
‘No one wants to open a restaurant in San Francisco’ because of break-ins, costs - jseliger
https://www.sfchronicle.com/restaurants/article/No-one-wants-to-open-a-restaurant-in-San-14842211.php
======
dmitrygr
This is what happens when your newly-elected DA says shit like "crimes such as
public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a
sidewalk, etc., should not and will not be prosecuted"

Source: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/What-s-
th...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/What-s-the-answer-
to-quality-of-life-crimes-in-14563426.php)

~~~
xsmasher
I don't see the connection you are making. The DA elected two weeks ago can
hardly have caused this issue.

Putting enforcement priority on burglary and vandalism (the problems mentioned
in the article) instead of the issues you listed seems like the right thing to
do.

~~~
dmitrygr
The DA was _freely elected_ by the people _FOR_ these views. The previous DA
had similar views. SF needs a DA who will actually prosecute crime, not make
excuses for it.

My car has been broken into multiple times in SF. Once in front of a police
station. Once near a school which had security cameras rolling which filmed
the entire thing. Police are uninterested. They told me "these people have it
hard enough, we're not going to make things harder for them"

~~~
wahern
> The DA was freely elected by the people FOR these views.

That's debatable. Another perspective: Boudin was nobody's first choice, but
because of ranked-choice voting and some political infighting among moderates
that split the vote, Boudin took home the prize. See
[https://missionlocal.org/2019/11/s-f-election-wrap-how-
could...](https://missionlocal.org/2019/11/s-f-election-wrap-how-could-this-
happen-and-what-are-we-in-for-now/)

Which is _not_ to say that he wasn't fairly elected, just that I seriously
doubt he was specifically elected _for_ his platform. The man is a Rhodes
scholar, a great speaker, and got a lot of press, precisely the kind of person
you vote for in ranked-choice after you've checked off your top pick(s).

For example, Boudin did well among the Chinese community, which is generally
conservative. But their first choice was Tung, a moderate-conservative who
supported prosecution of quality of life crimes at least as strongly as
currently. As the SF Chronicle put it, "Tung was a natural choice for Chinese
voters, who make up a third of the city’s voters, and Boudin campaigned
heavily in the Chinese community. He speaks some Cantonese and Mandarin and
won the endorsement of the Sing Tao Daily, the largest Chinese language
newspaper in the Bay Area. That could be a reason he won a lot of Tung’s
second-choice votes, even though their politics were at opposite ends of the
candidate spectrum."
[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ho...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/How-
Chesa-Boudin-a-public-defender-who-never-14826323.php)

As the Mission Local implied, this is the sort of oddball result you can
sometimes get from "the fetid rabbit hole of San Francisco club politics, that
perfect amalgamation of Tracy Flick and the Soviet politburo." (That quote is
just amazing. Are there journalism prizes for soundbites? 'cause that
journalist deserves one.)

------
TaylorGood
Is this all a long-time coming for SF, finally reaching a tipping point? The
press and chatter across many frustrations is omnipresent across the internet.

------
blackswan101
Break-ins, cost of labor, homelessness. The plight of SF restaurants is dire
and the situation might only get worse. Far cry from what the situation was 20
or so years ago. Companies like cloudkitchens are poised to take advantage of
the situation

------
sharkmerry
-Property crime is down year over year

"Property crime rates have actually declined in the city over the last year,
but reported incidents may tell only part of the story."

3,475 this year vs 4,375 at the same time last year. 20% decrease

-No one wants to?

"“No one wants to open a restaurant in San Francisco,” said Alter, "who wants
to expand in the city" but isn’t sure it’s currently a good idea.

~~~
wahern
Property crime is _not_ down. It ticked down briefly earlier this year,
unsurprisingly. Crime numbers vary. But you can see here,
[https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-
rat...](https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rate-and-
property-crime-rate), that they've quickly rebounded as of August, 2019.[1]
The trend line is clear.

Look, I supported sentencing and enforcement reform at least as much anyone,
but we can't hide from the facts. It's one thing to say that these facts don't
prove a causal relationship to sentencing reform, etc. That's absolutely fair.
But it's another to deny or diminish the problems. We can't be defensive,
fearful of consequences to reform efforts. If we can criticize the tough on
crime crowd for ignoring 20 years of steadily decreasing crime, then we should
be prepared to recognize when the numbers don't go our way. Facts aren't for
our convenience; they keep us honest and grounded.

[1] See the first slide which includes August, 2019. The second slide with the
property crime breakouts end in May, before the regression to the mean.

~~~
sharkmerry
That was burglaries that the stats said from the article.

Your data is interesting but it also shows crime is trending down if dates are
limited to 2017-2019, which the data you presented only goes to 2010 so doesnt
really show long term trends either

~~~
wahern
10 years is surely long enough to establish a new, local trend. (The graph
starts January 2009, not 2010.) And starting from 2009 has more legitimacy
than selecting any random 2-year period. What makes 2017 significant? Did
Trump's election bring less crime?

2009 was the bottom of the recession and has become the baseline for examining
many socio-economic trends across the country. 2011 was also the beginning of
serious criminal justice reform in California; it was the year the state began
to empty its prisons.

What remains down is violent crime, notwithstanding several high-profile
assaults this past year, many of which are incident to property crimes.

Arguing that if you go back far enough things are still improving is like
arguing wealth inequality isn't a legitimate issue because even the poor have
televisions and refrigerators.

------
Bostonian
If you reduce the chance of going to jail for "non-violent" crimes such as
burglary, you will get more such crimes, because burglars are neither deterred
nor incarcerated.

~~~
Bostonian
For some reason my comment was downvoted. Here is a quote from the end of the
article showing that burglars are not being punished severely enough to deter
them:

When Martin recalled the June break-in at the Pine Tar Grill, what sticks in
his mind wasn’t losing the computers or bobbleheads. Instead, it was a
conversation he had with a police officer who viewed the footage of the break-
in, who told him that he recognized the person in the video and that he had
been arrested multiple times, Martin said.

“As a business owner,” Martin said, “that’s just really hard to hear.”

------
nickthemagicman
Can't you get insurance for break ins?

