EDIT- To answer your question, SFPD works when they feel like it. When they do they want it to be easy. Local politics means there’s no real accountability that an increase is their power would come with increased expectations, so why wouldn’t they take as much as they can get
Seattle recently elected a hard-Republican city attorney, who ran on a platform of zero tolerance for misdemeanors. Despite this, SPD continues to be both unaccountable and largely useless. Go figure...
Maybe the process is too onerous, but if you stopped writing code altogether because of paperwork would you expect to keep your job?
There's a recent video where the police catch someone in the act of stealing a catalytic converter and let him go. In addition to the video there are multiple eye witnesses. Chesa's gone, they have allies in Breed and the new DA. What's the excuse now?
The justification of this is pretty obvioulsy, police love [d-cking around with] Police State surveillance tools, which have as much allure as their military cosplay as well as providing a rich vein of feeding off public funding and associated grift payback and political donation.
The actual use case which translates into public safety, especially with respect to property crime and the cluster of adjacent unenforced lifestyle-degrading failures of SF policing, seem to in no way justify the expenditure.
And that is 100x as true because plain old community policing consistently proves infinitely better return on value.
Not that actual proven return on value ever provokes investment in plain old community and social welfare, in our current dystopia...
Community policing requires cops, and lots of them. SFPD is hemorrhaging talent, and why wouldn't it? Who would want to work somewhere with a sky-high cost of living, a populace who largely despises you, and an mostly-hostile City Hall? The best officers are lateraling out to better climes and recruitment numbers are falling.
Also, it's very true that they don't go after many crimes, but they do spend resources on things like attempted murder, rape, etc. Too bad about your car, though...
London Breed ran a representative survey by a sophisticated polling group whose objective is to identify "actions that maximize increase in votes." It's Shorism - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/style/david-shor-democrat... - not specifically his group but in a Darwinian way this is how lots of local elected officials operate now.
So now we understand your question is really, "Why does this particular action affect voting?" We can only speculate. Too few people are victims of property crime for that to be the explanatory variable. I think the kind of people who are never victims of property crime (the majority) react very strongly to the presence of cameras. They also believe that Ring makes them more secure. It's all kind of stupid. But that kind of person votes.