Why Can’t San Francisco Stop Its Epidemic of Window Smashing?

When progressive leaders decline to keep their cities safe, they invite over-reactions and excessively punitive approaches.

Most Popular

Trump’s Emerging Immigration Sell-Out

• David Frum
• Trio:42 PM ET

• Conor Friedersdorf
• Apr 26, 2016
• Politics

• Share
• Tweet
• &#x2026

  San Francisco is among America’s richest cities. Its budget is almost $9 billion a year. It is only forty seven square miles in area. So why are city leaders incapable to stop vandals from smashing car windows at the astonishing rate of more than seventy per day?

  “The city took 25,899 reports of car break-ins in 2015,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports. That’s a seventy seven percent increase over the five years beginning in 2010.

  The epidemic has been getting worse for years. Back in 2006, when there were Ten,000 fewer break-ins per year, police, prosecutors, and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office felt that forty one such burglaries a day was enough to justify a crackdown.

  Crime and penalty in the age of mass incarceration

  For visitors, these “smash-and-grab” burglaries are enough to ruin a vacation, as thieves bust open rental cars and make off with suitcases, cameras, and even passports.

  Locals arguably have it even worse. They can’t park at night without worrying that their windows will be busted a 2nd or third or fourth time. For the very rich, the repair job is pocket switch. For everyone else, it’s a significant surprise expense.

  I discovered that the hard way. A duo months ago, I parked a 10-year-old Nissan Altima on 18th Street near South Van Ness in The Mission while in town to attend a wedding. It was only there overnight. Before I returned the next morning, a vandal had smashed both passenger-side windows. As best I can tell, nothing was stolen. It cost toughly $340 including peak to get the windows substituted. I could manage the expense, but federal data suggests that almost half of Americans would have trouble coming up with a similar sum in an unexpected emergency.

  A lot of San Francisco journalists who’ve covered this story have their own tales of woe. Sergio Quintana of the local ABC affiliate said that his car has been cracked into three times in latest years. KTTV says its cars and news vans have been hit several times.

  San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr had his car window smashed, too.

  “Why San Francisco is suffering a unique spike in property crime hasn’t been fully explained,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “but the problem is at the center of a war inbetween District Attorney George Gascón and the city’s police officers’ union over their respective crime-fighting competence as well as the influence of reforms favored by Gascón and other progressives designed to skinny jails and prisons.”

  The police particularly dislike Proposition 47, “a ballot initiative passed into law in November two thousand fourteen that diminished six nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.” But that was a statewide measure, while the smash-and-grab epidemic is local and predates 2015. What’s more, Gascón says that he still charges car break-ins as felonies.

  After the San Francisco Fox affiliate had a vehicle violated into in broad daylight while staffers were eating lunch, they called police, but didn’t get much help. Then they tracked down security camera footage that demonstrated two guys violating into their vehicle, including their faces and the license plate of the car they climbed into.

  Other local press outlets report that a excellent many “smash-and-grab” car burglaries are perpetrated by repeat offenders who are given light sentences by judges who don’t see the crime as a particularly serious offense. Is that judgment correct?

  The cost to victims is very variable. Some are like me and have nothing stolen. The only cost is substituting the glass. Others lose purses, laptop computers, and other valuables, sometimes including items with sentimental value that can never be substituted.

  If we’re very conservative, and figure an average of $500 of economic harm to victims of car break-ins, these thieves cost San Francisco victims just brief of $13 million last year. And that’s using the number of reported break-ins. Many more go unreported.

  A handful of guns stolen from vehicles in San Francisco and then used to kill people—including a muralist in Oakland, a backpacker in Golden Gate Park, a hiker in Marin and a woman walking on a city pier—have made headlines.

  But those high-profile cases represent just a fraction of the guns stolen from cars in a city that has seen a rash of auto burglaries. Through Nov. 20, fifty seven guns have been stolen from vehicles in San Francisco. That’s up from forty eight in all of two thousand fourteen and thirty one in 2013, according to San Francisco Police Department statistics.

