The Tenderloin neighborhood held a Public Safety Town Hall last night featuring the police chief Bill Scott, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto and DA Brooke Jenkins. Jenkins had a pretty clear message for the audience made up of people who are sick of the crime, the filth and never feeling safe when walking down the streets. Her message: The problem isn’t law enforcement, it’s the courts.

“The courts are the biggest barrier,” Jenkins said at a Tenderloin Public Safety Town Hall, in her strongest criticism of the courts during her one-year tenure. She made the comments during a panel discussion that included both police chief Bill Scott and Sheriff Paul Miyamoto. She noted that arrests for drug dealings are way up and her office has been vigilant in requesting that repeat offenders be detained while awaiting trial. But only 16 of 100 requests for detention have been granted, she said.

“We do everything we can and you can see the same person out on the street the same day,” she said. “Repeat and chronic offenders are selling the most deadly substance we’ve seen in this city. That tells you something about what has been going on in the courtrooms of this city. The judges are not taking this seriously. The judges are ignoring it. ”…

Jenkins, who was visibly worked up…vowed that her two small children would not grow up in a city destroyed by drug use. Fentanyl is worse than crack, heroin or any of the previous scourges, said Jenkins, who was unsympathetic to people dealing fentanyl due to lack of any other financial options.

“Many people come from nothing and are not selling death,” she said.

I believe Jenkins and Mayor London Breed are serious about trying to crack down on the Hondos who deal drugs in the city. The problem is they’re not just up against the demand for drugs and the cartels that supply them. They are also up against the ingrained attitude of permissiveness and equity that makes stopping this harder. Jenkins is right that a lot of that expresses itself through the courts which seems to be pleading charges down to prevent the dealers from being subject to deportation.

Almost all of the alleged dealers are released on their own recognizance before trial, which means they do not have to post bond but may be required to check in regularly with a case manager. Some get assigned to diversion programs or have charges dismissed, while others plead guilty to lesser, non-drug charges. The rest either go on trial or skip court proceedings and have warrants issued for their arrest.

Six percent of people charged with drug-sale crimes in San Francisco from 2018 to 2022 have so far been convicted on a drug charge.

Even worse, the city’s public defenders portray the dealers as victims.

Public defenders have begun arguing in court that Honduran migrants facing drug charges should be viewed as trafficking victims and therefore found not guilty. California defines human trafficking as a crime that involves compelling or coercing a person to provide labor or services.

The trafficking defense has been asserted in three cases, which involved people who were not interviewed for this story. Each resulted in a hung jury. None of the cases will be retried.

And the idiots in the courts are backed up by the idiots in the media who write editorials like this one from the SF Chronicle:

…it is clear that Honduran migrants who deal drugs aren’t the source of San Francisco’s problems. Rather, while escaping a life of poverty and violence at home, they are the latest group to capitalize on the city’s decades-long failure to develop comprehensive strategies to alleviate the misery on our own streets.

It is because of that failure that there can be no arresting, deporting or strong-arming our way out of the city’s mess.

Just throw your hands up in the air because there’s nothing anyone can do. The poor dealers are just fleeing poverty so there’s no point in arresting or deporting them.

All of this is wrong and pretty obviously based on a misunderstanding of how things work in the real world. It’s strictly true that no city can arrest its way out of the drug problem. Arrest one dealer and another one will take their place. So long as there is a demand, someone will step up to fill it. However, just because arrests and deportation won’t solve the problem in a permanent way does not mean that abandoning those efforts makes no difference.

Drug dealing is always going to be a battle between illegal behavior and the law. The only way for either side to completely win is for the other side to give up. If you imagine two people arm wrestling, that’s a decent analogy. What happens if one side of that equations stops trying? They lose badly and the other side dominates the streets. That’s basically what we have in SF now. The city had stopped trying and we’re seeing the results.

But what happens if law enforcement, the courts, business owners and the media all get on the same page and start arresting and deporting dealers, i.e. using all the legal tools available to push back? A new equilibrium is reached somewhere in the middle. The cartels, dealers and users push as hard as they can in one direction while the cops, courts, media and businesses push back in the other. That’s not going to result in a permanent victory over drugs, but it will result in a struggle which leaves the streets somewhat safer, somewhat less full of addicts and drug tourists, somewhat more open to legal businesses and decent citizens. You can never win that arm wrestling contest permanently but by working hard you can create a better equilibrium than the one the city has now.

The problem in SF is that too many people had given up trying. Former DA Chesa Boudin wasn’t trying. Now the city has a much better DA who is trying and the Mayor is trying too. But the courts and the media are still in a surrender posture having been convinced by activists this is the posture most in line with social justice and equity. Don’t be mean to those poor drug dealers from Honduras. Sure, they’re killing people every day and making the city unlivable but we can’t hold that against them, can we? Isn’t that racist? Shouldn’t we just defund the police and abolish prisons instead?

No, you morons, we shouldn’t.

Stop coddling foreign criminals looking to profit off the misery and death of Americans. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good. Take every opportunity to jail criminals and then send them back where they came from until word gets around that SF isn’t the softest touch in the US anymore. I’m not imagining this. The Chronicle just reported this a few weeks ago:

San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city makes it more attractive to the Honduran dealers, some of them said, because it means a lower risk of lengthy jail time and deportation if convicted. Under the central tenet of the sanctuary law, the city jail does not allow ICE to place holds on local prisoners so they can be picked up upon release and deported. The only way most dealers face deportation is if they are arrested on federal charges or in another city…

one Honduran dealer said many choose to work in San Francisco because they’re less likely to be deported. Another dealer interviewed in El Pedernal echoed this sentiment, estimating that half of the dealers from the municipality sell in San Francisco.

“The reason is because, in San Francisco, it’s like you’re here in Honduras,” he said. “The law, because they don’t deport, that’s the problem. … Many look for San Francisco because it’s a sanctuary city. You go to jail and you come out.”

The police, the mayor and the DA have finally all gotten off their asses. Now we need the courts and the media to summon up a few ounces of toxic masculinity and join the fight. Give the dealers hell so that women and children can walk the streets. Ignore the surrender caucus in the media and the far left activists who tell you the war on drugs doesn’t work. Fighting back can make things better even if it won’t ever result in a permanent victory.

Here’s a report on the public safety meeting last night. DA Jenkins says it takes four open cases before the courts will agree to keep someone off the streets.