That isn’t an argument for no laws and no order. But it is a recognition that “lawful and orderly” will be exclusive to some. But so will the alternative. It’s just a matter of deciding whom we want to include and whom we want to exclude and deciding who gets to decide that.Report
“You’re just privileged!” is an argument that works well if the person is complaining about someone with purple hair or an alternative lifestyle.
It works less well when someone is complaining about blasting music and it doesn’t work well at all when it comes to drag out fights.
If you want people to take transit, they’re going to have to feel comfortable taking transit. “If you’re uncomfortable, that’s a *YOU* problem!” is a response, I guess, but it doesn’t work well as a response to “so why aren’t you riding transit?”Report
Works well… to what end?
“Why don’t you take public transit?”
“All the purple hair queers.”
“All the guys who just got out of jail for the fourth time.”
“All the blaring music.”
“All the people not wearing masks.” [They’re still technically required in NYC at least.]
“All the fist fights.”
I mean, you could say, “You’re just privileged!” to all those but I don’t think you’re going to change anyone’s mind… so I don’t think, “You’re just privileged!” works for anything other than a rhetorical argument.
My point is not that there shouldn’t be laws and a sense of order and expectations for how one conducts themself. My point is that if your goal is to get more people on the train and their objection is certain people who are on the train, then you need to get those other people off the train. So you’re deciding whose presence on the train you value more. Which is fine. Just don’t pretend your doing anything else.Report
I suppose that there could be a discussion to be had whether “getting in fist fights” is similar to “being gay”.
If it is, that changes some things.Report
Do you doubt there are folks out there who would look more fondly upon someone who acknowledged having been in a fist fight than someone who came out as gay?Report
You mean, like, totally doing it on public transit in front of me?
I gotta say… both would be sufficient to get me to look into getting an uber.Report
If aggressively policing alcohol bans on public transit would increase ridership by 10%, should that be done?
20%
30%
What about instituting a rule that no adult could have more than 2 children under 12 with them… ya know, so John Rocker didn’t have to sit next to some single mom with 4 kids?
Should we enforce that if it gets enough John Rockers on the train to increase ridership by 10%? 20%? 30%?
Someone or someones have to answer those questions. And if your goal is to enforce lawfulness and order to help realize a progressive society, you just better home the person(s) deciding that are themselves pretty damn progressive.
Because, man, there are ALOT of people that would be really keen on rules about kids on trains.
Source: Me… someone who has spent the past 7 years riding multiple trains to work and some of those years with a child with me.Report
I’m comfortable saying that fights are bad. Like, that’s not something that you want.
“But what about women? Are you okay with *WOMEN*????”
Yes. I am okay with women.
But I am not okay with fights.
I’m okay with there being a blurry line in the middle there if we can agree that women are in the part that isn’t blurry on the good part of the line and fights are fully in the not-blurry bad part of the line.
Assuming, of course, that the goal is to get people to ride transit.
If you don’t give a crap about the poor getting attacked on transit… well, maybe you could try shaming them for not feeling safe just because women are on the bus too.Report
I just think it is important to recognize that there IS a blurry part and that not everyone will agree on what is or is not in the blurry part and that, ultimately, someone or someones needs to make those decisions.
If 95% of agree that women should be allowed on the train well, then, hoo boy, it is hard to get 95% of people to agree on everything. Clearly, women should be on the train! but we can’t pretend those other 5% of people don’t exist. And, hoo boy, let’s hope 95% of people… or 75% of people… or 51% of people… agree that you and I and all our typical train behaviors should be allowed to remain.Report
Wenever Liberty confronts Order, Order wins every time.Report
Conflating attacks on elderly Asians with “Liberty” is a good way to end up with stuff that will be conflated with “Order”.Report
What I should have said was, my liberty wins over your order, and my order wins over your liberty.
That is, the Venn diagram of people who get all worked up over that guy shoplifting at Walgreens, and the diagram of people marching defiantly into a store refusing to wear a mask, is a circle.Report
Yeah, the whole erasure of the legitimate criticisms that the AAPI community in San Francisco has is weird.
Voting ends in 45 minutes.Report
That’s too bad because in about 45 minutes we will never hear about AAPI again.
Unless some other city has the temerity to elect a progressive.Report
If you’re not familiar (and, hey, if you don’t live there, why would you be?), you can get some background here (do a search for “temper tantrum”).
The entire section talks about dissatisfaction in that part of the community.
If you think that you’ll never hear from that community again, I’d wonder if you remember February and whether you heard from that community for the little dust-up at the school board. Do you not remember them at all during that?
Did you see that as yet another Republican-led frenzy where naive Democrats got herded into opposing good Progressives who had a media problem?Report
“It’s just a matter of deciding whom we want to include and whom we want to exclude and deciding who gets to decide that.”
No, not at all, not if we’re talking about public transportation. Are you implying that there’s a sizable population that wants to make it illegal for purple-haired gays to ride the bus? In San Francisco? No, if I read Lee’s comment correctly, he’s admitting that beyond how the laws are written, each person is going to decide whether he’s willing to take the bus, given the conditions and his own circumstances.Report
If we say yes to purple haired folks, we’re telling John Rocker to kick rocks.
I’m good with that.
You seem good with that.
Is John Rocker good with that?
How many people would agree with him over you and me?Report
It’s not about non-mainstream people who are otherwise minding their business. Today on BART many of the seats in my car could not be sat upon because somebody vomited all over the place. I was on bus rides in SF where two old men were making some very inappropriate conversation to the annoyance of everybody else or somebody was screaming loudly on their phone or saying outt loud how everybody was looking at him and as a tough, N-word, he wasn’t going to allow this or blasting music or smoking pot high as a kite.Report
One person’s “non-mainstream person minding their business” is another’s “that person makes the train unridable.”
I’m not against clear expectations… in fact, I’m in favor of them! Man, I sure wish the train was more aggressive about enforcing rules about folks taking up empty seats with bags. It boils my blood! I think expectations are GOOD. I just think there was a matter-of-factness to your comment that ignored all the squirrely bits about setting expectations, especially as it relates to realizing a progressive society.Report
It’s weird. Lee used the example of “someone puked on the bus seats” and you immediately jumped to “man, I hate it when people put bags on seats instead of letting people sit on them”.
