Another aspect to TK's story is that prior to becoming a murderer he was involved as a subject in the "MK Ultra" human experimentation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra

There is a public perception that the effect of this dirty experimentation (that also involved help from good ol' dirty German Nazis, which BTW could not have been any less evil or murderous than TK, but were spared the kind of prison term that he got) was not sufficiently considered during TK's trial and sentencing.

Had there not been the entrenched environment of lawlessness in SF the perpetrator would not have even attempted his attack. And had the victim not been a prominent person the SF police would not have bothered to keep looking.

The only mistake the murderer made here is he underestimated the public outcry that forced the police and the DA to keep investigating in fear of theirs and the city's reputation.

You take those 1500k and put them into some other country and have them do the same thing they did that got them incarcerated in US prison, and unless they are friends with somebody important in the government there they'll get incarcerated there too. Furthermore, in lots of countries selling / smuggling drugs is an executable offense. Furthermore, many of these 1500k would not even be admitted to enter many Euro countries with the low incarceration rates that you envy.

In my view the main problem is not the politicians but the ineffective opaque police that does not have to produce any metrics and is not subject to any kind of oversight, not in SF and not anywhere else either.

For example, I had a car window smashed not in SF but in Fremont, and when I went to the police, they informed me that that is not even an arrestable offense. Window was smashed in front of a hotel with a prominent security camera overlooking the street. The police told me they left a voicemail with the hotel asking if their camera caught anything. The hotel never returned the police voicemail, the police never bothered to follow-up with the hotel, and told me they don't have authority to take the security footage of the public street without hotel's consent. Some time later I noticed that the hotel removed that street-facing security camera they had, leaving just an empty pole.

I wrote a letter to the Fremont city council regarding their police not wanting to work and lying to victims of crime. And that's when I got back some police action -- in the form of a mental Fremont PD police sergeant calling me in the morning to harass me and bitch about my letter.

So even if SF is bad, outside SF it is not much better. Another nugget to consider is that back in 2014, back when crime was nowhere as bad as today, CA voters, not liberal politicians, voted for Proposition 47 "Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act" which made potential felonies chargeable only as misdemeanors.

Name another country just as free and open with fewer incarcerated. Not Switzerland for sure.

Can we re-phrase "monopoly of violence" to maintaining the rule of law. The government has an obligation to maintain the rule of law. Monopoly on violence by itself does not provide real legitimacy.

I suppose the best outcome for the persecuted individuals inside PRC is to flee the country. Anybody wants to chime in if they'd be eligible for refugee status with the US immigration system? One would also think nearby countries like Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea should also try to accommodate, even though sadly they are not known to be very sympathetic toward refugees.

I would also argue that the best course of action for people outside PRC is to keep records of the victims of PRC atrocities, and to urge their governments to stop allowing business as usual with this fascist regime, unlike what happened since 1989.

Now, as far as documenting PRC atrocities, United States the bastion of freedom, does not even bother to keep track of statistics regarding the thousands of its own citizens killed each year by its own police.

And since the current status quo involves rape and murder, I argue that even if it sucks it would still be a huge improvement.

There are, but there are a lot less of them in countries with fair democratic elections, and those who are corrupt are on average a lot milder than in countries without fair democratic elections. On average we're talking theft vs murder / genocide.

> Doesn't seem to stop people from electing horrible sheriffs time and again.

There are some problems with the current election system in the US in that many potential voters don't register to vote to not get summoned for jury duty and similar issues, while lots of police vote in blocks guided by powerful police unions. These problems can be fixed, and overall the US election system is better than in countries like Russia.

> Is your comment satire?

Even US politicians who are massively disliked are way better than their counterparts in countries without fair elections. Furthermore, these massively-disliked politicians get voted out at the end of term if a better politician runs against them. And even if they don't get voted out, they have to leave eventually due to hard term limits.

I'm not saying that democratic elections with term limits for police will keep absolutely all bad people out of police, but what I am saying is that there will be an order of magnitude less bad people in the police, and they will also be an order of magnitude less bad than under the current traditional employment scheme.