Car break in victim: 'You hear about how bad San Francisco is'

Shelby Steele is an author and filmmaker who works at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Today, his son Eli Steele, who is also a filmmaker, posted a thread on Twitter about his most recent experience in San Francisco.

Advertisement

He wrote: “You hear about how bad San Francisco is. I was filming a shot of my father , Shelby Steele, and in the ten minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen. Called 911 & they hung up twice.”

Eli says the stole more than $25k worth of camera gear. That’s not including the damage to his rental car. There’s surveillance video of the thieves robbing the car. You can see their license plate but he says SF police haven’t shown up.

The officer they eventually spoke to was brutally honest. Nothing will happen. She told them, “The police have been defanged.”

Advertisement

This sort of theft is extremely common in San Francisco. Back in March, Jazz wrote about a CNN crew that was on assignment for a story and had their car robbed despite the fact that they had private security. There’s actually a Twitter account called SF Car Break ins which does nothing but highlight these stories on a daily basis. One of those stories involved a local reporter for an NBC affiliate.

Advertisement

Here he is talking about this story on the air. The first clip is the story and the second one is about San Francisco’s break in stats which are double what they are in other major cities.

Of course there are people who want to argue the point but Bigad Shaban has the receipts.

Advertisement

This is sad. There is no reason people should have to put up with this dozens of times a day. But actions have consequences and some of the same leaders who got on the defund the police bandwagon in 2020 are now whining about not having enough police support in their districts. You can’t have your defund the police cake and eat it too. San Francisco chose this and it will have to make better choices to get out of this mess.

Finally, it’s not just motorists who are being hurt by this. The San Francisco Chronicle published a story today about small businesses in Oakland who have stopped accepting cash because of the constant thefts.

After suffering three burglaries in two years, workers at Asha Tea House — a small shop in Uptown Oakland — made a wrenching but practical decision: They stopped accepting cash.

“We’re hoping it solves the problem,” assistant manager Angel Her said on Friday morning, standing over a flat-screen register bearing a small “credit cards only” sign…

As crime spikes in shopping districts throughout Oakland, more businesses are forbidding cash transactions — a move so controversial in San Francisco that the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance in 2019 requiring all merchants to take dollars. The legislation emphasizes “San Francisco’s ethos of inclusivity,” which extends to people who are denied credit or cannot get bank accounts.

Advertisement

Of course San Francisco will stand in the way of business owners trying to protect themselves. But eventually all of this adds up. That’s why you have something like 17 major retailers calling it quits in SF over the past six months. Some of those retailers won’t say precisely why but others have made it clear that constant theft and dealing with deranged street people all day every day takes a toll.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on HotAir Videos

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement