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Dreako

They have stopped prosecuting repeat offenders, and reduced the size of the police force

People are slowly realizing that it was a mistake, but its gonna take some time to fix the situation.

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>They have stopped prosecuting repeat offenders, and reduced the size of the police force

Ok, but apparently it was shit even before that, so this can't be full answer.

The uncomfortable answer which no one wants to speak about is that an overtly liberal policy doesn't translate to the best possible society, or necessarily even an acceptable one, regardless of how well off the city or state is.

Compare San Francisco to somewhere like Singapore, and ask yourself where would you rather live - and if the freedoms available in SF are worth the trade offs. BTW I'm not taking a stance here as I live in neither location.

You can have 'overtly liberal policy' without becoming like San Francisco, and you can have conservative policy without becoming Singapore. Those are outliers.

Executing people for illegal drugs will almost certainly improve the situation in SF quite dramatically for those left alive afterward.

Thankfully, the US and California are still Democracies for the moment.

Anyone who tries to hold up Singapore as a beacon of "good governance" simply isn't working in reality ...

We will only know this in a 100 years or so.

The SFPD just refuse to do work because they know refusal will cause people to blame it on "overtly liberal policy" and give them even more funding to do no work.

(In the 70s they also once bombed the mayor's house when they didn't like him.)

What do the police have to do with the fact that prosecutors and DAs aren't filing charges and judges aren't handing out meaningful punishments?

"Oh look, Ricky is stealing again, should we bother arresting his aggressive angry ass again for the 7th time this year? Nah."

They should do their job they're paid for. Do you get to just not do your job when you don't feel like it?

Here another fun example of the sf police refusing to work — only this one has a happy ending - they actually face consequences.

An la times article said: “ San Francisco police officers Kevin Lyons and Kevin Sien have been temporarily suspended after they were arrested last year in connection with the destruction of evidence. They’re accused of destroying credit cards, identification records and suspected methamphetamine discovered in the luggage of a person staying in a hotel.

Lyons and Sien allegedly told staff that cataloging the evidence would take too long and instead disposed of the credit cards and IDs in a shred bin and flushed the drugs down a hotel toilet, according to state court criminal complaints.”

It’s a story mentioned here https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-03/twenty-p...

Is this actually true? I remember seeing SFPD post stuff on twitter like, "13th time this perp has been brought in, still no charges". They were getting the same guy over and over. It could have been a one-off, but I suppose they were using their platform to show that they _were_ working, and it was a policy of no teeth that let the perpetrators get off easy.

Edit: found the tweet: https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/133728051660988416...

Do you have evidence for the claim that cops in SF stopped working because they didn't like the DA?

No one is being honest in this debate. I would not take either sides word. I don't live in SF, but a similar city and the police use the same rhetoric while they refuse to do anything except sit in their car all day. No one trusts the police to accomplish anything here because they've been silent striking since covid began and I would not be surprised if the same was happening in SF. The DA is also a shit show though, it's not like you can point to any one person or action and in good faith say "here's the problem"

I don't own a gun, but honestly, if I lived in a place like this, I would try to get a concealed carry license, and frankly if that didn't work I'd probably carry anyway.

In civilized society, you make a pact with the state. They have a 'monopoly on violence' and in exchange, you and your property are protected. That pact seems to be broken in SF, and to a lesser extent in CA at large. People should do what they need to in order to keep themselves safe. If that means a gun? So be it.

The county is notorious for not giving out concealed carry licenses. Only a local business owner who has been robbed multiple times before would qualify essentially.

Not anymore! California became a CCW “shall issue” state (instead of “may issue”) last June, under NYSRPA v Bruen. There’s a backlog of people applying, but it’s finally possible. https://calmatters.org/guns/2023/03/california-concealed-car...

TIL. Thank you for sharing this with me.

While I agree with your sentiment, the problem with gun ownership in a place like SF is the risk of manslaughter charges. Shooting someone committing a property crime may be seen as justifiable from the eyes of the property owner, but not in the eyes of the law. Unfortunately you’re best off just letting yourself get robbed, or moving away if you don’t want to accept the risks of living with an ineffectual local government.

