US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4120

On December 28 2023 08:18 Mohdoo wrote:

It’s a weird situation because, like I pointed out, it’s not like any of us are dazed and confused trying to figure out how to solve the problem.

The issue is that as they begin to plan how to address homelessness, city council or mayors or whatever look at 2 things:

1: the scale of the issue and approximate cost of solving the problem

2: resources available to use solving the problem

As is the case with most things, there simply is not enough available resources to fix it, so the question becomes what can be done to still improve it with the resources available. This approach works in many situations but it does not work for homelessness. The actual, in practice policies enacted by Portland are wildly deficient and basically don’t solve anything. And there are many ways to argue the policies are a net negative. They had the right idea. Their hearts weee in the right place.

But this is the fatal flaw: “well, we have to do something, so how can we work within these limitations to still make something happen? Even if we can’t solve it, we can make an impact through this or that”

This ultimately leads to extremely poorly executed, under-funded, and mechanistically deficient policies. The people writing the adapted policies don’t understand how to adapt them well. They do a poor job at estimating cost because it’s extremely challenging, even after deciding to “do what we can”. The timeline ends up messed up because the logistics are also challenging, which often leads to certain pieces not lining up right and making it even less effective. Or certain parts of the project get cut half way through, which ultimately ends up being a critical weakness, making it all even less effective.

And so I’ll say it again: homelessness is a federal problem. I would vote for a mayor/governor candidate who declared they would completely stop all the half-ass pats on the back and instead go absolutely nuclear on the federal government. Constantly posting graphic images, descriptions of deaths from overdose, and explicitly saying all of the blood is on mayor Pete or Biden’s hands. Make a national spectacle of it, be absolutely shameless, vile stuff left and right attacking the feds while highlighting the suffering of homeless people.

Maybe some kind of running counter of “number of homeless people hit by car’s being driven by Joe Biden” or something like that. I’d love it.

On December 28 2023 08:47 Sadist wrote:



Can you clarify what the solution is? My understanding of homeless people in the US is that many of them have mental health issues and or addiction issues. I dont know what the percentages are but I would guess a majority. I am curious about what the solution is for the folks with Mental Health problems are. Outreach and stuff is great but Im pretty sure thats already happening.

You can increase the Social Safety Net and I am 100% for that, I just think there will always be some homeless unless they are basically jailed in an asylum or something. Didnt the homeless population jump pretty dramatically once those places were shutdown in the US in the 70s and 80s?

On December 28 2023 13:53 BlackJack wrote:


I've already answered that several pages ago. In 2021 Oakland City Council voted to reallocate $17 million from the police to other social programs for 2022. Part of the money was to be used for future police academies. It's quite obvious how you can get a downstream effect of fewer academies in 2022 to fewer police in 2023. Policy changes don't have instantaneous affects. We don't blame the President for the state of the country the day after he is inaugurated. Almost everything has lag times between policy enactment and when you will see the change.

On December 28 2023 14:01 KwarK wrote:

In 2021 they also didn’t defund the police. People said if they did it would cause issues and so they didn’t actually defund it.

Your side whined until they won the argument, you got what you wanted, the police got funded, and you’re still complaining. And to make matters worse you're complaining about how progressives spend ever increasing amounts on policies that don't yield results.

https://abc7news.com/amp/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12311750/

Fast forward a year later, city leaders celebrated what they called a 'historic vote' to defund the police. In June 2021, Oakland city council voted to cut nearly $20 million from its police force to other programs aimed to help prevent crime and address mental illness. But the headline at the time didn't reveal the full story.

While those cuts did happen, the I-Team found OPD's budget still increased more than $5.7 million in the following 2021-2022 fiscal year.

On December 30 2023 05:49 ChristianS wrote:
I mean, it’s reflective of a larger innumeracy issue with the “law and order” conservative position. They’re constantly insisting crime is up when it’s not, murder is up when it’s not, shoplifting is up when it’s not, and whether the numbers are up or down the answer is always the same: more prosecutions, more cops, more mandatory minimums.

I’m not following crime stats in SF specifically, but it wouldn’t matter even if I was, because any inconvenient stat can be dismissed as fake anyway (even, say, homicide numbers, which seem much harder to fake). “Crime is out of control” is often a conclusion reached entirely on vibes, and the causal link between brutalizing accused criminals and reducing crime is simply axiomatic, no proof necessary.

My impression is that SF *is* going through a crisis right now (at least, it was last time I checked in which was probably a while ago), but attributing the problems to “soft-on-crime DAs” or insufficient police funding is pretty much entirely unsupported. The argument over what constitutes a “budget cut” is largely a distraction from more important questions like “why is crime up, assuming that’s even accurate?” or “what actually is the right societal response to petty crime?”

On December 30 2023 06:28 BlackJack wrote:


Can you clarify what you mean by it doesn't matter what the crime stats say because any inconvenient stat can be dismissed as fake anyway?

I agree that crime data can be faulty as a lot of crimes go underreported like rape and petty theft, but surely we have enough decent data to establish that crime is going significantly up, particularly in Oakland.

As of early July, Oakland’s homicide count was up by 37% compared with 2019 and reported robberies were up by about 30%. Property crime jumped too, particularly car-related crimes: Car break-ins were up by over 40%, while vehicle thefts had more than doubled. source

Homicides are at 118 on the year, or 119 if you include the Oakland police officer that was shot and killed this morning.

Sure maybe there are some people whose opinions on policy will remain unchanged regardless of what the stats show but for others that's not the case. If we can't even agree on whether or not crime is actually up or down then a conversation about what to do about it seems pointless.