  In a related story, the Fresh York Times reported, “Recent data from the F.B.I. showcase that San Francisco has the highest per-capita property crime rate of the nation’s top fifty cities. About half the cases here are thefts from vehicles, smash-and-grabs. ”

  The article proceeds:

  Scott Wiener, a supervisor and an advocate for more aggressive law enforcement, said his constituents were urging him to act. “I can’t tell you the number of times where I have received emails from moms telling, ‘My kids just asked me why that man has a needle sticking out of his arm,’ ” he said. “San Francisco at times is a consequence-free zone,” Mr. Wiener said. “I’m not advocating extreme law and order, but there has to be consequences. Sometimes people might need to spend six months in jail to think about what they did.” In a bitterly contested 6-to-5 vote last year, Mr. Wiener led the passage of a measure adding several hundred officers to the city’s police force, the very first increase since the 1980s, when the population was over ten percent smaller.

  But the supervisor for the area that includes The Mission, where my car was burglarized, said this:

  On the other side is David Campos, a supervisor who opposes the increase in police officers and describes Mr. Wiener’s views as “a very knee-jerk kind of punitive treatment that is ineffective and inconsistent with the values of San Francisco.” Mr. Campos and many others evoke the charitable spirit of the city’s namesake, St. Francis. “We are not going to criminalize people for being poor,” he said. “That criminalization is only going to make it firmer for them to get out of poverty.”

  San Francisco’s liberal ethos, Mr. Campos said, was switching as the city focused more on business and the needs of the tech industry. “I think there has been a shift in the people who have come to San Francisco,” Mr. Campos said of the city’s fresh arrivals, a group that is well educated and well heeled. He deplores what he describes as a growing “sink-or-swim” free-market ideology that stands in contrast to the city’s traditions.

  “I don’t know which San Francisco will prevail,” he said.

  Campos’ position is frustrating. (See update here*.) The people who want San Francisco’s “smash-and-grab” vandals disciplined, myself included, do not want “to criminalize people for being poor.” We want to criminalize people for willfully smashing in car windows, stealing individual items, and imposing hundreds of dollars in repairs on victims, most of whom are working people who truly suffer from such a loss.

  Campos vilified his colleague for telling, “Sometimes people might need to spend six months in jail to think about what they did.” Yet how did Campos react to news that guns are being stolen in some of these smash-and-grab burglaries? He crafted legislation “to require that law enforcement officers as well as civilians who leave guns in parked vehicles in the city secure the weapons in lock boxes or in an enclosed, locked trunk. Failing to secure a gun in a parked car would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail or a $Ten,000 fine.”

  In other words, he wants to penalize some of the victims of smash-and-grab burglaries with longer jail sentences than he is willing to give the perpetrators of the crime.

  A backlash against figures like Campos helped fuel California’s last round of over-punitive criminal-justice policies. Fortunately, there is a much more sensible course available today.

  Contra the San Francisco cops and Campos, there is no contradiction in believing that California imposed overzealous penalties on petty criminals for a generation and believing that a crackdown on property crime in San Francisco is overdue. The key is to avoid the mistakes of past crackdowns by internalizing the lesson that raising the likelihood of penalty is more significant than enlargening its length.

  San Francisco shouldn’t send first-time “smash-and-grab” convicts to state prison for five years, or for life because they’ve already got two felony drug convictions in their past.

  But they should penalize as many perpetrators as possible as quickly as possible.

  They should force first-time offenders to do a brief stint in city jail––30 days, say–– to strap on an ankle bracelet that monitors their location after their release, and to make restitution. For second-time offenders, “six months in jail to think about what they did,” plus two-years of monitoring, seems like a reasonable penalty to me.

  Alternatively, city officials could proceed to tolerate the window-smashing, causing more working people to be victimized and making their city a more lawless place. At some point, San Francisco residents will get so fed up that voters will elevate their own version of a Rudy Giuliani figure, embrace surveillance cameras, and otherwise react more harshly than would’ve seemed necessary if municipal officials had only exercised a modicum of common sense.

