San Francisco Mayor Declares State of Emergency to Fight City’s ‘Nasty Streets’ | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco Mayor Declares State of Emergency to Fight City’s ‘Nasty Streets’

nytimes.com

72 pointsedmcnulty10183 comments

It is a very disingenuous turnaround, as the current mayor and city council members are part of the problem. Lets see if they actually make it happened. Word on the street is that this came from Pelosi, as they saw poll numbers and San Francisco is making the whole Democratic party look awful. There was a turnaround even from the Pilly ultra progressive DA as well, who just two weeks ago was denying that there was a crime problem, meanwhile murders reached all time high. So this turnaround is a coordinated thing, which means it is coming from the DNC.

This turnaround is because the political class/establishment got scared from both the Virginia (and somewhat New Jersey race), and in Seatle where people elected a republican DA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/06/seattle-ele...

The 'progressives' and their insane left wing policies, are causing a major regress of quality of life of everyone in the city, and the rest of the country is paying attention. This is the rest of the political establishment trying to save their skin, and jumping from the sinking ship and trying to reverse course.

Also, both CA (LA and SA), and Seattle and Chicago are what happens when a region becomes a one party state. There is no more competition and the establishment gets entrenched to the point that it hard to dislodge, and they can enact all kind of crazy policies, that don't benefit their constituents.

The same thing, but opposite ideology (right wing), is in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. (Orban and Erdogan are the opposite side of the same coin. Super entrenched majority, that is hard to kick out, and steer the place into regress, corruption or mismanagement).

Moral of the story: Don't vote blindly for one party. If the current elected leaders are not making your life better, vote them out.

Well said. Even blind freddy can see this about-face is about trying to keep themselves and their political apparatus in power and not because they ever cared about the residents quality of life. The sad part is that their constituents will believe the new lies and keep voting for them.

How are the 'progressives' causing anything when they've not gotten a single thing they've wanted, ever? What's going on now is a directly traceable result of the 'mainstream' politicians in both parties doing what they've been doing for decades. These problems are a direct result of the progressives not getting what they're fighting for.

For worse (certainly not better), we have 2 parties. One is far, far worse for the general population than the other. Yes, if the current elected leaders are not making your life better, vote them out, but that doesn't mean blindly for the other party. Vote for better democrats, progressive and (actual) working class representatives that aren't brought to you by Amazon. It's the only party that gives people like that a chance. No matter how small that chance might be, it's infinitely better than 0.

Please don't lie and try to gaslight.

Current SF DA is an ultra progressive that doesn't want to jail criminals, and thinks stealing is redistribution. Also, the proposition 47 passed in CA that makes stealing a midemenor, . Both very 'progressive' ticket items. Also, police got less funding as well.

How are they working out for SF?

How are the open drug markets working for SF? Currently there are 570 people dying over overdose, every year. More than twice than covid, which we all admitted it was a national emergency.

Time to admit, 'progressive' policies are failures. They are just a left wing form of anarchy, and normal folks are getting fed up with them.

You are cherry picking local initiatives that some progressives have won that have basis on European ways of handling these sort of issues but have been hijacked or undermined by others who want them to fail.

> Also, the proposition 47 passed in CA that makes stealing a midemenor

With the whole hijacking of BLM the police have become very cavalier towards even attempting to do their jobs. What started as a request to not shoot unarmed black people has morphed into police protesting by not enforcing their duties and using their unions as cover. This is to help encourage the failure of these proposals and revert to an exreme right wing policy.

In places like Oregon they don't even follow the will of the people (eg. ballot initiative to decriminalize all drugs just gets ignored by the mayor/police). The purpose of this law is to follow the Dutch model where people are given the drugs in a controlled environment and offered treatment options to wean them off. At least thats the end goal. But like everywhere else in this country where these bills get passed, they will be sabotaged by people at all layers that want to keep the crappy status quo(ie. a permanent racial underclass that serves the upper classes\corporate interests)

You are also ignoring all the big ticket items that they never get. Did you see how Bernie Sanders was totally curb-stomped by the DNC and afterwards they went back to sleep? Where is universal healthcare? tuition free college? federal jobs program? Green new deal Infrastructure/Jobs/R&D investment? Almost nothing progressive gets passed and when it does it gets sabotaged immediately.

> that have basis on European ways of handling these sort of issues

I suggest you try shoplifting in any European country and see what happens.

Entering the European prison system is not a life ending experience like it is here in the US. Once you get out of prison, you have a record and because of that you are ineligible for many jobs. That leads to a cycle that lands you back in prison. Like they say, once you are in the system it is extremely hard to get out.

