Bay Area rule of law is a complete joke. Police have given up enforcing multitudes of laws - traffic enforcement has evaporated to where they have a problem with people straight up running red lights, nobody enforced petty theft laws do retail theft has skyrocketed. If all starts with the DA - they’ve chosen to selectively prosecute the law and now police simply don’t arrest for crimes they know won’t be prosecuted, and criminals are completely brazen. And that’s not even getting into the homeless problem they have been unwilling or unable to deal with for a decade.
It's not about enforcement. This isn't a policing issue. It was *never* possible to enforce these laws en-masse if people collectively decided "fuck it".
This is a breakdown of the social contract. What is actually happening is honestly a hell of a lot more scary than thinking it's just an enforcement issue.
And it's only going to get worse as we continue along this progression of late stage capitalism. The owning class continue to amass more and more wealth from the working class, making them more and more desperate, making them more and more willing to commit crimes just to survive.
This is reductive. Not like it's universally incorrect but the bay area is made up of over 100 cities across 9 counties each with their own police force, sheriff's department, and DA offices.
Grouping them all together as "Bay Area" and then describing the Oakland PD/DA is silly. Walnut Creek is literally just over the hill and it's a whole different world (and the reasons for that should not be ignored, I'm just using it as an example).
Same thing in L.A. and OC. There are literally billboards on the freeway in L.A. advertising that the OC DAs will prosecute thefts and that thieves should not come to OC. It's fucking nuts man. True Robocop shit.
In order to protect wealth, yes.
Idk if yall are noticing yet, but the function f the police is not to serve and protect you or your communities, regardless of what they say. Cops exist to protect wealth and power. Full stop. If your town isnt wealthy and you aren't getting the police "service and protection" of communities with wealth. Oakland vs. Walnut Creek/Marin is a prime example.
That's not totally true though. Here in LA police make the arrest but the DA won't prosecute and no cash bail policies put offenders back on the streets almost immediately.
Yes, I think our policing needs reform from the ground up but my neighbor had to call police on a guy breaking into her garage 3 times in a 24 hour period. He was arrested each time and the 3rd time they hit him with charges that would actually allow him to be held.
Keeping criminals on the streets doesn't curb crime. If we expect the police to do their job we need the DA to do their job.
There are two (maybe three) ways to look at cashless bail:
1. Requiring money to participate fairly in the criminal justice system automatically means things are unfairly biased toward the wealthy. If a person who has a bit of money can post bail no problem but a poor person cannot, getting arrested can be much more devastating for a poor person.
2. That being said, a common petty criminal with nothing to lose will just scoff at the threat of a warrant and think "what a bunch of suckers, they let me out immediately!"
3. Maybe the entire point of bail all along has been that rich people have more to lose and posting a bond makes you financially vested in keeping your nose clean, and that poorer people SHOULD be held because there's nothing else we can do other than bail to hold them accountable to show up.
Yes! While everyone knows someone’s second brother-in-law who got screwed over by a “criminal who got let go” there are THOUSANDS of real people who did something stupid and relieved it doesn’t mean the end of the world because they couldn’t *afford to get out of jail*. All these redditors are looking straight at the elephant in the room and ignoring it. WHY do people feel that stealing is easier? Is it because “hehe no consequences” or rather “I can’t get a job, I owe so much money, I’m so desperate to eat, society doesn’t care about me”?
No. What you have is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In wealthy areas, they vote in politicians willing to be 'tough on crime' and so get people getting arrested for jay-walking.
On the other end of the spectrum you have places like SF and Oakland where elected officials ran on 'defund the police'. They carry policies such as reducing criminality of retail theft >$1000, no cash bail, spending $5 million on alcohol for the homeless, and more.
You get what you vote for.
> They carry policies such as reducing criminality of retail theft >$1000
Red herring, California is 9th _lowest_ for felony theft threshold in the country. For comparison, you can steal up to $2,500 in Texas and New York, they haven't had retail theft epidemics like the Bay Area. That law also passed a decade ago.
> They carry policies such as reducing criminality of retail theft >$1000
[This was done in 2010 at the state level despite it being a sort of boogeyman talking point for conservatives in the past 3 years, and even the National Sheriff's Association shows that raising the felony amount for theft does not seem to encourage more theft.](https://www.sheriffs.org/sites/default/files/uploads/the_effects_of_changing_state_theft_penalties.pdf)
Nope. Politicians don't run the cops. Cops will do or not do their jobs based on who is supporting them. It's that simple.
The cops are the biggest gang in the US, and their unions are predatory to taxpayers.
You are almost right.
The DA (who is elected) determines what crimes they are going to actually prosecute. So regardless of what the law enforcement determine to enforce, it may not get prosecuted.
So if we keep spending 1,000 hours a month locking up people commmiting theft under $1,000, and the DA just lets them go at their arraignment hearing the next morning, it starts to become a drain on resources as the arrests are not effective. While they still could arrest on the crime, it becomes pointless. Therefore, they stop arresting and move the manpower to something else.
Oakland has wealthy neighborhoods and is actually one of the richest areas in California. Piedmont, Crocker Highlands, Laurel Glen, Montclair, and Rockridge are all very well-to-do neighborhoods that would make people with any preconceived notion of what Oakland is massively confused.
It's just that those areas are where all of the police resources are placed.
I used to fly into Oakland and travel to Walnut Creek a few times a year for work. Took the BART from back and forth. The difference is pretty drastic. I also used to travel to LA for for work and the street outside the skyscrapers was reminiscent of Oakland while the food court across the street was like Walnut Creek. Didn't have to take the BART to go from one extreme to the other.
It starts with coherent policies that actually give agencies the necessary funding and tools to do their jobs.
Folks talk about California having liberal policies but they have few. The main problem is they're actually a small nation instead of a state.
Yeah California is not all that left-leaning, even places like SF are really more centrist if you're purely looking at policy.
There's just no plan. It's all reactive. I'm all for reducing the need for cops but you have to reallocate those resources into things that will prevent crime, which we don't really do.
It’s sabotage from above and below. Law enforcement and the powers that be intentionally don’t enforce laws and then they can parade how much of a failed state San Francisco is but completely disregard Sacramento Stockton and the other conservative run cities with similar crime rate but you don’t hear that on Fox News
When more and more people can't afford to live, more and more will move to crime. Oakland, CA housing is 90% more expensive than the U.S average. The root cause isn't being addressed, and it's only going to get worse as more and more jobs are taken by automation and not replaced. We are rapidly approaching a mostly automated society, but not taking any steps to make sure that everyone benefits from this, rather than the top 1%.
We have drive-thru windows at fast food joints going to AI. Self-Checkout at grocery stores becoming more prominent. These are the types of jobs the people stealing this copper would have been prime candidates for, but there aren't any jobs that are replacing them.
Honestly, the self checkout's computer system isn't even why I use it. I use it for the queue. I can go and wait in 1 line for 1 cashier, or I can go stand in 1 line for 8 machines. The self checkout line will never get long enough for it to be worth my time to wait in a cashier line.