  The movement opposing over-incarceration is overdue, significant, and fragile. It can’t sustain another era of big-city progressives failing to keep crime at reasonable levels. L.A. has four million residents and had 27,535 car burglaries last year. 25,899 car burglaries in a city of less than a million people just isn’t reasonable.

  *Update: After this article was published Supervisor Campos emailed me, writing that “the NYT article you rely on is wrong in its reporting,” and adding, “We should target property crime and I have advocated as much.” I replied, “I am antsy to update my article if it misrepresents your position,” then asked followup questions: “What specifically did the Fresh York Times get wrong? With regard to the comments made by your colleague: Do you think six months in the city jail is an suitable penalty for someone caught in a smash-and-grab car burglary? What else, if anything, would you do about the smash-and-grab car burglary epidemic?”

  I’m blessed to explain when we speak, but the main problem with the NYT article is that the reporter is asking me for my views on the most pressing issue facing SF based on a Chamber poll. He describes that issues as street conditions and I assumed he is talking about homelessness, which the Chamber poll found to be number one issue. My comment about not criminalizing the poor had to do w/ homelessness.

  Had he asked me about property crime in particular, I would have noted that I actually held a hearing on car break ins where I called for more enforcement by police. And if he had asked me about police staffing, which he didn’t even raise the issue, I would have noted that my problem w/ the Wiener treatment is twofold. One, he calls for more cops without any analysis of what the need is. I am a former police commissioner so I know it’s a complicated issue. Two, as the DA notes, the problem w/ car break-ins is that the police have made arrests only in four percent of the cases, well below the national average of fourteen percent. Thus, unless we do something about arrests, we are going to have a problem. Is it a deployment issue or staffing issue. In any event, blessed to talk.

  I’ll proceed attempting to find out what he believes the penalty ought to be for smash-and-grabs and update this article again if I’m successful.

  Update Two: Supervisor Campos explained in a phone interview Wednesday that he favors innovative ways to catch more perpetrators of smash-and-grab burglaries, but said he’s reluctant to react with incarceration. “Catching people is the priority,” he said. “I believe in alternatives to incarceration, but I still believe that there have to be consequences. What is the right level of penalty? Look, I believe in restorative justice. I don’t think the response is throwing people in jail. But I do believe there have to be consequences. You have to give people the capability to make amends to the community–to make the victim of the crime entire and to provide community service back to the community. We have to make sure that there is a price to be paid for what they did.” When I asked about second-time offenders, he said that the penalty had to be greater for them, but didn’t specify further.

  San Francisco – s Epidemic of Car Break-Ins – The Atlantic

  Why Can’t San Francisco Stop Its Epidemic of Window Smashing?

  When progressive leaders decline to keep their cities safe, they invite over-reactions and excessively punitive approaches.

  Most Popular

  Why the Republican Party Will Come to Regret Rolling Back DACA

• James Fallows
• Five:09 PM ET

• Conor Friedersdorf
• Apr 26, 2016
• Politics

• Share
• Tweet
• &#x2026

  San Francisco is among America’s richest cities. Its budget is almost $9 billion a year. It is only forty seven square miles in area. So why are city leaders incapable to stop vandals from smashing car windows at the astonishing rate of more than seventy per day?

  “The city took 25,899 reports of car break-ins in 2015,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports. That’s a seventy seven percent increase over the five years beginning in 2010.

  The epidemic has been getting worse for years. Back in 2006, when there were Ten,000 fewer break-ins per year, police, prosecutors, and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office felt that forty one such burglaries a day was enough to justify a crackdown.

  Crime and penalty in the age of mass incarceration

  For visitors, these “smash-and-grab” burglaries are enough to ruin a vacation, as thieves bust open rental cars and make off with suitcases, cameras, and even passports.

  Locals arguably have it even worse. They can’t park at night without worrying that their windows will be busted a 2nd or third or fourth time. For the very rich, the repair job is pocket switch. For everyone else, it’s a significant surprise expense.

