Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, accused me of unethical reporting(radleybalko.substack.com) |
Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, accused me of unethical reporting(radleybalko.substack.com) |
I think both sides of this conflict (Tan and Radley) are talking past each other and scoring points for their respective sides; Radley is famously an advocate of progressive prosecutors, and Tan (IIRC) worked to remove Boudin. I don't expect a totally accurate and balanced retelling from either side, in the same way that you should not expect a completely neutral report on inner-ring suburban housing policy from me (I'm a housing activist).
But I did come away from this with a lower opinion of Boudin's office.
(For what it's worth, I was extremely optimistic about the wave of progressive prosecutors led by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and while I have some Radley Balko issues, I've been reading John Pfaff on this stuff for a decade. What's happened to my worldview since then is that I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues. I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship; we tried this in Chicago and didn't get that.)
† btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
Huh, I went through a similar journey in New York, starting as an advocate of criminal-justice reform and then getting fed up with the incompetence.
And while I wouldn't say ideological inflexibility is ideology per se, one of the contributors to ineffectiveness I saw in New York was a simultaneous inability to tolerate competent people with even slightly-divergent viewpoints (and there were a lot of red lines–I don't know what multidimensional beast could thread them), or, alternatively, an inability to fire or beach clearly-incompetent people because they were part of a priority community. (Read "community" broadly. It might be an identity. It was more often whatever union or local progressive club the person cropped up through.)
All discussion of the 'Misrepresentations' article is responsive to Gary's mention of it in the original article. And at no point does Radley appear to endorse its contents.
So, first, no, I feel like I'm saying the opposite of "they're dumb". I don't think either Foxx or Boudin are dumb. I think they're both interesting people with interesting and valuable views.
When I say "basic competence issues", I'm talking about the kinds of things that would go wrong if, like, you or I took over the CCSAO and started managing all the prosecutions in Cook County. For instance: having huge numbers of line prosecutors resign, in part because you totally fuck up the promotion ladder, in part because you shift staffing priorities away from line prosecution and towards internal policy positions, and in part because you fail to sell your immediate-term vision for how you're going to manage the agency.
The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency. These prosecutor offices were incredibly strained before people like Boudin and Foxx got there. Which means: there was already an extent to which prosecution decisions were being made not just on justice, safety, or public policy more broadly, but simply on a triage basis.
When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
What's more frustrating is that Foxx was doing this at the same time as Illinois was rolling out SAFE-T, which ended cash bail in Illinois. I am wholeheartedly in favor of SAFE-T, and I think by-default cash bail is an idiotic system that unnecessarily amplifies the societal cost of law enforcement. But SAFE-T was ultra-controversial in Chicagoland, and Foxx went through all this stuff while people were freaking out daily about catch-and-release. It didn't help that all of this coincided with a huge regional increase in carjackings, the second most important urban index crime after murder. It further didn't help that she was accused of refusing to prosecute juvenile carjackers, and that when confronted by reporters about that, she didn't have a clear denial.
I hope this reads as I intend it to, which is: not ideological, just an assessment about whether someone is prepared to step in and run the office, most of which is boring and just needs to be done correctly.
(I think you can probably look at Krasner as an example of a prosecutor who has avoided these traps.)
Strongly inclined to hire such a prosecutor. Has this model been successfully deployed in any large U.S. cities? My only experience is watching it struggle in a medium one.
On your last point: given the ethical responsibility of a prosecutor, I’d go one step further. If you’re the prosecutor for a jurisdiction where a journalist works, and you make any statement about the legality of the journalists works, you better be substantially likely to secure a conviction, otherwise you should mind your business.
(I have feelings here because we're in a mini-spat between our PD and our terrible local newspaper, which is upset that our chief won't give them an interview after the local police union gave her a no-confidence vote; where I live, that vote is, reasonably, viewed as a sign she's doing the job well. But either way: she's not going to give an interview on this!)
Are we reading the same document?
The first example is almost a perfect example of what's stated in TFA. Lim is incredibly aggressive in making her argument, and not an argument based on real evidence.
Scanning through the rest, it reads as much the same.
Direct gdrive link for those who don't want to go back and scroll through the article again: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VZKYxe0oGq7HeC5Kj2lxf-X55r4...
edit:
> At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
Ehhhhh. I diagree with that reading. There's a clarification bullet point two lines down from the headline bullet (page 3). Emphasis mine.
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
I read this as the unauthorized source is violating HIPAA. But I guess neither of us are lawyers. So...