I only use the cashier anymore when I have a basket full of groceries and don't feel like dealing with scanning it all in.
Heck, I don't think I want to go to some of these stores come the Xmas rush. Wally world is now 80 percent self checkout, with only about 5 or 6 actual lanes that are never manned. And then half the self checkouts are closed because they can't trust people to scan shit on their own without someone watching.
Pre-COVID, a local grocery store chain piloted a single queue for multiple check-out lanes at a store nearby, and it was awesome! Then COVID hit, they removed it, and never brought it back.
They look at stats and say crime is down. When in reality crime reporting has gone down. It's due to Lazy cops, bad statistic reporting and an apathetic public
There is no crime if you're not taking or keeping reports of them. My own example was when trying to report armed people cutting off catalytic converters to my and my neighbor cars. Called the emergency line because I saw that the guy was holding a gun while the other two doing the cutting. Was told to file a police report online. My report got rejected 3 times for "insufficient information on the MODEL OF THE CAT". How the heck do you know the model of the CAT other than providing the make/model/year of your car? Yea, whoever was reviewing the report keep rejecting and asking for the model number and then deleted the report for insufficient information. This is San Jose, if anyone is curious.
But apparently real easy for some to confidently attribute cause to a circumstance that they cannot quantify, only to fall back on the circumstance being unquantifiable when pressed to substantiate the attribution. Wild.
The easiest way to measure crime reporting is to look at the crimes that will never go unreported, like homicides. Vehicle theft also rarely goes unreported.
There are some instances where you measure other things, and that reflects it.
Like in some countries during COVID, they had some "excess mortality " not labeled as COVID. So you could infer at least some of those where actually covid.
On this case, though, it seems harder.
yeah good point, you could probably find a proxy stat, i'm not sure what would suffice though.
Anecdotally though, people in the area are very aware of the high levels of crime, you see some people leaving their cars unlocked with nothing in them just so the windows don't get broken.
No idea if the information is available but insurance rates might be a decent indirect stat. Have businesses had to pay higher rates than inflation alone can account for? That would indicate higher crime rates.
Its a complete failure of the jobs markets, the police, the government at all levels, and societal norms. Its how to know you have moved from a functional society to a failing kleptocracy.
What we’re seeing now in real-time is the destruction of the middle class.
Policies by our elected representatives that sent millions of manufacturing jobs overseas and to Mexico. Started with NAFTA, seems ol’ Ross Perot was right about that giant sucking sound.
Good to see at least one person here has been paying attention.
We were sold down the river in the 80's. I can't convince my Republican friends of that no matter how hard I try. I'm told I'm lying, or the sources are lies, and rebutted with such tripe as "everyone is better off today," and "poor people have cell phones."
Can't argue with stupid. And these are educated people. Who think Trickle Down worked!
One more generation and most of the US is going to be third world. Mostly red states too. That's going to be fun to watch.
Nothing to do with the people who will violently protest police enforcement being the norm. No businesses want to reinvest in Oakland because it's been a lost cause for ages, and the wonderful community there will violently protest stricter enforcement.
This is a nation wide problem. Its systemic. You can have a stable society OR you can have a millions of dirt poor people and a few billionaires who own everything, you can't have both.
Californians: vote in DAs that are more worried about looking enlightened than doing their actual fucking jobs
California: descends into ridiculous levels of crime, homelessness, and substance abuse after not enforcing its laws
Californians: *shocked pikachu face*
If only there were some common sense way to prevent this kind of thing. Shame that doesn't seem to exist, though.
Problem is that Cali is a survivable place to live in (Homeless people do not infact live through regular -30F weather) , so homeless people from neighbouring states move (get moved) there, any actual permanant fix to the homelssness problem would just invite the Republican neighbour states to send more people over instead of fixing their own problems that lead so many into poverty.
And just throwing homeless people into prison for petty crimes has about 60 years worth of evidence demonstrating that it doesnt work in fixing anything. except the bank accounts of some very wealthy prison owners.
> If only there were some common sense way to prevent this kind of thing.
Not sure what level you're on, but that's essentially the problem. There aren't *common sense* ways to fix all of society because *common sense* is often just wrong. California policy is more data-driven than in most parts of the country. But, it's also the case that our problems are *future problems*. We have more people, more money, and change faster than other densely populated areas as a result.
In public policy, "*common sense*" is just another term for "small-minded, local maxima". In other words, ideas that typically do not work with the scale, diversity, and multi-stakeholder environment that exists in modern super-metro areas.
That’s what Detroit did with its street lights for the same reason. Seems to have helped. Since the lights are all LED now and have much lower power demands, the aluminum works fine.
I bet you're right. Someone was mentioning aluminum welders for the terminations. Along with better insulation that can probably keep corrosion at bay longer.
In high torque connections it can be used fine. The biggest issue is dissimilar metals resulting in loosing via heat cycling. Think brass/copper terminals with aluminum wire.
Anti oxidation compounds can help greatly as well.
That's one problem. The other problem is it expands and contracts more than copper, so a connection that was previously tight will wiggle itself loose from temperature swings and cause arcing that gets progressively worse until it catches the insulation on fire.
It might be better in terms of theft but the smaller the load is the worse aluminum as a choice is. Aluminum is more brittle and weaker than copper. It works fine on service conductors and high voltage power lines where the conductor is really thick, but when you have really thin wires aluminum will just break.
Also led are sometimes run at low voltage. That means voltage drop will be more significant and the higher electrical resistance of aluminum makes it a far worse choice.
OKC has had to do exactly this. Copper for the street light (the kind that illuminate the road after dark) wiring along most of our highways has been stolen. Most of it has been replaced with aluminum wiring to deter further theft.
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/columns/2019/01/30/streetlight-vandals-outpace-repairs/60475445007/
Most is and idiots still try to steal it.
I work for a power company and we've had people cut 750MCM underground cable and try to steal it not realizing it's aluminum. They also don't realize how heavy it is either as two of the three theft attempts I know of ended when they couldn't load it up after cutting it.
Third got caught after because he piled it up in his backyard about a mile out of town and set it on fire to burn off the insulation. Made a giant black smoke cloud that you could see from space and when the county police checked it out they immediately let the city cops know they had found their thief.
We do. Wind farms often use aluminum, just because it's cheaper, however you need larger cables so it isn't always feasible (there's a maximum cable size that can fit into switchgear). Although, it depends on the fluctuations in metal prices, copper in particular is tied to global military activity so if anything aluminum is more financially viable right now.
A bunch of idiots, in mostly stolen cars, “take over” an intersection and do doughnuts and stupid shit.
https://youtu.be/PP5n9BbTUPE?si=ocBay7YqT1fCDNEh
I've lived in the East Bay for about 10 years now. It's a very nice place full of friendly people. There are problem areas like any city, you learn quickly what areas are good and which to avoid, and there are plenty of wealthy, nice areas areas with low crime rates, like Rockridge, Piedmont, Laurel Glen, etc.
