There was a time you could travel to and walk the streets of any of our nation’s major cities and feel safe. Unless, of course, you happened to turn a corner and find that city’s “skid row,” with run-down and abandoned buildings and vagrants suffering from alcoholism and drug addiction. Now, almost every major city suffers from an explosion of homelessness and open-air drug use that can be seen on any street.
San Francisco is one of those cities. The City by the Bay is a “sanctuary city” run by progressive Democrats whose polices have caused suffering from this explosion of homelessness, and has become a “rancid drug-ravaged pit of human misery,“ a “hellhole” according to recent op-ed by David Marcus, author of Charade: The Covid Lies That Crushed a Nation.
Marcus wrote:
1,700 people have died from drug overdoses since the beginning of 2020. That is nearly 700 more fatalities than the county suffered from the Covid pandemic.
Mayor London Breed says she’s now ready to get serious about the problem, by putting an end to open-air drug markets, where users and dealers go about their crimes in full view of the public without any fear of law enforcement.
That’s because the progressive lunatics running the city believe that every criminal is a victim. Don’t arrest them, they say, give them a hug.
In response to Mayor Breed’s ideal, city supervisors Matt Dorsey, Rafael Mandelman, and Catherine Stefani came up with a plan to “bribe” addicts to accept recovery services. Dorsey, who is leading this initiative, called it “San Francisco Recovers,” saying it was a “soft-touch.”
The plan includes:
Expanding the current practice by the DA’s office of electronically tagging drug users and having police officers track them down and confiscate their drugs if they wander into known drug-dealing areas—known as “Assertive Case Management.”
Supervised consumption sites where drug users can safely use substances under medical supervision to prevent accidental overdose deaths.
“Right to Recovery” zones located near treatment centers where drug enforcement is prioritized, but illicit drugs would be confiscated and drug dealers subject to arrest.
Job placement and training instead of imprisonment for those who agree to stop drug dealing activity–known as the “High Point Drug Market Intervention Strategy” that is already used in New York, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Dorsey added this nugget of “soft touch” truth: “This is a way that nobody’s going to jail but we’re doing an effective job of interrupting the drug market and drug scenes.”
Noted Marcus, “As part of the plan, the city government will task no fewer than 21 city departments and six city commissions with a 90-day challenge to come up with ideas.”
But what about enforcing the laws now on the books to clean up the streets? How about arresting drug dealers? Have the leftists in charge of San Francisco clearly lost their minds and given up on protecting the citizens of their fair city?
David Marcus goes on in his description of San Francisco, a visual that could just as well as depict Los Angeles or Seattle:
Unless one has walked through the Tenderloin district of San Francisco of late they cannot fully understand the utter and complete breakdown of society on display.
I have.
Take anything you have seen on TV or read in the news and multiple that by ten.
I saw complete hopelessness in the eyes of haunted souls dragging themselves down the street looking for their next fix.
I saw men and women of all ages hunched over on the sidewalks with open wounds all over their bodies.
I saw the filthy tent cities stinking with human excrement and strewn with needles and pipes.
I saw children staring in horror at people dying right in front of them.
There is nary a cop to be found for vast stretches of beat, rundown byways.
Hardly a business open and barely a twinkle of legal commerce or sign of civilization.
But instead of letting law enforcement fix the problem, San Francisco is doubling down on this despair.
San Francisco is far from alone. The top 10 cities with the most homeless people in the United States are progressive-Democrat enclaves where big-government, woke, utopian-like policies are failing miserably.
An SFNext poll published Wednesday by the Daily Mail found:
Two thirds of San Francisco residents say their city is going downhill because of widespread homelessness, crime and rising housing costs – and a third plan to leave the city within three years.
The survey of 1,653 adults found that 65 percent said the city was declining, while 37 percent said they would live elsewhere in three years. A staggering 84 percent of people aged 65 and over said they are planning to leave.
It paints a bleak portrait of an iconic city famed for its Golden Gate Bridge and colorful ‘Painted Ladies’ homes being wracked by poor leadership and urban decay, where the sight of addicts shooting up on sidewalks is now all too common.
Many good citizens of these failed socialist cities across the nation are fleeing for safer communities in which to live, work, and raise their families. Their destination cities are almost always found in Republican- and conservative-controlled states and communities. Those safe cities will need to keep out progressive leadership and avoid progressive policies, or they too will quickly resemble San Francisco.
Marcus was right when he wrote, “The permissiveness of progressives is getting people killed.”
