The first step to making your city not a crime-ridden violent shithole is to stop treating it like a badge of honor.
NYC is like this to some extent, but not nearly as extreme as the Bay Area.
Reminds of this choice quote from the Onion: "In addition, 3 million New Yorkers reportedly left the city because they realized the phrase "Only in New York" is actually just a defense mechanism used to convince themselves that seeing a naked man take a shit on a park bench is somehow endearing, or part of some shared cultural experience."[1]
The Bay Area is much worse in this regard. It's the sort of place where privileged rich people treat objectively terrible, horrible as some sort of rite of passage. There's some kind of sick, perverse pride in living in a 24-hour The Wire episode.
There is an attitude, a bohemian attitude, a beatnik attitude... that it is more free to live with the junkies and the prostitutes and the gang bangers than to be hiding away behind some gate.
This is what is ultimately being destroyed in San Francisco. A real understanding of what it means to be free.
People used to put up with the same violence in NYC, till they got sick of it and elected mayors who cared about fighting crime more (messrs giuliani and bloomberg). Back in the messrs koch and dinkins eras, NYC was a dump, by and large.
San Jose takes crime seriously and it's constantly up there among the safest large cities in the US.
One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously. SF is slowly taking crime more seriously. Maybe the EB can lear from SJ and SF a bit.
Undoubtedly some people will raise the issue of profiling criminal behavior[1]. If I had to choose between simmering street violence and occasional police excess (where one can seek redress), I'd choose the latter. Not sure why the EB is so anti-police so much as to spite their own safety. The good of being better policed vastly outweighs, to me, the occasional bad cop. But to each their own.
One phenomenon I don't understand so well. In NYC I'd see people dress us as (wannabe) mobsters (acquire their style), but they were no mobsters, tho maybe they idolized them in some way --they would complain that they'd get flack from the police. Maybe if they didn't try to pretend to be toughs the police wouldn't think they were toughs. I can see some similarities in the 'anarchists' in the EB.
> One can only wish The EB will take crime more seriously.
'wish' is a good term to use here, since I don't see any other way of reducing crime in Oakland since they have no money to provide nearly enough police services, and can't really tax their residents any more since they're already financially overburdened.
