San Francisco turns to Texas for police recruitment

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

This is a switch. Just a short while ago, Texas was on a list of no-go states for California state business. Now the City of San Francisco is trying to recruit new hires from Texas.

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How’s that defund the police thing going? Oh, you mean there is a rise in criminal activity when so little respect is paid to the police? Who knew?

Crime is out of control in many America cities as a result of the Summer of Love – the Marxist BLM movement’s reign of terror as they led protests that spiraled into riots in major cities. Police were overwhelmed by the number of people in the streets causing havoc and destruction, sometimes death. The defund the police movement is popular with brain dead progressives and the effect of such mindless demands is now apparent. Americans no longer feel safe and crime is rampant.

Things are so bad that last year the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a $50 million increase in SFPD’s budget. They had to add money back after defunding the department so deeply. There have been more homicides this year so far than the whole of last year. There have already been 40 murders this year, while there were 36 last year.

Police recruitment is off because who wants to be a cop in today’s environment? Police officers are shot and killed in the line of duty so often we are at risk of being numb to the reports. The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is recruiting at four Texas university campuses this month in hopes of finding people willing to relocate to the city and join the police department. Out-of-state candidates will take a written test, a physical ability test, and have an interview to see if they make the cut.

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Seems reasonable. It will be interesting to see if their recruitment efforts work. In San Francisco, signs appear in businesses that state cops are not welcome. That doesn’t fly in Texas. Texas isn’t perfect but it seems to me that signs like that would be a good indication that there isn’t a lot of support for law enforcement there. For the first time, candidates will be tested outside of California. The reason for testing in Texas is to speed up the process and lower barriers to entry into the police department. Testing at college campuses begins today.

It’s interesting that the schools chosen are all in east and southeastern Texas – Texas Southern University in Houston; Sam Houston State University in Huntsville; Prairie View A&M University; and Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. Texas Southern University is a historically black university, as is Prairie View A&M University.

In the midst of this story, Salesforce Inc. CEO Marc Benioff is speaking out about pushing the city to do something. He wanted the city cleaned up before his company’s annual convention.

AI convention Dreamforce, which draws 40,000 people from around the world according to the company, was held in the city last week.

During a press event on Wednesday, Benioff said: ‘We put a lot of pressure on the city this year. It looks great. It’s very safe right now. We’re moving in the right direction.’

Benioff, 58, held the event at the Moscone Center, which is in an area that is currently facing issues including homelessness, crime and open air drug markets, according to Kron4.

Benioff also posted on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, saying: ‘San Francisco has been incredibly clean, beautiful, and safe for the last 3 days of Dreamforce.

‘It is great that the city is able to put its best foot forward for this major event that brings in 40K people from around the world, and $80M to the economy.

‘It is important to ask why the city cannot be this clean and safe every single day?’

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Indeed. Why can’t it be like that every day? Leadership comes from the top. Mayor London Breed is only now waking up a bit to the fact that her previous position that BLM was a movement worthy of her full-throated support was wrong. Now that the city has gone to hell in a hand basket, the light bulb is going off. Too bad the city had to get into the shape it is before she figured it out. Businesses have closed, especially downtown, and they aren’t coming back anytime soon. Who can blame them? Nobody wants to shop in that kind of environment – stepping over homeless people, worried about personal safety. There are too many other options for shopping.

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Ed Morrissey 2:00 PM | October 11, 2024
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