SF Mayor Recovers from Pandemic Wokevid Virus

Two pandemics swept through America last year and lasted into this year. One, of course, was the virus that causes Covid-19. The other was the Wokevid virus.

Symptoms of Wokevid include (1) believing oneself to be “woke” while actually oblivious to reality and unable to speak correct English; and (2) bizarre delusional beliefs that defy logic, evidence, and common sense. These delusions include beliefs that reduced police presence and minimal punishment of criminals will somehow reduce crime instead of increasing it.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed showed unmistakable symptoms of Wokevid infection last year when she cut $120 million from law enforcement budgets. See this story from KGO. However, this speech Wednesday demonstrates a seemingly complete recovery.

I’m here to discuss, as I said, public safety in this city. In recent months we’ve not only seen a number of high-profile incidents of brazen robberies and car break-ins, but also street behavior and criminal activity especially in the Tenderloin [district of SF] that has become far too normal and cannot continue to be tolerated. All of our residents, our workers, and everyone who visits our city should feel safe no matter what part of town they’re in.

Music to my ears.

To be clear what I’m proposing today and what I will be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and I don’t care. At the end of the day the safety of the people of San Francisco is the most important thing to me and we are past the point where what we see is even remotely acceptable.

We passed it a while back, of course, but the important thing here is that the mayor of one of the most left-wing cities in the country is not scared of the woke crowd any more. That is like hearing the first bird of spring after a long and brutal winter.

Just imagine if you had to walk your kids down the streets of the Tenderloin every single day with people shooting up, selling drugs and because the sidewalks were so packed with people you had to walk out into the street into oncoming traffic on a regular basis.

Yes, public order is essential to the quality of life in a city, as Kelling and Wilson explained almost 40 years ago. And for much of the time since, those of us trying to do something about it have been called everything from heartless to fascist, a din that has bumped up 10 decibels during the Wokevid pandemic. But now Mayor Breed understands that the opponents of public order are the ones who are heartless to the people who have to live with consequences of disorder. That is progress.

… the nasty streets, and when I say nasty full of feces and urine that the department of public works is cleaning every single day but it comes back just a few hours later …

No need to elaborate on that.

We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and every day we let things linger our residents are suffering, and we need to be different to act with urgency and to be aggressive encountering these problems.

And perhaps in the future you can not do a thing in the first place when common sense tells you it is going to produce an unacceptable result?

It also means coordinating with the police and the sheriff’s office on felony warrant sweeps which have led to the arrest of 23 individuals so far with outstanding warrants. These are some of the people who have been holding this neighborhood hostage. Our criminal justice system has a responsibility to hold them accountable. When the police make an arrest, the residents of the Tenderloin should not see that same person back on the streets the next day dealing drugs right in front of their neighborhood.

Denouncing the revolving door and the hoodlums who can hold neighborhoods hostage as a result. I applaud this statement. But the doorman is the independently elected district attorney who does not answer to you, Mayor Breed. Can you get him on board? If not, what will you do next?

Today I’m introducing legislation to dis-incentivize theft by making the resale of stolen goods more difficult. For the resale of goods on the streets it will create an exclusion zone for all street vending activity in existing locations that are highly problematic such as UN Plaza.

Legislation by local governments can only have limited effect when the state legislature is hell-bent on moving criminals through the revolving door as fast as it can. Still, efforts to make the fencing of stolen goods more difficult and costly will likely have some effect at the margins.

We also know that we need to give our officers more tools to effectively do their jobs. In 2019, the Board of Supervisors passed a law that limited law enforcement’s ability to use camera feeds during emergency situations. There are exceptions where they can, but for a lot of the issues like what happened in Union Square they could not. Where there were multiple robbery crews hitting multiple stores, they couldn’t even access those cameras, which is ridiculous. Think about that. During an incident of severe looting, our officers are not able to use a tool that we have that other jurisdictions all over this country can use. This create barriers for law enforcement’s ability to respond quickly when responding to critical incidents and significant public safety issues. We need amendments to clarify that officers are allowed to access these cameras when needed to address critical public safety issues.

SF was warned at the time by a chorus of voices from the Police Officers Association to Jonathan Turley. See this article from 2019 in the NYT. Why didn’t the Sups listen? Did you oppose the bill?

Lastly we’re increasingly asking our police department to do more.
They’re working more overtime to address these challenges …

On a budget that you cut during your Wokevid delusion stage. Or was it perhaps because you were running scared of the Woke Apocalypse?

But everything they’ve been doing over the recent months and everything we’re going to ask of them in the coming months before we pass a new budget is going to require more overtime funding, and it’s going to require more police officers. My budget office is currently working with the San Francisco police department and the chief to understand what the needs will be to get us through 2022.

We are glad you understand. Better late than never.

We pushed for reforms to our criminal justice system. We will continue to do that, but when a line is crossed people have to be held accountable for the crimes they commit in our city, and that’s where our police officers have been critically important to our ability to do so.

Hmmm. Here is one sign that Mayor Breed’s recovery is not quite complete. The “reforms” have been aimed at gutting the criminal justice system’s ability to hold people accountable for the crimes they commit. To “continue” the path of what has been called “reform” in recent years necessarily means moving that line even further back and reducing the accountability even more. Is she still in denial about that?

When you are in a room full of people, I would say probably anywhere between 90 and 95 percent of folks could raise their hand and say that either their car has been broken into or they’ve been a victim in some capacity or another. That is not okay, that is not acceptable, and it’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end.

Bravo. I won’t even quibble whether it’s time or past time this time.

And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.

I have said exactly the same thing, although I use that particular terminology only in private.

Does Wokevid, like Covid, affect the sense of smell of some of the people it infects, rendering them unable to detect BS? The people of sense have known it was BS the whole time.

But let us put bygones aside. This issue is too important to dwell on past errors. The mayor cannot fix the problem alone. The Supervisors need to wake up or be replaced. The District Attorney needs to wake up or be replaced. Ultimately, we need a seismic shift at the state level. Let us hope that enough voters have recovered by November of next year to make that change.