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From 2004 to 2019, the responsibility of enforcing law and order in San Francisco was placed on District Attorney Kamala Harris and her protégé George Gascón. The result? By any measure, it was a disgraceful disaster.
Driving downtown from the airport in this once-great city, I pull off the highway and see streets lined with empty storefronts, jagged and sad, like broken teeth.
In the Tenderloin, things are getting worse, worse, not better. The last time I visited the Bay City, in 2021, I struggled to describe the vile brutality of homelessness and drug addiction. I’ll try again.
At next week’s convention, the Democratic candidate for whom no one voted will try to convince voters that his record of failure is not a record of failure. But the chaotic streets of San Francisco tell a different story. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
San Francisco police officers forced to work overtime due to staffing shortages: report
Just off Union Square, I pop into the lovely coffee house where I spent my mornings three years ago. It’s gone now, boarded up, and addicts are gathered in front of the shop under the amused gaze of a security guard who thinks this is normal.
A few blocks up the block, the smell hits me first. It wasn’t like that last time, but now the air just smells of human depravity that New Yorkers only know on their unlucky choice of subway car. It doesn’t even smell like marijuana.
August 2024: A person is lying on the street in San Francisco.
Amid this dire situation, a number of dogs continue to bark, but at least they know something is wrong. In the tents, the city’s forgotten poor sell drugs. Not joints or bags of marijuana, but deadly heroin and fentanyl, openly.
The enormity of human tragedy is made clear by the proximity of wealth and poverty, of healthy, beautiful minds and bodies and the drug-addled, wasted lives that lie beneath the signs of Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany & Co.
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The well-heeled folks heading to the Apple Store seem to pretend this isn’t happening, but to outsiders, it’s as clear as the summer sun.
You can’t buy beef jerky here. You can try it, but the Walgreens near my fancy hotel keeps tourist-friendly dried foods under strict security. The customer service button is like being connected to a remote base in Antarctica. You have to leave after five minutes.
An open-air drug deal in San Francisco, August 2024.
During the pandemic, I used the metaphor of pointillism to describe the ever-increasing rules: it’s just masks, it’s just six feet, it’s just distance learning, each just a dot on a canvas, but when I stepped back, I saw the picture of a prison. Even in San Francisco, little fears piled up to create a city of nightmares.
It would take five minutes for anyone in any city in our northeastern US to tell you that San Francisco is a dystopian disaster, but many here, like a slowly boiling frog, think it’s normal. Does Vice President Kamala Harris, one of the architects of this disaster, think this of all of us?
At next week’s convention, the Democratic candidate for whom no one voted will try to convince voters that his record of failure is not a record of failure. But the chaotic streets of San Francisco tell a different story.
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This is reality. It’s awful. And no amount of wealthy liberals posting pictures next to the Golden Gate Bridge can really hide the depravity of it all. And sure, the spaghetti strainer of police and DA that Harris has created may be keeping the wealthy enclaves safe, but everyone else is miserable.
One of the finest street clocks in America is in San Francisco – and it’s also broken.
No matter how confident you become, you can’t hide from your hometown. There, people know you, they know your story. And Kamala Harris and the story of San Francisco are a wake-up call that America needs to hear.
Not far from the Tenderloin, I found a curious object: one of the finest street clocks in all of America. It was once insured by Lloyd’s of London. You can see the gears and the mechanisms. It’s a beautiful clock reminiscent of the ones that adorn Grand Central Station in New York. It also doesn’t work.
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This legendary clock’s face is set to 10:10 Advertiser’s time, and it strikes the proverbial nail twice a day. But why is it broken? How much would it cost to get this historic clock working again? Why doesn’t anyone do it?
These are all questions for a Democratic front-runner who won’t take questions. But she can’t hide from San Francisco. This is her legacy. And like a broken clock, it just doesn’t work.
David Marcus is a columnist from West Virginia.Farce: The COVID lie that brought a nation down“
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