I'm confused where this came from. I cannot find this link in the original article as submitted:
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/truth-power-and-honest-jo...
The most I can find is "But I found another place where someone has posted all 81 pages. It’s here. Feel free to look them over."
Where "here" links to:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21011168-responsive-...
That is the 81 page PDF referred to multiple times in the article and is titled "Responsive Records Lim - Balko correspondence_Redacted". I don't see "HIPAA" appear in it anywhere. Toward the end of that document on page 69 is a screenshot of a text that includes a Word attachment titled "Dion Lim Misrepresentati...". After that are screenshots that are excerpts of the gdrive document that you linked, but the HIPAA accusation is not in any of those screenshotted excerpts.
So how did tptacek even come across the HIPAA accusation, and how did you find the document that you linked that contains it?
Edit: ah, it's linked from this sentence "But in the interest of transparency, I’m posting it as well. You can read it here." where "here"[^1] links to the gdrive document.
Sheesh.
[^1]: Pet peeve - you've failed HTML 101 if you use "here" as a link. A few sentences earlier in that paragraph is the text that should've been the link text: 'the “Dion Lim Misrepresentations” document that Tan mentions in his post'.
Anyway, possibly poorly-worded title aside, it is made clear that Lim was receiving information from someone that clearly was violating HIPAA laws.
Here is the text:
Dion Lim Violates HIPAA Rights of a Victim of Violence & Invades Her Privacy
• Dion Lim released an x-ray of the victim of a stabbing—without the victim’s permission, in a clear violation of the victim’s HIPAA and privacy rights.
o She claimed online that she had her grandson’s permission, but there is no indication he was authorized to grant consent on her behalf—and he was not the one to provide the photo, which she made clear in a tweet explaining she showed the x-ray to him, “and explained the decision to share it” as part of pressure to ensure the case was prosecuted.
▪ This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
• In connection with that same case, Ms. Lim posted video of the brutal stabbing.
o Despite the DA’s Office’s press release referencing the victim’s request for privacy (which was reiterated at the May 7, 2021 press conference in which Ms. Lim was present), she has not taken down this post.
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
The only way to read that sentence as an accusation of Lim violating HIPAA would be to read it and conclude that she was both “an unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA” and also the reporter that the unauthorized source shared the information with (in violation of HIPAA, the law)
Calling the whole document “Trumpian” is kind of extreme when the criticism is “There’s an ambiguous phrase in it and I will not be addressing the clarifying language a couple sentences away from it” or “I think this lawyer meant ‘statutes’ when he wrote ‘rights’ which I imagine makes him wrong”
Political achievement via moral/ethical/legal means does not work. We expect a single person with extremely limited power to assume a relatively minor position in government, then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong? It's nearly impossible. Progressives need to return to the good old days of corruption and coercion if they want to get anything done.
No, we expect them to do like one thing right without bungling the basics. The track record of the pre-pandemic era wave of progressive prosecutors was some combination of doing absolutely jack shit in the first category and/or being asked for table stakes on the latter and swallowing their chips.
How can you reasonably expect to be viewed as an objective reporter of facts if you also are acting as a commentator trying to shape public opinion?
>The DA’s office, which should have been prosecuting the people attacking Asian Americans, was orchestrating a media hit on the journalist covering those attacks.
A reporter being in contact with the prosecutors office and getting their view is a core part of the reporters job. It would be malpractice for them not to be getting that view on this story. To characterise it as the government "orchestrating a media hit" is just flatly wrong. It's just straight up defaming a journalist for doing their job.
And this is a consistent trend in silicon valley - that reporting they don't like is actually just corruption. This is a fundamentally anti free speech view and it's toxic and you see it all over silicon valley.
What a rather unpleasant business.
I mean, kind of? You can definitely point at certain quantified types of crime falling since Boudin left office in 2022: https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s... . (Of course progressives wave their hands and say, it's random, or caused by structural oppression, or whatever.) And Lurie seems to be taking steps in a reasonable direction as well. The Board of Supervisors is still packed with nuts, of course.
Or part of a nationwide trend that couldn’t possibly be caused by Boudin or Tan
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-re...
How is this even legal? Surely the article means it’s a company focused on stories relating to Asian Americans, regardless of the race of the author.
Title VII doesn’t apply to independent contractors. If you want to argue that authors should count as their publisher’s employees, go sue TSB in some complicit jurisdiction.
