Soft-on-Crime Congressman Has Luggage Stolen in SF

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Kevin Fagan reports for the San Francisco Chronicle:

Hello to the city, goodbye to your luggage. That was U.S. Senate candidate Adam Schiff’s rude introduction to San Francisco’s vexing reputation for car burglaries Thursday when thieves swiped the bags from his car while it sat in a downtown parking garage.

The heist meant the Democratic congressman got stuck at a fancy dinner party in his shirt sleeves and a hiking vest while everyone else sat in suits. Not quite the look the man from Burbank was aiming for as he rose to thank powerhouse attorney Joe Cotchett for his support in his bid to replace the late Dianne Feinstein.

“I guess it’s ‘Welcome to San Francisco,’ ” Cotchett’s press agent Lee Houskeeper, who was at the dinner, remarked dryly.

Congressman Schiff is a “progressive” on criminal justice, meaning that he seeks to water down the consequences of crime to criminals. See his congressional website, where the crime page is a collection of all the left’s standard fallacies and buzzwords. His approach necessarily means weakening deterrence and incapacitation. Yet he claims that his program will make us more safe, selling the old snake oil that rehabilitation programs will transform criminals into law-abiding people in large enough numbers to make a real difference in crime rates. This is the criminal justice equivalent of Lucy promising Charlie Brown that she won’t pull away the football. The promise has been made for decades, but the programs only change recidivism rates slightly at the margins. Yet people still fall for it.

The late Senator Feinstein had a better grasp of the realities of crime. She was a liberal in many ways, but she was better on crime than most of the folks on her side of the aisle. She helped the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 get through the Senate. Schiff is the favorite to take her seat, which would be a loss for the cause of justice, but maybe Steve Garvey can tag him out.

Will this incident open Schiff’s eyes to the reality of crime? Not likely. I suspect he is too far gone for that.

James Freeman has this article at the WSJ.