Stumbled across this interesting rabbit hole on twitter.
Brian Kirschner did the math in constant 2019 numbers:
And, on traffic citations:
Statistically, SFPD have stopped enforcing traffic laws
In April 2014 they issued 11,000 tickets. In April of this year, only 350, a 97% decrease in 8 years
45 officers issue ~10 citations per day in total
This is not explained by COVID, they've simply stopped doing this work: pic.twitter.com/n1PiQ5wnxf
— Jake Moffatt (@jakeonrails) January 1, 2023
So, this interesting. There’s been a general collapse in clearance rates across the country, but when you look at them in detail you tend to see that police have basically stopped trying to clear crimes against blacks, and concentrate on crimes against whites.
But SFPD looks like more than that, it looks like refusal to work.
It’s an interesting situation. Part of it, I’m quite sure, is the way that police are trained to be scared. David Grossman (I’ve read his book “On Combat”) is famous for insisting that training must create instinctive killers who react without conscious thought. Police training is full of exercises which make cops scared of the public.
…officers are afraid of being injured or killed because their jobs are dangerous, but data show that being a police officer is relatively safe. Law enforcement doesn’t crack the top-15 list of most dangerous jobs in America, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
…“A lot of research shows that what people think is dangerous and what they believe poses the greatest risk of harm is determined by your membership in various social groups,” Arsiniega says. This is a phenomenon called “social amplification.” Police may believe they are at a great risk of civilian assault, even when empirical data say otherwise…
…
Mixing systemic racism and socially amplified fear of assault becomes deadly because police are armed, and they have “legal justification to kill people and be legally excused if they’re protecting their lives or lives of a third party,” Arsiniega says.
However, in more than 90 percent of cases in which an officer kills a civilian – about 1,000 each year in America – officers claim to be protecting themselves, not a third party.
Neither do the majority of injuries to on-duty officers come from civilians.
For her dissertation at the University of California at Berkeley, Arsiniega studied police officer injury data from all causes in Savannah, Georgia, between 2010 and 2018. Only 11 percent of all officer injuries were the result of civilian assaults.
She also studied assaults on Atlanta Police Department officers from 2015 to 2018 using reports written by officers themselves. Despite having a violent crime rate roughly 2.5-times the national average, not a single officer was shot or stabbed in the years of her sample. The most serious injuries caused by civilians were broken bones in the hand and cuts and scrapes on officers’ hands and knees while arresting suspects.
Cops are basically immune to prosecution for violent crimes against civilians. There are exceptions, but they’re exceptions. They aren’t actually doing a particularly dangerous job: being a logger or a fisherman is way more dangerous, but they think they are, and they have an ethos of “us versus them.”
But their training emphasizes that is “better to be judged by twelve, than carried by six”. They are more concerned about their safety than the safety of others, they don’t “protect and serve” civilians, they protect and serve themselves.
This feeling of being a beleaguered group, under great danger, probably contributes to refusal to work. They show up, but they don’t take anything they perceive as risks.
There is also a sense that they aren’t appreciated, a “we risk our lives and you look down on us and don’t treat us like heroes” and that also, I’m sure contributes to a sense that they don’t owe it to the public to do their jobs. After all, money isn’t worth their lives.
But basically, being a cop is close to being a sinecure at this point. They are mostly immune to prosecution, they are paid very well for municipal workers, and police budgets in most cities keep rising and are often the largest part of the city budget. It’s a union job in the worst sense of the word: a job where there is no real accountability to actually do the job, and it is cushioned by the high respect that most white Americans have in the police.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans trust local police and law enforcement to promote justice and equal treatment for people of all races (up from 56%), and 52% feel the same about police unions (up from 40%).
Since clearance rates have been declining for decades and since the response to that has been to increase budgets, there really is no reason for police to do their jobs. In fact, not doing their jobs is probably the strategy that works best: it’s easier, they get to say crime is out of control and claim that more money is needed.