Your probably right, it's probably better just to move. The only time I could ever see myself shooting someone is if my life is in danger, though where I'm from a shotgun loaded with rock salt used to be a common deterant against theft

> shooting someone committing a property crime may be seen as justifiable from the eyes of the property owner, but not in the eyes of the law

One can fire non-lethal rounds, and aim around a person (or into the ground), instead of at them. I'm not a believer in urban gun ownership. But there are ways to responsibly be one and benefit from it without putting others' lives or your own freedom at risk. (Counterfactual: pulling a gun on a criminal is a good way to have a criminal pull a gun on you.)

perverse how the places where you probably need a gun most, it's hardest to get.

i pray i never need it but i'm glad to live in a place that's not without its problems, but where i can at least defend myself and my property.

also @JumpCriscross since his comment is dead: that's silly, you shouldn't make a threat you aren't willing to follow up on. more importantly "warning shots" are a really good way to cause collateral damage. might be you shoot through a wall. plus your eye is on the threat so it's irresponsible to shoot elsewhere bc you aren't actually evaluating what's there and what's behind it.

I'm sure the defund the police rhetoric helped.

This is not true from my experience. I’ve been the victim of a crime in SF and while they are severely understaffed they were very cooperative and willing to help.

Is San Francisco more liberal than major European cities?

Hamburg just started enforcing that pan-handlers mustn't sit down. They haven't outlawed it, but they're pretty actively trying to not make it a common occurrence in the city center. Tent cities, completely open drug consumption, ignoring theft < 1000€, ignoring car break-ins etc would absolutely not fly here. You might get some of that on a local level in a very progressive district of Berlin, but not in other major German cities. So at least for Germany: yeah, I think it is.

That's not liberalism at all, that's just dumbness. You seem to label everything you dislike liberal.

It's dumb to jail homeless and mentally ill people, but it's just as dumb to just stop jailing them without providing them the help they need.

The most liberal cities in the world don't have big homeless and crime problems because help and housing is provided.

> That's not liberalism at all, that's just dumbness.

I don't know, I'm not the judge of that, but it sounds a bit like a very mobile goal post. Usually, "liberal policies" are removing or weakening penalties and enforcement. A liberal drug policy will decriminalize drug use. liberal = tolerant, so liberal policies tolerate a lot more things.

And SF is in many regards more liberal than European cities. Whether it's your preferred kind of liberal politics, or whether it's combined with other effective policies etc, is a different question.

Would it be considered a liberal policy to tolerate someone walking into a store, conspicuously stealing ~$500 worth of goods, yelling, punching, and throwing furniture at anyone who confronts them and then returning the next day to do it again?

To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.

From where I'm sitting: yes, that would be considered liberal policy. It rejects the individual's responsibility and claims society is at fault for individual delinquency and should tolerate deviance.

> To me that looks like a society that has completely abdicated its responsibility of using legal force to protect the rights and safety of its inhabitants, rather than just an honest disagreement on what variation in values and lifestyles that are accepted.

It does to me, too, that's one of the reasons I moved to the suburbs, and it wasn't anywhere as bad as in SF and other US cities. But I felt that the priorities were backwards and I understood that the majority of people wanted them pushed further in the direction I considered wrong. So I moved, because why stay and suffer if you don't believe in those policies but most of your neighbors do?

It’s hard to fathom a society where the majority will not defend themselves against literal violence.

In a sense it’s closer to the original Christian ideal than most, but I don’t see how that can lead to peace, joy and prosperity long-term in a society where a minority abuses it.

> Usually, "liberal policies" are removing or weakening penalties and enforcement.

Are they? In the US "liberal policies" are also associated with higher taxation and government regulation. So which is it?

A brand can be associated with multiple things at once. If your question is why they don't want to decriminalize tax-fraud, you'd have to ask them.

> providing them the help they need.

