For The New York Times, the closure of San Francisco’s flagship Whole Foods — due to shoplifting, a machete-wielding repeat intruder and local addicts turning its bathrooms into shooting galleries — is “a representation of some of the city’s most intractable problems.”
Dead wrong: These woes are no ancient, unsolvable mysteries of the human condition.
They arose after (now-booted) woke DA Chesa Boudin won election in 2019, more or less stopped prosecuting quality-of-life crimes and with the help of his comrades elsewhere in politics realigned the city to be friendly to crooks and hostile to the law-abiding.
San Fran has long been extremely liberal, but with Boudin’s election the last remnant of common sense took a leap off the Golden Gate Bridge.
Murders were up more than 36% in both 2021 and 2022 over 2019.
The Tenderloin is a violence-riddled no man’s land. Lunatics with machetes wander through the arugula aisle.
That’s not because of poverty, or because the city is too dependent on the tech industry (another dodge from the Times).
It’s because of bad, deliberate policy choices — policies still inflicting bloody aftershocks though their authors have in some cases moved on.
The same empty refrain defines the media’s coverage of crime in San Francisco.
Take a late April column on San Francisco by the LA Times’ Anita Chabria, blaming vague macro issues, like “a crisis of addiction,” for crime.
Well, what made it a crisis? Leniency toward drug dealers: Boudin convicted a paltry few of intent to sell during his term (only three in all of 2021, down from 90 in 2018 under his predecessor).
Jay Caspian Kang’s April New Yorker piece went so far as to deny that San Franciso’s seen any violent crime epidemic at all — though murders rose every year from 2019 to 2021; 2022 duplicated the prior year’s grim total.
The important thing, puffed Kang, is to focus on the “inequalities in the justice system.”
The obvious solutions — hire more cops and actually prosecute criminals, even low-level ones — are staring these people in the face.
But they refuse to notice.
So here’s a tip: Before you worry about tech, or inequalities, or anything else, just shut down the open-air drug market.
Send all the deadly delusions straight to Alcatraz.
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