The first in an exchange between two writers on the progressive San Francisco DA's fall from grace and what it reflects about broader national debates over crime.
Spielberg's "economic struggles causes what we see in the streets of SF" argument is simply wrong. The refusal to recognize the pull effect of these "decriminalization" policies, people with drug addictions coming to SF for easy access, the fact that drug cartels are running circles around it all. Cost of living in SF has nothing to do with this dystopian nightmare that has unfolded in SF. It's like a zombie movie: in the name of compassion we have drug deranged people wandering the streets, pissing and shitting everywhere, tents everywhere like tram stations where sane people - who pay for all of it - are supposed to use to go to work. How is all that compassion? And always the general bs of "exploitative employers, capitalism...bla bla bla". Look at the results, Ben! Stores closures, broken windshield glass everywhere, people diying in the streets. If that's what success looks like than I'm rooting for the utter "failure" and reversal of these policies. I've lived and worked in SF for over 30 years and have never seen a decline that fast and that deep into chaos anywhere.
Nice right wing diatribe, but your fundamental facts are provably wrong.
First, poverty causes street crime, and any serious criminologist will tell you that (as opposed to criminologists with political agendas who don't tell the truth). The fact that some people are drawn to San Francisco, mainly for CULTURAL reasons BTW, is irrelevant to the fact that that street crime is caused by poverty. And guess what? If drugs were legal and weren't overtaxed like California did with marijuana, they'd be a lot cheaper and addicts wouldn't have to steal as much or at all.
Second, it's totally false that the cost of living has "nothing to do" with homelessness. Approximately 44% of homeless people have jobs according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, despite your incorrect preconceived notions to that they're all druggies. Many people lose their homes when they're evicted, because they can't afford the increased rent for a new place. San Francisco and New York City are the most expensive cities in the country by far, and the high cost of rent here is a large factor in homelessness.
I call bullshit on your labeling and bullshit on your statistics. When people get evicted they don't start smashing car windshields at a 700% percent increase in less then 2 years. You know who doesn't give a fuck because their brains are impared? Drug addicts. Poor people don't simply become criminals, walking into Walgreens, stuffing bags with merchandise and walking out. SF has never ever been cheap, my friend. I've moved to SF in the earthy 1990s and housing was about twice as expensive as in Chicago. It didn't have twice as many homeless and/or drug addicts as Chicago (per capita that is)! SF had always some homeless people and a drug scene. You know what a person does when he/ she looses a place? Move somewhere where he/she can find housing he/she can afford. Not fucking start smashing store front windows! I call bullshit on your ideology not because I'm "right wing" but because I've been around long enough and watched so-called Progressives with all their good intentions and their compassion ruin regular live in the city and LA and other "progressive" cities. What I equate with "Progressive policies" these days is incompetence, blind ignorance and cult like ideology. Hey, but why should I trust my lying eyes if I have guys like you explaining to me what is really going on!
I tried to upvote your comment here Mr. Winter, but the fucking button doesn't work?!?!?!?
I agree with every word you said. It is the Uber-Left Neo-Marxist who are the problem in this nation. They are irrational, irresponsible and WOKE like Orwellian authoritarian nutjobs.
Why is there poverty if the unemployment rate is historically low? Could it be these people make bad life decisions? Anyone can be a Doordash driver and earn quite a bit of money. There are also other states with poverty that have nowhere near the level of street crime that LA, SF, Seattle, see.
“Working criminals” is what you meant to say since poverty causes crime. No one is responsible for their actions. Unless they earn a certain amount of money each year they are FORCED to commit crimes and victimize their fellow citizens. /s
Why do you and other right wingers here obsess on street crime, when white collar crime kills & injures FAR MORE people, and causes major environmental harms, the latter which street crime doesn't do? Are you actually rich and just pretending to be poor? Or are you brainwashed?
And to show you and everyone else how clueless you are, I'm not a Marxist, pretty far from it. I'm a radical environmentalist who usually agrees with the left, but my priorities are totally different.
Perhaps explain what white collar crime you are taking about that kills and injures far more people that want everyone knows is street crime.
Funny how you out your bad faith and the true beliefs you hold by assuming all poor people hold the same values, or lack of, that you do. You should know that poor people don’t want or need your self righteous activism that just gets more of them killed. Many of them realize that your victimhood and envious mentality, all sins BTW, will relegate them to perpetual poverty.
No person in history has ever overcome poverty through legal means by acting out your perverse ideology.
If poverty causes street crime, why are Chinatowns generally so safe? There are many poor people there and always have been. Chinatown is usually the first stop for poor immigrants.
Most poor people don't commit crimes of any kind. Are they somehow exempt from poverty as a "cause"? How can most poor people not be affected by the "cause" of street crime?
If SF and NYC are fully controlled by Democrats, why is there such high cost of rent? Don't they then shoulder the blame for the conditions of homelessness? You can't have it both ways.
Where do you see any mention of Democrats in my post?
The high cost of rent in SF and NYC is because they're very desirable places to live, and rent prices are supply & demand like most other things. Nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans, though the Democrats who run these cities are right wing corporate Democrats, and are not economically progressive.
what about the very strict building and zoning restrictions in SF?? These are policies that could improve housing availability. I suggest you read the works of Thomas Sowell, a long time bay resident and respected economist.
There is no housing shortage in the Bay Area. There is an overpopulation problem and an AFFORDABLE housing shortage.
I strongly oppose ruining communities with high rises or other overdevelopment. Developers are just getting rich doing this (and their lackeys in government almost certainly are also), it doesn't solve the housing problem because the large majority of what they build is not affordable, and it doesn't even stop sprawl, as developers falsely claim it does.
The good solutions are to lower human population (though this will take a long time and is not an immediate solution) and to make housing affordable by whatever means necessary (subsidies, stronger rent control including vacancy control -- which my city used to have until the disgusting California legislature took away that choice for cities and which worked very well to keep rental costs down -- etc. More development is a bad solution that I don't support.
Here in Southern California, there was a recent study done on the homeless which concluded that the homeless population consists in rough proportions of the "have nots", the "can nots" and the "will nots". The have nots are those encountering some type of financial upset and are the ones most likely to promptly secure transitionary housing while they work through their problems. The "can nots" are the mentally ill and the "will nots" are the chronically addicted. Any individual living on the street for more than 30 days is not there because of eviction or acute financial distress.
I lived in a car and on a park bench for about three months then joined the military, went to the college and just completed a success career in tech. You are wrong in your blanket statement.
Lol Jeff, you need a better response than "It's right-wing BS!" I see that you self-identify as a radical environmentalist and yet you still walk the earth, sending out your nasty CO2 emissions, choking all the rest of us. Surely a man as tuned in as you are can come up with a better explanation for why decades of Democrat leadership haven't left blue cities as nirvana for all?
If a sane homeless person had a job, they would buy a ticket at the greyhound station and move to someplace they can afford. There are low wage jobs everywhere. OBVIOUSLY SF is not the place to be if you are working and cannot afford to live there. The problem in the cities is that the corporations-via the Dems- keep importing illegals in order to keep wages down.
Those who want to restrict immigration so their fellow American's can afford to live where they want to, are called RIGHT-WING RACISTS.
Gee Jeff, we seem to see that term up and down this comment section with your name on it.
Exactly. The notion that people become homeless because they're evicted for failing to pay those high San Francisco rents stretches belief. Any sane person would leave SF way before getting evicted. Evictions don't happen overnight - it's a process that takes months on end. If the rent is too high for you to the point where you run the risk of being evicted, get out of there! Catch a bus to Iowa or some place you can afford. Seriously, compassion should be reserved for those who deserve it. Personal responsibility is NOT a "right-wing" concept. I'm a liberal and I'm horrified by what our big cities have become under supposedly "liberal" policies. Enough already with this BS.
Jeff, your inability to synthesize a coherent justification for the purposeful dismantling of law and order in SF is legion and speaks for itself.
Some gems: "addicts wouldn't have to steal as much"
"poverty causes street crime" (tho you're forgiven because this idiocy was likely pulled from the pages of WaPo or NYT)
"people are drawn to San Francisco, mainly for CULTURAL reasons" (and start immediately shitting in the street and robbing CVS?)
"44% of homeless people have jobs " I could write a book on the illogic of that statement in a tirade designed to defend the "liberal" ( actually fascism with a gigantic public relations department) DISASTER that is SF.
"Many people lose their homes when they're evicted, because they can't afford the increased rent" and Jeff would have you believe that when fine upstanding people can no longer afford the rent in their current SF apartment (which has been highest in the nation for all of our lifetimes), they move onto the street and start robbing people and shitting in the street.
I think the primary problem with liberals is that they were trained for so long to just listen and regurgitate (with honors) that they've been trained out of the notion of questioning the "authorities".
Wake Up Jeff. Your country is being purposely bankrupted and demoralized before your eyes. And your newspaper is telling you to want more.
Housing in San Francisco and New York City is indeed super expensive. It’s too bad we don’t have a country where people can choose what city and state to live in, and therefore choose those with lower housing costs when needed. Oh, right - we do have a country like this! If people can’t afford housing in SF or NYC, they can go elsewhere where it is cheaper. So that does not fly as a “cause” of either crime or homelessness.
This topic is personal to me as someone who lived in the SF Bay Area for almost 20 years when I was younger. Now that I’m retired, I’d love to go back there - but guess what? Housing there is too expensive for me. And I am not poor - I have a graduate degree, had a successful career, and owned a home in Washington, DC.
So now I live in central VA, where I own a nice house that I purchased for about $300K - a house that would easily cost four times that in SF.
I don’t get people complaining so much about the cost of housing while choosing to live in the most expensive places in the country.
or just move someplace more affordable. Being born and raised someplace doesnt mean you are entitled to stay there forever, but you may choose too if you wish. Maybe if that person loved the bay area and wanted to stay, they would have chosen a career in tech, or finance so they could remain in the city they love without worrying about cost of living. People have choices, people have options, thats the point.
Yet New York City is actually handling its homeless problem far more effectively than San Francisco. You should read San Fransicko by noted hard-right activist Michael Shellenberger.
Yeah, he's very left. Veteran of the environmentalist movement. I was being sarcastic, apologies. It was a riposte to "Jeff's" labeling of P. Winter's point as "right-wing". I am a big fan of Shellenberger, I think his ideas make a lot of sense and he's been. resident of San Francisco for decades . The book I referenced is a very detailed study of the issues in San Francisco, mainly focusing on the homeless problem, but also the ancillary issues that arise from it. The numbers in his book, around the total homeless population and San Francisco's budget for dealing with the homeless population are simply astounding.
I didn't pick up on the sarcasm and only felt the need to correct any misconceptions because I, too, am a big fan of Shellenberger. His is a voice of refreshing reason coming from a quarter that is not willing to speak out against the narrative.
I heartily agree with you. It’s shocking that someone who put in so much time actually fighting for left wing causes, really fighting not just re tweeting, is not taken seriously by folks on the left. It’s all about narrative, as you point out.
First you need to understand that human beings with no discipline will always take the path of the least resistance. Stop giving them or yourself an excuse. Poverty causes street crime? Why are they poor? The result of their action? Yes? Cultural reason?.. like degenerate attracts degenerate (it is probably more like CA climate than culture).? Your reasoning makes me chuckle. Decriminalizing marijuana caused holy crap load of problem in this state. There used to be scores of illegal marijuana farms in So Cal. now its waaaay over 500. and they are run by illegals and Mexican cartels. They are threatening neighborhood and stealing water. You have no idea, do you? Because having illegal farms cost them a few hundred bucks of penalty. So, Mexican cartel just picked up their business and crossed our open border to open their shops. Drugs killed 107.000 Americans last year. A lot of them are not addicts. Cartel mixes fentanyl into some counterfeit pills... https://carteldoc.dailycaller.com/ And your second point. Are you familiar with what London Breed did? putting all those addicts and homeless into the hotels? (at tax payers expense, no less.) They trashed every establishment, and a lot died in there doing drugs in their room. S.F. had more deaths from drug than from Covid. When it comes to the people living on the streets of S.F. particularly. People like Shellenberger and others actually did the leg work, probably you should read his book. He is also not alone who did the actual work on the ground. if not all, most of them are actually addicts or having mental illness, or both unless your source is counting those drug dealers, fencers, and cartel members as the working people. :P Giving needles, crack pipes or even living quarters will never solve this problem. Didn't Einstein say "Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results" It is time to try the different approach, I say. By the way, if you can't pay the rent? You should move to cheaper states. At least, that is what we tell our kids. Living within their means is an important concept.
