Ask yourself: why do public defenders have a tiny fraction of the budget of prosecutors?
So without proper charges judge cannot do anything but release. Police cannot do anything but arrest.
Prosecutors are the main line of defense (defending public from criminals).
It’s used for surveillance in the truest sense
Heaven forbid you are on someone’s watchlist, they will just track your movement across the city
This isn’t some fake CSI pop dream - this kind of tech isn’t used to catch the people breaking into your house
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/she-got-abortion-so-te...
People who are “soft on crime”, practically speaking, are the people and politicians so committed to dehumanizing others that they’d rather watch their neighbors wallow in poverty or rot in jail than to actually do something to address the root causes (the foremost of which being the aforementioned societal dehumanization of the poor).
There's an old saw: A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ [0]
0: https://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sw...
N.B.: there was selection for the worse-off in those coming to the U.S.
That's an exceedingly weak defense for a country that imprisons 4x more people per-capita than China.
China's murder rate is about 0.5 murders per 100,000 people per year, while South Africa's is 44 per 100,000 people per year (assuming both countries report honest statistics). That's an 88x difference between two large countries. [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
You're going to need to back that claim up with statistics
California enacted a law in 2014 that turned all theft under $950 into a misdemeanor instead of a felony (reverted last year). Theft became so common that police wouldn't even respond to theft calls unless it was over $950, which enboldened theives. During covid especially, entire stores would be looted and robbed constantly.
When people were caught, the judges would often give them minimal sentences, and release them over and over. Then the same people would commit more crimes because they knew the judges were lienent.
I'm not saying every single person fits into this box, but it's common enough to be recognized as a trend that happens in liberal areas. Los Angeles, Oakland are prime examples.
So all states with $1000 Felony cutoffs or higher should have this issue, right?
So why don't they?
You know the National Retail Federation had to stop posting their annual shrink numbers after they demonstrated that shoplifting was not meaningfully higher than previous years.
Those other places are just lying they don't have clean streets and stores without bars over the windows they're secretly just like us we have the numbers to prove it!
Everyone has an annecdote. "it's common enough to be recognized as a trend" is equally justification for racial profiling, and at least racial crime statistics are easily citable. And you still haven't even put forth that modicum of effort.
I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't put words in my mouth. I never once suggested racial profiling as acceptable, and I wasn't insinuating it either. I know you were just using it as an adjacent example, but I don't appreciate that.
I'm just giving my experiences man, I lived in Los Angeles for years. Have you ever been here or lived here? There is very little respect for the law because the law is not enforced. I'm not saying I have all the answers, it's just what I've noticed.
I'm not trying to be rude, and I'm not a stupid bot. Am I not allowed to have a point of view and express it?
I'm just saying there's a predictable result when you express it with the level of detail and amount of effort that you _did_. And frankly, your comments are no better than pre-reasoning era LLM rage-bait.
What level of engagement are you looking for here; support for your lack of citations, or "yeah that's also my personal experience rah rah"?
I'm having a meta-level discussion, if you can't tell. I'm not "putting words in your mouth", I'm trying to discuss: the quality of your discussion. I'm discussing the quality of your arguments and your evidence. If you think that "racial profiling" is too hot, substitute in something else; that's not the point.
It's totally fine if those talking points resonate with you, but it makes me sad that you don't have the mental capability to actually think about what the career path of a judge entails, what kind of room for decision making they have, and what kind of trade-offs they might need to consider in order to adjust the punishments.
Ignorance is bliss.