This is the opposite of the advice in the book, The End of Policing. Book was so good that I bought copies for people close to me.
Just take care of people. We can afford to. It costs less than enforcement costs.
From the article:
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Just take care of people. We can afford to
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That’s unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That’s unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
The costs for locking up homeless people is greater than the cost of providing housing. The following quote is from a slapdash search; I haven’t read the document because my original source is a book, The End of Policing, and that book had multiple citations that I’m not listing here.
As identified in the chart above, the total cost of incarceration is estimated to be 25% higher than the total cost of providing equivalent supportive services to prevent recidivism.
There’s a question of induced demand. We don’t have really good data, but anecdotally there’s a common belief that a lot of SFs homeless either migrated here from other parts of the country or were bussed here, because of SFs lenience.
During most surveys, most homeless people report being born here. Which is a useless fact, because if they report being from somewhere else, they’ll likely get sent back there.
In any case, San Francisco does not incarcerate the homeless. It allows them to live on the streets.
Just take care of people. We can afford to.
Sure we can, but we won’t, because to certain people in power the cruelty is the purpose.
I mean the book is spot on, but taking care of people is socialism and that’s a dirty word nowadays.
Plus scared and disconnected people buy more stuff so we suffer for the sake of capitalism.
It helps them to have an enemy to blame for… whatever. They move the target a lot, but the poor are in the worst position to fight back. And the powers that be don’t want a fair fight; they want to punch down and then brag about how right they were and that that’s why you should re-elect them. Because they’re sociopaths.
This is what happens when less than 25% of the population comes out to vote.
Turnout in the last election in SF was 44.4%. Not fantastic, but much better than the rest of the state.
That is a pretty sad turnout. The votes reflect the choices of about 92K registered democrats, vs. roughly 13K registered rebublicans though, so it’s not like this is some right wing takeover.
That’s why they pushed these referendums this election cycle, they knew it would be low turnout
People vote left wing
Left wing policies make city better
Better city attracts more people
More people increases costs
Increased costs filter for rich people
Rich people vote authoritarian.
And to be clear, they vote authoritarian because they are the authoritarians. In a capitalistic society money is authority. Those with money rule.
People assume rich people are voting against their self interests somehow, but they’re not. Money serves them and allows them to be exempt from most of the laws and rules.
They vote on laws that let them keep and make more money, at the expense of you not making as much. Then they use that wealth and influence to do it more.
Which is why we’re past due to be eating the rich.
You skipped the essential NIMBY step between these two:
Better city attracts more people
More people increases costs
Costs scale way out of proportion with population because of artificial constraints imposed by those lucky enough to be here first.
Worth noting that constraints aren’t 100% artificial in SF, just mostly artificial. It, like Helsinki, is situated on a peninsula and is part of a metropolitan area, so expansion isn’t really an option. Intentional NIMBY constraints make it so much worse.
Suburban sprawl is terrible for the environment anyway.
One of the worst parts of this, and one that will get people killed, is they loosened the restrictions on police chases. Now police can chase cars for crimes where there’s no longer a threat of violence like robbery through the second densest city in the country. People are so indoctrinated by copaganda that they think police chases always end up with the cop catching the bad guy instead of how they usually end, with a fatal crash.
That same measure also allows the use of drones and other technology to follow and track the suspects, so may not necessarily mean more automobile persuits. We’ll have to wait and see I guesa.
The way I always hear it is that they are only ever chasing murderers and violent offenders and you should want them to catch those grandma-killers before they get you, too.
That’s how it was before, for the police to chase their had to be a reasonable suspicion that the criminal was in there way to commit another violent crime. So if a robbery happened and the police arrive and the criminal takes off the reasonable assumption is theyre heading back home, not off to commit another violent crime, so the police would not pursue them. Now they can pursue them and endanger all the people on the road just to protect the property of the store owner.
Cop shows and movies distort our perception of them but the reality is that most police chases end in a crash and serious injury if not death. This chance goes up even higher with dense cities with a lot of pedestrians around like San Francisco. So they should only be used if they’re preventing someone from murdering or seriously injuring someone else. A car at high speeds is just as , if not more dangerous than a gun and should be used as such.
You just know they’re gonna be using copious amounts of pit maneuvers as well during the now increased car chases.
I occasionally get in the police dash cam rabbit hole. It’s crazy how most states have realized how dangerous car chases are and don’t chase at all. BOLO the car and go arrest them the next day.
