As they enjoy doing about once every six months, Fox News has done a piece about how San Francisco's "liberal policies" are going to be the city's undoing, and how they're directly to blame for rising property crime rates and mountains of human feces. Fox also points to the city's "perennial budget deficit" (untrue) and somehow manages to blame the Sanctuary City policy along with Willie Brown's mayoral administration twenty years ago, and former District Attorney Terence Hallinan who "taught Marxist seminars and helped run the Communist club at UC Berkeley."
And yet San Francisco is one of the most expensive places in the nation to live, which also seems to make their heads explode and/or that fact only adds to the schadenfreude on the right and lets them shake their heads about how anyone could want to spend so much to live in this crime-ridden shithole!
Of course, also, they delight in our persistent feces problem, but as most of us here know, that's got more to do with homelessness than anything, and homelessness is not unique to San Francisco despite what some columnists and pundits seem to think. (And New York and Los Angeles have far bigger homeless populations.)
They manage to get State Assemblyman David Chiu on the record to defend San Francisco, and he says, "It's unfair to just say this is a San Francisco thing. These are the same issues across the state and the nation.”
And it's true. There are cities as liberal or more liberal than SF, including Portland, Seattle, and Berkeley, and yet San Francisco gets to stand in for all of them on Fox News just like we did after illegal immigrant Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez allegedly shot Kate Steinle on Pier 14, and Fox News descended to make an example of the city as being so stupidly tolerant of immigrants.
As of April, the FBI released a report showing that SF had the highest per capita property crime rate, which Bill O'Reilly seized upon back then, and now his parent network is right back at it, just to close out the year. Mayor Lee came out swinging against SF's Superior Court judges a month later, blaming them, and not the police or the criminals themselves, for the spike in property crime. And meanwhile, when the mid-year crime figures came in for June 30, they showed year-over-year decreases in larcenies, robberies, and car thefts, so we may in fact be seeing a decrease in crime for the year overall (even though homicides look to be slightly up).
In summation, Fox News remains full of shit, and San Francisco remains their favorite liberal punching bag, and this country has much bigger problems right now than SF's car break-ins and street poop. But, sure, those would be good problems to solve.
Previously: SF's Plummeting Crime Rate (Except For Homicides), By The Numbers
Homelessness Goes Down Nationwide, Rises On West Coast
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