Because half the country doesn't like the answers that experience produces. Reducing crime isn't hard: support and hire police, put criminals behind bars, and ticket even small/petty crime (broken windows policing). The formula works but because evenly applying the rules produces disparate outcomes among various groups it's evidently racist and it's preferable to just allow violent criminals to run unchecked on the streets.

Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just simply not the approach that countries with globally low crime rates take? At the very least, it's insanely reductive. USA already has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. Supporting and hiring more police officers into a broken system won't help anything, especially when the cops are often criminals themselves (let alone the fact that their priorities so frequently seem to be contrary to the community's).

On some level, sure, we need a form of policing that the public trusts, and we need to take crime seriously when appropriate. USA is nowhere near the first point, and is fumbling the bag terribly when trying to apply the second point.

Strong social support nets and programs, fostering community and civic culture, a focus on rehabilitation instead of punishment, working to prevent the conditions that create violent crime in the first place--these are all much more effective steps as opposed to "more cops, more people in jail."

America is a more violent place; it has been for its entire history. Things that work in places with incredible cultural homogeneity don't work here, no matter how many happy images they conjure. What actually works here is policing, and SF is an example of people who believe your post following it off a cliff.

The conditions that prevent violent crime are simple: consequences for violence. Many jurisdictions let people that commit violent crime walk again and again.

From my neck of the woods? The perpetrator of the Waukesha parada massacre had a long history of violent behavior and was out on bail for trying to run someone over with his car a few days prior. Aliyah Perez, the niece of a Milwaukee alderman, was killed in a domestic situation by a man that had previously committed "a brutal domestic attack in which he stomped on, choked, and punched the victim, pulling out clumps of her hair and knocking out a tooth." He was given a minimum sentence only to return to his previous behavior and kill his next victim.

I don't care how our prison population compares to the rest of the world if clearly dangerous and violent people are walking free. The purpose of prison is to separate such people from the rest of society.

Clearly it's better to stop people from becoming violent criminals, then to wait (or push them, e.g. by increasing income inequality, reducing respect for "unskilled" professions, etc.) for them to become violent criminals and then punish them.

It is far from proven that "broken windows policing" is effective, and in fact there is much evidence to the contrary. See, for instance, the peer-reviewed meta-analyses described here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2019/05/15/northeastern-univer...

There is not conclusive proof that so-called "broken windows policing" works as advertised.

Nevertheless:

Decent people fix broken windows - literal and metaphorical ones - no matter what the stats say.

If everyone in a country feels valuable and equitable coming up with solutions that benefit everyone is very easy. As it stands in the US there will always be someone that sees themselves losing something and prevents any improvement.

We do. It’s called “product-market fit” in software. It’s called “elections” in democratic government. The government provides the services and competence its leaders, and consequently its electorate, demands.

San Francisco’s electorate demanded what it’s getting. As you can see just from these comments, “the facts” are twisted, distorted, and obfuscated to confirm a preferred narrative. But the faith in the narrative, whichever narrative you hold, never wavers.

the point of having a bunch of different states and municipalities is you can test something in one place and see if it works. like weed legalization, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try. or constitutional carry, some states did it and the world didn't end so others try.

there's some poli sci theory that politics is actually about the majority's schadenfreude at fucking over the minority. which seems increasingly credible. but that means we've been pushing more and more stuff to the feds for years so this is now harder to do.

let states and counties do more stuff again. like this should be a party neutral issue, let the dems to more dem stuff and the reps to more rep stuff.

Public services are just massive, costly, complicated, and cater to all sorts of vulnerable populations, and the public have pay for it. The time horizon on some complicated projects is so long that knowledge can change in the meantime and make the project/strategies look incoherent. E.g., some countries decommissioned public transport options over decades when cars became more widespread, and are undoing it now because cars became too widespread, and it'll take decades to rectify. Then there are world events that upend everything, such as Ukraine or COVID-19. It's just very complicated, far more complicated than anything in software development in my experience.

Fwiw, "governance" does exactly that. Many states literally copy, or copy-then-tweak California law (e.g. motor vehicle efficiency requirements).

I know it can't be copied wholesale, but there are certain aspects I think would be nice, such as having penalties for committing crimes.