I don’t agree that this is flamebait. A significant fraction of the Bay Area seems ok with decriminalization of street crime including shoplifting. There are many stories of businesses like Walgreens closing due to the impact of constantly theft in San Francisco.
I'm being sincere. My research indicates both problems cause roughly $40 billion/year in damage to the economy. It's not my fault that most people posting here don't see the impact of wage theft and/or the impact of tangling shoplifters in the criminal justice system.
Your median wage thief probably steals way more than the median shoplifter.
Flamebait means a comment is likely to provoke a flamewar. This doesn't vary with sincerity, but rather with substantiveness and flammability. Those are the variables you need to modulate.
We have to moderate effects (or likely effects), not intent. Effects are observable while intent often isn't, and of course it's effects which actually make a difference on the site, whether intended or not.
Intent doesn't communicate itself, especially on flammable topics, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it. One way to do this is to write thoughtfully and add information. Your reply here is already much better than your GP comment. This often happens in response to moderation—people respond by explaining some of the background that was in their mind but which they didn't say earlier. The thing to do is to include more of that in the first place, and then it will be clear that your intent is substantive discussion rather than provocation.
Here are some previous explanations in case they're helpful:
Depriving others of their property without their permission is generally seen as a bad thing and worthy of self-defense actions. Theft should be a crime.
I understand leniency if a hungry person is stealing food.
If wage theft were a criminal offense, the people being locked up wouldn't necessarily be of the social class of people currently being locked up for non-violent offenses.
Decriminalization without functioning social work infra is this result. Just because SF is incompetent in this regard does not mean continued criminalization of minor offenses should continue.
There’s nuance, and that nuance is critical to the discussion.
Oh please. These crimes have real consequences, both financially and in quality of life for the people who live in these areas. Almost everyone I know has had their car broken into. I know multiple people who have been assaulted. I personally have had to run from a homeless man with a knife. I’ve seen people grind up pills on the roof of a trash can and snort them next to a police officer.
We deserve a better quality of life than this. There is absolutely no reason to tolerate people behaving in this way in society. These are adult human beings with agency who should face consequences for their actions. The problem isn’t lack of investment or infra, the problem is incentivizing behavior that is destructive to a functioning society.
There's a massive gulf between crime with a victim like shoplifting and general petty theft and crime without a victim, like jaywalking, that everyone seems to go willingly blind to on an ideological as-needed basis.
How much does it cost to run someone through the legal system for shoplifting? Is that an effective use of resources versus preventing the shoplifting using social services? Three strikes laws have proven very expensive and not very useful for behavioral nudges, so maybe we explore other ways to get folks to shy away from committing property crimes.
If cost were what mattered we wouldn't prosecute all sorts of crimes. It's not about the cost. It's about making it not worth people's while violate other people's property rights.
I would sympathize with your confusion if it were just the first half of the post, but the second half makes it obvious that it is a sincere suggestion (and a reasonable one).
Why not punish both? Shoplifting and wage theft involve theft. It's not okay to harm some random business because some other business made you bus tables after your shift ended or whatever.
Who suggested in this thread that we shouldn't punish them? The grand parent commenter asked for them to be punished the same, the parent commenter for some reason thought that was so outlandish it must've been sarcasm.
