>Take care of people's most basic needs and you'd see a huge reduction in crime

This looks to me like a very good example of logic from someone who does not live in the real world.

We have a huge safety net and it's getting bigger. It would take too long to explain how bloated and unaudited our social benefit systems are and list the examples of people who don't need it receiving help and sitting on their ass. Not to mention in cities like SF where you are definitely fully taken care of if you're in bad shape, crime is worse than ever.

What's really funny about this is you claim cracking down on crime doesn't change things at all when NYC is the way it is today versus 10/20/30 years ago because of drastically different policies from different administrations having an effect.