‘No one wants to open a restaurant in San Francisco’ because of break-ins, costs
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/What-s-th...
Putting enforcement priority on burglary and vandalism (the problems mentioned in the article) instead of the issues you listed seems like the right thing to do.
My car has been broken into multiple times in SF. Once in front of a police station. Once near a school which had security cameras rolling which filmed the entire thing. Police are uninterested. They told me "these people have it hard enough, we're not going to make things harder for them"
That's debatable. Another perspective: Boudin was nobody's first choice, but because of ranked-choice voting and some political infighting among moderates that split the vote, Boudin took home the prize. See https://missionlocal.org/2019/11/s-f-election-wrap-how-could...
Which is not to say that he wasn't fairly elected, just that I seriously doubt he was specifically elected for his platform. The man is a Rhodes scholar, a great speaker, and got a lot of press, precisely the kind of person you vote for in ranked-choice after you've checked off your top pick(s).
For example, Boudin did well among the Chinese community, which is generally conservative. But their first choice was Tung, a moderate-conservative who supported prosecution of quality of life crimes at least as strongly as currently. As the SF Chronicle put it, "Tung was a natural choice for Chinese voters, who make up a third of the city’s voters, and Boudin campaigned heavily in the Chinese community. He speaks some Cantonese and Mandarin and won the endorsement of the Sing Tao Daily, the largest Chinese language newspaper in the Bay Area. That could be a reason he won a lot of Tung’s second-choice votes, even though their politics were at opposite ends of the candidate spectrum." https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ho...
As the Mission Local implied, this is the sort of oddball result you can sometimes get from "the fetid rabbit hole of San Francisco club politics, that perfect amalgamation of Tracy Flick and the Soviet politburo." (That quote is just amazing. Are there journalism prizes for soundbites? 'cause that journalist deserves one.)
I just checked Yelp and it said there are 2,642 restaurants in SF that are open right now. So maybe they just have enough restaurants?
"Property crime rates have actually declined in the city over the last year, but reported incidents may tell only part of the story."
3,475 this year vs 4,375 at the same time last year. 20% decrease
-No one wants to?
"“No one wants to open a restaurant in San Francisco,” said Alter, "who wants to expand in the city" but isn’t sure it’s currently a good idea.
Look, I supported sentencing and enforcement reform at least as much anyone, but we can't hide from the facts. It's one thing to say that these facts don't prove a causal relationship to sentencing reform, etc. That's absolutely fair. But it's another to deny or diminish the problems. We can't be defensive, fearful of consequences to reform efforts. If we can criticize the tough on crime crowd for ignoring 20 years of steadily decreasing crime, then we should be prepared to recognize when the numbers don't go our way. Facts aren't for our convenience; they keep us honest and grounded.
[1] See the first slide which includes August, 2019. The second slide with the property crime breakouts end in May, before the regression to the mean.
Your data is interesting but it also shows crime is trending down if dates are limited to 2017-2019, which the data you presented only goes to 2010 so doesnt really show long term trends either
2009 was the bottom of the recession and has become the baseline for examining many socio-economic trends across the country. 2011 was also the beginning of serious criminal justice reform in California; it was the year the state began to empty its prisons.
What remains down is violent crime, notwithstanding several high-profile assaults this past year, many of which are incident to property crimes.
Arguing that if you go back far enough things are still improving is like arguing wealth inequality isn't a legitimate issue because even the poor have televisions and refrigerators.
When Martin recalled the June break-in at the Pine Tar Grill, what sticks in his mind wasn’t losing the computers or bobbleheads. Instead, it was a conversation he had with a police officer who viewed the footage of the break-in, who told him that he recognized the person in the video and that he had been arrested multiple times, Martin said.
“As a business owner,” Martin said, “that’s just really hard to hear.”
There is also the simple fact that people in custody are physically separated from potential victims. This very obviously works.