~~ recommended by emil karpo ~~
Just in time for election season, San Francisco is confronting yet another spike in murders and shootings on city streets. Despite a tough new tone from District Attorney Brooke Jenkins — Mayor London Breed’s handpicked prosecutor — the cycle of crime continues unabated, providing a bloody reality check for voters and politicians alike.
On Monday, two women were shot at 23rd and Valencia, within sight of the Mission’s trendy Beretta restaurant. One was hospitalized with grave, life-threatening injuries. Over a two-week period early this month, two men were shot to death in the Western Addition, and another man was stabbed to death nearby in the Tenderloin. On Sept. 4, a shooting in the Bayview left one woman dead and another critically injured.
The five murders so far this month represent a 66% in increase over last September, which had three murders. Of course, violent crime has been at historic lows in San Francisco, but such arguments didn’t save Chesa Boudin.
The stubborn persistence of crime — both violent and nonviolent — exposes the ridiculousness of Jenkins’ claim that her aggressive “tone” will scare criminals straight and make the streets feel safer. Murder carries the most severe consequences possible, but nobody worries about the DA’s tone before they pull the trigger.
In truth, Jenkins is already failing just as badly as Boudin and Breed when it comes to magically solving San Francisco’s most pressing problems. The latest outbreak in violence comes as she’s been busy rolling out harsh new policies to prosecute drug users and try juveniles as adults in some cases.
Jenkins is doing her best to send a message that things are going to be different now, but the streets don’t seem to care much about her campaign talking points. On Wednesday, I took my usual stroll through SoMa and the Tenderloin (after two weeks away on vacation) to find that nothing has changed. Eighth and Mission remains a cesspool of open drug dealing and use. Same with United Nations Plaza and the open-air drug corridor at Eddy and Larkin, where on July 12 she held a news conference to pledge an end to the public meth and fentanyl scenes.
It’s a promise Jenkins can’t keep. If a politician’s tone could halt crime, then Breed’s expletive-laden Tenderloin emergency declaration last year would have done the trick. Having worked in politics for over a decade, I’m unaware of any instance in which a politician’s tone succeeded in solving crime, drug addiction or any other real problem. Other than tone, Jenkins offers no solutions besides a return to the same old policies that failed to succeed before. So it’s not hard to guess where this ends up.
Despite all the tough talk and big plans, the problems will continue to worsen. As I wrote during the recall campaign, the overthrow of Boudin would give voters an outlet for their anger, but it wouldn’t solve the actual problem. And then voters would need a new target for their ire — most likely Mayor Breed.
A poll conducted by The Examiner in late May found that 52% of voters disapproved of Breed’s performance as mayor. A subsequent poll, conducted in June and July but published by the San Francisco Chronicle on Sept. 13, found that 58% of voters who identify themselves as knowing “a great deal” about city affairs think Breed is doing a “poor” or “very poor” job.
Only 25% of all 1,650 city residents polled by the Chronicle thought Breed was doing a “good” or “excellent” job. Forty two percent said she was doing a “fair” job and 35% rated her performance as “poor” or “very poor.”
“The results suggest that Breed’s popularity has plummeted over the past two years,” wrote Mallory Moench of the Chronicle. “Praise for her early success at steering the city relatively safely through the pandemic has given way to discontent and outright rage over issues like homelessness, property crime and the deadly fentanyl epidemic.”
The Board of Supervisors is even more unpopular than Breed, but that’s hardly a surprise. Legislative bodies tend to fare poorly in polls, but it’s hard to gauge whether those numbers matter, since legislators only need to worry about their district constituencies to stay in office.
Some argue that San Francisco simply needs more moderates — like District 4 candidate Joel Engardio and District 6 candidate Matt Dorsey — to solve the problem. But this is an easily disprovable delusion. After all, The City’s major problems have festered and spread under the reign of a feckless moderate mayor.
Ideology isn’t really the most important issue at City Hall, where everyone is pretty much some flavor of Democrat. What’s missing in San Francisco is any semblance of a person with the power or skill to actually lead a city. Breed is clearly in over her head, and the fact that she now controls the DA’s office (in addition to the Police Department, along with every other city department) will only underscore her mediocrity as voters continue to experience frustration with our rising dysfunction, poverty and death.
Breed, along with Jenkins, sold voters on a fairy tale in which a tough DA aligned with Breed and the SFPD would make a palpable difference in the conditions on our streets. These amateurs are now on the hook for results, but they have laid out no plausible path (besides Jenkins’ ridiculous “tone” theory and failed drug war policies) for how they will begin to solve these complex, intractable problems.
How long before they start to see Chesa Boudin staring back at them when they look in the mirror? When will voters start wondering whether perhaps they recalled the wrong politician?
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