The original complaint was people getting in fights. You went to John Rocker.
Hey. There are some people who punch other people on the bus. Some people on the bus get punched.
The argument that says “We’re going to have to pick the side of the person who punches or the person who gets punched and it’s silly to pretend that we’re not going to be picking a side” is one that fails to take into account that we want more people to ride the bus.
The whole “people who punch” vs. “people who get punched” is only a lifestyle decision in a handful of places and public transport ain’t one of them and it’s a bad analogy to analogize between punchy people and even people who put their purse on the seat next to them.Report
The fear seems to be that police who do not look mainstream are going to be policed more for obnoxious behavior to others than people who look mainstream. Therefore, the non-mainstream in appearance should be given a lot of leeway in their behavior.Report
Oh, complaints that the cops will be afraid of people who show willingness to commit violence and will limit their policing to harmless weirdos and hippies is a complaint that makes sense to me.
“We can’t trust the cops!” has a lot of stuff that follows and I get that.
But you’re then stuck with “so what do we do about punchy people on the bus?”
Pretending that they don’t exist at all and talking about people who manspread is one option. I don’t think it’s the best one.Report
My point was more that an appeal to “law and order” and “Some people won’t ride the train because of who else rides the train” can just as easily become a John Rocker quote as a thoughtful plan to make the train better for 99% of people by dealing with the 1% of people that 99% of people can agree are a problem (i.e., the punchers).
Isn’t this like the Baptists and Bootleggers thing you quote often?
“WE SHOULD CLEAN UP THE TRAIN!”
Who said it: LeeEsq or John Rocker?
I’m down to clean up the train. I just think we should be careful and thoughtful about how we go about it. Because I think there is a much finer line — in terms of how policies get developed, implemented, and enforced — between the LeeEsqs and John Rockers.Report
But Lee wasn’t doing this motte/bailey thing where he started with “we need to clean up the train” and ended up mumbling about muggings or whatever.
He opened with:
He gave the example of someone puking on the bus.
If I bothered, I could find you some footage of a young woman being attacked on the subway in San Francisco (helpfully filmed by an acquaintance of the attacker).
Pretending that complaining about this is the equivalent of John Rocker’s smack talk prior to the World Series is going to end up with people assuming that you are deliberately obfuscating the legitimate complaints that Lee has.Report
Well, sure, fights.
But what constitutes “blasting music”? And what are the acceptable and unacceptable ways of “making a scene of themselves”?
If he stopped at fights, I wouldn’t have commented at all.
And if he stopped at blasting music, I probably wouldn’t have commented.
But he really left the door open with “making a scene of themselves.”Report
Luckily, he left other comments. I am copying and pasting this:
He ain’t motting/baileying this. You might want to tell him that he shouldn’t have a problem with people smoking pot on the bus or having a screaming phone conversation.
For my part, I don’t have a problem with people saying “You know what? I don’t want to ride transit.”Report
So.. just out of curiosity… which part of my initial comment (pasted below) do you disagree with:
“Whose laws? Whose orders?
That isn’t an argument for no laws and no order. But it is a recognition that “lawful and orderly” will be exclusive to some. But so will the alternative. It’s just a matter of deciding whom we want to include and whom we want to exclude and deciding who gets to decide that.”Report
But it is a recognition that “lawful and orderly” will be exclusive to some.
“Chaotic” is exclusive to others, mostly via quiet exit.
“Who do we want to include and who do we want to exclude?”
Well, the people who have stopped taking transit have excluded themselves.
Congrats. You’ve only got the punchy, yelly, barfy people left. Oh, and the people too poor to have any other option.
Do you want me to find you the footage of the woman being attacked? I can find it for you, if you like. You can go back to pretending we’re talking about stuff like people being upset at adolescents chewing gum loudly immediately after, I promise.Report
Bruh… I literally said that:
“But so will the alternative.”
I’m not pretending anything. Lee’s initial comment… to which I responded… mentioned people “making a scene of themselves.”
If we’re limiting “making a scene of themselves” to “fighting” you’ll get no argument from me.
And if we stretch it a bit to include vomiting, you won’t get any argument from me either.
But you know who you might get an argument from? The wealthy parents of wealthy kids from Westchester who take MetroNorth into Manhattan for a night out and then vomit on the train ride home at the end of the night. Seen it myself.
Are we all cool with the wealthy folks in Westchester pulling out of public transit? Because, hoo boy, will that have repercussions.
So if we’re just talking about fighting and vomiting, you and I agree! If we’re talking about more, well, devil is in the details.
Meanwhile, go talk to the wealthy folks in Westchester.Report
But notice how much of this “social disorder” is really just an aesthetic objection to other people’s lives, and an implicit judgement of them.
I mean, could I make the same sort of comment about Cletus and Lurlene arguing at the White Trash Buffet in Hardscrabble, Oklahoma?
Yes I could, but I suspect there would be some pushback about out of touch coastal elites mocking the Authentic American salt of the earth.
Again, by almost any standard, the American cities are cleaner, safer, and more orderly than anyone here can remember.
But the shrieking about the collapse of civilization which I remember during the Flower Children era have not stopped, not once not ever.Report
“But notice how much of this ‘social disorder’ is really just an aesthetic objection to other people’s lives, and an implicit judgement of them.”
Are you talking about Lee? He said the following:
“A progressive society needs to be a lawful and orderly society. People find shoplifters and turn style jumpers annoying enough. They aren’t going to like the more obnoxious forms of visible disorder.”
By implication he’s saying that minor crimes are annoying enough but more obnoxious forms of visible disorder are more annoying. Do you think he meant purple hair, or more serious crimes?Report
But notice how much of this “social disorder” is really just an aesthetic objection to other people’s lives, and an implicit judgement of them.
You mean fighting and barfing?
