San Francisco mayor pledges more police, safety measures
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This isn’t meant to be a trick question. I simply haven’t seen any obvious choices.
My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don't think he got many votes. Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates, with strong and worthwhile candidates from each party, each getting a decent share of votes. I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don't remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone (giving the homeless productive, gainful occupation and dealing with all the litter, needles, human waste, etc. on the streets). I can't think of a more out-of-touch idea than that, but this was the #2 choice for San Franciscans.
I think anyone sensible would have simply asked for what Breed is now proposing to do. Voicing that opinion in SF years ago would've made you a pariah. It's a common sense opinion if you're living in and observing reality, but that's simply not what SF culture has been about.
There were two Republicans, and the one that got more votes (both first preference and total, since it was an IRV not first-past-the-post election) of the two wasn’t a “he”. (The one that got fewer votes was the one endorsed by most local Republican institutions.)
But if you are thinking of her 2019 reelection in the regular election and not the 2018 special election…
The other candidates were (in order of most to least final votes)
Ellen Lee Zhou (R) – the leading Republican from the special election
Joel Ventresca (endorsed by Green Party, subsequently ran in the gubernatorial recall as a Democrat)
Paul Ybarra Robertson (no apparent party affiliation)
Wilma Pang (previously Peace and Freedom, but not sure if that was current in 2019)
Robert L. Jordan (a "street minister" with no apparent party affiliation)
> Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates
There were in the open seat election where Breed was first elected; there was one of each in the regular election where she was reelected.
But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly. Many individual factions within the Democratic Party are larger, in terms of electorate, than the Republican Party in SF, and the ratio in support between the Democratic and Republican parties is smaller than that between the Republican and American Independent parties and almost the same as that between the Republican and Libertarian parties.
> I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don’t remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone
That…didn’t happen. None of the major Democrats either banded together or had a platform like that. (There were some institutional cross-endorsements for Breed and Leno.)
> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.
SF is extremely unbalanced. See: https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/san_franci.... Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?
The bottom line is that they're deeply out of step with the city on culture war issues they themselves whipped up. Forcing women to give birth to corpses, legalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation, opposing all pandemic mitigations, etc. Even if an individual politician doesn't support these positions,they define the brand.
It's silly to expect that national distribution of political thought to be approximated in every geographic subdivision. It has never been even approximately, the case. Structurally, the US electoral system encourages coalition building and dividing so that factions that nationally are roughly balanced form the major national parties, but there is no reason that that's even a privileged frame to decide what is “balanced”.
Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?
In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?
What data? What data could even support the idea of a threshold of acceptable deviation from the national average distribution of political thought?
Honestly, I think that while there is a problem, you have conceptualized it entirely incorrectly. The problem is not with the diversity of distribution of political thought, the problem is national political duopoly and the electoral systems that support it, among the many manifestations of which (and far from the most important) is an absence of partisan competition in jurisdictions whose political center isn't very close to the national political center.
> If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme
It's not (and I think obviously not), unless you specific for what. If you specify that, it's may be that such a discussion is possible (and even, though less likely, possible that it is meaningful and not a distraction from more important considerations for that purpose.) But I’m not optimistic.
Can we agree on any possible intersubjective standard for too extreme? If not, fine, we revert to solipsism.
If either of the data mentioned in the first paragraph is a possible metric, how many standard deviations is too many?
If not this standard/metric, will you propose another? I challenge anyone to propose a metric or set of metrics that reasonable people will entertain as a standard of measuring a cities extremes, plus a set of thresholds that reasonable people will entertain as determining too extreme/not too extreme, and then coming to the conclusion under these metrics that SF is not too extreme. In other words, any way you want to slice it, SF is too extreme, unless you refuse to “slice it”.
2. National political duopoly is problematic, but we live in a democracy. Every citizen is free to have their own positions, vote for whoever they want, and run for office if they don’t like who’s running. Your perspective is not your skin color, you can change it and update it as you participate in the real world. Citizens of SF simply cannot blame the national duopoly for their choices. It’s completely possible to foster, appreciate, and embody diversity and non-partisanship of thought. It’s possible to foster a culture of balance and diversity, which in turn could encourage the partisan competition you mention.
SF even has ranked choice voting which should weaken the duopoly’s death grip, in theory.
The national structural problems you mention are true for every city. There’s nothing in the water or Karl the Fog that uniquely prevents people in SF from doing what I mentioned above. But they don’t, that’s their choice, that’s SF culture, and that’s the problem.
[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...
[2] https://www.thesfnews.com/mayor-breed-cuts-police-budget-hir...
[3] https://californiaglobe.com/articles/sf-mayor-london-breed-g...
[4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/S-...
When Mayor Lee died, Supervisor Mark Farrell became interim mayor.
London Breed won the subsequent special election to become mayor.
EDIT: Actually, as noted downthread, its more complicated. But Breed’s stint as acting mayor did not immediately proceed her time as elected mayor.
https://sacobserver.com/2018/01/residents-protest-board-vote...
https://abc7news.com/michael-nuru-sf-mayor-breed-london-publ...
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-san-francisco-re-funding-th...
Based on this article, it looks like Y/Y spending on law enforcement was flat, maybe even up when you include funding to the SF Sheriff, DA, and Probation offices.
[7] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/San-Francisco-s-cr...
