San Francisco's woke mayor has performed a dramatic U-turn on the 'defund the police' strategy as she called for 'more aggressive policing' to replace ‘@#$%^!&*!! progressive policies'. I guess you could say she is transitioning from progressive to aggressive.
After Black Lives Matter protesters last year demanded that cities “Defund the police,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed held a press conference to announce that her city would be one of the first to do exactly that. Breed cut $120 million from the budgets of both San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments. A spokesman for the police officers’ union warned the cuts “could impact our ability to respond to emergencies.”
This week, Breed reversed herself in dramatic fashion, announcing that she was making an emergency request to the city Board of Supervisors for more money for the police to support a crackdown on crime, including open-air drug dealing, car break-ins and retail theft.
“I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances,” said Breed. “Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law … Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference … I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”
Breed punctuated her emotional speech with an explicative.
“It is time for the reign of criminals to end,” she said. “And it comes to an end when are we more aggressive with law enforcement and less tolerant of all the bull—— that has destroyed our city.”
What explains Breed’s 180-degree turn in less than 18 months? And what will determine whether she keeps her promise?
Crime
The main reason for Breed’s turnabout is skyrocketing crime. A report released this week by San Francisco’s Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) concluded that homicides increased in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco by 17 percent in 2021. Property crimes in those four cities rose 7 percent between 2020 and 2021, reaching 25,000 total in October. Two-thirds of the increase is due to larcenies, mainly car break-ins, by 21 percent, and vehicle thefts, by 10 percent.
And the rate of arrest has declined significantly for many crimes. In 2019, 40 percent of all shoplifting reports resulted in arrest; in 2021, only 19 percent did. San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin charged just 46 percent of theft arrests, a 16-point decline since he took office in 2020, and charged just 35 percent of petty theft arrests, a 23-point decline from two years ago.
In November, San Francisco was the first of several liberal cities hit by smash-and-grab mobs of thieves, sometimes as many as 80 in a group. Video from the San Francisco looting of Louis Vuitton shows criminals walking casually out of the store, goods in hand. In response, many of San Francisco’s luxury stores in its Union Square shopping district boarded up their windows, making the area resemble a blighted neighborhood in Detroit, and embarrassing city leaders.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s open drug scene contributed to three times more deaths from illicit drugs than COVID last year, and has degraded the low-income historically black Tenderloin neighborhood.
San Francisco could shut the open drug scene down like European cities did but has instead refused to mandate proven medical treatment to drug addicts. San Francisco’s leftist leaders have effectively been overseeing a radical social experiment, one that killed more African Americans last year alone than the entire Tuskegee syphilis experiment killed over 40 years.
Interestingly, Breed has been personally impacted by addiction and crime. Both Breed’s sister and brother struggled with addiction while growing up in public housing in San Francisco. Her sister died of a drug overdose and her brother is in prison for armed robbery.
But Breed also had to be pushed. In May, Jacqui Berlinn, a mother of a homeless fentanyl addict, organized the first-ever protest of open drug dealing in the Tenderloin, which generated national and local headlines and local TV coverage.
Then, in early November, more than 200 mostly poor and working-class people in the Tenderloin protested a 161 percent increase in violence in the neighborhood between 2020 and 2021, and open drug dealing, in a march on City Hall.
Part of their motivation was a brutal attack on an 11-year-old girl while she was walking to school. The day before, a 61-year-old man was shot while sitting in a donut shop. Two weeks later, half a dozen gunmen fired 30 and 40 rounds at each other, sending bystanders running in chaos.
Uhh, Let’s Refund The Police
Breed’s announcement comes days after former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter attacked progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner for dismissing the city’s record high homicides, and several weeks after Seattle voters, of whom less than 10 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2020, elected a Republican as the city’s state attorney in response to rising crime.
“I don’t think we can overestimate the influence of the city of Seattle voting 8 percent for Donald Trump one year ago and voting 55 percent for a Republican city attorney who had a law-and-order platform in this year’s election,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys.
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“The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself” (Ezekiel 18:20).