Rachel Harmon: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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? First of all, I would detach the idea of an arrest from the idea of criminalization and penalizing. I don’t know, again, much about Singapore, although I did spend a week there in 1989. I was sick for most of it. Maybe it was ’90. What we can say is that, if somebody is engaged in behavior that we don’t want, there are lots of ways to address that. One of them is criminal sanction, but the decision to arrest somebody and the decision to sanction them criminally aren’t the same decision. Okay? We didn’t arrest Harvey Weinstein. He was allowed to self-surrender with a pre-negotiated bail package. The only time he ever spent in handcuffs was in walking — before his conviction — walking from the police station to the courthouse after his self-surrender. This was a violent felon. We had evidence that he would be a harm to the public if he was let go. And we didn’t arrest him. I’m not sure we should arrest every low-level offense for possession of marijuana. What’s the importance —…

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