Banned in 1996, same as the USA. I'm not sure how heavily it was phased out before then. Certainly newer vehicles were already using unleaded petrol at the time.
I can't quite understand the difference here between the crime classes. Burglary (the victim is absent) and robbery (the victim is present) are somehow separate from theft?
Theft is taking off with something that is in plain view. Burglary includes breaking in, and robbery involves violent force. Lawgivers the world over especially detest violence, so no surprise that the latter two traditionally attract stiffer penalties.
6 years ago hardly anybody had heard of Fentanyl. % growth is a misleading statistic when you're starting out on the bottom of the S curve. I'm not saying it's not a problem, just that the summary is sensationalized.
Still, opiate deaths now outnumber vehicular deaths, although vehicular death has been dropping. Opiate deaths probably skew young and one might ask: just what percent of, on average, poor impulse control young people are now killed by opiate death?
Number 3, please. A world in which there's other ways to give back then selling out your privacy, thereby having great choice and privacy simultaneously. I know, I'm naive.
It's sad to say, but using a VPN Provider with a list of globally distributed exit points is critical to navigate the web from the inside EU these days.
What I do for this is get Google Translate to translate the article, then opt to view the original. The experience is usually better than it is for this article, but it's still readable.
The peak in the late 80s seems to correlate well with the global phaseout of leaded gasoline. In the US, the phaseout began in the mid 70s and leaded gasoline was completely banned by 1996.
> A 1994 study had indicated that the concentration of lead in the blood of the U.S. population had dropped 78% from 1976 to 1991.
Leaded gas was in use since the 20's or 30's. Crime/Murders didn't to spike up until 1965. Murders started going down around 1994 or so. And then in the late 2000's, many cities have started to see it go back up.
I would wager the reasons for the increase in the late 60's is similar to the recent rise, and that it has nothing to do with lead.
Leaded gasoline was for many years a premium product, patented and produced initially by a single manufacturer. Production really takes off after WWII (3x the amount before the war). Assuming a child takes 20 years to grow up then 1945 + 20 = 1965. That's exactly when we start seeing a sizable jump in crime. Furthermore, lead use increases until a peak around 1970 with violent crime peaking around 1990, 20 years later. In other words, the pattern of violent crime follows the pattern of lead usage +20 years, including a small dip in lead use in the early 1960s which corresponds to a small dip in violent crime in the early 1980s. This isn't just about the start - their entire histories are remarkably correlated.
Is there any correlation now between violence and proximity of airports? Aviation still uses leaded gas, and there have been studies finding that children near airports have elevated lead levels [1].
Only piston-engined aircraft use leaded gas. That rules out almost 100% of commercial passenger and military aviation.
Unlikely that there's enough of this type of exposure to be a real factor. Even this study finds that it affects children living within 500m of a civilian airport and that the level of lead detected was "not especially large."
There may be an argument for phasing out leaded avgas, as no amount of lead exposure is good, but it's not likely to have an impact on overall violence in an area, even assuming that lead has anything to do with that in the first place.
Kevin Drum has tracked this in detail. He wrote this in 2018:
"It’s important to emphasize that the lead-crime hypothesis doesn’t claim that lead is solely responsible for crime. It primarily explains only one thing: the huge rise in crime of the 70s and 80s and the equally huge—and completely unexpected—decline in crime of the 90s and aughts."
Most of the article, but especially the section labeled "Pet Theories" reminds me a lot of this recent XKCD. In the Biffco timeline, everyone has an explanation for how things got as bad as they did, and none of them are a time traveling sports almanac. Seems to be the same way for lead poisoning, for some people at least.
My pet theory is the combination of a rise in CCTV and cell phones + the increased use of credit cards put a big damper. Think of how many situations would be scary, if it not were for the fact that CCTV and/or a passerby on a phone would lead to a swift arrest?
While there will always be smash and grabs and the like, I think smart criminals have realized there are steep penalties for muggings, the response time is much lower than it was previously, and even if you succeed you won't get much out of it since the CCs will soon be cancelled, the phone is IMEI locked, and the wallet only has a twenty.
I have always though video game especially violent ones were an outlet for aggression and could actually curbs those tendencies, not make them worse, it sure seemed like that way for me growing up, playing Doom and Carmageddon later Battlefield and GTA. Time line matches up pretty well with violent crime decline.
I think the most important thing here is whether or not the person consuming the violent media has fantasies of violence. Purely anecdotal, but in my own life, I'm convinced certain types of media have pushed me over the edge from fantasy for reality. For example, ever since I was a young child, I found smoking women to be sexy. I fantasized about it in my adolescent years. Then I discovered smoking fetish pornography and that really got me going and I started to think maybe I should actually date smokers. Then I did and I started to think it might not be to badd to try smoking myself.
I doubt I would have made it this far down my current road had I never taken that initial jump from purely in my mind to consuming smoking fetish media. In other words, I think the smoking fetish media helped me take a harmless fantasy and turn it a ruinous reality. I wonder if the same could happen for other people with other (not even necessarily sexual) fantasies.
