It seems like many in this thread don’t think that:
San Francisco & Los Angeles may be the worst cities for homelessness and petty crime.
Portland’s and Seattle’s homelessness and petty crime rates are increasing at a large rate.
Exactly. So is that because of the progressive policies in place in those cities/California?
…whats wrong with that?
Are you aware of how many people the United States locks up? You were number one per capita for the longest of times. Now El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, American Samoa and Cuba have sneaked ahead. Why are your prisons so full? Four times as many as England and Wales. Twice as many as Russia. Most haven’t even been convicted of a crime yet.
So in California:
So they still face six months in jail and/or a fine. That still seems excessive to me. But are you arguing that it isn’t enough?
This thread is not to discuss morality of the law. It is to discuss if policies like that are contributing to the increase in crime. And your comment ignores the added piece of the discussion is that those misdemeanor laws are not being enforced or prosecuted in many cases.
Since this isn’t MPSIMS or the Pit: Cite showing increase in crime greater than conservative-governed cities?
“Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”
…I wasn’t talking morality of the law. I asked whats wrong with that?
Cite for the increase in crime please.
Cite that these misdemeanor laws are not being enforced or prosecuted in many cases please.
I think discussions of rates of homelessness (if homelessness is one of the agreed upon metrics of interest in this thread) are far more meaningful than raw numbers that aren’t adjusted for overall population of the city. To wit:
|City (State)|Homeless people
per 100,000 residents*|Rise / Fall between
2014-2018|
|Eugene (OR)|432|-12.4%|
|Los Angeles (CA)|397|+37.4%|
|New York City (NY)|394|+16.9%|
|San Jose (CA)|363|-6.5%|
|Seattle (WA)|349|+23.0%|
|Anchorage (AK)|274|+6.6%|
|Las Vegas (NV)|273|-24.8%|
|San Francisco (CA)|261|+12.1%|
|Savannah (GA)|259|-26.9%|
|San Diego (CA)|257|-2.0%|
|Reno-Sparks (NV)|254|+45.3%|
|Vallejo (CA)|253|-16.2%|
|Amarillo (TX)|250|+44.6%|
|Tallahassee (FL)|236|+10.0%|
|Napa (CA)|231|+13.9%|
|Stockton (CA)|224|+0.3%|
|Spokane (WA)|217|+1.9%|
|Fresno (CA)|216|-20.0%|
|Colorado Springs (CO)|210|+18.2%|
|Visalia (CA)|208|+23.9%|
|Denver (CO)|181|-24.6%|
|Battle Creek (MI)|175|-16.7%|
|Topeka (KS)|175|-1.4%|
|St Joseph (MO)|161|+2.6%|
|Sacramento (CA)|154|+41.0%|
|Albuquerque (NM)|146|+5.6%|
|Boston (MA)|138|+0.5%|
|Springfield (IL)|131|+2.7%|
|Minneapolis / St Paul (MN)|122|+68.7%|
|Tulsa (OK)|109|+4.7%|
|Manchester (NH)|103|+2.8%|
|Columbus (OH)|86|+6.4%|
Without me going down the list and looking up the party of each city’s mayor … I’m pretty sure this doesn’t comport with the OPs take.
Name a conservative city. We’ll test that hypothesis.
Business has to make a profit, or it goes out of business.
…I run a business. It is making a profit, and I’m not going out of business. Yet.
However, I don’t know what that’s got to do with a misdemeanour that could mean six months in jail and/or a fine.
First of all, let me thank you for coming here with facts to make your point.
However, that chart may be out of date. It shows Denver’s homeless rate going down over that time period but it has actually increased 44% over the last 5 years. Also measuring the rate of increase/decrease may not be a good comparison with large cities vs small cities. If my town of 500 people adds a second homeless person, it it fair to say, “Holy crap! Your homeless rate is 100%. You clearly have a worse situation than Minneapolis.” That why I compared the rates of two comparable cities, Dallas and Portland, and pointed out Portland’s homeless rate is 3.5X that of Dallas.
“Could” being the operative word. The police will not bother to make arrests if there are no charges filed, it isn’t really more complicated than that.
Arrests and incarceration costs money too. A lot of money. We live (or lived, perhaps) in what is sometimes called a “high trust” society. The truth is, there aren’t enough laws, there aren’t enough cops, there aren’t enough jail cells, once a certain level of lawlessness is achieved, a critical mass of people decide YOLO, it’s game over.
To your point, once retail theft of a given store exceeds a certain level, they have to close the doors. It isn’t making any money. Some businesses operate on very small margins. Grocery stores are one.
I named a moderate city with a Democratic mayor - Dallas. Remember this is not a Republican/Democratic argument or a Conservative/Non-Conservative argument. It is specifically about a political faction - Progressives vs. everyone else.