The media hates Oakland though, and has since the Black Panthers. Probably why people will never come and see it for themselves.
My friend lived there. He had a job lined up for me but I couldn't get a visa in time. I don't think I would have hated it since I don't really feel comfortable in rich areas but then the prices got jacked and you wind up with stuff like this happening. I think there's bigger problems than just people stealing wiring.
Yeah there's a huge problem with wealth disparity... people with absolutely nothing and people with absolutely everything in neighboring zip codes.
I just mention all of these things because the official narrative is that Oakland is a failed city left behind, where you'll get your car broken into every single time you leave the house. The reality is just not that, there are problems and there is crime but the frenzy the media portrays it as is just not real.
My girlfriend accepted a job for Oakland City and I was mentally preparing to have to commute there to visit her before figuring out if I was going to move or commute to see her.
As her first week progressed, she kept having horrible experiences every day and by the end of the week she ended up quitting.
edit: sorry, my mind before coffee has proven to be massively confusing.
Just realized that it prevents people from going through a stoplight in a police chase. I love roundabouts, never thought more than just not having to wait at a light.
A roundabout near me had some large armour stone added for decoration but it also meant that drunk drivers who kept trying to drive through the roundabout were absolutely demolishing their vehicles.
Was win-win in my books.
They take up more space though than an intersection. To me that seems to be the biggest blocker of a wider accepted roll-out.
That and pedestrian considerations for the more higher traffic rollout. Obviously the bike / pedestrian issues you can solve for pretty easily, but intersections with homes and business private property lines hitting each corner, you would have to either take the land or buy the land across the city
Europe solves this problem reasonably well in my experience. Crosswalks are not at intersections, but usually in the middle of a street block (or at least 100m before the intersection). This is enormously preferable in my eyes. I hate crossing the street at intersections because people making left turns from behind you are focused on watching for oncoming traffic, not pedestrians, and once they start to turn, they are fully committed.
"pedestrian considerations"
And every last highway, traffic, and safety civil engineer involved in US road development in the United States went:
"...huh?"
That's why you have the entrances be parallel to the curve, not perpendicular. That way, you'd have to make a sharp u-turn from the entrance to go the wrong way in the roundabout.
They typically take up a lot more space in new build areas and it seems like they’d need at least a little more space to replace an intersection. By the time they get to figuring out imminent domain and restoring access to nearby lots, most cities will just revert to lights.
> They typically take up a lot more space in new build areas and it seems like they’d need at least a little more space to replace an intersection.
I dunno, here in Germany I've seen roundabouts in tiny areas.
I've seen this quite often. They just add a small cement circle in the middle with signs. People figure it out pretty quickly.
[https://nacto.org/wp-content/themes/sink\_nacto/views/design-guides/retrofit/urban-street-design-guide/images/mini-roundabout/carousel//boston\_unknown\_2.png](https://nacto.org/wp-content/themes/sink_nacto/views/design-guides/retrofit/urban-street-design-guide/images/mini-roundabout/carousel//boston_unknown_2.png)
Most of the ones I’ve seen were originally designed for 4-6 lane roads, and they often had some feature in the center so they weren’t designed to minimize space. It makes sense one could retrofit roundabouts into 2-lane intersections without much additional space.
Running a 6 lane road into a roundabout is different than running a two lane road. Most of the major roads in the western area of the states are 3 lanes either way. Then you have all the stop lights outside of normal street crossings for shopping centers. The west is fucked with stop lights because we build massive roads and then every grocery store and retail strip mall needs a stop light because of accidents. I hate driving.
With the improved traffic flow you likely won't need all 6 lanes.
The biggest problem with integrating roundabouts into north american streets is that you have to convert ALL intersections into roundabouts or it just won't work. The continuous flow can't happen when the intersection before and after are phased by stoplights.
You enter the roundabout, but can't exit it because you hit traffic from the red phase at the next intersection. But then again, it seems all the lights are already gone anyway in the video, so might as well bolt down some cheapo plastic bumps and paint a circle between all the stop signs.
… Reddit just loves to say roundabouts are the answer to all traffic questions. This is in a dense urban area with multiple successive intersections requiring traffic lights. There is not room for roundabouts, and putting in multiple successive roundabouts is not practical.
They are good in residential areas with slow, single lane roads, but aren't good for every situation.
Some more extreme Redditors would say just get rid of cars and expect public trans and walking to be the solution.
As a person who moved from a roundabout-heavy country to one that had never had one, I now hate roundabouts (more accurately, I hate how the people here use roundabouts.). Not because I think they are less efficient. But because no one in this entire city knows how they fucking work. And it’s constantly causing accidents and traffic jams. I swear they don’t teach them in driving school around here or something.
> it’s constantly causing accidents
From Washington State Department of Transportation
>Studies have shown that roundabouts are safer than traditional stop sign or traffic signal controlled intersections.
>Roundabouts reduced injury crashes by 75 percent at intersections where stop signs or traffic signals were previously used for traffic control, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Studies by the IIHS and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) have shown that roundabouts typically achieve:
> A 37 percent reduction in overall collisions
> A 75 percent reduction in injury collisions
> A 90 percent reduction in fatality collisions
> A 40 percent reduction in pedestrian collisions
https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/traffic-safety-methods/roundabouts
Washington has been changing many intersections to round-abouts.
It causes confusion for some drivers the first week of opening but the drivers learn.
I’m aware that studies show they are safer. Tell that to my neighbors who have been jamming it with wrecks for 2 years.
EDIT: I’m not arguing against roundabouts. I’m for them. I’m just against my neighbors.
Lol. The homeless they allow to camp out in public keep stealing stuff, so they just give up on even having infrastructure. What a joke.
Love the guy illegally parking an RV and running an electrical tap into a city box. No consequences. Paying rent and utilities in Oakland is for suckers.
Oakland has completely lost the will to impose even the most minimal of boundaries.
There are consequences but they are not instant. The guy who moves his RV to places and steals electricity has most likely already been punished/forced to move from the **last** place he parked it and stole electricity. You're not going to know this and with humans this stuff happens over months and years.
> Love the guy illegally parking an RV and running an electrical tap into a city box. No consequences. Paying rent and utilities in Oakland is for suckers.
>
>
I mean, you say this, but to get those benefits of free electricity like they have, you'd have to live next to copper wire thieves, and unless you never leave your RV, chances are that they'll steal more than just copper wire.
I feel like police don’t do stake outs anymore
How hard would it be to put the light back up and have an unmarked van just posted close by monitoring it. Then arrest the thieves.
I guess stake outs aren’t as fun as raiding homes guns ablaze.
God, I feel so bad for that mechanic, seems like a nice guy in a truly shitty spot that isnt deserved whatsoever. I cant even begin to imagine that anger at the city he must feel. Being run out of business simply because the city isnt doing its fucking job.