Statements like this seem to be exactly why people are frustrated with SF's policies. What is the "help they need" that will be sufficient to keep them from being a problem? I've known addicts and schizophrenics, and it's near impossible to fix them, even with an affluent and caring family to support them the whole way. What will an incompetent state actor possibly do that is better, other than just lock them up to keep them from harming others?

basically the help they need is not becoming homeless in the first place. because the stress of that would make most people insane. once you go a few days without sleep, anyone is going to become psychotic. and then once you’ve been psychotic it just gets worse. so basically they just need basic housing and a place to wash their clothes. if you don’t want to give them that just kill them or stop complaining

You should submit your new baseless theory about schizophrenia and addition to the AMA. Sounds like you've solved this Nobel-worthy problem.

Another comment in this thread said:

> Since I moved [to SF], I have seen people break into cars (numerous times), fill suitcases with products from Target and Walgreens and leave without paying, casually smoke meth in a crowded bus, empty their bladder and bowels in the middle of the sidewalk, etc. all of this brazenly and in broad daylight.

I'm not aware of any major European city where this kind of behaviour is tolerated, much less common.

I can confidently say that pretty much nothing I've heard about SF (haven't spent much time there myself other than passing through) would be tolerated in Moscow. It's unthinkable. The worst thing you run into here would be a drunk guy at night or something like that. Moscow isn't exactly an example of a liberal-leaning city though :)

As for smaller cities in Europe like London or Berlin, they're also still reasonably safe (I didn't like night buses in London but that's about it) and the crazy stuff is mostly contained.

I guess a huge part of this is that most countries over here at least have something resembling a working social system.

I don't know that it really falls under the normal definition of liberal. But it's certainly the epitome of American neo-liberal ideals. This isn't really the same as liberalism in Europe (yet). The bulk of the general problems in SF and the US can be correlated to the number of mental health beds available. In Europe most countries have a rate of around 120 per 100k. In Asia it's upwards of 300. In the US. It's around 12.

Liberalism in the US heavily resists the usage of asylums and actually helping people in general. In Europe that's not really the case.

I'd use Japan (Tokyo), Taiwan (Tai Pei) or Hong Kong (prior to 2014 and the CCP becoming increasingly authoritarian) as examples instead of Singapore. Singapore is extreme and I think other cities that are less extreme are actually nicer to live in (having either lived or spent time in all 4)

There's too much focus here (the discussion) on the law itself.

The cities you mention have a different culture. It's ingrained into you as a kid. It's "less liberal" in the sense that the wider society doesn't accept these values. The media, your family and friends and other parts of the environment are a lot more effective than the law.

That's a good point, I think group pressure is definitely a factor there. Just as an example, it would be inconceivable for someone who knows he's sick not to wear a mask when going to work because of the social pressure and opprobrium around those actions.

On the other hand, I also know that in general in any of those countries, the consequences for something like shoplifting are a lot stronger than they would be in most western countries.

In Taiwan the homeless rate is very low because having a homeless relative is shameful. Affluent people do whatever it takes to ensure that no one in their extended family is out on the street in order to save face, even if they don't particularly like those relatives. No such culture of family responsibility exists in the US.

As an island nation, Taiwan also has a somewhat easier time preventing narcotics smuggling. Whereas the mainland Chinese Communist Party has covertly targeted the USA for "Opium War 2" by tacitly allowing the smuggling of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Mexican drug cartels.

What's there on the other side(the US)? Mexico does not have a fentanyl problem here, maybe there are some American cartels over there in the US which are not being put on the spotlight because... who knows.

> Compare San Francisco to somewhere like Singapore, and ask yourself where would you rather live

Singapore

Singapore has social housing and minimal unemployment so maybe once SF gets there we can have this conversation.

I think they have a different drug policy too.

Nobody is turning to drugs because they're left destitute on the streets in Singapore

SF's problem isn't liberal policies. It's the lack of them. The homeless problem is a prime example. Gentrification, NIMBYism, and a lack of affordable housing aren't "liberal."

A lot of selfish libertarians in Austin think they are liberal, too. Hmm.

An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law. Look at major cities across the country. Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad. This isn't 'liberal policies', this is corruption and ineptitude.

> An overtly liberal policy doesn't mean you don't enforce the law.

But hasn't the hue and cry been "defund the police"? We heard it as far back as the mostly peaceful protests that ravaged major US cities across the US in 2020-21. And it's been the chant of mostly left-leaning politicians and organizations.

