Despite San Francisco’s nightly portrayal on cable news as the burning dumpster fire of libtard misrule, crime fell slightly in 2023. Quips had been made decades ago — long before some dope coined the term “doom loop” — that you could skate from the bay to the ocean on broken car glass. But reported property crime also dropped a full 10 percent last year.
Yet 2024 has started off with a bang. And a scream. And, frankly, a hilarious thud, with some politician-on-politician crime. To wit: Mayoral candidate Daniel Lurie last week announced he will appropriate the mayor’s police chase and surveillance ballot measure, Proposition E, funnel metric shitloads of money into backing it and use the resultant blitz to burnish his image. He will also, either subtly or not, chastise the incumbent mayor — whose ballot measure, again, this is — for making us vote on crap like this rather than mayor-ing it into existence during her six years in office.
The mayor’s reaction was fiery and apoplectic, like Smaug awakening from his complacent slumber to discover that Bilbo had filched his golden cup.
“Daniel Lurie, who is running against Mayor Breed in the November election, has stooped to shameless opportunism by launching a personal campaign to support one of Mayor Breed’s ballot measures, Proposition E, while simultaneously attacking her for it,” read an email from Breed’s campaign committee, which arrived with a nifty red siren emoji in its subject line.
“Why, you ask? Because his Prop. E campaign will allow him to exploit a dark money loophole: with no contribution limits on ballot measure campaigns, trust-fund millionaires like Daniel are able to pour massive amounts of cash into promoting their own name and face while criticizing Mayor Breed.”
(This is more fun if you read it in the voice of Ted Baxter from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”)
And this is where the hilarity comes in. Because raising gobs of cash for an opportunistic candidate to self-aggrandize herself and distract from her actual record is not only what Mayor Breed was already doing but what ridiculous, vacuous, red meat election-year measures like Prop. E are for. This isn’t a “loophole,” this is a system.
So for the mayor to claim the moral high ground here was, yes, hilarious. Both the mayor and Lurie resemble nothing so much as two thieves trying to rob the same bank.
In fact, there was just such a scene in Woody Allen’s 1969 film “Take the Money and Run.” In that movie, the competing bank robbers asked their hostages to vote on who they’d rather be robbed by.
A pretty on-the-nose analogy to the present, don’t you think?
If Prop. E was really about public safety, you’d think the mayor would welcome any and all support (and, regardless, professional and well thought-through campaigns don’t respond in an angry, knee-jerk fashion).
But it isn’t — and never was — and Breed’s reaction was telling.
“For lack of a better term,” says longtime Bay Area campaign strategist Jim Ross, “they knew it was a horseshit proposal. And now they’re not even gonna get credit for it.”
In fact, megadonors helped pump some $375,000 into Daniel Lurie’s Prop. E committee in its first week of existence. This is big money Lurie’s people can now spend in ways that bolster Lurie — rather than the mayor’s people using the mayor’s ballot measure to help the mayor.
“While the measure itself is stupid, the political ploy is smart,” assesses veteran strategist Eric Jaye. “What did the Viet Cong say? They said they’d fight by grabbing their opponents’ belt buckles. Get close. Don’t let her outmaneuver you with public safety voters. That’s what he is doing.”
When Breed in October announced a plan to subject people on welfare to dope screening — with the possibility of them losing their General Assistance checks and/or housing — Lurie denounced it as unserious and unworkable. The city already lacks the resources to adequately test and treat drug users, and this measure could lead to scads more people being tested and treated. What’s more, addicts deprived of money and housing will, predictably, end up on the streets and desperate for drugs and cash — a recipe for human misery and ramped-up crime.
Well, nice argument — but you lose. Campaign pros tell me this proposal, now called Proposition F, figures to pass, handily in March. As does Prop. E for that matter. More importantly, the universe of voters both Lurie and Breed need to win over to be our next mayor like this idea. They want dope fiends to be subjected to screening.
“Daniel was not wrong on the policy but many if not most of his supporters support that idea,” sums up Jaye referring to the drug-testing proposal. “So, saying the right thing wasn’t very good politics. He was out-maneuvered.”
Well, not again. Lurie isn’t ceding the right flank this time.
When Mayor Breed in October announced she was putting what would become Prop. E on the ballot, she chose to do so at Alamo Square.
This, as we wrote at the time, wasn’t just a troll of area resident Dean Preston, but a nod to a recent incident there in which media and online commenters were outraged at what appeared to be a police car failing to give chase to a car burglar caught in the act.
“Many people wondered why the police could not pursue and make sure that person is brought to justice,” Breed told the crowd (as we noted at the time, for whatever reason, she adopted the Donald Trump “many people” framing). “Some of the changes to policies have limited our officers’ ability to be as effective as we know they can.”
And yet, as we also wrote in October, the “changes” to the cops’ vehicle pursuit policy date to 2013. More to the point: The police did give chase to the thief on the viral video. He fled and dropped the stuff he’d stolen, which police recovered.
So the anecdote the mayor used to undergird her photo-op press conference — and, more seriously, to justify this ballot measure — never happened.
This, too, is amazingly on the nose.
But there’s more in here, of course: In addition to asking voters to unmake an 11-year-old vehicle pursuit policy — a jarring move akin to subjecting SFPD patrol car or weapon choice to the electorate — Prop. E also weakens requirements for police to document and report use of force on civilians; exempts police from city policy requiring transparency around surveillance technology; and also neatly sidesteps the city’s ban on facial recognition technology.
Even moderate campaign operatives — whose hearts do not bleed — summed up Prop. E as “a shallow vessel to raise money” that would “make a difference around the margins, at best.” It remains to be seen if voters’ vehement attitudes toward crime — which never correlated with actual city crime trends — will be softened by crime trends positing things are getting better.
Vamos a ver. For what it’s worth, in “Take the Money and Run,” the hostages voted to be held up by the insurgent bank robbers. Not the incumbents.