Since the bodycam rollout however, we're inundated with videos of justified police actions, over and over again. Proving that most criminals are indeed retarded, unable to follow simple commands and escalate minor stuff into full violance, necessitating the use of force against them.
Balko now of course sees bodycams as propaganda or "copaganda".
Utterly biased "reporting", starting with an agenda and then trying to prove the point by any means possible.
Go Gary.
When people tell you who they are, listen to
In this case, there’s no way this story would be considered worthy of front page placement if it wasn’t about a YC exec. We’ve overridden usual moderation policies and signals to keep it on the front page, as per our longstanding policy.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I would categorically disagree with your statement.
Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg
All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.
Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.
He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity. Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.
One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.
I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet which would indirectly force the decision to leave Amazon onto their drivers. A depreciating stock price means their corporate RSU grants look less attractive, which I speculate would make working at Amazon less attractive, leading to worse talent and declining company performance. If a decline was to happen in this way there would probably be more demands on drivers, potentially decreasing demand for the job as the whole, and leaving the drivers who stay behind in worse conditions.
Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.
I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.
You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.
Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.
Directors of small companies are the same, they're just not wealthy enough that they could do any harm.
Firstly, you will have the people who will praise your diamonds and everything and make you lose touch with reality.
But there would also be the more subtler ones whom you actually consider friends. there can be two things that you meet some people before hand and judge them or were already rich before having such friends, but even then the first group might just change knowing that you are now extremely rich and might want subtle favours and so act subtly different.
In a nutshell, I feel like extremely rich people might not know how people actually think of them because we have commoditized everything to money,opportunities and networks and in some sense, they are unable to trust their own real instincts too.
Also we are forgetting the fact that these people would change with so much external influences too and that some people would stop after a certain point so as to they will not reach the scale of billions but rather stop at millions.
All of these factors combined make for the most egotistical machines.
just a few thoughts on extremely rich people, South park creators seem to be one of the exceptions for me and it seems like those guys are just two friends who just like doing what they do and even said a massive fuck you to paramount even on television.
Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.
The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.
Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).
To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.
To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.
>Boudin ... alleged... that the campaign was largely a Republican effort to remove him from power. Despite Boudin's claims, the recall campaign was publicly led by Democrats. 83% of donors to the campaign were from Democratic-registered voters or no-party-preference voters, with over 80% of donations coming from local San Franciscans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin)
There's quite a lot on the reasons why in the article.
> In the pro-recall camp, big money makes up a much bigger slice of the pie. Over three-quarters of the total money raised ($4.76 million) has come from $50,000-plus donations, and only 4 percent has come from donations smaller than $1,000.
This doesn't give me a very charitable view of the recall donors. Democrats or not.
(I posted this article with its actual title a few days ago and it didn't pop at all, which is funny I guess)
This document isn’t great, but comparing it to Trump administration actions isn’t great either. As well as focusing on it rather than on a substance of the article in question (which is, about Garry Tan accusations in a first place).
Thank you for your comment though it made me go back and reread the linked text more critically.
Yeah he was just making stuff up.
lmao that nothing that you said is true at all in any way, and was trivial to disprove but you’re sticking to the vibes anyway 8-)
tptacek: “The DA for San Francisco and the DA for Chicago were the same guy and I know that because the SF guy is Trump because I did not read what he wrote and theres a thread about that“
you won capitalism. go away.
> He doesn’t hold dollars, he mostly holds equity.
A distinction without a difference.
> Also it doesn’t seem like he’s directly involved in the day to day tasks assigned to delivery drivers so it’s weird to assign blame to him for that as well.
It’s weird to assign blame to the CEO for a long-standing practice of his company? You’ve got to be kidding? I don’t want to go full Godwin’s law here but Jesus…
> One could argue that if drivers were unhappy with the work, they could just quit. Another would argue that that’s a callous way to view the problem as a new job may not be easy to get.
Yes, “Another” would. Anyone who has existed in the world could tell you that. “Just get another job” is so incredibly tone deaf. It’s up there with “just sue your employer if they are stealing from you/harassing you/etc”.
> I’d link these 2 issues and say my view is that if Bezos were to sell his stock to give to charity, Amazon’s own stock would plummet
Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.
Yes, especially since it would be considered a business minutiae in the grand scheme of things.
> Literally a made up outcome with zero basis in reality. And a rather disgusting defense of his practices “no, no, you don’t understand, he has to be horrible or Amazon will falter and fail and then those people will lose their jobs!”.
