THEY LOST THEIR MINDS IN SAN FRANCISCO AND COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?

Elections have consequences and some of those consequences can be slow to reveal themselves. They sneak up on you one by one until you realize that the commonsense rules of the road that you have lived by have been removed and replaced by new rules.

Sometimes these are untested rules that were cooked up in classrooms of elite universities by ivory tower professors and then handed down to the rest of us to fix what we didn’t know was broken. Because we are often too ignorant to get the message or too unwilling to accept it, a new class of citizens has come together to show us the way.

It is possible that the fundamental consequence of Watertown’s last election will be that progressives have won the balance of power on the city council. While we already know who the councilors are who are solidly progressive ideologues and who the councilors are who are moderate and pragmatic, there are three “wild cards” in this deck.

Are those wild cards also solidly progressive or are they quietly more moderate and likely to perform their elected duties as pragmatists? We will not have the answer to that question until we see the patterns of how they perform and vote as part of this newly elected council.

But let’s assume for now that progressives can and will win every major council vote, including those impacting public safety, by at least one vote. And let’s suppose that progressives maintain or increase their control of the council by winning additional seats in the next election and in the election after that.

What then might Watertown become as progressive law makers turn their test tube ideas into actual local policies? To get a better idea, we might want to take a look at a city that has lived under progressive control for the past twenty years.

On the last day of the year 2019, at approximately 4:00 in the afternoon, two women who were crossing the street and were in the middle of the crosswalk, were hit by a driver who had just run a red light.

The driver then crashed his car and fled on foot. When police officers found him, they ran a check on the vehicle and found that it was stolen and then they learned that the driver had just committed a burglary and was making his getaway when he hit the two women, who would both die from their injuries.

When the police ran a check on the driver, they found that he had a long rap sheet. In this city alone, he had been arrested for 73 felonies and 32 misdemeanors, and he was currently out on parole.

At the time of the “accident,” he was high on crystal meth.

You didn’t see this story in the local news because it didn’t happen in Watertown. It happened in San Francisco. Had it happened in Watertown, it would have sent unending shockwaves reverberating through the community, but in today’s San Francisco, it was little more than the crime story of the week, soon to be replaced by the next crime story of the week.

San Francisco has become one big social experiment − a progressive experiment. The once great city has become a 47 square mile laboratory, where every resident is a lab rat and the rules and norms have been suspended in order to create a morally perfect society.

From the progressive point of view, Troy McAlister, the driver of the vehicle, who happens to be Black, was the true victim in this story. The unfortunate women who died, Hanako Abe (27) and Elizabeth Platt (60), were collateral damage in the war against systemic or structural racism.

The reason that McAlister was not in prison, on that New Year’s Eve day, given his rap sheet and his parole violations, was that the San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin, believes that prisons cause more harm than good − especially to people of color − which is why he is on a mission to dismantle the structurally racist “prison industrial complex” for the greater good of San Francisco.

The progressive war against structural racism got a very big boost in 2014, when California’s progressive voters passed Proposition 47, which determined that any theft of under $950 would become a misdemeanor instead of a felony. It was the right thing to do because crimes against property are really victimless crimes (if the victims are properly insured) that require too much policing and clog the courts and prisons disproportionately with Black victims of racism who don’t have the ability to hire expensive lawyers the way that many white criminals do.

“Unenlightened” pragmatists have an answer for that.

Hire more cops and better prosecutors, elect more judges, and arrest and convict more white criminals. You don’t have to clog up the prisons. Just put them in orange jump suits and make them clean up the streets, which in San Francisco are the dirtiest streets of any big city in the US.

Michael Shellenberger, a renowned environmental, climate, and social justice advocate, and a former progressive, is the author of the eye-opening book, San Fransicko, subtitled, Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Just how dirty are the streets of San Francisco? Shellenberger tells us (and even columnist, George Will was impressed):

Between 2015 and 2018 the city replaced more than 300 lampposts “corroded by urine after one had collapsed and crushed a car.”

In 2018, there were “20,933 calls to San Francisco’s government complaining about human feces” on streets and sidewalks.

Last year in San Francisco, there were “6,275 registered complaints about used hypodermic needles in public places.”

In San Francisco, an addict doesn’t need to sneak into a bathroom stall to shoot up, because the streets and sidewalks will do just fine. Drug use and drug dealing take place out in the open without consequences.

