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Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

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151–160 of 262 posts

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't want to be caught in the cross-fire between a criminal and a layman trying to be a hero.

I know this sounds crazy, but I'd be willing to tolerate a modest number of bystander deaths if it meant a dramatic uptick in the number of criminal deaths. There can't be that many criminals. The steady-state equilibrium might be safer than the current regime, which is that criminals can assault (and kill) with little risk to themselves. Of course I'd like my chance of death-by-bullet to be zero. But for whatever re…

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Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#152

This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding. People don't want to take public transit if they will fear for their lives, or be surrounded by drug addicts and mentally disturbed people yelling at and spitting on other passengers. BART trains and stations are like this on a regular basis; Muni has the same problems but not as bad. I've seen this kind of thing happen on Caltrain late at night also, b…

Is this just an American thing? Healthcare funding, or something? I've never been to SF, but I've visited NYC, and the subway there feels like stepping in to a horror movie. During a two week visit I saw people passing out and being ignored (I was the only one attempting to help), individuals swinging around bricks in socks, and various other obvious examples of severely mentally ill individuals. In London I've never…

Surely it must be.

In my country, our recently former Prime Minister was known to regularly catch trains while going about his government business. Sometimes with a cabinet minister. Sometime on his own. And rarely, if ever, with a visible security detail.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Malcolm+Turnbull+train&tbm=i...

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#153
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we should do absolutely anything other than increasing the number of guns in a crowded, enclosed space.

The more likely it is for criminals to be fatally shot by everyone around them if they try to do anything, the less likely they're going to try --- even if they themselves have a gun, they're going to be outnumbered.

Can we not make baseless claims and back up things especially when they involve justification of a fatal weapon?

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#154
post #92
post #79

The HN demographic skews male, and I suspect a lot of the men who are big fans of public transport here fail to appreciate how unsafe many women feel on those systems.

Yes. There’s a reason that Japan created a new term “Chikan” to describe gropers on trains. It’s exceedingly common. Recent reports, suggest that almost every woman who has used a underground in Japan regularly has been groped at some point. I asked the women in Japan who I know well enough, and they confirmed this. Japan tries to combat this with female only carriages. I was recently talking to a woman in the US abo…

Groping is certainly an issue in Japan, but much less so than in the past. MOJ stats show around 8K cases/year in the sixties and seventies, with that dropping to ~1.5K by 1990 and ~1K in recent years. (Anecdotally it's probably dropped even more than that, as one would expect more cases went unreported in the 60s than today.)

Stats: e.g. http://www.moj.go.jp/content/001178520.pdf

Side note: according to an article I read at some point, women-only train carriages have apparently not noticeably affected statistics on groping cases. (Which is not to suggest they're not worthwhile for other reasons.)

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#155

This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding. People don't want to take public transit if they will fear for their lives, or be surrounded by drug addicts and mentally disturbed people yelling at and spitting on other passengers. BART trains and stations are like this on a regular basis; Muni has the same problems but not as bad. I've seen this kind of thing happen on Caltrain late at night also, b…

Is this just an American thing? Healthcare funding, or something? I've never been to SF, but I've visited NYC, and the subway there feels like stepping in to a horror movie. During a two week visit I saw people passing out and being ignored (I was the only one attempting to help), individuals swinging around bricks in socks, and various other obvious examples of severely mentally ill individuals. In London I've never…

It’s due to a failure to enforce the law. The reason for that failure is needs to be addressed.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the fact that drug dogs at train stations unfairly target poor people and minorities for possession of personal quantities of drugs (traffickers don't take the train), despite rates of drug use being fairly consistent across socio-economic borders. Drug dogs are also generally also inaccurate and respond heavily to their handlers signals, and are therefore susceptible to their handlers biases. They're basically…

unfairly target poor people and minorities How do they train the dogs to recognize which people are poor?

They only have the dogs at stations with in lower socioeconomic areas...

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but a plaintiff's lawyer has an incentive to overstate the problem on the client's behalf. It's irresponsible journalism to just quot this and attribute it to 'lawyer' (a stereo typically responsible person) without mentioning the adversarial context in which the remark is made. 'Plaintiff alleges BART 'a free-for-all' for Criminals' would have been better. The attorney's duty is to maximize the perceived level…

It's true though. Do you ride BART or live in SF or Oakland?

I don't think it is, and yes I do. I'm well aware that crimes happen on BART, someone was murdered at my local station not long ago. But I don't think that 'lawless' is a good description, although many of my journeys take me to stereotypically sketchy stations or occur late at night.

It's because of this subjectivity that I said I hoped the case would turn on a more rigorous definition.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#158

Same is true for San Francisco. Criminals have more rights than children. Or taxpayers... If we are to have a functional civilization we must remain open but also learn how to say no to unacceptable behavior. Especially the egregious. Like you see everyday. People littering, shooting up and shitting on the sidewalk. Meanwhile our legislators are passing laws to limit the amount of restaurants in certain neighborhoods…

You're the second person I've seen to say "Criminals have more rights than children" Where do you get your talking points from?

Criminals can drive, vote, sell their labor, enter contracts, and are free to travel without legal emancipation.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no political group supporting these robbers Sure there are. I know how to easily identify them, too. If, perchance, one of the robbers is shot and killed while committing an armed robbery, look to see which groups are more concerned about punishing the shooter than blaming the criminal. Insofar as this is California, it will be a substantial list.

For all of the protests against police shootings / killings I know of, the protests were due to the fact that the criminal was unarmed and didn't actually pose a threat. Is there really a large political movement against shooting armed criminals?

Yes, there is.

Re: Lawyer: ‘It’s a Free for All’ for Criminals on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)

#160

This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding. People don't want to take public transit if they will fear for their lives, or be surrounded by drug addicts and mentally disturbed people yelling at and spitting on other passengers. BART trains and stations are like this on a regular basis; Muni has the same problems but not as bad. I've seen this kind of thing happen on Caltrain late at night also, b…

> This is why it's hard to get support for public transit funding My fiance and I took the BART two stops to get to civic center to the Trump protests about 2 weeks ago. We saw people selling meth/heroin/etc literally INSIDE the BART station in the public... No one cared. No police around. This happened 2-3 times. We were on for TWO stops. Seriously... BART needs to clean up their fucking act. I associate BART with h…

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