The situation with the "crisis" feels very manufactured consent. Right around the time "defund the police" is getting serious attention, suddenly there's a crisis of theft to take the wind out of the movement.
I personal theory is that there are two types of criminals - normal people who do the occasionally stupid thing (stealing a single item from retail or getting into a bar fight), and people who make crime their career path. The US model is to treat everybody as being in the latter group, while the Scandinavian model is to treat everybody as being in the first group. Instead we should treat people based on who they are, even if that means very different sentences for the same crime to different people.
Lucky for you, criminologists have crunched the numbers over and over again. Only 20% of prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses—not just “low-level” ones. Furthermore, many of them are violent offenders who pleaded down to lesser offenses as part of a plea bargain.
In other words, the United States could release every single drug offender from prison and still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Mass incarceration is overwhelmingly driven by violent offenders. America is simply a much more violent country than any European one.
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/organized-crime-rings-are-dr...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Bay-Area-retail-th...
There are organized groups recruiting significant numbers of people to do retail theft, bike theft, and car break-ins. The police and legal system haven't been very effective at combating this, so over the past few years the theft has become very public and visible.
The experiment failed, and it's now time to clean up the mess and resume normal order.
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-san-francisco-re-funding-th...
Which was, itself, a response to another crisis...