If not doing your job leads to more money not less, why do your job, especially when you’ve been trained to think it’s a dangerous job, when being a policeman isn’t even as dangerous as being a farmer, logger, or fisherman.
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Dan Lynch
Police in the U.S. truly suck, but it is not clear what to do about it. Power corrupts, and that certainly applies to police.
Other countries, like Iceland, seem to have better police. But would Scandinavian methods work in the U.S.? Heck, Scandinavian policing is not even working well in the immigrant areas of Sweden, which are like a war zone.
To have a good society, you need low economic inequality. If you have high inequality, or if you lack social cohesion for other reasons (like religion or racism), then there is going to be friction, and then the police are sent in to deal with the friction. At best, the police are a bandaid solution, when what we really need is a more equal & cohesive society so we don’t have friction in the first place.
One reasonable proposal might be to replace the U.S.’s thousands of local police forces with a single state or national police force. That’s how Scandinavia does it, and the idea is that it is easier to regulate a single police force. Standardized training, standardized rules, etc.. But Americans have been brainwashed to believe that centralized government is tyranny, even though in practice local government is the worst, and what little progress we have achieved happened at the national level (i.e., freeing the slaves, civil rights, Roe v. Wade, Miranda, environmental regulations, national parks, national forests, and so on down the line).
NR
Or maybe the police forces’ real job has changed, and most people just don’t know it? Police will still happily beat protesters and evict people from their homes, which is all rich people really care about them doing. If people in poor neighborhoods have to deal with more crime, they certainly don’t care about that.
Of course police departments that don’t try to fight crime should be defunded, but MAGA politicians are working to make that impossible. For example, Texas passed a law in 2021 that essentially allows the state government to seize control of a city’s finances if they try to cut police budgets. Fascist movements need their foot soldiers, after all.
Purple Library Guy
You know, this may sound crazy, but I think this is a good trend in the long run. Consider: What we’ve always needed, really, is to replace the cops with an institution which is not based around a military and paramilitary background and ethos, whose roots are not in Canada a force dedicated to keeping down the First Nations and in the US forces dedicated to hunting down escaped black slaves. And what we need in the short term is for the cops not to kill as many people.
OK, so in the short term, if the cops don’t make arrests and make no effort to clear cases or even enforce traffic laws, they presumably won’t be interacting with people as much, and so won’t be killing or maiming them as much. Win!
In the longer term, if they’re not doing their jobs, and what interactions they do have with people still tend to be violent, the pressure will increase to start introducing and expanding some of these alternative response groups that have already been quite successful in a couple of cities, where you get social workers and mental health people and stuff responding to calls instead of cops. Often the police themselves don’t mind this because they hate dealing with mental health and domestic violence stuff anyway. But over time if these services get institutionalized, they are likely to expand and gain clout. At a certain point it will become clear that they’re doing most of the “policing”–and doing so with much less violence to the community. At that point, police budgets could well start to fall, and police roles will see a redefinition, restricting their functions. Might be you’d see a split, with a police force just dedicated to ticketing that has no real violence powers, and a small force of detectives just doing investigation of serious crimes, while the bulk of “keeping order” type stuff is left to the social workers. Win!
Willy
I worked in a place where guys who did extra, who went above and beyond their call of duty, were workplace mobbed until they quit. Shunned, smeared, scapegoated, frozen out… whatever worked to get them to leave. Then I saw it again at the next place. And then again. Sure, these weren’t paramilitary heroes trained to protect and serve, more like dweebs trained to imagineer and crunch some numbers. But it was a distinct pattern which I’d only seen sporadically in all my jobs previous. Something was getting worse and quickly.
At first, management allowing that kind of culture to exist made no sense to me. Logically, if management really wanted to get their sociopathic freak on they’d get the other poor dumb bastard to do most of the imagineering and number crunching and then take all the credit. Wasn’t that the American Way, at least in the late 20th century? But this was the early 21st century and something was different now.
