Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

In early 2020, San Francisco’s progressive D.A. said drug dealing was a “victimless crime,” theft resulted from inequality, & the police were too militarized.

Today, SF is 400 cops short of the minimum, 700/year die from drugs, & looting is commonplace.

wsj.com/articles/san-f…

There has been a lot of gas-lightening of SF residents by highly ideological activists seeking to deny the obvious increase in crime. Often they show graphs of crime in the aggregate, inappropriately conflating homicides, robbery, & shoplifting, which is deliberately misleading.

Some crimes declined due to covid, and many of them, like car break-ins, are today above 2019 numbers, while others, like shoplifting show radically lower arrests per reports, which follows directly from the D.A.’s pledge to reduce prosecutions.

VIDEO EXPLAINER:

San Fran­cis­co’s lib­eral res­i­dents are now pay­ing for pri­vate se­cu­rity guards, tak­ing self-de­fense classes, and sup­port­ing a re­call of Mr. Boudin, with a vote set for June 2022.

Re­tail­ers like Wal­greens and Tar­get are clos­ing stores in the city, cit­ing ram­pant shoplift­ing. Last week, a shock­ingly or­ga­nized mob of loot­ers ran­sacked a down­town Louis Vuit­ton store.

Mr. Boudin and his de­fend­ers say crime in San Fran­cisco has ac­tu­ally de­clined un­der his watch. The store clos­ings had lit­tle to do with shoplift­ing, they in­sist; Wal­greens an­nounced in 2019 it would close stores as a cost-sav­ing mea­sure.

In­deed, some crimes did de­cline, but for Covid-re­lated rea­sons, while many other of­fenses in­creased. The pan­demic crimped tourism, which meant fewer car break-ins and less shoplift­ing, but both are now on the rise. Car break-ins were 75% higher in May 2021 than 2019.

While it’s true that of­fi­cial in­ci­dents of shoplift­ing haven’t in­creased un­der Mr. Boudin, the pun­ish­ment has changed—and the bad guys ap­pear to have got­ten the mes­sage. In 2019, 40% of shoplift­ing re­ports re­sulted in ar­rest; in 2021, only 19% did.

Wal­greens says shoplift­ing is five times as high, and se­cu­rity costs 50 times as high, in its San Fran­cisco stores as the chain­wide av­er­age.

Mean­time, the charg­ing rate for theft by Mr. Boudin’s of­fice de­clined from 62% in 2019 to 46% in 2021.

San Fran­cis­co’s jail pop­u­la­tion has plum­meted to 766 in 2021 from 2,850 in 2019.

And more than half of all offend­ers, and three-quar­ters of the most vi­o­lent ones, who are re­leased from jail be­fore trial, com­mit new crimes.

Like other pro­gres­sive pros­e­cu­tors around the coun­try, Mr. Boudin has ex­pressed great an­tipa­thy to­ward the po­lice. At his elec­tion-night party, a sup­porter led the crowd in a chant against the Po­lice Of­fi­cers’ As­so­ci­a­tion: “F— the POA! F— the POA!”

The SF Po­lice De­part­ment is short 400 of­fi­cers and de­mor­al­ized. A se­cu­rity video ob­tained by the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle last week ap­peared to show of­fi­cers al­low­ing a rob­bery of a mar­i­juana dis­pen­sary. Nar­cotics ar­rests de­clined by half 2019-21

Mr. Boudin has in­creased charges for some crimes. The charg­ing rate for rape rose from 43% to 53%, and for nar­cotics deal­ing from 47% to 60%, even as it de­clined for theft, il­le­gal weapons and as­sault.

What can be done? Read the whole piece @WSJ and find out!

/END

wsj.com/articles/san-f…

Sad

These are all from the last four hours