For 2021, overall crime is up 10% vs 2021, but is still seems to be on track to be down 15% vs 2019.
A lot of this is probably due to COVID restrictions rather than any change in policing or enforcement, but using the metrics you've cited, crime is actually at a low.
If we follow your argument about adjusting police budget proportionally, we should have cut the police budget 23% in FY 2020, or $160M. FWIW, I don't think cutting the budget 23% in 1 year is a great idea.
[1] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Anyway, as a mayor, if London Breed promised to do something and she did not, it is a sign of incompetency. It erodes her own credibility.
[8] https://www.change.org/p/resign-or-recall-san-francisco-da-c...
[5] https://sfethics.org/ethics/2021/08/ethics-commission-fines-...
[6] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/mayor-breeds-brother-will-ge...
San Francisco is becoming a deeply unpleasant place to visit across the board. Large parts of the city stink of human refuse. The downtown core is a corporate wasteland. The other half of the city is a NIMBY wasteland. The public transit is embarrassing. Everyone is grumpy and pretentious. You don't feel safe walking across town alone.
It's a city that seems to hate itself. It is constantly offering you a protective bubble - private cars, bars on rooftops, an apartment with a doorman.
It seems the only people who earnestly enjoy SF are those who can afford to maintain their own world somewhere in it.
― Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With André
Notably absent from the press conference: Chesa Boudin. Go ahead and arrest anyone you want. Boudin will have them back in society post haste.
A given city can try out a new policy. It works, or even if it doesn't cause a breakdown in society, then it can spread, and all cities benefit. But if works badly, then that city takes the hit, and hopefully everyone else benefits by avoiding that. (The real world is of course messier than that simple model.)
It's hard to parse the actual policy change from only mayor's remarks that are quoted in the article. It sounds like it's not heading to law and order policing, but rather trying to hybrid of increased surveillance and faster response times to some kinds of problems. I'm not sure it will work, but either if works or does not, another datapoint will have been explored.
Living in unsafe places is one of the worst horrors of poverty. I think there is a subset of progressives that does not want to accept the idea that some people really are psychopathic predators. Or perhaps only limits that idea to the rich, bankers etc., while finding all kind of excuses for anyone else.
There is no denying that a lot of successful psychopaths accrue at the top of the societal ladder, but the violent ones often inhibit the bottom, terrorizing the rest.
When I was a single mother's kid in the early 1990s in a country with a rudimentary welfare system, I was poor-ish enough to be in the bottom fifth of the society, and I knew plenty of similar people. It is my experience that mere lack of money won't turn an otherwise kind person into a violent criminal. They may be driven to steal or cheat, but deliberately injuring or killing other people, for that you need to be quite a bad apple yourself.
Poverty next to wealth does. Suddenly that poor but adequate lifestyle isn’t enough when the guy down the street is driving a Porsche.
We are in a pretty extreme wealth gap and we celebrate wealth too much. On top of that, people confuse being soft on crime with helping the poor. Poor people don’t break into cars to eat. Criminals break into cars.
Enforcing laws gives comfort to everyone because they know we're all on a level playing field. But once you start ignoring laws and letting people off, suddenly lawbreakers can get ahead while law abiders fall behind. Let's try to punish criminals instead of rewarding them.
The difference is that most criminals at the top don't need to use violence as a tool to get what they want, at least not usually.
> They may be driven to steal or cheat, but deliberately injuring or killing other people, for that you need to be quite a bad apple yourself.
A small percentage may be born bad, but a lot more are subjected to consistent physical and psychological violence and trauma, and becoming bad ends up being a kind of short term focused survival mechanism. Exposure to drugs and environmental toxins at a young age also damages neurological development.
Black mold, lead paint, etc can ruin your life.
It certainly does seems to be a belief on the left that if one were to use the n word one time (not even directed at anyone), they should be shunned from society and they life as they know it should be over. Shop lifting to the point where a business has to shut down, or breaking into cars and stealing irreplaceable possessions—that maybe shouldn’t even be illegal.
I’m in favor of reasonable penalties for bad behavior, and leniency and forgiveness when it’s warranted. But as another posters said: we need to live in reality.
I would imagine corporations funding politicians would want their businesses not be vandalized. I get some NIMBY policies are pushed by wealthy donors w/ real estate but that should be balanced out by developers.
Something deeper is wrong. It's almost as these politicians are purposely destroying the vast amount of wealth built up over the years and letting in chaos.
The fact that we have defacto private police is exemplified by:
- It is well known that wealthy neighborhoods get more patrols and faster responses.
- It is well known that if your restaurant or store gives free stuff or otherwise encourages police you will be better protected
- It is well known that opposing the police leads to poorer protection
All of these are not just well known but often backed up by the police themselves. Any store that says they want more accountability for police will get told “when you’re in trouble, don’t expect to get the best response” and so on.
There is a clear thing going on here. The police are clearly effectively privatized but the privatization is subsidized. Instead, let’s just remove the pretense.
I think we should just have police be privatized and regulated and whatever group of people can pay for them should be able to pay for them. Open up the market and stop funding the police out of state money.
That way, if you want to spend no money on the local police, you can defund them. If you want to spend lots of money you can fund them.
If you want to band together with your neighborhood, go right ahead.
Is it poor?
How could it be, considering it's in middle of one of the richest cities in the world?