I'm curious as to what you think would happen? If schedules were loosened and drivers were paid more, what do you think would be the long-term impact? Tell me how the way you would change things would improve the world.
It’s not really. We are approaching $100k/year in Seattle just to house someone in a tiny home or apartment building as charged to the city/county by local non profits, without any help beyond that (and no guarantee that they wont go out and, for example, shoot a pregnant woman driving a Tesla). Prison/jail is only around $60k/year, in comparison. There must be some corruption going on, but no one in government will even consider it as a possibility.
I can't imagine how it could possibly cost $100k/year to house someone. Rent for a small flat is under $1000/month or you're living in a failed state. Food is definitely well under $1000/month or you're living in a failed state, and everything else like electricity, internet, cellphone is under $500/month though I could be wrong on that one, so that's $30k/year absolute pessimistic max - what's the rest?
Nevermind if this is even a "phenomenon". How about we just pick 2 or 3 issues and actually solve those first? It's very clear that we are at best spreading ourselves thin and at worst being distracted by everything in a malicious attempt to flood the zone. We aren't angry enough at any single issue as a result.
Pick 2-3 main issues, and just spend an entire year tackling those. Easier PR, easier accountability.
And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost. Of course, when word gets out that people are forced to pee in bottles, he suddenly wants to change things, not because he cares about the conditions that led to it, but because it damages his image.
You have to say "Deliveries should be as efficient as is consistent with basic decency, anyone delivering Amazon packages will have breaks and schedules that are reasonable and achievable", in the same way that he mandated APIs[1]
It's a huge mistake to confuse that kind of deep cultural Christianity with what has been politically ascendant for a long time now in the US. That older, European set of values is still much more alive in say Sweden, which despite an even higher per capita rate of billionaires would not produce Garry Tan or Bezos or Musk.
I guess it’s not illegal to have a publishing house that promotes white authors. I’m no expert in that area.
I think people got this misconception that affirmative action was legal because universities practiced it. But the EEOC guidance for example has been consistent since the Carter administration. “Under Title VII, there is no separate legal concept of ‘reverse discrimination.’ Discrimination against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin violates Title VII.”
The only exception was that employers who had practiced segregation could take measures to undo the effects of that in their workplace. That’s what “affirmative action” meant. It was not sanctioned as way to address perceived disparities in society at large.
Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.
Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.
So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.
The existence of the fourth estate is the existence of a political actor in tension with the others.
"COUNT 2 (Conspiracy to Wrongfully Obtain and Disclose Individually Identifiable Health Information) 19. Paragraphs 1-3 and 5-18 of Count 1 of this Superseding Information are hereby realleged and incorporated as though set forth in full herein. 20. At all times relevant to this Superseding Information: a. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) protects individually identifiable health information from wrongful disclosure or obtainment and seeks to set national standards to maintain patient confidentiality. b. In connection with HIPAA, the United States Department of Health and Human Services enacted regulations to safeguard the privacy of patients’ medical records and limit circumstances in which individually identifiable health information or protected health information can be used or disclosed. The HIPAA law and privacy regulations apply to, among others, health care providers, such as medical doctors, who transmit health information in connection with a transaction covered by the law and privacy regulations. c. Frank Alario, who is listed as a co-conspirator with respect to Count 2 of this Superseding Information but not as a defendant herein, was a health care provider and a covered entity under the HIPAA law and privacy regulations.
21. From in or about August 2014 through in or about February 2016, in the District of New Jersey, and elsewhere, defendant KEITH RITSON did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with Frank Alario and others to commit offenses against the United States, that is, to knowingly and without authorization obtain individually identifiable health information and protected health information to another person, and to knowingly and without authorization disclose individually identifiable health information and protected health information maintained by a covered entity relating to individuals, contrary to Title 42, United States Code, Section 1320d-6."
Here is another similar case of a non-medical person violating HIPAA.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdtn/pr/memphis-man-sentenced-c...
Take the L :-)
i don't know about you, but i'm pretty confident a DA's office has a much better idea than me about what each of the HIPAA sentences in the document translate to in terms of "allegations".
That's a question about messaging, not the law.
> † btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
> That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking.
you seem to be inferring that the DA has made an allegation of unlawful acts, and that there could be consequences for that allegation. that sort of thing often entails "legal stuff". courts and judges stuff. hence, my spiel on "we are not lawyers".
i believe you stated an *uncharitable* take on the bullet points in the document. my point is that there is another reading. one where the benefit of the doubt is given to the relative experts in law. a sibling in the thread seems to agree that *a* violation occurred, not directly implicating Lim, which implies that they may have read it a similar way to my *charitable* take.
