On Tuesday morning, the 43-year old founder of Cash App lay dying on a residential street in San Francisco. Bob Lee had been stabbed repeatedly.

Passersby ignored his pleas for help and drove on.

Police called arrived too late.

So the father of two bled out on the streets of Nancy Pelosi’s former district and was dead by the time police arrived.

Lee had recently left SF to move back to Miami because he felt that San Francisco was “deteriorating.”

When I heard about this I immediately wondered what the local District Attorney had to say.

Brooke Jenkins turned out to have a faster response time than the emergency services, jumping onto social media and other platforms to extend “sympathies” to the family of Mr. Lee and writing, “We do not tolerate these horrific acts of violence in San Francisco.”

It immediately put me in mind of the pronouncements of another DA and other officials a day earlier here in New York.

Because on Monday, ahead of the arraignment of Donald Trump, Mayor Adams and Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell had made their own public pronouncements to the people of New York.

Like DA Bragg, they talked as though Donald Trump and his supporters were the major threat to the life of New Yorkers. They told us to take the subway but otherwise try to go about our daily business while the media and political circus was in town.

But the standout comment was from Sewell who warned Trump supporters, “Violence and destruction are not part of legitimate lawful expression, and it will never be tolerated in our city.”

I almost spat out my coffee when I heard that sentence. What? New York doesn’t tolerate violence and destruction?

Has there been some major change in policy since the summer of 2020?

Were the violence, smashing and looting of that summer a figment of our imagination?

Do Sewell and others hope that we have the collective memory of a goldfish?

Perhaps they do. If so, fine.

Because we don’t need a memory going back a whole three years to know that Sewell’s pronouncement was untrue.

We can see it around us any day.

We can see it in the lawlessness allowed on the streets.

We can see it in the open drug-selling, the menace on the subway and the encouraged lawlessness of being a “sanctuary city.”

We know from every day’s news and events what happens when people like Bragg are in charge.

We don’t need to know the stats.

That under Bragg’s time in office he has declined to prosecute 35% more felony charges than his predecessor, or that he has downgraded 52% of felony cases to misdemeanors.

We do not need to know this because everyone in New York lives it. We see it all around us – in the violence and crime which goes unpunished.

This reality has been growing for years.

Remember the case of Army veteran Hason Correa, stabbed to death in Harlem in 2018?

Although one of his killers was convicted and sent to prison, two of the other gang members involved were given plea deals by Bragg. So much for Bragg’s insistence that “no one is above the law.”

It seems that if you are a murderer you can be.

When I hear the claims like those of Bragg, Sewell and Jenkins I am reminded of an insight of a friend of mine who spent his career working as a prison doctor.

He once told me how many of the people he worked with in prison have a view of themselves that is completely divorced from reality.

From the reality of their lives and the reality of what they have done.

So for instance somebody can be in prison for causing life-altering harm to a girlfriend but hold the idea in their head that they are a good and loyal boyfriend.

Quite the catch, in fact.

It is a curious thing about human beings.

But it doesn’t only affect people who are in prison.

It also affects many of those whose job is meant to be to send people there.

Perhaps in Alvin Bragg’s head there is an image of himself as a stony-eyed Batman-like figure, scouring the city for wrong-doing and willing even to indict a former president on a historic charge relating to campaign finance.

And yet the reality is of a DA who is nakedly political, deeply cynical and self-advancing, and clearly unbothered by the day-to-day crime which is happening on his watch.

In the same way I don’t doubt that DA Brooke Jenkins in San Francisco believes that her city is not “deteriorating.”

I am sure she does indeed think that “horrific acts of violence” are not tolerated in San Francisco.

Yet they are.

They happen all the time, as even the most casual visitor to SF can see.

The family of Bob Lee know that, as surely as do the family of Sgt Correa.

But that’s the way with these “progressive” DAs and their accomplices.

They have an idea of the cities they are meant to take care of.

And that idea is a fantasy.

It´s just a shame that the rest of us have to live in the reality they actually create.

Are some of the city’s food-sheds finally coming down?

I hope so. One of those on my block was dismantled this morning.

There are others of course, some of which have a rather elaborate, even attractive decor.

But every burrito store in the city does not need its own wooden shack on the sidewalk, like a motorbike and sidecar.

The sheds were crucial to get the sector through the COVID era of 2020-21, but they aren’t crucial today.

In fact they are a nuisance.

They cause single-lane traffic on many blocks, lead to terrible traffic-jams and even worse behavior than normal from the city’s drivers.

Leave some up perhaps, but it´s time for most of them to come down.

I for one won’t miss them any more than I miss masks or having to produce proof of vaccination every time I want to eat food I haven’t cooked myself.