San Francisco, There It Goes

Everyone has an opinion about the San Francisco recall of Chesa Boudin, so, why not yours truly? As you know, the overwhelmingly Democratic voters of that city recalled the radical leftist district attorney by a very large margin-- something like 20%.

But, enquiring minds want to know: what does it all mean?

Consider this, the Boudin program, shared by leftist prosecutors across the nation has been called soft on crime and weak on crime. I find this to be a misnomer. They are effectively trying to decriminalize crime. According to the warped reasoning that passes for reasoning in some of America’s great educational institutions, if you do not call it a crime, it is not a crime. And if you do call it a crime, you are a bigot. 

The problem of minority, especially black crime, has bedeviled the nation. Keep in mind, our great country has been a world leader in the field of civil rights. For over sixty years we have produced a massive amount of civil rights legislation, bureaucratic initiatives and programs designed to put the kibosh on racial discrimination. We have spent trillions on special programs, for housing, for jobs, for education and for poverty-- programs that were designed to alleviate the legacy of slavery and segregation.

And we were told, with the most solemn seriousness, that we needed to put black politicians-- or honorary black politicians like Chesa Boudin-- in charge, because that would surely tamp down the crime waves that seem to be endemic to minority communities. Representation would solve the problem-- up to and including the presidency. How did that work out?

A rational human being would take a look around America today and would conclude that these programs have not worked. They have failed. Now, the radical left has chosen to ignore that simple fact and to lower crime statistics by decriminalizing crime. In San Francisco, for example,  shoplifting has basically been decriminalized, to the point where it is open season on drug stores and even boutiques. 

The other side of our track record has it that blacks have not achieved levels of academic success and economic prosperity that are comparable to those of Asians, especially, but also of many whites. 

The solution, proposed by notable morons like Ibram X. Kendi, has been to give out plaudits and laurels, to say nothing of jobs and promotions and bonuses, on the basis of race. If you say that the system is unfair or that it is a lie, you are a bigot.

Given America’s manifest failure to engineer something like proportional representation at all levels of society, we have decided that the only solution is to crack down on white supremacy and to cancel anyone who points out the simple fact that we have failed.

And yet, as Shelby Steele pointed out some two decades ago affirmative action programs and diversity programs stigmatize black achievement by making it appear to have been unearned.

In any case, America’s great blue cities are now run and controlled by minority group members, real ones or aspiring ones like Chesa Boudin.

In any event, decriminalizing crime and promoting people beyond their abilities has not solved America’s race problem. In truth, it has aggravated it. It has forced people to live a lie and to refuse to mention any inconvenient truth about the outcome of our civil rights movement.

Anyway, we are fortunate to have discovered several important columns and essays on the problem of San Francisco, which problem can be defined in terms like-- reality bites. The totalitarian effort to take complete control over the American mind, especially in regard to racial matters, seems to have crashed on the shoals of reality. Excuse the mixed metaphor.

What is the San Francisco reality? Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler-- who is not a member of the vast right wing conspiracy-- offered some facts about homelessness and drug addiction:

San Francisco has seen a rash of robberies. Stealing items valued at less than $950 is considered a misdemeanor. Last fall, organized “smash and grab” looters hit Louis Vuitton and other luxury stores. Eleven Walgreens have closed since 2019. In a remarkably still-open CVS near Eddy Street, nearly every item is locked behind plexiglass. Is this the future?

Don’t be fooled by the Orwellian newspeak of the “unhoused” that completely ignores the problem of mental illness and addiction rampant in San Francisco. Count 640 drug overdose deaths in 2021—more than Covid deaths. These were predominantly from fentanyl, yet the district attorney had zero convictions for dealing fentanyl and only three convictions of any kind for drug dealing vs. more than 90 in 2018 under George Gascón (now Los Angeles County’s district attorney). Instead, according to the San Francisco Standard, 80% of Mr. Boudin’s narcotics convictions were classified as “accessory after the fact.” Why? So dealers wouldn’t be subject to deportation. Personnel is policy. Electing a soft-on-crime, illegal-immigrant-friendly district attorney produced more tent cities and drug-overdose deaths. Shameful.

