Three years after “defund the police” became a BLM rallying cry, San Francisco and other Bay Area cities are still trying to recover from the brief popularity that phrase once had with mayors and city councils. San Francisco is still down hundreds of police officers and has come up with a new plan to attract more recruits: Go to Texas.

The San Francisco Police Department is visiting four Texas university campuses through September as part of new recruiting efforts to find candidates outside of California.

For the first time, police officer candidates will be tested outside of California, with a written test, a physical ability test and an oral interview.

An announcement was made on X a couple weeks ago.

‼️🚨SFPD IS COMING TO TEXAS🚨‼️

Come join the San Francisco Police Department for ONE DAY TESTING!

For any questions about this event please contact us by phone, email, or DM. Hope you can make it!! #sfpd #joinsfpd #police #sanfrancisco #sf #california #ca pic.twitter.com/2IbL0zJWsp

— SFPD Recruitment (@JoinSFPD) September 6, 2023

You really have to soak in the comedic aspect of far left San Francisco going to bright red Texas to try to find officers. For six years, San Francisco had banned business with Texas. This was part of a 2016 brainstorm by Scott Weiner, though he later came to have second thoughts.

In 2016, then-Supervisor Scott Wiener passed an ordinance making San Francisco the first city to ban travel to states with repressive anti-LGBT laws or contract with businesses headquartered there…

“I’ll be honest, over time I have come to have mixed views on the approach,” says Wiener, now a state senator. “On the one hand, I believe in using our dollars to express our values. When you have a state like Florida right now, which is about to enact its horrific ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, the idea of spending our public dollars in Florida is an affront.”

“But on the other hand,” Wiener continues, “we know that an awful lot of Floridians, maybe the majority, don’t support that law. There is a huge LGBTQ community in Florida, including many LGBTQ-owned businesses. We are sweeping in an entire state, and sweeping in businesses owned by people who are trying to help. So, it’s complicated and I have become very conflicted and I argue with myself.”

He was wrong about that. A majority of Floridians do support the Florida law banning lesson on gender identity for 2nd graders. In any case, there is no evidence that the ban made any difference at all. No state ever cited it as a reason to change their laws. Weiner saw the writing on the wall and last April the city repealed his dumb boycott.

Scott Wiener, a former supervisor-turned-state senator who authored the original ban, agreed that the measure hadn’t produced the intended results.

“We believed a coalition of cities and states would form to create true consequences for states that pass these despicable, hateful laws,” the San Francisco Democrat said in a statement. “Yet, as it turned out, that coalition never formed, and the full potential impact of this policy never materialized. Instead, San Francisco is now penalizing businesses in other states — including LGBTQ-owned, women-owned, and people of color-owned businesses — for the sins of their radical right wing governments.”

So the city has gone from rejecting any official travel or business with the state to traveling there to beg for new police recruits. Granted, police officers aren’t all conservatives but there is definitely a strong conservative aspect to policing which is about maintaining law and order. Even if the SF pay scale is pretty high wait until the recruits find out how much rent costs in the city. It’s hard to imagine a lot of people in Texas are going to want to move there, a place where police will always be seen as a necessary evil at best.

Speaking of bad decisions haunting the Bay Area, Alameda County’s progressive district attorney Pamela Price is doing her best to win people over, but even the SF Chronicle admits it’s not going over very well.

The town hall, held at a church, was billed as an opportunity for residents to get to know Price and “talk together about her successes and challenges.” But even before I got inside I could sense the atmosphere would be tense: Several dozen protesters were waving signs at a nearby stoplight, one of which read, “PRICE-LESS CORRUPTION.”…

The energy shifted palpably, however, when Price began talking about restorative justice as an alternative to incarceration.

“It’s about making sure that victims have the opportunity to hold the person who hurt them accountable,” she said, but was cut off by people booing and screaming, “That’s a lie!”

The author of the piece, Emily Hoeven, writes that it would be great to live in a world where incarceration wasn’t necessary but unfortunately, that’s not the one we’re in. But Pamela Price just carries on as if we’re already living in that world.

This whittling down of the traditional criminal justice system without a backup plan — while charging offenders as if that plan were already in place — is a recipe for disaster. Until Democrats acknowledge this, they will lose ground with Californians, many of whom feel unsafe amid a level of violent crime that hasn’t been seen in more than a decade.

We’ve written about Price several times this year. In July the Oakland NAACP blasted her in a letter blaming her for failing to keep residents safe.

Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar…

There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.

Price’s approach to criminal justice is a disaster for Oakland and another terrible decisions made after the summer of 2020 when BLM and criminal justice reform effectively invited every daft leftist idea to the table as a form of progress. The Bay Area is going to be paying for those decisions for years to come.