Car Burglaries Rise 753% in San Francisco as City Reopens
The reopening of San Francisco, California, means restaurants and hotels are back in business, but criminals have also stepped up their activities, burglarizing cars at a 753 percent higher rate in June over last month.
The fallout of the crime wave is reaching beyond the city as criminals find quieter streets to sort through stolen luggage for valuables, leaving behind stolen belongings.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the development:
Last month, the Police Department’s Central Station saw a 753 percent increase in auto burglaries compared to the previous May. But that was the height of lockdown restrictions. They are up only 75 percent compared to 2019.
The number of break-ins also increased 94 percent between April and May of this year, tracking with the city’s gradual reopening from the pandemic.
The most recent data for the Central District, through June 6, shows that 2,048 cars were looted so far this year, compared with 858 through the same period of 2020 — an increase of nearly 139 percent. Park District, home to part of Golden Gate Park, saw about a 3% increase. Every other district is still below its 2020 year-to-date total.
Police have responded by increasing the number of officers, including foot patrols, around the city.
“We have the city reopening, we know people are coming back and we want them to have a good experience,” Officer Adam Lobsinger, a police spokesman, said in the Chronicle report.
The Chronicle interviewed Kinga Sojka, who lives in Florida and came to visit California’s wine county.
Sojka parked her rental car in a garage near Pier 39 and set out on foot to explore Lombard Street, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the waterfront. When she returned she found the rear window smashed and her suitcase and a friend’s backpack, which was carrying the keys to her home, missing.
“It was pretty shocking because I don’t think of high crime in San Francisco, especially in a touristy area,” Sojka said. “It’s also so shocking how they basically dump it out on street in front of million-dollar homes and just leave it there if there’s nothing worth keeping.”
“Police and the Hotel Council advise tourists to leave nothing of value in their cars, even out of sight or for a short period of time, instead storing their luggage at hotels, even before or after their stays,” the Chronicle reported.
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Crenshaw: Biden and Harris ‘Like’ the Border Crisis — ‘That’s Why They Don’t Want to Solve It’
During Monday’s broadcast of FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) slammed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for the ongoing crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Crenshaw said Biden and Harris “like” having the crisis, which is “why they don’t want to solve it.” He added it is “pretty obvious” Harris does not care about the issue and that her recent trip to the border was for a “quick photo op.”
“It’s pretty obvious Kamala Harris does not care about this issue. I think it’s rather obvious she only went to visit where there was a convenient airport, where she could do a quick photo op, say she did it because she was sick of getting made fun of by conservative media that she never went, but she’s not going to actually take any action,” Crenshaw argued. “Look, when it comes to these facilities, they are overcrowded, they are overwhelmed, and we could wring our hands trying to figure out what to do with that, but we don’t have new ones just to build right off the bat, so we have to look at the source of the problem. And the source of the problem is the Biden administration because they reversed policies that were in place that was limiting the flow. OK, they reversed the Remain in Mexico policy, they reversed asylum cooperation agreements with the Northern Triangle countries, and they refuse to tackle the biggest issue. And the biggest issue is that we can’t legally hold migrant families or minors past 21 days, so we can’t adjudicate these claims. This would be the simplest fix, and it has to be a legislative fix. It has to come from Congress, and all we have to do is increase that number of days, increase the number of immigration judges, adjudicate these claims, make the process go faster. You know what that avoids? It avoids this catch and release program, which means that there’s less incentives to just jump across the border.”
He continued, “This stuff is easy to fix, and I think that’s why it’s so infuriating that the Democrats don’t want to. And you have to question their motives here. Why don’t they want to? Well, they want more illegal immigration. OK, they like the crisis. That’s why they don’t want to solve it. There’s really no other way to explain this.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent
If and When VP Harris Does Visit the Border, Don’t Expect Her to Go Where Its Collapse Can Be Seen
The steeply mounting pressure for her to visit the southern border may finally prove too much for Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s looking like she’ll actually have to go now, even if dragged kicking, screaming, and fibbing to NBC’s Lester Holt.
