You hear about how bad San Francisco is. I was filming a shot of my father , Shelby Steele, and in the ten minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen. Called 911 & they hung up twice.
This is the video. Black Chevy Blazer with license plate #9AAZ318. Still no SF police.
Found more equipment missing. Now about $25k -$30k. Plus rental car damage. SF police doing nothing. It’s so bad that my friend is calling gang members for help.
At the police. Every single person here had their car broken into and we’ve been here 15 minutes!
While dealing with our situation we see more robbers pulling up in a Mercedes and looking into cars. We yelled at them. They pulled a gun on my friend. He’s filing his report now. Not one police officer showed up.
People asking where this was. On top of famous Lombard Street. One of richest neighborhoods in SF and America. I’ve worked dangerous neighborhoods for years and nothing like this.
We just left police station. The officer was kind and took down all info. She expressed sympathy and said nothing will likely happen: “The police have been defanged.”
On Monday, we attended San Francisco’s meeting on reparations — see my father in tan jacket in photo. Some of the committee members were arguing for more defunding of the police. Just crazy.
Just learned from a Good Samaritan that the license plate on the Blazer was stolen off a 2022 Mitsubishi owned by Enterprise. Just as SF locals told us would be the case.
Guy at Hertz car rental at SFO said they average 3O cars a day that have been broken into.
My father and I never thought we would be in the position of having a good friend ours set up a Go Fund Me for us. We lost even more than we realized and any support would truly be appreciated. It will allow us to continue making this film which is the filmic sequel to my… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
We are back out filming with our remaining equipment. The shot is the only thing that counts.
Talked to my insurance rep. I told her what happened & she says, “I’m not surprised.” & then tells me that her own car was stolen despite all her precautions.
Not only that, several San Franciscans stopped us today with their own crime stories.
We have to get off this bottom.
Here’s the video of the second 911 call after the first call was hung up/disconnected. Here we get disconnected again. (Above, I said hung up in heat of moment. Still, should not be two failed calls, especially in wealthy, high tech SF. What if it was a rape?)
Here's the SF reality: my father & I realized we can't even go out to dinner tonight after a crazy week of filming. Who's going to watch our SUV rental while we eat? Do we have to move the equipment into the hotel room to enjoy a meal? Criminals - not the law - run this city.
“You left $$$ of equipment out in broad daylight.”
“The police need to step up.”
Both are true. I take full responsibility. At the same time, police need to do real work. But there’s a third part: the people. Too many San Franciscans have surrendered. They need to retake power.
There’s been speculation on the race of the robbers. Many say black. However, I can’t tell the race of robbers who broke into my suv from the video. The robbers in the Mercedes were light skin. The robber that pulled gun was black. To default to all black is not accurate.
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The fact that microagressions exist today is bull. I am deaf and I wear this weird looking device attached to the side of my head by a magnet. If I were to consider every remark or question about my cochlear implant a microagression, I wouldn’t get through the day.
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Microagressions have been generally defined as slights, intentional or not, against a marginalized group. I guess being deaf qualifies me as marginalized though I would never describe myself as such.
When I first got the implant, I admit I was self-conscious. It was the year 2000 and people really didn’t know what the implant was. I was stared at all the time — one time I caught Mark Wahlberg staring right at me and he quickly looked away to the ceiling.
Yes, America is the nation that enslaved and segregated my people for centuries — I am the first male in my family to be born free of those historical oppressions.
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America is also the nation that admitted in the 1960s to its great racial evils. Since then, it has tried to right those wrongs, however flawed those efforts may have been.
My black grandfather, born to enslaved grandparents, marched for equal rights because he believed in the American principles despite being denied them.
Born in 1900, he was only able to enjoy those principles fully for the last ten years of his life.