Its even joked about in American media[1]:https://youtu.be/q7GiJHBNqvU?t=54

These laws that are causing all this chaos are a desperate attempt to break this cycle but clearly poorly implemented. But the fundamental truth is that we cannot achieve the European method without overhauling the whole system. That takes either a very brave politician at the top or people elected in the various multiple layers that form the current apparatus. I don't see progressives capable of doing this. It is near impossible to get just one person elected so overhauling the prison system? Forget about it.

This is a very disingenuous comment coming from what appears to be a right wing point of view. I like how you left out all the right wing states that are also one party rule or even how many partake in gerrymandering to cheat the results.

The Democratic party and its media arm made record levels of fundraising/profit money when Trump was in office and they were the #resistance. They are motivated by staying in power yes, but they benefit greatly from the other guys being in office as well. Its a stretch to say this is a coordinated move. While the DNC does coordinate, I suspect its more to do with complaints from corporate donors and not for any re-election efforts.

The only ones sounding the alarm over Virginia and NJ are the far left progressives but its clear the DNC does not care. Just look at Biden's actions. He has many levers he could pull right this minute to fire up the base (executive orders such as legalizing marajuanna, pardon all nonviolent drug offenders, forgive student debt, etc.) but he chooses not to. Their strategy is to blame progressives when they lose in 2022 and 2024 in an effort to further delegitimize them.

I am a Democrat btw. I just don't want to see my party shooting their own foot but adopting terrible policies that don't improve people's life.

The existing policies have failed, thats why we are even entertaining discussion of new policies that you don't like. There are only two directions from here. A more progressive approach as implemented in Europe or authoritarian far-right policies.

I need to vent out. I am an immigrant to USA at young age and now naturalized citizen. Ever since I got citizenship, I've for voted for Democrats because they represent my values. But today's left-wing is unbearable for me. We've thrown away meritocracy, liberty and rule of law. Instead, we have rampant racism (against Whites), authoritarian undertones at policy level, and straight up anarchy in many municipalities. It's constant barrage of identity politics to divide people into groups, its a constant government corruption and a constant attack on the spirit of of this nation that attracted my parents to move here. These people want to rewrite history in darkest possible terms.

People in my country of origin are shocked at what's going on in American left, they are already aware of the right. It's all fucked up.

I visited SF right before the pandemic, and 15 years before (I am French).

The difference was palpable. We used to walk down the streets at night with my wife 15 years ago, and we were walking quickly now with our children, surrounded by homeless people and dirty streets (or hotel was next to the harbor, in the touristic area).

It is a shame, I liked SF a lot.

Isn’t this entirely the fault of the extremist politicians and the voters who put them in place? Mayor Breed has been in her position for a few years. Why speak up now, when all of this has been building up for years, and was so obvious and predictable? I know it is tough to risk reputation when the other side is framing everything in terms of race, justice, and other “risky” terms, but I feel the incumbent politicians (and extremist DA Chesa Boudin) should not get credit for reversing course now.

Unfortunately the damage has been done. Restorative justice born in SF is now a widespread practice, particularly along the west coast. In many of these cities we see the same policies of treating crimes as non crimes, removing consequences, releasing criminals early, and other such practices that ultimately risk public safety. I bet other cities will see the same effects as well.

Breed isn't extremist. In San Francisco politics, she's a tad right of center. Indeed, the Board of Supervisors "progressive" caucus replaced her as acting mayor in early 2018 with Mark Farrell in a failed effort to torpedo her campaign for the coming mayoral election.

Here's the very left supervisor Hillary Ronan describing Breed in 2018: "The same rich white men that steered the policies that have created the mess we are in today are the same people who are firmly behind the candidacy of London Breed." (https://beyondchron.org/sfs-twisted-racial-politics/)

Now, the progressive left is an extremely powerful force in the city, though not quite a majority. No mayor, whatever their political views, could get anything done without understanding how to placate that group. That's how politics works--you have to compromise to get anything done. Unfortunately, like Republicans nationally, local progressives have learned how to abuse that dynamic by using obstructionism and extreme rhetoric to pull the center of debate in their preferred direction. And that's how the city ends up with some of its more extreme policies and general paralysis.

How is Nancy Pelosi still in office if the city is so progressive? I was part of the Shahid Bhuttar campaign and was very disappointed that they chose to re-elect Pelosi after all the messes of the Trump years. I think the city is really controlled by the rich neoliberals and progressives are nothing but lip service. There is no other reason they would keep such a garbage candidate around.

Replacing incumbents is hard. Replacing ones with wide recognition is even harder (she's the speaker of the house).

Replacing them with people with zero history in politics is going to be nearly impossible. Wikipedia doesn't even consider Buttar notable enough to have his own article, and he still managed to get a quarter of the vote in the last election, which should be seen a real accomplishment.

