If I were a cop I wouldn’t expend any effort to chase down a criminal if I know the DA is gonna shirk their responsibility. What’s the point? Law enforcement doesn’t work if the law isn’t enforced.

Same way I’m not gonna do any extra work in the office if I know my manager doesn’t care.

What getting the new DA has shown is that if many people are cops, they won't expend any effort to chase down a criminal whether or not the DA is going to shirk their responsibility.

Every quarter since we recalled the old DA we've had higher homicides than the year preceding (the old DA had no increase over the one before).

What’s the prosecution rate per arrest? If it’s still miserably low compared to previous years or other jurisdictions with effective DAs then the problem is still the DA

Property crime should be considered violent crime. Nothing in this world is free, someone had to spend hours of their life to be able to buy said property, and taking that is essentially stealing those hours of their life away.

One difference is how brazen it is. I grew up in SF, and was here for the big bad 70s and early 80s. Violent crime was worse then, but disorder feels worse to me now. Of course, it's hard to remember across five decades, and I'm remembering one thing as a kid and another as a middle aged adult.

One thing, though - nobody in the 1970s was welcome to walk into a grocery store with a garbage bag, sweep things off the shelves into the bag, and just walk out. Watching that feels very unsettling.

Also, I recently walked from the golden gate theater to the civic center bart station, and I am not exaggerating, I mean it when I say that it is worse than the dystopian vision of post-apocalyptic boston in "last of us". The amount of menace, disorder, drug use, drug dealing, theft, tent cities, edgy, tweaking people, comatose and dying people, swollen and infected toes and limbs... it is truly a hellscape.

Now, there are few problems so bad that they are immune to hyperbole, and because SF's progressive failure can be good fodder for conservatives, there is incentive to exaggerate. I still have good days here, and there are still parts of SF that are much less affected (though almost nowhere you don't see some jolting sign of the disorder). But it isn't just the 'loin and soma, this disorder has turned many formerly lovely parts of San Francisco into horrible places. And while you may compare violent crime rates and homeless rates to other cities, it does matter where in a city it occurs.

For example, imagine if the Luxembourg gardens in Paris became overrun the way the civic center has? That the fountain outside the old senate building became an open air drug scene tent city, where now and then someone is stabbed to death. Yeah, you could compare this to a violent city with more homeless living under a freeway overpass, but I'm willing to say it represents a deeper, more alarming loss. I say this with full acknowledgment of the humanitarian disaster both scenarios represent.

This, to me, is why people are so shocked by San Francisco. We've allowed our civic center and market street, areas that were once the center of government, business, and cultural life for a huge area of the western united states, to become a kind of hellscape. I wouldn't put it on the level of the luxomberg gardens, but you can see the artifacts of a prouder city.