Reading the Wall Street Journal’s latest dispatch from the Bay Area, you might think the city of San Francisco had innovated a novel and effective technique for policing its homeless population.

The paper recently observed that, since a 2024 Supreme Court decision provided cities with “more power to penalize people for sleeping outside,” San Francisco “has been among the most aggressive in wielding it.” In the year since, the city has arrested over 1,000 people on “illegal-lodging charges” — more than ten times the number of similar arrests the city made in the year that preceded the Court’s ruling. That sounds like a lot, but when you’re starting from a baseline that approaches zero, everything is relative.

Still, there has been progress. At one point last year, San Francisco counted a staggering 8,300 homeless in just one night — a population that vastly exceeds the city’s shelter capacity. In the blighted Tenderloin district, for example, “the city recorded 15 tents in the June tent count, down from 214 in April 2020.” Overall, San Francisco claims to have engineered an 85 percent decrease in the number of homeless encampments since the spring of 2020.

City officials and even the tone of the Journal’s dispatch make it sound, however, like San Francisco’s hands were tied before the Court cast off its shackles. But the data tell another story:

What does this graph tell you? It certainly doesn’t suggest that, prior to July 2024, San Francisco was incapable of policing vagrancy. Rather, it indicates that something happened in the spring of 2020 that compelled San Francisco officials to stop following the law. Then, lo, this policy was slowly abandoned at the outset of a presidential election year, more than six months prior to the Court’s ruling.

What happened here was not that the Court found that enforcing anti-vagrancy statutes did not constitute unconstitutional “cruel and unusual punishment,” thus opening new frontiers in law enforcement. What happened was that San Francisco, like every dark-blue municipality in 2020, succumbed to a faddish progressive hostility to law enforcement. City officials proceeded from the presumption that policing quality-of-life crimes amounted to oppression, and they just stopped doing it.

There’s still plenty of support for that leftwing proposition, even in the Journal’s dispatch. As one homeless advocate contended, pushing itinerants out of squalid illegal encampments “might substantially increase drug-related deaths among homeless people.” That is a vestige of the intellectual scaffolding erected around the notion that bivouacs populated mostly by the mentally ill are, in fact, more salutary than the alternatives.

These two paradigms — the notions that proactive policing is itself oppressive and vagrancy is a condition imposed on the homeless, not chosen freely, and, therefore, a status that should render its sufferers immune from prosecution — put San Francisco in the position it faced. And the Supreme Court did not rescue San Franciscans from their unfortunate lot. It was plain old politics that led to a backlash, convincing former mayor London Breed to abandon the lax policies over which she presided. That political evolution culminated in the mayoralty of Daniel Lurie, who ran for office on a platform that committed him to a crackdown on homelessness.

San Francisco’s elected officials should take some pride in their successes. Indeed, they should not be allowed to blame their belated assumption of their civic responsibilities on outside forces. The city is at long last seeing to the interests of its taxpaying residents, and they deserve credit for it — even if they’d like you to think they don’t.