Knowing what I know about bay area politics, I bet half the people who voted for him will say that crime in San Francisco is not the district attorney's fault and blame Regan for closing down the mental hospitals in the 70s.
I live just outside San Francisco city limits and everything is peaceful, because the criminals know that the laws are enforced here. It's that simple. Encountering homeless people shitting in front of me, or screaming bloody murder at the top of their lungs at 2 a.m or whatever was a regular occurrence in S.F. I thought about homeless people every day in S.F. I don't think about homeless people at all where I live now.
The homeless budget in S.F is $300 million dollars a year. That employs a lot of people! Where I live now it's not a whole lot and yet there is no homeless problem.
But it probably goes: SF spends a lot of money on services for the homeless, so lots of homeless people keep going there to get those services. Other places don't spend any money on services for the homeless, so the homeless people leave.
If every place spent a little bit on services for the homeless, there would be just a few homeless everywhere instead of lots of homeless in a few places and no homeless in other places. But that would require coordination to ensure nobody free-rides and just lets other places take on the homeless.
$300 million is a lot though. I've worked on construction projects building ~250 unit apartment buildings that had budgets of $25 million. It seems like you could just build actual housing for most of the homeless with that kind of budget. (Of course that would require SF to allow housing to be built).
I think a lot of San Francisco's problems come from too much tax money. They have a $12.3 billion dollar budget. That's more than some small European countries! The city collects an enormous amount of taxes from all the tech money and needs to do something with it so they get the big idea that they are going to try and fix all social problems with the universal and only solution to all problems: more money.
That's really not a realistic view of the situation though. Pretty much everywhere in the US, _all_ major cities at the very least, have "services for the homeless".
I think the problem lies a lot in the "progressive" idea that people claiming "homeless" somehow classifies for a privileged status. They setup a "homeless class" of people that don't have to work, and get paid to do so. The worse they act, the bigger the "problem" is according to their "caretakers" and the only outcome they can expect is to get an even _bigger_ payout.
In most major cities, shelters require a certain code of conduct. Those that don't abide by it get ousted, suffer the cold of winter, and buck up and man up and deal with it. In SF, they just camp out in the nicest of areas, people cry "hey there's some victims!" and they get an even bigger reward for their degeneracy. People that think they're helping stop some sort of cycle are literally just working at creating the feedback loop.
I think it's more likely than you expect, at least on the very vocal group that is aggressively pushing the overton window on our views on the social contract.
Read “the righteous mind” by Jonathan Haidt. Great audiobook too.
Now the question is do voters realize that benchmark can be artificially lowered by terrible policies that don't help anyone other than make some people "feel good"? We can literally make all crimes legal and we'd end up with an incarceration rate and prison population of zero.
I’ve seen the logic used by many in SF.
The problem isn't with the position of DA, it's with "progressive" voters.
Much of the platform is based on feelings and ideology instead of facts and problem solving, but it manages to even be worse than the right wing counterpart somehow because it comes served with a side dish of "holier and smarter than thou!"
The problem is a large numbers of voters in SF don't realize it's bad policy, and maybe a bigger problem would be why are district attorneys elected positions in the first place?