Leaders in Democrat-run cities across the country are having to learn the hard way that being soft on crime doesn’t pay.
Take, for instance, big cities in California like San Francisco and Oakland.
In June 2022, then-SF District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted in a recall election, with even reform-minded left-wing San Franciscans sending strong signals that they’d had it with his soft-on-crime approach to dealing with the city’s rampant crime problems.
The woman who took his place, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, has developed a reputation for being “anti-woke” although, in her Twitter bio, she indicates that she is “dedicated to criminal justice reform.”
Unfortunately for Jenkins, not much has changed in the City by the Bay, with open-air drug use, retail theft including smash and grabs, hate crimes against Asian-Americans, and vehicle break-ins continuing to be a problem. Homelessness is also spiraling, with new tents sprouting up on city streets almost daily.
In fact, the problems have gotten so bad that some employees at the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco are being urged to continue working from home.
The reason cited? Concerns over their safety.
“Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advised hundreds of employees in San Francisco to work remotely for the foreseeable future due to public safety concerns,” the San Francisco Chronicle recently reported while also noting that “the area is also home to one of the city’s most brazen open-air drug markets, where dozens of dealers and users congregate on a daily basis.”
On any given day one can log onto social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok to see new videos of what downtown San Franciso looks like, and it’s not a pretty picture.
Businesses are packing up and leaving in droves, with many admitting that fear for the safety of their employees and customers was a major factor in deciding to permanently close their doors.
Nearby Oakland is facing similar issues, so much so that Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, whose style has been compared to Boudin’s, is also facing the possibility of a recall election.
Even prosecutors who want to throw the book at the repeat offenders who are wreaking havoc on these cities are having a hard time doing so, with laws on the books that effectively make taking them to court useless.
Yolo County (California) District Attorney Jeff Reisig explained the situation on his Twitter page.
“This retail theft mob happened at a Nordstrom in California today. Because of broken state laws, these crimes are considered ‘non-serious’ and ‘non-violent’ and nobody will go to state prison,” Reisig wrote, “even if caught and convicted. State laws need to be fixed and YES, many people need to go to prison for this type of crime.”
“In many cases, within hours of people being released from custody on Zero-bail, they were re-offending and committing new felony crimes,” he also wrote.
When I read stories about what’s taking place in blue states like California and New York, I’m reminded of how these states have over the years issued government-related business travel bans to states like North Carolina over laws like the HB2 “bathroom bill” and the like.
Earlier this year, San Francisco’s board of supervisors abandoned its travel bans to states like N.C. “after a report found it was potentially costing the city money and contracts and wasn’t working as intended,” according to Deseret News.
Just goes to show that a reworking of priorities for these Democrat-run parts of the country may be in order. After all, it’s often been said that one should concentrate on fixing their own problems before they go trying to nose around in someone else’s backyard.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