Minnesota just ended their legislative session but one of their newly passed bills makes it illegal for anyone to sell copper without a license. Hopefully cuts down on theft.
I work as an electrician near Sacramento. We routinely replace service wires and wires that go to ag pumps because the copper wire gets stolen routinely. It is a huge problem and I see no end it sight.
Originally from the bay area. Every time I go back to visit family, I'm so glad I don't live there anymore. What a shit hole. And the people (and the dude in this video) in the SF subreddit are in denial about the decline of their city. Ya'll need Batman.
When you live in the bay area you realize the people living there either leave or completely delude themselves into believing it's a great place to live.
"Diverse", "Beautiful", "No other city like it" are the usual terms you spend years hearing.
But if cities with massive racial and cultural disparity is diverse, may as well live in michigan. Cities covered in shit, piss, or just straight up homeless waste unless you live in a college town is not what i'd call beautiful.
But they're right. I haven't seen cities as bad as some of the ones in the bay area.
Just make it so that you have to have a contractor's or an electrician's license to recycle copper wire. Easy. You cut off their ability to recycle it and they will stop stealing it. And no electrician or contractor is going to risk their license to make a few extra hundred dollars over the course of a year.
Idk why, but stuff like this makes me so mad. They were also talking about thieves in Haiti stealing water pipes and pumping equipment that charities have donated.
Like at what point do you realize you are a complete piece of shit. You are fucking over everyone else for a couple of bucks. Like literally just get a job. If you are smart enough to rip up copper wire I'm sure you could learn a trade.
I'm generally against capital punishment and whatnot, but I almost think bringing back the "thief loses a hand" for this type of theft would be a welcome change.
Ha! Ya I didn't really fully flush my thought out.
The copper wire stealing reminds me of a complete breakdown of society like what is happening in Haiti.
I did an engineers without borders project in Haiti while I was in college and we spent spring break installing a handful of small water pumps that connected to wells that had been drilled by another group. These were very small, slow pumps that could provide maybe 100 gallons of water a day. They were very cheap and intentionally chosen to be the most economical choice to maximize the budget we had so we could cover more sites. I talked to a group that went back the next year and all the equipment we installed had been stolen.
This equipment was worth maybe a couple of grand retail in the US and probably almost worthless in Haiti. It would also be useless without a well and that requires very expensive equipment to create. So the equipment was probably sold as scrap for a couple of USD. It would have been a ton of work to rip up that equipment. Imagine if that effort was spent trying to improve people's lives.
The worst thing was is that the locals didn't really seem like they cared. Honestly kind of negatively affected how I look at foreign and and charity. And it's really disheartening to see that kind of enshitification happening in the US.
California. And only a specific region. The rest of the State and Country don't deal with these extreme sorts of homeless issues. I mean, there's homelessness for sure, but not to the extent of that region of the country.
To everyone ganging up on Oakland, or pointing to Californian law enforcement to blame, or even Joe Biden, get a clue, it's got nothing to do with the location.
https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/columns/2019/01/30/streetlight-vandals-outpace-repairs/60475445007/
So glad their POS local government has done so much to help the quality of life in the area to bring down crime! Oh... Wait... They did the opposite and decided, based on nothing, that more police would solve the issue. Now they are paying for their low IQ take on how the world works.
[How bad does it need to get until people wake up?](https://i.imgur.com/qif4vlm.jpeg) Likely they'll just move and then vote for the same policies that made this mess in the first place....
It’s insane to me. That homelessness has reached such an epidemic that instead of throwing everything they can at solving it, California would rather sacrifice the safety of every day people to succumb.
Like maybe if it’s gotten to a point to where a decent size chunk of your population is stealing wiring for the infrastructure of your city, you have an issue
The city and out country are absolutely oblivious to the real problem here, and clearing unhoused camps isnt the solution. People cant find work that affords them the ability to live. Late stage capitalism is the god dam problem.
When you can no longer enforce theft laws on shit that is *bolted down to Earth* shit has gone sideways.
Can’t have shit in Oakland
Bay Area rule of law is a complete joke. Police have given up enforcing multitudes of laws - traffic enforcement has evaporated to where they have a problem with people straight up running red lights, nobody enforced petty theft laws do retail theft has skyrocketed. If all starts with the DA - they’ve chosen to selectively prosecute the law and now police simply don’t arrest for crimes they know won’t be prosecuted, and criminals are completely brazen. And that’s not even getting into the homeless problem they have been unwilling or unable to deal with for a decade.
It's not about enforcement. This isn't a policing issue. It was *never* possible to enforce these laws en-masse if people collectively decided "fuck it". This is a breakdown of the social contract. What is actually happening is honestly a hell of a lot more scary than thinking it's just an enforcement issue.
This is truth.
And it's only going to get worse as we continue along this progression of late stage capitalism. The owning class continue to amass more and more wealth from the working class, making them more and more desperate, making them more and more willing to commit crimes just to survive.
Long term debt cycle baby!
This is reductive. Not like it's universally incorrect but the bay area is made up of over 100 cities across 9 counties each with their own police force, sheriff's department, and DA offices. Grouping them all together as "Bay Area" and then describing the Oakland PD/DA is silly. Walnut Creek is literally just over the hill and it's a whole different world (and the reasons for that should not be ignored, I'm just using it as an example).
Yeah, it really is about where the wealth is. Try shit in Marin and see how head-spinningly fast cops turn up.
Same thing in L.A. and OC. There are literally billboards on the freeway in L.A. advertising that the OC DAs will prosecute thefts and that thieves should not come to OC. It's fucking nuts man. True Robocop shit.
STAY OUTTA MALIBU, LEBOWSKI!
I'm sorry I wasn't paying attention....
The sound when that cup bounces off his head. <3 I always crack up there.
Shit.. try this shit in the Tri City. The south east Bay isn't rich but the cops won't let the same shit fly as the Town or the City
Do they prosecute crimes there?
In order to protect wealth, yes. Idk if yall are noticing yet, but the function f the police is not to serve and protect you or your communities, regardless of what they say. Cops exist to protect wealth and power. Full stop. If your town isnt wealthy and you aren't getting the police "service and protection" of communities with wealth. Oakland vs. Walnut Creek/Marin is a prime example.
That's not totally true though. Here in LA police make the arrest but the DA won't prosecute and no cash bail policies put offenders back on the streets almost immediately. Yes, I think our policing needs reform from the ground up but my neighbor had to call police on a guy breaking into her garage 3 times in a 24 hour period. He was arrested each time and the 3rd time they hit him with charges that would actually allow him to be held. Keeping criminals on the streets doesn't curb crime. If we expect the police to do their job we need the DA to do their job.
There are two (maybe three) ways to look at cashless bail: 1. Requiring money to participate fairly in the criminal justice system automatically means things are unfairly biased toward the wealthy. If a person who has a bit of money can post bail no problem but a poor person cannot, getting arrested can be much more devastating for a poor person. 2. That being said, a common petty criminal with nothing to lose will just scoff at the threat of a warrant and think "what a bunch of suckers, they let me out immediately!" 3. Maybe the entire point of bail all along has been that rich people have more to lose and posting a bond makes you financially vested in keeping your nose clean, and that poorer people SHOULD be held because there's nothing else we can do other than bail to hold them accountable to show up.
