Does that mean we can stop keeping mouth wash and deodorant behind lock and key on store shelves and resume locking up the criminals making messes of our cities?
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In short, no, they won't stop locking it up. They wouldn't even if there was a decline in petty crime... those locks are so that they can staff the store with 2 people instead of 5.
Maybe in some cases that's true, but it's definitely not true for the few big box stores I frequent in SF where this practice occurs. The Target on 4th street has significantly more staff running around constantly unlocking things and tending to this sort of b.s. than they would otherwise. I'm not sure who pays for the tactical gear wearing security guards at the entrance looking ready for Iraq, but it can't be cheap.
About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.
After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.
He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.
The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.
This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.
If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.
Are you certain, or were they running 3 people ragged who will burn out in a month and quit? Constant motion can make it seem like there are more people, but I also remember the 1990s and seeing at least one person per department in a Kmart, some just monitoring their area. A bigbox store like Target would've had 2 people for the cash registers up front, at least one in customer service, and one per department during off-peak hours. If you're telling me you're seeing a dozen people for certain, I'll believe you, but I am wondering if it wasn't actually fewer.
And besides all that, I was thinking more along the lines of CVS and Walgreens, which are the stores I know of locking everything behind glass.
This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).
More staff won't solve theft significantly because thieves carry the target merchandise to a less securely monitored area of the store. If they see an employee in an aisle, they'll move down another aisle where there isn't. And you can't have a person everywhere.
If anything, putting something behind glass increases staff because we have to keep that area covered as much as possible so we get those sales.
"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
Wouldn't wish my worst enemy to be held in the CCJ, though. Easily one of the worst detention facilities in the USA.
Simply obeying the 8th amendment would have fixed everything, and so much better too.
In some cases, high bail was used because judges were pussies who refused to deny bail to those who were actual threats to the public (see this alot whenever you hear bullshit about some killer whose bail is set at $5 million or whatever). Other times, it was just the status quo, and judges were giving no real consideration to the problem.
Probably, but why should that matter?
>If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped
So you mean that charges that don't matter are often pressed anyway, because prosecutors have a cheat code to short circuit the long and arduous process of trial which is supposed to be long and arduous? No thanks.
If they could prosecute fewer cases, then they would pick the ones that mattered. Last time I did grand jury duty, it was 40 cases every day, most of them bullshit drug possession charges.
Or maybe, maybe they really do have so many important cases that this would become a problem. Then it should become a problem, so the public is forced to realize it must fund a more robust judicial system that can handle that high load. Either way, I do not want prosecutors using plea deals. And you shouldn't either.
>"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."
There was a slow day at the grand jury, and the assistant DA was talking to us jurors. Claimed that our small city had about 4000 cases per year, and only 30 or so ever went to trial. How can justice be served if that's the case? He certainly thought that he was doing justice, but some of those people were just pleading out so that they could put an end to the nonsense, and not out of any true guilt. Whether they were forced to go to trial so that they would be then compelled to assert their (true) innocence, or whether the prosecutor would just stop making up bullshit charges, we'd all be better off. He genuinely thought of trials as some sort of fun distraction instead of what it really was... the entire point of his job. It was fucked up.
The trouble with our world isn't that there aren't solutions, it's that when someone proposes them, they sound outlandish to people who subconsciously want the problems to persist.