Dallas 0.26% of the population is homeless
San Francisco 0.96% of the population is homeless, over 3.5X greater.
So your turn on your terms. Name a large conservative city with a higher homeless rate than 0.96%
I’ve heard anecdotes that this is a major problem in San Francisco and Chicago. Simply companies not willing to deal with the crime and feeling there is no support from the police. I’d love Loach and pkbites to give us their perspective on: on the whole, would you still make arrests for crime X if you knew the DA was probably not going to press charges.
Why is this notable? A city could enact summary execution as a punishment for homelessness and their homeless rate would probably go way down (while other cities nearby would see their rates go up). What would this prove?
Even if we did agree upon a single metric (not a wise approach to complex societal questions like this one, IMHO) as the discussion point, and even if we did decide to limit the samples to cities of a certain MIN/MAX population (which you’re defining too narrowly for my taste), you’d still have to have frequent changes of the party in power (the Mayor wouldn’t – in isolation – be enough to constitute “party in power”), and then see – reproducibly over numerous iterations – if trends over time actually changed.
And you’d have to allow a lag time for trailing indicators to catch up to changing policies. That, alone, is Dissertation material.
Such factors as climate and the perception of the state of a city’s economy can have a huge influence on a town’s homeless population, as can factors like rising housing costs and unemployment rates.
As can understanding whether locals are going from “housed” to “unhoused” vs. ‘immigrants’ who come from other areas, starting off unhoused and staying that way.
IOW, it’s so ridiculously multifactorial and tightly-coupled that it’s nearly impossible to adequately control for confounding variables and come to a meaningful conclusion, even about a single metric like homelessness.
I think it’s much more meaningful to evaluate the social determinants of homelessness as a nation, and seek to improve those, than it is to determine how and where we are slicing the pie at a given point in time.
That has got to be one of the most ridiculous arguments I’ve seen. If you want your argument to be realistic and talk about cities moving homeless to other cities such as what Denver did and Anchorage is proposing. Because that would actually contribute to the thread as those homeless are being moved to more Progressive cities.
I don’t know what makes you think the police in San Francisco have been defunded. The department budget rose 4.4% from 2019 to 2022. There’s a lot of talk, but that’s all it is.
San Francisco has made efforts to train police to handle confrontations better, especially with the mentally unstable, and to sometimes take the police out of direct confrontations where violence is unlikely. I don’t know how this training is doing, it’s been several years since I looked into it.
Perceived leniency on crime is a complex issue, and yes, it may have something to do with liberal policies. I see it as a temporary difficulty while cities are trying to find a way to deal with actual crime while avoiding endemic racism and classism in its enforcement.
…all penalties need to be proven in a court of law. “Could” is obviously the correct word to be using here.
Cite that the police aren’t arresting people because “no charges are being filed” please.
In America you have so many fucking laws, so many fucking cops, so many fucking jail cells, that you are the world leaders in the industrial prison complex.
You’ve got 17,985 police agencies. Over 800,000 police. 1.2 million people incarcerated, the majority haven’t been convicted yet. This isn’t a “high trust society.” It’s a dystopia.
I’ve worked grocery at the management level. I know the margins. And if a grocery store is unable to be profitable that’s a grocery store problem, that’s a management problem, but what that isn’t is a progressive failure.
Yet the premise is that the Progressives are entrenched in power leading to the downfall of the city. You don’t need changes to power to analyze it. You could take America’s 50 larges cities and their homeless rate and split it into Progressive and Non-Progressive and run a t-test to see if the two groups are significantly different. Let’s do the same for petty crime rates. And emigration rates as in I don’t want to live here anymore. Or whatever variables that can be agreed to to measure a cities crappiness. If we can establish the two groups are statistically different then that leads into if it is the politics that make it so.
I haven’t done that full statistical tests. I’m going off of what I am hearing about California and her cities. And Chicago (the shutting of stores due to crime). What I see in Denver with the growing homelessness and graffiti, petty crime and gang influence. If someone wants to counter with facts to show that non-Progressive cities are just as bad then let’s hear it; but if anyone takes an honest look at this thread, there are woefully few facts countering my premise that Progressively-run large cities are the crappiest in the US. Hell I’d even take well known anecdotes for now but when the counters are things like there are homeless in other cities and what if we kill all the homeless, then I don’t think my premise is seriously weakened. Things like the statistics on violent crime are good because that at least hones the definition of what does it mean for a city to be going into the toilet.
…San Francisco and California are not progressive in the terms that you laid out in the OP, as in lead by the “ultra left-wing part of the party like Warren, Sanders and AOC.”
Which, by my count, would mean that every state is Non-Progressive.