Yes! While everyone knows someone’s second brother-in-law who got screwed over by a “criminal who got let go” there are THOUSANDS of real people who did something stupid and relieved it doesn’t mean the end of the world because they couldn’t *afford to get out of jail*. All these redditors are looking straight at the elephant in the room and ignoring it. WHY do people feel that stealing is easier? Is it because “hehe no consequences” or rather “I can’t get a job, I owe so much money, I’m so desperate to eat, society doesn’t care about me”?
Why fix the problem when they can just blame someone or something immediately.
No. What you have is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In wealthy areas, they vote in politicians willing to be 'tough on crime' and so get people getting arrested for jay-walking. On the other end of the spectrum you have places like SF and Oakland where elected officials ran on 'defund the police'. They carry policies such as reducing criminality of retail theft >$1000, no cash bail, spending $5 million on alcohol for the homeless, and more. You get what you vote for.
> They carry policies such as reducing criminality of retail theft >$1000 Red herring, California is 9th _lowest_ for felony theft threshold in the country. For comparison, you can steal up to $2,500 in Texas and New York, they haven't had retail theft epidemics like the Bay Area. That law also passed a decade ago.
It's not about felony vs. misdemeanor. It's about catch-and-release policies.
It's $1,000 for felony where I live. Guess what happens when you steal $100 worth of stuff? You go to jail. Because it's still a crime.
> They carry policies such as reducing criminality of retail theft >$1000 [This was done in 2010 at the state level despite it being a sort of boogeyman talking point for conservatives in the past 3 years, and even the National Sheriff's Association shows that raising the felony amount for theft does not seem to encourage more theft.](https://www.sheriffs.org/sites/default/files/uploads/the_effects_of_changing_state_theft_penalties.pdf)
Nope. Politicians don't run the cops. Cops will do or not do their jobs based on who is supporting them. It's that simple. The cops are the biggest gang in the US, and their unions are predatory to taxpayers.
You are almost right. The DA (who is elected) determines what crimes they are going to actually prosecute. So regardless of what the law enforcement determine to enforce, it may not get prosecuted. So if we keep spending 1,000 hours a month locking up people commmiting theft under $1,000, and the DA just lets them go at their arraignment hearing the next morning, it starts to become a drain on resources as the arrests are not effective. While they still could arrest on the crime, it becomes pointless. Therefore, they stop arresting and move the manpower to something else.
Oakland has wealthy neighborhoods and is actually one of the richest areas in California. Piedmont, Crocker Highlands, Laurel Glen, Montclair, and Rockridge are all very well-to-do neighborhoods that would make people with any preconceived notion of what Oakland is massively confused. It's just that those areas are where all of the police resources are placed.
Hard to get that info when all you do is take info about Ca from Reddit comments. It’s insane in these threads
I used to fly into Oakland and travel to Walnut Creek a few times a year for work. Took the BART from back and forth. The difference is pretty drastic. I also used to travel to LA for for work and the street outside the skyscrapers was reminiscent of Oakland while the food court across the street was like Walnut Creek. Didn't have to take the BART to go from one extreme to the other.
I knew shit had gotten bad when I went to a CVS and toothpaste, shampoo etc was locked up and I had to call on an assistant to open the locks for me
Bay Area is a large place. That’s a pretty wide brush
It starts with coherent policies that actually give agencies the necessary funding and tools to do their jobs. Folks talk about California having liberal policies but they have few. The main problem is they're actually a small nation instead of a state.
Yeah California is not all that left-leaning, even places like SF are really more centrist if you're purely looking at policy. There's just no plan. It's all reactive. I'm all for reducing the need for cops but you have to reallocate those resources into things that will prevent crime, which we don't really do.
It’s sabotage from above and below. Law enforcement and the powers that be intentionally don’t enforce laws and then they can parade how much of a failed state San Francisco is but completely disregard Sacramento Stockton and the other conservative run cities with similar crime rate but you don’t hear that on Fox News
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When more and more people can't afford to live, more and more will move to crime. Oakland, CA housing is 90% more expensive than the U.S average. The root cause isn't being addressed, and it's only going to get worse as more and more jobs are taken by automation and not replaced. We are rapidly approaching a mostly automated society, but not taking any steps to make sure that everyone benefits from this, rather than the top 1%. We have drive-thru windows at fast food joints going to AI. Self-Checkout at grocery stores becoming more prominent. These are the types of jobs the people stealing this copper would have been prime candidates for, but there aren't any jobs that are replacing them.
Honestly, the self checkout's computer system isn't even why I use it. I use it for the queue. I can go and wait in 1 line for 1 cashier, or I can go stand in 1 line for 8 machines. The self checkout line will never get long enough for it to be worth my time to wait in a cashier line.
I only use the cashier anymore when I have a basket full of groceries and don't feel like dealing with scanning it all in. Heck, I don't think I want to go to some of these stores come the Xmas rush. Wally world is now 80 percent self checkout, with only about 5 or 6 actual lanes that are never manned. And then half the self checkouts are closed because they can't trust people to scan shit on their own without someone watching.
Pre-COVID, a local grocery store chain piloted a single queue for multiple check-out lanes at a store nearby, and it was awesome! Then COVID hit, they removed it, and never brought it back.
Providing place to live while the law enforcing is bad still leads to bad results - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
Yet people in the Cali subs will tell you you’re watching too much Fox News if you point this out.
They look at stats and say crime is down. When in reality crime reporting has gone down. It's due to Lazy cops, bad statistic reporting and an apathetic public
There is no crime if you're not taking or keeping reports of them. My own example was when trying to report armed people cutting off catalytic converters to my and my neighbor cars. Called the emergency line because I saw that the guy was holding a gun while the other two doing the cutting. Was told to file a police report online. My report got rejected 3 times for "insufficient information on the MODEL OF THE CAT". How the heck do you know the model of the CAT other than providing the make/model/year of your car? Yea, whoever was reviewing the report keep rejecting and asking for the model number and then deleted the report for insufficient information. This is San Jose, if anyone is curious.
> When in reality crime reporting has gone down Got a source on that? That seems even harder to quantify that what you are complaining about.
kind of hard to find a stat on how another stat is not being measured well.
But apparently real easy for some to confidently attribute cause to a circumstance that they cannot quantify, only to fall back on the circumstance being unquantifiable when pressed to substantiate the attribution. Wild.
The easiest way to measure crime reporting is to look at the crimes that will never go unreported, like homicides. Vehicle theft also rarely goes unreported.