Chip, Chesa *LOST*. Pretending that the only reason he lost was white people found him personally embarrassing following his cleaning up the subways is a position that is not founded in reality.Report
You are making my point by combining fighting and being sick in the same breath.
The stated objection is “crime” but the real objection is “I find these people aesthetically unpleasant”.Report
The stated objection among the communities of color was that he was not particularly successful as a DA.
Here, I’ll share this one again:
Report
The unfortunate reality is these two can overlap.Report
They can, but its a small Venn diagram most days.Report
I don’t see the division in American society as one between advocates for a “lawful and orderly society” on one side, and individualist rulebreakers on the other.
Or at least, the division seems entirely bipartisan.
For every Chesa Boudin who is tolerant of turnstyle jumpers, there is a Federalist columnist who cheers on mask-refusers berating store clerks.
But for every self-proclaimed “Law N Order” type who demands strict enforcement of shoplifting laws, there is an supporter of MeToo who demands accountability for sexual harassment
It isn’t so much that our political divisions fall along Order versus Liberty, but on My Order versus Your Order.
Which in turn reflects a larger battle over who has a legitimate place in our society, versus who will be the outcasts.Report
There is a lot of partisan division between what counts as visible disorder or not in the current political climate. For many of the non-political normies, the turn style jumper, the mask refuser, shoplifter, and sexually harasser are obnoxious threats to the commons even though all of them have their defenders among the partisans. Like no matter how much the activists on either side want it, the majority of people are not going to like big homeless camps in their cities or people packing heat everywhere and being loud, rude, and often violent about it.Report
Right, but notice how this plays out.
People carrying assault rifles in Kroger has one political outcome, people camping in the riverbed carries a wholly different political outcome.
The rifle carryers are not widely seen as “rulebreakers” because for Republicans (and a large portion of the media), they are advocates for the Good Order whereas a guy camping in the riverbed is Rabble who must be Made To Obey.Report
I’ve never seen someone carrying an assault rifle outside of hunting and pictures of political protest.
I’ve seen lots of homeless camps.
The issue isn’t just “what” it’s also “how often” and “how much imposition”.
On the one hand is something so rare I’ve never personally encountered it, and if I did it would only be for a few minutes. On the other is something that’s common and an active problem to large numbers of people all the time.Report
This has to do with power differences and the fact that the gun-nuts have a much bigger percentage of politicians and judges behind them than homeless encampments. It is unjust but the voters aren’t going to not to do something about disorder they can fight if there is a type of disorder they can’t fight.Report
For every Chesa Boudin who is tolerant of turnstyle jumpers
The criticisms against Chesa included minimizing crimes against Asian-Americans to the point where leniency was given to alleged murders of Asian-Americans.
Ignoring this is part of why he was recalled with a margin of 20 points.Report
Actually its about ethics in AAPI crime reporting.Report
JayBird is exaggerating the situation but I do think there is basically something of a growing silent majority type belief system among many Asian-Americans. This is especially true for working and lower middle class Asian-Americans who aren’t really that connected to the White liberals.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done in remedying all the past racism against African-Americans. One not really discussed problem is that American society is a lot more diverse than it was during the time of the Civil Rights movements. At least a decently sized minority of the post-INA Americans seem to think that they are being asked to take a hit because of past white racism against African-Americans and Native Americans and don’t like it at all. They will vote accordingly.Report
When these “normies”, these Asian-Americans watch the Jan. 6 hearings and all the videos of Republicans beating up cops and smashing the US Capitol, how will they react?
I predict the hearings will have very little impact among self-described “Law N Order” types.
I mean, look at our conservative commenters here- Which drew more outrage, a video of a guy shoplifting, or video of the violent assault on the Capitol?
The assertion that there is a large latent constituency for a lawful orderly society is true, but it misses that there is wide and deep disagreement over which set of laws and order are desired.Report
Highly ideological people make excuses for the disorder they sympathize with or see as somehow justified. Most people however are not ideological and probably don’t draw the connection between 1/6 and urban crime/quality of life problems.
Of course it also may help that the 1/6 people are actually being prosecuted. Whether that matters out there in the land of public opinion or not I don’t know but it strikes me as a potentially important distinction from decisions not to prosecute certain types of offenses.Report
Do nonideological people draw a connection between the Republican violent assault on the Capitol and the Republican running for election in their district?
I am resisting this appeal to “normies” or “nonideological people” as if their viewpoints are somehow superior or valid, while the viewpoints of “ideological” people are not.
“Normies” have throughout history, cheered on every awful thing from witch trials to the Satanic Panic to the War On Drugs and War On Terror.
I’ve said this many times, but authoritarianism is very often wildly popular, especially by “nonideological” people.Report
I don’t want to make excuses either. I’m just saying I can see how a pretty common response could be ‘well the QAnon Shaman guy is in prison and the people committing these infractions should be too.’ I could also see how someone could feel that way and not see the sentiment in particularly partisan terms.
My guess is that’s closer to the median which puts reformers of the Boudin persuasion and 1/6 apologists of the Trumpian persuasion nearer to each other in that horseshoe theory of politics that comes up periodically. Which isn’t to say BSDI, because I don’t think it’s remotely that simple. However there is a common premise at work and figuring out where an individual stands on that premise may be more valuable for understanding their behavior than which party they are more likely to pull the lever for in a given general election.Report
Here’s a data point.
According to a recent poll something like 44% of Republicans say we should just learn to live with the occasional mass shooting.
Where did their deep principled desire for a lawful and orderly society go?
They get outraged over turnstile jumping but shrug off the slaughter of dozens of children.
It was never about order. It is about THEIR preferred order.Report
This may be another way of saying they don’t believe in magic thinking, don’t think we can restructure society, and don’t see a way to prevent mass shootings short of becoming a police state.
No doubt they’re wrong and just a tiny amount of gun control will make suicidal mass murders obey the law.Report
According to a recent poll something like 44% of Republicans say we should just learn to live with the occasional mass shooting.
San Fran just had a vote on whether we should just learn to live with the occasional attack on Asian-Americans.Report
Are they supposed to?
