I read the Atlantic article that Miguel covered in his post, They do not think like regular people.
He focused on the woman stealing the packages but thought that her actions were justified and not wrong because she was in need.
I agree with him, but the lesson that I took away is that nobody in San Francisco thinks like a regular person.
Still, some residents, like Margett, said they were attracted to the diversity in a city that is hemorrhaging people who don’t earn tech paychecks. Margett said Potrero welcomed her, a white woman and a proud lesbian sporting a Mohawk ponytail (“The pulse of the neighborhood, to me, is more important than petty crime”), and the neighbors have dealt with the glaring disparities in their own ways. Every week, Margett picks up donations from big-box stores to take to homeless shelters; she also puts them on the bench in front of her house, free for the taking. A union-leader neighbor, Jason Rosenbury, showed the person he suspected of stealing his succulent plants a Nest recording of the heist, and said he wouldn’t report it to the police if he got the plants back. Upon their return, he glued new pots to the concrete to avoid further strife. “I’m a full-blown socialist,” he told me, “but I’m also for law and order.”
That means that she is fine with stealing, just that the stealing is to be done by bureaucrats and not people on the street. Or more specifically, she doesn’t want her stuff stolen, but if Zuckerberg’s stuff if stolen, she doesn’t care.
The problem here is that it is a trickle-down ideology. The same moral justification she has for socialism is the same moral justification Fairley used to justify her porch theft.
When I visited Margett, she said that in her interaction with Fairley, the charged dynamic of “white-privileged homeowner” versus “someone who is barely making it” was not lost on her, yet she didn’t consider herself a bigot for calling out what she deduced was petty crime. “One is always so concerned about not wanting to appear that way, and then I’m second-guessing myself—Maybe I did leap to that conclusion because she’s African American,” she recalled. “But no! I know what I saw.”
It’s all social justice until it’s her stuff that got ripped off.
As soon as it is the police enforcing the law, you know that Margett is out ranting and raving and screaming at them.
Currently, 17 percent of American homeowners have a smart video surveillance device, and unit sales are expected to double by 2023. (Fairley was caught on Nest and another cam called Kuna, and several neighbors filmed her on their phones.) The popularity of these devices has led to the “porch pirate gotcha” film genre, a sort of America’s Funniest Home Videos of petty crime.
Even so, Sierra Villaran, a San Francisco deputy public defender who handled Fairley’s case early on, has seen how social media’s rabble-rousing still leads to profiling of minorities and the poor. One of her clients, a Latino man, was arrested after a resident mistook him for someone recorded by their Ring device. (He was later released.) Not only does an arrest go on an innocent person’s record and potentially subject her to the use of force, Villaran said, it makes the accused feel like the cops will take the word of accusers, who are usually wealthier, over their own. Neighborhood surveillance and social media aren’t “adding quality to their life, making them any more safe.”
To the San Francisco deputy public defender, your desire to keep your home safe and protect your property with cameras is classist and racist and you are a bigot.
Ring maintains that offering the discount makes the device more affordable, but Maass countered that, even with tax-subsidized rebates, “things like doorbell cameras are not a purchase someone would make if they already have trouble putting food on the table.” The cheapest doorbell costs $99, before rebates; the ability to store or review footage after the fact runs another $30 to $100 a year. “Does that mean that police are protecting the property of affluent communities more than the property of poor communities?” Maas asked.
Having a security camera is (white) privilege and using that security camera to alert the police when some poor minority rips you off is your (white) privilege showing.
Poor, desperate people should have the ability to steal what they need without some bigot using his doorbell cam to record the evidence for the police.
Stings and porch-pirate footage attract media attention—but what comes next for the thieves rarely gets the same limelight. Often, perpetrators face punishments whose scale might surprise the amateur smart-cam detectives and Nextdoor sleuths who help nail them. In Jersey City, the bait-box operation netted 16 arrests in 10 days. Offenders may be routed to drug treatment and housing, according to police emails to Amazon; those with previous convictions could be eligible for jail time.
Oh no, how terrible that people who steal stuff go to jail. We can’t have that, that will only lead to fewer thefts.
In December, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas announced an enforcement campaign called Operation Porch Pirate. Two suspects were arrested and charged with federal mail theft. One pleaded guilty to stealing $170.42 worth of goods, including camouflage crew socks and a Call of Duty video game from Amazon, and was sentenced to 14 months of probation.
Not enough, if you ask me.
Another pleaded guilty to possession of stolen mail—four packages, two from Amazon—and awaits sentencing of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Russell, the blond woman in Dallas, ended up on two years of probation. The California legislature is considering a bill that would elevate porch piracy to a burglary charge; it would be a misdemeanor or a felony based, in part, on the suspect’s criminal history.