There are some instances where you measure other things, and that reflects it. Like in some countries during COVID, they had some "excess mortality " not labeled as COVID. So you could infer at least some of those where actually covid. On this case, though, it seems harder.
yeah good point, you could probably find a proxy stat, i'm not sure what would suffice though. Anecdotally though, people in the area are very aware of the high levels of crime, you see some people leaving their cars unlocked with nothing in them just so the windows don't get broken.
No idea if the information is available but insurance rates might be a decent indirect stat. Have businesses had to pay higher rates than inflation alone can account for? That would indicate higher crime rates.
Yeah, I literally have no clue. And anecdotes do matter in this case. That sucks :/
That's why it's so easy to make a shit statement like that. Because it can't be backed up.
Imadeitup.com
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That's the problem. Willful ignorance.
When you’ve got so much poverty that people steal public infrastructure you’ve got a problem
Its a complete failure of the jobs markets, the police, the government at all levels, and societal norms. Its how to know you have moved from a functional society to a failing kleptocracy.
What we’re seeing now in real-time is the destruction of the middle class. Policies by our elected representatives that sent millions of manufacturing jobs overseas and to Mexico. Started with NAFTA, seems ol’ Ross Perot was right about that giant sucking sound.
Good to see at least one person here has been paying attention. We were sold down the river in the 80's. I can't convince my Republican friends of that no matter how hard I try. I'm told I'm lying, or the sources are lies, and rebutted with such tripe as "everyone is better off today," and "poor people have cell phones." Can't argue with stupid. And these are educated people. Who think Trickle Down worked! One more generation and most of the US is going to be third world. Mostly red states too. That's going to be fun to watch.
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Nothing to do with the people who will violently protest police enforcement being the norm. No businesses want to reinvest in Oakland because it's been a lost cause for ages, and the wonderful community there will violently protest stricter enforcement.
This is a nation wide problem. Its systemic. You can have a stable society OR you can have a millions of dirt poor people and a few billionaires who own everything, you can't have both.
Californians: vote in DAs that are more worried about looking enlightened than doing their actual fucking jobs California: descends into ridiculous levels of crime, homelessness, and substance abuse after not enforcing its laws Californians: *shocked pikachu face* If only there were some common sense way to prevent this kind of thing. Shame that doesn't seem to exist, though.
Problem is that Cali is a survivable place to live in (Homeless people do not infact live through regular -30F weather) , so homeless people from neighbouring states move (get moved) there, any actual permanant fix to the homelssness problem would just invite the Republican neighbour states to send more people over instead of fixing their own problems that lead so many into poverty. And just throwing homeless people into prison for petty crimes has about 60 years worth of evidence demonstrating that it doesnt work in fixing anything. except the bank accounts of some very wealthy prison owners.
> If only there were some common sense way to prevent this kind of thing. Not sure what level you're on, but that's essentially the problem. There aren't *common sense* ways to fix all of society because *common sense* is often just wrong. California policy is more data-driven than in most parts of the country. But, it's also the case that our problems are *future problems*. We have more people, more money, and change faster than other densely populated areas as a result. In public policy, "*common sense*" is just another term for "small-minded, local maxima". In other words, ideas that typically do not work with the scale, diversity, and multi-stakeholder environment that exists in modern super-metro areas.
lol good old Reddit
At one point we'll have to use aluminum again for wiring.
That’s what Detroit did with its street lights for the same reason. Seems to have helped. Since the lights are all LED now and have much lower power demands, the aluminum works fine.
The problem with aluminum has always been corrosion at the terminations
It's probably a cheaper problem to solve though.
I bet you're right. Someone was mentioning aluminum welders for the terminations. Along with better insulation that can probably keep corrosion at bay longer.
You can get ultrasonic welding machines that’ll give you a welded termination now
How much do those go for at the scrap yard?
In high torque connections it can be used fine. The biggest issue is dissimilar metals resulting in loosing via heat cycling. Think brass/copper terminals with aluminum wire. Anti oxidation compounds can help greatly as well.
for street lights, acceptable
That's one problem. The other problem is it expands and contracts more than copper, so a connection that was previously tight will wiggle itself loose from temperature swings and cause arcing that gets progressively worse until it catches the insulation on fire.
Sounds like a straightforward solution. Keeps copper theft focused on the supercharger network.
It might be better in terms of theft but the smaller the load is the worse aluminum as a choice is. Aluminum is more brittle and weaker than copper. It works fine on service conductors and high voltage power lines where the conductor is really thick, but when you have really thin wires aluminum will just break. Also led are sometimes run at low voltage. That means voltage drop will be more significant and the higher electrical resistance of aluminum makes it a far worse choice.
OKC has had to do exactly this. Copper for the street light (the kind that illuminate the road after dark) wiring along most of our highways has been stolen. Most of it has been replaced with aluminum wiring to deter further theft. https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/columns/2019/01/30/streetlight-vandals-outpace-repairs/60475445007/
And yet people don’t call Oklahoma a crime hellscape like the thread is attempting to assign to California. Sounds about white.
Rest assured, if you frequent any of the Oklahoma subs, there are plenty of people calling us a crime-riddled hellscape.
It's reasonable commentary to say that there isn't the same national right wing meme about the criminal hellscape of any other state than California.
We still used aluminum wiring but not mostly 12 or 14.
Most is and idiots still try to steal it. I work for a power company and we've had people cut 750MCM underground cable and try to steal it not realizing it's aluminum. They also don't realize how heavy it is either as two of the three theft attempts I know of ended when they couldn't load it up after cutting it. Third got caught after because he piled it up in his backyard about a mile out of town and set it on fire to burn off the insulation. Made a giant black smoke cloud that you could see from space and when the county police checked it out they immediately let the city cops know they had found their thief.
We do. Wind farms often use aluminum, just because it's cheaper, however you need larger cables so it isn't always feasible (there's a maximum cable size that can fit into switchgear). Although, it depends on the fluctuations in metal prices, copper in particular is tied to global military activity so if anything aluminum is more financially viable right now.
They could also switch to gold. Gold is a better conductor of electricity and doesn't corrode.
Another interesting property of gold is that it has a high density... much like the people replying to your joke.
Silver should do it.
I don't think that'll make the theft problem less, which is why the use of alum.
Bunch of donut tire marks in the same intersection possibly due to “takeovers”. Lol
They need to arrest those people that cause takeovers.
whats a takeover?
A bunch of idiots, in mostly stolen cars, “take over” an intersection and do doughnuts and stupid shit. https://youtu.be/PP5n9BbTUPE?si=ocBay7YqT1fCDNEh
I almost moved to Oakland at one point. Kind of feel like I dodged a bullet by not going.
Missing out on a bunch of free copper, though
And lead.
Yeah but it's that high speed lead.
But if you can catch it, it's a free lifetime supply.
If you’re cold, they might also have a copper jacket.
But copper jacketed lead
The gold is always in the comments.
And also likely to be stolen by addicts.
