The big stories of the week revolve around big government, which mean big theft, which is not unrelated to socialism:
Tag: San Francisco
Decades of wrongheaded policies have eroded San Francisco’s once much-vaunted charm.
These policies include onerous burdens on building construction; lax attitudes toward homeless folks’ tent cities and public excretory practices; and a green light for sundry criminal activities, including broad-daylight theft.
The green light flashed statewide in 2014, when Californians passed Proposition 47, giving looters much less to worry about if caught stealing less than $950.
Remove a disincentive and you wind up with a huge incentive: thugs were emboldened; folks on the margin between criminality and civilized peace went the wrong direction.
In San Francisco, they were further emboldened when voters installed Democrat Chesa Boudin as district attorney in 2019. At least the election was close.
A recent recall election wasn’t so close, with some 61% voting to oust him.
In the cause of abetting criminals, DA Boudin did everything but serve as getaway-car driver.
Right away, he fired several prosecutors, and The Epoch Times reports that soon “more than 50 prosecutors, support, and victim services staff had either been fired or had quit their jobs over Boudin’s progressive agenda.”
The agenda included ending cash bail, slashing incarceration rates, routinely releasing repeat offenders.
Although it has lost a lot, San Francisco still has piers and fog and that famously twisty road, Lombard Street. Residents have a ways to go to emerge from their ideological fog and perhaps must travel an even twistier road to reclaim their city.
By getting rid of Boudin — and three pretty rotten school board members in another recent recall election — San Franciscans have taken the first steps back to something like sanity. Which always makes next steps easier.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The pro-education, anti-indoctrination counterrevolution is chalking up a major win in . . . San Francisco?
Homeschooling — or at least private-school schooling — sounds better every day. Pandemic-rationalized permanent shutdowns of classrooms, along with the accelerating ideological assaults that many school boards are waging on behalf of gender fluidity, racist “antiracism,” regimented speech, etc., do more than merely suggest we find alternatives.
Yet, for one reason or another, many families are stuck with public schools.
But they are apparently not stuck with the very worst that public schools can impose. Last Tuesday, in the first recall election in San Francisco in some 40 years, fed-up parents threw giant butterfly nets over three local school-board malefactors and dragged them off stage: Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and Faauuga Moliga.
Instead of working to reopen schools, the board’s been busy these last couple of years killing merit-based admissions at the magnet school Lowell High, scrubbing the names of dozens of schools to get rid of such blighted appellations as “Abraham Lincoln” and “George Washington,” and spending a million bucks to repaint a mural of the life of Washington. Last year, the district’s budget deficit swelled to around $125 million.
After the votes came in, other educrats in town scurried to the defense of the downfallen trio and prayed that their replacements would consist of more of the same.
But what parents can do once, they can do again, and not just in San Francisco.
Kids, shake their hands. Your moms and dads are cool.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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In last week’s news conference, President Biden seemed to wave a green light to Vladimir Putin: Russian military forces may make a “minor incursion” into neighboring Ukraine. Was Biden applying to diplomacy, I wondered, the permissive posture so many other Democratic officials have taken, domestically? Crime’s fine, if small enough.
If so, Biden’s not leading — Democrats around the country are changing direction.
“We are in a crisis,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced last month, declaring a state of emergency. “Too many people are dying in this city. Too many people are sprawled all over our streets. And now we have a plan to address it.”
Her approach? Simple: End the “reign of criminals” by taking “the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement . . . and less tolerant of all the bullsh*t that has destroyed our city.”
The New York Times called it “a sharp break with the liberal conventions that have guided her city for decades.”
“About time,” was California Governor Gavin Newsom’s response.
When Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner responded to questions about rising crime by arguing, “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence,” former Mayor Michael Nutter expressed incredulity.
“How many more Black and brown people, and others,” Nutter wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a ‘crisis’?”
Still, upon taking office weeks ago, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg “ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies . . .” the New York Post reported.
“The identical platform,” noted a police supervisor, “has not worked out in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore.”
Or anywhere else. Ever.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Frisco Findings
Bravely risking damage and scorn, San Francisco engaged in a grand sociological experiment: testing whether or not we might all be better off “essentially ‘legalizing shoplifting.’”
Before announcing the conclusion of this daring research, let’s review.
“Shoplifting cases are all too common in San Francisco,” explained the UK’s Daily Mail, “where charges of property theft less than $950 in value was downgraded from a felony to a misdemeanor in 2014 — meaning that store staff and security do not pursue or stop thieves who have taken anything worth less than $1,000.”
After a Neiman Marcus department store was looted back in July, NBC News described it as “only the latest to give an impression of lawlessness running rampant. . . .”
The ever-so-sensitive re-calibration of the justice system has not been helped by the abundance of examples of mass theft putting stores out of business — all going back at least a year or two.
“As the number of burglaries soar,” informed KPIX, the city’s CBS affiliate, “San Francisco residents say they feel unsafe.”
Finally, following last Friday’s episode of robbing and vandalizing stores in Union Square, city authorities decided to end the research.
Mayor London Breed told her fellow ‘City by the Bay’ guinea pigs the study’s shocking conclusion: Brazen theft is “detrimental to our city.”
“What happens when people vandalize and commit those level of crimes in San Francisco,” her honor elaborated. “We not only lose those businesses, we lose those jobs.”
And then, she applied her hypersonic kicker: “We lose that tax revenue that helps to support our economy that helps to support many of the social service programs that we have in the city in the first place.”
So, there you have it. Theft is bad. Cuz taxes.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of course, Mayor Breed’s most talked-about approach to getting crime under control has been more deliberately screwing up the city’s already snarled traffic to make it more difficult for looters to flee. Courage.
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When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post.
That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”
A sampling:
- “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
- One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
- The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**
“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”
Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins.
The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.
** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.
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