I once mentioned cultural reasons for Rome’s fall. Others would go on about the Huns and Sassanids and especially those dangblasted Goths, as if those barbarians had suddenly acquired magical superpowers which all Rome’s previous vanquished barbarians never had. But the tale of Honorius chicken resonated with me. And also, the more recent tale of Uvalde, with its hundred good guys with guns unable to efficiently eliminate just one bad guy with a gun. Maybe these days the prevailing cop culture is to eliminate all the Columbos and TJ Hookers and even the Dirty Harrys, and to be more like Crocket and Tubbs except without any of the risky action. I mean, in pricy techy hedge fundy San Francisco, why risk your life to just go home every night to a tiny apartment you can barely afford?
Feral Finster
Who says it cannot be more than one of the above, for each individual cop and unit?
Mark Level
So Ian, the only problem with your post is use of the word “or”, when “and” is needed, Lazy, and scared, and incompetent– and lastly (& perhaps most important) AND entitled not to do anything beyond harass the weakest!! Americans worship bullying and bullies. The last time I had to fly, I was reminded on both legs of the trip when boarding the plane, our “sacred” “Service members” alongside the physically handicapped and people with small children were entitled to “early boarding”!! Gotta reward ’em for “their service” killing those uppity foreigners, invading their countries and installing right-wing Austerity economics regimes to privatize everything and appropriately separate the wheat (rich, “better” types) from the poor & exploited. I left the Bay Area 2 years ago and actually Oakland Police Dept. had a worse reputation than S.F. for cops, they had been in federal receivership for over 20 years after “the Riders” incident (4 cops who robbed drug dealers for money and drugs, then arrested their victims) + the killing of Oscar Grant for being obnoxious on a BART train during the New Years’ holiday (shot dead while he was lying prone on the ground, oh, coincidentally if you wondered yes he was a young black man), etc. Actually, having lived in Chicago for 3 years (1977-79), New Orleans for 8 years in the 1980s and subsequently Oakland, I have spent over 90% of my adult life in cities known for vicious police violence against minorities and the Left. I will say that the Oakland P.D. did a righteous job of violently shutting down the Occupy movement in 2011-12, beating and mass arresting, burning the library and personal belongings of people who’d been camping out and seeking minor improvements in ‘Murican life, so hey, some credit. They took their orders from a “liberal” Dem. mayor, Jean Quan, who had been a campus activist at Berkeley way back in the 60s (accd. to one of my weirdo friends also a Maoist at the time.) She did at least lose office for those actions and other overt corruption. Unfortunately the Chapo Trap House episode just released last night is not one of the freebies on Mondays, but some topics they covered were the strangling of a mentally ill homeless man on a subway train by a vigilante in NYC (and the perp released, the cops will not even make the murderer’s name public), a Texas meteorologist who posted on Facebook that he was ready to kill a 6-year old neighborhood girl who “rang his doorbell” looking for her lost kitten, told her he wanted to pull her hair, but ultimately decided against a shooting, the shooting of a woman who accidentally tried to get into the wrong car in a mall parking lot (thinking it was an Uber), someone who shot & killed a different woman in their own car for accidentally pulling into his driveway, etc. USA all the way, baby, I’m sure those Ukranians are really looking forward to integrating into the Master Class “civilization” we have built for them. Like Steven Pinker says, shut up and be grateful to live in the “safest” and best society that has ever existed (well, for a few in his and friend Jeffrey Epstein’s clique, anyway) in 5,000 years of civilization. Let’s all be proud! At least the SCoTUS is restoring traditional morality and making sure that “sluts” (any woman who believes she has sexual agency) can be forced to respect “life” by giving birth to a dead baby or being executed for having a miscarriage which is possibly (we can’t blame God!) their fault. So yes, we do have a “culture of life” in the US, but it is somewhat selective in its application, I guess.
Trinity
My first thought was that they are “employed” or concerned with other activities, perhaps of the money making kind.