Maybe, but you sought it out on your own. The porn was a convenient pit stop on the way to living things out, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't have ever gone down that road. All you would've needed was to screw up the courage to make a pass at a receptive lady you saw smoking.
For example, ever since I was a young child, I found smoking women to be sexy. I fantasized about it in my adolescent years. Then I discovered smoking fetish pornography and that really got me going and I started to think maybe I should actually date smokers. Then I did and I started to think it might not be to badd to try smoking myself.
I think the chain stops at the point where you started dating smokers, and you should think of this as a success! (Depending on whether the relationships themselves are ruinous or successful on the whole.)
I'm going to bet that technology in general has a whole lot to do with it. I remember all the trouble people got into because they were just out and about with nothing to do. Having a cellphone gives you instant access to something you are interested in regardless of what it is and can be used acceptably if there is any downtime.
It’s true that the second major dropoff (especially in the SF numbers) appears around the time smartphones came along. But the real peak and initial descent started in the 1990s, which is long before smartphones, and even very early for dumbphones (which don’t seem like they’d prevent gang violence, in any obvious way anyway.) There’s a similar peak and plunge in the 90s for virtually every type of violent crime, nationwide.
I know there are potentially lots of other confounding variables (like socioeconomic status), but would that kind of correlation not support the thesis? I know that me and my friends did much fewer stupid things as soon as we got a computer and internet.
No, I meant it specifically causally. As in, the people who commit crimes are the last group to catch up to technological trends. So technological trends cannot be used to explain sudden shifts (= coincident to the new technology) in the behavior of that group.
I used to think this as well, but the model of the human mind as some kind of steam machine that "builds up pressure" and needs to "let off steam" are leftovers from a view of psychology stemming from early industrialisation. Our language is still littered with expressions like this, which I think affects how we think the mind works.
I do think video games might have an impact though, but only as a distraction. They are so compelling that other activities are crowded out, including bad ones.
It has nothing to do with modeling the mind after steam machines. These expressions exist because of beliefs about how the mind works, not the other way around. Feelings would still get "bottled up" and you'd have to "release" them somehow, even without knowledge of steam machines.
Yes, it's the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis all over again.
I've never felt that Video Games are truly an outlet for anger. In particular, it's not clear that the Freudian idea that anger can somehow be "built up" and then "released" is valid in any context, let alone video games.
However, I do strongly believe that video games reduce violence, but only for the same reason that smart phones and the internet do: less socializing, less physical exercise, less kids hanging around bored and looking for trouble.
People who just finished playing are not calmer after they play, especially in online games. They quite often end angrier less patient and more frustrated right after session. One would expect people calmer after outlet for aggression.
Pretty misleading title. US homicides are up significantly since 2013 (they rose by almost 25% from 2014 to 2016 before leveling off in 2017 and dropping perhaps 7% in 2018).
>As he pulled the trigger, Monroe said, he flashed on an image of his alcoholic father beating his mother.
Well, I think I found a possible explanation. Domestic violence has always been shameful, but it only became unacceptable with the rise of second-wave feminism. The first generation of kids raised under the new rules hit adolescence in... you guessed it, the late '90s. Unlike other trends, this one was transnational.
How much of the precipitous drop in SF juvenile crime is simply because there are fewer juveniles in the city? SF used to have a large middle class population that has largely vanished with the rise in the cost of housing combined with a reduction in the number of kids per household. While once pretty common, those big families with 4-5 kids are as rare as 4 leaf clovers these days.
The arrest rates at least are given per 10,000 juveniles, not as an absolute number, for exactly the reason you mention. Some of the other numbers aren't adjusted though.
I think that GP's question still stands though. Has the reduction in density of juveniles (either per capita or per square mile) had an effect on juvenile crime?
It seems to me like it would be harder for many juveniles to get into trouble if there just aren't that many other juveniles around. It's hard to form a gang if there's nobody else around to join.
The trend is global and not limited to the US. For example, violent crime has dropped dramatically in Sweden since the mid 90s. Of course you would never believe that by only reading the headlines!
One of the causes pointed out by criminologists is the decrease in alcohol consumption. Among the general population it has decreased slightly, but enormously among youths. For example, the average alcohol consumption in liters per year for 16 year old boys has decreased from 7.4 l in 2004 to 3.0 l in 2018.
When young males aren't drinking there are much fewer incidents of unnecessary violence. Less of these "misunderstandings" in nightclubs and pubs that always caused fights in the decades prior. RE: Clearly, people high on cannabis doesn't get nearly as violent as some people get when they are drunk. However, the Swedish statistics doesn't indicate that young people are switching from alcohol to cannabis. Cannabis use remains fairly low as it has always been. The kids are just partying less it seems.
Pure speculation but increased marihuana usage and acceptance could have been a contributing factor as well. A lot of young adults switching from binge drinking to chilling out while smoking with friends.
I wonder if the in-house reason for liberating military recruitment protocols is the same reason for liberation of sexual standards: there is a smaller pool of interested applicants/mates, so we make do with what we can.