  I discovered that the hard way. A duo months ago, I parked a 10-year-old Nissan Altima on 18th Street near South Van Ness in The Mission while in town to attend a wedding. It was only there overnight. Before I returned the next morning, a vandal had smashed both passenger-side windows. As best I can tell, nothing was stolen. It cost harshly $340 including peak to get the windows substituted. I could manage the expense, but federal data suggests that almost half of Americans would have trouble coming up with a similar sum in an unexpected emergency.

  A lot of San Francisco journalists who’ve covered this story have their own tales of woe. Sergio Quintana of the local ABC affiliate said that his car has been cracked into three times in latest years. KTTV says its cars and news vans have been hit several times.

  San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr had his car window smashed, too.

  “Why San Francisco is suffering a unique spike in property crime hasn’t been fully explained,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “but the problem is at the center of a war inbetween District Attorney George Gascón and the city’s police officers’ union over their respective crime-fighting competence as well as the influence of reforms favored by Gascón and other progressives designed to lean jails and prisons.”

  The police particularly dislike Proposition 47, “a ballot initiative passed into law in November two thousand fourteen that diminished six nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.” But that was a statewide measure, while the smash-and-grab epidemic is local and predates 2015. What’s more, Gascón says that he still charges car break-ins as felonies.

  After the San Francisco Fox affiliate had a vehicle violated into in broad daylight while staffers were eating lunch, they called police, but didn’t get much help. Then they tracked down security camera footage that showcased two fellows violating into their vehicle, including their faces and the license plate of the car they climbed into.

  Other local press outlets report that a superb many “smash-and-grab” car burglaries are perpetrated by repeat offenders who are given light sentences by judges who don’t see the crime as a particularly serious offense. Is that judgment correct?

  The cost to victims is very variable. Some are like me and have nothing stolen. The only cost is substituting the glass. Others lose purses, laptop computers, and other valuables, sometimes including items with sentimental value that can never be substituted.

  If we’re very conservative, and figure an average of $500 of economic harm to victims of car break-ins, these thieves cost San Francisco victims just brief of $13 million last year. And that’s using the number of reported break-ins. Many more go unreported.

  A handful of guns stolen from vehicles in San Francisco and then used to kill people—including a muralist in Oakland, a backpacker in Golden Gate Park, a hiker in Marin and a woman walking on a city pier—have made headlines.

  But those high-profile cases represent just a fraction of the guns stolen from cars in a city that has seen a rash of auto burglaries. Through Nov. 20, fifty seven guns have been stolen from vehicles in San Francisco. That’s up from forty eight in all of two thousand fourteen and thirty one in 2013, according to San Francisco Police Department statistics.

  In a related story, the Fresh York Times reported, “Recent data from the F.B.I. showcase that San Francisco has the highest per-capita property crime rate of the nation’s top fifty cities. About half the cases here are thefts from vehicles, smash-and-grabs. ”

  The article resumes:

  Scott Wiener, a supervisor and an advocate for more aggressive law enforcement, said his constituents were urging him to act. “I can’t tell you the number of times where I have received emails from moms telling, ‘My kids just asked me why that man has a injection needle sticking out of his arm,’ ” he said. “San Francisco at times is a consequence-free zone,” Mr. Wiener said. “I’m not advocating extreme law and order, but there has to be consequences. Sometimes people might need to spend six months in jail to think about what they did.” In a bitterly contested 6-to-5 vote last year, Mr. Wiener led the passage of a measure adding several hundred officers to the city’s police force, the very first increase since the 1980s, when the population was over ten percent smaller.

  But the supervisor for the area that includes The Mission, where my car was burglarized, said this:

  On the other side is David Campos, a supervisor who opposes the increase in police officers and describes Mr. Wiener’s views as “a very knee-jerk kind of punitive treatment that is ineffective and inconsistent with the values of San Francisco.” Mr. Campos and many others evoke the charitable spirit of the city’s namesake, St. Francis. “We are not going to criminalize people for being poor,” he said. “That criminalization is only going to make it stiffer for them to get out of poverty.”

  San Francisco’s liberal ethos, Mr. Campos said, was switching as the city focused more on business and the needs of the tech industry. “I think there has been a shift in the people who have come to San Francisco,” Mr. Campos said of the city’s fresh arrivals, a group that is well educated and well heeled. He deplores what he describes as a growing “sink-or-swim” free-market ideology that stands in contrast to the city’s traditions.