The rioters are being treated normally by the criminal justice system. That Shaman got 4 years for being there. The rioters who engaged in violence will get worse.
You seem to be insisting that since the rioters will get a pass, so should the shoplifters. The problem is the rioters aren’t getting a pass.Report
How many Republicans are running for election claiming that the election was stolen, the insurrection was justified, and are openly planning to steal this next one?
Do the Law N Order Republicans object to stealing elections, or just snack chips?Report
The Video Games Freikorps was also distant and in Washington, DC rather than up close.Report
Agreed. And Chip raises a fair point that it’s not really credible to claim to be for law and order in the city streets but somehow see the 1/6 event as acceptable. I just don’t think that’s how the generally blue voters in urban areas suffering from these problems are thinking about it.Report
“You must have this much moral standing to criticize my shortcomings.”
And people who have not sufficiently criticized whichever events I would like to appeal to are people whose criticisms I do not have to address.
On top of that, if there is someone who has happened to criticize that event, I can still sweep it away because “that’s the same criticism the other guy made”.
Eventually you reach the point where you find yourself saying “the only people with the moral standing to make this criticism are the people who are so very moral that it would never occur to them to criticize their own side in the first place.”Report
When you want to attack progressives, you wear the robes of morality and demand justice for AAPI people.
When conservatives are attacked you smirk about “moral standing”.Report
I’ll let you get back to complaining about January 6th.Report
Saul gets at this below but I’m not sure there really are sides here in the normal sense. This fight is intra-blue. Conservatives may laugh and crow but it’s really to the credit of the larger coalition that it can and will at times correct course. It’s not like there will be any Republicans holding office in SF any time soon and the more the Democrats show themselves as the party of sanity the worse that is for Republicans, who still seem unable to control their crazier personalities in elected office.Report
I agree that there are not sides.
Heck, a simple and elegant “Chesa lost because of the following shortcomings that were within his control… and those shortcomings were compounded by the events that were entirely outside of his control” is probably warranted far more than the attitude that this was about people being disturbed at the number of earrings being worn by men on the bus.Report
“I mean, look at our conservative commenters here- Which drew more outrage, a video of a guy shoplifting, or video of the violent assault on the Capitol?”
srsly?Report
Report
I don’t think anyone is in favor of sexual harassment. The disagreement is on whether we should go directly from accusation to punishment.
I accuse you of shoplifting 30 years ago. I have no proof at all and have obvious other motivations. IMHO you aren’t allowed to disagree with me and you need to lose your job.
That’s not “Law N Order”.Report
Great comment Lee.Report
I don’t think your two examples are the best here. It is more the out of control levels of homelessness and equating that with crime.Report
Homelessness is the biggest manifestation of visible disorder but it isn’t the only one. BART is increasingly busy but a lot of people in the United States do not take transit even when it is semi-good. because they don’t want to deal with vomit like the BART ride home today.Report
Here is the current top post on Reddit’s /r/sanfrancisco subreddit.
It links to this CNN piece and excerpts this paragraph:
Report
Mainly London Breed who would get to appoint his replacement. The official party and a lot of unions have stood by him.Report
Open these links in an incognito window to follow the recall results live:
New York Times
SF ChronicleReport
He has been recalled almost certainly. Otherwise, the Republican candidates are largely getting trounced. Lanhee Chen is leading in the primary for comtroller but has fewer votes than both Democratic candidates combined. Republican turned Democrat mall-developer Rick Caruso is slightly leading Karen Bass for LA Mayor.Report
The Chronicle has called it:
The entire thread has some interesting stuff in it.Report
At this point, the numbers are now 60.0% to 40.0%.Report
An interesting thread that I don’t agree with, but don’t see as *CRAZY*.
Report
Which is what liberals have always said, that conservatism consists of intolerance of certain identities.Report
Accepting that definition as a given, I’m now stuck trying to figure out if there has ever been a liberal society anywhere at any time.Report
I think the real takeaway is his point about SFPD being lazy well before Boudin’s stint as DA.Report
I have told you over and over again that you can vote straight-ticket Democrat and still be as conservative as Lloyd Bentsen.Report
Conservative and liberal are false binaries here. In general, the candidate that wins city-wide elections is considered the moderate. However, London Breed, David Chiu, Nancy Pelosi, etc are very liberal by any reasonable definition of the word. This is more about people being upset that their leftier than thou anarchism is not widespread.Report
I honestly think that this recall is best interpreted as a backlash against incompetence rather than a backlash against leftism or anything like that.
If people were able to go to Walgreens without witnessing shoplifting and then getting back to their car and finding that it hadn’t been broken into, Chesa would have been retained.
Spinning this as white people not liking Chesa because they don’t like people who happen to be temporarily experiencing houselessness is going to result in misunderstanding the dynamic.
Like, entirely.Report
This is probably common knowledge in San Francisco, but I just found out that Boudin was raised by Bill Ayers after his parents were convicted of murder in an armored car robbery which was a joint venture between Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. His father just got out last year.
As someone who is very different from my own parents, I would never prejudge anyone by the sins of his parents, but in retrospect, this makes a lot of sense.Report
Local politician loses race, priors confirmed. Film at 11:00.Report
It is amazing how much this happens again and again and the media rides that this a quake against the left. As I pointed out, this would be true if Republicans actually performed well in the CA primaries overall. They did not.Report
copeReport
Personally, I don’t see this as a quake against “the left”.
This is a backlash against a very particular flavor among the left. I, myself, do not see this particular flavor as representative of “the left”.
But wait… should I?Report
That being said, I am seeing a lot of white people really not dealing with the fact that Boudin’s support mainly came from some of the whitest, bougie-boho, hipster parts of San Francisco. They really want to be able to blame this recall on white people and they can’t and it hurts their heads.Report
Yeah the thing to keep in mind is this is an intra-left argument. The right and the Republicans aren’t even being cursorily considered. This is just a certain kind of leftist performative ideology versus an older version of leftist/liberal thought. Neither side winning presages some rejection of liberalism/leftism in total no matter how much Boudin’s supporters scream it is so.Report
What result tells us more:
This guy being recalled 60-40
OR
Kemp winning his primary 74-22?Report
each tells a different story.Report
The Atlantic put up a pretty interesting article on the subject today. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/Report
This is getting back to Kristin’s post about Democratic cities.