What you don’t seem to understand is the fact that if there are no prosecutions for drug use or dealing, then it IS legal. So your argument is meaningless.
I worked as an RN in detox & rehab for 20+ years & there is no one solution to this all but intractable problem. Shelters that are drug & alcohol-free is a first step in helping those who want off the streets. If they’re not, you have simply moved the danger indoors.
No, not prosecuting is not the same as legal status. For example, if drugs were legal, you could go to Walgreen's and buy the drug without the risk of dying from fentanyl overdose.
I admit that this would be a situation with new problems, and it is not something I am proposing or favor (I don't know enough about how that might work or fail to work), but the simple point is that outright legality offers a lot of options that would be preferable to simple avoidance of direct prosecution of users.
How is the weather in this fantasy land you live in? I have been dirt poor and magically, never committed a crime much less victimized a fellow citizen. How is that even possible in your self-responsibility lacking political ideology? What is the annual income cut off for a citizen to become a criminal since poverty causes crime?
The fact that poverty causes street crime doesn't mean that all poor people or even most poor people commit street crime. Take a high school logic course.
The FACT that poverty causes street crime is Criminology 101. I've learned it from criminologists, I didn't make it up. But it doesn't fit with your right wing rugged individualist ideology, so you won't accept this basic fact. I do not at all excuse people from taking personal responsibility, but there are also huge societal factors that are beyond the control of individuals. The rich & powerful are FAR more responsible for societal problems, because they cause them, and because they have the money and power to fix them.
Criminals have the same freedom of choice all Amricans have. Commiting a crime in desperation is no excuse under the law. Committing a crime by ignorance of the law is no excuse under the law. Commiting a crime has no excuse under the law, but for the presumption of innocence under US jurisprudence.
As usual the devil is in the details. The "employment" stats by the National Coalition for the Homeless are ummm....a little misleading. I will concede that poverty is associated with some types of crime, but I am surprised that you don't mention wealth is also associated with some types of crime. That pointy headed abstract issue of poverty and crime does not decide recalls however. Recalls and DA elections are decided by how the blue and white collar workers integrated into their socioeconomic niches feel about or experience crime
SFran he long been a a place were housing costs have been sky high compared to many US cities. So what has changed??? Not enforcing vagrancy and drug laws. Even ignoring shoplifting, which drove companies out of the city. Steinberg seems ok with these "evil" companies shuttering there businesses, taking there jobs with them. Then he rambles on about low wage jobs, and mistreatment of employess. It seems his soulution is allowing people to live as junkies and have the government subsidize it via universal income and the like. Its a utopian dream that has no basis in the real world. Taxpayers should be able to operate there business and walk the streets without having to worry about stepping on needles and human feces and have there business robbed by drug addled lunatics. That should be the number 1 priority of the social contract between government and taxpayer. Not using there money to enable filth, addiction and lawlessness under the guise of "social justice".
San Francisco as well as most of coastal California is the perfect place for homelessness. There is most definitely a pull factor for homeless and addicts. Flyover country thanks you, California.
Well, it depends. The mild climate, sure, but go to a city like Carlsbad and try to find homeless or drug addicts in that city. If Jeff wants to see "right wing" in action.
Every city's homeless are in SF these days! And SF officials seem to be proud of this sad fact. Why the residents and tax payers of SF have to cough up for all these imports has yet to be explained.
Ok, how many of them have more homeless and drug addicts than high school students? There might be homeless in all cities but they are surely have not taken over public squares unchallenged like in SF.
Spielberg is correct in stating that Boudin implemented the policies he ran on. He promised those policies would improve people's lives. They did not. His argument that economic inequality is the driving force behind the decline of San Francisco is vague and unsubstantiated. As are his claims that poverty is the leading cause of feeling unsafe. Regardless of your economic circumstance anyone that finds a knife welding homeless person defecating on their front steps doesn't feel safe. 60% of San Franciscan voters, voted to recall Boudin. They didn't do that because they felt safe.
CA's basic problem is that they're simply ignoring ALL crime, even the real crimes where somebody or their stuff is harmed. We don't care that people go home and get high, we DO care when they're on the street yelling at passersby.
There is also the elephant in the room, cost of living. All of the taxes demanded by the city, county and state make it ever harder for people to afford to own homes or even rent. Leave it to the government bureaucracy to take too much in taxes to fund their pensions.
You care about someone with mental health issues yelling at people as a crime? All white collar crime is exponentially worse than that minor detail. Someone harming you or stealing your stuff is one thing, but freaking out because someone is yelling is an overreaction.
Even if we grant the idea that "All white collar crime is exponentially worse" than aggressive street people, the difference is that the former is not visible in day to day life, while the latter is very visible and has a major affect on how safe we feel in our homes and neighborhoods.
I live in LA and while im very sure someone somewhere around here is committing fraud and emblezzlement etc (and i obvs don't approve), it doesn't register to me or my neighbors in the same way that feeling unsafe on our daily strolls does.
I don't know if you've ever been to the Venice/Santa Monica area, but in say a half-hr stroll along Main Street you are basically dealing with an aggressive street person every few mins. In the past few yrs here, I have been assaulted by a street person, one of them even kicked my dog (a small chihuahua!) and all my neighbors have tales of being harassed, up to including fights and home invasions.
Now of course this is anecdotal, and there may be a spreadsheet showing that the concerns of me and my neighbors are overheated, and of course there is the eternal idea that "if only we eradicated poverty etc" there'd be no crime or grime and a 1000 flowers will bloom etc etc...but the real truth is that when you no longer feel safe going to the corner store, that is going to be a major pressing concern for you, your family (esp the women) and your neighbors.
so, yes, one person here or there yelling is an inconvenience, but when it happens daily it begins to feel like social collapse, and all airy abstractions and fantasies about a SWAT team of sociologists ready to parachute down every time someone forgets their psych meds have zero weight against the basic idea of safety, a society founded on safety, and the real first urgent need we expect from our politicians and politics: to be able to live our lives without being menaced by deranged and often dangerous vagrants and criminals.
When those people are also shitting on the sidewalks and doing drugs in the open? Of course. Even the people of San Francisco and Seattle are figuring this out.
You didn't say anything about defecating or doing drugs, you just said "yelling." The large majority of mentally ill homeless people are not a danger to others.
Of course no one wants public defecation, and that needs to be stopped. But the proper solution is to provide homeless people with bathrooms, not to arrest them. Where would you defecate if you were homeless?
You make it sound so easy. Don't like them shitting on the sidewalks, build them $400 thousand dollar bathrooms. Don't like seeing them on the streets, give them $60 thousand dollar tents. Think they're stealing to much merchandise, give them money so they don't steal as much. Simple as that right. Except when put in practice, they trash the tents, they use the bathrooms to shoot up, and have sex. The money you give them goes to drugs, so they're still stealing from the greedy corporations. Our federal, state, and local officials are the biggest enabling hypocrites, as long as they don't have to be around or interact with them they can point to some statistic and say see its working. If you ask people whose job depends on the misery of other people, the pat answer is we need more money.
Homeless people with mental health issues who are threats to themselves or others need to be put into special homes. I am not talking about Pennhurst, but assisted living facilities whereby they are not allowed to leave until being deemed not a danger for society would solve many problems. The main issue with that though is how easily it could be weaponized. Still, it's better than having people wander about without a home.
The main problem with Spielberg's arguments is that, from about 1965 - the 1980s, we tried them and they failed spectacularly. Essentially every word of his could have come from liberal crime policies during those decades that saw unprecedented levels of crime, particularly violent crime. Since then, James Q. Wilson and many others have authoritatively demolished claims about "root causes." The "facts on the ground" are what matter. Exactly why some people commit crime and others don't remains, to a significant extent, a mystery. But, until we have the answer to that, society rightly demands compliance with the law and punishment for those who don't. "Incapacitation" may or may not force virtue on a criminal, but it does remove him/her from society and, when it does, the rest of us are better off because of it.
Citation? During the 50s and 60s, the poorest residents of California were Asians who also had the lowest violent crime rate. Besides, what you mention isn't causation, it's correlation.
I learned this a long time ago from a criminologist. No honest criminologist that I know of has ever disputed it.
Your example about Asians is flawed for 2 reasons: 1) assuming what you wrote is true, this would be an exception, not the rule; and 2) I said that poverty causes street crime, not necessarily violent crime.
And you're wrong, criminologists say that poverty CAUSES street crime, not that it's correlated with it.
He cited James Q. Wilson, probably the most eminent criminologist of our time. You cite "criminologists [you] know" and whom you consider "honest" (because if the are honest, they agree with you).
Anyway, how many criminologists do you know? It's not like they're everywhere.
And yet essentially everything Wilson and so many others found and wrote contradicts your claim. After all, poverty greatly reduced in this country in the 60s and 70s at exactly the time crime rates soared. Again, give me a citation.
Poverty was reduced in the U.S.? Quite the contrary; the U.S. is quickly becoming a 3d world country, with most people living paycheck-to-paycheck and being unable to afford any type of emergency, and half the children not getting enough food to eat. What planet do you live on? The U.S. has the greatest income disparity in the developed world.
I'm tired of arguing about this and this will be my final comment on this thread. This is not a high priority issue for me, peace and the environment are (as they were for the Green Party before it decided that trying to win elections was more important than staying true to its original ideals). If you law-and-order types want to insist on having ever more of a police state, nothing I say is going to change your minds except possibly being caught up in it yourselves one day. All I can say is that's not the world I want to live in. While he's no hero of mine, I totally agree with Ben Franklin that people who would sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither.
Well, you're a bit overwrought. What I said was that, during the 60s and 70s, poverty in the U.S. decreased markedly and crime soared. Both are easily ascertainable facts. I understand that they tend to contradict your thesis, but facts they remain. Plus, I can't help but notice that you still haven't offered a citation or any other support for your claim that poverty is a cause of crime.
It's weird. I provide you an authoritative citation and you call it "conjecture." It doesn't make any sense. Plus, whatever's going on today in the Chinese community of California, it has no bearing on my original statement that was about the state of crime in the 50s and 60s.
"Poverty causes street crime, that's criminology 101."
There's your problem, Jeff. You think all that BS you learned in college is "true." Get your nose out of the book/classroom and get real. At this point, university faculties are wall to wall "woke" and thus are useless as a source of knowledge on this, or any other, issue.
Your continued appeal to the authority of "criminologists" would be laughable if it did not have such catastrophic real world consequences.
"Street crime" sounds a lot more benign than "violent crime" and "property crime". I imagine that's why you keep using it. Changing terminology doesn't change the underlying reality.
Many things are associated with poverty. Low intelligence is a big one. Bad family history is another. Single parenthood is another. Lack of ability is another. Oppression by governmental power is another. I could go on and on.
Looking forward to the next installment of this debate.
One thing I’d like to point out is that this view of mass incarceration put forth by the New Jim Crow theorist is not representative of reality. The majority of people behind bars are not there because of non-violent drug offenses. Yes, our system does a terrible job when it comes to rehabilitation; felons find themselves disenfranchised in many ways after release (one of the valuable findings put forth by NJC theorists) and that only contributes to high rates of recidivism. But the claim that blacks are disproportionately represented out of some racial animus hidden in the structure of the criminal justice system fails to account for the high rates of black (often intra racial) violence. The rate of violent crime for black male youth is 19x the rate for young white males. Violent crime is a major contributor to mass incarceration. Another point that should not be missed is that crime is perpetrated by a tiny minority of individuals, who terrorize their impoverished minority communities. Time and time again surveys have shown that blacks want the same or more policing in their neighborhoods, because they feel unsafe. I think it’s disingenuous to equate the deadly physical consequences of living in neighborhoods that are under the constant threat of gun violence, where children are killed by stray bullets piercing through house walls, and the lack of safety afforded by a low-wage job. Finally, the majority of people victimized by these violent criminals are also poor, yet they are law abiding citizens. One wonders…haven’t these law abiding citizens heard that they were supposed to be criminals based on their socioeconomic status? How do the proponents of the “poverty is the root cause” theory explain this bizarre phenomenon?
What you're missing is that poverty causes street crime, and Black people live in poverty in far greater proportions than white people. Combine that with the insane number of guns in this society and how violent this society is in general, and you have the reasons for the stats that you listed.
