When Snehal Antani, the CEO of a tech firm in Silicon, sent a team to San Francisco for a meeting last week, their car was broken into, and $10,000 worth of gear was stolen. As were backpacks and passports.
Afterward, Antani said he would think twice before sending anyone to San Francisco again. "My teammates will be scarred forever," he tweeted, adding that "being robbed hits you at your core."
But instead of receiving sympathy, Antani was mocked, namely by former Police Commissioner John Hamasaki, who accused Antani of allowing the suburbs to shelter him from "basic city life experiences."
Talk host Jeff Crank says the cynicism is off the charts.
"It's just the lowering of standards to say that we just have to accept that that's just the way life is," he submits, asserting that "we don't have to accept that that is the way that life is."
With attitudes like Hamasaki's, the City by the Bay is unlikely to ever recover from rampant crime. Though people can "vote with their feet," Crank says San Franciscans are getting what they voted for in November 2020, when 71% of them joined Supervisor Hillary Ronen in essentially voting to defund the police.
In August of 2020, Ronen tweeted, "I want to make it clear that I believe strongly in defunding the police and reducing the number of officers on our force."
The city listened. Since 2020 and the George Floyd riots, San Francisco has trimmed some $36 million from its police budget. Predictably, crime has gone up, especially in Ronen's Mission District.
But time and consequences seem to have changed her tone.
"We've been begging for more officers in the Mission District," she said last week. "I have been told time and time and time and time again there are no officers that we can send to Mission. It hurts, and I feel betrayed."
In her address to the San Francisco police chief during a Budget and Appropriations Committee meeting on Wednesday, she accused him of spending too much time on an anti-retail theft program.
"In the Mission, Chief, it's not theft,' she said. "In the Mission, people are getting shot and killed. In the Mission, people are getting beat up. In the Mission, people are dying."
Crank says Ronen and the voters of her district are suffering from their own poor judgement.
"She tried to defund police officers in the neighborhood that she represents, and who gets hurt? Her constituents get hurt," the talk host points out.
Police officers, he says help "control the evil," so the absence of law enforcement has allowed man's sin nature to rise to the top. And instead of taking responsibility for their own policies, politicians like Hamasaki and Ronen are "trying to justify their existence or their past in a particular role."
