“There’s a noticeable uptick in the activity, in the aggressiveness, the drug dealing out in the open,” said Dave Broderick, a barber at The Bureau Barber and Shop.
Both Johnson and Broderick describe a situation where customers are being scared away. They say they see open drug use and dealing, aggressive and violent panhandling, public urination and defecation, people passed out on sidewalks, and people experiencing mental health crises on a daily basis.
“They feel unsafe,” Johnson said of customers. “That affects our business.”
“There’s a noticeable uptick in the activity, in the aggressiveness, the drug dealing out in the open,” said Dave Broderick, a barber at The Bureau Barber and Shop.
Both Johnson and Broderick describe a situation where customers are being scared away. They say they see open drug use and dealing, aggressive and violent panhandling, public urination and defecation, people passed out on sidewalks, and people experiencing mental health crises on a daily basis.
“They feel unsafe,” Johnson said of customers. “That affects our business.”
“There’s a noticeable uptick in the activity, in the aggressiveness, the drug dealing out in the open,” said Dave Broderick, a barber at The Bureau Barber and Shop.
Both Johnson and Broderick describe a situation where customers are being scared away. They say they see open drug use and dealing, aggressive and violent panhandling, public urination and defecation, people passed out on sidewalks, and people experiencing mental health crises on a daily basis.
“They feel unsafe,” Johnson said of customers. “That affects our business.”
That was a good article. Thank you for sharing. San Francisco is one of my favorite cities in the U.S. for a lot of the reasons the authors cites.
This is not overly relevant, but I thought this was weird:
The hills are so steep that I didn’t learn to ride a bike until high school, but every day I saw the bay, and the cool fog rolling in over the water.
We really have to do away with this type of thinking at the end of this:
Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help. I was embarrassed—what was I, a tourist? Living in a failing city does weird things to you. The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist.
This too:
A couple of years ago, one of my friends saw a man staggering down the street, bleeding. She recognized him as someone who regularly slept outside in the neighborhood, and called 911. Paramedics and police arrived and began treating him, but members of a homeless advocacy group noticed and intervened. They told the man that he didn’t have to get into the ambulance, that he had the right to refuse treatment. So that’s what he did. The paramedics left; the activists left. The man sat on the sidewalk alone, still bleeding. A few months later, he died about a block away.
A succinct explanation of the problems with many 79s and their approaches:
It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.
These are sad, but interesting statistics:
But many are clearly in an awful situation. San Francisco saw 92 drug deaths in 2015. There were about 700 in 2020. By way of comparison, that year, 261 San Franciscans died of COVID.
This seems like an issue:
The head of CVS Health’s organized-crime division has called San Francisco “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime.” Thefts in San Francisco’s Walgreens are four times the national average. Stores are reducing hours or shutting down. Seven Walgreens closed between last November and February, and some point to theft as the reason. The city is doing strikingly little about it. About 70 percent of shoplifting cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15 percent did.
This entire paragraph seems filled with bad ideas. 79, thoughts?
Under Boudin, prosecutors in the city could no longer use the fact that someone had been convicted of a crime in the past to ask for a longer sentence, except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Boudin ended cash bail and limited the use of gang enhancements, which allow harsher sentences for gang-related felonies. In most cases he prohibited prosecutors from seeking charges when drugs and guns were found during minor traffic stops. “We will not charge cases determined to be a racist pretextual stop that leads to recovery of contraband,” Rachel Marshall, the district attorney’s director of communications, told me.
And lead to results like this:
A 2020 tweet from the Tenderloin police station captured the frustration of the rank and file: “Tonight, for the fifteenth (15th) time in 18 months, and the 3rd time in 20 days, we are booking the same suspect at county jail for felony motor vehicle theft.”
Another perfect paragraph showing the problems of some of the 79s:
The city’s schools were shut for most of the 2020–21 academic year—longer than schools in most other cities, and much longer than San Francisco’s private schools. In the middle of the pandemic, with no real reopening plan in sight, school-board meetings became major events, with audiences on Zoom of more than 1,000. The board didn’t have unilateral power to reopen schools even if it wanted to—that depended on negotiations between the district, the city, and the teachers’ union—but many parents were appalled to find that the board members didn’t even seem to want to talk much about getting kids back into classrooms. They didn’t want to talk about learning loss or issues with attendance and functionality. It seemed they couldn’t be bothered with topics like ventilation. Instead they wanted to talk about white supremacy.
They are truly insane:
Brenzel is a music teacher, and at the time he and his husband had a child in public school. Eight seats on the committee were open, and Brenzel was unanimously recommended by the other committee members. But there was a problem: Brenzel is white.
“My name’s Mari,” one attendee said. “I’m an openly queer parent of color that uses they/them pronouns.” They noted that the parent committee was already too white (out of 10 sitting members, three were white). This was “really, really problematic,” they said. “I bet there are parents that we can find that are of color and that also are queer … QTPOC voices need to be led first before white queer voices.”
