Another Black female mayor is facing her own massive challenge in the statewide unhoused crisis; embattled San Francisco mayor London Breed, promised to clean up San Francisco, but she does face some progressive challenges. Former socialist district attorney Chesa Boudin was antithetical to Breed’s tough on crime rhetoric, so before he could complete his first term in office he was ousted in a recall election allowing Breed’s appointee Brooke Jenkins to come in and continue a tough on crime agenda.
Boudin was elected after the rise of Bernie Sanders where social democracy gained much popularity. After the election of Trump, many Americans felt, to fight an imagined fascist in the White House, we simply needed to vote for progressives and everything would be fixed. An overly simplistic technocratic strategy that begins and ends with putting the right people in positions of power. Politics as consumerism, buy progressive, and they alone will fix social ills.
Peak COVID’s shelter in place orders, coupled with a 24/7 newscycle, mainstream and independent laser focused on the racism and ineptitude of then president Trump, a barrage of public police killings of unarmed Black citizens and vigilante violence also aimed at people of color and it culminates with the televised police murder of George Floyd and the country erupts.
The solution to the racial reckoning was simple as a line item on a spreadsheet. Just allocate funds for law enforcement elsewhere. The amount of money spent on police was causing all this senseless violence, so move those funds over where they can be better suited and we’ll not only put an end to extra judicial police killings, but we’ll end poverty, crime, etc. I know many of you listening have heard this before, but we can’t even begin to discuss a city like San Francisco without putting into context the feeling of the nation, because it can be that feeling that shapes policy. We need to understand how public opinion can be manipulated and shaped and changed overnight.
In San Francisco, demands were made to defund the police, and maybe the city’s biggest ally to actually hold law enforcement accountable, then district attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted. The progressive love affair was over in SF. Property crime was on the rise and people didn’t care about aversion programs and high incarceration rates anymore. That’s abstract thinking, they wanted solutions NOW! Chesa wasn’t the only leftist/socialist in city government, there were others, and London Breed and her new D.A. went on the attack to call them out as a hindrance to law and order in San Francisco as they were idealists who weren’t from the city, and didn’t have an appreciation for the people of SF. Breed and Jenkins are Black women, it was easy for them to use that and call out the white progressives in office for not understanding the plight of Black and Brown citizens facing rising post peak COVID crime and the daily blight of the large homeless encampments affecting small business owned by many people of color throughout the city.
Just like that, the news went from following any case of police misconduct to showing an endless stream of smash and grab robberies. Some in high end downtown shopping districts. Nordstrom, the long-time staple of the Westfield Mall in downtown SF, left. Their rationale for leaving for many in SF was simple, it was all the robberies. People were scared to go to SF for fear of having their car broke into, or being robbed leaving a store. On top of all of this, any attempt at building any sort of solution for housing the homeless population was running into issues with people in the community. As I’ve said many times on this show, we can all talk crap about “NIMBYs” but who wants to have an encampment next to their child’s school? A tiny home community in your community? A shelter in the heart of your neighborhood?
Breed vowed to clean up SF and she, like many mayors in the country facing similar challenges, was going to do large sweeps of the larger encampments that were literally blocking sidewalks. Some of these encampments were massive, and yes, sometimes violent. Open air drug markets and public drug use, and many cases in SF, deaths. In the 80s and 90s crack was the big bad and it had to be eliminated and the people that sold it were compared to demons praying on the innocent in their community. The same can be said for opioids in 2023. To date, there have been 473 deaths from opioids in SF and the year isn’t even over. The big bad for Breed is opioids and fentanyl, so the crackdown has begun.
But sweeping the encampments has hit a snag for Breed as homeless people and their advocates have filed suit against the city for not holding to their own laws about how to handle the sweeps. A federal judge has put a halt on the sweeps, because if you’re going to sweep an encampment, the city has to provide housing solutions for the people caught up in the sweep. According to the SF Chronicle, of the 165 days SF cleared a site, only about 18% of those days did the city actually have beds for everyone caught up. Advocates and homeless citizens claim law enforcement threw away IDs, important documents and records, you know pertinent documents needed to obtain housing. So now the city and advocates are in a fight. The city feels they can’t do what they need to do to reach people in need without clearing an encampment, and the advocates say the sweeps are criminalizing poverty. The one thing both sides seem to mildly agree on is that people shouldn’t have to sleep on the streets. Crue, what do you say about what’s going on in SF?
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