San Francisco doldrums

The ejection by recall of San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin only spotlights our broader season of discontent. I decided several months ago that my adjective for the public mood was "pissy" and I'm sticking with it.

Consider what the Examiner found in a late May poll: Mayor London Breed is no favorite either.

Only 16% of The City’s voters plan to vote for Breed in the next election, according to The Examiner poll. Twenty-nine percent of voters said they would “definitely vote for someone else,” 40% said they would “consider voting for someone else” and 15% were not sure. These terrible figures seem even more grim when you consider that even the beleaguered Boudin won 40% of the vote. 

Of course, under The City’s convoluted ranked-choice voting system, Breed could still manage to pull off a win. But such dismal voter ratings are hardly an argument in favor of her re-election, much less a vote of confidence in San Francisco’s future.

I wouldn't bet on Breed being overthrown in the next election; you need a potent candidate to oust even an unpopular incumbent. But we're not happy with the Mayor.

We are just not happy. We experienced a deadly pandemic and nobody fixed it. And it lingers on. 

Although the official count says less people are living on the streets, an awful lot visibly are. And they are dying of drug overdoses all too often. And nobody seems to have fixed anything about this visible misery. 

The powers-that-be haven't fixed crime either. It's hard to tell whether crime is up or down. We pretty much always tell pollsters that crime is rising -- though objectively our individual danger of experiencing a crime has fallen for decades. The pandemic seems to have unleashed threats to Asian-origin people. Somebody must be to blame. We hear almost daily about yet another shooter somewhere in the country ... We're pissy.

Meanwhile, less publicly than the problems in the prosecutor's office, the San Francisco Police Department seems to be a futile bunch:

The head of the police union, Tony Montoya, has been forced to step down amid accusations of theft and/or embezzlement. 

Though Chief Scott complains he doesn't have enough officers and wants more spiffy facilities, SFPD simply doesn't do a very good job (vis Mission Local.)

The SFPD’s arrest rate is typically low — 8.1 percent in 2021 — and clearances (rates of charging suspects) dropped further in many categories this year. Seven percent of rapes, six percent of motor vehicle thefts, and fewer than 10 percent of burglaries have been cleared in 2022. 

And the department’s track record in arresting and using force against people of color still points to extreme racial bias: Black people are 12 times as likely to have force used on them, and 10 times as likely to be searched as whites.

Those stats makes me pissy. Why should we spend yet more money on these stiffs? Yet that's the Mayor's plan, endorsed by most of the Board of Supervisors. 

San Francisco doldrums indeed.