Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

Defund the police activist in L.A. now fears gun threats at child's school

Defund the police activist in Oakland now so scared she removes her jewelry before pumping gas

LA Times defund activist admits "even Black Americans" don’t want to defund police

latimes.com/california/sto…

Last year, @latimes columnist @Erika_D_Smith called for defunding the police

She now admits that defunding the police was PR disaster but claims that covid is supposedly the cause of rising homicides, not the withdrawal of police & criminal emboldenment

latimes.com/california/sto…

It'a all already over for the progressives on crime. They lost. Why?

— Record homicides in Philly+12

— Emboldened criminals, from Walgreens to Louis Vuitton

— And the progressive denial of crime, the minimization of crime, and the gas-lighting of the public experiencing crime

— Criminologists endorse Ferguson effect of withdrawing police & emboldened criminals following anti-police protests

— BLM protests must thus be viewed as major if not most important factor behind crime rise

— Delegitimizing police & criminal justice system = more crime

Now, San Francisco's Mayor @LondonBreed has put her career on the line to crackdown on SF's crime problem

She did so without the support of progressive TL supervisor @MattHaneySF who was caught off guard by her request for more $ for cops

Today @MattHaneySF moved to Team Breed

Breed announced a State of Emergency and in her announcement quotes Haney: "This is a public health emergency demanding a crisis level response, with massive urgency... a declaration of an emergency will give us the tools we need to respond...”

sfmayor.org/article/mayor-…

The supposedly über-powerful Soros-funded progressive criminal justice reform movement has gone quiet, reduced now to a handful of radical progressive columnists at newspapers who further discredit & isolate themselves by denying the Ferguson effect & blaming "the right wing"

The most important national expert on drugs & crime is @KeithNHumphreys of Stanford University

His oped, "Breed’s plan to shut down Tenderloin drug markets is progressive," is in today's @sfchronicle

It is the new center of a moved Overton window

sfchronicle.com/opinion/openfo…

Humphreys is one of the leading experts I cite in "San Fransicko," which draws heavily on the same study that informs Humphreys oped, which is very detailed and careful study of how Austria, Frankfurt, Lisbon, Vienna, & Zurich shut down open drug scenes

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…

Progressives misled the public about addiction, about how Europe dealt with it, and about what the best practices are for dealing with it

Best practice is *not* to enable, normalize, and legalize open-air fentanyl & meth addictions, which kill 100k people/year

Best practice is to arrest street addicts who break the law and give them the choice of rehab or jail

THAT'S what they did in Portugal.

They didn't just do harm reduction and they certainly didn't destigmatize meth, heroin, and fentanyl use!

Watch:

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1415345836913922054?s=20

Progressives similarly misled the public, including me, on crime

They said they would seek alternatives to incarceration but prog DAs mostly aren't doing that, they're just letting people out without probation & rehabilitation, and diversion programs aren't working

Rather than be honest about this, progressive prosecutors and progressive activist writers have simply denied the crime rise

Until, that is, former Philly Mayor @Michael_Nutter called out @DA_LarryKrasner for denying record homicides Krasner apologized

Then came Breed's speech: “When you are in a room full of people, I would say between 90% & 95% of folks could raise their hand and say that either their car has been broken into, or they’ve been a victim in some capacity or another. That is not acceptable."

Over the last 10 days it became, suddenly, politically impossible for mainstream progressives to maintain the lie that crime wasn't rising, which is why we're now seeing radical progressive writers at LA Times, SF Chron saying, self-revealingly, that "Defund the Police" is bad PR

Yes, it's bad PR for progressives, but that's a pretty gross and pathetic thing for columnists who, just a few months ago were thundering away about Black Lives, to take away from the loss of so many black lives to homicide

The moral center has returned to honest souls like @MistahFAB whose authenticity, sensitivity, and commitment to reality stands in sharp contrast to the progressive columnists who betray their true agenda by showing little concern for non-police homicides

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1471552973331263492?s=20

Progressives can win back their credibility but they will need to

— Admit Ferguson effect of police withdrawal and criminal emboldenment is real & responsible in large measure for rise in homicides & crime

— Enforce laws & support accountability for all not victimology for few

— Genuinely seek rehab & recovery through probation as alternative to incarceration, and abandon the false idea that any engagement with crim justice system results in higher risk of incarceration. It's been proven wrong by drug testing & drug courts.

— Shut down open drug scenes following the European model of enforcing laws against public drug use/camping/defecation; Shelter First, Housing Earned; universal psychiatry; and sufficient shelter space, supportive housing, psych beds in hospitals, group homes, & rehab clinics.

— Embrace "tough love" and "carrots and sticks"; reject victimology, anti-system radicalism, & harm reduction-only; embrace a positive view of the potential of people to recover from their illness, not a cynical view that views the sick as permanently sick victims of evil system.

A lot has changed in a few days. Philly DA reversed his crime denialism. Breed embraced tough love & shutting open drug scene. Former Gov Jerry Brown rejected public drug use. SF Sup Haney switched from Team Prog to Team Mod.

There's much more to come, but change has begun.

What happens next could make America a truly better place

The underlying problem, I concluded in "San Fransicko," is the refusal of Americans at all levels of society, not just in government, to take responsibility

We need a new era of responsibility & accountability

/END

P.S.:

amazon.com/gp/product/006…

they know they lost

https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1472266967503368193?s=20

huh

"Jackson is absolutely right to double down on her efforts to shift money from the Fresno Police Department’s budget and toward residents who have long been denied even the most basic public amenities, such as decent parks."

latimes.com/california/sto…