Then why is the PD of every single major American city dramatically understaffed?
I agree the SFPD’s lack of cooperation and inaction is a central issue that needs addressing by cleaning house and rebuilding. The leftist proposal (often shorthanded to “abolish the police”) would say wipe away the current structure that answers to no one built for antagonism and punishment and replace it with a service bound to strong community oversight tasked with protection, aid, and rehabilitation.
That idea may be the literal scientifically perfect solution to crime or an impossibly impractical utopian fantasy but we’ll never know from SF’s vague motions. Appointing Boudin DA so he could reduce charges and lessen punishments without making corresponding changes in the police force to focus on community outreach and aid services was never a real attempt that could be judged, and was hamstrung from the beginning in a way that could only result in failure.
But even if you think real try at that proposal would never work and the correct solution for addressing crime in SF is something very different the same type of failure is guaranteed if the city doesn’t address the point you made. If the police refuse to act in accordance with the wishes of the community and aren’t replaced with people who will the city will never have a cohesively focused law enforcement strategy that any approach requires to have a chance at succeeded.
The homelessness issue is the exact same thing with SF continuing to be afraid to commit to anything more than half measures regardless of costs. The city has a homeless population of around 8-10 thousand and spends around $1.1b a year on services. Over $100k per person, a bit more than the average income in the city, how does that make any sense? Providing every homeless person an apartment, free food, healthcare, drug rehabilitation, and job search services would very likely cost less and actually solve the issue. Like yes that's a massive simplification and not actually workable in the current world, especially without the rest of the country providing similar services, but it approximates an actual plan with singular direction and the numbers involved highlight demonstrate the problem.
San Francisco really wants to be seen as progressive on homelessness so it keeps throwing large amounts of money at one-off half-baked projects like $5k a month per person on tent spaces in parking lots to prevent COVID spread in the homeless or $70k a year to fund new beds in shelters the homeless can only sleep in at night or $1.7m to build a single public toilet.
At the same time it really wants it to seem like its listening to its tax payers and taking action with visible effect so it also tosses however many millions on encampment sweeps, building hostile architecture, and having law enforcement harass or temporarily arrest the homeless all of which just results in the homeless moving somewhere else a few blocks away.
So it ends up wasting this extraordinary amount of money and effort doing a whole bunch of nothing instead of you know, actually getting the homeless off the street. Because that would require establishing a goal with measurable criteria, forming a comprehensive plan to accomplish it, and working as a cohesive public body to make it happen.
I really rambling here but I feel like pretty much every single issue in San Francisco stems from this same problem. The city and its government is terrified of doing anything that requires the integrity to build a concrete project that it could be judged by, in whichever political direction, and so it keeps creating a giant mismatch of conflicting partial measures it can parade around as progress to counter criticism and avoid quantifiable failure while never actually making any forward movement. See everything with the schools or the cost of living or public transit or other infrastructure or a million other things for even more examples of this.
As long as SF continues to half-ass everything and avoid commitment nothing is going to change.
I don't trust these numbers, or at least how meaningful they are. Vancouver officially has a similar homeless population, but on a sunny day you can go to the downtown eastside and see 8000 people who you might assume are homeless. Maybe some of them are sleeping in cars, or SROs, or squats, and don't identify as homeless. Or they're currently in jail, incarcerated, a hospital, or a mental health facility, and also don't get counted towards the number. The number is entirely determined by groups that come up with them coordinating an effort to go out over a 24 hour period and ask people if they're homeless. Whoever says yes gets added to the count.
I think the number would be more meaningful if they instead asked people about their living conditions, and came up with a number of people who fall below some basic standard of housing (possibly a combination of: >100 sq ft per person, working stove, working bathroom, working utilities)
I have friends in London Breed's cabinent and most of her choices are made in the context of her political aspirations for her next office. This means bandaids and duct tape for the city if that doesn't rock the boat.
This political problem isn't unique and I don't know how to fix it. The public needs leaders who's number 1 priority is their current job, not building towards their next job.
In a vacuum, where news of free apartments don’t leak out and invite more people to coke for them, maybe