The city streets have been taken over by 5,000 unsheltered homeless - a 95% increase over the last 15 years, with the vast majority being either drug addicts or mentally ill. According to Shellenberger’s research, they are homeless as a result of their sickness, rather than being sick as a result of their homelessness.

DA Boudin does not prosecute street level drug dealers because they, themselves, are victims who would be further victimized by being placed behind bars. So why, you might wonder, aren’t all of the homeless, including the drug dealers, being removed from the streets and placed in shelters or treatment centers?

And that question brings me to the city’s legislative body, known as the board of supervisors, which is San Francisco’s version of our city council. Other than the number of members − they have eleven; in Watertown, we have nine − there are two distinct differences. First, each of their members represents one of the city’s eleven districts. There are no at-large members. And second, the president of the board is elected by a majority of members, and not by the majority of voters. The former makes it easier to be uninvested in the city as a whole, while the latter makes it easier for the majority to consolidate power.

In 2000, progressives took over the majority on the board and have maintained it ever since, which means that they have controlled the government’s agenda for over twenty years.

Local business groups, that haven’t already fled the city, and that pay close attention to the political environment, agree that the current board of supervisors is composed of either nine progressives and two moderates or eight progressives and three moderates.

What those business groups are hoping to see are glimpses of commonsense, pragmatic problem-solving that will restore some degree of sanity and order to the once great City by the Bay. But with either seven or eight ideologues controlling the agenda, commonsense problem-solving pragmatism will likely be held, per usual, on a very short leash.

San Francisco could use more homeless shelters, but progressives on the board of supervisors block the spending for the building of shelters because they insist that those dollars be spent on affordable housing. The progressive view is that shelters are dehumanizing and everyone is entitled to their own apartment.

In San Francisco, the average cost to build an affordable housing unit is $737,000.

Because each board member represents a single district, placing either shelters or affordable housing in their district is met with self-serving technical hurdles and roadblocks that prevent it from happening. Ideologues don’t build concrete solutions. Pragmatists do.

Restoring order from the chaos, by forcing the homeless, including the drug addicted and mentally ill, into shelters or treatment centers is a progressive taboo − a violation of their dignity and rights, including the right to defecate on a sidewalk and shoot up in a public park.

But I don’t want you to think that progressives don’t have some practical ideas to straighten out the mess. They certainly do. They call it “harm reduction.” To reduce the harm, they put up instructional billboards displaying the safety fundamentals of injecting heroin.

Here’s the actual billboard message:  Do it with friends. Don’t do it alone. Take turns (shooting up). Keep some Narcan handy.

See? It's all about respect. Nobody’s rights get trampled on. Government is your friend and not your oppressor. Please be careful not to overdose. It upsets taxpayers and tourists.

You can appreciate why the election of Chesa Boudin as district attorney was a progressive’s dream come true. To advance their social experiment, the board of supervisors needed a social justice warrior − not just a liberal DA, like the previous guy, but a proud revolutionary.

Once he took office, Chesa moved with lightning speed. On his second day on the job, he fired seven top prosecutors and replaced them with public defenders.

Within his first few months, he released 40% of the prison population.

He dismissed 113 out of 131 arrests for domestic felonies within a three-month period. During that same period, his liberal predecessor had brought 10 times as many cases to trial.

He won the job despite never having prosecuted a case. No problem since he views prosecuting offenders as an unnecessary part of his job description.

But not everyone is happy with Chesa or with the consequences of the progressive social experiment. Enough people got fed up and joined a recall campaign and so Chesa will face a recall election in June.

When you live in a city run by highly educated idiots, you might take offence when the idiocy is shown to the rest of the world. In general, we all prefer to keep our family problems inside the family. 

According to a report commissioned by city hall, the San Francisco Police Department is 400 cops short of being adequately staffed. They did what other major cities did in response the demonstrations following the death of George Floyd, they defunded the police.

And then when the crime rate spiked, as it usually does when you reduce police presence, the police-defunded cities tried to restaff in the face of a nationwide cop shortage and found that they couldn’t get their cops back.

However the San Francisco lawmakers and their DA, in their greater wisdom, know that police don’t prevent crimes and “you can’t arrest your way out of a crime problem.” So San Francisco remains “progressively” under-policed.

And, just like elections, under-policing has consequences − like making the national news. Very few violent crimes make the national news because they are way too common. Violent crime, including homicides are rising in almost all big cities.

What does make the national news are crimes that standout because they are stunningly ridiculous.