'defund the police' has literally only been uttered seriously within the blm movement. Even the most progressive of politicians knew it was dead on arrival.

Sure, they may have known that "defund the police" couldn't last, but during the summer of 2020, progressive politicians took it seriously enough in public (much of it due to BLM). We got CHAZ in Seattle, Antifa trying to burn down federal buildings and police stations, and progressive DAs (e.g., Chesa Boudin) at the time decided to severely reduce the penalties that they would pursue for even serious crime. A few cities even got around to attempting to redirect funding from police to social workers and the like. Progressive politicians continued to take "defund the police" seriously until the fall, when it was clear that the issue had turned an easy election for Biden into a close election that he was at significant risk of losing. All of this indicated to criminals that law enforcement would be much lighter, which is why crime skyrocketed during that time and has continued to stay elevated until this day

Sometimes it helps to read more than just a slogan before commenting on issues. "defund the police" does not mean that there shouldn't be policing, it means that more attention needs to be brought into preventive measures and community building, so that you don't NEED the excessive police force that helps stirring the violence.

1. Police have never been defunded. San Francisco PD budget is up 5% from 2019. This is similar to every other city in the US (LAPD has $250M more in funding after George Floyd).

2. "Defund the Police" usually means diverting money away from reactive policies (policing) to proactive policies (community initiatives that prevent people from falling into abject poverty to begin with). You can claim that "defund the police" is bad optics, but honestly the US is such a far gone police state that "liberals" could have picked any rallying cry and it would have been weaponized.

3. The reason you see police forces doing less even though they have more funding is because they are using the narrative that they were "defunded" (recall this never happened) as a bargaining chip for police unions to negotiate with lawmakers for less oversight and more funding.

4. There is no correlation between police funding and crime rates. Police only show up AFTER a crime has been committed, and anyone who has dealt with police firsthand knows how much they love to drag their feet:

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2022/03/31/preven....

5. This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state. While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.

If your goal is to simply remove "undesirables" from the view of the public then police are a great tool, but if our conception of justice is that crude then we might as well return to the code of Hammurabi.

If the goal is to reduce violence and crime overall, then police are not the best tool for the job. Preventative measures must be taken to keep people from getting to the mental state that causes them to commit crimes.

Where are you getting your numbers? This link [1], says budget was cut 15% in 2020, 11% in 2021, and 11% in 2022.

This link [2] says police headcount is down 25% from 2017.

https://californiaglobe.com/articles/new-report-sfpd-short-8...

https://missionlocal.org/2023/03/police-staffing-crisis-san-...

https://abc7news.com/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-departmen...

Police budget was lowered in 2020, that's from a decrease in tax revenue though, not ideological.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/archives/breed-orders-departments...

It was also increased back to normal levels in 2022.

> While the crazy homeless people and crack addicts might be "out of sight out of mind", you can guarantee they are getting stabbed and beaten up in prison, or shot in the street by the cops.

Well, quite frankly, they deserve that outcome a lot more than guys like Bob Lee. I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes

> I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm.

This is some Hammurabi thinking. It's not about protecting "Osama Bin Laden" (although justice should be blind and not paywalled), it's about ensuring that our system produces fewer Osama Bin Ladens.

To steelman your point, let's say that police are 100% necessary in society and the more police the better. In this universe the police never cause collateral damage and are always 100% in the right.

In this world, even if you lock up every "Osama Bin Laden" you are still putting the police officers in harm's way. They are using their bodies to ensure that the Bob Lee's of the world can keep on innovating.

To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means. If society is a machine that produces Osama Bin Laden's as a byproduct, isn't it in everyone's best interest to reduce the rate at which we produce Osama Bin Laden's? Especially the police who put themselves in harms way?

I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line. You see this in places like Singapore that are extremely safe yet have much lower incarceration rates. As for the police obviously it’s unfortunate that they get put in harms way, but it is kinda what they signed up for, to an extent. An over focus on cop safety leads to situations like Uvalde.

If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.

Singapore has perhaps the world's most robust and citizen-accessible public housing system, which enforces not only class but also racial diversity in placement.

