You knew after this story came out Monday about how SF now has the highest per capita property crime rate of the top 50 cities in the country that Fox News was probably going to jump all over that. Enter Bill O'Reilly, who on his Thursday broadcast, in between asking Donald Trump how he'd steal oil from ISIS and castigating Millennials for all being socialists, did a finger-wagging segment about how San Francisco, "the most liberal place in the country... is now paying a price for electing far-left people." That price: We're all being robbed all the time.
Much like Fox News highlighted our fair city last year in the wake of the shooting of Kathryn Steinle on Pier 14, which they and others were quick to blame on our Sanctuary City policy and the fact that the sole suspect, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, had been deported five times previously, they are back to telling us how liberalism is folly because it means anarchy and crime.
O'Reilly sends correspondent Claudia Cowan to SF City Hall to try to get one of our liberal Supervisors on camera, and while she gets images of Scott Wiener walking away from her and David Campos wearing a bowtie, she fails to get anyone to talk to her, and nor does she catch any of their names. "San Francisco has had a long history of tolerance," she reports, "which has made it a magnet for the homeless and the mentally ill. But tolerance has a price, which more people here are starting to realize." (Meanwhile, Campos just wrote this op-ed in the Examiner reacting to the New York Times's implied characterization of him as soft on crime.)
Then they get former supervisor Angela Alioto to represent San Francisco in a talking-head discussion, and she insists that when her car was recently broken into, it was not the work of some passing homeless person, but was a sophisticated, organized effort by a single ring of burglars. And she ends up shouting "We need to find the ringleader!" while O'Reilly tries shouting over here, "But the homeless! They're urinating and they're defecating everywhere, Angela!"
It's a real treat.
Previously: SF Now Has Highest Per Capita Property Crime Rate In The US
SF's Sanctuary City Status Safe In Unanimous Vote, Rebuffing Conservative Media