darrellowens | I don’t really know if there’s a crime wave regardless of the perception that there is one. I don’t trust police statistics besides homicide, home invasion and auto burglaries. I don’t know many people who would make a police report about assault or theft. I worked at a Walgreens with an extensive theft problem and know first hand only extreme cases were reported to the police. In San Francisco, there’s seven fewer homicides, two hundred more burglaries and fifty more motor thefts than last year. Is that a crime wave? I suppose. The entire country has seen increased crime since the pandemic. The only thing that sticks out about San Francisco is the appalling high drug overdoses last year in which no other Bay Area county came close.
Couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of mob burglaries happened outside of San Francisco, though. I notice that only crimes in San Francisco require public responses from district attorney Chesa Boudin. Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley is never made to answer for the very clear crime wave in Oakland right now. O’Malley virtually never appears in any publication about the endless homicides, the endless dispensary attacks, or even the freeway shootings that have killed two in the last couple months including a mother and a baby, on top of 80 freeway shootings last year in Alameda County. Nothing about district attorney Diana Becton who bears apparently no responsibility for the numerous homicides in Pittsburg and Antioch, or the burglaries in Walnut Creek. Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County DA, home of the Lululemon and this recent shoe store mob burglary? Never heard of him.
It’s only Boudin, apparently, who’s expected to give public comment to media about crime. Why? It’s not as if he runs SFPD. He doesn’t make staffing decisions, he doesn’t decide who gets arrested and where beat patrols go. He’s a prosecutor. Because he pointed out that punitive behavior isn’t always warranted in every situation, now he’s become target #1 for all social ills in San Francisco with a recall initiative, despite no real evidence that he’s more lenient on prosecutions than his Bay Area counterparts, or that the crime wave is unique to San Francisco.
What really gets to me though is that there is a clear crime wave happening. Oakland’s at its 127th homicide as of typing this. When I started this substack 2 days ago it was at its 126th. Where’s the faces of the victims? Where’s the twitter videos? Who even are these homicide victims? With exception to the murdered KRON guard Kevin Nishita or baby Jasper Wu, we hardly even know them.
Prior to the pandemic, homicides in Oakland were at all time lows, but now the homicide levels for a second year in a row is reaching 1990s levels of death. But since these are mainly confined to East Oakland and West Oakland, and the victims are mostly Black and Brown, nobody really cares. After all, it’s where murder is expected to happen and to the people it's expected to happen to. When crime happens where it’s not supposed to happen like in suburban Walnut Creek or downtown San Francisco, suddenly it gets hyper media focus.
Louis Vuitton and Nordstrom have become incessantly repeated names as if they’re people, not 15 year old Shamara Young, 34 year old Danny McNary Jr, 41 year old Kanawa Long, 22 year old Devani Aleman Sanchez, 24 year old Suiti Mesui, 33 year old Lindsey Logue, 52 year old Dirk Tillotson, 30 year old Willie Lennon III and the list goes on. What about the numerous unidentified people who were gunned down and had their lives taken from them? The media doesn’t care because they died in the zipcodes where society has deemed it acceptable and not news worthy.
There were three instances of shootings in Oakland the weekend of the Louis Vuitton burglary. Two people—two human beings—died. Shot to death by a gun, bled out on the street with their minds in panic. One a 17 year old boy who spent over 6,000 days being born, raised, having life struggles and successes, having family, going to school — all erased in just a few seconds. No follow up stories by newspapers, no check-ins on the family from journalists. No social media outrage. Nothing.
Just another sex and age description in the homicide weekly wrap up. Public dollars goes not to the therapy for the families who lost their relatives or have been terrorized by crackling bullets, not just in Oakland or Antioch but in Bayview-Hunter’s Point or the troubled areas in downtown San Francisco, but instead to free parking and street closures for suburban Black Friday shoppers.
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