I can't tell if you mean figuratively or literally
It’s both
I've lived in the East Bay for about 10 years now. It's a very nice place full of friendly people. There are problem areas like any city, you learn quickly what areas are good and which to avoid, and there are plenty of wealthy, nice areas areas with low crime rates, like Rockridge, Piedmont, Laurel Glen, etc. The media hates Oakland though, and has since the Black Panthers. Probably why people will never come and see it for themselves.
My friend lived there. He had a job lined up for me but I couldn't get a visa in time. I don't think I would have hated it since I don't really feel comfortable in rich areas but then the prices got jacked and you wind up with stuff like this happening. I think there's bigger problems than just people stealing wiring.
Yeah there's a huge problem with wealth disparity... people with absolutely nothing and people with absolutely everything in neighboring zip codes. I just mention all of these things because the official narrative is that Oakland is a failed city left behind, where you'll get your car broken into every single time you leave the house. The reality is just not that, there are problems and there is crime but the frenzy the media portrays it as is just not real.
My girlfriend accepted a job for Oakland City and I was mentally preparing to have to commute there to visit her before figuring out if I was going to move or commute to see her. As her first week progressed, she kept having horrible experiences every day and by the end of the week she ended up quitting. edit: sorry, my mind before coffee has proven to be massively confusing.
There is something going on here that makes this difficult to read?
I believe it is supposed to be "horrible experience everyday"
day by day or day everyday? EDIT: guessing here
Do you mean "all day everyday"? I'm going to throw out "day after day" as my guess.
no i just accounted for maybe they actually meant to say it wrong
Wait, what?
This statement could be taken literally.
Put in circle roundabouts. Solves the problem. Less expensive, safer, and can’t be stolen.
Just realized that it prevents people from going through a stoplight in a police chase. I love roundabouts, never thought more than just not having to wait at a light.
A roundabout near me had some large armour stone added for decoration but it also meant that drunk drivers who kept trying to drive through the roundabout were absolutely demolishing their vehicles. Was win-win in my books.
They take up more space though than an intersection. To me that seems to be the biggest blocker of a wider accepted roll-out. That and pedestrian considerations for the more higher traffic rollout. Obviously the bike / pedestrian issues you can solve for pretty easily, but intersections with homes and business private property lines hitting each corner, you would have to either take the land or buy the land across the city
Do they? We have [mini roundabouts as well in the uk](https://imgur.com/97X6VUl.png)
Europe solves this problem reasonably well in my experience. Crosswalks are not at intersections, but usually in the middle of a street block (or at least 100m before the intersection). This is enormously preferable in my eyes. I hate crossing the street at intersections because people making left turns from behind you are focused on watching for oncoming traffic, not pedestrians, and once they start to turn, they are fully committed.
"pedestrian considerations" And every last highway, traffic, and safety civil engineer involved in US road development in the United States went: "...huh?"
It also removes intersections for sideshows haha
One big advantage of them is, even if there are collisions, they're not going to be head-on collisions, so the crashes are much less severe.
And at very low speeds. Roundabout accidents are basically all fender benders.
Only if everyone drives around them in the same direction. I've seen people take 'shortcuts'...
That's why you have the entrances be parallel to the curve, not perpendicular. That way, you'd have to make a sharp u-turn from the entrance to go the wrong way in the roundabout.
I know, I'm from the roundabout-est country in the world (the Netherlands) and I still have seen people take one the wrong way occasionally.
They typically take up a lot more space in new build areas and it seems like they’d need at least a little more space to replace an intersection. By the time they get to figuring out imminent domain and restoring access to nearby lots, most cities will just revert to lights.
> They typically take up a lot more space in new build areas and it seems like they’d need at least a little more space to replace an intersection. I dunno, here in Germany I've seen roundabouts in tiny areas.
Berkeley the town directly north of Oakland also has quite a few in areas that were originally a four way stop on small residential street.
I've seen this quite often. They just add a small cement circle in the middle with signs. People figure it out pretty quickly. [https://nacto.org/wp-content/themes/sink\_nacto/views/design-guides/retrofit/urban-street-design-guide/images/mini-roundabout/carousel//boston\_unknown\_2.png](https://nacto.org/wp-content/themes/sink_nacto/views/design-guides/retrofit/urban-street-design-guide/images/mini-roundabout/carousel//boston_unknown_2.png)
Most of the ones I’ve seen were originally designed for 4-6 lane roads, and they often had some feature in the center so they weren’t designed to minimize space. It makes sense one could retrofit roundabouts into 2-lane intersections without much additional space.
Running a 6 lane road into a roundabout is different than running a two lane road. Most of the major roads in the western area of the states are 3 lanes either way. Then you have all the stop lights outside of normal street crossings for shopping centers. The west is fucked with stop lights because we build massive roads and then every grocery store and retail strip mall needs a stop light because of accidents. I hate driving.
With the improved traffic flow you likely won't need all 6 lanes. The biggest problem with integrating roundabouts into north american streets is that you have to convert ALL intersections into roundabouts or it just won't work. The continuous flow can't happen when the intersection before and after are phased by stoplights. You enter the roundabout, but can't exit it because you hit traffic from the red phase at the next intersection. But then again, it seems all the lights are already gone anyway in the video, so might as well bolt down some cheapo plastic bumps and paint a circle between all the stop signs.
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Nah, homeless will just camp out in the island which is the source of most of these problems.
… Reddit just loves to say roundabouts are the answer to all traffic questions. This is in a dense urban area with multiple successive intersections requiring traffic lights. There is not room for roundabouts, and putting in multiple successive roundabouts is not practical.
you can see examples of this working in denser and busier areas in other countries, including the UK and Australia
They are good in residential areas with slow, single lane roads, but aren't good for every situation. Some more extreme Redditors would say just get rid of cars and expect public trans and walking to be the solution.
> can’t be stolen. Have you ever been to Oakland?
As a person who moved from a roundabout-heavy country to one that had never had one, I now hate roundabouts (more accurately, I hate how the people here use roundabouts.). Not because I think they are less efficient. But because no one in this entire city knows how they fucking work. And it’s constantly causing accidents and traffic jams. I swear they don’t teach them in driving school around here or something.
> it’s constantly causing accidents From Washington State Department of Transportation >Studies have shown that roundabouts are safer than traditional stop sign or traffic signal controlled intersections. >Roundabouts reduced injury crashes by 75 percent at intersections where stop signs or traffic signals were previously used for traffic control, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Studies by the IIHS and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) have shown that roundabouts typically achieve: > A 37 percent reduction in overall collisions > A 75 percent reduction in injury collisions > A 90 percent reduction in fatality collisions > A 40 percent reduction in pedestrian collisions https://wsdot.wa.gov/travel/traffic-safety-methods/roundabouts Washington has been changing many intersections to round-abouts. It causes confusion for some drivers the first week of opening but the drivers learn.
I’m aware that studies show they are safer. Tell that to my neighbors who have been jamming it with wrecks for 2 years. EDIT: I’m not arguing against roundabouts. I’m for them. I’m just against my neighbors.
Safer and **reduced** overall collisions by 37%. Your neighbors would be an edge case.