>I don’t understand how one could care so much about protecting dangerous, crazy homeless people from harm. It’s like worrying about making sure Osama bin Laden doesn’t get hit by any hijacked planes.

Controversial take incoming, brace yourself. Bin Laden was the son of a construction magnate who was radicalized in a war where he fought for the US by proxy, only to be abandoned (except where Western meddling was advantageous for Western interests) when it was over. His picture is the illustration for the proverb, "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth."

Bob Lee sounds like a great guy. He is among a class who benefited enormously from federal and state policy that subsidized suburban communities at the expense of cities, arguably in a way that shifted, rather than eliminated, the social ills that are endemic to most human societies above a certain population threshold. The policies that gave Bob Lee et al. their advantageous start created the dangerous, crazy people, when different policies might have diluted the circumstances which shaped them to the point where they might have been treatable, without necessarily cramping Mr. Lee's style.

There but for the grace of housing/economic policy advantageous to my intersectional identity go I.

(Note that we've ended up with the worst of both worlds.)

The countries with the most severe punishment tend to be the most dangerous countries. Singapore is a bit of an outlier. Most safe countries like Korea, Japan and Norway are not known for brutal punishments.

> I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line.

See my point #5 in the parent comment:

> This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state.

When you give the police overwhelming power to punish dangerous people, you have created a new class of very dangerous people. In my theoretical universe where cops are infallible this is not a problem, in the real world if you give an institution that much power what do you think would happen when they "solve crime". Would they willingly relinquish that power? Or would they aim to extend their influence onto larger swaths of the population with more draconian laws?

> If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.

I think you're missing the point. I am not saying there should be zero accountability for criminals and zero police. I am saying we should also attack the root causes of criminality instead of just using punitive measures. Right now we are treating the symptom and not the cause.

> To prevent harm to officers, we should figure out how to reduce the number of encounters they have, which means reducing the number of criminals through other means.

Conversely, increase the number of officers. This will cause the incidence per officer to fall.

There are places in the world that have done this. For example [0], where the populous has been deputized in order to quell violent crime.

[0] https://www.breitbart.com/latin-america/2023/04/03/ecuadors-...

I don't think you get the point.

Selective non-prosecution and non-enforcement of the law is a liberal policy. You see it with Soros-sponsored DAs and you see it with immigration. What is a “sanctuary”? Somewhere you don’t have to worry about the consequences of breaking federal immigration law.

There is a high degree of "blueness". I live in Austin, which is very blue, but not so blue that we didn't criminalize public tent living and enforce it. Dallas and Houston are "blue", but far less than Austin.

The West Coast cities, LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle are much more liberal than most "blue" cities.

Dallas and Houston are two cities with higher violent crime rates than San Francisco, so some array of reasons has Austin better off than both.

Regardless, I live in SF, and love it here, for way more reasons than the tech scene (it's actually a coincidence I live here as far as my job goes). I really hope we can improve this situation, regardless of the relative scale compared to other cities. It seems like part of a national problem.

> Most all of them are blue, even in deep red states, yet SF and LA are the only cities I know of with homelessness and crime being this bad.

Your impressions are, bluntly, wrong.

LA and San Francisco have the 32nd and 37th highest violent crime rates out of the top 100 largest cities in the US, and the 72nd and 7th in overall crime rates. Homelessness, driven by lack of development combined with the the attraction and generation of concentrated wealth is a real California statewide problem (though there are plenty of non-California cities with serious problems, NYC is nearly as bad as LA, and far worse than San Francisco, in terms of population share that is homeless.)

"homeless and crime" are usually associated with property crime such as larceny.

SF is 4th highest in the United States for larceny rates. Note that larceny is the most frequent type of property crime per the FBI.

As a liberal who lived there for a while -- I honestly think this is one of the few cases where liberals are less correct.

I think initially it started as "being poor is not a crime" with the good thought that you can't arrest people for not having a house. I think this escalated toward a lax attitude toward drugs and many "petty" crimes (e.g. public urination, stealing a case of beer).

The interesting thing was that when I lived there sometimes I'd ask or joke about it (bicycle theft was a huge problem, car windows being smashed, etc). People would mostly pretend they didn't see it and have no idea what to say to my joke for fear that somebody around them had a very strong opinion and they would offend.