My second thought was that we appreciate cops because we’ve been brainwashed to believe we are always in danger. There have been multiple, persuasive (to me) arguments that police officers actually cause more crime, in the same way the “War on Drugs” made everything worse, not better. (Was it done to cover up something even more nefarious?)
In smaller groups, we have a tendency to police each other. In grad school, I joined the local Dark Sky association (reducing or eliminating lights burning at night). The research on lights at night as being a deterrent to crime at that time wasn’t exactly definitive. The main point is if you are standing inside a lighted area at night, you cannot see anyone else outside the light, but they sure as heck can see you. The amount of energy we waste burning lights all over the country at night is unimaginable, and has partly contributed to the decimation of certain insect species in many areas. And where exactly are most of those lights located? Protecting business interests, mostly.
The better alternative was the peace officer, the beat cop, the neighborhood officer who by his (or her) presence deterred many of the problems (in white neighborhoods).
Policing was “invented” originally to protect the property of the rich, no more, no less, as I understand it. So like I said, perhaps they are still working, and working hard, but perhaps not on behalf of the average citizen. And this may be what we can expect moving forward: those with the most money (even though we-the-people pay for police salaries, and they don’t pay any taxes) will take even more advantage because they can.
different clue
@Dan Lynch,
If we had a single National Police Force as you suggest, but all the National Police Officers were trained by the David Grossman ( ” On Combat” ) described in this post, such a National Police Force would be a hybrid combination of the Guardia Civil of Franco-era Spain and a national-scale Department of Summary Street Murder. I don’t think that is what you would want, but that is what you would get.
As long as the “police” are chopped and shredded into eleventeen hundred different self-contained departments, it might be easier to de-Grossmanize or abolish a random few here and there. If all the “polices” are brought together into One Big Federal Department, they will become the nucleus and the backbone of a nationwide fascist movement and would be one of the terror-branches of a nationwide fascist party.
Let’s not go there.
different clue
@Trinity,
They certainly worked hard to shut down the Occupy movement ( co-ordinated from the top by the Obama Administration).
They certainly worked hard to shut down every anti WTO and/or other anti Free Trade demonstration.
different clue
@Purple Library Guy,
In the US, police were also invented and instituted in many places to violently repress and suppress the growing Union Movement starting in the late 1800s.
joe
In some nations the neighborhoods pool up money and employ private guards. The Wealthy tend to fortress up and hire them to patrol just the immediate area. In the S.F. bay area the cops are hurt because they can’t bust heads with impunity. they deal with this by refusing to do anything at all. A Sort of a whiney way to be lazy. I expect the private security model is coming to the states soon too.
multitude of poors
Some backdrop re SFPD:
050423 By Tim Redmond Death for spitting — and more key revelations from the Police Commission Homeless assaults ‘not on the radar’ and Newsom-Breed Tenderloin plan is a lot of hype but very little substance. https://48hills.org/2023/05/death-for-spitting-and-more-key-revelations-from-the-police-commission/ . Excerpt, bolding mine:
Mark Lever,
Great comment. Noticeably all of those cities you mention, are major, coastal (i.e. within that 100 mile Warrantless US Border Zone) Blue™ cities. People who still think dems are on their side any more than republicans and libertarians, really do need to live in one of those cites as a marginalized (or even just conscientious) human being for a long stretch of time. I had the bleak ‘opportunity’ (as you maybe did) to personally witness that—Mehserle Verdict re murdering Oscar Grant —illegal Kettling™ of Lawful Protesters, just prior the Occcupy protests. The sky looked like it might have in areas of Iraq at that time, black with miltary helicopters (one can bet Obama was involved with this, right along with the Blue™ State and Local Public Servants™ ). I recollect that 17 counties of cop forces were deployed to Oakland in that massive—ultimately deemed illegal—kettling event; where even residents and their visiters caught outside were illegally swept up.
