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Vancouver homeless have nothing on San Francisco homeless. A&W halberd? I'll raise you a McDonald's raccoon corpse. Hand separation by machete? Have a do-gooder who invited a homeless man into his home for shelter and ended up dismembered in a fish tank. And we exalt them enough that we don't even punish them:
And:
The question of why things are the way they are is a good one, and I think it just comes down to costs. It is expensive to impose costs on the homeless: you have to get involved physically with them to impose any kind of penalty. If things go awry (which they inevitably will), you end up with either a dead police officer (costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars) or a dead homeless guy (costing the city millions of dollars). And, when arrested, they are just an endless pit you throw cash into. Put them in prison, and you're talking a process and punishment that itself costs hundreds of thousands. Letting them wreak havoc on the local populace has its own costs, but those are diffuse and don't immediately harm the government budget: it's a tragedy of the commons.
The non-homeless, though, are cash cows who are easily... cowed. So the city focuses a disproportionate amount of its law enforcement capabilities on them, and it's self sustaining. Sure, SF might shrug at someone being murdered and dismembered, but that's because they have to focus on much more serious issues like a businessman spraying down a homeless woman with a hose, which gets everyone from the NAACP to the New York Times weighing in.
What the hell? They were released? At minimum, they are plainly guilty of trespassing on property that isn't theirs. And there's good reason to suspect them of murder (in my opinion they definitely murdered the guy, but due process and all that) so they should be held for an impending trial for both those things. That's the minimum that needs to happen here. What kind of feckless idiot was in charge of that situation, that they went "eh let em go"? Is it always that bad in SF these days, or was this some kind of isolated incident based on a particular DA (or whoever) being bad at his job?
The DA at the time was Gascon, who's usually described as "would be the most lenient DA of San Francisco of all time, if not for his successor Boudin."
If I recall correctly, after a wellness check by police (who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer, and decided, well, I guess that means he's fine), the vagrants got spooked and used the victim's credit card to hire a professional cleaning company (named, appropriately enough, Aftermath Services) to fix up the mess. This destroyed most of the evidence, though not the dismembered body in a fish tank.
I suspect there are also aspects of the circumstances which would complicate the case. Why would someone let a homeless vagrant live in his house with him? Absolutely everyone, even (or especially, really) in San Francisco, knows this is a really bad idea. But, to add some color, Brian Egg was a single man who worked as a bartender at a gay bar. My speculation is that this was actually an exchange of sexual favors for housing. In this type of situation, with no witnesses or material evidence, it'd be easy enough for the vagrant to claim the homicide was in self-defense against a rapist. And who knows, might even be true; even if so, the killing, dismembering, covering up, and other crimes would be enough for me to convict.
But that makes this an absolute stinker of a case. It would be salacious, the public would project whatever their own opinions are onto it, and the jury would get confused about what they're supposed to be considering. Better to just dump the case in a fishtank and hope no one notices.
So was it the cleaning service that found the body and reported it to the police, or did they just assume it was some weird art installation?
The fish tank was tucked away in a small room, which was hidden behind some furniture or something.
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Supposedly the neighbors called again when the cleaners came. A crime-cleaning business probably doesn't get good reviews for calling in the crimes you want cleaned up.
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This reminds me of the sad story of Kai, who found himself in a similar circumstance and also murdered his host.
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Oh certainly, other cities have it bad too and I didn't intend to present Vancouver as a uniquely bad locus of dark forces. Certainly no dismembered people in fhish tanks. It's just that Vancouver suddenly became medieval, I found it strange, funny, worthy of weaving the narrative around.
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That story in your link had quite the quote
“ Scott Free was also a neighbor and good friend”
We definitely live in a simulation
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I think this is true, but I think it's also very important to be clear exactly why there are the costs there are - I think they're far from inevitable.
From Tanner Greer's piece in Palladium, A School of Strength and Character
"When Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his reports on America for a French readership, he recalled that “In America, there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.” Yankee agency became an object of fascination for him: “Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted,” Tocqueville told his readers, then “neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.” This marked a deep contrast with the French countryside Tocqueville knew best, where the locals left most affairs to the authorities."
The whole piece is worth reading, but I think the case is strong that, in reality, whatever was good and useful about decentralized democratic power, it has been largely drained by the rise of 20th century managerialism going hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights revolution (which in practice has made lots of basic democratic self-government entirely illegal). Or as Greer also states, "The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?”" I think this stuff also dovetails nicely with James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State". If you're allowed to solve your problems in tacit, illegible ways, a lot of problems are actually pretty simple to solve, and they respect the Gods of the Copybook Headings too, so you don't get more of it... which I think was the OPs point. But if the entire power of the remote state requires that everything be legible... well. Costs clearly skyrocket, and massive amounts of inertia and veto points kick in. (This also clearly mirrors the experience of working in a motivated, small, mission-focused startup versus working at a giant, wealthy, extremely hierarchical corporation, for similar reasons).
I think after much of the experience of the 20th century, a lot of people in the most "civilized" places have just internalized a massive degree of fatalism about everything. Everyone knows, really, how to solve these problems. It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all.
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