We can point out that any rural Republican area can match San Francisco- drunkard for drunkard, meth addict for meth addict, misery for misery failed school for failed school.
Yet the Cletus safaris never seem to ask how rural Ohio became a failed hellscape.Report
I would say the fairest metric of a particular area’s dysfunction is how closely day to day life resembles The Warriors.Report
Day to day life hasn’t really met the Warriors in San Francisco or New York for decades. Same with most blue cities. Gang crime like that is not present. I agree with my brother about how people dislike the visible disorder of homelessness and this hurt Boudin. I also agree that there has been a rise in ant-Asian crimes. However, it is still about as far away from the Warriors as possible. If we were dealing with Warriors level crime and anarchy, housing prices in SF would not be astronomically high.
There does seem to be a kind of person though who will always think every city is like the Warriors despite all facts to the contrary.Report
I know I’m just kidding. And having gone to law school in a neighborhood probably best known for occasionally being
featured in the Wire I like to think I have at least a little perspective.Report
This isn’t about red vs blue, though- it’s an internal to team blue discussion. I grant you that team red is over in the corner caked in feces ranting about Maga etc. they’re not in this discussion at all. It doesn’t matter to San Francisco voters, however, if ruralia Ohio is a bucolic paradise or a fentanyl ridden wasteland.Report
But it somehow matters, like, a whole lot to folks in say, Colorado or Washington state that some guy in SF got sick in a subway car.
And it matters a whole lot to editors and publishers all across America that cities must absolutely be depicted as wastelands while rural areas are where Real America lives.
I may have mentioned here about the TV shows that are filmed in my neighborhood which portray it as a Walking Dead type hellscape.
The very streets that I walk down, alone, unarmed and unafraid because they are actually very safe.
And it matters!
The media depictions of city life drive votes and tip elections and result in policy.
Why else has this blog devoted so many pages and comments to the subject?Report
Well it matters in Colorado or Washington State because those places are packed to the gills with people who left California and are facing the exact same policy problems and challenges that California does.
And yes, the GOP has to exaggerate and denigrate Cali since it’s viewed as the standard bearer of the left and probably is. But on that same note saying “My city isn’t as bad as they’re saying it is.” isn’t a great argument either. The substantive critiques do have teeth.
What I find most interesting about the whole matter is more a matter of political lessons. Specifically that no matter how much the right and media and twitter try and say otherwise, identarian woke politics are just another flavor of left wing politics. Mouthing woke slogans or aping tin eared identarian argument styles doesn’t work outside social media or the academy- it just loses elections. Not just to rabid right winders but also to simply older styles and alternative styles of liberals.Report
The very best argument is to speak the truth, that American cities are cleaner, safer, and more orderly than at any time in almost anyone’s lived experience.
To have an actual adult memory of a time when cities were better, one would need to be at least 80 years old.
This isn’t a slick and savvy argument, its just the simple truth.Report
The very best argument is to speak the truth, that American cities are cleaner, safer, and more orderly than at any time in almost anyone’s lived experience.
FOR WHOM?
That’s the problem. Had the DA in San Francisco said something about the attacks on Asian-Americans to the effect of “these attacks are unconscionable and will not be tolerated” rather than “well, you know, boys will be boys”, the Asian-American community would not feel like the DA was not representing their community.
The violence in the Tenderloin was also pretty bad and, yes, swept under the rug.
As a matter of fact, according to the voting, it seems like the only people who felt that Chesa was doing a good job were the ones in the bougie parts of the city. The white tech-bros.
I can easily imagine them laughing and saying “We’re all as safe as we’ve ever been!”
And the only question is about who counts as “we”.Report
Present your case, that cities are more dangerous for Asians now than in past eras.
But why bother because you aren’t actually saying that. What you’re saying is that the perceived violence matters regardless of actual violence.
But that just proves my point of the importance of knocking down the crazy myths.Report
Oh, now I have to defend that for *CITIES* and not merely San Francisco?
Is that because you knew that I’d link to stuff like this and you wanted to get out in front of that?Report
I’ve demolished the Bailey so now onto the Motte.
Your link proves my point. Half of the ONE YEAR increase was due to ONE SINGLE PERSON.
Despite a recent uptick Asians are still safer today than in past decades.
Do you actually believe that San Francisco is more dirty, more disorderly more dangerous than 10, 20, 30 years ago?
No you’ve already acknowledged that in previous threads.
So you keep doing the Satanic Panic thing of cherrypicked stats and rumors of perceptions.
Can you make and defend even a single assertion about crime in America?
ETA
What I mean is, you’re trying so hard to Make Libruls Look Bad you haven’t seemed to have formulated a coherent viewpoint of your own.Report
No, Chip. You didn’t. You switched from us talking about San Francisco to talking about the entire country and then, when I continued talking about San Francisco, you claimed that I am doing something with the motte.
Half of the one year increase was due to a single person… and given that the uptick was 567%, then that means that, if you get rid of that one single person, the crimes are up 233.5%.
Despite a recent uptick Asians are still safer today than in past decades.
The recall was due to, among other things, the recent “uptick”.
And the response of the authorities to said “uptick”.
So you keep doing the Satanic Panic thing of cherrypicked stats and rumors of perceptions.
If I wanted to explain why Chesa was not supported by the Asian-American community, I think I’ve done so.
What’s your explanation for why they should have backed him?
Can you make and defend even a single assertion about crime in America?
You mean like with statistics?
What I mean is, you’re trying so hard to Make Libruls Look Bad you haven’t seemed to have formulated a coherent viewpoint of your own.
I’ll try to throw something together. An essay or something.Report
So are we in agreement that American cities, including San Francisco are safer now that they have been in decades?Report
I dunno. I’ve got some numbers right here that show that hate crimes against Asian-Americans are up in San Francisco.
Might be safer for white people. Should that be my focus instead?Report
So your numbers show that American cities are more dangerous now than in previous decades?