While it is indisputably true that, in a given place, the poor will commit more violent crimes than the middle class or rich, it's difficult to claim that poverty causes crime. Compare impoverished Asian immigrant communities to less-impoverished black communities - even in the same Metro Statistical Area - and you are likely to conclude that race is more closely correlated with crime rates than income. Compare one impoverished rural black community to an equally impoverished urban black community and you will conclude urbanism is the cause of crime rates. Then look at the MSAs with the highest violent crimes rates in the U.S. and you'll notice it's full of small-ish towns like Pine Bluff, Ar. (black), Fairbanks, Ak. (white), Danville, Il (mixed) and Florence, SC. (mixed). Detroit and Philly don't make the top 50, but Corpus Christi and Albuquerque (both disproportionately Hispanic) do. Then look at crime rates by family structure and question whether money, race and geography aren't really just confounding factors. It's obviously much more complicated than you are claiming.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. There are so many confounding factors: history of each group, class, urban vs. rural, culture, family structure, etc... When I teach my students about this issue, I offer them three lenses to look at inequality: racism, class, and culture. By the end of the semester most students are less certain of their stance re: causes. The takeaway is that it is very complicated and that silver bullet solutions are reductive and not sufficiently nuanced to capture the complexity of the issue on the ground.
Parents with a culture of employment. Neighborhoods with a culture of maintaining your home/apt. in good condition. Societal norms that tolerate beers after 5:00, not heroin at noon. Close-knit communities where kids know that everyone that sees them knows their parents. It's almost impossible to untangle all these things and to separate cause and effect. It is really important, though, that a society can decide which of these things belong in the pro column and which belong in the con column, even if we can't agree on relative importance and causation. It strikes me that much of the debate about people like Chesa Boudin is an inability even to acknowledge something so elementary.
Good point, ih8. Yeah, when you get right down to it, it's not complicated at all. Intact families, a belief in the power of education, and hard work equals successful communities.
From my experience, immigrant families seem to understand this basic truth far better than do "native born" Americans. I wonder why that is.
American blacks also commit far more rapes than American whites, and whites commit significantly more rape than Asian Americans. Are you going to maintain that poverty causes black men to commit rape at higher rates, as well?
In male prisons, blacks and Hispanics commit rape at fairly high rates against white men (particularly young white men). The reverse almost never occurs. You can check this in a Human Rights Watch report. Are you going to attribute differential rates of prison rape to poverty, as well?
Many countries with far lower per capita GDP also have far lower crime rates than the US, actually. Portugal, for example. China. (A typical working class Chinese makes about $350 a month.)
You could also look at interracial stranger rapes. Presumably non-Asian women (and men) are willing to report stranger rapes by Asians as much as by non-Asians. I think you'd still find lower rates. Please research this and get back to us, since you care.
My assertion was that I think it probably so, so I don't need a citation.
Your claim is that low rates of reporting of rape in Asian communities explain the lower rates we see. Right? That is an interesting claim and is plausible. However, it does not explain anything about victimization of non-Asian strangers, so that statistic would explode YOUR claim OR support it. It is indeed the critical statistic for your claim. You could in fact have a very interesting article to publish. But you'd have to accept the possibility that you are just -- wrong.
The fact is that Asian Americans (in ethnic terms) have low reported rape rates. You want to explain this away via a bald assertion that low reporting rates are the explanation, right? So you need to support that, not me.
The rate of violent crime conviction, not violent crime. Blacks and whites do drugs at the same rate but blacks are 5x more likely to be jailed for this. Why do you think violent crime is any different?
Because victims report the race of assailants. Blacks are victimized at higher rates than whites, and report that the perpetrators are also black. Unless of course you believe that whites are sneaking into black neighborhoods and committing violent crime, but victims don't report it? Maybe it's really suburban white kids shooting at each other every weekend in Chicago.
Yes, witnesses and victims report that black victims are attacked by black assailants in a large majority of cases. I am surprised when people seem to believe that higher crime rates among Blacks and Hispanics are just a right-wing talking point. Ask the victims, their reports tell a different story.
I lived in NYC in the first half of the 1990's, when homicides and crime in general were setting records. The change happened in 1992, before Giuliani. My tell for when the city turned the corner on crime and began to improve safety - when I no longer saw the squeegee guy at the entrance to the 59th Street bridge. After him being gone, it was the endless stream of drug dealers hassling people to buy drugs that were no longer inhabiting the streets.
When you commit to dealing with the issue at all levels of the justice system - DAs included - it becomes safer for everyone. The economics change.
It's totally false that anything that anyone did in New York affected the crime rate. New York City's crime rate has gone up and down along with the national average. Street crime is caused by poverty and requires a major national effort in order to deal with it adequately. What certain local politicians do that coincides with a rise or fall in crime is largely irrelevant, though politicians and their propagandists in the media will lie to you about it for their own ends.
The efforts of Bill Bratton (and many others) in the MTA is widely acknowledged to have laid the foundation for the dramatic reduction in crime experienced in NYC. Crime is local.
Since the Biden administration claims the US economy is stronger than at anytime in history. Unemployment is low and there have been twice as many job openings than unemployed, pray tell why crime is a top concern of the population? If crime is caused by poverty, shouldn't we see that in the data when overlaid with economic activity?
What causes poverty?!? Capitalism, duh….check your privilege. One man’s drug addicted knife-wielding shoplifting mugger is another man’s freedom fighter.
Haha, you certainly have no idea about my economic situation. How about you check your ad hominem attacks? Oh, and have you looked at the poverty rates in North Korea, China or any of the socialist states in South America? Certainly capitalism has its faults, but to ascribe poverty writ-large to it is simply inaccurate.
Washington Square? A walk along Broadway from the 80's down to Macy's and dealers on every corner. I mean *every* corner. Times square? The dealers were less conspicuous in the financial district, but they were everywhere.
Maybe hassled is too strong, but every one of them asking if you wanted to buy drugs.
It wasn't my experience. I really don't know what you are talking about. Maybe it was the way I looked. I certainly was not interested in drugs. If you looked shaggy or "alternative," perhaps you were approached more.
Short hair, clean shaven, married white guy going to grad school. The homeless guys used to say, "You're not from around here" in response to me giving them some money and responding with "your welcome" when they said "thank you".
My wife and I both commented that the drug dealers on the streets reminded us of running the gauntlet through the cosmetics departments of Macy's, Bloomingdales, Saks, etc. All marketing a free gift with purchase.
I lived in NYC all my life, until I retired; grew up around drugs, never even smoked grass, never got arrested or hazzled by the police - but it was happening.
Thanks to Glenn for hosting a spirited debate on what has become a real blight on the quality of life in our country. Ben Spielberg talks about things like "a roof to sleep under" and "exploitative employers", as if the homeless scene is so complex in its makeup that it's unsolvable until we solve every possible social ill, which - news flash - will not happen. There are millions of jobs and opportunities in this country which immigrants legal and otherwise quickly take advantage of, find some living arrangement, save and slowly move up the income ladder. Their kids graduate from college when they never graduated from high school. Drug addicts are free to make choices like the rest of us, and they have. Most don't want to clean up, most don't want to be housed. Ben sounds like a guy who's life is very far removed from the subject he purports to opine on.
I mostly agree with you, except to say that drug addiction profoundly, and in many cases irrevocably, alters and impairs brain function. This leads to a transformation of personality and eventually a complete inability to martial the executive decision-making functions of the brain’s pre-frontal cortex. Once the pre-frontal cortex is compromised through addiction, we are unable to make wise, objective decisions about anything. Thus, drug addicts are no longer "free to make choices" in the normal sense. It's not accurate to say that most addicts don't want to clean up, or don't want to be housed. The tragic truth is that they have no idea what they want, since they are in thrall to an addiction that overrides every other desire or healthy impulse they might otherwise have. Addicts are no longer in charge of themselves. This is why drug addiction is such a horrible, life-destroying illness.
People cannot heal on their own. We require intervention and a program. Without intervention and a support system, addicts rarely recover. Even with support, it’s very tough to kick a drug habit. But there is one approach that most certainly does not work at all: giving addicts all the drugs they want and a piece of sidewalk to die on.
Good comments, Beeswax. Thanks for introducing some neuroscience to a conversation that has been mostly sociological. If, as you say, "drug addicts are no longer free to make choices in the normal sense", it implies the state should play a more forceful role for their own good. That isn't happening. Society seems to tolerate and at times celebrate the right of addicts to continue to make choices that are destructive to both themselves and society. I agree about the importance of intervention and a support system, but how do we get people to cross that bridge to recovery? As it sounds like you know, the addict has to want to heal. Many do not. This is tough stuff. My view is that they should not be able to wander the streets and wreak havoc on themselves and others while they are deciding what to do with their lives. Sadly, most will never get their lives back.
I agree with you. While we are scratching our heads attempting to answer the confounding question of how to "get people to cross that bridge to recovery," the state should indeed "play a more forceful role for their own good." As you assert, they should not be allowed to wander the streets and wreak havoc on themselves and others. What passes for compassion in the current model is really just cruelty and indifference, both to the addict and everyone else.
Addiction is itself a symptom of a much deeper disease, and yes, poverty has a lot to do with it. But the enormous sums of money being spent to keep addicts hooked and living on the streets would be much better spent if we took responsibility and confronted the problem head-on.
Addicts may very well be committing suicide in progression of their disease but how is allowing them to perish on the streets a kindness or adequate response. It might be better to house them in dormitory like facilities run by government with drugs/alcohol furnished along with nutrition. The facility would provide a safe space to commit their suicide. They can enter but leaving requires a reentry delay. They would be responsible for cleaning their areas and themselves. Staff would oversee the operation and counselling available for those who wish it.
Could be less expensive than trying to enforce the law and run the ER for respite care. It would suggest society supports drugs but the addict is there already. Some addicts might decide on their own to get clean but there would be no force needed. I understand that our morality gets in the way of such a proposal but we certainly aren't helping by allowing the street to be their home.
"Ben sounds like a guy who's life is very far removed from the subject he purports to opine on."
So does "Jeff" on this comment thread. Both of these guys are walking/talking caricatures of a strand of Leftist thought whose time has passed...it just sounds somewhere between naive and flat out stupid.
I would suggest reading Thomas Sowell* on who is in prison, and how they got there.
It’s a fact that 33% of the black male population is either in prison, jail, or on parole**. That’s an astounding number. Most for patterns of misconduct, repeat offenders.
Funny they didn’t ask any prosecutors, who would have told them that there is definitely an Element in America, often but not always accompanying poverty, that doesn’t give a fuck about you, your rights, property, etc. and it takes a great deal of bad conduct to get a jail sentence, unless the “first” offense (which is so rare as to be statistically insignificant) is very serious. I was a very easy going urban prosecutor who cut offenders a LOT of slack because if everyone charged was convicted of their actual offense, the system would break down. We don’t have the space or resources to deal with it. There’s just too much of it - fuckups harming others out of stupidity and selfishness. These people cannot function in normal society because they can’t read, write, factor, control emotions, etc. And it’s clear that America seems to excel in the production of such individuals (culture have anything to do with that? Perish the thought!). Over incarceration? Jail is reserved for serious threats to public safety. Yet what percentage of crimes are actually solved? Murders or attempted murders without a resolution? Look that up. And then tell me we have too many people in jail when WELL OVER A MAJORITY OF SERIOUS CRIMES ARE NOT SOLVED. People who have committed egregious crimes commonly walk the streets God forbid you run into them at the wrong time. This whole conversation is for shit until folks start dealing with reality, and not have remote academic arguments about crime and violence. This used to be a conversation about pathology, but Over the course of cultural suicide, has become an unserious meditation about anything BUT what it is. Life as a prosecutor is a daily litany of human misery. It is people failing and dragging entire families down with them. It is injury inflicted upon ACTUAL innocents, who now bear the scars and will likely do it to the next person. Misery loves company, a lot of it, and it’s the easy way out, for a time. Not being honest about crime solves nothing. It only perpetuates it. For God’s sake, be serious, for once, about what is happening in these peoples’ lives, their communities. They are in a free-fall and nobody has the fucking courage to stand up and say “stop, enough”. You’re all fiddle fucking around with theoretical navel-gazing and it does nobody any good, whatsoever. You really care about these folks? Fine. How about the lives they ruin? Give a shit about that? Do all of us a huge favor and get serious, on both sides of the goddamn ledger. Without it, we’re fucking done. The easy road to total collapse. It’s sickening and infuriating. Jesus H Christ.
