San Francisco’s tough call: more police funding, or a delusional reparations plan?
Zachary Faria
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San Francisco Mayor London Breed is requesting an additional $63 million in police funding to address a rising crime wave. But what about the important issues that this money could go to, such as reparations for black residents who never experienced slavery?
Please excuse the sarcasm.
Breed’s budget request of $14.6 billion is a record for San Francisco, and it includes a 9% increase in police funding as crime continues to drive businesses away from the city. It includes more funding to hire prosecutors focused on the city’s open-air drug markets, as well as $27.6 million in additional police overtime spending to address the city’s police officer shortage.
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Meanwhile, San Francisco’s reparations plan continues to go nowhere, as no one involved in pushing it has any idea how they even reached the $5 million per black resident number they have been using, let alone where that money would come from. The reparations committee requested $50 million to form an “Office of Reparations” that would start putting the process in motion. That additional $63 million in police funding could easily be redirected to start the bold reparations plan the city has been hyping up for months now.
Of course, the total plan could cost over $100 billion, or nearly seven times Breed’s total budget request for the entire city government. But surely, if it’s so important, San Francisco can find the money for it. Is crime really that important that it deserves funding over reparations?
This is the problem with Democratic monopolies on governance, which is what San Francisco has enjoyed since 1964. The city’s board of supervisors has pushed a plan to pay black people reparations for slavery, which ended 150 years ago, in a city in California, which was never a slave state. To call the plan a pipe dream seems almost too kind: It was a delusion based entirely on the racial obsession that liberals have adopted in the past several years.
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It was made all the more ridiculous by the fact that San Francisco has real problems, including the fact that crime is driving businesses away and hollowing out neighborhoods. The city’s plan of letting drug addicts overdose whenever and wherever they want has led to homelessness and addiction becoming more widespread and pervasive. San Francisco has lost 7.6% of its population since the 2020 census because people simply don’t want to live there anymore.
That is what happens when you allow city leadership to be staffed with unserious people. The board of supervisors is a joke, and both the district attorney’s office and the school board were so far off the liberal deep end that even San Francisco voters opted to change course during recall elections. But the years of disastrous Democratic control have torn the city down far faster than half-serious figures such as Breed will be able to rebuild it.