  “I don’t know which San Francisco will prevail,” he said.

  Campos’ position is frustrating. (See update here*.) The people who want San Francisco’s “smash-and-grab” vandals disciplined, myself included, do not want “to criminalize people for being poor.” We want to criminalize people for willfully smashing in car windows, stealing private items, and imposing hundreds of dollars in repairs on victims, most of whom are working people who indeed suffer from such a loss.

  Campos vilified his colleague for telling, “Sometimes people might need to spend six months in jail to think about what they did.” Yet how did Campos react to news that guns are being stolen in some of these smash-and-grab burglaries? He crafted legislation “to require that law enforcement officers as well as civilians who leave guns in parked vehicles in the city secure the weapons in lock boxes or in an enclosed, locked trunk. Failing to secure a gun in a parked car would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail or a $Ten,000 fine.”

  In other words, he wants to penalize some of the victims of smash-and-grab burglaries with longer jail sentences than he is willing to give the perpetrators of the crime.

  A backlash against figures like Campos helped fuel California’s last round of over-punitive criminal-justice policies. Fortunately, there is a much more sensible course available today.

  Contra the San Francisco cops and Campos, there is no contradiction in believing that California imposed overzealous penalties on petty criminals for a generation and believing that a crackdown on property crime in San Francisco is overdue. The key is to avoid the mistakes of past crackdowns by internalizing the lesson that raising the likelihood of penalty is more significant than enlargening its length.

  San Francisco shouldn’t send first-time “smash-and-grab” convicts to state prison for five years, or for life because they’ve already got two felony drug convictions in their past.

  But they should penalize as many perpetrators as possible as quickly as possible.

  They should force first-time offenders to do a brief stint in city jail––30 days, say–– to strap on an ankle bracelet that monitors their location after their release, and to make restitution. For second-time offenders, “six months in jail to think about what they did,” plus two-years of monitoring, seems like a reasonable penalty to me.

  Alternatively, city officials could proceed to tolerate the window-smashing, causing more working people to be victimized and making their city a more lawless place. At some point, San Francisco residents will get so fed up that voters will elevate their own version of a Rudy Giuliani figure, embrace surveillance cameras, and otherwise react more harshly than would’ve seemed necessary if municipal officials had only exercised a modicum of common sense.

  The movement opposing over-incarceration is overdue, significant, and fragile. It can’t get through another era of big-city progressives failing to keep crime at reasonable levels. L.A. has four million residents and had 27,535 car burglaries last year. 25,899 car burglaries in a city of less than a million people just isn’t reasonable.

  *Update: After this article was published Supervisor Campos emailed me, writing that “the NYT article you rely on is wrong in its reporting,” and adding, “We should target property crime and I have advocated as much.” I replied, “I am antsy to update my article if it misrepresents your position,” then asked followup questions: “What specifically did the Fresh York Times get wrong? With regard to the comments made by your colleague: Do you think six months in the city jail is an adequate penalty for someone caught in a smash-and-grab car burglary? What else, if anything, would you do about the smash-and-grab car burglary epidemic?”

  I’m glad to explain when we speak, but the main problem with the NYT article is that the reporter is asking me for my views on the most pressing issue facing SF based on a Chamber poll. He describes that issues as street conditions and I assumed he is talking about homelessness, which the Chamber poll found to be number one issue. My comment about not criminalizing the poor had to do w/ homelessness.

  Had he asked me about property crime in particular, I would have noted that I actually held a hearing on car break ins where I called for more enforcement by police. And if he had asked me about police staffing, which he didn’t even raise the issue, I would have noted that my problem w/ the Wiener treatment is twofold. One, he calls for more cops without any analysis of what the need is. I am a former police commissioner so I know it’s a complicated issue. Two, as the DA notes, the problem w/ car break-ins is that the police have made arrests only in four percent of the cases, well below the national average of fourteen percent. Thus, unless we do something about arrests, we are going to have a problem. Is it a deployment issue or staffing issue. In any event, blessed to talk.

