San Francisco's broad daylight retail heists have shocked the nation in their brazenness. They've triggered the closings of stores, such as Walgreens, and the shortening of hours from retail giants such as Target. Forty-four percent of the city is planning to move out, with 80% citing out-of-control crime.
But the shoplifters have got a defender, too -- in San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. So do the drug dealers. The only problems that Chesa sees are the victims.
This tells us a lot about the state of moral bankruptcy of the wokester movement, and what the New Yorker dismisses as the "backlash."
According to the Daily Mail, citing an interview in the New Yorker, after a viral video surfaced in June of a thief stuffing oodles of goods from a Walgreens into a trash bag and then riding his bike through the store unencumbered on the way out:
'When I watch that video, I think about five questions that people are not asking that I think they should,' Boudin told The New Yorker.
'Is he drug addicted, mentally ill, desperate? Is he part of a major retail fencing operation?
'What's driving this behavior and is it in any way representative, because it was presented as something symptomatic?'
The question that doesn't occur to him is whether the thefts are illegal. Or whether continuous unpunished crime is seriously disruptive to any society of lawful order.
In fact, according to the New Yorker, Boudin embraces the logic of looters from Black Lives Matter from over the summer:
Boudin said, “If Walgreens has insurance for certain goods or they expect a certain amount of loss, if they would rather not risk lawsuits or escalation to violence—then maybe that’s something we should know about.”
Well, gee, if they had insurance then, of course, it's all right, right, Ches? That was what the Black Lives Matter looters were saying as they hauled out the Nike tennis shoes and large-screen TVs.
He sounds like a sleazy defense attorney, crafting a case for a scummy defendant with nothing else for his defense than to blame the victim.
Worse still, he does the same thing for hardened drug dealers in the country illegally:
Greenberg showed me a video of Boudin at a town hall at which residents had asked what could be done about some drug dealers. Boudin noted, in his reply, that many of the drug dealers had been brought to the United States by human traffickers—that they were, in a sense, victims themselves. “He’s excusing the Honduran drug dealers,” Greenberg said. “Not holding them accountable greenlights.”
You see, they had a bad childhood, so dealing drugs is therefore all right.
The New Yorker piece is a total puff piece, giving Chesa's point of view on several things with nothing to counter it. It describes the huge broad daylight retail heist at Neiman-Marcus as 'zany' and actually kind of cute. Get a load of this:
Earlier this month, a bystander captured the final stages of a ten-person larceny of designer handbags from Neiman Marcus. One by one, they spill out the front door, each clutching oversized bags to the chest; the final thief races out carrying half a dozen handbags, still attached to a multipronged security chain. Their movements are encumbered, zany, almost Chaplin-esque; when they exit, some look uncertain about which way to run. This is disorder without menace, but not without effect.
Well isn't that charming?
As for the Walgreens video of the shoplifter riding out:
The video crystallizes the subversive, Banksy-ish quality of the San Francisco theft wave.
It's all so artsy, who couldn't be cool with it?
Three big points from Chesa in the interview, however, do stick out:
One is that Chesa keeps claiming that crime in San Francisco is down, citing city statistics:
The way the video had been presented suggested that shoplifting had become a raging problem in San Francisco, but, he pointed out, the official data showed that over-all theft was down from the previous year.
Two is that he fails to cite the reason, even though the evidence is right in front of his eyes:
Boudin turned to the matter of the security guard: Why, Boudin asked, had he reacted so passively?
...here, too:
He mentioned a fact he often cites when confronted about property crime—that the police make arrests in just two-and-a-half per cent of reported thefts. “Maybe that’s a good thing—maybe that means they’re prioritizing murders,” Boudin said.
Might it occur to this Machiavel that these crimes are not being reported given his refusal to prosecute? If every theft is considered by the D.A. a junk case not worth prosecuting, then maybe people don't bother reporting crimes anymore. Boudin announced early on that he would refuse to prosecute "quality of life" crimes, such as noisy hookers in the upstairs apartment and drunks peeing in doorways, a detail the New Yorker left out, along with young Chesa's early associations with Venezuelan Marxist dictator, Hugo Chavez, a man who turned Venezuela into the mother of all crime-pit hellholes. It did, however, cite this:
His office eliminated cash bail and announced that it would no longer use gang affiliation to seek longer sentences or bring cases in which police pulled over a car as pretext for a drug search. When the pandemic shut down San Francisco, and infections began to rise in prisons around the country, Boudin saw an opportunity for decarceration; by May, 2020, he had cut the city’s jail population from a daily average of about twelve hundred people to about seven hundred.
Let them out, refuse to prosecute, and somehow, crime is down?
When crime is never prosecuted, and reporting is simply futile, people don't report crimes. Why bother? Nobody's going to do jack.
