I was so pleased to read Ken Sheaffer’s letter to the editor in today’s San Francisco Chronicle that I’m repeating it here (with very minor edits).
“Every week, I read [Chronicle articles] detailing one infuriating thing after another about crime in San Francisco. Alleged serial gropers roam the city, grabbing women at will; catalytic converter thieves apparently caught red-handed go free; police see vandals in the act and let them go; cars are freely broken into with no consequences; courts decline to prosecute in the ‘interest of justice.’ What the heck is going on?
“I am a lifetime Bay Area resident who generally agrees with our liberal politics, but I am fed up with the current soft-on-crime mentality. Police, judges and district attorneys are either hamstrung by new laws, fearful of lawsuits and social media backlash, or they just don’t want to do their jobs.
“Crime is getting so out of control that stores are closing and people are afraid to go out. Racial disparities and mental health disorders are certainly issues that warrant discussion, but we need to stop prioritizing them over enforcing the law. We cannot be so afraid of possibly violating the rights of one criminal suspect that we disregard the rights of their many victims.”
Ms. Sheaffer, who’s from Castro Valley, was writing about San Francisco, but he could have been referring to Oakland, where we see the same tolerance of criminal behavior day after day. Reading his comment, I was reminded on the Coalition’s own Jack Saunders, who identified this issue long ago when he wrote of officials giving preferential treatment to criminals and basically telling victims to drop dead. We have, in the Oakland City Council, a group of radical progressives who seem to have never met a felon they didn’t love. We have a police department that would strongly like to arrest people they know are criminals, and yet is prevented from doing so by the City Council, by a rogue Police Commission bent on persecuting the cops they’re supposed to oversee, and by a populace that, indoctrinated by years of anti-police rhetoric supported by the media, mistakenly believes that cops are the enemy.
The result should not be surprising. As Mr. Sheaffer noted, laws are routinely broken with no consequences. The police won’t even respond any more to things like shoplifting or car break-ins. Even if your home is burglarized, you’ll be lucky if a cop shows up with 24 hours to take a report. For this, we can’t blame the cops. It’s not their fault they’re overstretched to the point of breaking. It’s the fault of a City Council that resolutely refuses to give the police department the funding it needs to do their job. It’s also the Police Commission’s fault for valuing the “rights” of criminals over those of the rest of us who obey the law.
So, to Mr. Sheaffer, I say, Well done! You’ve hit the nail on the head. We have an election coming up—not just here in Oakland, but nationally—and crime is going to be one of the driving factors, if not the single biggest one. This crap is going on across America; not enough attention has been paid to crime-enabling District Attorneys or to judges who, for reasons we cannot fathom, release criminals from jail so they can strike again. Recalling Chesa Boudin was a good start, but that was yesterday’s news. We can’t let go of the outrage we feel at the current state of affairs. We need to channel that anger and focus it on the proper targets: lenient politicians, DAs and judges, as well as a media the presents a bogus, jaundiced view of public safety. We need to hold them all to account. Otherwise, I fear we’ll sink even deeper into the anarchy that rules today, with the result that a weary electorate, desperate for protection, will turn to a fascist dictatorship, the way Italians did when they put Mussolini in power.
Steve Heimoff