This chart suggest Rapes/Sexual assaults are way up, Assaults are up, Murder/Robbery are the same or up a tiny bit. The only number in decline from the 90s looks like burglary.
First of, we're discussing violent crime here. Rape and/or sexual assault is often non-violent and hence a different type of crime.
Second, Wikipedia is an incredibly unreliable source for anything controversial and since the Orange Man decided make an example of the country ("Last night in Sweden..."), it's crime statistics became incredibly controversial!
It is correct that the number of reported crimes has increased, which is not the same thing as an increase in the actual crime rate. If we instead look at homicide and manslaughter (dödligt våld) per 100 000 inhabitants, it paints a different picture:
Blue line is for young people 16+, purple line for the adult population (16-79) and green line also for the adult population (16-84). In reality, violent crime has decreased much more than what those graphs indicates. The reason is that the threshold for what constitutes violent "crime" has lowered. For example, 30 years ago someone who "lost a streetfight" likely wouldn't have considered himself a victim, nor would a woman who was slapped by her husband. But today they would because attitudes change. Therefore, counter-intuitively, the number of crime reports increases as crime decreases.
I wouldn't limit it to smartphones, or the elimination of physical education, or the mainstreaming of online couch potatoing, or any other part of that. But overall, and there is more than one reason, domestic existence has become nearly universally white collar in the way time is spent. Desperate people can resort to using social media instead of taking things into the streets. And if you do go outside, you're in a much smaller minority, and the cops don't have to contend with a whole generation that will be there between you and them. That raises the encounter rate. In fact it's only in extremely wealthy extremely poor neighborhoods that i see children playing outside nowadays. That exacerbates the psychological strain on poor communities, especially black, because of the difference in how and where black communities are located versus the methodology of Hispanic and overseas immigrant population distribution. I think this is a reflection of the shift. Humans have become housepets to a society-changing extent. And housing geography has changed to a new phase of post-suburban internal migration. Police still exist to keep poor people from troubling the rich, but now the distances and physical barriers are greater and have systems built on top of them by the declines in population growth.
I claim not that it is the whole effect size, but certainly the massive drop in testosterone must account for some of it. Would be interesting to see the state-by-state, year-by-year correlation.
After working out for 20 years, here's what I've learned anecdotally:
* Testosterone is proportional to lean mass and inversely proportional to fat mass.
* Cholesterol is a precursor to testosterone, so gen x being raised with the "eggs are bad" mentality lowered testosterone.
* Sugar and carbs cause body fat increase, not fat/saturated fat/cholesterol.
* High weight, low reps like the 5x5 workout seem to raise testosterone and strength better than 3x8-12, but power lifting fell out of fashion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s due to injury concerns which were unjustified. Luckily, this is reversing due to the instruction available on YouTube.
* Lower and misallocated funding for public education has resulted in poor school lunch programs and no money available for extracurricular activities like strength training during adolescence when testosterone is highest.
* Phytoestrogens in factory farm foods like soy antagonize testosterone in boys and cause early puberty in girls.
* Our economy moved from industry to information, so gen x and millennials are far more sedentary than baby boomers and previous generations. I'll let other commenters expand on that!
* Testosterone increases lean mass and decreases fat mass. I think you have the relationship backwards
* Your body creates cholesterol, dietary cholesterol hasn't been shown to increase hormone production AFAIK, might want to link some studies if you can find them
* Calories increase body fat, no particular macronutrient has been shown to be disproportionatelly fattening. The insulin hypothesis is mostly incorrect.
* Different workouts produce different hormone reactions in different individuals. Even so, the effect is transient and unluckily to modify average testosterone levels
* Phytoestrogens in normal dietary amounts likely have minimal effects on testosterone
My personal hypothesis is that the environmental load of various endocrine disruptors from plastics, pharmaceuticals, hygiene products, clothes, etc, has increased dramatically.
Re: calories increase fat -- this can't be full picture, I can eat pretty much anything and not gain weight (I never tried a sugar loaded diet of coke and cookies though), and I understand this is not so for many people.
I think "calories increase body fat" is a correct, but a very low resolution statement. One can say that it will rain in the summer sometimes when there is more water in the air than the air can hold. But what else affects it? Can you say that today the chance of rain is 20% and tomorrow it is 40%?
There is still way too much crime in California and in the Bay Area in particular. Perhaps violent crime from juveniles is down; but my observation as a decade-long SF resident is that crime overall is certainly not getting better, and it certainly seems to be getting worse. Muggings, break-ins, theft, etc. are absolutely rampant. The authorities couldn't give two shits about preventing, investigating, or prosecuting it.
Some anecdotes:
I've personally been mugged at gunpoint in Oakland. I luckily managed to hold on to my cellphone and called 911 right away. The police showed up right away, but only cared to take a statement and left without going after the perpetrators, or even giving us a ride to somewhere safe.
The only other time I called 911 because a woman collapsed on the street in front of me. She was bleeding from the head and making a scary-looking pool of blood. It took 45min for an ambulance to show up, in downtown San Francisco, around noon on a weekend day (no traffic).
The authorities are entirely useless and unreliable.