So when a video went viral of a man on a bicycle, riding down an aisle of a San Francisco Walgreens, raking merchandise off the shelves and into a garbage bag and then riding out the front door, blowing by a helpless security guard, San Franciscans who witness similar events on a regular basis, might have been a bit embarrassed.

It was at least the fifth time that the thief, later identified as Jean Lugo-Romero, had targeted that particular Walgreens. He has since been tied to at least 40 similar thefts at other retail businesses and is part of a growing number of organized theft rings.

Walgreens, CVS and other large retailers have ordered their security guards not to interfere with shoplifters due to the frequency of violent attacks on the security guards. Those violent shoplifters will not get prosecuted because they are all victims of poverty and homelessness and because they steal less than $950 worth of loot.

Since each of Lugo-Romero’s shoplifting expeditions netted under $950, his crimes are misdemeanors and would likely never be prosecuted, if it were not so embarrassing to the social engineers who call the shots on criminal justice.

A public defender, representing Lugo-Romero said that he committed the thefts because “as an indigent individual, suffering from housing instability, he needed services and now he’s getting them.”

That should be more than good enough for the current DA and the super majority on the board of supervisors.

Walgreens, citing “profit crushing” theft, has closed that store along with 21 others in San Francisco. Progressives insist that the closings are due to corporate greed, and that the stores were destined to close as part of their downsizing strategy. In San Francisco, businesses are not allowed to call themselves victims.

If any crime-in-progress video got more views and generated more embarrassment than the bicycle thief, it was the smash and grab raid of Louis Vuitton and other upscale retailers in the Union Square section of San Francisco.

The world got to see video of around 80 thieves, armed with hammers, smashing store windows and display case glass, waltzing out the store with arms filled with loot, loading up their cars and taking off in every possible direction.

The destruction resulted in boarded up store fronts and the public’s fear of further attacks and turned the swanky tourist destination into a bleak ghost town during the heart of the Christmas shopping season.

The police have determined that the “Christmas crime party” was organized on Snapchat and other social media apps. So far it appears that the clever band of thieves purposely did not know each other, so no one can name their accomplices. But arrests have been made and prosecutions are sure to follow.

Well, let’s not get carried away.

Finally, San Francisco embodies the entrepreneurial spirit, most notably in the tech industry. And San Francisco is one of the world’s most popular destinations for tourists. So, it should come as no surprise that a new generation of crime entrepreneurs would build a new business model focusing on tourists.

San Francisco’s vibrant Richmond District offers some of the most spectacular views of the Golden Gate Bridge, unique architecture, and its own Chinatown, making it a stopping point on San Francisco’s tourist trail. It also boasted a low crime rate. And then it was discovered by enterprising criminals as the next untapped market.

Their business model is simple. They cruise the district, looking for unattended rental cars that contain visible luggage, briefcases, or shopping bags. With efficient speed, they smash the windows, grab the bags, and take off. Tools required: a hammer to smash windows, gloves to protect knuckles while smashing windows, and a knife to slash open locked bags.

And seemingly overnight, a crime category was born. A longtime district resident, Mark Dietrich had begun finding ripped open luggage on the streets and sidewalks in his neighborhood. They were stripped of items of value but often contained personal items valued by their owners.

He began collecting those items, including diaries, photographs, students’ school projects, children’s toys, and a backpack used by an army veteran during two deployments in Afghanistan, and then posting the pictures on social media, reuniting some owners with their personal possessions.

Others in and around his neighborhood also began finding, what became known as “luggage dumps,” with personal possessions “strewn like garbage” on their own street corners and they began following Dietrich’s kindness model, using their own social media sites.These days, some unfortunate tourists leave not just their hearts in San Francisco, they also leave their laptops, iPads, cameras, jewelry, sense of safety, and confidence in the rule of law.

Mark Dietrich witnessed the loss of tranquility in his district when burglaries shot up 87% in 2020, when shoplifting became commonplace, and when he began finding used hypodermic needles near parks and playgrounds.

He has become a local hero for his public safety advocacy. He describes himself as being a lifelong liberal. He has now become an outspoken anti-progressive activist. That’s the kind of backlash worth noting because it offers hope.

So, here in the little City of Watertown, you might be wondering, is there any realistic hope that San Franciscans will wake up and put an end to the progressive experiment gone bad?

It’s a great question, because if there is hope for San Francisco, a city stuck on a road to ruin, then there is hope for Watertown, a city at a crossroads.

And that will be the subject of my next post.

 

Bruce Coltin, The Battle for Watertown