Third, he can't stop blaming the victim. Get a load of his inability to use the word 'rob':
Boudin said, “If your car gets broken into, you’re outraged or angry or inconvenienced or incurred an expense. If your home gets broken into, it feels much scarier.”
Getting your car stolen with payments still due on it, and being forced to pay $600 for a police tow you didn't ask for once the car is recovered (this happened to me in the '90s), is merely an "inconvenience," you see, an expense incurred, something you can put on your expense sheet or tax loss returns the way rich people do, same as Walgreens can claim insurance. You shouldn't be upset about it. Nowhere does Boudin ever use the term 'robbed' or issue recognition that most people don't have expense sheets or tax qualifications, and can only eat the loss.
As for public sentiment turning against the current crime wave, Chesa explains that it's all in their heads:
He said, “From a public political standpoint, what matters more is the ups and downs and if people feel less safe. It doesn’t matter that crime is down. People feel less safe. They want to feel safe.”
Maybe they don't feel safe because they aren't safe. Maybe they've been robbed one time too many.
The recall petition seems to suggest just this kind of trouble, but Boudin compares it to Trumpism, "Trump's big lie," as he stated at a July 9 Mission District community meeting. It's not about crime, you see, it's about closet-Trump people somehow living in a place like San Francisco, with anyone who doesn't like his act rightfully name-called a Republican. In Chesa's passive-aggressive, Ayers-like mind, that's something that ought to guilt-trip the locals, though it may, in the end, annoy them.
The New Yorker, still having Chesa's back, calls it "backlash," Chesa being innocent and all, with none of the public discontent having anything to do with his actions you see. Just "backlash."
It's unknown whether two recall petitions against him are gathering all the required signatures. The New Yorker writer dismisses both as unlikely to succeed, but the signature-gatherers say they are making progress ahead of the August and October deadlines.
According to the California Globe:
“Both Newsom and Boudin had their first recall petitions filed one year after they took office, the minimum to do so in California,” said former lobbyist Harry Schultz, who has monitored and advised on recall campaigns in California since the late 90’s, in a Globe interview on Thursday. “As you mentioned, both saw support increase following huge nationwide stories that painted them negatively and decisions that proved to be very controversial. And both recall movements have been doing quite well despite being in largely Democratically held areas, Newsom having California and Boudin being in the more liberal San Francisco County.”
“For them to face a recall in California it’s incredible, but it goes to show just how upset they’ve made people. When voters say we want someone not as extreme as you, or in Newsom’s case, a Republican, in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one no less, well, they did something wrong.”
“And now Boudin is starting to go through what Newsom did recall-wise this year. These huge spurts of funding against him are a big indicator there. I wish we had signature data, but once we have that, or at least see what the group with the August-expiring petition wound up with, we can see where we are big-picture wise when it comes to a possible Boudin recall either this year or next.”
One can only hope that with a revolting leftist who blames victims, defends shoplifters, stands up for drug dealers, abetted by a press that calls crime 'zany,' that San Franciscans will finally come to their senses.
As retail theft continues to surge in San Francisco, a group of four women were caught on video allegedly fleeing from a CVS store with bags full of stolen merchandise.
The incident occurred at the CVS location on Van Ness Avenue and Jackson Street on Monday around 5 p.m. and was first reported by KTVU FOX2 crime reporter Henry K. Lee, who spoke briefly with witnesses on the scene.
According to Steve Adams, a witness at the scene, the four women fled from the scene after “picking the place dry.”
When Adams asked the CVS employees if they were going to call the police after the incident took place he said “they just shrugged.”
“This sort of thing is becoming so normal,” the witness told Lee.
An increase in crime sprees across the country, specifically in New York and California, have recently forced several retail stores to close their doors permanently.
As previously reported by Fox News, “multiple incidents in California have been captured on camera, including a viral video from earlier this month that shows a group of shoplifters dashing out of a Neiman Marcus department store in San Francisco and jumping into idling getaway cars.
Earlier this month, Target announced it would be closing its five San Francisco stores early due to a surge in crime and an ongoing loss of police presence in the city.
As previously reported by ABC7 news, Walgreens told the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that theft in their San Francisco stores is four times more than the average in stores across the country. The company also spends 35 times more on hiring security personnel. In the past five years, Walgreens has closed 17 stores in the Bay Area.
“Our investigations have shown that there are organized fences where people are selling these products that they steal,” said San Francisco Police Department spokesman Robert Rueca.
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40 Shot, 11 Killed, During Weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago
AWR HAWKINS
Forty people were shot, 11 of them fatally, during another violent weekend in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.
ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times reports the first fatality occurred just before 5:30 p.m. Friday night, when 47-year-old Shawn Young was shot dead “in the 11800-block of South State Street.”
Approximately one hour later a 39-year-old was killed in a drive-by shooting in Roseland.