It's almost as if the article is equating less crime being prosecuted as less crime existing. There's a big issue with that.
I feel like we need much tougher police that actually prevents and prosecutes all types of crime, including rampant petty theft, car break-ins, muggings, shootings (which are common), harassment by deranged drug-addicts all over the streets, etc. etc.
Preventing that kind of street crime requires Guilani-style "stop and frisk" police work that I would guess most people in San Francisco would not tolerate for a day.
I’m curious if how much of that has to do with the police constantly disrupting low level drug dealing. Nothing more dangerous than a bunch of desperate low level drug dealers and junkies. It’s almost better to let them operate and focus the resources on major operations and violent crime.
Some of this may be impact from Proposition 47 in 2014. Law enforcement officers have told me that they're no longer motivated to follow up on minor crimes because the criminals are no longer prosecuted. (I don't know whether their perceptions are accurate or not, it's just anecdotal reports.)
It's crazy how bad car break-ins are though. If you park outside overnight, it's not exactly surprising to wake up to a smashed window. Even if you don't have anything in the car to steal.
> It's almost as if the article is equating less crime being prosecuted as less crime existing. There's a big issue with that.
No, doing that would be silly. Criminologists look at both prosecuted crime, crime reported in victim surveys, number of arrests and incarcerations and a whole host of other metrics before drawing conclusions. The good news (which no one ever believes :)) is that they all point in the same direction. See this fact sheet f.e https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/ncvrw/2017/images/en_artw...
I admittedly have not looked at the data in detail and maybe it's the cynic in me, but how much of that decrease in crime can be attributed to manipulating the data?
For instance, in San Francisco, car breakins have been reclassified as a misdemeanor. And obviously this is anecdotal, but residents are so blasé towards the complete fucking shitshow that is SFPD (I actually rewrote that into something much gentler) that they don't even bother calling the police or reporting crimes.
If it's gotten so bad that people don't even report crimes, and police make it difficult to report crimes (there are many stories about this - yes it's anecdotal), how can we expect the statistics to mean anything?
The only thing I know for certain is I've been assaulted by homeless people more than once, including one who pushed me into traffic. After the first few times calling the police and having nobody show up for 30+ minutes I just stopped bothering.
I've also seen someone rob a store while a cop was stationed at the entrance of the store for the sole purpose of stopping theft - the cop literally shrugged and said "what am I gonna do, chase after him?"
Obviously I'm biased based on my experiences and I'm referring to the microcosm that is SF, but I absolutely unequivocally do not trust anything that comes from the SFPD. And I see no reason to trust other police departments either.
For something a little less anecdotal, here's an interesting podcast that basically says once cops started tracking crime they just stopped reporting it. Goodhart's Law in action.
What you will see is broad agreements of the trends, often including fluctuation in shorter terms.
Your theory would thus require (a) some evidence that the police is now somehow hiding murders, or (b) that murders fell but other crimes (even attempted murder) were somehow exempt from the trend and the police in almost any jurisdiction managed to underreport all other crimes with almost perfect accuracy to reproduce the trend in murders.
The comparisons across jurisdictions is interesting by itself: falling levels of violent crimes have been observed across a broad swath across North America, Europe, and beyond. It's somewhat unlikely that all these unrelated police forces somehow simultaneously decided to and succeeded in embarking on a corrupt campaign to falsify statistics.
If anything, the prevailing winds should have led to more crime being reported. Something like rape or assault tend to be taken more seriously these days. In cases such as Spain, one would also expect today's statistics to be more accurate than they were in the 70s, when it still was a fascist dictatorship interested in projecting an image of stability and safety.
> Just look at homicides. A dead body is somewhat impossible to hide from the statistics.
Actually it's been posited before that Japan reclassifies murders as suicides in order to skew the data, and some believe other countries are doing this as well. There is a correlation between countries with low murder rates and high suicide rates.
I think it's one of many confounding factors that detracts from the ultimate conclusion "violent crime is down." As others have pointed out better trauma response could also be a factor in this trend.
In fact, the suicide rate in the US is the highest it's been in decades.
I know at least one instance where there was a lot of controversy over the police ruling it a suicide and stopped the investigation there. Not everybody in the victim's family agreed but they decided not to challenge the police.
My experience with the SFPD was very different — I'm sorry you had such disappointing experiences.
The first time I called 911 was when a man coming down from drugs tried to kick in my fire escape window. Four police were in my apartment within five minutes; they arrested and handcuffed the man. I couldn't have been more thankful.
My second interaction with the police occurred when I was punched in the face a couple of times while riding a Muni bus (San Francisco Mass Transit). The driver pulled the bus over while me & two other passengers held the guy until the police showed up (within minutes). Again, the police detained the gentleman who had punched me in the face.
Whenever I've needed the police, they've been there.
I've traveled all around the world (~60 countries) including plenty of third world countries and honestly, I feel safer in pretty much all of them than in San Francisco.
Even in other American cities known for crime, I feel safer than in SF, because at least those cities' crime is more contained to "bad neighborhoods" whereas in SF it's everywhere and extremely concentrated downtown.