Even if we are sufficiently woke not to say that these are crimes, these are a national disgrace. For those who recall, I once wrote a book about the difference between shame and guilt. I will not recall all of my wonderful arguments, but one point was that criminalizing behavior or even decriminalizing behavior does not make it right or wrong. Societies have moral standards. They are not necessarily written down in the criminal code. Bad behavior is bad regardless of whether it is criminal behavior. Upon that issue, the tenure of Chesa Boudin has come a cropper.

It does not matter whether the following incident, from Kessler’s personal experience, was or was not criminal. It was unacceptable. The fact that the people of a San Francisco suburb felt that they could do nothing about it shows how far the city has become morally degraded:

My family and I live 30 miles from San Francisco. A homeless man walked into our house on a Tuesday morning, high as a kite with sopping-wet pants and smelling like a marinated skunk—even our dog didn’t bark. I strongly said, “Get. Out. Of. My. House.” My wife called 911. Eventually, he left. The police wouldn’t arrest him until a Hazmat unit (!) arrived to clean him up. And of course he ended up getting released. When we asked neighbors who saw him walking around that morning why they didn’t say something, the typical response was, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Gee, thanks.

Kessler closes with a salient point. People in California are up in arms about abortion rights, clean energy, plastic straws, whatever. They want simply to isolate themselves from the ambient chaos, a chaos unleashed by the political class. There comes a time when that chaos invades your home. At that point, as we noted in a prior post, you are mugged by reality.

Just in case I have not rattled on about San Francisco at too much length, I do not want to close without mentioning an excellent essay by one Nellie Bowles, in the Atlantic. Bowles calls San Francisco a failed city, and one cannot reasonably dispute the point. 

In her words:

There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city. And many San Franciscans have had enough.

It’s always useful to have a few facts from everyday life:

On a cold, sunny day not too long ago, I went to see the city’s new Tenderloin Center for drug addicts on Market Street. It’s downtown, an open-air chain-link enclosure in what used to be a public plaza. On the sidewalks all around it, people are lying on the ground, twitching. There’s a free mobile shower, laundry, and bathroom station emblazoned with the words DIGNITY ON WHEELS. A young man is lying next to it, stoned, his shirt riding up, his face puffy and sunburned. Inside the enclosure, services are doled out: food, medical care, clean syringes, referrals for housing. It’s basically a safe space to shoot up. The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.

And let’s not forget, as Bowles emphasize, the deleterious effect of the do-gooders who are out defending the constitutional rights of people who are killing themselves with drugs:

A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.

As for crime statistics, the story is mixed. More so because the police do not arrest criminals and the prosecutors do not prosecute and the courts do not remove people from society:

You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019. Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities like Atlanta and Los Angeles.

The head of CVS Health’s organized-crime division has called San Francisco “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime.” Thefts in San Francisco’s Walgreens are four times the national average. Stores are reducing hours or shutting down. Seven Walgreens closed between last November and February, and some point to theft as the reason. The city is doing strikingly little about it. About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.

Guess what-- it’s all about decriminalizing crime:

The movement to decriminalize shoplifting in San Francisco began in 2014 with Proposition 47, the state law that downgraded drug possession and also recategorized the theft of merchandise worth less than $950 as a misdemeanor. It accelerated in 2019 with the election of Boudin as district attorney.

In particular:

Last month a man who had been convicted of 15 burglary and theft-related felonies from 2002 to 2019 was rearrested on 16 new counts of burglary and theft; most of those charges were dismissed and he was released on probation. It really didn’t inspire confidence that the city was taking any of this seriously.

So, a failed experiment, rolling across America’s blue cities. At what point will all of them understand that they have been consigning themselves to oblivion.