Comment by JumpCrisscross

20 days ago

> In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with

If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.

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JumpCrisscross

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anigbrowl  20 days ago

Far from it. On one occasion, when the DA in question went after a notorious fence (buyer for stolen goods), he had to rent a u-haul truck because the SFPD would not supply a vehicle to transport the arrestee.

https://missionlocal.org/2022/05/the-case-for-recalling-da-c...

You have to look past the hype. Media on a national scale ran a character assassination program against that DA for trying to rebalance his organization's efforts against the organizers of crime instead of individual delinquents.

  • JumpCrisscross  20 days ago

    This is standard inter-agency nonsense. The arrest was made.

    It doesn’t absolve Chesa’s various failures to enforce the law. (I say this as someone who started on the police reform side.)

    • anigbrowl  19 days ago

      I don't think there's anything standard about this. I've looked into numerous claims of Boudin not enforcing the law during his tenure and they invariably turned out to be cherry picking at best.

myvoiceismypass  20 days ago

Not sure if "recall" was a pun or not... But the recall campaign for DA Boudin started a month after the 2020 election, so he was effectively DA for 10 months at that point, including during the heart of the pandemic. Interestingly, it was also right after he started trying to implement police accountability reforms in response to the Floyd backlash that year. He did de-prioritize drug prosecution right at the time of major fentanyl spikes in SF, so not a good look.

stouset  20 days ago

This was the sensationalist media narrative, yes. Chesa got kicked out. Brooke Jenkins took over to much fanfare. Aaaand nothing material really changed, either with enforcement or with prosecution. The media stopped talking about it though.

SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).

Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.

  • JumpCrisscross  20 days ago

    I can’t speak credibly to San Francisco. But in New York there was a visible rise and drop in what I’ll call nuisance crime. Petty theft forcing the toothbrushes into cages, homeless people yelling in the middle of the night, subway jumpers, graffiti, et cetera.

    • dttze  20 days ago

      The nypd is better funded than many state’s armed forces. Any funding changes would have been minimal and not caused that increase in crime.

      The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.

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