  I’ll proceed attempting to find out what he believes the penalty ought to be for smash-and-grabs and update this article again if I’m successful.

  Update Two: Supervisor Campos explained in a phone interview Wednesday that he favors innovative ways to catch more perpetrators of smash-and-grab burglaries, but said he’s reluctant to react with incarceration. “Catching people is the priority,” he said. “I believe in alternatives to incarceration, but I still believe that there have to be consequences. What is the right level of penalty? Look, I believe in restorative justice. I don’t think the reaction is throwing people in jail. But I do believe there have to be consequences. You have to give people the capability to make amends to the community–to make the victim of the crime entire and to provide community service back to the community. We have to make sure that there is a price to be paid for what they did.” When I asked about second-time offenders, he said that the penalty had to be greater for them, but didn’t specify further.

  San Francisco – s Epidemic of Car Break-Ins – The Atlantic

  Why Can’t San Francisco Stop Its Epidemic of Window Smashing?

  When progressive leaders decline to keep their cities safe, they invite over-reactions and excessively punitive approaches.

  Most Popular

  Why the Republican Party Will Come to Regret Rolling Back DACA

• James Fallows
• Sep Five, 2017

• Conor Friedersdorf
• Apr 26, 2016
• Politics

• Share
• Tweet
• &#x2026

  San Francisco is among America’s richest cities. Its budget is almost $9 billion a year. It is only forty seven square miles in area. So why are city leaders incapable to stop vandals from smashing car windows at the astonishing rate of more than seventy per day?

  “The city took 25,899 reports of car break-ins in 2015,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports. That’s a seventy seven percent increase over the five years beginning in 2010.

  The epidemic has been getting worse for years. Back in 2006, when there were Ten,000 fewer break-ins per year, police, prosecutors, and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office felt that forty one such burglaries a day was enough to justify a crackdown.

  Crime and penalty in the age of mass incarceration

  For visitors, these “smash-and-grab” burglaries are enough to ruin a vacation, as thieves bust open rental cars and make off with suitcases, cameras, and even passports.

  Locals arguably have it even worse. They can’t park at night without worrying that their windows will be busted a 2nd or third or fourth time. For the very rich, the repair job is pocket switch. For everyone else, it’s a significant surprise expense.

  I discovered that the hard way. A duo months ago, I parked a 10-year-old Nissan Altima on 18th Street near South Van Ness in The Mission while in town to attend a wedding. It was only there overnight. Before I returned the next morning, a vandal had smashed both passenger-side windows. As best I can tell, nothing was stolen. It cost harshly $340 including peak to get the windows substituted. I could manage the expense, but federal data suggests that almost half of Americans would have trouble coming up with a similar sum in an unexpected emergency.

  A lot of San Francisco journalists who’ve covered this story have their own tales of woe. Sergio Quintana of the local ABC affiliate said that his car has been cracked into three times in latest years. KTTV says its cars and news vans have been hit several times.

  San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr had his car window smashed, too.

  “Why San Francisco is suffering a unique spike in property crime hasn’t been fully explained,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “but the problem is at the center of a war inbetween District Attorney George Gascón and the city’s police officers’ union over their respective crime-fighting competence as well as the influence of reforms favored by Gascón and other progressives designed to lean jails and prisons.”

  The police particularly dislike Proposition 47, “a ballot initiative passed into law in November two thousand fourteen that diminished six nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors.” But that was a statewide measure, while the smash-and-grab epidemic is local and predates 2015. What’s more, Gascón says that he still charges car break-ins as felonies.

  After the San Francisco Fox affiliate had a vehicle cracked into in broad daylight while staffers were eating lunch, they called police, but didn’t get much help. Then they tracked down security camera footage that showcased two boys violating into their vehicle, including their faces and the license plate of the car they climbed into.

  Other local press outlets report that a superb many “smash-and-grab” car burglaries are perpetrated by repeat offenders who are given light sentences by judges who don’t see the crime as a particularly serious offense. Is that judgment correct?