Granted I haven't spent a ton of time in US flyover country… I hear St. Louis, Tulsa, Baltimore, etc. aren't too nice…
People always have a very hard time believing crime is decreasing where they live. For example, I'm sure I could convince you that crime is decreasing in Russia, Poland, Scandinavia, Germany, Canada or even New York but I'll never ever get you to believe it is decreasing in San Francisco! :) Similarly, a Londoner would never believe their city's crime rate is decreasing but easily accepts that San Francisco's is.
There are a lot of criminologists in the United States and they will all agree on that violent crime is much less than what it used to be, with some parts of the country (Colorado, for example...) bucking the trend. The idea that they would all have been fooled by manipulated data is absurd.
For example, yes it is possible that some police departments has a tendency to under-report crime. Criminologists aren't dumb and they know about such tendencies. So to counter that they measure crime rates using other statistics too.
One example is victim surveys in which they ask X number of people if they have been the victim of a crime. If the number of respondents answering yes decreases then it is plausible that the crime rate has decreased. Another is hospital surveys in which they ask hospitals how many patients they have treated for being punched in the face. If the hospitals report that fewer patients have been treated for getting punched in the face than before, then it is plausible that the number of people getting punched in the face has decreased.
Putting enough of these statistics together lets you conclude that, yes, violent crime definitely has decreased.
For a better explanation you have to ask a real criminologist, which I'm not.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but that seems like a National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). How does a recent downward trend at the national level tell you anything about crime in San Francisco which actually seems to have significantly more crime than the National average and a recently rising crime rate?
If I show you statistics claiming that American men are, on average, taller than American females, does that tell you anything about the height of San Francisco males?
>I feel like we need much tougher police that actually prevents and prosecutes all types of crime, including rampant petty theft, car break-ins, muggings, shootings (which are common), harassment by deranged drug-addicts all over the streets, etc. etc.
Pushing the police to be 'tougher' while the community is critical of their every move isn't going to happen. It also takes about 7 years until an SFPD officer makes the salary of an entry level Software Engineer in San Francisco. You get what you pay for.
So tired of all this fucking comparison to software salaries. I should just start doing a shitty job too, and complain that it's because I don't get payed as much as doctors.
The bigger problem is that these police officers can't afford to live in the city which they work. Think for a second, about how that might affect your desire to "clean up" crime. Who's neighborhood is it? Certainly isn't yours.
It's not that software engineers are payed too much, it's that it costs too much to live here.
Software engineers have driven the rent up for everyone else but can't provide new housing stock, so they get fleeced by the class of commercial property owners who invest in the startups the software engineers work for. Unfortunately the software engineers have little incentive to disrupt a property market that is mostly working OK for them. The software engineers are being paid to make tools which concentrate more and more wealth, but that's OK because those people all have shitty jobs so their lives don't matter, and once they have fallen below a certain level of economic productivity they can die, because market economics is the source of all human goodness and anyone who does not prosper in the market deserves to suffer.
>So tired of all this fucking comparison to software salaries.
>It's not that software engineers are payed too much, it's that it costs too much to live here.
It's simple, pay cops more and you'll attract better cops. No different than anything else. I made the comparison to software salaries because the risk involved with being a cop is much higher than a software engineer.
Directing policing based on how people feel rather than evidence is a recipe for getting it wrong (and, I suspect, is often how it does go wrong). That said, the same is true of pretty much everything.
Things are so misaligned Haight-Ashbury had then a worse case of runaways/vagrants/addicts/panhandlers. There were laws already on the books to deal with this (loitering, drug use in the open, vagrancy, etc.,) but thd police still could not do much as prosecutors were loath to apply existing laws. They were so fed up progressive supe Ross Murakami introduced new laws specifically aimed at the loiterers and even with that it was hard. But after years I think the sitch in the Height is better than it used to be.
It’s infuriating though that laws exist but aren’t used so additional laws have to be introduced (sit-lie laws).
Right. Just because you something makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean someone should be arrested for it. Criminalizing homelessness and poverty is not a humane solution and we already have laws for actual crimes.
Neither is a permissive attitude that leaves the homeless, primarily the mentally ill and hard core drug addicts in the SF case, to literally rot on the streets.
Fairness and justice do not require relinquishing all expectations of socially normative behavior. There are plenty of freedom utopias around the world where libertarians can live tax free and nonconformists can escape the bondage of community morals, but few of them are places people _choose_ to live.
> Neither is a permissive attitude that leaves the homeless, primarily the mentally ill and hard core drug addicts in the SF case, to literally rot on the streets.
No, I'd invest in helping them with the wealth in SF rather than criminalizing people for trying to survive. 60% of the city agreed by voting for Prop C.
Homelessness is an important and complicated issue. I wish we had a national program to manage it. Distribute funds to where the homeless have spent the most time over the last 20% of their time (to avoid “shopping”.
That said help is different from ensuring they’re not disturbing the lives of the productive people (who they might rejoin one day).
60% of the city voted to throw more money at the problem hoping it'll go away, money that was easier to part with than certain zoning ordinances, prosecutorial rules, social programs, and other policy choices.