"At some point, you know, we are going to the border," Harris blustered when Holt kept pressing her on the matter, then the lie that: "We've been to the border. So this whole, this whole, this whole thing about the border. We've been to the border.”
Which Holt felt obliged to correct: “You haven’t been to the border.”
But Republicans and security hawks salivating over visions that Harris will soon enough lead a national press corps delegation down to see the actual historic mass migration happen — the crisis the Biden administration wrought with words before taking office and with action ever since — should tamp down expectations.
Chances are that the reluctant “root causes czar” will entirely avoid traveling to the southern sectors of Texas, where she and her press corps would readily see some of the tens of thousands of foreign families and children coming in each month, all day and night. In certain areas from Del Rio to Brownsville, Texas, for instance, waves of family units and unaccompanied children cross the Rio Grande constantly (all of it at the Biden administration’s explicit “leave-no-child-in-Mexico” invitation) and turn themselves in to anyone wearing a uniform. If Harris were authentic, she would go to, say, Roma, to watch amphibious raft landings happen in plain view all night, any day of the week as did the Center for Immigration Studies on a recent trip there.
But instead, the administration’s press handlers are no doubt already hard at work trying to figure out how to avoid the prospect that illegally crossing immigrants and Harris will end up in the same frame. Conceivably, Harris could go to south Texas after having the Mexican military clear out the other side until she’s gone, Harris being the vice president and able to get that sort of thing done. But an outdoor drive or walk anywhere in south Texas is an unnecessary political risk because, in addition to immigrants behind almost every bush, there are ranchers, residents, local police, and sheriffs lurking around whose lives have been completely turned upside down by the crisis.
The safe money is that Harris will entirely avoid south Texas, unless to pose with a cute child migrant or gratefully weeping mother inside a tightly controlled interior environment.
There are plenty of politically safer places on the long U.S.-Mexico border. Keep in mind that every sector of the 1,954-mile long southern border features unique geographies that shape illegal immigration patterns and demographics. The crisis unfolds out of sight in many places, manifested in historic surges of single adults who are not likely to be visible.
Because they are still being turned back to Mexico under a Trump-era pandemic containment measure, the single adults constantly coursing into the country tend to run, hide, and evade — often in the dead of night — throughout the rugged Big Bend region and also in Arizona. In this kind of illegal immigration, the immigrants and their smugglers work hard not to be seen and won’t be unless the vice president and the press gaggle set up with night vision goggles in remote arroyos and canyonlands.
One quiet kind of spot that will be ruled out are areas where Donald Trump’s border walls are standing. The areas are now very quiet other than the most furtive instances of drug trafficking, according to Border Patrol agents who work in those areas, the truest experts on that matter. Showing up with cameras in an area quieted by Trump’s border wall would showcase an effectiveness that is far too contrary to Biden party line. So forget that.
Harris will be able to check the box by, say, helicoptering over an empty stretch of Arizona desert or be seen walking or driving along the border where all the illegal immigrants are hiding or have been cleared out ahead of time.
For the party faithful, gullible and illegal immigration advocates, she could also get away with conducting a press briefing inside a Border Patrol facility that has been largely emptied of its families and children by their transfers to federal Health and Human Services facilities, and designated hotels and convention centers in big cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles (a move-the-migrant shell game the administration has disingenuously portrayed to the gullible and ill-informed as a major policy success). But showing up in a facility emptied in that way — or maybe even with a vetted “grateful” immigrant family — would provide Harris with a means to check the box with some artful spin.
However the visit pans out, Republicans and border hawks demanding it need to readjust their grand “gotcha” expectations for a Harris visit.
The White House will find plenty of ways to lead an equally reluctant national press corps to almost any other spot but those where they can most easily observe the nation’s border control systems collapsing.
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