Mayor London Breed, Police Chief Bill Scott, and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins sat down last week for an hour-long discussion on crime and homelessness in San Francisco, and some of the comments were, even by their standards, pretty astonishing.
The event was hosted by KGO TV, Channel 7, and you can watch the whole thing here. Other than a few posts on Twitter, it’s received very little other news media attention.
A lot of the program was pretty predictable. The studio audience was filled with people who want the city to crack down on crime and “clean up” unhoused people from the streets.
We saw clips about the “doom loop,” about the national image of San Francisco taking a hit. The two main interviewers were Lyanne Melendez and former Chron reporter Phil Matier, who has always been a conservative journalist who criticizes government spending on social problems and supports law-enforcement as a solution to a lot of complex issues.
Melendez at one point suggested a three-day summit to address homelessness; Breed said she would “think about that.”
But Jenkins was the one who set the agenda, making it clear that she and her allies (and Breed never disagreed) were now going to blame the Superior Court judges for the city’s drug overdose problems.
She complained that the judges on the San Francisco bench won’t lock alleged dealers (although she didn’t use the word “alleged,” in her approach everyone who is arrested is guilty) while they await trial.
Although she said she’s not involved in the StopCrimeSF effort to oust sitting judges, she said clearly in a follow-up interview with Melendez that “the judges who are hearing these motions are the problem,” the reason we still have a crisis on the streets.
Reality check: Judges in California have to follow the law, which right now strictly limits pre-trial detention. That’s a good thing: In the old days, you could get out of jail if you could afford cash bail, and if you were poor you were stuck. Now, the judges use state-approved rules to decide if someone who is, under the US Constitution, innocent until proven guilty has to sit in jail until trial.
That’s not liberal judges on the bench. In fact, the governors who appoint the vast majority of local Superior Court judges in the past 20 years have hardly been left-leaning soft-on-crime types; we’re talking Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom, none of whom distinguished themselves with their record of appointing a left-wing judiciary.
That’s state law.
But never mind: Jenkins and Breed, having run out of people to blame, are now going after the judges.
But that’s not the most remarkable thing from the broadcast.
When Matier asked Jenkins about unhoused people, and what the city could legally do, she said this:
“They have to be made uncomfortable.”
That’s right: The solution to a national crisis, which has its roots in neoliberalism and economic inequality, is to make the people on the streets even more miserable.
Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, told me:
Unhoused people are already uncomfortable. The streets are hard and cold. The city should be engaging unhoused folks into and expanding services, not treating them with cruelty.
So now we are supposed to make it worse.
Then what are people supposed to do? Breed talked about adding 300 shelter beds—for more than 3,000 unhoused people. I don’t get it.
All of the things that Jenkins and Breed are talking about have a five-decade history of failure. Blaming the judges isn’t going to change any of that.