Other fatalities over the weekend included two other people–a 20-year-old and a 33-year-old–who were killed in a drive-by shooting Saturday afternoon. And 31-year-old Londre Sylvester was shot and killed Saturday night at 8:50 p.m. while walking “in the 2700-block of West California Boulevard.”
Sylvester was walking with a woman when the shooting occurred. She was also struck by gunfire by was hospitalized in good condition.
A 22-year-0ld man was shot and killed Sunday morning at 3:45 a.m. He was “walking in the 2100-block of South Oakley Avenue” when someone inside a vehicle opened fire.
Breitbart News noted that nearly 100 people were shot over the long Fourth of July weekend in Mayor Lightfoot’s Chicago. Thereafter, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) came under pressure from community leaders to declare a “state of emergency,” regarding Chicago gun crime.
The Chicago Tribune points out that 2,021 people were shot January 1, 2021, through July 7, 2021, in Chicago. The Tribune explained that 364 people were killed in Chicago during the same time.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
Nearly 100 people were shot, 17 fatally, Friday night through Monday night in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) Chicago.
BLACKS HAVE LONG FELT IT WAS THEIR INALIENABLE RIGHT TO LOOT AND MURDER. NOTHING HAS CHANGED BUT THE NUMBERS
Biden Offers to Send a ‘Strike Force’ Against Chicago Gun Crime
Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
AWR HAWKINS
9 Jul 2021272
President Joe Biden offered to send a “strike force” into Chicago Thursday in order to help Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) stem the tide of shootings occurring daily in the city.
ABC 7 reports that a “strike force” would focus on gun trafficking.
Lightfoot responded to Biden’s offer by saying, “My hope and expectation is that they’re going to be coming relatively soon. I’ve made not secret of the fact that this is a matter of incredible urgency and I think the president’s plan is to make a difference in localities like Chicago this summer.”
On July 7, 2021, the Chicago Tribune noted that the city has witnessed 2,021 shooting victims this year. That figure represents victims in fatal and non-fatal incidents combined.
The Tribune maintains a second table of data focused solely on homicides, and it shows that 364 have been killed in Chicago so far this year.
Chicago, like all of Illinois, has a 72-hour waiting period on gun purchases, a red flag law, and a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card requirement for would-be gun purchasers. The process for acquiring a FOID card involves a background check.
Moreover, Cook County, the county in Chicago is located, has an “assault weapons” ban.
Yet gun crime in Chicago continues to rage.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
s there a cultural realignment, a patriots’ rebellion, a second American Revolution afoot? There is evidence that this is true all around us. Parents are fighting back against the racist absurdities of CRT and the demands of the LGBT crowd. Steve Bannon’s Warroom has over sixty million listeners. The truth of BLM is leaking out as well. Its leaders, avowed Marxists, are as acquisitive as any other faux civil rights organization.
Better they heed Thomas Sowell’s maxim:
The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.
People are waking up to the damage done to this country by the wrecking crew that is the Biden administration. What this cabal is doing is by design despite Kamala Harris’ obvious incompetence and Biden’s dementia. Will and Ariel Durant wrote:
Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
We are seeing savagery now on the streets of some of our cities. It has to stop. Our four horsemen must be relegated to the visions of the Apostle John and defeated by an energized America.
All Lives Matter When It Comes to Murder
By Jeffrey Folks
In the wake of the killings of George Floyd; Daunte Wright; and Andrew Brown, Jr., which have received huge national attention in the media, it's time to establish the truth in our thinking about race and crime. How common are killings of blacks by police officers, most of them white, or, for that matter, by whites in general? And how common are killings of white police officers, and other whites, by blacks? And why is it that only the killings of blacks seem to receive extensive media attention?
The fundamental truth is that all human beings are divinely created creatures whose lives are sacred. The taking of life, except in war or self-defense, is recognized everywhere as among the worst of offenses. The murder of another person steals from him the most precious of all possessions — the chance to live out one's life on this beautiful earth. Although some persons are more intelligent, more educated, more talented, or more productive than others, all are equal in their right to life. The passing of any one of us deserves to be reported with appropriate respect and dignity.
That is not what is happening in the national media, where one's race now seems to determine the amount and angle of coverage. It's as if the press believes that respectable whites and Asians are expendable while a black criminal who dies while resisting or fleeing arrest should be treated like a saint. At the very least, the press should be honest in reporting the facts.
The fact is that far more whites are killed each year in America by blacks than blacks are by whites.
In one recent FBI report, 500 whites overall were killed by blacks (in 2015), while in that same year, 229 blacks were killed by whites. How many of those white victims received the media coverage afforded George Floyd or any coverage at all?
Here are some recent cases, all of them involving black violence against whites or Asians. How many of these names are well known to the public?
—Jarrod Powell, 50, arrested for stomping the head of an elderly Asian man in New York in April. The victim is in a medically induced coma.
