Earlier this week San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced she was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it come to an end,” Breed said. There must be something in the water because the same day Breed announced her plans, Nancy Pelosi decried the “attitude of lawlessness” in the country. Gee, I wonder where that could have come from…?

Today, Mayor Breed doubled down on her plan to deal with crime and drug abuse in the city by declaring a state of emergency in the Tenderloin.

“The situation in the Tenderloin is an emergency and it calls for an emergency response,” said Mayor London Breed. “We showed during COVID that when we’re able to use an Emergency Declaration to cut through the bureaucracy and barriers that get in the way of decisive action, we can get things done and make real, tangible progress. We will use that focus and coordination to disrupt the illegal activity in the neighborhood, to get people the treatment and support they need, and to make the Tenderloin a safer, more livable place for the families and children who call the neighborhood home.”

Also today Gov. Newsom also came out with a new plan to crack down on retail crime throughout the state:

The governor announced $250 million in competitive enforcement grants that will be given to local law enforcement agencies and district attorneys to prosecute organized retail crimes…

The governor is responding to a recent run of large-scale thefts in California and across the nation in which groups of individuals shoplift en masse from stores or smash and grab from display cases. Single operators have also been a growing problem for retailers who say the thieves face little consequence.

Even Mayor Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles and Mayor Libby Schaaf in Oakland are calling for a tougher approach on crime.

All of this is quite a reversal from where things stood last year after the murder of George Floyd. Now, suddenly, funding police is back in vogue and as you might imagine this is making some BLM activists in the state very sad.

“I don’t think all is lost.”

I’m not sure what I expected to hear when I called up Cat Brooks, co-founder of Oakland’s Anti Police-Terror Project, but it sure wasn’t that…

“We knew that dead Black bodies were very soon not going to be the ‘it’ thing to rally around,” she told me. “White people are going to go back to business as usual. So we need to brace ourselves for that.”…

“Organizers around the country are scurrying to try to figure out what of our gains can we keep,” Brooks said. “Where did we miss the mark? What were we not prepared for?”

It’s probably going to come as a shock to Mayor Breed to discover that she’s white. Honestly, these activists only have one response to everything and that’s to accuse everyone who opposes them (or who supports police) of racism. So, no big surprise that’s where they go even if it doesn’t make any sense.

As for where these activists missed the mark, the answer is pretty obvious. Defund the police was an experiment that failed badly all across the country. These activists missed the mark as soon as they made that dumb slogan their main goal. Even Brooks herself admits that the conditions in the streets have gotten much worse, though of course she doesn’t see any connection to what she’s advocating.

Brooks said she takes off her jewelry before she gets gas now…

“The conditions are real out here now,” Brooks said. “Now, what generated those conditions, though, was not some great mass explosion of Black people being savages. What happened was we had a pandemic.”

As I’ve pointed out many times, blaming the increase in crime on the pandemic does not explain the fact that in many places the real inflection point of shootings and homicide happened in late May last year, exactly when protests kicked off over the murder of George Floyd. Just as tellingly, the pandemic happened all around the world but the spike in shootings and homicides is not happening everywhere. Some have tried to blame that difference on access to guns but there’s evidence that’s not the case.

What generated the conditions was anger over a murder shown on television over and over. The anger was understandable but the attempts to lash out at police, both during the riots and with attempts to defund them in various cities, was not constructive. In fact it has caused a lot of destruction and unnecessary death which is still ongoing around the country. It’s good that California’s elected officials have finally realized they were headed in the wrong direction. As for the anti-police activists, they’ll never admit the experiment was a bloody failure.