Do you work with the homeless? I have a family memory who does, busing to and from 6th & Howard every day. Do you know what's actually going on out there? A neighbor's daughters lives on the streets, willingly. Every affordance is continually made available to her, but she's incapable of pulling herself away and there are no longer any forms of legal coercion available. Shooting up on the streets everyday and literally, physically wasting away is not only acceptable to the community but justified. Real, immediate human suffering is excused in the name of abstract, perverted principles and self-serving indignation.
The city spends more than $40,000/yr per homeless person, a sum that has been rapidly increasing for a decade. No city spends more money on the homeless than SF. The reality is that if you're actually homeless and living on the streets you can and will get permanent housing in a matter of months if not weeks, provided you're willing to make an effort at rehab.
The intransigence of street homelessness is at this point a deeply structural issue--medically, legally, politically. It has almost nothing to do with money. The affordability crisis is largely borne by those struggling to get by, sharing accommodations or living in vehicles--nominally functional citizens who aren't shooting up and defecating in the streets. Because providing services to the street homeless and housed addicts is priority #1, #2, and #3 at City Hall, everybody else is effectively locked out of housing assistance. And while more money could help these people (and hopefully will), you'd have to actively direct it away from existing street homeless programs. Without reforms that permit and demand the community to coerce treatment for mental illness and drug addiction, no amount of additional funds for street homelessness is going to substantially change things.
I wish that article wasn't quite so one-sided. It mentions that 2/3 of 250m of its budget goes towards subsidising or outright housing people, but how many? I.e. if that money went away, how many more homeless would there be?
I would imagine that would be a better argument than countering with a different number, since it would actually speak to the effectiveness of their budget. Or, show the budget to be not very effective, though I doubt that to be the case.
Agreed but it does counter the 40k
per person number quite effectivly and, to your point, shows that spending money does actually help some people to not be homeless, which were two big points in the previous comenters thesis beyond the anecdotes.
When people abuse implicit freedom in the system (aka “why we can’t have nice things”). When it’s chronic. When they pursue and harass locals, shout at passers by, aggressively panhandle, etc.
A very progressive city supervisor had had enough of it. That should tell you how bad it had become.
Because a lot of bad people circulate among these groups. It's why being homeless or living in poor communities is so dangerous. Being homeless or poor doesn't make you a criminal, but it does attract criminals and criminal behavior--which is largely opportunistic. If a block is full of drug users and people loitering, the thief smashing windows won't stand out, or if he does he can quickly blend back into the streetscape.
Proximity also makes it more likely that those predisposed to thievery will band together, creating a cycle of escalating criminal behavior--a virtuous cycle, so to speak, not unlike how Silicon Valley works because of the density of engineering talent.
IMO, one reason why the drug epidemic has exploded in SF is because of the creation and centralization of so much homeless housing around the Civic Center and SOMA. Nothing is more certain to exacerbate addiction and drug use than to put drug users in close proximity. And anti-social behavior invites more anti-social behavior, particularly crime.
The Tenderloin always had it's share of problems, but the problem was primarily poverty, not extreme social dysfunction. Violence and property crime were relatively rare as compared to today. Drug use had been tolerated for decades, though the unwritten rule was that people had to make some effort to hide it, like shooting up in the alley. The erasure of this one very simple quid pro quo, the removal of any serious threat of consequences (i.e. the prospect of being forced into rehab if you invited arrest), and the dramatic increase and centralization of the addict population thanks to Mayor Newsom's and Mayor Lee's creation of over 10,000 units of permanent housing for the homeless, has created chaos.
The number of cars with smashed windows that I see on my morning runs in SF is insane. In some cases it will be an entire block of cars. And I run in the 'nice' neighborhoods.
Counter anecdote since that's what you're doing: I have lived in downtown Oakland for 5 years and have had zero issues with any kind of crime.
Statistics are more valuable than the weight either of us put on our good/bad personal experiences.
Mixing up homelessness and adiction with serious violent crime in a single statement and saying both need to be dealt with by increasing policing is an very imprecise and inefficient way of addressing different issues.
"It's almost as if the article is equating less crime being prosecuted as less crime existing."
That's how they ran Baltimore for a while. Great improvement in metrics make a good show even if the real situation is not good. Or go the other way: arrest more and more people for more and more trivial offenses. Number of arrests going up that way looks good but in reality it's useless.
Looking at Baltimore as a good example of how to do anything right is a bad idea. During the riots it took the then-mayor much longer than it should have to reach out to the Governor for help. Baltimore politics are an absolute disaster. I suppose this is quite possibly the case for every US city, I've never considered that before.
Say what you will about Ed Norris, but he was an incredibly effective commissioner until he was removed from office.
> Baltimore politics are an absolute disaster. I suppose this is quite possibly the case for every US city, I've never considered that before.
Baltimore is in a class with about half a dozen other US cities for being an exceptional disaster. The entire city should be federalized and cleaned up top to bottom.