It gives an indication that the electorate (of which there should be ~700k people) does not care enough to even consider a different option or even bother to come out and vote.

It looks like your account is using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. Can you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When an account crosses the 'primarily' line of doing this, that's the line at which we start banning, for reasons explained at these links:

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I find it interesting that crime in S.F. in 2021 is actually amongst some of the lowest it's been in in a decade.

https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...

But it appears that compared to a similarly sized city (850,000ish) Jacksonville FL, San Fr. has almost twice as much property crime.

https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/fl/jacksonville/crime

Does anyone have any additional data that would be good to look at to get a clearer picture?

People aren't reporting all the crime because cops take 3-4 hours to show up and even when the cops do show up, they don't even always take a police report. For car breaks they tell you to call 311. If it's an issue with a homeless person (and most are) then they tell you to call the non-emergency line... It's a complete joke.

Last year my wife was pregnant and we had a homeless guy walking around our building with a machete and smoking meth and it still took the cops HOURS to show up and when they did--they just shooed him down the street. Great job! You have to have an actual restraining order for the cops to do anything and that takes time+money.

People just aren't wasting their time reporting crimes that they know the SFPD and city won't do anything about. I know I didn't report the last 3 times my car got broken into. Most people probably report it the first time, see that the SF basically takes no action, then stop reporting further break ins.

Anecdotally, this is the same anywhere. Cops take forever to show up. I always assumed it was a coordinated effort to pump the populace for more funding.

Not true. I've lived in other parts of the state where cops show up much quicker--especially if it's something that isn't a property crime.

> She said she recognized that San Francisco was a compassionate city, but “we’re not a city where anything goes.”

I think that is reasonable. From these comments, I get a very "dammed if you do, damned if you don't" sentiment. Should she not try to improve things, just because they tried something and it went too far in the other direction?

She won’t stick with it. She just saw a poll and is switching her tune. She was downplaying the same stories previously. She’s self-motivated to save her own position. Every time there was a violent crime in BART that made the news, they’d have cops for 2-3 days in the stations then go back to ignoring things once the spotlight was off. I suspect the same will happen here. They cleaned the city up for the Super Bowl so clearly it can be done.

They didn't "clean up the city" for the Super Bowl. They just took all of the bad stuff going on near where the SB festivities were, and (temporarily, as it turned out) moved it elsewhere.

i assumed this was a new mayor, i was surprised to see that she's been in office since 2018.

Yes, the elections are close so she has to undo part of what SB 82 did by decriminalising petty theft in order to stand a chance for a new term.

This is how politicians create problems and then fix them in order to stay relevant and pretend they're doing actual work.

I wouldn't say "close"; Breed is less than two years into her four-year term. The next mayoral elections aren't for another two years, at the end of 2023.

But I suppose it's possible that she believes she needs to start "doing something" about the crime problem even now (rather than waiting another year), or it could affect her chances at reelection.

> This is how politicians create problems and then fix them in order to stay relevant and pretend they’re doing actual work.

Or a politician is simply reacting with the changing viewpoints of their constituents in regards to a failed policy. You know, how well-adjusted members of society behave when faced with changing circumstances.

I simply cannot tolerate this “us vs them” mentality in American politics.

We need to stop normalizing states of “Emergency” to deal with everyday policy issues. It’s inappropriate, anti-democratic, and a dangerous road to head down.

I sometimes feel like a crazy person in today's news. A city notorious for decriminalizing... everything, is now crying that crime is too high. What exactly is the news break here?

A key skill in politics is breaking things through your decisions then act like your shocked and angry at how it was allowed to happen.

Yeah, and it cuts both ways unfortunately.

I feel like there should be a way more reasonable middle ground on where to live between 'people are suffering let them steal from you and do whatever they want outside of murder' and 'no gay marriages, no abortion, no welfare', which seem about what we're stuck with anymore.

Does a city exist that is progressive in nature but tough on crime?

Yes, New York City under Bloomberg.

Cities exist that are progressive and low on crime.

Low on crime =/= tough on crime. SF used to be reasonably low crime.

I doubt that you can name one in the US.

I was thinking of cities in Europe and Asia although I could try to name some cities in the US but the definition of low in that context would be by US standard (sadly). Austin is equal to Kansas in crime rate. The latter is conservative-leaning and former is liberal-leaning.

Europe and Asia are far less progressive than you think.

Thinkers are far less European and Asian than you progress.

Assuming you mean Kansas City, Kansas the state may be red, but the city…blue.

You really believe all that cities in the US only fit in those two buckets?

Maybe. I'm mostly asking honestly because it doesn't seem that hard.

