San Franciso mayor London Breed has announced that the city is taking “new steps to address public safety,” writing that “San Francisco is a compassionate city, but our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference.” Those new steps, laid out in a post on Breed’s Medium page, include:
-
Executing an Emergency Intervention Plan in the Tenderloin neighborhood,
-
Securing emergency police funding to ensure we have the resources to combat major safety problems over the next several months,
-
Amending our surveillance ordinance so law enforcement can prevent and interrupt crime in real time — something they’re effectively barred from doing now — to better protect our homes and businesses,
-
Disrupting the illegal street sales of stolen goods that have become a clear public safety issue and are contributing to retail theft.
This is not the first example of a progressive mayor in a crime-plagued city eating crow in recent months. The anti-police fervor that swept America in 2020 led to a number of ill-conceived reforms in many of America’s major urban areas, including the slashing of police budgets to “reallocate” funds to community programs in San Francisco and at least twelve other major cities. In the face of a deadly, record-breaking crime spike — which has seen twelve cities already surpass all-time annual homicide records with weeks still left to go before the end of the year — the push to neuter law enforcement seems far less attractive than it did for many at the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cities such as New York, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Portland, and a number of others have all moved to re-fund the departments they de-funded in a fit of self-destructive mania last year. Thankfully for its beleaguered residents, San Francisco is now joining that list.
Our cities’ experiments with lawlessness over the course of the last year proved what most sane people already knew: Police stop crime, and an absence of police leads to more crime. It’s good to see cities like San Francisco also arriving at this realization — better late than never. But it’s disturbing that anyone ever thought otherwise.