The "everything is politics" meme is old and annoying.
It's just not political for me.
I guess I'm not surprised that this cognitive trap about politics has spread - after all, people care more about deploying any tools they can to "win", rather than being correct.
I can assure you they absolutely are. Of course there isn't a well defined elected government here, but 'social politics' between children are absolutely occurring. Things like looks, material goods, clothes, ability to take care of themselves, etc all affect how they interact with each other and who is popular and gets to take the lead/be bullies/etc.
HN posters can be really clueless to the world around them at times.
What children? What park? The presence of a park pre-supposes a political society that has prioritized parks, the budget to enact those priorities, and the space to do so. Any one of those can spiral into its own political microcosm.
How is that park maintained? Is there a special kids area of the park? Is it "for kids" or is it "The kids area", implying that kids aren't allowed in the rest of the park? Are the children not allowed in the park after a certain time - and who decides that time, and why? Sometimes the park is used for town events, but can get rented out. Who decides that?
Complexity is inherent, from the atoms to the galaxies. Any rejection of that is just plugging your ears, willfully or not.
And I know that you never said anything about ignoring the externalities, that's what I'm saying about you.
I'm commenting on the specific thing Boudin's office (inexplicably) wrote about this particular reporter. I'm not making a grand statement about HIPAA.
(I don't know anything about the reporter other than that they worked for ABC7 in SFBA and not like GatewayPundit).
A functioning justice system MATTERS and being trustworthy is one of the core requirements for a functioning justice system.
There is also a broader question of how to properly handle what are, quite honestly, likely bad-faith actors — the journalist in this case. Should the office simply ignore the smearing campaign and the lies? Maybe. But this is already an issue even before accounting for the significant amount of money — pushed by a very small number of people — being spent against the attorney’s office.
I think both are right - shouldn't ignore crime and should be responsible in addressing it.
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
"Defund the police" didn't poll well so the progressive prosecutors who actually got elected were the ones who didn't admit that they were going to have to tear things down and start over (and maybe they didn't even realize it), but it was a very unsurprising outcome.
This isn't really a statement on Boudin did or did not do since I don't have that knowledge but rather from separate experience seeing law enforcement shit itself during other elections.
It's like writing a PR/MR every day [by hand] and having it declined every day, eventually you stop.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! God so many people don't "get" this. Engineering leaders that come in and create and exodus of senior leaders, same thing. I started calling it organizational momentum. The speed at which you get things done, goes up as the organization gets to understand itself. A bunch of key people leave and BAM momentum goes to zero and suddenly all the milestones you are missing are putting all the wrong pressure on the org to get moving again.
> When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
So, circumstances were making prosecutorial decisions, and the new DA efforts to make fundamental changes did not fix those circumstances, and therefore all changes they made were considered to cause that state.
The office wasn't running. It is not the fault of the new guy that it keeps not running.
A problem I see all the time in these kinds of public policy debates is that people have ideological rooting interests. That isn't going to get you anywhere in a debate about a major metro prosecutor's office. You can't project out "this person was progressive therefore they were good" and you can't do "this person is a law-and-order tough-on-crime prosecutor so they're good" either. It's a very difficult job. Notably: I think you'd have a hard time finding credible people who believe Foxx did a good job in her office.
Or like, in your example (to be clear I defer to you entirely on the facts), not only would Foxx have to be a competent State's Attorney, she'd have to be competent at changing a system that's not ideal for her into one that is, e.g. by persuading existing staff, hiring new staff, etc.
This is by no means impossible--it's called leadership. My hot take, more or less, is that if you get someone into office who shares your values but can't make the office execute those values, not only will you fail but you'll tarnish your political movement for... a good long time, so competence is actually more important than values alignment.
My even hotter take is that people used to know this. When people from minority groups or political persuasions got power (women, LGBTQ people, racial/ethnic/religious minorities, ideological/philosophical minorities, etc) they knew they were modeling for everyone in their group. Is it fair? No. Is it reality. Super yes! Is whining about unfairness good politics and/or attractive at all? Super no!
Can you comment on why this is? Is it because it's common? Or so visibly impactful?
Importantly: the carjacking wave wasn't Foxx's fault (it was in fact Kia's fault). She was in an incredibly tough position --- she also had to deal with Chicagoland police departments that have not covered themselves in glory over the last 20 years. But she didn't rise to the challenge.
