Frisco County Line

Incentives matter. Increase the likelihood or severity of the penalty for doing X and fewer people will do X. This is a basic principle of human behavior, yet the soft-on-crime crowd regularly insists that deterrence is useless (implying that criminals are mindless beasts, not fully human).

San Francisco has only one land boundary, with San Mateo County to the south. (SFO Airport is in San Mateo.) The differing approaches to auto burglary provide one more data point confirming what common sense tells us.

KTVU in San Francisco had this report back in 2016.

Many residents in San Francisco often share stories about how numerous car burglaries are in city limits with little to no punishment for offenders.

But officials in adjacent Daly City [in San Mateo County] take a different approach: one that includes aggressive enforcement and stiff punishment for criminals caught breaking into vehicles.

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The county has a no-nonsense policy for such crimes. In San Francisco, repeat offenders can serve 10 days in jail if they are found guilty whereas in San Mateo a similar crime can result in a jail sentence of six months to a year behind bars.

This is a continuous urban area, so it is not always obvious where the county and city lines are. Burglars seek to avoid committing their crimes south of the line, but sometimes they make mistakes.

“I’ve heard the tapes, with police where Daly City made an arrest and the person says ‘I was on the wrong side of Geneva Avenue. Hence, I was in San Mateo County, I know what they’re going to do to me down here,'” [District Attorney Steve] Wagstaffe said.

Anything written about crime that starts with a premise that criminals never think about punishment and never modify their behavior in response is simply wrong out of the gate, and nothing that follows should be taken seriously.

The differing approaches to auto burglary of the two counties is now an issue in the Los Angeles District Attorney election, where former SF DA George Gascon seeks to oust LA DA Jackie Lacey. Michele Hanisee of the LA Association of Deputy District Attorneys has this article on Mr. Gascon’s record.