Then there Arkansas and Georgia where all the cops are just itching to get into a 130mph chase through neighborhoods willing to pit at any speed risking their life, the suspects life, and the hundreds sometimes thousands of people they go screaming past during a chase.
I used to work for a local TV station and every year they did this thing called “Crimestoppers” where we’d ride along with a cop all night just in case something happened. This is not a huge city, but there’s enough crime that something ended up on camera. I didn’t hate doing it. I’m no cop-lover, but the guy they paired me with was a good enough conversationalist to talk to all night at least… but I was terrified of ending up in a car chase situation. Cars make me anxious as it is. Thankfully, that never happened.
This kind of opportunistic journalism really makes me skeptical of the value of a lot of our local TV news stations. You’re describing the local news using the same production tactics as COPS, a reality TV show…
Was there anything that the crimestoppers program covered that was of sigificant newsworthiness to the community that you remember?
Oh there was no value to the local TV station. It was either boring lifestyle stories or sensationalist bullshit. Also, the lead anchor said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard anyone say. The ISS was passing overhead and we all went out into the parking lot to see it and she looked up and said, “can they see the Earth from up there?” This was who they hired to give what they decided were the important stories of the day.
The pay was also shit.
Oh… there was one notable thing that happened during Crimestoppers. Mainly that the website news guy found out one of his friends had a warrant and warned them by putting out that he was wanted on the website before the cops went after him that night. But that was not on TV. He just got fired.
Removed by mod
Can we start with addiction to Fox News?
Drug treatment is important, yes, but making it a precondition for benefits will absolutely hurt the most vulnerable. If there was actually enough affordable housing available for everyone that needs it, there would be far less of a need for this kind of policy. It is well documented that providing housing before anything else sets people up for success. If someone has been living on the streets and suddenly has housing available, their life will improve so drastically thanks to the job and social opportunities that will become available, also making it less likely that drug abuse will continue.
This seems like a cop out to me. Just build houses for fuck’s sake.
Breed has been on the wrong side of so many issues. Most recently she made an incredibly tone-deaf statement denouncing the city council’s vote against the genocide in Gaza. I’m done with her.
https://voterguide.sfelections.org/local-ballot-measures/measure-a
This affordable housing measure also passed in the same election, for what it’s worth.
Thanks for the heads up. Yeah, I’m cautiously hopeful, but still quite skeptical they’ll get it right. These measures often sound good, but implementation is key.
Yeah I feel the same, cautiously hopeful. It seems like the implementation always gets bogged down with corruption, red tape and fingerpointing in this city…
Given that neither her nor the council have anything to do with policy in Gaza and that both are going to be making statements purely to aim to appeal to chunks of the electorate, does it make sense to condition your vote on that?
If you were choosing a dentist, would you use their stated positions on the Levant to do so?
I’m not a San Francisco resident, so I don’t get a vote, I just have lots of connections to the region. She didn’t have to denounce the city council’s resolution against the genocide, she chose to, and that felt like a gut punch to me at the time. As for the relevance of it all, it was a non-binding (obviously) resolution taking a moral stand on an issue directly impacting hundreds if not thousands of residents in a pretty small city, so it matters.
I take your point, but if I asked my dentist if they thought it was okay to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of children because they were born on the wrong side of a border, and they said yes? I’d absolutely find a different doctor.
Now I’m imagining a binding resolution on Gaza lol
Representatives of the City of San Francisco being legally required to go try to negotiate a cease fire, per city mandate
If I had a dentist who told me that they were okay with tens of thousands of children being murdered? Yeah, I might worry about their compassion as a healthcare provider.
How would (forced) addiction treatment hurt the most vulnerable?
For one thing, it’s extremely difficult to force someone out of an addiction. You usually have to want to quit in order for that to be an option. Otherwise you have to do something like torture them by making them go through a possibly extremely painful cold turkey withdrawal.
So I’d say torturing the most vulnerable would hurt them.
But what makes you think that’s what they’ll do? Would helping someone with an addiction towards treatment really ‘torture’ them?
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
You asked about forced addiction treatment. Not this specific program.
There are a lot of times people are forced to have addiction treatment, especially by judges. And it is a form of torture.
