On November 3, 2021, National Public Radio’s website carried the following headline: “San Francisco’s new rapid response teams race to save lives as ODs dramatically rise.”    

From the story:

“‘Fentanyl is a game-changer,’ Dr. Hillary Kunins, the city’s director of behavioral and mental health services, says of the opioid that’s 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine. ‘It requires a new way of thinking and resourcing.’ It also, she says, ‘requires people to learn to work across disciplines and sometimes across organizations.'”

And what is the ultimate result of repeatedly saving drug-abusers from their own self-destructive behavior?  

In his 2021 bestseller, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, author Michael Shellenberger provides the answer. 

According to its dust jacket:

“Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse.

“Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison.

“But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem. What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies.”

In a June 1, 2022 interview with The Spectator World, Shellenberger blamed liberal ideology for this epidemic:

“The first thing is that they don’t enforce laws. They don’t enforce laws against people that they consider victims, which includes addicts and the mentally ill. And if you don’t enforce laws it turns out people don’t follow them and you don’t have functioning civilization.

Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

“The second is that they have pursued a radical de-incarceration, de-policing and decriminalization agenda, which has removed penalties for many laws, including shoplifting $950 worth of goods, or possessing three grams of fentanyl and meth, enough to produce paranoid psychosis. And they’ve pursued a so-called housing first anti-shelter policy.

“So they’ve defunded the shelters. The governor himself has established that housing should be a right. That anybody who comes to San Francisco or Los Angeles should have their own apartment unit in those cities. That is the state policy. It is so ridiculous. It is shocking to even say that that is what the policy is, but that is what it is.

“What we need is pretty straightforward. We need to enforce laws. We need a shelter-first housing-earned policy and you need statewide psychiatric and addiction care like they have in every civilized country.

“We’re reviving people from overdose six, nine, twelve times and then sending them right back onto the streets to smoke more fentanyl. It’s bonkers.

“Fifty percent to 75 percent of all fires put out by the San Francisco and Los Angeles fire departments are in homeless encampments. My own research, and the research of others, shows that most of these are arson fires, people just getting back at each other.”

And how did the city’s mayor, London Breed, respond to the closing of Whole Foods Market?  With a public statement that was pure boilerplate: 

“Public safety is Mayor Breed’s top priority and vital to the City’s work around restoring our economy and making our residents and workers feel safe. 

“Over the last several months, the San Francisco Police Department and the Mayor’s Office have been working collaboratively with Whole Foods’ leadership to address public safety issues at their 8^th and Market location.

“We will continue to engage with them about the future use of the site. The Police will continue aggressively enforcing against open-air drug dealing, maximizing police response to urgent calls for assistance, partnering with retailers to address theft in their stores, and enforcing new street vending regulations to disrupt the sale of stolen goods.”

In short: Blah-blah-blah.

Nowhere in that statement is there any mention that from 2020 to July, 2022, San Francisco had a District Attorney—Chesa Boudin—who saw criminals as victims and sought any reason to excuse them for their crimes. 

Nor is there any mention that the current D.A.—Brooke Jenkins—remains stymied by the realities that, under California law: 

• Theft under $950 is considered a misdemeanor.
• As a result, many prosecutors prefer to free those charged rather than holding them in jail.
• The maximum sentence offenders can get is six months. 

Also left unsaid:

• Firefighters, police officers and schoolteachers are unable to afford the extortionate rents charged by San Francisco landlords. But city officials have thrown out the welcome mat for DDMBs—Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums. 
• Many DDMBs refuse to enter the city’s available shelters. Some claim these places are dangerous—understandably so, since they’re peopled with drug addicts, alcoholics, mentally ill and outright bums. 
• Another reason why many of these shelters go unused: They don’t allow their “guests” to drink up or drug up.

The latest wrinkle in San Francisco’s “be kind to Untermenschen“ campaign is the creation of “Navigation Centers.” These are essentially holding pens for DDMBs—until they can be “navigated” to permanent housing.

This is a triumph of misleading language over reality, since there is little available housing in San Francisco to “navigate” them to.

“My son Don was beaten by two men with a steel pipe last night on Laguna Street and Lombard Street,” read a Nextdoor post by Joan Carmignani, the mother of the former San Francisco Fire Commissioner, Don Carmignani.