"A healthy society does not imprison millions of its citizens."
Well, a healthy society (whatever that is) does not import millions of African slaves, oppress them for two or three centuries, free them, then expect them to just blend in to the rest of society.
The Africans in America are a near total failure; aside from the 20% high achievers, they have simply failed to be competitive, and have resorted in high numbers to theft, violence, murder. 2/3 of the homicides in the U.S. are committed by black males, who constitute 6.5% of the population (though the actual perps are part of a smaller subset of probably 1% or less, the ghetto-based gangbangers who have opted out of the education system and the working world and choose instead to be drug dealers, hired guns, and generally dead-end thugs with very short life expectancies.
Now what were you saying about crime? Oh, yes, so we need to "reform" criminal justice. Yet, looking at the majority of citizens in suburbs and smaller cities, ethnic whites and Asians, the crime rates are very low, no worse in fact than in Canada and western Europe. In fact if you could round up that 1% very violent subset, the American cities would suddenly become safer than any large European urban area.
So, no. Screw these reformists. They have no idea what they're talking about. Imprison the violent ones and the thieves and don't be nice; give them tough love, put'em to work turning big rocks into little rocks as Anthony Brian Logan says.
Offer real economic opportunity to at-risk youth to keep them on the straight path, i.e. the Opportunity Zones set up by the Trump Administration and Senator Scott, apparently now forgotten by the Biden regime. Clean up the schools and make the students work for their degrees. Stop awarding them for failure. Clean up the streets with zero tolerance policies, stop-and-frisk, cops walking the beat, broken glass policy as per Giuliani's NYC. Stop talking about racism when the one race that complains the most is the one committing most of the crime.
This is doable, given the political will. But will never happen, as long as the white power elite have a guilt complex about slavery. Get over it, already.
"The Africans in America are a near total failure; aside from the 20% high achievers, they have simply failed to be competitive, and have resorted in high numbers to theft, violence, murder."
Actually Black Americans started their real decline after the mid-60's and LBJ's Great Society began to take charge. Prior to that the Black intact family was a very real thing with improving upward social mobility.
Yes it seems like their decline was rather precipitous. You might say, it also coincided with the popularization of ghetto culture -- rap, drug dealer clothing fashion, "tough guy" image -- and all the white commercial money pouring into this culture that made it the career path of choice for young black men lacking in other opportunities. Then there was the decline of the military as a desirable option - Vietnam killed it, as did popular white culture that demonized the military, despite its role in uplifting generations of black men from poverty and illiteracy.
I think the rapid decline began in the late 80's with the generation of fatherless households. Also the military went all volunteer and became much more selective with all but the Army requiring a HS diploma or a finished GED. But the demonization of the military likely helped. But the community is even worse off now with the decline in educational basics in lousy schools with people trapped in poverty. Ben Carson had some good efforts started that never got the attention and follow through they deserved.
"The Africans in America are a near total failure; aside from the 20% high achievers, they have simply failed to be competitive, and have resorted in high numbers to theft, violence, murder."
Overgeneralize much? I never thought I'd say this to anyone who is not part of the 'woke left' but that sounds bigoted. Besides, why is it that there is higher crime in communities of African descent than the general population? Does the 'war on poverty' and broken family that it created bear no mentioning? Those 'unintended consequences' destroyed all poor families due to the absent father and lack of childhood stability.
I think you meant "the war on drugs," not the war on poverty that Nixon ended as soon as he was elected, and that had been very successful during its very short life.
High incarceration rates in the US are corporate-globalists' doing. Prisons were "privatized", that's code for corporatized , and there was a TON of money to be made- and, oh, they made it. Billions of tax dollars funnelled into private hands...
When people started noticing the problem, the same anti-American corporate-globalist clowns seized the opportunity to "fix" (wink-wink) the problem and simultaneously advance their anti_American agenda, by weaponized the very angst THEY created, by using shill DAs to COMPLETELY undermined the criminal justice system's ability to keep law and order in its cities.
The DAs were the key to keeping the summer of 2020 riots going, and election fraud was key to getting the right corporate globalists shills into the right DA offices. You shouldn't need help figuring out which cities have corporate-globalist shill DA, their murder and crime rates are through the roof.
The globalists were assured of the support of every MSNBC watching NYT reading liberal Karen and her whipped husband, lining up behind the cause of "prison reform" - which refusing to prosecute criminals IS NOT.
Chesa is a Marxist- born and raised. Both his biological parents and his adopted were open Anti-American- Marxist. Lying captured media (of all kinds) and election fraud would be ESSENTIAL to putting him into place. They succeeded.
The entire "Green New Deal" is a Trojan horse designed to break America financially and bring her to her knees by way of engineered food shortages (nitrogen is bad ?!?!) and energy shortages (we can't drill our own oil but we can buy it from the Saudis?)
The violence experienced in cities across this nation were Orchestrated, FUNDED, LEGALLY, and MEDIA protected by the corporate-globalist SHILLs- who, over the last 50 years have infiltrated every corner of our formerly great Republic, and completely captured ALL MAINSTREAM MEDIA.
This is a very long term attack on this country- Plain and simple. It's been decades of this unrestricted warfare.
We owe McCarthy a sincere apology - he was right. Hollywood is and was COMPLETELY complicit in this Marxist takeover. We have been consuming their slowly escalating anti-America, anti-marriage and anti-child propaganda to the point where so many Americans are now alone and demoralized (and questioning their gender and sexuality- the confusion designed to keep us from procreating). The universities are all captured and complicit as well.
On a scale of 1-10, how interested am I in a "intellectual" discussion about what went wrong in San Francisco for Chesa Boudin? ZERO. Chessa was a weapon dropped on a beautiful American city that is now a festering. I wish he'd been arrested, but law enforcement too is full of shills- and FORGET the Justice Department.
When this story has been written, more than half of this country will be in SHOCK over how close we came to falling prey to the monsters of the New "Liberal" World Order, and how close the notions of freedom, liberty and citizen sovereignty, codified only in here in our US Constitution, came to being lost FOREVER. If it dies here, technology will prevent these principles ever bubbling to the surface appearing again.
I know this sounds Victorian, but I think the government should help set up work farms for people with no income, but not disabled enough to need constant care. And not for a cash crop, but for subsistence. Helping to grow your own food, and learning how to do it, in a rural environment with natural areas, could be uplifting.
A pet idea that I have, despite a dearth of any real evidence, is that one explanation for increasing levels of crime by people suffering mental health issues is that modern societies have gotten more complex and require higher levels of socialization skills to successfully function. Perhaps 200 years ago, people that lacked these skills could still find peace and meaning in being a shepherd, splitting fence rails or trapping furs without getting bent out of shape about not being able to get this or that license without the right forms, credentials, identification. I don't know. It's not a fully-formed opinion, but I think it may be something worth further study.
The increase in complexity and required skill causing more mental illness...it is a logical hypothesis. The forced 'requirement' if you will for a college degree in order to get anywhere in life is also a factor, at least for drug use due to the feeling of hopelessness.
At the same time as our society has become more complex, and simple hard work is no longer sufficient to provide a living, our public education system is churning out functional illiterates. It's a recipe for disaster, as we clearly see in our dystopian cities.
The public education system has a lot to answer for.
Some religious communities follow a similar model - living and working communally. The Bruderhof have a business making school furniture and toys, with everyone earning the same salary - nothing (they share all their resources). The Catholic Worker farm in Marlboro, New York, houses workers and homeless people who come to live there. Of course, those communities are guided by a worldview entirely different from the prevalent worldview of our society.
An important question is whether some people who commit crimes are irredeemable, and if so, what society should do about them. I believe that some criminals were led to crime by hopelessness, while others are innately antisocial.
Like Mr. Shapiro, I think it is wrong to blame Chesa Boudin entirely for the state of San Francisco today. George Gascon spent the prior 8-years in the post. Democrats have controlled the City for almost 58-years. They own it, whether you believe in politics or not.
I love the idea of San Francisco and I have many good memories over many decades in the city. However, in 2016 I took my then 19-year old daughter to a couple concerts there. On a Saturday at 3PM I walked her through the Tenderloin. From my perspective it wasn't that bad. She saw it and said, "Why don't they fix this?" I can still hear the trauma in her voice upon seeing it for the first time.
In 2018, I took my then 25-year old daughter to northern California. We did a day trip to San Francisco during the trip. When leaving San Francisco she said she would never go back there. She found it filthy and disgusting.
Both girls had been to San Francisco multiple times before and are progressives. In 2019, San Francisco hosted an international convention for professionals in finance, or 'criminals' to Mr. Shapiro. Investment professionals from the UK and France, as did others, commented on how disgusted they were with the San Francisco they saw. All had positive memories of time spent there before. All these moments predate Chesa Boudin.
What Chesa Boudin got wrong is he viewed the patient (city of San Francisco) as someone in need of a change in lifestyle and diet. Unfortunately, the patient was bleeding out in the emergency room with a few gunshot wounds to the chest, multiple blunt force traumas and a knife in a kidney.
Honestly I feel a sense of schadenfreude towards the residents of San Francisco. They created the conditions that caused these problems and are living with the consequences. I disagree that the root cause of the current crime wave is economic unless you consider the criminals are "sticking it to the man". Those stealing from CVS aren't taking cough syrup, they're taking lottery tickets, Juul's and other items for personal use or resale. Don't get me started on those robbing Louis Vuitton. They are doing it because they can; and know they won't be prosecuted. Reminds me of that movie, The Purge, but the purge is everyday. Most people want personal, physical safety for themselves, their families and their possessions. Additionally, they want the laws applied equally. If PoC are disproportionately disadvantaged in the criminal justice system, why not pay public defenders more? That way at least they get better representation. Not prosecuting them is no answer and leads to the current situation.
"Deterrence, rehabilitation, and restoration" are "inappropriate"? In other words, no one should be punished. Why not? Do you remember the case in the 70s of the teenage girl who went hitchhiking and was picked up by a man who cut off her arms? I do. Why shouldn't he be punished? Why shouldn't arsonists, rapists, criminal banksters, murderers, etc. be punished? What about men who splash acid in the faces of girls who won't date them? Why shouldn't they be punished? How about people who torture toddlers? What's wrong with punishing them?
Spielberg's "economic struggles causes what we see in the streets of SF" argument is simply wrong. The refusal to recognize the pull effect of these "decriminalization" policies, people with drug addictions coming to SF for easy access, the fact that drug cartels are running circles around it all. Cost of living in SF has nothing to do with this dystopian nightmare that has unfolded in SF. It's like a zombie movie: in the name of compassion we have drug deranged people wandering the streets, pissing and shitting everywhere, tents everywhere like tram stations where sane people - who pay for all of it - are supposed to use to go to work. How is all that compassion? And always the general bs of "exploitative employers, capitalism...bla bla bla". Look at the results, Ben! Stores closures, broken windshield glass everywhere, people diying in the streets. If that's what success looks like than I'm rooting for the utter "failure" and reversal of these policies. I've lived and worked in SF for over 30 years and have never seen a decline that fast and that deep into chaos anywhere.
Nice right wing diatribe, but your fundamental facts are provably wrong.
First, poverty causes street crime, and any serious criminologist will tell you that (as opposed to criminologists with political agendas who don't tell the truth). The fact that some people are drawn to San Francisco, mainly for CULTURAL reasons BTW, is irrelevant to the fact that that street crime is caused by poverty. And guess what? If drugs were legal and weren't overtaxed like California did with marijuana, they'd be a lot cheaper and addicts wouldn't have to steal as much or at all.
Second, it's totally false that the cost of living has "nothing to do" with homelessness. Approximately 44% of homeless people have jobs according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, despite your incorrect preconceived notions to that they're all druggies. Many people lose their homes when they're evicted, because they can't afford the increased rent for a new place. San Francisco and New York City are the most expensive cities in the country by far, and the high cost of rent here is a large factor in homelessness.
I call bullshit on your labeling and bullshit on your statistics. When people get evicted they don't start smashing car windshields at a 700% percent increase in less then 2 years. You know who doesn't give a fuck because their brains are impared? Drug addicts. Poor people don't simply become criminals, walking into Walgreens, stuffing bags with merchandise and walking out. SF has never ever been cheap, my friend. I've moved to SF in the earthy 1990s and housing was about twice as expensive as in Chicago. It didn't have twice as many homeless and/or drug addicts as Chicago (per capita that is)! SF had always some homeless people and a drug scene. You know what a person does when he/ she looses a place? Move somewhere where he/she can find housing he/she can afford. Not fucking start smashing store front windows! I call bullshit on your ideology not because I'm "right wing" but because I've been around long enough and watched so-called Progressives with all their good intentions and their compassion ruin regular live in the city and LA and other "progressive" cities. What I equate with "Progressive policies" these days is incompetence, blind ignorance and cult like ideology. Hey, but why should I trust my lying eyes if I have guys like you explaining to me what is really going on!
