Opinion

editorial

From the Post editorial team

May 1, 2023 | 5:51 p.m

Shoplifting and security concerns forced Whole Foods to close its San Francisco flagship store last month.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

For the New York Times, the closure of San Francisco’s flagship Whole Foods — due to shoplifting, a machete-wielding repeat offender and local addicts turning its bathrooms into shooting galleries — is “a portrayal of some of the city’s most persistent problems.”

Completely wrong: These sufferings are not ancient, unsolvable mysteries of human existence.

They emerged after prosecutor (now uploaded) Chesa Boudin won the 2019 election, more or less stopped prosecuting quality of life crimes, and with the help of his comrades elsewhere in politics, realigned the city to face crooks to be friendly and anticriminal law abiding.

San Fran has long been extremely liberal, but with Boudin’s election, the last scrap of common sense has jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

The number of homicides increased by more than 36% in both 2021 and 2022 compared to 2019.

The Tenderloin is a no man’s land riddled with violence. Madmen with machetes wander down the rocket aisle.

It’s not because of poverty or the city’s over-reliance on the tech industry (another Times ploy).

It’s because of poor, conscious policy choices — policies that still cause bloody aftershocks, though in some cases their authors have moved on.

That same empty refrain drives media coverage of crime in San Francisco.

Take a late April column on San Francisco by LA Times’ Anita Chabria, which blamed crime on vague macro issues like “an addiction crisis.”

Well, what made it a crisis? Forbearance to drug dealers: Boudin convicted few for intent to sell during his tenure (just three in all of 2021, down from 90 in 2018 under his predecessor).

Jay Caspian Kang’s article in the April New Yorker went so far as to deny that there was even a violent crime epidemic in San Francisco — even though the number of homicides increased every year from 2019 to 2021; In 2022, the dismal sum of the previous year doubled.

The most important thing, Kang pompously said, is to focus on “inequalities in the justice system.”

The obvious solutions – hiring more cops and actually prosecuting criminals, even low-level ones – stare these people in the face.

But they refuse to notice.

So here’s a tip: before you worry about technology, inequality, or anything else, just shut down the open-air drug market.

Send all deadly delusions straight to Alcatraz.

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Los Angeles Times
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1.5.23

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