Is it that it’s a “gateway crime” to full on carjacking? You get away with a few joy rides in a Kia and get bold enough to do an armed carjacking of someone’s SUV while they load their kids up in the alley garage?
Carjacking is up there with murder for “scary” urban crime because it’s violent and anyone can imagine being a victim. Having your car stolen off the street overnight doesn’t really elicit the same visceral response.
Add in the CPDs general “no chase” policy (mostly a good thing for harm reduction) plus a bunch of largely juveniles posting on social media the dangerous driving stunts they were pulling on social media to really amp up the fear and outrage. Even if it were mostly for show, no prosecutor is going to survive an election if they come across as soft on that style of crime.
I leave my keys in my car and don’t lock my front door. That isn’t because of the local prosecutor. But it’s not to their demerit. If my car were stolen, I’d still expect them to at least do some work.
How do you as an elected official change the culture of a rotten institution, that the public wants reformed but is engaged in vital public service who can simply stop doing the work if you piss them off?
I don't know. I feel like so many of our institutions are rotten these days and attempt at reform are sabotaged and/or cause backlashes.
A lot of people want everything, immediately, and seem to believe maximalist approaches are no more politically dangerous than more incrementalist ones. They're wrong: prioritization is a thing, and pragmatism and realism about what you can accomplish isn't a sign of selling out but of wanting to be an effective agent of change.
And once you succeed at the first tranche of easier wins, you've built up the trust, skills, and political capital to take on the second tranche. Rinse and repeat.
Successfull minimalist beneficient reforms will be maligned as much as possible, to prevent subsequent beneficient reforms. Simple as that.
Lots of organizations are riven with corruption (exhibit A: every fire department). Doesn't mean you can fuck them up, at least not if you want to matter in public policy for long. This is a difference between message boards and reality.
>The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency.
Your whole point is (aside from Chicago and San Francisco being interchangeable to the extent that Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin are functionally the same person) “if you don’t keep your ideological detractors happy and employed then you’re doing a bad job.” That’s just another way of saying that culture change isn’t feasible
You could make the argument that it discourages them from making the effort, but they're still getting paid and supported by my tax dollars and so should do their damn job.
If they’re getting away with it, with YouTube views to boot, it is* sport.
This seems pretty self evident.
(I have two carjackings on camera from behind my old house, where we had a Nest camera. One thing I learned from that: anybody who thinks carrying a firearm is a realistic defense against a carjacking is in fantasyland. You don't get even a split second to react; the encounter begins with a gun in your face.)
No-chase is absolutely the right policy for a dense urban area. Every once in awhile where I live we get trustee candidates promising to bring chases back, and I have to wonder what they're smoking.
Oh, I misunderstood the term. I thought you meant randos who steal cars.
This strikes me as the sort of violent crime that should be aggressively followed and punished.
> No-chase is absolutely the right policy for a dense urban area
Drones?
> Carjacking relies on burner cars; they drive up near victims, 2 people get out and rush the car, and then both cars speed off
Ah yeah, I forgot about this part. Makes sense. I also happen to have two (well, 1.5 - only caught the drive-away for one of them as the actual carjacking happened down the block) carjackings on my home cameras in the immediate post-COVID era. It happened in a similar manner here in one of the "very safe" neighborhoods of Chicago with burner cars. One of the burners was another stolen Mercedes - so I guess it's likely turtles all the way down until a KIA.
> Drones?
We have giant human-operated ones here in Chicago (helicopters) with at least one in the air seemingly all the time (according to my desktop ADS-B display). These coupled with the various traffic cameras spread all around seem to do a fairly effective job of tracking a stolen car if the police care enough to respond in time. Of course it's limited in the number of "chases" and available manpower.
Not sure why drones haven't made more of an entrance to this space. I think partly police union/labor issues, and partly the size of a drone needed to be useful enough (station keeping and response time) for the task would tend to look at lot like military surveillance drones. I vaguely remember some noise about about CPD trialing something like this, or it could have simply been "partnering" with Federal agencies during various recent protest activity. These are MQ-9 Reapers and similar drones in the class and they have been deployed over the city in recent memory.
I'm not sure giving CPD that capability is a great idea overall. If they end up having one or two drones in the sky 24x7 as a matter of course, surveillance concerns and abuse opportunities multiply. At least with the helicopters there is a large manpower and financial cost involved, and it's usually very obvious when one is deployed in your area due to noise.