I tried to upvote your comment here Mr. Winter, but the fucking button doesn't work?!?!?!?
I agree with every word you said. It is the Uber-Left Neo-Marxist who are the problem in this nation. They are irrational, irresponsible and WOKE like Orwellian authoritarian nutjobs.
Why is there poverty if the unemployment rate is historically low? Could it be these people make bad life decisions? Anyone can be a Doordash driver and earn quite a bit of money. There are also other states with poverty that have nowhere near the level of street crime that LA, SF, Seattle, see.
Are you serious? You really don't understand that people can be working and still poor?
There's a difference between the working poor, and the permanent homeless class who rely on petty crime and dealing drugs to fuel their addictions.
Most people who are homeless don’t stay there for long. Like me for instance.
“Working criminals” is what you meant to say since poverty causes crime. No one is responsible for their actions. Unless they earn a certain amount of money each year they are FORCED to commit crimes and victimize their fellow citizens. /s
You Marxists are a cancer.
Why do you and other right wingers here obsess on street crime, when white collar crime kills & injures FAR MORE people, and causes major environmental harms, the latter which street crime doesn't do? Are you actually rich and just pretending to be poor? Or are you brainwashed?
And to show you and everyone else how clueless you are, I'm not a Marxist, pretty far from it. I'm a radical environmentalist who usually agrees with the left, but my priorities are totally different.
Perhaps explain what white collar crime you are taking about that kills and injures far more people that want everyone knows is street crime.
Funny how you out your bad faith and the true beliefs you hold by assuming all poor people hold the same values, or lack of, that you do. You should know that poor people don’t want or need your self righteous activism that just gets more of them killed. Many of them realize that your victimhood and envious mentality, all sins BTW, will relegate them to perpetual poverty.
No person in history has ever overcome poverty through legal means by acting out your perverse ideology.
If poverty causes street crime, why are Chinatowns generally so safe? There are many poor people there and always have been. Chinatown is usually the first stop for poor immigrants.
Most poor people don't commit crimes of any kind. Are they somehow exempt from poverty as a "cause"? How can most poor people not be affected by the "cause" of street crime?
The poor Jews of ghettos across the world have been historically known for their high crime rates.
I assume you are being ironic/sarcastic.
I wouldn't be so sure Hugh....
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If SF and NYC are fully controlled by Democrats, why is there such high cost of rent? Don't they then shoulder the blame for the conditions of homelessness? You can't have it both ways.
Where do you see any mention of Democrats in my post?
The high cost of rent in SF and NYC is because they're very desirable places to live, and rent prices are supply & demand like most other things. Nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans, though the Democrats who run these cities are right wing corporate Democrats, and are not economically progressive.
You didn't mention it, but that's a fact. Both cities are dominated by Democrats for decades. Ergo, if there's a problem, they are to blame.
what about the very strict building and zoning restrictions in SF?? These are policies that could improve housing availability. I suggest you read the works of Thomas Sowell, a long time bay resident and respected economist.
wtf is wrong with the Upvote button on this Substack?!?!?!?
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There is no housing shortage in the Bay Area. There is an overpopulation problem and an AFFORDABLE housing shortage.
I strongly oppose ruining communities with high rises or other overdevelopment. Developers are just getting rich doing this (and their lackeys in government almost certainly are also), it doesn't solve the housing problem because the large majority of what they build is not affordable, and it doesn't even stop sprawl, as developers falsely claim it does.
The good solutions are to lower human population (though this will take a long time and is not an immediate solution) and to make housing affordable by whatever means necessary (subsidies, stronger rent control including vacancy control -- which my city used to have until the disgusting California legislature took away that choice for cities and which worked very well to keep rental costs down -- etc. More development is a bad solution that I don't support.
Here in Southern California, there was a recent study done on the homeless which concluded that the homeless population consists in rough proportions of the "have nots", the "can nots" and the "will nots". The have nots are those encountering some type of financial upset and are the ones most likely to promptly secure transitionary housing while they work through their problems. The "can nots" are the mentally ill and the "will nots" are the chronically addicted. Any individual living on the street for more than 30 days is not there because of eviction or acute financial distress.
I lived in a car and on a park bench for about three months then joined the military, went to the college and just completed a success career in tech. You are wrong in your blanket statement.
That's totally wrong. Almost half of the homeless have jobs. That study is right wing BS, and you have no idea what you're talking about.
Lol Jeff, you need a better response than "It's right-wing BS!" I see that you self-identify as a radical environmentalist and yet you still walk the earth, sending out your nasty CO2 emissions, choking all the rest of us. Surely a man as tuned in as you are can come up with a better explanation for why decades of Democrat leadership haven't left blue cities as nirvana for all?
It's right wing BS and it's up to the OP to support his ridiculous assertions. Duh.
If a sane homeless person had a job, they would buy a ticket at the greyhound station and move to someplace they can afford. There are low wage jobs everywhere. OBVIOUSLY SF is not the place to be if you are working and cannot afford to live there. The problem in the cities is that the corporations-via the Dems- keep importing illegals in order to keep wages down.
Those who want to restrict immigration so their fellow American's can afford to live where they want to, are called RIGHT-WING RACISTS.
Gee Jeff, we seem to see that term up and down this comment section with your name on it.
Exactly. The notion that people become homeless because they're evicted for failing to pay those high San Francisco rents stretches belief. Any sane person would leave SF way before getting evicted. Evictions don't happen overnight - it's a process that takes months on end. If the rent is too high for you to the point where you run the risk of being evicted, get out of there! Catch a bus to Iowa or some place you can afford. Seriously, compassion should be reserved for those who deserve it. Personal responsibility is NOT a "right-wing" concept. I'm a liberal and I'm horrified by what our big cities have become under supposedly "liberal" policies. Enough already with this BS.
There is a very strong correlation between rents and homelessness. And not just in the US. Paris has lots of homeless too.
Jeff, your inability to synthesize a coherent justification for the purposeful dismantling of law and order in SF is legion and speaks for itself.
Some gems: "addicts wouldn't have to steal as much"
"poverty causes street crime" (tho you're forgiven because this idiocy was likely pulled from the pages of WaPo or NYT)
"people are drawn to San Francisco, mainly for CULTURAL reasons" (and start immediately shitting in the street and robbing CVS?)
"44% of homeless people have jobs " I could write a book on the illogic of that statement in a tirade designed to defend the "liberal" ( actually fascism with a gigantic public relations department) DISASTER that is SF.
"Many people lose their homes when they're evicted, because they can't afford the increased rent" and Jeff would have you believe that when fine upstanding people can no longer afford the rent in their current SF apartment (which has been highest in the nation for all of our lifetimes), they move onto the street and start robbing people and shitting in the street.
I think the primary problem with liberals is that they were trained for so long to just listen and regurgitate (with honors) that they've been trained out of the notion of questioning the "authorities".
Wake Up Jeff. Your country is being purposely bankrupted and demoralized before your eyes. And your newspaper is telling you to want more.
I don't think there's anything that can cause people like Jeff to change their minds, neither common sense nor evidence. They're in the grip of dogma.
Housing in San Francisco and New York City is indeed super expensive. It’s too bad we don’t have a country where people can choose what city and state to live in, and therefore choose those with lower housing costs when needed. Oh, right - we do have a country like this! If people can’t afford housing in SF or NYC, they can go elsewhere where it is cheaper. So that does not fly as a “cause” of either crime or homelessness.
This topic is personal to me as someone who lived in the SF Bay Area for almost 20 years when I was younger. Now that I’m retired, I’d love to go back there - but guess what? Housing there is too expensive for me. And I am not poor - I have a graduate degree, had a successful career, and owned a home in Washington, DC.
So now I live in central VA, where I own a nice house that I purchased for about $300K - a house that would easily cost four times that in SF.
I don’t get people complaining so much about the cost of housing while choosing to live in the most expensive places in the country.
Yeah why should someone who was born and raised here, and has their family and job and friends here have anything to complain about?
They should just move to rural Virginia!
or just move someplace more affordable. Being born and raised someplace doesnt mean you are entitled to stay there forever, but you may choose too if you wish. Maybe if that person loved the bay area and wanted to stay, they would have chosen a career in tech, or finance so they could remain in the city they love without worrying about cost of living. People have choices, people have options, thats the point.
Yet New York City is actually handling its homeless problem far more effectively than San Francisco. You should read San Fransicko by noted hard-right activist Michael Shellenberger.
Not sure about your point of reference but Mr Shellenberger describes himself as "on the left".
Yeah, he's very left. Veteran of the environmentalist movement. I was being sarcastic, apologies. It was a riposte to "Jeff's" labeling of P. Winter's point as "right-wing". I am a big fan of Shellenberger, I think his ideas make a lot of sense and he's been. resident of San Francisco for decades . The book I referenced is a very detailed study of the issues in San Francisco, mainly focusing on the homeless problem, but also the ancillary issues that arise from it. The numbers in his book, around the total homeless population and San Francisco's budget for dealing with the homeless population are simply astounding.
I didn't pick up on the sarcasm and only felt the need to correct any misconceptions because I, too, am a big fan of Shellenberger. His is a voice of refreshing reason coming from a quarter that is not willing to speak out against the narrative.
I heartily agree with you. It’s shocking that someone who put in so much time actually fighting for left wing causes, really fighting not just re tweeting, is not taken seriously by folks on the left. It’s all about narrative, as you point out.
"First, poverty causes street crime, and any serious criminologist will tell you that"
What, then, explains the majority of poor people who DON'T commit street crime? Are they just suckers, who've bought into the system?
Indeed. Crime causes Poverty, as insecure people and property collapse marketplaces and destroy wealth creati9n.
First you need to understand that human beings with no discipline will always take the path of the least resistance. Stop giving them or yourself an excuse. Poverty causes street crime? Why are they poor? The result of their action? Yes? Cultural reason?.. like degenerate attracts degenerate (it is probably more like CA climate than culture).? Your reasoning makes me chuckle. Decriminalizing marijuana caused holy crap load of problem in this state. There used to be scores of illegal marijuana farms in So Cal. now its waaaay over 500. and they are run by illegals and Mexican cartels. They are threatening neighborhood and stealing water. You have no idea, do you? Because having illegal farms cost them a few hundred bucks of penalty. So, Mexican cartel just picked up their business and crossed our open border to open their shops. Drugs killed 107.000 Americans last year. A lot of them are not addicts. Cartel mixes fentanyl into some counterfeit pills... https://carteldoc.dailycaller.com/ And your second point. Are you familiar with what London Breed did? putting all those addicts and homeless into the hotels? (at tax payers expense, no less.) They trashed every establishment, and a lot died in there doing drugs in their room. S.F. had more deaths from drug than from Covid. When it comes to the people living on the streets of S.F. particularly. People like Shellenberger and others actually did the leg work, probably you should read his book. He is also not alone who did the actual work on the ground. if not all, most of them are actually addicts or having mental illness, or both unless your source is counting those drug dealers, fencers, and cartel members as the working people. :P Giving needles, crack pipes or even living quarters will never solve this problem. Didn't Einstein say "Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results" It is time to try the different approach, I say. By the way, if you can't pay the rent? You should move to cheaper states. At least, that is what we tell our kids. Living within their means is an important concept.
What you don’t seem to understand is the fact that if there are no prosecutions for drug use or dealing, then it IS legal. So your argument is meaningless.
I worked as an RN in detox & rehab for 20+ years & there is no one solution to this all but intractable problem. Shelters that are drug & alcohol-free is a first step in helping those who want off the streets. If they’re not, you have simply moved the danger indoors.
No, not prosecuting is not the same as legal status. For example, if drugs were legal, you could go to Walgreen's and buy the drug without the risk of dying from fentanyl overdose.
I admit that this would be a situation with new problems, and it is not something I am proposing or favor (I don't know enough about how that might work or fail to work), but the simple point is that outright legality offers a lot of options that would be preferable to simple avoidance of direct prosecution of users.