***********
joe, re:
I don’t have the time I’d need to further share info re California Blue™ City Security measures, other than to say that it’s not just city cops, its Tech Campus owned cops (from 04/26/14 By Cyrus Farivar, Facebook-funded Silicon Valley police station, with free Wi-Fi, opens—Rich Menlo Park accepts $600,000 to re-open substation in poorest part of town. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/facebook-funded-silicon-valley-police-station-with-free-wi-fi-opens/ ); Securitas gun packers; dogs trained to be vicious by the aholes who own them; ever increasing Hospital Security as Hospital and othe Medical Facility™ Management get more and more horrid, deadly, and greedy. Etcetera.
Much of this has been going in in the California Blue™ cities for a long time now, well before the pandemic, while homeless increasingly die of hypothermia on the cement, or Trespass™ on the ever increasingly Trespasser™ guarded CalTrain tracks between San Jose and San Francisco (e.g. there were 3 CalTrain Trespassers™ who died on the tracks, in less than a week, in November 2022)
Written at 12:07 PM PDT, when joe’s comment was the last showing on my browser.
gotta run ….
Z
No cop fan, but I lived in SF for a few stints in the 2000s and one of the things I appreciated about living there was that the cops didn’t sweat the small stuff. For instance, there was commonly coke being snorted in bar restrooms and many bars would serve past the legal time (they’d just lock the doors and the folks inside were good, but they wouldn’t let anyone else in). Pot, of course, was very common and routinely smoked outside of the bars and in the outdoor bar patios. It was the law at that point that smoking inside of the bars was illegal and I saw very little of that except for after-hours.
In regards to traffic violations, one issue that police take into account is where do you pull them over? And if there is no safe place to pull a driver over they commonly won’t bother to enforce traffic laws on streets unless it is an egregious and dangerous violation. I don’t blame them for that. I wonder what the stats are for cops being killed accidentally by passing by drivers compared to being shot.
And can you trust most drivers to pick a safe place to pull over? I’d say no. Most folks are pretty shaken up by the lights and the sirens and don’t want the cops to think they are fleeing so they’ll pull over the first place they see without regard to the safety of it. So, by pulling people over for minor traffic violations the situation can end up being inadvertently dangerous to the public and the cop.
Back in the 2000s, though there were a lot of homeless folks (though probably not nearly as many as now), SF was a pretty safe city for its size despite the cops’ lax enforcement of drug and traffic laws.
Z
Ché Pasa
Yes.
anon y'mouse
you are talking about places owned previously by the mob and organized crime.
SFPD has long been cited for total incompetence.
OPD for outright corruption (running an underage prostitution ring).
meanwhile, none of them will actually do anything about the drug runners and other actual criminals conducting business in daylight on public streets (please note: i am for legalization of nearly all drugs, but as we see with marijuana gray-zone multibazillion dollar “legal” trade, that solves less than half the problems associated).
you just have to live there 20-30 years. this stuff is just the endpoint of what always was, there.
different clue
I just recently read a comment at NaCap which appears to offer a reason for why SFPD has been not responding to small and even medium property crimes. Perhaps it deserves some consideration also.
flora
May 4, 2023 at 8:06 pm
Good gawd. What’s going on? On a probably completely unrelated note, a long time friend who’s lived for decades in da big city of San Francisco environs told me some years ago the city wouldn’t send police to investigate or take reports on small burglaries or even large burglaries and non-violent crimes because it would make the city’s ratings on city insurance premiums, real estate values, and other financial considerations problematic. Meaning, the city would pay more for its various insurance rates and real estate values might drop (even slightly). This was a couple of decades ago for non-violent crime. Has not reporting for a city’s financial reasons grown to include violent crime?
I hope that’s not what’s happening in your area. / oy
somecomputerguy
I took a couple of criminology courses many years ago, and it was quite a mind-bender.
