[amitkgupta84]

Based on who San Franciscans has been electing, it seems too many live in world of progressive delusion far removed from reality. Reality got too real, now elected officials react. If only the citizens of SF could bring themselves to support and elect politicians who would’ve nipped this tragedy, years in the making, in the bud. Breed talks about the need to change course now — SF needed to change course long ago.

[nullnilvoid]

London Breed is a bad mayor for SF. She defunded the police by $120 million during the movement [1] while she spent $12.4 million on her own personal security detail [2]. And now she pledges more police. It's a slap on her own face. She dances in a nightclub without a mask, breaking the very rule she set herself [3]. She partied at the French Laundry restaurant while she encouraged everyone else to shelter in place [4]. London Breed is a terrible mayor for SF. As the innovation center of the world, SF deserves better. Can anyone shed some light on how she got elected?

[1] https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...

[2] https://www.thesfnews.com/mayor-breed-cuts-police-budget-hir...

[3] https://californiaglobe.com/articles/sf-mayor-london-breed-g...

[4] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/S-...

[nullnilvoid]

London Breed also violated ethics seriously several times [5]. She asked the governor to release her brother who killed his own girlfriend [6].

[5] https://sfethics.org/ethics/2021/08/ethics-commission-fines-...

[6] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/mayor-breeds-brother-will-ge...

[jljljl]

It's not clear that the $120M in defunding ever actually happened:

https://www.sfweekly.com/news/is-san-francisco-re-funding-th...

Based on this article, it looks like Y/Y spending on law enforcement was flat, maybe even up when you include funding to the SF Sheriff, DA, and Probation offices.

[nullnilvoid]

Given that the crimes in SF have spiked during Covid, a flat police budget is de facto defunding [7]. To keep up with the crimes, police budget should increase proportionally as well. Otherwise, crimes will not be controlled.

[7] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/San-Francisco-s-cr...

[jljljl]

The article you are citing shows that some crimes have increased (Homicide, Burglaries, Vehicle Thefts) but several other categories have decreased. If you go to the SFPD Dashboard linked[1], overall crime in 2020 was down 23% vs 2019.

For 2021, overall crime is up 10% vs 2021, but is still seems to be on track to be down 15% vs 2019.

A lot of this is probably due to COVID restrictions rather than any change in policing or enforcement, but using the metrics you've cited, crime is actually at a low.

If we follow your argument about adjusting police budget proportionally, we should have cut the police budget 23% in FY 2020, or $160M. FWIW, I don't think cutting the budget 23% in 1 year is a great idea.

[1] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

[nullnilvoid]

Some have increased while other have decreased. The total number of crimes have increased by my own experience. Many of the crimes are not reported. It is the experience of other residents as well [8]. For example, my experience is that car window breaking has increased dramatically. I did not have any car window breaking in the first 5 years in SF (I live in a relatively safer neighborhood). This year, my window was smashed. I see glasses all over the streets nowadays. I did bother to report to the police because i did not think the police would be able to do something about it.

Anyway, as a mayor, if London Breed promised to do something and she did not, it is a sign of incompetency. It erodes her own credibility.

[8] https://www.change.org/p/resign-or-recall-san-francisco-da-c...

[bpiche]

The last mayor died on the treadmill and she became interim mayor.

[dragonwriter]

> The last mayor died on the treadmill and she became interim mayor.

When Mayor Lee died, Supervisor Mark Farrell became interim mayor.

London Breed won the subsequent special election to become mayor.

EDIT: Actually, as noted downthread, its more complicated. But Breed’s stint as acting mayor did not immediately proceed her time as elected mayor.

[bpiche]

It's been a while, so I had to look. It seems she was actually interim mayor, and was then recalled as interim mayor. After she was recalled, she won the special election.

https://sacobserver.com/2018/01/residents-protest-board-vote...

[dragonwriter]

Good catch; I remembered she wasn’t elected as an incumbent, and found a reference to Farrell as interim mayor at the time, but hadn’t recalled all the preceding mess.

[nullnilvoid]

How did she become the interim mayor among all the candidates? Power brokers such as Willie Brown. Powerful families in SF?

[bpiche]

I presume there was a line of succession like we have for the President and other public offices for these contingencies. Sure, she's had relationships with city officials like Mohammad Nuru, but I didn't get the sense that there was any corruption around her succeeding Ed Lee.

https://abc7news.com/michael-nuru-sf-mayor-breed-london-publ...