How is the weather in this fantasy land you live in? I have been dirt poor and magically, never committed a crime much less victimized a fellow citizen. How is that even possible in your self-responsibility lacking political ideology? What is the annual income cut off for a citizen to become a criminal since poverty causes crime?
The fact that poverty causes street crime doesn't mean that all poor people or even most poor people commit street crime. Take a high school logic course.
The FACT that poverty causes street crime is Criminology 101. I've learned it from criminologists, I didn't make it up. But it doesn't fit with your right wing rugged individualist ideology, so you won't accept this basic fact. I do not at all excuse people from taking personal responsibility, but there are also huge societal factors that are beyond the control of individuals. The rich & powerful are FAR more responsible for societal problems, because they cause them, and because they have the money and power to fix them.
Are you Jeff Biss with a new account?
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Criminals have the same freedom of choice all Amricans have. Commiting a crime in desperation is no excuse under the law. Committing a crime by ignorance of the law is no excuse under the law. Commiting a crime has no excuse under the law, but for the presumption of innocence under US jurisprudence.
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As usual the devil is in the details. The "employment" stats by the National Coalition for the Homeless are ummm....a little misleading. I will concede that poverty is associated with some types of crime, but I am surprised that you don't mention wealth is also associated with some types of crime. That pointy headed abstract issue of poverty and crime does not decide recalls however. Recalls and DA elections are decided by how the blue and white collar workers integrated into their socioeconomic niches feel about or experience crime
SFran he long been a a place were housing costs have been sky high compared to many US cities. So what has changed??? Not enforcing vagrancy and drug laws. Even ignoring shoplifting, which drove companies out of the city. Steinberg seems ok with these "evil" companies shuttering there businesses, taking there jobs with them. Then he rambles on about low wage jobs, and mistreatment of employess. It seems his soulution is allowing people to live as junkies and have the government subsidize it via universal income and the like. Its a utopian dream that has no basis in the real world. Taxpayers should be able to operate there business and walk the streets without having to worry about stepping on needles and human feces and have there business robbed by drug addled lunatics. That should be the number 1 priority of the social contract between government and taxpayer. Not using there money to enable filth, addiction and lawlessness under the guise of "social justice".
San Francisco as well as most of coastal California is the perfect place for homelessness. There is most definitely a pull factor for homeless and addicts. Flyover country thanks you, California.
Well, it depends. The mild climate, sure, but go to a city like Carlsbad and try to find homeless or drug addicts in that city. If Jeff wants to see "right wing" in action.
Rich people hire violent thugs to beat up poor people. Not surprising. Are there homeless in San Francisco?
Every city's homeless are in SF these days! And SF officials seem to be proud of this sad fact. Why the residents and tax payers of SF have to cough up for all these imports has yet to be explained.
There are homeless in all cities in the US especially the West Coast cities, including Vancouver.
Ok, how many of them have more homeless and drug addicts than high school students? There might be homeless in all cities but they are surely have not taken over public squares unchallenged like in SF.
Those cvs workers were all working class and the stores themselves serve working and middle class communities, how about some empathy for them?
Apparently they aren't 'victim' enough.
Why are we supposed to feel sorry for them again? Because someone stole from their employee? They were probably secretly cheering inside.
Spielberg is correct in stating that Boudin implemented the policies he ran on. He promised those policies would improve people's lives. They did not. His argument that economic inequality is the driving force behind the decline of San Francisco is vague and unsubstantiated. As are his claims that poverty is the leading cause of feeling unsafe. Regardless of your economic circumstance anyone that finds a knife welding homeless person defecating on their front steps doesn't feel safe. 60% of San Franciscan voters, voted to recall Boudin. They didn't do that because they felt safe.
Violent crime and incarceration went down. He did exactly what he was elected to do.
And no, 60% of San Francisco voters did not vote to recall him. Your “not really from San Francisco” slip is showing.
"results showing 60% of voters supporting his removal" That's from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/08/chesa-boudin-san-francisco-recall-analysis. The Atlantic ran a similar article, even the liberals turned on him.
No crime did not go down. And thankfully I am not from San Francisco.
CA's basic problem is that they're simply ignoring ALL crime, even the real crimes where somebody or their stuff is harmed. We don't care that people go home and get high, we DO care when they're on the street yelling at passersby.
There is also the elephant in the room, cost of living. All of the taxes demanded by the city, county and state make it ever harder for people to afford to own homes or even rent. Leave it to the government bureaucracy to take too much in taxes to fund their pensions.
You care about someone with mental health issues yelling at people as a crime? All white collar crime is exponentially worse than that minor detail. Someone harming you or stealing your stuff is one thing, but freaking out because someone is yelling is an overreaction.
Even if we grant the idea that "All white collar crime is exponentially worse" than aggressive street people, the difference is that the former is not visible in day to day life, while the latter is very visible and has a major affect on how safe we feel in our homes and neighborhoods.
I live in LA and while im very sure someone somewhere around here is committing fraud and emblezzlement etc (and i obvs don't approve), it doesn't register to me or my neighbors in the same way that feeling unsafe on our daily strolls does.
I don't know if you've ever been to the Venice/Santa Monica area, but in say a half-hr stroll along Main Street you are basically dealing with an aggressive street person every few mins. In the past few yrs here, I have been assaulted by a street person, one of them even kicked my dog (a small chihuahua!) and all my neighbors have tales of being harassed, up to including fights and home invasions.
Now of course this is anecdotal, and there may be a spreadsheet showing that the concerns of me and my neighbors are overheated, and of course there is the eternal idea that "if only we eradicated poverty etc" there'd be no crime or grime and a 1000 flowers will bloom etc etc...but the real truth is that when you no longer feel safe going to the corner store, that is going to be a major pressing concern for you, your family (esp the women) and your neighbors.
so, yes, one person here or there yelling is an inconvenience, but when it happens daily it begins to feel like social collapse, and all airy abstractions and fantasies about a SWAT team of sociologists ready to parachute down every time someone forgets their psych meds have zero weight against the basic idea of safety, a society founded on safety, and the real first urgent need we expect from our politicians and politics: to be able to live our lives without being menaced by deranged and often dangerous vagrants and criminals.
When those people are also shitting on the sidewalks and doing drugs in the open? Of course. Even the people of San Francisco and Seattle are figuring this out.
You didn't say anything about defecating or doing drugs, you just said "yelling." The large majority of mentally ill homeless people are not a danger to others.
Of course no one wants public defecation, and that needs to be stopped. But the proper solution is to provide homeless people with bathrooms, not to arrest them. Where would you defecate if you were homeless?
Your front yard?
You make it sound so easy. Don't like them shitting on the sidewalks, build them $400 thousand dollar bathrooms. Don't like seeing them on the streets, give them $60 thousand dollar tents. Think they're stealing to much merchandise, give them money so they don't steal as much. Simple as that right. Except when put in practice, they trash the tents, they use the bathrooms to shoot up, and have sex. The money you give them goes to drugs, so they're still stealing from the greedy corporations. Our federal, state, and local officials are the biggest enabling hypocrites, as long as they don't have to be around or interact with them they can point to some statistic and say see its working. If you ask people whose job depends on the misery of other people, the pat answer is we need more money.
Except no one is doing this in 99% of San Francois except in your fantasy of what San Francisco is.
I guess only 1% of your streets covered in shit is a victory for you.
Homeless people with mental health issues who are threats to themselves or others need to be put into special homes. I am not talking about Pennhurst, but assisted living facilities whereby they are not allowed to leave until being deemed not a danger for society would solve many problems. The main issue with that though is how easily it could be weaponized. Still, it's better than having people wander about without a home.
It begins to feel like a social collapse because it is a social collapse.
The main problem with Spielberg's arguments is that, from about 1965 - the 1980s, we tried them and they failed spectacularly. Essentially every word of his could have come from liberal crime policies during those decades that saw unprecedented levels of crime, particularly violent crime. Since then, James Q. Wilson and many others have authoritatively demolished claims about "root causes." The "facts on the ground" are what matter. Exactly why some people commit crime and others don't remains, to a significant extent, a mystery. But, until we have the answer to that, society rightly demands compliance with the law and punishment for those who don't. "Incapacitation" may or may not force virtue on a criminal, but it does remove him/her from society and, when it does, the rest of us are better off because of it.
That's not correct. Poverty causes street crime, that's criminology 101.
Citation? During the 50s and 60s, the poorest residents of California were Asians who also had the lowest violent crime rate. Besides, what you mention isn't causation, it's correlation.
If you're intellectually honest but and not lazy, you would look it up yourself; it's not that hard with google.
I learned this a long time ago from a criminologist. No honest criminologist that I know of has ever disputed it.
Your example about Asians is flawed for 2 reasons: 1) assuming what you wrote is true, this would be an exception, not the rule; and 2) I said that poverty causes street crime, not necessarily violent crime.
And you're wrong, criminologists say that poverty CAUSES street crime, not that it's correlated with it.
He cited James Q. Wilson, probably the most eminent criminologist of our time. You cite "criminologists [you] know" and whom you consider "honest" (because if the are honest, they agree with you).
Anyway, how many criminologists do you know? It's not like they're everywhere.
And yet essentially everything Wilson and so many others found and wrote contradicts your claim. After all, poverty greatly reduced in this country in the 60s and 70s at exactly the time crime rates soared. Again, give me a citation.
Poverty was reduced in the U.S.? Quite the contrary; the U.S. is quickly becoming a 3d world country, with most people living paycheck-to-paycheck and being unable to afford any type of emergency, and half the children not getting enough food to eat. What planet do you live on? The U.S. has the greatest income disparity in the developed world.
I'm tired of arguing about this and this will be my final comment on this thread. This is not a high priority issue for me, peace and the environment are (as they were for the Green Party before it decided that trying to win elections was more important than staying true to its original ideals). If you law-and-order types want to insist on having ever more of a police state, nothing I say is going to change your minds except possibly being caught up in it yourselves one day. All I can say is that's not the world I want to live in. While he's no hero of mine, I totally agree with Ben Franklin that people who would sacrifice freedom for safety deserve neither.
Well, you're a bit overwrought. What I said was that, during the 60s and 70s, poverty in the U.S. decreased markedly and crime soared. Both are easily ascertainable facts. I understand that they tend to contradict your thesis, but facts they remain. Plus, I can't help but notice that you still haven't offered a citation or any other support for your claim that poverty is a cause of crime.
Citation needed. Violent crime was high but unreported in Chinatown.
Wilson and Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature, p. 473. So, if crime was unreported, how do you know it was high?
Thanks for the cite, though I won’t pay for the book, I read some reviews and it is interesting.
Do you mind quoting at length?
We know that domestic violence is high and underreported in the Chinese community. The rest is a conjecture, just as your claim is.
It's weird. I provide you an authoritative citation and you call it "conjecture." It doesn't make any sense. Plus, whatever's going on today in the Chinese community of California, it has no bearing on my original statement that was about the state of crime in the 50s and 60s.
"Poverty causes street crime, that's criminology 101."
There's your problem, Jeff. You think all that BS you learned in college is "true." Get your nose out of the book/classroom and get real. At this point, university faculties are wall to wall "woke" and thus are useless as a source of knowledge on this, or any other, issue.
Your continued appeal to the authority of "criminologists" would be laughable if it did not have such catastrophic real world consequences.
"Street crime" sounds a lot more benign than "violent crime" and "property crime". I imagine that's why you keep using it. Changing terminology doesn't change the underlying reality.
Ok, what causes poverty?! The line you keep stating is not the mic drop answer you think it is.
Many things are associated with poverty. Low intelligence is a big one. Bad family history is another. Single parenthood is another. Lack of ability is another. Oppression by governmental power is another. I could go on and on.
Rich people cause poverty by hoarding wealth.
Yeah, moral poverty.
Looking forward to the next installment of this debate.
One thing I’d like to point out is that this view of mass incarceration put forth by the New Jim Crow theorist is not representative of reality. The majority of people behind bars are not there because of non-violent drug offenses. Yes, our system does a terrible job when it comes to rehabilitation; felons find themselves disenfranchised in many ways after release (one of the valuable findings put forth by NJC theorists) and that only contributes to high rates of recidivism. But the claim that blacks are disproportionately represented out of some racial animus hidden in the structure of the criminal justice system fails to account for the high rates of black (often intra racial) violence. The rate of violent crime for black male youth is 19x the rate for young white males. Violent crime is a major contributor to mass incarceration. Another point that should not be missed is that crime is perpetrated by a tiny minority of individuals, who terrorize their impoverished minority communities. Time and time again surveys have shown that blacks want the same or more policing in their neighborhoods, because they feel unsafe. I think it’s disingenuous to equate the deadly physical consequences of living in neighborhoods that are under the constant threat of gun violence, where children are killed by stray bullets piercing through house walls, and the lack of safety afforded by a low-wage job. Finally, the majority of people victimized by these violent criminals are also poor, yet they are law abiding citizens. One wonders…haven’t these law abiding citizens heard that they were supposed to be criminals based on their socioeconomic status? How do the proponents of the “poverty is the root cause” theory explain this bizarre phenomenon?