Well of course not, and you aren’t silly enough to make such a preposterous claim.
So all you can really offer is, “I dunno.” and hope no one notices.
But we do notice, that you aren’t willing to even acknowledge what is factually proven in countless studies, that crime has been on a downward trend since before you were born, and cities are safer, cleaner, and more orderly than they have been.
And I would direct all my fellow Democrats to this exchange, as Exhibit A against the notion that “If we only had better arguments…!” stuff we see online.
Conservatives know the truth. They read the same papers, have access to the same stats and facts we do.
If they stubbornly insist that there is a crime wave and cities are burning hellscapes, another Vox explainer article won’t change things.
This is their Young Earth Creationism, their Satanic Panic, and they won’t surrender it because to do so would be too disturbing.Report
Chip, I’m mostly surprised that the numbers I’ve shown so far are numbers that you’re impervious to.
Like, keeping to San Francisco, I provided evidence that hate crimes against Asian Americans were up more than 500%.
Your counter-argument to this was that half of those were due to one guy.
Do you see how that that isn’t a counter-argument to whether hate crimes against Asian-Americans is up in San Francisco?
So you want to talk about the whole country? Here’s an article from Time Magazine from earlier this year. The title? “Violent Crime in the U.S. Is Surging. But We Know What to Do About It“.
Yes. Crime is going up.
“But it’s not as bad as it was in the 90’s!” is true.
But it not being historically bad is not an argument against it going up.
What numbers do you have that cities are as good now as they were in 2015? Studies from 2015?Report
That Time article was an interesting read. One passage that stood out for me:
There are states in this country where saying stuff like this in a school would cause a teacher to lose his/her job. With this as a starting point, how does one begin the conversation?Report
Well, I think that a great way to avoid it is to point out that crime is not up and cities are safer than they’ve ever been.
Here’s a thread from last year talking about multiple cities having multiple records being set for homicide.
The problem is that there appears to be a narrative that people want to hold on to that crime is not, in fact, going up.
First things first, we have to agree on whether or not that is true.
There. I’ve given my arguments for how crime is going up.
You can read Chip’s for why cities are doing better than ever.
Lemme know when we figure out what is true. Then we can talk about how to fix it.Report
What is true is that overall aggregate crime rates are still in decline, as they have been for several decades.
What is also true is that some violent crimes – including homicides – are going up in some cities.
What is true is that racial violence against Asian Americans in San Francisco is up 563%.
What is true is that its a misleading statistic to quote by itself because half of that increase is one person.
Now, what do you – Jaybird – believe we should do about What is True?Report
Phil, I gotta admit: I look at some of the claims made about crime stats and can’t help but do some quick switching in my head and I look at statements like:
“Racial violence against African-Americans in Mississippi is up 563%.”
“That’s misleading. Half of that violence was one guy!”
See? Look at that. Imagine someone saying that.
Now realize that *YOU* are saying that.
When it comes to “overall aggregate crime rates”, we’re still in a place where we’re finding out that, no, it’s trickling up.
If we want to get “big picture” and do a comparison of points in 1994 to points in 2020 or 2021, we can say “look big number look smaller number”.
But if we look at the trend from, oh, 2015 or so, we see that the line is going up, even if the point on the line that is going up is lower than the point on the line that was going down in 1995.Report
How is this a response to what I posted?Report
I was pointing out that we’re not quite all on board with having a conversation with it yet.
But, I suppose, if we can agree that we can ignore the people who deny reality, we can move forward.Report
I’m not making an argument, I’m just pointing out the truth.
The claim that is made by Republicans, that cities are deteriorating and growing worse, is a lie.
Not a debatable argument, not a viewpoint but quite simply a lie.
Its a lie, just like their claim that Trump won the 2020 election, or that masks don’t work, or that teachers are grooming children. People, intelligent people, who repeat these claims are liars.
Again, this isn’t some clever cunning argument that will win points on the internet or make votes go our way. Its just simply the truth of what is.Report
Well, there are people who said that the damage from the riots in 2020 weren’t that bad.
The damage was over two billion dollars!
Wait, you may ask. Were we talking about the 2020 riots? I thought we were talking about something else? Why are you bringing up the claims made by some people about the amount of damage done? Is it just to say that these people, that you haven’t even bothered to quote, are wrong? Are you then using the fact that these (maybe imaginary?) people are wrong as the jumping off point to make a point about something else?
I can’t believe that the 2020 riots are still dominating even our conversations about Chesa being recalled on Tuesday.Report
I remember the lies told about the riots then, too, like the lie about a bus being commandeered in Chicago.Report
Yeah, the lie was being told by the elected officials! The *MAYOR* told that one!
Crazy.Report
Another lie.
She made what she thought was a truthful statement, which turned out to have just been a rumor.
After a rumor is exposed as a rumor, anyone who repeats is now a liar.
And you know this.Report
Wait, are you complaining about us discussing rumors (ones being spread by the mayor) at the time that the rumors were flying around?
Man. The Chesa thing must *REALLY* suck.
Do you think that it’s a national story instead of a local one? Like, is it indicative of November at all?Report
No, I’m pointing out that spreading a rumor after it is disproven is a lie.Report
I’d be pushing to explain that the problem of Chesa is a problem that has been addressed and now we can move back to something more like “Good Governance”.
But, if we can’t even say that the DA who got recalled wasn’t a good DA, then I guess changing the subject is the only thing on the table.
Have you heard that hate crimes against African-Americans in Mississippi are up more than 500%?Report
This is true. It’s also true that our tolerance for being unsafe has gone down a LOT during that same time. So if one person dies at the hands of the cops we may get a riot.
What’s driving that lack of tolerance is technology. All local news is now national. Everyone is a reporter.Report
You are repeating a lot of what I’ve pointed out about the police. The cops are less violent and less racist than at any time in the past. The perception doesn’t match the reality.Report
Its like saying overall murder has declined, but mass murders have gone up.
Both can be true, but we can still see it as a problem to be solved.
