If career criminals are terrorizing a neighborhood with nightly burglaries, should residents push to send these criminals to jail? Or should they turn their homes into fortresses because the reigning woke ideology doesn’t believe incarceration works?
If this neighborhood is in San Francisco, the answer is easy: to the barricades!
According to the
San Francisco Chronicle,
burglaries are up another 13% this year in the jurisdiction of the Mission District Police Station after a considerable rise in burglaries last year. The reported numbers are just the tip of the iceberg, though, because many people don’t report burglaries as they know nothing will come of it.
Two burglars recently arrested by San Francisco police after robbing the basement of a Victorian house in the city’s Castro District had a total of 20 arrests on suspicion of burglary between them. They were both on probation when they were arrested again.
“It raises tricky questions about incarceration,” Supervisor Rafael Mandelman told the Chronicle. “Because so far we’ve been unable to release (the burglars) without them committing more crimes. And the question for reformers is, ‘What do we do with someone like that?’”
Apparently, for San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the answer is not jail. The criminal justice system “cannot resolve all of the major, structural problems — including poverty, a lack of housing, and widespread addiction that create the conditions for property crime,” a district attorney’s office spokeswoman told the Chronicle.
Instead of sending repeat offenders to jail, Castro residents are turning their homes into fortresses. Homeowners are upgrading their existing locks, adding new locks to windows, and installing security cameras and motion detectors.
The homeless, however, don’t have the resources to fortify their tents. But some residents notice they seem to be coping just fine. After police declined to take a resident’s bike back from a homeless encampment, the homeowner told the Chronicle, “I just wasn’t willing to steal my bike back.”