She thanked the neighbors who stopped the fight and called 911: “If they were not there my son would be dead! He is in the hospital with a skull fracture, broken jaw and many cuts.”

Camignani was attacked around 7:20 p.m. on April 5 in the upscale San Francisco Marina District. 

Five days later, on April 10, one of the largest supermarkets in Downtown San Francisco—the Whole Foods Market at Eighth and Market streets—announced it would shut down at the close of business that day.

The store, operated by Amazon, had been operating slightly more than a year.  

White these two incidents might seem to be unrelated, they actually shared a common link: Both were victims of San Francisco’s notorious toleration of DDMBs—Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums.  

The Politically Correct name for these people is “homeless.” The accurate name for them is summed up in a German word: “Untermenschen”—“subhumans.”

“Right now, one of my dear friends is in the hospital because last night in the Marina he was attacked by a homeless person with a metal pipe,” San Francisco Supervisor Catherine Stefani, whose District 2 covers the Marina, said in a city meeting.

Stefani explained that Don Carmignani’s mother had called the police because homeless people were doing drugs outside her door and wouldn’t leave. When no police responded, her son came to talk to the men outside her door and was assaulted.

“It was two guys smoking meth or crack in front of his mother’s house, like blocking the entrance, and she’s in her late 70s,” said Ali Jamalian, a friend of Carmignani’s. 

Catherine Stefani

Ironically, drugs have played a major role in Carmignani’s life: “He’s a very well-known local cannabis entrepreneur. He’s always been a pro-cannabis landlord and a fighter for the cause,” Jamalian said.

Stefani blamed the lack of police for the assault: “We’re 55 officers short in the Northern Station. That’s a real thing. This isn’t fear-mongering. I’ve been here 21 years, and this didn’t use to happen. I believe this is a direct result of the fact that we do not have enough officers on our street.”

Given the Politically Correct climate of San Francisco, it was almost guaranteed to happen—as was the closing of the Whole Foods store at Market and Eighth.

At its opening, on March 10, 2022, the store operated from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. By October, it opened at 9 a.m. and closed at 7 p.m.

“It’s to better serve our customers, and it’s more or less because of the area and security issues,” said the store’s manager. “There’s just high theft and people being hostile.”

In November, the store enforced new rules for customers after syringes and pipes were found in the restroom. The bathroom was now open only to customers who showed security guards a receipt. Customers were then given a QR code for entry.

It was no coincidence that the bathrooms were often used by drug-abusers—the store was close to the Tenderloin Center, a safe drug-use site. 

Crack cocaine 

Argv0, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikipedia Commons 

Another reason for the change in bathroom policy: Thieves would fill up suitcases with merchandise before going into the restroom.

And who is ultimately responsible for such outrages as the assault on a former San Francisco Fire Commissioner and the closing of a major downtown supermarket? 

San Francisco’s topmost officials—the Mayor, Board of Supervisors, District Attorney and chief of the San Francisco Police Department. Together, they have formed an “Untermenschen”-friendly alliance.

The start of the COVID-19 pandemic inflicted a massive loss in foot traffic in downtown San Francisco as employees fled high rises to work remotely from home. Many small businesses—especially restaurants—shuttered.

Compounding this disaster has been an increasing influx of DDMBs—Druggies, Drunks, Mentals and Bums. Sidewalks are littered with tents, used hypodermic syringes and needles, empty beer cans and wine bottles, human feces and pools of urine.

The local and national press have predicted a “doom loop” facing San Francisco, as the city’s tourism rate sharply declines and City Hall officials currently project a nearly $800 million deficit in San Francisco’s budget.

But this has not prevented these same officials from calling for increased efforts to comfort those very parasites who threaten not only their own lives but those of law-abiding San Franciscans and the city’s tourism industry. 

On November 3, 2021, National Public Radio’s website carried the following headline: “San Francisco’s new rapid response teams race to save lives as ODs dramatically rise.”

From the story:

“Faced with a stunning rise in drug overdose deaths the last few years, the vast majority tied to fentanyl, San Francisco has launched mobile teams made up of paramedics and nurses.

“The new Street Overdose Response Teams (SORT), a collaboration between the city’s health and fire departments, aim to deliver a broad range of support and care directly following an overdose.”