Pundits scold us for fretting about crime/drugs/homeless in San Francisco
Just look at these crime statistics, they say. Thing are actually going great.
(This newsletter has been on hiatus for quite a while. There was some thought it might be deceased. But now, maybe for a limited time, it’s baaaaaaaaak.)
Hopefully you are in the mood for a hearty helping of “I told you so,” because that’s all that’s on the menu in San Francisco.
From the local publications to the big foot journo giants like The New Yorker and CNN, everyone wants to tell us we were wrong in on the aftermath of an arrest of a suspect in the stabbing death of popular techie Bob Lee.
The lyrics vary, but the chorus is the same: You Frisco Chicken Little’s had it all wrong. You all thought it was some crazed homeless individual, didn’t you? (And, to be fair, there was some completely irresponsible suspicions cast on the nearby homeless Navigation Center. And, just for the record, Elon Musk is an idiot.)
The death was actually apparently a crime of passion between two people who knew each other, not a terrifying random act of violence that is just another example of a city gone lawless and wild. It wasn’t someone who was previously released from custody by a liberal-gone-loony district attorney.
It was just a sad, terrible fight between two guys, possibly over a woman. Nothing more. Now don’t you feel foolish?
Uh . . . No actually.
And if it is all the same to you, I’m going to hang on to my shock and disbelief for a while.
Several years ago our family rented a place at the Portside — that curiously nautical residential building on the Embarcadero. Seeing video of the mortally wounded Lee staggering along the sidewalk in front of that building, or watching clips of workers cleaning smears of blood off the white walls, felt surreal.
I walked the dog right by that corner dozens of times. I’ve strolled past that spot along the Embarcadero a thousand times. I never imagined a murder there.
So no, if your next step is to tell me things are actually sunny and cheery in the city, put me down as skeptical. I assume you’ll pull out some spread sheets that will demonstrate that actually crime is down. And that if you look at a list of American cities, San Francisco’s homicide rate is well below places like Atlanta, Chicago and Houston.
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The theory is that nervous Nellies are obsessing over their Nextdoor crime report posts. Or, in the age of video, they see a few clips violence or lawbreaking, and conflate that to a crime wave.
The fact is, they say, San Francisco has always had a certain level of crime, drug use and violence, and the only difference now is that it is getting more publicity.
Really?
Why then, is Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, as serious a local pol as there is in City Hall, calling for a help from the Feds to combat what he calls a “fentanyl dealing and human trafficking crisis in San Francisco.” Peskin went all in, sending letters to Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, the BART board and the UC Board of Regents to name a few.
He also proposed that Board meetings be held at the drug supermarket at U.N. Plaza.
And, to add evidence from a wildly different source, Giants General Manager Farhan Zaidi lamented the difficulty of signing some of baseball’s top free agents because San Francisco “is a little bit of a polarizing place” to potential players.
This isn’t San Francisco being San Francisco. This is a city in crisis.
Who among us doesn’t know someone who was the victim of crime? Or was a victim themselves? When they broke our car window the silver lining was they smashed the small one in back so it didn’t cost so much to repair.
We drove by the Ferry Building last week and amid the tents and campers was a guy who had built a little clubhouse with plywood and boards. He was settled in. He even had an American flag flying.
Our next drive-by was the Federal Building, where a sprawling tent community takes up most of the sidewalk. Across the street a man wearing only gym shorts lay on his back on the sidewalk, waving his hands in the air.
As I watched he rolled over into the gutter, right in front of a parked police patrol car. The officer stood over him, apparently mulling his options.
And, of course, the fentanyl crisis is an unbelievable tragedy. An acquaintance who worked as a homeless advocate told me he’d “lost count” of how many overdose victims he’d brought back to life with Narcan. And “open air drug market” has become a local shorthand for the whole, uncontrollable narcotic cycle of addiction and death.
So you add all that up, along with the general sense of gloom that a bustling downtown may never recover, you get caught up in the circle of doom that says the city is ungovernable. That try as they might, city officials are overwhelmed and unable to establish public order.
It’s a city gone wild.