Compare it to functional or semi-functional, prosperous cities like Seattle, San Diego, Austin, New York, Boston or even Boise Idaho.
Seattle had 19 murders in 2016. Baltimore had 318, or 51 per 100k (with a slightly smaller population than Seattle). That's almost a warzone. It compares to cartel ravaged countries in Latin America. There's no excuse for it and nobody will do anything about it. There's only one possible solution given the extreme incompetence: the federal authorities must step in, take over the city and stop the slaughter no matter the financial expense.
The disaster that is Baltimore is largely caused by federal drug policy. Federal drug policy is also largely responsible for a number of other dark patterns that we see in the US: Militarized and corrupt police, ghettos, and a massive prison population.
EDIT: To clarify, "The Color of Law" and "The New Jim Crow" cover the ways that we have made sure that POC are primary police targets in the US. I further submit that we intentionally create lawless zones for POC to live in so that they can be harassed by police, and that the war on drugs was the perfect cover to do so. There is enough evidence of this that I don't think I need to go nuts explaining it.
Cities with similar demographics will have similar problems, because it has been designed to work that way.
thank you so much for this comment - what a relief to see this among all of the "idc about statistics, my observations tell me crime is way up" and "crime is only down because of prop 47"...
Having been here much longer, crime seems very light to me now compared to how it was in the 90s. There is a lot of property crime because it's much more financially precarious now and rents are astronomical while housing stock has been decreasing.
I feel like we need much tougher police [...]
Maybe you would enjoy living in Singapore or some other more paternalistic and repressive society.
> It's almost as if the article is equating less crime being prosecuted as less crime existing. There's a big issue with that.
No, the article is about how arrests of juveniles have vastly declined, but state and county officials haven't adjusted juvenile facility availability (e.g. shutting underused facilities down), resulting in some counties paying as much as $500K/yr per juvenile detained, up from less than $200K.
As someone who has also been robbed at gunpoint, I empathize a bit with your experience. But it is so tangential to the actual topic of the article -- you suffering from a violent crime has very little to do with whether California is overspending on unneeded juvenile detention infrastructure.
Note I didn't say state any opinion about how we should deal with juvenile violent offenders.
What I take issue with articles making it seem like things are all rosy these days in California when I live in one of the wealthiest cities in the world which has an unbelievably rampant crime problem and woefully ineffective governance regarding this issue (and most other issues, really).
Also, I also take issue with the article alluding to the idea that a shift away from prosecuting crime is a good thing. I can see the problem with those policies in my city on a daily basis.
But at this point, I've given up on SF and I'm moving out. I've stuck it out here for too long and things aren't getting better, they're getting worse. I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. So, so long…
There is still way too much crime in California and in the Bay Area in particular. Perhaps violent crime from juveniles is down; but my observation as a decade-long SF resident is that crime overall is certainly not getting better, and it certainly seems to be getting worse.
Theoretically any crime is too much and some amount of crime is inevitable given human beings.
I mean, I was mugged twice, once beaten unconscious, saw someone murdered across the street from apartment, scared away someone who pulled out a gun and tried to mug me, and witnessed numerous other crimes in 90s San Francisco.
It's almost as if the article is equating less crime being prosecuted as less crime existing.
I'd believe statistic and neither your nor my anecdotes and statistics say violent crime is down everywhere. Statistics are taken from reports as well as prosecutions btw.
And police have never had more power than today but police very seldom directly stop crime, just prosecute it afterwards.
I remember in Boston, a couple guys walked out of a bar, one pointed at me, and after some quick talking, realized I had to either fight or flight, and they pursued me. They both looked pretty muscular, and I dont know why they targeted me.
I called the police, let them know I was running, and the operator told me "OK maybe we will send someone" and hung up.
Another story even earlier, when I live in Oakland in the 80s. One day, walking over a deserted overpass, I passed by another pedestrian who I somehow sensed vague hostility from. As we passed, quick as a wink, he punched me but just as quickly I instinctively blocked his punch (my history of playground fights came in handy). He simply continued walking as did I.
Which is to say my anecdotal experiences agree with the statistics - violence has been on the decline in the US for a while. Remember, this is a country with a considerable "frontier history" where violence on all sides was common.
I tried calling 911 in the peninsula because I saw a drunk driver on 101. I tried calling 6 times but it never got through and finally I gave up.
In SF, a group of youths stuffed their backpacks with things from Walgreens and ran off, but started walking about a block away because they knew the store owners wouldn't do anything about it, and because even if they got caught nothing would happen. I believe it's called Prop 47 that decriminalized theft under $1000 and these are now the unintended consequences.
It's seriously a joke here right now. The only reason protecting you against crime is just dumb luck. If you are a victim of crime, you will get no help from the cops or the government unless it's a "high profile" crime but you're probably already dead then.
Ya I was just thinking that the arrival of the internet around 1995 should show up as a drop in violence (by increasing connection and reducing angst for young people).
Also I wonder if widespread use of marijuana and magic mushrooms in the relatively prosperous late 90s would have led to a drop in violence, like what happened during the free love era of the late 60s.