California is going to drop that like a flaming dog turd. If they can let some store get ripped off for $950 worth of merchandise in a single run, they won’t bust people for stealing an Amazon Prime box off a porch.
Despite the much higher cost of white-collar crime, it seems to cause less societal hand-wringing than what might be caught on a Ring camera, said W. David Ball, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Did people really feel that crime was ‘out of control’ after Theranos?” he said. “People lost hundreds of millions of dollars. You would have to break into every single car in San Francisco for the next ten years to amount to the amount stolen under Theranos.”
Yeah, until we start throwing CEOs who commit fraud in prison, we should just ignore petty, quality of life crimes. Let middle-class Americans suffer from having their stuff stolen, who cares about them.
In august 2018, Fairley plunked herself behind the defense table for a four-day blur of disputes over Nick’s solar panel battery switch, Daniel’s Apple keyboard, Alexandra’s HelloFresh groceries, Sorcha’s Montessori books, Micaela’s and Elizabeth’s checks, Samantha’s dog’s probiotics, Jennifer’s, Jabari’s, and Brigette’s United credit cards, and, by God, Dell’s hot sauce—representing a total of 23 misdemeanor charges of “petty theft,” “receiving stolen property,” and “mail theft,” plus the drug possession charge for the heroin found in Fairley’s pocket back in August 2016 when this had all started.
The prosecutor, Jennifer Huber, told jurors that the case was “not a whodunit: The defendant was caught red-handed stealing, over and over and over again.” Fifteen neighbors testified, and the prosecutor showed jurors the evidence they’d collected: The photo of Fairley’s daughter sticking her tongue out at Julie Margett. The cellphone video of Fairley sniping “That’s why people get shot” after the gardening neighbor took the lamp box from her. The spat where she’d called Arnold a racist. None of these incidents were charged as crimes but were admitted as evidence of Fairley’s m.o., though Banks, the defense attorney, alleged that the parade of squabbles was just to sully her character.
We can’t point out that a habitual offender is a habitual offender, let alone charge her for those habitual offenses. That’s unfair to the woman who stole things because she was “desperate” and also a heroin addict.
As Banks saw it, Fairley had been caught in a web of surveillance, gentrification, and racism, in which vigilante neighbors targeted her for anything that went missing, when, in fact, many other porch pirates were also stealing in Potrero. She might have stolen some items, but not everything she was being blamed for taking. “This case is about mob mentality and the lowest-hanging fruit,” Banks declared in his opening statement. “And the lowest-hanging fruit in this case is Ms. Fairley.”
Just because a bunch of people who could afford security cameras and Amazon Prime caught the thief stealing stuff over and over again, doesn’t mean she’s guilty. She’s poor, black, and an addict, so everyone else and their doorbell cams are racist.
He emphasized that she was a longtime resident of Potrero, a neighborhood whose rising wealth had alienated her from her own community. (To be fair, while some of the neighbors were relative newcomers, several victims testified that they’d lived in Potrero for decades.) Given that Fairley had been caught on tape stealing several packages, and cops had recovered other items in her possession, some of Banks’s case seemed to rest heavily on the “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, focusing on the fact that several of the victims, such as the man who had lost his subscription hot sauce, had never seen Fairley taking the stolen items:
“Well, I guess, when did you first become aware that this hot sauce was missing?”
“It’s hard to tell. I get them every month. So I don’t know.”
“You don’t know who took the hot sauce?”
“I don’t know who took it. Just, I recognize this”—the sauce found on Fairley—“is definitely my hot sauce.”
(It was.)
Who are you going to believe, the poor minority with the home full of solen stuff or your lying eyes and the racist camera?
As HP said in my previous post about property crime in California, “let it burn.”
I have to agree. We need a wall, and it needs to go from Mexico and cut across the western edge of California’s Central Valley severing the coast from the rest of the US.
The reason that property crime out there is so high is that the Progressive have convinced themselves that right and wrong are flexible concepts.
Theft is okay to them as long as only some people get hurt and being a criminal is just the result of victimhood as long as other conditions are met. Enforcing the law is racist gentrification if the people demanding the enforcement are wealthier and lighter-skinned than the perpetrator.
They have applied every idea of socialism and social justice to get away from “right is right and wrong is wrong” and they are suffering the consequences of it.
Every one of the Lefties handwringing over the use of doorbell cams to capture footage of property theft is as responsible for the crime as the thieves themselves. They are enablers.
Everyone in San Francisco doesn’t think like a normal person which is why the crime rate there is what it is.
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