White flag: ‘sanctuary city’ vow signals Lurie’s surrender on San Francisco drug crime
James Rolph Jr and Daniel Lurie, at first glance, have much in common. Both born and raised in San Francisco, each became mayor of their city in their 40s after successful careers outside politics. And Lurie, like Rolph before him, promotes the City by the Bay as it seeks to recover from a major reverse.
It was Rolph who brought the hammer down on the Barbary Coast, the city’s notorious red-light district. Under his leadership, police cracked heads, regulators shuttered vice dens and civic groups shamed owners. Residents enjoyed safer streets and respectable businesses were able to flourish once again.
Lurie, though, has shown no interest in undercutting the city’s position as the west coast’s premier refuge for narcotics traffickers, nor curbing the rampant public drug use among those attracted by their wares.
His insistence that “San Francisco is no longer a safe haven for those who want to sell drugs, do drugs and live on our streets,” is belied by the straightforward reality that it continues to be precisely that.
Had he been in Rolph’s shoes, the Barbary Coast would still be in business and the drunken crowds, public brawls and uncontrolled spread of disease would be continuing unabated.
One would not have to become a Bukele-style strongman to turn the situation around, or even close, but it’s clear Lurie does not have the piss and vinegar necessary to take the decisive action required, which is not much of a criticism given that San Francisco is no longer capable of producing leaders who do.
Instead he turns a blind eye to the embedded underclass of Hondurans responsible for the majority of the street-level havoc, along with the Mexican cartel enforcers who supply the drugs they sell.
A disaster ten years in the making, it is their activities that drive the city’s 600+ overdose deaths per year.
The Duke-educated Lurie insincerely collapses legal residents and illegal aliens into the single term “immigrants,” robbing ordinary San Franciscans of the language needed to name who is victimizing them and how readily the problem could be addressed.
And he demands that local law enforcement not assist federal authorities’ immigration efforts, which he brands as terrorism.
Lurie insists that he has ramped up drug enforcement, by putting more police on the streets, with more buy-bust operations and a focus on arresting fugitives who have squirreled themselves away in the city.
It will not work. But it isn’t intended to work.
It is the latest example of city leaders turning themselves inside out to avoid doing the only thing that will work: working with immigration authorities to deport illegal aliens immediately after a drugs arrest.
Industrial-scale trafficker with cartel connections? Gone. Mid-level distributor? Gone. Street-level dealer? Gone. User? Gone.
At the moment most get sent to the city’s Hall of Justice, where they are immediately released and promptly return to peddling fentanyl. A small proportion get federally prosecuted, serving perhaps a month in jail before being handed to ICE for deportation. And an unlucky handful end up in prison.
When they are deported, they simply come back. The first Honduran deported under the ‘fast track’ federal scheme – after barely four weeks in custody – promptly returned to the United States.
And why wouldn’t they return?
With traffickers making tens of thousands of dollars per month, tax free, to lavish on their families back in Honduras, in addition to free or very low cost medical care provided by Medi-Cal, plus cash help for any children born in the United States, the benefits easily outweigh the drawbacks.
Add to this a $175/hr taxpayer funded attorney, plus complimentary Spanish interpreter, to shepherd them through every stage of the court case and present extensive mitigation in the form of a collection of excuses ranging from the plainly implausible to the outrageously untrue. Presumably some are true.
It’s no wonder those charged in state court get arrested time and again and those deported come back time and again.
Lurie is far from alone in his lax approach. Judges at the city’s Hall of Justice routinely and repeatedly release armed illegal alien drug dealers with industrial quantities of fentanyl who go straight back to dealing.
The absence of consequences is so preposterous that even the notoriously lenient federal judges at San Francisco’s federal courthouse have been aghast at how easily the traffickers stay in business.
“At some point it’s pretty clear that the state system totally dropped the ball,” said U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney last year as she sentenced a Honduran fentanyl dealer to nine years’ imprisonment after the drugs he sold killed a teacher. She had heard that he had been arrested on 14 previous occasions.
“He was in the state court system being treated as if he was hardly doing anything wrong. They would put him on probation…and within days he would be back on the street committing another crime.”
“So, at this point, this is someone who thinks ‘boy, at this point, I can do just about anything, no one cares’.”
When Honduran Brayan Lopez Cruz was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment last year U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer remarked on the leniency he had been shown by local judges who had released him despite earlier drug dealing.
“This suggests to me that maybe the judges aren’t doing the right thing – somebody’s not doing the right thing,” he said of his state counterparts.
The cobbled-together federal scheme to deport some dealers – which ironically has SFPD officers at its heart, which they presumably don’t tell Lurie about – now appears to have stalled entirely.
What worked with respect to public safety in the post-quake era of the 1910s has plainly fallen out of favor in the post-pandemic 2020s. But even so, Lurie’s commitment to the luxury belief that illegal alien criminals ought to be protected from immigration enforcement would be anathema to James Rolph Jr.
It is an astonishing state of affairs. Future historians will surely find it remarkable that city leaders, aided by a greek chorus of fey handwringers, have gone so far and done so much to protect some of the state’s most callous criminals.