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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[5] https://sfethics.org/ethics/2021/08/ethics-commission-fines-...
[6] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/mayor-breeds-brother-will-ge...