In a bid to address the city's drug crisis — and the crime and homelessness that come with it — San Francisco voters shifted right in Tuesday's primary, approving ballot measures that aim to boost enforcement powers.
One of the worst parts of this, and one that will get people killed, is they loosened the restrictions on police chases. Now police can chase cars for crimes where there's no longer a threat of violence like robbery through the second densest city in the country. People are so indoctrinated by copaganda that they think police chases always end up with the cop catching the bad guy instead of how they usually end, with a fatal crash.
I occasionally get in the police dash cam rabbit hole. It's crazy how most states have realized how dangerous car chases are and don't chase at all. BOLO the car and go arrest them the next day.
Then there Arkansas and Georgia where all the cops are just itching to get into a 130mph chase through neighborhoods willing to pit at any speed risking their life, the suspects life, and the hundreds sometimes thousands of people they go screaming past during a chase.
I used to work for a local TV station and every year they did this thing called "Crimestoppers" where we'd ride along with a cop all night just in case something happened. This is not a huge city, but there's enough crime that something ended up on camera. I didn't hate doing it. I'm no cop-lover, but the guy they paired me with was a good enough conversationalist to talk to all night at least... but I was terrified of ending up in a car chase situation. Cars make me anxious as it is. Thankfully, that never happened.
This kind of opportunistic journalism really makes me skeptical of the value of a lot of our local TV news stations. You're describing the local news using the same production tactics as COPS, a reality TV show...
Was there anything that the crimestoppers program covered that was of sigificant newsworthiness to the community that you remember?
Oh there was no value to the local TV station. It was either boring lifestyle stories or sensationalist bullshit. Also, the lead anchor said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard anyone say. The ISS was passing overhead and we all went out into the parking lot to see it and she looked up and said, "can they see the Earth from up there?" This was who they hired to give what they decided were the important stories of the day.
The pay was also shit.
Oh... there was one notable thing that happened during Crimestoppers. Mainly that the website news guy found out one of his friends had a warrant and warned them by putting out that he was wanted on the website before the cops went after him that night. But that was not on TV. He just got fired.
That same measure also allows the use of drones and other technology to follow and track the suspects, so may not necessarily mean more automobile persuits. We'll have to wait and see I guesa.
The way I always hear it is that they are only ever chasing murderers and violent offenders and you should want them to catch those grandma-killers before they get you, too.
That's how it was before, for the police to chase their had to be a reasonable suspicion that the criminal was in there way to commit another violent crime. So if a robbery happened and the police arrive and the criminal takes off the reasonable assumption is theyre heading back home, not off to commit another violent crime, so the police would not pursue them. Now they can pursue them and endanger all the people on the road just to protect the property of the store owner.
Cop shows and movies distort our perception of them but the reality is that most police chases end in a crash and serious injury if not death. This chance goes up even higher with dense cities with a lot of pedestrians around like San Francisco. So they should only be used if they're preventing someone from murdering or seriously injuring someone else. A car at high speeds is just as , if not more dangerous than a gun and should be used as such.