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I think he just doesn't know how bad it is in a big city today. From my understanding, he's lived in many places around the world including Houston and Los Angeles, but permanently moved to Amsterdam several years ago due to how horrific and car-dependent North America was. (Well, not only that, but because everywhere else was bad too, and the Netherlands was the best - or rather, the least worst, since he still says it's not perfect but better than everything else.) And he's only visited places to either film videos or visit his family back in Ontario, Canada.
Maybe a decade or so ago, the crime was somewhat bad, but he got out of North America then and in the intervening years the crime has only gotten worse. So yeah, he's probably never seen muzzle flashes in the park across the street from his front window. In fact, I think there's a pretty big disconnect between him and the average person in America. From his employment history, he seems to have only ever had jobs being some sort of product management or consultant for tech companies, and never had to, say, work a trade where he needed his own private vehicle. He could easily do his job from home, so even if he moved back to a hotspot of crime in North America, he wouldn't have had to go outside to commute to work and thus potentially risk being shot.
There are a lot of people like this, that have never worked a front line job servicing the general public. Things like gas (service) station attendant, counter staff at McDonalds etc. Working in these positions gives you skin in the game in society and provides real lived experience with the poor and working class. Most people who work these jobs want to move on from them as quickly as they can, because they are horrible. To be fair they want to move on, not just because of working with the general public, but having dealing with management (personalities that made these service jobs their 'careers') and general conditions (hours standing in public view, shift work etc).
I worked as a video store attendant once (back when that was a thing), and I couldn't wait to graduate university. Working corporate with all it's pitfalls was a pleasure cruise compared to dealing with the general public, but I digress.
There is a big disconnect between privileged people being sheltered from the impacts of the policies they are proposing (such as homeless friendly policies in San Fransisco), and those that are exposed to them. People that have to walk to work through crime hot spots and take public transport. They can't wait around for far off utopian solutions to crime like standardising genetic selection for strong impulse control and high G in embryos. They need to use crude measures like policy which allows police to use their monopoly on the use of force, or weakening the monopoly on force to allow them to carry weapons for self defense.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of those front-line people will still vote for people who support the soft on crime policies.
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For what it's worth I haven't used LA public transportation post-COVID. But supposedly it is shockingly bad. Ridership has crashed. Someone dies from fentanyl once every few days. Violent crime rates and deaths have spiked.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains
https://www.dailynews.com/2023/02/24/crime-skyrockets-on-la-metro-system-including-a-jump-in-drug-deaths/
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/abortion-pill-public-transit-moving-on-film-ny-phil/la-metro-crime-drugs
The responsible authorities have assured us that there is no evidence that second hand fentanyl smoke is bad for your health.
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If you haven't been riding North American public transit post-COVID, you might genuinely just not know. It's gotten a lot worse these past few years. So if your reference point is Amsterdam your view is going to be pretty skewed.
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