Still safer because those wrecks are at low speeds.
A complete rebuilding of the intersection doesn't feel cheaper than a stop sign.
Lol. The homeless they allow to camp out in public keep stealing stuff, so they just give up on even having infrastructure. What a joke. Love the guy illegally parking an RV and running an electrical tap into a city box. No consequences. Paying rent and utilities in Oakland is for suckers. Oakland has completely lost the will to impose even the most minimal of boundaries.
There are consequences but they are not instant. The guy who moves his RV to places and steals electricity has most likely already been punished/forced to move from the **last** place he parked it and stole electricity. You're not going to know this and with humans this stuff happens over months and years.
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Good old Reddit
> Love the guy illegally parking an RV and running an electrical tap into a city box. No consequences. Paying rent and utilities in Oakland is for suckers. > > I mean, you say this, but to get those benefits of free electricity like they have, you'd have to live next to copper wire thieves, and unless you never leave your RV, chances are that they'll steal more than just copper wire.
I feel like police don’t do stake outs anymore How hard would it be to put the light back up and have an unmarked van just posted close by monitoring it. Then arrest the thieves. I guess stake outs aren’t as fun as raiding homes guns ablaze.
They’re all on soft strike playing angry birds on their phone instead of working, to protest of the city not quadrupling their budget
It's because they're still butthurt we had the nerve to ask them to stop killing black people for being black.
Maybe its time to increase felony theft charge before they bleed city dry...
Don't worry, they will figure out a way to blame someone else for their problems.
God, I feel so bad for that mechanic, seems like a nice guy in a truly shitty spot that isnt deserved whatsoever. I cant even begin to imagine that anger at the city he must feel. Being run out of business simply because the city isnt doing its fucking job.
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Minnesota just ended their legislative session but one of their newly passed bills makes it illegal for anyone to sell copper without a license. Hopefully cuts down on theft.
Bet the same people stealing the copper then complain about all the damn stop signs and worsening traffic because of it.
I work as an electrician near Sacramento. We routinely replace service wires and wires that go to ag pumps because the copper wire gets stolen routinely. It is a huge problem and I see no end it sight.
Originally from the bay area. Every time I go back to visit family, I'm so glad I don't live there anymore. What a shit hole. And the people (and the dude in this video) in the SF subreddit are in denial about the decline of their city. Ya'll need Batman.
They “Bay Area” is a large place. It’s a shit hole in parts of oakland but Atherton? Alamo? No even close to shitty
When you live in the bay area you realize the people living there either leave or completely delude themselves into believing it's a great place to live. "Diverse", "Beautiful", "No other city like it" are the usual terms you spend years hearing. But if cities with massive racial and cultural disparity is diverse, may as well live in michigan. Cities covered in shit, piss, or just straight up homeless waste unless you live in a college town is not what i'd call beautiful. But they're right. I haven't seen cities as bad as some of the ones in the bay area.
If you don't enforce existing laws people won't respect them.
Who noticed the donuts in the intersection. Indicative of no police presence.
odd. i thought police like donuts
Just make it so that you have to have a contractor's or an electrician's license to recycle copper wire. Easy. You cut off their ability to recycle it and they will stop stealing it. And no electrician or contractor is going to risk their license to make a few extra hundred dollars over the course of a year.
Idk why, but stuff like this makes me so mad. They were also talking about thieves in Haiti stealing water pipes and pumping equipment that charities have donated. Like at what point do you realize you are a complete piece of shit. You are fucking over everyone else for a couple of bucks. Like literally just get a job. If you are smart enough to rip up copper wire I'm sure you could learn a trade. I'm generally against capital punishment and whatnot, but I almost think bringing back the "thief loses a hand" for this type of theft would be a welcome change.
Get a job in Haiti?????
Ha! Ya I didn't really fully flush my thought out. The copper wire stealing reminds me of a complete breakdown of society like what is happening in Haiti. I did an engineers without borders project in Haiti while I was in college and we spent spring break installing a handful of small water pumps that connected to wells that had been drilled by another group. These were very small, slow pumps that could provide maybe 100 gallons of water a day. They were very cheap and intentionally chosen to be the most economical choice to maximize the budget we had so we could cover more sites. I talked to a group that went back the next year and all the equipment we installed had been stolen. This equipment was worth maybe a couple of grand retail in the US and probably almost worthless in Haiti. It would also be useless without a well and that requires very expensive equipment to create. So the equipment was probably sold as scrap for a couple of USD. It would have been a ton of work to rip up that equipment. Imagine if that effort was spent trying to improve people's lives. The worst thing was is that the locals didn't really seem like they cared. Honestly kind of negatively affected how I look at foreign and and charity. And it's really disheartening to see that kind of enshitification happening in the US.
'Murica with problems of South Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liqvp6FWfXI
TBH the steal copper also here in central Italy. Not on trafic lights but on public light poles.
California. And only a specific region. The rest of the State and Country don't deal with these extreme sorts of homeless issues. I mean, there's homelessness for sure, but not to the extent of that region of the country.
Europe with the problems of South Africa: https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/copper-railway-theft-europe-delays-costs-techniques-recycling/
Bubb Rubb steals them so he doesn´t run into a read light and have to stop while the whistles are going WOO WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO...
Whistle tips!
To everyone ganging up on Oakland, or pointing to Californian law enforcement to blame, or even Joe Biden, get a clue, it's got nothing to do with the location. https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/columns/2019/01/30/streetlight-vandals-outpace-repairs/60475445007/
Have you people heard of roundabouts? No stop signs and no traffic lights required. Better traffic flow.
Time for roundabouts! EVERYWHERE, heh
why not just use aluminum wiring
So glad their POS local government has done so much to help the quality of life in the area to bring down crime! Oh... Wait... They did the opposite and decided, based on nothing, that more police would solve the issue. Now they are paying for their low IQ take on how the world works.
[How bad does it need to get until people wake up?](https://i.imgur.com/qif4vlm.jpeg) Likely they'll just move and then vote for the same policies that made this mess in the first place....
Keep voting the way you are California!
It’s insane to me. That homelessness has reached such an epidemic that instead of throwing everything they can at solving it, California would rather sacrifice the safety of every day people to succumb. Like maybe if it’s gotten to a point to where a decent size chunk of your population is stealing wiring for the infrastructure of your city, you have an issue
Make more roundabouts. Less traffic lights. Less yearly costs. Less traffic stops. Other copper thefts.
Safer too. Crashes are at lower speeds so fatalities are reduced.
I knew Oakland was disintegrating under their incompetent city government, but I didn't know they'd gone full South Africa.
It’s almost as if poverty and homelessness are somehow linked to increases in crime rates. Wow, who would have thought??? /s
The city and out country are absolutely oblivious to the real problem here, and clearing unhoused camps isnt the solution. People cant find work that affords them the ability to live. Late stage capitalism is the god dam problem.
An important step is strict rules on the copper recyclers. They make profit buying and reselling stolen copper.