In today’s San Francisco, there’s a car break-in every 20 minutes. Public urination has gotten so out of control that the city spent $20 million to build open-air urinals in different parks — an effort that still hasn’t reduced the amount of human feces, urine, and vomit that can be found on the streets at any given time. And now there are just under 10,000 homeless individuals living on San Francisco’s streets — a crisis that rivals homelessness in third world countries.
San Francisco’s new district attorney plans to do absolutely nothing about it.
Chesa Boudin, a former deputy public defender who won the city’s heated district attorney race last week, says he plans to turn his attention to police brutality and mass incarceration.
“When we started this campaign, we believed that the people of San Francisco wanted a different vision of justice,” Boudin told the Washington Post. “We were right. In voting for this campaign, the residents of San Francisco have demanded radical change and rejected calls to go back to the tough-on-crime era that did not make us safer and destroyed the lives of thousands of San Franciscans.”
That new “vision of justice” does not include enforcement against the many quality-of-life crimes that are well in the process of turning San Francisco from a prosperous metropolis into a third-world dystopia. In fact, Boudin has promised that he won’t prosecute these crimes at all.
“We will not prosecute cases involving quality-of-life crimes,” Boudin said during the campaign. “Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted. Many of these crimes are still being prosecuted. We have a long way to go to decriminalize poverty and homelessness.”
Boudin’s agenda — or the lack thereof — is what happens when social justice trumps the rule of law. The liberal plan to “decriminalize poverty and homelessness” might make sense in Boudin’s head, but in application, it will only make the city more uninhabitable than it already is. If there are no consequences for theft, public indecency, drug use, etc., then these problems will continue to get worse.
Boudin isn’t helping anyone. If anything, his nonchalant attitude will only widen the enormous divide between San Francisco’s ultra-wealthy, who live in separation from the muck — and the rest of the city. The 1% will continue to flood the tech industry, unbothered by high rates of crime, poverty, and low quality of life that won’t personally affect them. And the middle class and lower class will continue to flee while the poor get poorer. This is how California has become one of the worst states in America for both wealth and income inequality.
With his politically correct campaign, Boudin is paying lip service to the poor while pushing policies that will make their lives worse, just as San Francisco Democrats have done for decades.
San Francisco has very real and very startling problems. Police brutality and mass incarceration are the very least among them. What San Francisco needs is a heavy hand that will help pull the city out of the slump it’s in. Instead, the city elected Boudin, a politically correct lightweight whose decriminalization will accelerate the city’s downward spiral.