A brave and insightful comment, TunaFortune.
What you're missing is that poverty causes street crime, and Black people live in poverty in far greater proportions than white people. Combine that with the insane number of guns in this society and how violent this society is in general, and you have the reasons for the stats that you listed.
While it is indisputably true that, in a given place, the poor will commit more violent crimes than the middle class or rich, it's difficult to claim that poverty causes crime. Compare impoverished Asian immigrant communities to less-impoverished black communities - even in the same Metro Statistical Area - and you are likely to conclude that race is more closely correlated with crime rates than income. Compare one impoverished rural black community to an equally impoverished urban black community and you will conclude urbanism is the cause of crime rates. Then look at the MSAs with the highest violent crimes rates in the U.S. and you'll notice it's full of small-ish towns like Pine Bluff, Ar. (black), Fairbanks, Ak. (white), Danville, Il (mixed) and Florence, SC. (mixed). Detroit and Philly don't make the top 50, but Corpus Christi and Albuquerque (both disproportionately Hispanic) do. Then look at crime rates by family structure and question whether money, race and geography aren't really just confounding factors. It's obviously much more complicated than you are claiming.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. There are so many confounding factors: history of each group, class, urban vs. rural, culture, family structure, etc... When I teach my students about this issue, I offer them three lenses to look at inequality: racism, class, and culture. By the end of the semester most students are less certain of their stance re: causes. The takeaway is that it is very complicated and that silver bullet solutions are reductive and not sufficiently nuanced to capture the complexity of the issue on the ground.
Parents with a culture of employment. Neighborhoods with a culture of maintaining your home/apt. in good condition. Societal norms that tolerate beers after 5:00, not heroin at noon. Close-knit communities where kids know that everyone that sees them knows their parents. It's almost impossible to untangle all these things and to separate cause and effect. It is really important, though, that a society can decide which of these things belong in the pro column and which belong in the con column, even if we can't agree on relative importance and causation. It strikes me that much of the debate about people like Chesa Boudin is an inability even to acknowledge something so elementary.
Good point, ih8. Yeah, when you get right down to it, it's not complicated at all. Intact families, a belief in the power of education, and hard work equals successful communities.
From my experience, immigrant families seem to understand this basic truth far better than do "native born" Americans. I wonder why that is.
American blacks also commit far more rapes than American whites, and whites commit significantly more rape than Asian Americans. Are you going to maintain that poverty causes black men to commit rape at higher rates, as well?
In male prisons, blacks and Hispanics commit rape at fairly high rates against white men (particularly young white men). The reverse almost never occurs. You can check this in a Human Rights Watch report. Are you going to attribute differential rates of prison rape to poverty, as well?
Many countries with far lower per capita GDP also have far lower crime rates than the US, actually. Portugal, for example. China. (A typical working class Chinese makes about $350 a month.)
Wow, Tano, you just dropped a big big truth bomb. I'm sure you will be roundly chastised for doing so.
Repotted rapes. Domestic violence including rape in Asian communities is massively under reported. But you don’t care about that so you?
You could also look at interracial stranger rapes. Presumably non-Asian women (and men) are willing to report stranger rapes by Asians as much as by non-Asians. I think you'd still find lower rates. Please research this and get back to us, since you care.
Your assertion, your citation.
My assertion was that I think it probably so, so I don't need a citation.
Your claim is that low rates of reporting of rape in Asian communities explain the lower rates we see. Right? That is an interesting claim and is plausible. However, it does not explain anything about victimization of non-Asian strangers, so that statistic would explode YOUR claim OR support it. It is indeed the critical statistic for your claim. You could in fact have a very interesting article to publish. But you'd have to accept the possibility that you are just -- wrong.
The fact is that Asian Americans (in ethnic terms) have low reported rape rates. You want to explain this away via a bald assertion that low reporting rates are the explanation, right? So you need to support that, not me.
The rate of violent crime conviction, not violent crime. Blacks and whites do drugs at the same rate but blacks are 5x more likely to be jailed for this. Why do you think violent crime is any different?
Because victims report the race of assailants. Blacks are victimized at higher rates than whites, and report that the perpetrators are also black. Unless of course you believe that whites are sneaking into black neighborhoods and committing violent crime, but victims don't report it? Maybe it's really suburban white kids shooting at each other every weekend in Chicago.
Violent crime is notoriously underreported but murder is not. FBI murder stats support your claims.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-6.xls
Yes, witnesses and victims report that black victims are attacked by black assailants in a large majority of cases. I am surprised when people seem to believe that higher crime rates among Blacks and Hispanics are just a right-wing talking point. Ask the victims, their reports tell a different story.
I lived in NYC in the first half of the 1990's, when homicides and crime in general were setting records. The change happened in 1992, before Giuliani. My tell for when the city turned the corner on crime and began to improve safety - when I no longer saw the squeegee guy at the entrance to the 59th Street bridge. After him being gone, it was the endless stream of drug dealers hassling people to buy drugs that were no longer inhabiting the streets.
When you commit to dealing with the issue at all levels of the justice system - DAs included - it becomes safer for everyone. The economics change.
and everybody, including the poor, are better off, because they and their families are safer and there are more job opportunities.
Absolutely right!
They are better off because they are living in tents under the freeway overpass.
It's totally false that anything that anyone did in New York affected the crime rate. New York City's crime rate has gone up and down along with the national average. Street crime is caused by poverty and requires a major national effort in order to deal with it adequately. What certain local politicians do that coincides with a rise or fall in crime is largely irrelevant, though politicians and their propagandists in the media will lie to you about it for their own ends.
Poverty generally went down in the 1960s while crime exploded.
The efforts of Bill Bratton (and many others) in the MTA is widely acknowledged to have laid the foundation for the dramatic reduction in crime experienced in NYC. Crime is local.
Since the Biden administration claims the US economy is stronger than at anytime in history. Unemployment is low and there have been twice as many job openings than unemployed, pray tell why crime is a top concern of the population? If crime is caused by poverty, shouldn't we see that in the data when overlaid with economic activity?
What causes poverty?
What causes poverty?!? Capitalism, duh….check your privilege. One man’s drug addicted knife-wielding shoplifting mugger is another man’s freedom fighter.
Haha, you certainly have no idea about my economic situation. How about you check your ad hominem attacks? Oh, and have you looked at the poverty rates in North Korea, China or any of the socialist states in South America? Certainly capitalism has its faults, but to ascribe poverty writ-large to it is simply inaccurate.
Michael, my comment was purely satirical.
Fair play, my apologies! And I'm assuming you are a fellow Texan, by your username!
I lived in NYC 1984-1991 and was rarely hassled by drug dealers. What are you talking about?
Washington Square? A walk along Broadway from the 80's down to Macy's and dealers on every corner. I mean *every* corner. Times square? The dealers were less conspicuous in the financial district, but they were everywhere.
Maybe hassled is too strong, but every one of them asking if you wanted to buy drugs.
It wasn't my experience. I really don't know what you are talking about. Maybe it was the way I looked. I certainly was not interested in drugs. If you looked shaggy or "alternative," perhaps you were approached more.
Short hair, clean shaven, married white guy going to grad school. The homeless guys used to say, "You're not from around here" in response to me giving them some money and responding with "your welcome" when they said "thank you".
My wife and I both commented that the drug dealers on the streets reminded us of running the gauntlet through the cosmetics departments of Macy's, Bloomingdales, Saks, etc. All marketing a free gift with purchase.
I lived in NYC all my life, until I retired; grew up around drugs, never even smoked grass, never got arrested or hazzled by the police - but it was happening.
Thanks to Glenn for hosting a spirited debate on what has become a real blight on the quality of life in our country. Ben Spielberg talks about things like "a roof to sleep under" and "exploitative employers", as if the homeless scene is so complex in its makeup that it's unsolvable until we solve every possible social ill, which - news flash - will not happen. There are millions of jobs and opportunities in this country which immigrants legal and otherwise quickly take advantage of, find some living arrangement, save and slowly move up the income ladder. Their kids graduate from college when they never graduated from high school. Drug addicts are free to make choices like the rest of us, and they have. Most don't want to clean up, most don't want to be housed. Ben sounds like a guy who's life is very far removed from the subject he purports to opine on.
I mostly agree with you, except to say that drug addiction profoundly, and in many cases irrevocably, alters and impairs brain function. This leads to a transformation of personality and eventually a complete inability to martial the executive decision-making functions of the brain’s pre-frontal cortex. Once the pre-frontal cortex is compromised through addiction, we are unable to make wise, objective decisions about anything. Thus, drug addicts are no longer "free to make choices" in the normal sense. It's not accurate to say that most addicts don't want to clean up, or don't want to be housed. The tragic truth is that they have no idea what they want, since they are in thrall to an addiction that overrides every other desire or healthy impulse they might otherwise have. Addicts are no longer in charge of themselves. This is why drug addiction is such a horrible, life-destroying illness.
People cannot heal on their own. We require intervention and a program. Without intervention and a support system, addicts rarely recover. Even with support, it’s very tough to kick a drug habit. But there is one approach that most certainly does not work at all: giving addicts all the drugs they want and a piece of sidewalk to die on.
Good comments, Beeswax. Thanks for introducing some neuroscience to a conversation that has been mostly sociological. If, as you say, "drug addicts are no longer free to make choices in the normal sense", it implies the state should play a more forceful role for their own good. That isn't happening. Society seems to tolerate and at times celebrate the right of addicts to continue to make choices that are destructive to both themselves and society. I agree about the importance of intervention and a support system, but how do we get people to cross that bridge to recovery? As it sounds like you know, the addict has to want to heal. Many do not. This is tough stuff. My view is that they should not be able to wander the streets and wreak havoc on themselves and others while they are deciding what to do with their lives. Sadly, most will never get their lives back.
I agree with you. While we are scratching our heads attempting to answer the confounding question of how to "get people to cross that bridge to recovery," the state should indeed "play a more forceful role for their own good." As you assert, they should not be allowed to wander the streets and wreak havoc on themselves and others. What passes for compassion in the current model is really just cruelty and indifference, both to the addict and everyone else.
Addiction is itself a symptom of a much deeper disease, and yes, poverty has a lot to do with it. But the enormous sums of money being spent to keep addicts hooked and living on the streets would be much better spent if we took responsibility and confronted the problem head-on.
Addicts may very well be committing suicide in progression of their disease but how is allowing them to perish on the streets a kindness or adequate response. It might be better to house them in dormitory like facilities run by government with drugs/alcohol furnished along with nutrition. The facility would provide a safe space to commit their suicide. They can enter but leaving requires a reentry delay. They would be responsible for cleaning their areas and themselves. Staff would oversee the operation and counselling available for those who wish it.
Could be less expensive than trying to enforce the law and run the ER for respite care. It would suggest society supports drugs but the addict is there already. Some addicts might decide on their own to get clean but there would be no force needed. I understand that our morality gets in the way of such a proposal but we certainly aren't helping by allowing the street to be their home.
Beeswax, thanks to you and Sea Sentry for a thoughtful exchange.
And, that's just what they are doing. They call it compassion.
"Ben sounds like a guy who's life is very far removed from the subject he purports to opine on."
So does "Jeff" on this comment thread. Both of these guys are walking/talking caricatures of a strand of Leftist thought whose time has passed...it just sounds somewhere between naive and flat out stupid.
“A healthy society does not imprison millions of its citizens.”
Or maybe...
A healthy society doesn’t do things that would land millions of them in prison.
Why or and not and?
Great question fellow paratrooper.
I would suggest reading Thomas Sowell* on who is in prison, and how they got there.
It’s a fact that 33% of the black male population is either in prison, jail, or on parole**. That’s an astounding number. Most for patterns of misconduct, repeat offenders.
