No, I don’t think our short pro-crime national nightmare is over. The pro-crime movement is tightly integrated into the Left. It has major backing from wealthy donors and the media. With BLM taking the field, it’s the only permitted narrative, and anyone who disagrees, even if they’re black, is accused of racism.
But if there were a turnaround, it would look like the city that’s Ground Zero for pro-crime, for unleashing hordes of zombies to wander the streets, deciding to compete on getting tough on crackheads.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed is apparently doubting voters’ progressive mood so much that she’s banking her reelection on a shift to the right.
The Democratic mayor is proposing the city require all recipients of county-funded welfare to undergo drug screening — and treatment, if needed — in order to be eligible for cash assistance.
“No more anything goes without accountability. No more handouts without accountability,” Breed said on Tuesday.
Critics framed Breed’s proposal as an expedient shift as she runs for reelection. She announced the effort on the same morning that Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit executive and Levi Strauss heir, announced that he will challenge her in next year’s election.
Lurie, speaking to supporters a few miles away in Potrero Hill, said he would seek to dramatically increase San Francisco’s police force. He vowed to “slam the door shut on the era of open-air drug markets and end the perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life in San Francisco.”
This isn’t really new. Breed helped push out Chesa Boudin and replace him with Brooke Jenkins who, while far from perfect, is at least an improvement over the pro-crime Soros DA, and attacked a woke school board.
The question is whether she did this because she was sick and tired of leftists wrecking the city or because she had her finger on the pulse of the voters.
And now there’s an election in which two San Fran candidates who ought to be progressives are starting to compete on getting tough and advancing a ‘broken windows’ philosophy.
Lurie started out as the head of Tipping Point: a charity that was going to solve homelessness. He learned the hard way that it doesn’t work. Or so one would think. But he’s still talking about more shelter space.
Does San Fran herald a national turnaround? Probably not yet. And one major reason is that while the public is ready, the politicians who helped take point on crime and blight in the 90s, like Giuliani, have yet to emerge. There’s a distinct shortage of compelling articulate voices capable of laying out a law and order agenda. It’s hard to say why that is, but a big part of the reason may be that the Democrats have largely been swallowed by the Left, while the Republicans are in a state of catastrophic dysfunction.
And that makes what’s going on in San Fran all the more notable.