The Perfect Storm for Crime to Flourish in San Francisco

In San Francisco fear has become part of life for many of its residents. According to this article by Kenny Choi of CBS San Francisco:

Residents in San Francisco say they don’t feel safe amid an alarming rise in the number of burglaries across the city. Residents say the initial response form San Francisco police went nowhere. So after someone broke into her complex in the middle of the night, [Iryna] Gorb started sleuthing, obsessively collecting evidence on her own from neighbors’ cameras.  

 

This may come as a surprise, as San Francisco burglaries have not been highlighted or discussed as an issue in the current news. Residents of the City felt they had to take matters into their own hands in order to hold the criminals burglarizing them accountable. The perfect storm in San Francisco would be the combination of no sentencing enhancements for prior convictions, early releases from jails due to Covid risk, new bail policy, and delayed or poor law enforcement response to calls. When considering the crime rates, in this case burglary rates, it is impossible to know what the actual number is when there are no reports being filed by law enforcement or the district attorneys office for these crimes. Additionally, there are many more people who have been previously convicted of burglary who received court-ordered releases in San Francisco. There has been such a level of failure to make residents feel safe in their communities that some are taking matters into their own hands. If there is to be hope of a sense of security again among residents, the leaders of the city will need to reevaluate their stance and policies listed above which have a large effect on the crime rates.