alt Hacker News> They did, significantly, and in some hot spots like San Francisco quite a lot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-crime-decline-c...
That article doesn't say any such thing in the way you are strongly implying it does.
In that it doesn't discuss retail theft at all. Violent crime is down. It refers to property crime, but only one (relatively small, about 11%) segment of property crime is retail theft.
The government threw money to combat "organized retail theft" and you point to a reduction in violent crime as being a result?
Indeed, California itself seems to believe it had no effect: https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/Retail_Theft_Fact-Shee... - "reported retail theft remains at roughly the same level as during the 2010s and lower than it was in earlier decades"
I point to a reduction in property crime as being a result. The page you've linked here doesn't attempt to measure retail theft in 2024; it summarizes a report with a data cutoff in 2022.
Notably, if you click into that report, it also illustrates a huge reduction in property crime since California passed its three strikes law in the mid-1990s. That seems like another big example of how we can directly observe "more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer", despite the author's claim that it doesn't.
It really, really seems to me like the author is engaging in the behavior he describes as "copaganda", selectively telling only the stories that fit in with his vision of how public safety ought to work.