Leftie ReDoubts

In Democrat controlled San Francisco in the past two years or more .....

Tenderloin and SoMa - San Francisco

 ..... 1,300 plus people have died of drug overdoses in the city - many of the dead who have been found, were in a tiny area in the city centre - perhaps 10 blocks by 12 blocks - incorporating the Tenderloin and another district, SoMa, both of which have been in a state of emergency in 2022.

The reason? The great Western drug epidemic, and the homelessness and crimes that they drive.

The cities official statistics showed that more people have died from drugs overdoses than from the Covid virus. The arrival of Fentanyl, a drug 100 times stronger than morphine, has overwhelmed San Francisco's drug scene. It's by far the most lethal drug in the city. 

London Breed -The Democratic Mayor of San Francisco

London Breed the Democratic Mayor (and the cities first black female mayor) of the city, is or was, a so called 'progressive' who supported the "de-fund the police," campaigns, by diverting $120m from the police departmental budget, to services and programmes for black communities in the city (liberal drugs laws, support services and needle exchanges etc). Her own sister had overdosed (OD) and died in the Tenderloin district in 2006.

So she pledged to redirect an unspecified amount of funds from the police department’s budget to the Black community. “Reforms to any single system, such as the criminal justice system or the police department, must go hand in hand with closing the gaps and ending the disparities that we know exist."

"Because half the policies pushed in San Francisco are “progressive policies” that don’t work for Black people. Because, if they did, why are things far worse for Black people here? In San Francisco, a city where less than 5 to 6% of the population is African American and yet we are disproportionately overrepresented in everything that’s bad: high school dropouts, arrests, homelessness. You name it."

Ironically, San Francisco's Black population has actually been decreasing over the last couple of decades, due to sky-rocketing rents, the failures of  Black businesses, and that many Black families have moved to cheaper sections of the Bay Area. In the last 50 years, the city’s Black demographic has shrunk from being one in every seven residents to one in 20.

However as crime and drug use (Fentanyl in particular) spiralled in the city, and those two districts in particular, she announced that she was tired of the "bullshit that has destroyed our city," and that the new direction for the city would be one of "tough love," in the form of more, not less, police, and a more aggressive approach to tackling crime. It appears that the old policies had had a questionable impact on reducing the number of drug deaths, and didn't do enough to push people away from the addiction that led to crime, despair, homelessness and death.

She had already lost patience with the 'tent cities' that have invaded many of the US tech capital's streets, as between 2013 and 2016, complaints of homeless encampments to San Francisco’s 311 emergency line rose from 2 per day, to 63 per day, and so she had initiated tougher policies on their inhabitants. “If people don’t pack up and move, or agree to services, we have a responsibility [to act]. To let them set up shop and use drugs in these tents—and to continue to impact public health in the way they are—is not something we’re going to tolerate.”

San Francisco police were even given powers by the lady Mayoress to order tents removed from the city streets, even at times slashing them with knives themselves. Public Works employees were throwing the ever-ubiquitous nylon homes of the homeless street people, into dumpster trucks on a weekly basis.

But events outside of her control then forced the city to have to set up six so-called “safe sleeping villages” such the one on Fulton Street, during the Covid-19 pandemic, at a cost to San Francisco of $18.2 million for about 260 tents. That was a high price tag of more than $60,000 per tent, per year. Enough to build housing accommodation for more than twice that number.

Between 2005 and 2020, the estimated number of homeless people in San Francisco had increased from 5,404 to 8,124. The estimated number of unsheltered homeless rose from 2,655 to 5,180. Of those, 37 per cent were defined as chronically homeless (homeless for more than a year), in 2020.

The pain killing opoid Fentanyl has slowly replaced crack cocaine and heroin on the streets, and its relatively easier to OD on it, contributing to the huge rise in drug deaths in the city, especially in the Tenderloin and SoMa districts. However some Democrats say that "Doubling down on a failed war on drugs is never going to solve those problems." 

Trying To Look Both Left And Right

The problem is that as the Democrats run many large cities across America, these are often the very places where murder rates and drug deaths were spiking in 2022. So the Democrat 'progressives' who swept into power in 2020, are now facing the reality of a deteriorating crime and drug situation across the USA  ....

And with national mid-term elections in November 2022, they were all under pressure to rethink their 'progressive' policies such as de-funding the police, as the electorates saw no reduction in the issues destroying many cities under their control.