Like, cities are more orderly than they were a few years ago, but homelessness has increased. So while we can feel good about the progress, we can still see that problems remain.
As to your point, it may be true that the cops are better than the days of Jim Crow, but that doesn’t negate the remaining injustice that occurs.Report
Meh. I disagree strongly and think this piece is exaggerated even if I disagree with quite a few of the points Chip makes in this thread. Randy Balko had a good tweet regarding how many San Franciscans will start feeling safe now because there is not going to be a campaign telling them they are unsafe and crime is out of control.
Boudin for a variety of reasons was targeted by critics as ripe for recall. In neighboring Alameda and Contra Costa counties, progressive DAs have seemingly one or received the most votes thus far.
I think it is risible to call San Francisco a failed city when everyone also talks about how expensive it is here in the same breath.Report
Oh yeah, to paraphrase Woody, noone wants to live in San Francisco: it’s so crowded and the portions are so small! Do you have anything specific beyond the headline you disagree with (IIRC the authors don’t write the headlines).
Boudin, along with the compatriots from the SF school board, strikes me as simply not a very capable politician.Report
A knockout paragraph:
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Knockout how? Do we indeed have the power to use the state to impose interventions on people not seeking them? Is that imposition moral? Have we as a nation adequately funded those interventions? After we have imposed these interventions, what else should impose on people who don’t want it? Should we force pregnant women to carry a child to term? Should we force teachers to only teach certain things that make us comfortable? How far down the slippery slope do you believe we should go?Report
It’s knockout insofar as it is incredibly insightful.
We have the power, I think.
Is that imposition moral? That’s the question, ain’t it?
Have we as a nation…? It’s weird how we constantly flip from San Francisco to “The Nation” when we talk about these things in the context of San Francisco. Like, we can be talking about an article where San Francisco is failing at something and the conversation switches to the nation and, like, well… we can’t even do this in San Francisco! Arguably the most progressive city in the country! Pointing out that they’re failing to do this in Harlan County, Kentucky isn’t really an own because of *COURSE* Kentucky is backwards and reactionary and all of the bad things. But San Francisco was the main topic.
After we have imposed…? Continued existence. Perhaps we could force them to become productive members of society.
Should we force pregnant women to carry a child to term? SHOULD WE FORCE PEOPLE IN PRISON TO WORK JOBS FOR COMMISSARY MONEY
Should we force teachers to only teach certain things that make us comfortable? We should certainly force teachers to teach children about the “Gish Gallop”.
How far down the slippery slope do you believe we should go? Oh, Phil. The “so-called” slippery slope is a fallacy.Report
Another interesting take: https://defector.com/it-all-came-together-against-chesa-boudin/
“The recallchesa.org URL was registered before he even took office.”
Apparently, some San Franciscans were prematurely disenchanted.Report
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Chesa lost because of the shortcomings that were within his control… and those shortcomings were compounded by the events that were entirely outside of his control. I suppose it’s unfair to complain about the events that were entirely outside of his control.
But they compounded the events that were.Report
I remember how the media treated the Satanic Panic in the 80s, where they would offer some throat clearing mumbling about how there was no evidence, but then give paragraphs over to therapists and parents breathlessly claiming that children never lie about such things and Something Is Happening.
This is like that, where journalists give a perfunctory statement of the truth, then several paragraphs of hysteria about OUTTACONTROL crime. Usually its “man on the street” comments, sometimes its copaganda from the local PD, but it always ends up washing away whatever “The earth is actually round” statement they started with.Report
Is this supposed to be some kind of smoking gun? Did he campaign as a centrist, such that no one could reasonably have had a problem with him before he took office? It costs like $10 to register a domain. If you think there’s even a small chance you’re going to want a domain in the future, it makes sense to buy it ASAP. You don’t want to start a recall campaign and then find out that the guy you’re trying to recall already registered the domain.
For comparison, impeachtrump.com was first registered in 2011. Impeachbush.com was registered in 1999, and impeachobama.com, surprisingly, was registered in 2004.Report
2004? That’s pretty prescient. I’d find out who registered it and ask him about time travel.Report
I looked it up, and it was registered the day after the announcement that he would give the DNC keynote speech, so that kind of makes sense as a longshot gamble. At that point it was still unlikely that he would become president, but likely enough that it would make sense to buy the domain in hopes of selling it for a profit later.Report
This is a largely decent essay. It is a bit too easy on NIMBYs because the author doesn’t want to be seen as engaging in hippie-punching. However, it brings up a good point inadvertently. Boudin was a much worse politician than many of his fellow reformist DAs. He also won on a much thinner margin and mainly because of mistakes from his chief competitor.Report
The number that really stood out to me was the 75K who voted to recall. That’s out of a population of 850K. Talk about a vocal minority!Report
And to me that’s the huge story here – again (as with so many national political issues) a vocal minority is inflicting its tantrum on a majority. Granted, that majority isn’t defending its position. Still . . . . .Report
Are you familiar with the original election back in 2019?
It was ranked choice voting.
Round one had Chesa get 68,805 votes.
Round two had Chesa get 73,550.
Round three had him get 86,712.
More people voted for his recall than he got votes in the first two rounds of the ranked choice voting election back in 2019.Report
I’m assuming the vote totals for all candidates were still higher than 75K. This is kind of a specious comparison.Report
You don’t have to assume anything. You can click on the ballotpedia link and look at the numbers for yourself.
75k voted to recall Chesa.
86k voted for him in the third round of the DA election which he won… and he got less than 75k in the previous two rounds.
The specious comparison isn’t between the folks who voted for the recall and the people who voted for him in the election.
It’s between the folks who voted for the recall and the population of the city.Report
so after ALL this, you are essentially asking us to decide progressive DA reforms are dead because of bad politicing by a guy who got less then 10% of the population to vote for him initially and was run out of office by even fewer people?
Do you always miss the forest for the trees? Or just where progressives are concerned?Report
No, I’m not asking you to do anything, really.
My take on it is something to the effect of:
If you are going to make a bold sweeping change in how stuff is done without making sure the trains also run on time, then you can look forward to not being re-elected if not recalled.