[zepto]

Who are these ‘politicians who would’ve nipped this tragedy, years in the making, in the bud.’?

This isn’t meant to be a trick question. I simply haven’t seen any obvious choices.

[amitkgupta84]

Good question. I didn't mean this to refer to a specific politician, I meant that SF isn't the kind of place where such a politician could thrive. I think in a healthy place, you would see a healthy balance of right and left politicians who genuinely have to contend with one another. I would expect conservative politicians to win elections when things like crime and quality of life start to go the wrong direction. I don't think the delusional climate in SF is conducive to this healthy balance.

My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don't think he got many votes. Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates, with strong and worthwhile candidates from each party, each getting a decent share of votes. I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don't remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone (giving the homeless productive, gainful occupation and dealing with all the litter, needles, human waste, etc. on the streets). I can't think of a more out-of-touch idea than that, but this was the #2 choice for San Franciscans.

I think anyone sensible would have simply asked for what Breed is now proposing to do. Voicing that opinion in SF years ago would've made you a pariah. It's a common sense opinion if you're living in and observing reality, but that's simply not what SF culture has been about.

[zepto]

I agree. This is the problem with California having become effectively a one-party state.

[dragonwriter]

> My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don’t think he got many votes.

There were two Republicans, and the one that got more votes (both first preference and total, since it was an IRV not first-past-the-post election) of the two wasn’t a “he”. (The one that got fewer votes was the one endorsed by most local Republican institutions.)

But if you are thinking of her 2019 reelection in the regular election and not the 2018 special election…

The other candidates were (in order of most to least final votes)

Ellen Lee Zhou (R) – the leading Republican from the special election

Joel Ventresca (endorsed by Green Party, subsequently ran in the gubernatorial recall as a Democrat)

Paul Ybarra Robertson (no apparent party affiliation)

Wilma Pang (previously Peace and Freedom, but not sure if that was current in 2019)

Robert L. Jordan (a "street minister" with no apparent party affiliation)

> Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates

There were in the open seat election where Breed was first elected; there was one of each in the regular election where she was reelected.

But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly. Many individual factions within the Democratic Party are larger, in terms of electorate, than the Republican Party in SF, and the ratio in support between the Democratic and Republican parties is smaller than that between the Republican and American Independent parties and almost the same as that between the Republican and Libertarian parties.

> I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don’t remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone

That…didn’t happen. None of the major Democrats either banded together or had a platform like that. (There were some institutional cross-endorsements for Breed and Leno.)

[amitkgupta84]

I was thinking of 2018, but I don't remember Ellen Lee Zhou being Republican, only Richie Greenberg. Four unaffiliated-but-Democratic candidates ranked higher, Ellen and Richie were next both with less than 5% of the vote. Mark Leno and Jane Kim were the two I recall banding together; they were #2 and #3 respectively after London.

> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.

SF is extremely unbalanced. See: https://www.bestplaces.net/voting/city/california/san_franci.... Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?

[dragonwriter]

> Why is it silly to expect it to be less extreme?

It's silly to expect that national distribution of political thought to be approximated in every geographic subdivision. It has never been even approximately, the case. Structurally, the US electoral system encourages coalition building and dividing so that factions that nationally are roughly balanced form the major national parties, but there is no reason that that's even a privileged frame to decide what is “balanced”.

[amitkgupta84]

No one is saying every geographical subdivision needs to reflect exactly the aggregate distribution at the national level. I expect the split in individual cities to deviate from the national mean split. Based on my subjective experience living in SF, and based on the data, SF’s deviation is too extreme.

Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?

In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?

[sagarm]

It's up to Republicans to find a way to appeal to San Franciscans.

The bottom line is that they're deeply out of step with the city on culture war issues they themselves whipped up. Forcing women to give birth to corpses, legalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation, opposing all pandemic mitigations, etc. Even if an individual politician doesn't support these positions,they define the brand.

[amitkgupta84]

I think the problem is San Franciscans are out of touch with reality. The root problem is not the GOP brand; despite the flaws in the GOP brand that is not the bottom line.

[dontgocold]

I don’t mean to sound idiotic on my end, but clearly she was a voted in elected official…whats to stop her from being voted in again? I honestly don’t understand.