Mayor Breed spoke for 10 minutes, until the crowd shouted her down and someone threw a brick:
Board President Aaron Peskin called today's monthly Board of Supervisors mayoral question session outside at the plaza, only feet away from City Hall. It was a unique move to question Breed directly on her latest policies around the fentanyl crisis and record overdoses experienced by people on the street -- many of which happen right in and around the UN Plaza. [...]
As the sun shone brightly on the crowd, Breed bore a look of displeasure long before taking her position at the podium to scattered boos and clapping. [...]
When she returned to the podium, a spectator launched into an ear-splitting whistle of the "Star Spangled Banner," while others started chanting "No more cops" -- enough that the mayor turned around and Peskin abruptly pulled the plug on the outdoor meeting, called a recess, and relocated the event to the Board of Supervisors chambers on City Hall's second floor.
Once inside, to a much more sedate audience, the mayor told the crowd her new plan includes what she calls "tough love."
Whuuuut? But Mayor Greed's doing oh-so-much to keep The City safe... for the right people.
Why, just look at the below photo from Sunday showing squad cars stationed outside of that Walgreens. I mean, it's not like she had them there because her administration is cozy with the company or something! No, siree - she's showing them the same "military garrison" support she usually reserves for the Louis V and Prada stores in Union Square!
Every supposed "left-wing" city I'm aware of has some really awful, corporatist, quisling mayor. Seattle's is busy terrorizing homeless people with sweeps and promising to "revitalize downtown" with "wine walks." His lesbian predecessor colluded with the police chief to "lose" thousands of text messages during the Black Lives Matter police violence.
Because most politicians aren’t left. The right / conservatives, since Reagan and Thatcher at least, have done a really good job in vilifying “the other side”. It’s not unique to the US either. Same can be seen in Canada, the UK, most of Europe really.
Vancouver, BC, has a conservative mayor who pleads the city is broke, it’s not, but has no problem finding money for 100 additional cops. Because apparently “Defund the police” is what caused all the problems. Let’s ignore that over the last decade the budget has gone from 250 Million to around 350 Million. But apparently that has not solved all the civic issues the cities has. So now more money for cops, reallocate money for bike lane construction to the actual removal and shove cops back into school even though people had made it clear they didn’t want cops in school.
But I guess if he hires 100 more cops they need to spend their time somewhere, why not indoctrinating the little ones?
The comment section of the West Seattle Blog is divided about 4/5ths people saying "see this is what we GET when we DEFUND THE POLICE" and 1/5th saying "we never defunded anything, we tried to move parking tickets to a civilian division and the police union ensured it got bureaucratically fucked up such that they had to refund a million dollars in fines so that ultimately they got control of parking tickets again and nothing at all has changed but a ton of them have quit the force in a snit over occasionally being asked to account for the body cam footage which is why no one shows when you call 911 over your catalytic converter being stolen which BTW your elected representatives declined to do anything about in this years legislative session."
I hate this timeline.
Yeah, people are scared and that makes them angry and they want a target to lash out against.
And Copaganda has worked, people truly do believe that the “thin blue line” is all that stands between them (the good guys) and the others (the bad guys).
I don’t think we’ve reached the bottom yet.
The last District 6 (Soma) Supervisor race was between a drag queen, and a gay former-addict SFPD spokesperson, each campaigning on which of them would be Tougher On Crime. Surprise, the actual cop beat the fake cop. The race was utterly appalling.
Ugh that sounds like a terrible episode of Max Headroom.
Local politics are absolutely insane.
A mom I know from my kids' school is the most politically active person I know--she does tons of fundraising for progressive candidates all around the country, and can tell you off the top of her head which state and federal races you should give money to if you want to have the best chance of making an impact on the race. She seems to know where a huge body of candidates all sit politically and has a deep understanding of electoral strategy. But when asked about SF politics, she throws up her hands and says she can't make any sense of it.