Heart? I didn’t leave so much as a capillary in San Francisco — and it’s a good thing, too, since the city’s nuttiness has increased logarithmically since I left there a quarter-century ago.
The latest example is San Francisco police commissioner John Hamasaki arguing that arresting criminals won’t “solve” the problems of “car break-ins or any violence.”
Replying to a Justin Phillips San Francisco Chronicle column on crime (we’ll get to that in a moment), the police commissioner (and criminal defense attorney) tweeted: “No one wants the car break-ins or any violence, but we won’t solve those problems with an arrest nor overnight. We need to roll up our sleeves and solve this together.”
Honestly, I have no idea what Hamasaki is trying to say here, aside from shoveling the kind of worse-than-useless pablum that makes leftists so predictable, tiresome, and damaging.
San Francisco’s real rot is exposed in Phillips’ column, published on Friday. And please note that I said the rot is exposed in his column, not by his column.
First, a tiny bit of background.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was elected to office in an extremely low-turnout 2019 election. He’s the son of convicted murderers (and leftwing Weather Underground “activists”) David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. Following his parents’ imprisonment, Chesa was adopted and raised by two other Weather Underground terrorists, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Prior to attending law school, Boudin hitched his wagon to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez and worked as his translator. He also translated into English Understanding the Bolivarian Revolution: Hugo Chávez Speaks.
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Boudin ran on a platform of “decarceration,” the elimination of cash bail, and other criminal-friendly policies.
Crime is up under Boudin, particularly so-called “quality of life” crimes like shoplifting. Violent crime is up, too. The city’s violent crime rate is about 50% higher than California as a whole and two-thirds higher than the national rate. You’d have to travel across the Bay Bridge into Oakland to find a worse crime situation (but don’t).
The situation under Boudin has gotten so bad that there is a recall effort underway to remove him from office.
Phillips came to Boudin’s defense, putting the blame on poverty, racism, and COVID. The well-organized and well-financed (and mostly minority) mobsters running SF’s infamous shoplifting rings must have gotten a good laugh out of that.
There’s also this bit of blame-the-victim flavored cherry-picking:
San Francisco had become a lawless place, they said. Sure, there was a bump in San Francisco’s homicides, 41 to 48 from 2019 to 2020, with 46 so far this year — but overall violent crime is far lower than what city residents endured from 1970 to 1990.
That’s right: Phillips thinks that the decades-long crime surge this country endured after the madness of the ’60s is the yardstick by which Boudin should be measured.
Well, maybe it is.
Whatever the case, it’s one thing for the city’s increasing lawlessness to be defended by a young food writer like Phillips, dabbling in woke politics.
It’s quite another for a city police commissioner to chime in with his support.
But that’s postmodern San Francisco, where dodging dirty needles and human feces have become the least of residents’ self-inflicted problems.
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