I mean, if you don’t mind me talking about Chicago for a minute, you want to know what almost brought down Daley in Chicago (of all places)?
Snow removal.
It’s one thing to engage in graft. It’s another thing to remake society and make it better.
But if you don’t make the trains run on time, you’re going to find yourself out on your butt.
This strikes me as a fairly trivial observation, actually. If you want to get into major failures of Chesa (rather than the “this is what you elected him to do” features-not-bugs), I’d just point (again) to the Asian-American community in San Francisco, the messaging problems that were *SO* awful that I suspect that he was self-sabotaging, and his attitude toward what he considered to be “petty” crimes.
I’m not saying his reforms are dead. I’m saying that if you can’t reform justice *AND* make the trains run on time, justice reform is dead everywhere. EVERYWHERE.Report
This is true, but only in Democratic run cities.
Republicans have a different set of rules for their guys.
Exhibit A, Trump;
Exhibit B, Abbot.
Exhibit C, the 44% of the voting base who are happy to passively accept crime, so long as it involves a gun.Report
Trump’s and Abbott’s cities just aren’t the same.Report
Meaning they don’t think giving up their guns will convince mass murders and Chicago thugs to give up theirs?
I’m not sure if 44% is too high or too low.Report
I’m just pointing out that the Republican base sees dozens of children slaughtered and shrugs in helpless passivity because the “government can do nothing”, but react with fury to a guy shoplifting a soda because the government’s duty is to do something.
They see the power go off due to Soviet-level incompetence and sigh in resignation but show up at school boards demanding book banning.
They see inept tariff management cause family farms to sink into bankruptcy, and wring their hands in hopeless despair but storm into restaurants to berate clerks about masks.
They don’t demand action or competence from government, but instead demand only the punishment of their enemies.
There is an old joke from the Soviet days, called Ivan’s Goat.
Boris is sad because Ivan has a goat and he doesn’t.
So a fairy comes to Boris and tells him she will grant him one wish, as a solution to his sadness.
Boris brightens and says, “Kill Ivan’s goat!”
This is the Republican party nowadays, where they would rather see trans people hurt and humiliated than have reliable power or safe schools.Report
There is a difference between “can’t do anything” and “victory conditions are preventing this from ever happening anywhere in the country”.
That 44% is correct. Given where the goal posts are set and the one-off nature, this is an impossible task.
Will your proposed solution result in this never happening? If the answer is “no”, then congrats, you’re in that 44% too.
No one is expecting every shoplifting from being prevented, but maybe it should be viewed as a big enough deal that the store can report it to the gov and expect sometimes something will happen? And given how these are professional crime rings and they’re going to do it again and again, there are lots of opportunities to do something.Report
Shoplifting is an interesting crime problem. It would be nice if “the store can report it to the government and expect sometimes something will happen.” But what would that be?
There’s ordinary shoplifting and organized shoplifting.
Ordinary shoplifting is pretty resistant to government policy. You can’t put cops in every store or even major targets, without reallocating cops dealing with, say, rape or murder. Most of the prevention has to be done by private security measures. The only government deterrents are catching identifiable shoplifters that private security measures fail to apprehend, which is unlikely to succeed for obvious reasons, and prosecuting such ordinary shoplifters as are caught.
Organized shoplifting rings might be susceptible to long, thorough, well-resourced investigations — if you can catch enough small fry to work your way up. (But see above.) Or get some leads. Or get an undercover cop into the ring. Hard, but probably worth doing.
Or do you have other suggestions?Report
I would think organized shoplifting would have all the strengths and weaknesses as organized crime in general.Report
So you don’t have any suggestions about what the government can do and what we can reasonably expect when somebody calls about shoplifting? OK, that saves a lot of time.Report
Why does this need special suggestions?
It doesn’t seem like an unsolveable problem. We’re not trying to prevent all instances of mass shoplifting everywhere forever.
When we’re dealing with organized crime you find one member of the ring and flip him. What you don’t want to do is treat organized crime as a low impact not-worth-our-time “crime”… which is apparently what we’re doing now.
There is a vast difference between anything The Supranoes did and some 6 year old pocketing a candy bar.Report
Why? Because you brought it up, that’s why.Report
You know, that Onion headline was meant as a wry joke, right?Report
I didn’t realize it was Onion. You seemed to be treating it seriously.Report
I bet you guys are talking about something different. I bet Chip’s reference to the Onion headline was their “unsolvable problem” gun thing, and Dark thinks that Chip meant the 44% was the Onion headline.Report
Yes. Thank you.Report
California primaries are historically low turn out. It is partially why he won in 2019. The feel bad economy does not help.Report
Additional information:
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Additional information:
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Huh.
Rural America Reels From Violent Crime. ‘People Lost Their Ever-Lovin’ Minds.’
Murder rates didn’t soar only in cities during the pandemic; small-town sheriffs and prosecutors are overwhelmed with homicide cases.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251?mod=djemalertNEWS
Must be all that political correctness in *checks notes* Central Arkansas, South Carolina, and Montana.
This is bad news for the Democrats.Report
Are you claiming that crime is up everywhere? I thought you were claiming it wasn’t up at all.Report
What if I told you Neo, that crime rates can go up over a one year period and still be lower than in previous decades?Report
Politics tends to be more short term than that. The short term political reality is violent crime is up. This is showcased by that school shooting recently.
Now it might be up because of covid, and it might be up after having fallen for a while, but the electorate has a short memory.Report
Short term politics gets us right back to perception versus reality, which is impacted directly by a media ecosystem starving for content and clicks.Report
But on the other hand, maybe this will bring the OUTTACONTROL crime rate down:
The Supreme Court gives lawsuit immunity to Border Patrol agents who violate the Constitution
https://www.vox.com/23159672/supreme-court-egbert-boule-bivens-law-enforcement-border-patrol-immunity
Filed under “Consequences of voting Republican, a continuing series.”Report
Why does the crime rate need to be down? It’s lower than historic highs.Report
And why are we even talking about crime? It’s clearly an attempt to distract us from the real issue.Report