Yeah, I don’t buy that. It looks more like a city that has given up.
You say people are walking into supermarkets and drug stores and loading up bags with goods and brazenly walking out without paying?
Whatever. There’s no point in stopping them. Somebody could get hurt. And they’ll just be back tomorrow.
The general sense of ennui leaving individuals feeling they are on their own. Got a problem? You’re going to have to handle it yourself.
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We’ve been stewing over the story of Former fire commissioner Donald Carmignani, who went out to confront some homeless campers, trying to get them to move away from his parent’s house in the toney Marina neighborhood.
Carmignani got into a confrontation with one of the men (some reports say he may have used pepper spray) and the man went absolutely psycho on him, beating him so badly with a metal pipe that he is hospitalized with a fractured skull.
I don’t know Carmignani. He may be a hothead who escalated the issue. But I know he’s not the first person to take issue with someone camping in front of his house who has been a victim of violence. He won’t be the last.
And you can frame it as a frustrated citizen taking things too far. Maybe they called the police, but nothing happened. (In fairness, SFPD is down some 500 officers and that should be addressed.) You can blame angry citizens for causing the whole situation.
But let’s don’t overlook the motive of the pipe-swinger. He wasn’t just fighting. He was defending his turf.
He’s saying, I live here and you have no right to tell me I can’t.
Except . . . It’s the sidewalk. In normal society you don’t get to homestead public spaces. You don’t get to set up a tent or a camp and just take over land.
And when that happens, and no one in authority seems be able to come up with a solution, you get people taking matters into their own hands. And, with the proliferation of guns in the country, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could go wrong.
This has to be better. The city has to be better. City Hall must. Mayor London Breed must.
And unfortunately now we’re headed back to the playbook that got former DA Chesa Boudin recalled. The mayor and Police Chief Bill Scott have taken to rolling out reams of stats that insist that we’re all too sensitive.
Crime is actually down, they say. Or at least manageable. When everyone over-reacts to something like the stabbing death of Lee, it just feeds into the misconception.
San Francisco is fine, they say. Everything is trending in the right direction. Quit stressing about the drug market, the tent cities and the empty stores. Nothing to see here.
Who knows? Maybe we should just give up and give in to the mind set.
If so, I’d propose a new city motto that captures the new low bar:
San Francisco — not as bad as Houston.
Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Twitter: @cwnevius
Agree across the board. Fundamentally, the City has a serious of related situations it needs to address. Addiction is creating crime. Harm reduction isn’t interrupting that cycle at all. And maybe that’s not its intent, but it’s not. It might be worsening it. I think people are waking up to this and not liking it. I think a smaller minority of voters and policy-makers are saying we aren’t doing enough - we need more harm reduction measures.
I’ve gone to a number of neighborhood meetings, including ones attended by the DA, Chief and others. The public comments could be reduced down to a couple of themes but one certainly is - what does the City do when it offers homeless people services and shelter but they decline? If the answer is - a federal judge says we can do very little? We are in trouble.
Excellent observations. These days so much public conversation gets lost in attempts at pigeonholing responsibility and finger pointing which only further inhibits any direct action. Liberal, conservative, even Republican, Democrat, what’s the difference in actually getting effective response to growing problems like those you mention? Hope it’s just a stage our country is going through. Public innovations have always caused disruption before better organization and I hope that’s what we’re seeing with this twitter/facebook social media induced public cacophony where everyone is immediately and continuously inundated with everybody else’s latest opinion or “outing” of their latest connecting groupthink to whatever Party or whomever Who. Small conversations do occur and signs of understanding others are vaguely apparent. But so much opinion and conjecture based on misleading headlines or sarcasm or freudenschade, so much, all the time, everywhere. We need honest people. Willing to help each other. We need the fellow laying on the sidewalk to take charge of himself to be able to accept another way for him to go forward on his own feet. We need another place for that fellow to go to build his future. So many people. Too many causes. The better answers will come from people working together, the worst ones will come from people working against each other. Thanks for your article. Maybe I’ve said too much. Im older and I ramble. I’ll subscribe.