*https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/05/it-isnt-legacy-slavery-caused-social-breakdown-ghetto-communities-thomas-sowell/
**https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-black-white-hispanic-americans-in-prison-2018-vs-2006/
Funny they didn’t ask any prosecutors, who would have told them that there is definitely an Element in America, often but not always accompanying poverty, that doesn’t give a fuck about you, your rights, property, etc. and it takes a great deal of bad conduct to get a jail sentence, unless the “first” offense (which is so rare as to be statistically insignificant) is very serious. I was a very easy going urban prosecutor who cut offenders a LOT of slack because if everyone charged was convicted of their actual offense, the system would break down. We don’t have the space or resources to deal with it. There’s just too much of it - fuckups harming others out of stupidity and selfishness. These people cannot function in normal society because they can’t read, write, factor, control emotions, etc. And it’s clear that America seems to excel in the production of such individuals (culture have anything to do with that? Perish the thought!). Over incarceration? Jail is reserved for serious threats to public safety. Yet what percentage of crimes are actually solved? Murders or attempted murders without a resolution? Look that up. And then tell me we have too many people in jail when WELL OVER A MAJORITY OF SERIOUS CRIMES ARE NOT SOLVED. People who have committed egregious crimes commonly walk the streets God forbid you run into them at the wrong time. This whole conversation is for shit until folks start dealing with reality, and not have remote academic arguments about crime and violence. This used to be a conversation about pathology, but Over the course of cultural suicide, has become an unserious meditation about anything BUT what it is. Life as a prosecutor is a daily litany of human misery. It is people failing and dragging entire families down with them. It is injury inflicted upon ACTUAL innocents, who now bear the scars and will likely do it to the next person. Misery loves company, a lot of it, and it’s the easy way out, for a time. Not being honest about crime solves nothing. It only perpetuates it. For God’s sake, be serious, for once, about what is happening in these peoples’ lives, their communities. They are in a free-fall and nobody has the fucking courage to stand up and say “stop, enough”. You’re all fiddle fucking around with theoretical navel-gazing and it does nobody any good, whatsoever. You really care about these folks? Fine. How about the lives they ruin? Give a shit about that? Do all of us a huge favor and get serious, on both sides of the goddamn ledger. Without it, we’re fucking done. The easy road to total collapse. It’s sickening and infuriating. Jesus H Christ.
"A healthy society does not imprison millions of its citizens."
Well, a healthy society (whatever that is) does not import millions of African slaves, oppress them for two or three centuries, free them, then expect them to just blend in to the rest of society.
The Africans in America are a near total failure; aside from the 20% high achievers, they have simply failed to be competitive, and have resorted in high numbers to theft, violence, murder. 2/3 of the homicides in the U.S. are committed by black males, who constitute 6.5% of the population (though the actual perps are part of a smaller subset of probably 1% or less, the ghetto-based gangbangers who have opted out of the education system and the working world and choose instead to be drug dealers, hired guns, and generally dead-end thugs with very short life expectancies.
Now what were you saying about crime? Oh, yes, so we need to "reform" criminal justice. Yet, looking at the majority of citizens in suburbs and smaller cities, ethnic whites and Asians, the crime rates are very low, no worse in fact than in Canada and western Europe. In fact if you could round up that 1% very violent subset, the American cities would suddenly become safer than any large European urban area.
So, no. Screw these reformists. They have no idea what they're talking about. Imprison the violent ones and the thieves and don't be nice; give them tough love, put'em to work turning big rocks into little rocks as Anthony Brian Logan says.
Offer real economic opportunity to at-risk youth to keep them on the straight path, i.e. the Opportunity Zones set up by the Trump Administration and Senator Scott, apparently now forgotten by the Biden regime. Clean up the schools and make the students work for their degrees. Stop awarding them for failure. Clean up the streets with zero tolerance policies, stop-and-frisk, cops walking the beat, broken glass policy as per Giuliani's NYC. Stop talking about racism when the one race that complains the most is the one committing most of the crime.
This is doable, given the political will. But will never happen, as long as the white power elite have a guilt complex about slavery. Get over it, already.
"The Africans in America are a near total failure; aside from the 20% high achievers, they have simply failed to be competitive, and have resorted in high numbers to theft, violence, murder."
Actually Black Americans started their real decline after the mid-60's and LBJ's Great Society began to take charge. Prior to that the Black intact family was a very real thing with improving upward social mobility.
Yes it seems like their decline was rather precipitous. You might say, it also coincided with the popularization of ghetto culture -- rap, drug dealer clothing fashion, "tough guy" image -- and all the white commercial money pouring into this culture that made it the career path of choice for young black men lacking in other opportunities. Then there was the decline of the military as a desirable option - Vietnam killed it, as did popular white culture that demonized the military, despite its role in uplifting generations of black men from poverty and illiteracy.
I think the rapid decline began in the late 80's with the generation of fatherless households. Also the military went all volunteer and became much more selective with all but the Army requiring a HS diploma or a finished GED. But the demonization of the military likely helped. But the community is even worse off now with the decline in educational basics in lousy schools with people trapped in poverty. Ben Carson had some good efforts started that never got the attention and follow through they deserved.
"The Africans in America are a near total failure; aside from the 20% high achievers, they have simply failed to be competitive, and have resorted in high numbers to theft, violence, murder."
Overgeneralize much? I never thought I'd say this to anyone who is not part of the 'woke left' but that sounds bigoted. Besides, why is it that there is higher crime in communities of African descent than the general population? Does the 'war on poverty' and broken family that it created bear no mentioning? Those 'unintended consequences' destroyed all poor families due to the absent father and lack of childhood stability.
Overgeneralize much? It is what it is. Deal with it.
I think you meant "the war on drugs," not the war on poverty that Nixon ended as soon as he was elected, and that had been very successful during its very short life.
High incarceration rates in the US are corporate-globalists' doing. Prisons were "privatized", that's code for corporatized , and there was a TON of money to be made- and, oh, they made it. Billions of tax dollars funnelled into private hands...
When people started noticing the problem, the same anti-American corporate-globalist clowns seized the opportunity to "fix" (wink-wink) the problem and simultaneously advance their anti_American agenda, by weaponized the very angst THEY created, by using shill DAs to COMPLETELY undermined the criminal justice system's ability to keep law and order in its cities.
The DAs were the key to keeping the summer of 2020 riots going, and election fraud was key to getting the right corporate globalists shills into the right DA offices. You shouldn't need help figuring out which cities have corporate-globalist shill DA, their murder and crime rates are through the roof.
The globalists were assured of the support of every MSNBC watching NYT reading liberal Karen and her whipped husband, lining up behind the cause of "prison reform" - which refusing to prosecute criminals IS NOT.
Chesa is a Marxist- born and raised. Both his biological parents and his adopted were open Anti-American- Marxist. Lying captured media (of all kinds) and election fraud would be ESSENTIAL to putting him into place. They succeeded.
The entire "Green New Deal" is a Trojan horse designed to break America financially and bring her to her knees by way of engineered food shortages (nitrogen is bad ?!?!) and energy shortages (we can't drill our own oil but we can buy it from the Saudis?)
The violence experienced in cities across this nation were Orchestrated, FUNDED, LEGALLY, and MEDIA protected by the corporate-globalist SHILLs- who, over the last 50 years have infiltrated every corner of our formerly great Republic, and completely captured ALL MAINSTREAM MEDIA.
This is a very long term attack on this country- Plain and simple. It's been decades of this unrestricted warfare.
We owe McCarthy a sincere apology - he was right. Hollywood is and was COMPLETELY complicit in this Marxist takeover. We have been consuming their slowly escalating anti-America, anti-marriage and anti-child propaganda to the point where so many Americans are now alone and demoralized (and questioning their gender and sexuality- the confusion designed to keep us from procreating). The universities are all captured and complicit as well.
On a scale of 1-10, how interested am I in a "intellectual" discussion about what went wrong in San Francisco for Chesa Boudin? ZERO. Chessa was a weapon dropped on a beautiful American city that is now a festering. I wish he'd been arrested, but law enforcement too is full of shills- and FORGET the Justice Department.
When this story has been written, more than half of this country will be in SHOCK over how close we came to falling prey to the monsters of the New "Liberal" World Order, and how close the notions of freedom, liberty and citizen sovereignty, codified only in here in our US Constitution, came to being lost FOREVER. If it dies here, technology will prevent these principles ever bubbling to the surface appearing again.
How about we have a discussion about that?
I know this sounds Victorian, but I think the government should help set up work farms for people with no income, but not disabled enough to need constant care. And not for a cash crop, but for subsistence. Helping to grow your own food, and learning how to do it, in a rural environment with natural areas, could be uplifting.
A pet idea that I have, despite a dearth of any real evidence, is that one explanation for increasing levels of crime by people suffering mental health issues is that modern societies have gotten more complex and require higher levels of socialization skills to successfully function. Perhaps 200 years ago, people that lacked these skills could still find peace and meaning in being a shepherd, splitting fence rails or trapping furs without getting bent out of shape about not being able to get this or that license without the right forms, credentials, identification. I don't know. It's not a fully-formed opinion, but I think it may be something worth further study.
The increase in complexity and required skill causing more mental illness...it is a logical hypothesis. The forced 'requirement' if you will for a college degree in order to get anywhere in life is also a factor, at least for drug use due to the feeling of hopelessness.
At the same time as our society has become more complex, and simple hard work is no longer sufficient to provide a living, our public education system is churning out functional illiterates. It's a recipe for disaster, as we clearly see in our dystopian cities.
The public education system has a lot to answer for.
Some religious communities follow a similar model - living and working communally. The Bruderhof have a business making school furniture and toys, with everyone earning the same salary - nothing (they share all their resources). The Catholic Worker farm in Marlboro, New York, houses workers and homeless people who come to live there. Of course, those communities are guided by a worldview entirely different from the prevalent worldview of our society.
An important question is whether some people who commit crimes are irredeemable, and if so, what society should do about them. I believe that some criminals were led to crime by hopelessness, while others are innately antisocial.
Like Mr. Shapiro, I think it is wrong to blame Chesa Boudin entirely for the state of San Francisco today. George Gascon spent the prior 8-years in the post. Democrats have controlled the City for almost 58-years. They own it, whether you believe in politics or not.
I love the idea of San Francisco and I have many good memories over many decades in the city. However, in 2016 I took my then 19-year old daughter to a couple concerts there. On a Saturday at 3PM I walked her through the Tenderloin. From my perspective it wasn't that bad. She saw it and said, "Why don't they fix this?" I can still hear the trauma in her voice upon seeing it for the first time.
In 2018, I took my then 25-year old daughter to northern California. We did a day trip to San Francisco during the trip. When leaving San Francisco she said she would never go back there. She found it filthy and disgusting.
Both girls had been to San Francisco multiple times before and are progressives. In 2019, San Francisco hosted an international convention for professionals in finance, or 'criminals' to Mr. Shapiro. Investment professionals from the UK and France, as did others, commented on how disgusted they were with the San Francisco they saw. All had positive memories of time spent there before. All these moments predate Chesa Boudin.
What Chesa Boudin got wrong is he viewed the patient (city of San Francisco) as someone in need of a change in lifestyle and diet. Unfortunately, the patient was bleeding out in the emergency room with a few gunshot wounds to the chest, multiple blunt force traumas and a knife in a kidney.
Why don't they fix this?
Honestly I feel a sense of schadenfreude towards the residents of San Francisco. They created the conditions that caused these problems and are living with the consequences. I disagree that the root cause of the current crime wave is economic unless you consider the criminals are "sticking it to the man". Those stealing from CVS aren't taking cough syrup, they're taking lottery tickets, Juul's and other items for personal use or resale. Don't get me started on those robbing Louis Vuitton. They are doing it because they can; and know they won't be prosecuted. Reminds me of that movie, The Purge, but the purge is everyday. Most people want personal, physical safety for themselves, their families and their possessions. Additionally, they want the laws applied equally. If PoC are disproportionately disadvantaged in the criminal justice system, why not pay public defenders more? That way at least they get better representation. Not prosecuting them is no answer and leads to the current situation.
"Deterrence, rehabilitation, and restoration" are "inappropriate"? In other words, no one should be punished. Why not? Do you remember the case in the 70s of the teenage girl who went hitchhiking and was picked up by a man who cut off her arms? I do. Why shouldn't he be punished? Why shouldn't arsonists, rapists, criminal banksters, murderers, etc. be punished? What about men who splash acid in the faces of girls who won't date them? Why shouldn't they be punished? How about people who torture toddlers? What's wrong with punishing them?