Ok, fair enough. But I don’t think many treatment programs still make them go cold turkey though. Of course it’s always ‘less fun’ than just continuing shooting fentanyl, even for those who freely make the change
What? You think fentanyl addicts use it for fun? They probably didn’t even start using opioids for fun. They probably started because they were in pain.
Also, if they stop using opioids they will be in a lot more pain and they will still be living in America, where a for-profit medical system to treat that pain is beyond their reach.
It’s not about fun at all. What an incredibly insensitive thing to say.
If they don’t get help to stop, they eventually progress to a point where they are definitely not using for fun. They have no choice anymore. They have one goal and that is to be high at any cost. I work in a part of SF where there are a lot of them and the things I see them go through are horrendous. It feels like watching state sanctioned torture. They are literally being left to rot. I know two people that have lost a loved one to fentanyl and it really is heartbreaking.
Thank you! People here getting all riled up without even reading the damn article. What else is new?
I am SO TIRED of articles about SF ending up in a national or global forum where people start complaining about stuff that SF is light years ahead on.
Forced addiction treatment isn’t what’s happening. They drug test the poor and then cut them off from benefits if they fail. It is a punishment.
The only way to be eligible for benefits again is to join a treatment program, many of which in the US are just religious ministries that care more about proselytizing than human outcomes. Even cults like the Church of Scientology runs drug treatment programs, with obvious motivations…
These people are exploited by pretty much everyone, including those who are tasked to help them. If your solution is to force them into anything, recovery or otherwise, you’re just exploiting them further.
You really need to read the article
From the article:
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
beyond that forced treatment is ethically questionable, conditioning other forms of help on sobriety puts people in a bind. it’s hard for people to get and stay sober when they’re suffering, physically and mentally.
housing/food/health care (to include mental health and psychiatric care) first means it’s more likely that efforts toward sobriety will even work.
conditioning other forms of help on sobriety puts people in a bind.
This bill explicitly does not do that.
The thing is, they don’t want drug users to have houses. Sad but true
I wonder how much money would be saved if they stopped means testing the poor and spent all their money helping people instead of paying cops to terrorize them.
Cops in SF don’t do shit. They effectively went on strike a couple of years ago.
This has had both good and bad effects.
SF has cops? Jk but yeah, Its so obvious that the people making comments like that don’t live here. The rage bait is strong with this topic for sure.
Finalllllyyy
I stand corrected!
These Trump areas need to just fall into the ocean. It is sick what they want to do to poor people.
San Francisco, California is now a Trump area? What the fuck are you talking about?
And why does your gibberish have so many upvotes??
Seriously. Who the fuck is up voting this completely detached from reality shit? This is honestly a really bad look for Lemmy. It reminds me of “The_Donald” subreddit from back in the day. Different end of the political spectrum but behaving pretty similar.
FUCKING CHRIST CAN SAN FRAN EVER RECOVER FROM FEINSTEIN
Please stop watching Fox News.
im an anarchist you stupid cunt read a history book
Same difference. Same IQ anyway.
christ are you a pathetic loser. get a life other than posting 24/7 you neolib cunt
I’d just like to point out to everyone watching that I’m not reporting this, because I firmly believe that this moron has the right to call me a pathetic cunt and I’m not so fragile that seeing it gives me a mental disorder.
For those of you who can’t handle being insulted by someone online, don’t participate in online discussions.
For any mods reading this, do better. Insulting someone is not a banworthy offense. Insults are a part of life and some people need to grow a damn spine.
Ah so the real estate developers are finally ready to finish their gentrification efforts. They must’ve forced out the last remaining owners in the area so now they can crack down and turn it into overpriced bullshit
The individual homeowners in California have developers over a barrel lol
Prop 13 gives all the power to home owners, as does the glut of local regulations and permits.
It’s why we have a housing crisis. Can’t build any more homes.
The NIMBY class will always project its insecurity more greatly than the remainder of the populace.
Just a fun remainder that Kamala made it like this on purpose and no we won’t vote for her either once biden resigns
once biden resigns
Can I borrow your crystal ball? The Powerball is up to $559 million this week.
Lol of all people, you’re pinning this on Kamala Harris? Wasn’t she a prosecutive attorney before she was DA? Wtf did she do that “made it like this”?
Jesus sed so muh preest says
You do know what the AG does, yeah?
Yes.
Policing a certain demographic more always works
Depends on who it’s working for. It works quite well for the people who want to drive up real estate prices.
