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   started putting fentanyl in everything, and being on fentanyl, it’s   
   changed him, deteriorated him so rapidly … Before, he looked pretty   
   healthy and smiling. And now he’s got this stoop. He walks almost at a   
   40-degree angle, like an old man.”   
      
   He’s been stabbed twice. He got an infection in his thumb, and she   
   thought he might lose the hand. “They need to stop ignoring the fact   
   that there are people out here selling fentanyl on the streets,” she   
   said. “When it was just heroin—I can’t believe I’m saying ‘just heroin.’   
   Fentanyl is different. We’re normalizing people dying.”   
      
   One day, Berlinn was out looking for Corey in the Tenderloin   
   neighborhood when she came across someone else’s son. “He was naked in   
   front of Safeway … And he was saying he was God and he was eating a   
   cardboard box.”   
      
   She called the police. Officers arrived but said there was nothing they   
   could do; he said he didn’t want help, and he wasn’t hurting anyone.   
   “They said it’s not illegal to be naked; people are in the Castro naked   
   all the time … They just left him naked eating cardboard on the street   
   in front of Safeway.”   
      
   What happened to the man at the Safeway, what happened to Dustin   
   Walker—these are parables of a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism,   
   of the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a   
   vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the   
   best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the   
   suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode,   
   and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of   
   someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican.   
   If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San   
   Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that   
   choice.   
      
   Last year, I bought my wife her wedding ring at a beautiful little   
   antique store a few blocks from my childhood home. It was ransacked at   
   the end of December. The shaken owner posted a video; the showcases were   
   empty and the whole place was covered in glass.   
      
   You can spend days debating San Francisco crime statistics and their   
   meaning, and many people do. It has relatively low rates of violent   
   crime, and when compared with similarly sized cities, one of the lowest   
   rates of homicide. But what the city has become notorious for are crimes   
   like shoplifting and car break-ins, and there the data show that the   
   reputation is earned. Burglaries are up more than 40 percent since 2019.   
   Car break-ins have declined lately, but San Francisco still suffers more   
   car break-ins—and far more property theft overall—per capita than cities   
   like Atlanta and Los Angeles.   
      
   The head of CVS Health’s organized-crime division has called San   
   Francisco “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime.” Thefts in   
   San Francisco’s Walgreens are four times the national average. Stores   
   are reducing hours or shutting down. Seven Walgreens closed between last   
   November and February, and some point to theft as the reason. The city   
   is doing strikingly little about it. About 70 percent of shoplifting   
   cases in San Francisco ended in an arrest in 2011. In 2021, only 15   
   percent did.   
      
   Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin   
      
   The movement to decriminalize shoplifting in San Francisco began in 2014   
   with Proposition 47, the state law that downgraded drug possession and   
   also recategorized the theft of merchandise worth less than $950 as a   
   misdemeanor. It accelerated in 2019 with the election of Boudin as   
   district attorney.   
      
   It is difficult to remember now, but the Boudin election was thrilling   
   for the city. It occurred during the heights of rage against President   
   Donald Trump, when more and more people were becoming aware of police   
   violence against Black people and demanding criminal-justice reforms.   
   London Breed, the city’s first Black female mayor, wanted a liberal   
   moderate for D.A., but Boudin ran to the left as a fierce progressive   
   ideologue whose worldview was shaped by his imprisoned parents, members   
   of the Weather Underground. He was a public defender, not a prosecutor   
   at all. He had worked in Venezuela and in 2009 congratulated the former   
   dictator Hugo Chávez for abolishing term limits. Boudin was a   
   charismatic figure. His campaign manager called him “a national movement   
   candidate.”   
      
   The Police Officers Association fought hard against him, spending   
   $400,000 on a barrage of attack ads, according to the San Francisco   
   Examiner. They didn’t work. At Boudin’s election party, a city   
   supervisor led the crowd in a chant of “Fuck the POA.” During his   
   campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He   
   wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social   
   causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was   
   selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.   
      
   But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own   
   property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they   
   sell.   
      
   It has become no big deal to see someone stealing in San Francisco.   
   Videos of crimes in process go viral fairly often. One from last year   
   shows a group of people fleeing a Neiman Marcus with goods in broad   
   daylight. Others show people grabbing what they can from drugstores and   
   walking out. When a theft happens in a Walgreens or a CVS, there’s no   
   big chase. The cashiers are blasé about it. Aisle after aisle of   
   deodorant and shampoo are under lock and key. Press a button for the   
   attendant to get your dish soap.   
      
   The rage against Boudin was related to that locked-up soap, but it went   
   far beyond it.   
      
   Under Boudin, prosecutors in the city could no longer use the fact that   
   someone had been convicted of a crime in the past to ask for a longer   
   sentence, except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Boudin ended cash   
   bail and limited the use of gang enhancements, which allow harsher   
   sentences for gang-related felonies. In most cases he prohibited   
   prosecutors from seeking charges when drugs and guns were found during   
   minor traffic stops. “We will not charge cases determined to be a racist   
   pretextual stop that leads to recovery of contraband,” Rachel Marshall,   
   the district attorney’s director of communications, told me.   
      
   Boudin is a big proponent of “collaborative courts” that focus on   
   rehabilitation over jail time, such as Veterans Justice Court and   
   Behavioral Health Court, and under his tenure they tried more cases than   
   ever before. In 2018, less than 40 percent of petty-theft cases were   
   sent to these programs, compared with more than 70 percent last year.   
   Marshall said it was the judges who decided which cases to divert, not   
   Boudin, and eligibility rules for the collaborative courts have loosened   
   in recent years. But critics also pointed out that Boudin got fewer   
   convictions overall: 40 percent in 2021, compared with about 60 percent   
   under his predecessor.   
      
   About 60 prosecutors had left since Boudin took office—close to half of   
   his team. Some retired or were fired, but others quit in protest. I   
   talked with two who joined the recall campaign. One of them, a homicide   
   prosecutor named Brooke Jenkins, told me she left in part because Boudin   
   was pressuring some lawyers to prosecute major crimes as lesser   
   offenses. (Marshall said this was “a lie.”) She couldn’t be part of it.   
   “The victims feel hopeless,” Jenkins told me. “They feel he has lost   
   their opportunity for justice. Right now what they see and feel is that   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)