Also, I remember once my improv class was chatting outside the theater and a homeless man asked for a cigarette and then started berating my classmates when they ignored him, and they actually felt bad. I know their sympathy came from a good place. Many of these people are damaged mentally and jail will only get them out of your face. But in my opinion something more proactive needed to be done.

I don't even think it needs to be traditional jail. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these people would be happier/healthier working outside in the sun getting some exercise instead of being in a cell. I think that's not boolean enough for most people though.

There's a huge faction of the country that wants to limit funding for all government services. Hell, they are so cheap that they want those imprisoned to pay for their own prison time!

Jail alternatives are more expensive in the short term, and that is all that matters to this faction.

This is literally what asylums used to be. They were largely farms and work operations. With thousands of patients per facility. There was a place between the streets and jail / the military. This has been completely destroyed, generally to the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry.

Really? I heard all these bad things about asylums, how they were basically worse than jails and some psychologists pretended to be sick to get admitted to see how long it would take them to realize they weren't insane. The staff never recognized, and when they eventually admitted the ruese the staff refused to believe it and only let them go as "Schizophrenic in remission"

Anarcho-tyranny. It’s impossible to get approval for anything, therefore people just rationally break the law.

To get approval to build new housing is essentially impossible.

When aggressive crimes are enforced less strictly than code violations or regulatory approvals, SF is the result.

They should be relocated to work camps in the wilderness. Lots of empty space on federal land in Nevada, Utah, etc.

Arbeit macht frei after all

Coming from an ex-Seattle resident, which has much the same issue.

The full, uncomfortable answer, is people who wear liberalism/equality as a fashion accessory - instead of really caring about it. The "don't criminalize homelessness" line is towed to the degree of mandating homelessness. There is a culture of blocking solutions, while offering no alternative solutions. This makes it almost impossible for the homeless who want to be uplifted (by far the majority) to make progress. Even something as simple as having a mailing address and a shower can make a huge difference (especially for finding employment and government aid), but such progress is blocked by faux-liberalism.

If startups were really worried about avoiding crime, they would be in high rent Mill Valley Sausalito etc

In startup world, you tolerate the crime to get cheap office space

Salesforce went downtown for the cheap rent. Otherwise it was always foggy chilly and a commute mess. Amazon's original offices in Seattle were near some really spooky stuff too. In startup grind you do what you do

Neither of these things are true, and SF ousted the DA that was apparently not prosecuting offenders, and things haven't seemed to change?

Chesa Boudin, the previous DA, was ousted in large part due to his prosecuting rogue police officers. His progressive policies and interest in restorative justice made him an extra easy target. The issues of crime and homelessness in San Francisco predate Boudin, and while current DA has a much more cozy relationship with the police (she disbanded the group investigating/prosecuting police misconduct) the crime trajectory hasn't changed.

The DA should focus on prosecuting the criminals, not the police. I don't think the police are the ones ruining SF at the moment.

But what if the real criminals are the cops…

The cops stabbed him while yelling "This is MAGA country!"

And what happens when the cops are the criminals?

Some criminals happen to be police officers. And they have a lot more power to harm people than the average street criminal. So I disagree. Criminality from police officers also broadly undermines faith in the rule of law. The entire summer of BLM protests can be viewed as an expression of that.

From what I have read, what's happening in SF is reflective of what's happening right across US. Encampments of drug addicted homeless people with authorities at a loss of what to do. From what I understand, this isn't just a SF problem but a nationwide epidemic of drug dependency. But as a non SF resident, of course defer to local knowledge

Chesa prosecuted more people than the previous DA nobody was offended by. The police just didn't like him so they stopped enforcing all the laws.

He did offend the Asian community with insensitive comments on attacks on them, which might've been enough for a recall.

he failed and refused to prosecute to catastrophic levels, comparing him to the previous who was also leaning in this direction is no consolation. his racist insensitive comments are only the cherry on top.

Can one of the two of you provide numbers? This would clear things up immensely.

Previous DA resigned and ran away because he was about to get ousted too.

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