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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I’ve long been a Laker fan. That is why when I saw ESPN’s Celtics/Lakers: The Best of Enemies, I had to watch. It goes into depth about Magic & Bird, including the racial controversies.
I was half way through when I saw the latest racial controversy surrounding WNBA's @CaitlinClark22.
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An All-American in high school, she rose to national prominence after leading Iowa University to two consecutive NCAA championship games — the last one taking place this past March. She then went straight into the WNBA after being selected first overall by the Indiana Fever in the draft. She set multiple records, made the WNBA All-Star team, and won the rookie-of-the-year award as well as a spot on the All-WNBA First Team.
Time Magazine chose to honor her with its “Athlete of the Year” award. What made this announcement on X controversial was that Clark said as a white woman she has privilege.
Have we yet achieved an America in which race cannot suspend the law?
My thoughts along with those of my father, Shelby Steele, who has seen this kind of travesty play out many times in America history.
Long 🧵:
I know some of you may be following the trial of Daniel Penny in New York City. For those of you who don’t know, Penny is a Marine veteran who was 24 years old at the time he allegedly choked Jordan Neely, a subway platform performer, to death.
In an interview, Penny recounted that Neely entered the train while saying, "I'm gonna kill everybody. I could go to prison forever, I don't care." He repeated this several times, including that he would “kill a motherfucker.”
Leon Bass was a nineteen-year-old African-American sergeant serving in a segregated army unit when he encountered the "walking dead" of Buchenwald. Like many others, he tried to repress his memories of the horrors that he saw there and "never talked about it all."
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But in the 1960s, while involved in the Civil Rights movement and teaching, he met a Holocaust survivor and felt moved to declare to his students that “I was there, I saw.”
Leon Bass: "Nobody ever talked about the things we did in the Battle of the Bulge. No one talked about the 761st Tank Battalion, which was black, who fought all the way through Europe with General Patton.
It has been 10 years since Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Shelby Steele and I made “What Killed Michael Brown?” & I am often asked what the lasting impact has been.
Answer: What happened in Ferguson split America into two & we have not recovered. 🧵 amazon.com/Killed-Michael…
One side believes that America is systemically racist and the other side believes that America has made much progress since the 1960s.
I remember watching the events of Ferguson unfold in real-time and was horrified that Brown’s body laid on the concrete for 4 1/2 hours. (When I filmed the 4th anniversary of his death, I could not keep my knee on the concrete for more than 30 seconds at a time.)
Yes, America is the nation that enslaved & segregated my family going back who knows how many centuries — I am the first male in my family to be born free of those historical oppressions.
Yet America also made my family today possible.
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My paternal grandfather, born in 1900 to parents who were born in slavery, marched for equal rights for all because he believed in the American principles despite being denied them.
He only had a third grade education, yet he read every book around and could have easily been a professor. Even how he fell in love and married was not conventional.
I was recently invited onto a podcast. Emails were exchanged, the date set. Then I mentioned my deafness and my need to lipread. What happened next was that I was ghosted.
A friend asked if I was angry. To my surprise, I said no and that I felt blessed.
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The one lesson I learned early in life due to my deafness is that life is unfair. It just is. Yet, at the same time, life is full of endless opportunities.
In today’s America where we argue over the ideological form of equity, equality of manufactured outcomes, manufactured fairness, my life has been blessed with the true form of equity, the kind that gifts me the equality of opportunities.