Of course, coming from the Napoleon Dynamite region of southern Idaho, I could very well have no idea what I'm talking about.
In a different HN thread, people were discussing how racially diverse California has become, largely due to the tech industry.
I wonder if that could have anything to do with it? As youth see more and more people who look like them find success, maybe they're less inclined to turn to a career in crime?
this quote caught my eyes:
``In San Francisco, said Gascón, prosecutors moved away from incarcerating children for low-level offenses like truancy or petty theft as research showed that even one stint in juvenile hall led to a higher likelihood of recidivism.``
This effect was known from the beginning of the traditional prison system. Here is the quote from "Discipline and Punish" by Michel Foucault:
``. And, just as the project of a corrective technique accompanied the principle of punitive detention, the critique of the prison and its methods appeared very early on, in those same years 1820-45; indeed, it was embodied in a number of formulation which - figures apart - are today repeated almost unchanged:
...
- Detention causes recidivism; those leaving prison have more chance than before of going back to itl convicts are, in a very high proportion, former inmates 38 per cent of those who left the maisons centrales were convicted again and 33 per cent of those sent to con-vict-ships (a figure given by G. de Rochefoucauld during the debate on the reform of the penal code, 2 December 1831 Archives parle-mentaires, LXXII, 209-10); between 1828 and 1834, out of almost 30,000 convicted of crime, about 7,400 were recidivists (that is,1 out of 4.7 of those convicted); out of over 200,000 correctionels, or petty offenders, almost 35,000 were also recidivists (1 out of 6);in all, one recidivist out of 5.8 of those convicted (Ducpdtiaux, 1837,276ff);in 1831, out of 2,174 of those condemned for recidivism, 350 had been in convict-ships, 1,682 in maisons cenffales, 142 in four maisons de correction that followed the same regime as the centrales (Ducp6tiaux, 1837, 276ff). And the diagnosis became even more severe during the July monarchy: in 1835, out of 7,223 convicted criminals, 1,486 were recidivists; in 1839, 1749 out of 7,858
''
Keep in mind, "Discipline and Punish" was published in 1975 which is whooping 44 years ago.
P.S sorry for typos, scanned version of the book is not very good quality
Working in San Francisco and living in Oakland, I have to imagine that to a significant degree, it is not (just) that there is less crime, but that there are fewer arrests. I see crime every day — literally every day. My co-workers have been sent to the hospital by random street violence. I have not heard of any resulting arrests.
To be clear, I am saying that personally I see crime daily, whether I am in San Francisco or Oakland, and my co-workers have been sent to the hospital via attacks right in front of our offices on Market Street in San Francisco.
I will also add that I rarely report crime. This is somewhat learned helplessness as I do not expect any results. For example, calling Oakland's non-emergency number has resulted in me eventually giving up after getting nothing but a busy signal over and over. I was attacked by one of San Francisco's street addicts, but as I did not suffer any serious injuries, I did not waste my time reporting it. (I regret this on principle as surely that person has attacked others and will continue to do so.) I also do not report the obvious dealers hanging out on corners by our offices because I know from following the local (Tenderloin) police force's Twitter account that even if they make the arrest, the dealer will be released within weeks (possibly hours or days; not sure) back onto the streets. It is common for them to arrest the same dealers three times in two-month periods. (And no, they aren’t pot dealers; they are arrested with meth, crack, heroin, and other hard drugs ready for sale.)
Taking a look at the table in that Wikipedia page, you can notice that while Oakland has more violent crime per capital than SF, SF has more property crime per capita than Oakland. No wonder it can seem that the streets are paved with shattered auto glass.
TFA mentions some interesting possibilities. Reduced lead exposures. Increased prosecution of drug dealers who use minors as soldiers. And non-punitive management of nonviolent crime, leading to reduced recidivism. [Except maybe more broken vehicle windows :(]
But maybe it's also the availability of recreational drugs from online dark markets. That'd be quite the trip, no?
This trend is very real. My wife works with juvenile delinquents and a couple years ago remarked how surprising the change in occupancy in central juvenile hall in LA is. Entire units are just closed off now.
This is happening all across the country.
I still don’t see anything as compelling as the elemental lead hypothesis that Kevin Drum has been pushing for the last couple of years.
Given that this trend is global, doesn't increased access to safe abortion make more sense than claims about lead specifically in the United States?
In the US, the sharp reduction in crime happened 18-24 years after the legalization of Roe v. Wade. Unwanted children who would have been juvenile delinquents were simply never born. This would fit in nicely with the claims other commenters have made about some places that have had an increase in sexually violent crimes, since again, the children who would have been products of those encounters are never born, so the overall trend is still a decrease in violent crime.
It’s not precisely global. Throughout the world it correlates best by far with the year that a given country, state, or region phased out leaded gasoline.
I.e. declines did not start in same year in every country. They almost entirely began 18-30 years after phase-out of leaded gasoline.
What about Steven Levitt's proposal that legalized abortion is the cause of suddenly vanishing juvenile crime, 20 years after Roe v. Wade?
"Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children... states that had abortion legalized earlier should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade."
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?...
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