—Billy Chemirmir, 48, who has been connected with the deaths of 24 elderly women in care homes and indicted in 17 of those cases.
—Demetrius Walker, 27, with an extensive criminal history and locally known as "Pharoah," charged with the death of an 85-year-old woman after breaking into her apartment and attacking her.
—Brandon Elliot, convicted of killing his mother 19 years ago, arrested as a suspect in the brutal beating of a 65-year-old woman walking to church in New York.
—A suspect, Yahya Muslim, arrested in connection with a string of attacks on elderly Asian-Americans in the Bay Area.
I am not interested in racial labels. In fact, I believe that crimes should be reported in a fair and balanced way without regard to race. But at present, race appears to be nearly the only factor determining the media's reporting of violence. I believe we must establish a racially blind society, but it appears that the national media are fixated on race when it comes to crime reporting. And this fixation takes the form of depicting blacks as victims and whites as perpetrators.
The extensive reporting of the George Floyd case and other cases involving blacks killed by police creates the impression that blacks are overwhelmingly the victims rather than the perpetrators. The truth is that young black males commit murder at over six times the national average. Most of their victims are other blacks (over 90% of blacks murdered are killed by other blacks), but a significant number of their victims are white (at present over 500 per year) and Asian.
This is not to say that whites do not commit violent crimes, including crimes against helpless victims. And, overall, most white victims are killed by other whites (2,854 of 3,499 killed in 2016, according to FBI statistics). It's important to maintain perspective and to respect the lives of all American citizens — but this, I fear, is not what is happening amid the current media frenzy over police killings of blacks.
Undoubtedly, there are what Kamala Harris would call "root causes" of the high level of violence among poor blacks — though I would probably differ with V.P. Harris as to the nature of these root causes. Would she include the decisions of black fathers to abandon their families; the decision of youths to join violent gangs; and the choice of young black males to engage in illegal activities such as robbery, assault, and drug dealing?
The victims of violence listed at the beginning of this article also made moral choices throughout their lives. As a rule, they obeyed the law, had never been sentenced to prison; were not aggressive; and were not, so far as I know, engaging in criminal behavior at the time of their murders or assaults. Their stories should be reported thoroughly so that society can make a fair judgment of the impact of criminal violence on the lives of innocent persons. And the reporting should be proportionate to the offense without regard to race.
Needless to say, that is not the case at present at a time when race, along with police involvement, appears to be the main factor driving the news. The deaths of George Floyd and others killed by the police should be reported along with a thorough account of the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Similarly, but to a greater extent because of their innocence, violent attacks on entirely innocent and helpless persons of all races should be thoroughly reported, with more coverage devoted to attacks on helpless victims such as New York's Rose Morat, a 101-year-old woman violently assaulted by Jack Rhodes, described by the New York Daily News as a "hulking brute." Rhodes was also convicted of robbing and assaulting two other elderly women. The public needs to be informed about such cases so that it will support strict punishment for perpetrators. If the facts are hidden, as they are at present due to the emphasis on black victims, there will be little incentive for prosecutors to seek longer sentences and death penalties.
Every year in America, some 500 whites are murdered by black assailants, more than twice as many as blacks killed by whites. The media need to report all of these cases fairly and without bias so as to counter the false reporting and misplaced emphasis in the national press. All victims, of whatever race, deserve justice because all human life is precious. The reporting of violence should not be based on race — it should be proportionate to the crime, without regard to the race of the perpetrator or the victim.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
Infrastructure Bill Includes $6.5 Million Earmark to Stop Suicides in Nancy Pelosi’s District
(Photo by Grant Ward/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) - The $715-billion infrastructure bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month includes a $6,550,000 earmark aimed at stopping people from committing suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, which is in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district.
Section 107 of the bill is entitled “Member Designated Project Authorizations.” It says: “The amount listed for each member designated project in the table…shall be available…for fiscal year 2022 to carry out each project.”
The 140th project listed in this section of the bill is called the “Golden Gate Bridge Physical Suicide Deterrent System Project.” The bill specifies that it will get $6,550,000.
The website of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District explains what this project is doing.
“The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District is in the process of constructing a Suicide Deterrent Net System (SDNS) to deter suicides at the Bridge by placing a physical barrier between a person and the water below,” it says. “The SDNS consists of marine grade stainless steel netting attached to structural steel net supports placed 20 feet below the sidewalks and extending out 20 feet over the water.”
“While the contractor has not provided a firm final date for project delivery, the Bridge District estimates the project is likely about two years behind schedule,” says a press released the bridge district put out in 2019. “Completion was originally scheduled for January 2021, but now it appears the SDNS will not be finished until 2023.”
As of 2019, an estimated 1,700 people had committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Construction of the bridge was completed in 1937.
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