I've lived in 6 cities between the great lakes and FL, and it seems like all were way too far in one direction or the other.

If not in policy itself, then in the people.

I just want a densely populated city that is clean. Why can other countries do this and not the US?

Lack of social cohesion, the cause of which could be attributed to a lot of things. Though I will say I live in Seattle and I never drive around downtown or really any area and think it's dirty. But maybe I'm just used to living in cities? Denver seems clean to me too.

Foreign cities that are clean and nice tend to be both very homogenous and high median intelligence. In the absence of homogeneity there will always be defectors who are willing to externalize costs like litter disposal. In an excessively downshifted intelligence distribution there will be insufficient productivity and developmental capacity for a high standard of living. There are few/no large cities in the US which meet these criteria.

Social housing instead of the worst off living in tents and under bridges

When you want a “densely populated city”, what exactly do you mean by that, in the year 2022? I assume you mean high-density…there are plenty of clean medium-density cities/suburbs in the US.

The US is a big, beautiful, lately-developed, scenically/climatically diverse land that hasn’t had the need to go high-density. Nobody is pushing to build another Manhattan…if the US people had wanted it, the US would have built several Manhattans over the last few decades. Most “normal” (?) US people seem to like their little plot of land and their own detached house, especially as they build families and grow older. The US has always had that luxury/basic human right and the resources to build such houses and that has led to lower population densities even in cities. Most people like a little elbow room (cue the “sprawl is the Devil’s underpants” crowd).

In the early-mid 20th Century, “high-density” meant access to major cultural venues and performances, top performances in sports, first crack at new technologies, broader access to economic opportunities, ease of finding your unique subculture that you could fit into, etc.. and you paid for it in cost-of-living and congestion (time/hassle tax).

Unless you have a major fixation on live performances on a regular basis, most of those positive arguments have weakened in the face of the advances in IT. Not totally gone away, but an occasional visit to a “densely populated” area will check off most of those boxes. The button that says “I <heart> NY, from a comfortable distance” comes to mind.

If a particular densely populated area is your querencia, then of course you have a strong reason/commitment to stay and improve it. Clean it up, it’s your town. Welcome to the slog. You can’t just buy or choose it, you have to build it.

If it isn’t your querencia, then the benefits from trying yet another “densely populated” area seem to have weakened over time and perhaps you should broaden your outlook on things. Do you really want 10000/sq mi, or will 2000/sq mi suffice (or even 500/sq mi) with the occasional trip to any one of several densely populated cities? You’ll see more of the US/world that way, and maybe even save money. You’ll certainly save on the congestion/hassle tax on a day-to-day basis. Get to plant a real garden. Smile at your neighbor who isn’t just the jerk who lives above you.

What are the positive values that you associate with “densely populated”? They differ by individual. Is it size? There are people who like their City to be so big that they couldn’t possibly grok all of it in their lifetime. There is always something new. Some prefer a City they can just fit into their head, like a comfortable overstuffed chair. Some want a small village, to free the rest of their mind for the rest of the human experience. Enquiring minds want to know…

What other countries?

Singapore? You’ll need a system of low wage foreign workers to clean up after your citizens and a complete readjustment to living in small apartment high rises.

Americans don’t want either?

I advise careful consideration about what it says that these things tend to be correlated. Social technologies that have existed for a very long time tend to have strong second-order effects in seemingly unrelated domains; those social technologies survive because their users are better adapted.

Most European cities.

They didn't decriminalize everything nor did they expect crime to increase. It's not "breaking news" either it's just something that happened.

This seems like a strained framing. News that a politician is OK with high crime is bewildering. News that they want to curb high crime is not bewildering, regardless of whether their existing policies contributed to the crime rate. And either policy seems like a pretty standard thing to report on, no? Lastly, announcing a stance against something is not "crying" about it.

I think you really just wanted to make the case that the city's policies spurred crime, which is fine, but you should then do that directly instead of making kind of nonsensical snarky quips.

> I think you really just wanted to make the case that the city's policies spurred crime, which is fine, but you should then do that directly instead of making kind of nonsensical snarky quips.

You are correct in my case. My entire comment was three sentences. It was perhaps just a hair snarky, admittedly, but I don't think it was full of quips or nonsensical.

Decriminalization should reduce crime by definition I think as fewer things are classified as crimes.

edit: my bad - "Decriminalization or decriminalisation is the lessening or termination of criminal penalties in relation to certain acts" so these things can still be classified as crimes

They haven’t actually been decriminalized. Some crimes have been classified as lesser crimes (through Prop 47, for example) and many crimes the DA has simply refused to prosecute. And the police know that making arrests is often pointless if DA won’t uphold the law on his end.

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