Look up the Kansas City experiment. They stopped patrolling in one section of the city, and doubled police patrols in another. Then, they switched sections. Conclusion; police patrols do not effect crime.
Do not trust my memory on the details, but during the late ’90s, something like this happened; the police in San Diego switched to a strategy of community policing, and crime went down. However, in New York City, they pursued a “broken windows, zero tolerance”, policy, and crime went down. In Los Angeles, they didn’t change anything. Than was a successful strategy as well.
At the time of my CJ course work, the only thing known to affect the rate of crime, is the number of males in the population who 16 to 30 years old; known as the prison risk age. The more of those you have, the more crime you have. So; when a young man gets to his 16th birthday, just send him to Alaska to mine ice cubes, and don’t let him back until he’s 30, and crime is solved.
Funny thing about those crime strategies all working.
Bearing in mind that the United States is a significantly higher crime, and higher violent crime country than its economic peers, crime started falling in the mid-90’s, and continued to fall continuously for 30 years, and only recently has stopped falling.
Bearing in mind an appropriate skepticism about crime statistics, the so-called crime wave we are experiencing, compared violent crime peak of ’94, is an insignificant statistical blip.
Now here is the super bizarre part; crime didn’t just fall in in the U.S., it fell in Canada and Western Europe, and a bunch of other places, places separated by giant geographical and social distances. Not all completely at the same time.
The only explanation I have heard that is even remotely plausible, makes The Clean Air act, the greatest anti-crime measure in history.
In all of these places, crime began to drop, roughly 20 years after the banning of leaded gasoline. Places that banned leaded gasoline later, saw crime alleviate roughly in line with that.
multitude of poors
Since the main topic was SFPD, and the reality that I feel it my public duty, whenever possible, to help shine a light on Deep State Republic of California Governor, Presidential Striver, Nefarious Gavin Getty Newsom whenever possible, Ill add the following link and excerpt. Frankly, volumes (one on Nefarious Big Pharma alone) could be written about this particular CARE Courts™ issue, it’s that nefarious. One could begin with an utterly unjust and punitive—Civil and Criminal—California Court System, along with the reality that most (outside of being appointed an under resourced and overwhelmed Public Defender), stand no chance of having someone affordable, with integrity, they can call My Attorney, who has the expertise, staff and resources to win a case, and never have. Excerpt, bolding mine:
09/22/22 By TJ Johnston, There’s not much care in Newsom’s CARE court But it’s coming to San Francisco, soon. (original source, StreetSheet: 09/16/22 By TJ Johnston CARE Courts Signed into Law https://www.streetsheet.org/care-courts-signed-into-law/ , but I like the updated title on the 48 Hills piece better)
I would add to that poor whites (and conscientious people of all backgrounds) do not fare much better regarding a false Mentally Ill™ diagnosis, especially when that mental unwellness, as with the black population, is actually a direct consequence of not being able to afford to live safe from harm, in decent and pleasant housing, with dignity 24/7. (Please note I am not saying there is no such thing as a mental health disorder.)
Very good to see some of you again in comments above (and mago, on the current open thread page), after a small hiatus.
I wrote this at 11:30 AM PDT, when anon y’mouse‘s comment (which I agree with) was the last comment showing on my browser. I doubt I’ll have any time to quickly respond to any responses.
gotta run ….
anon y'mouse
ha, that comment on the lack of crime reporting as it affects the insurance rates and so forth negatively is RIGHT UP San Fran’s alley as a totally corrupt place from the Gold Rush to now.
as a tangent to this discussion—it is well known enough to be featured in documentaries that the buildings in SF were never actually built to the standard they claimed, starting from the beginning, becoming thoroughly potemkinized after the Great Fire, and thoroughly entrenched in that mode with the mafia took over fully.
i know someone whose father worked for the building inspection department there, and he was run out of the job after running afoul of those who didn’t want their code violations marked down. when his car at home was fucked with (a somewhat unique older model import readily identifiable as his), he left the town AND the state.