Rachel Harmon: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But if we look at San Francisco — I was watching the movie Dirty Harry a week ago, set in 1971 in San Francisco. The city was much cleaner in terms of problems on the street. Although crime was higher, it seemed to work much better. There were no cases of people — maybe homeless people — just going into stores, taking things, knowing they won’t be arrested. Citizens have had it up to here. They claim it’s unlivable. Why don’t the police there simply need to be much tougher? Why is that wrong? I don’t know enough about what’s going on in San Francisco, but one of the big problems in San Francisco seems to be radical economic inequality that leads to the underlying problems, which you can’t arrest your way out of. You arrest somebody who walks into a store, and they spend the night in jail, and then they’re back out on the street and homeless again. I don’t know what that arrest achieved in terms of public safety and public order. And I’m not sure that San Francisco would be willing to pay the costs of those arrests, or that it would get them what they want. Inequality is very high in Singapore, but you know there, if you commit a crime, you will be arrested and sent to jail. Why wouldn’t that work for San Francisco?…

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