  The cost to victims is very variable. Some are like me and have nothing stolen. The only cost is substituting the glass. Others lose purses, laptop computers, and other valuables, sometimes including items with sentimental value that can never be substituted.

  If we’re very conservative, and figure an average of $500 of economic harm to victims of car break-ins, these thieves cost San Francisco victims just brief of $13 million last year. And that’s using the number of reported break-ins. Many more go unreported.

  A handful of guns stolen from vehicles in San Francisco and then used to kill people—including a muralist in Oakland, a backpacker in Golden Gate Park, a hiker in Marin and a woman walking on a city pier—have made headlines.

  But those high-profile cases represent just a fraction of the guns stolen from cars in a city that has seen a rash of auto burglaries. Through Nov. 20, fifty seven guns have been stolen from vehicles in San Francisco. That’s up from forty eight in all of two thousand fourteen and thirty one in 2013, according to San Francisco Police Department statistics.

  In a related story, the Fresh York Times reported, “Recent data from the F.B.I. showcase that San Francisco has the highest per-capita property crime rate of the nation’s top fifty cities. About half the cases here are thefts from vehicles, smash-and-grabs. ”

  The article proceeds:

  Scott Wiener, a supervisor and an advocate for more aggressive law enforcement, said his constituents were urging him to act. “I can’t tell you the number of times where I have received emails from moms telling, ‘My kids just asked me why that man has a needle sticking out of his arm,’ ” he said. “San Francisco at times is a consequence-free zone,” Mr. Wiener said. “I’m not advocating extreme law and order, but there has to be consequences. Sometimes people might need to spend six months in jail to think about what they did.” In a bitterly contested 6-to-5 vote last year, Mr. Wiener led the passage of a measure adding several hundred officers to the city’s police force, the very first increase since the 1980s, when the population was over ten percent smaller.

  But the supervisor for the area that includes The Mission, where my car was burglarized, said this:

  On the other side is David Campos, a supervisor who opposes the increase in police officers and describes Mr. Wiener’s views as “a very knee-jerk kind of punitive treatment that is ineffective and inconsistent with the values of San Francisco.” Mr. Campos and many others evoke the charitable spirit of the city’s namesake, St. Francis. “We are not going to criminalize people for being poor,” he said. “That criminalization is only going to make it tighter for them to get out of poverty.”

  San Francisco’s liberal ethos, Mr. Campos said, was switching as the city focused more on business and the needs of the tech industry. “I think there has been a shift in the people who have come to San Francisco,” Mr. Campos said of the city’s fresh arrivals, a group that is well educated and well heeled. He deplores what he describes as a growing “sink-or-swim” free-market ideology that stands in contrast to the city’s traditions.

  “I don’t know which San Francisco will prevail,” he said.

  Campos’ position is frustrating. (See update here*.) The people who want San Francisco’s “smash-and-grab” vandals penalized, myself included, do not want “to criminalize people for being poor.” We want to criminalize people for willfully smashing in car windows, stealing private items, and imposing hundreds of dollars in repairs on victims, most of whom are working people who indeed suffer from such a loss.

  Campos vilified his colleague for telling, “Sometimes people might need to spend six months in jail to think about what they did.” Yet how did Campos react to news that guns are being stolen in some of these smash-and-grab burglaries? He crafted legislation “to require that law enforcement officers as well as civilians who leave guns in parked vehicles in the city secure the weapons in lock boxes or in an enclosed, locked trunk. Failing to secure a gun in a parked car would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail or a $Ten,000 fine.”

  In other words, he wants to penalize some of the victims of smash-and-grab burglaries with longer jail sentences than he is willing to give the perpetrators of the crime.

  A backlash against figures like Campos helped fuel California’s last round of over-punitive criminal-justice policies. Fortunately, there is a much more sensible course available today.

  Contra the San Francisco cops and Campos, there is no contradiction in believing that California imposed overzealous penalties on petty criminals for a generation and believing that a crackdown on property crime in San Francisco is overdue. The key is to avoid the mistakes of past crackdowns by internalizing the lesson that raising the likelihood of penalty is more significant than enlargening its length.

  San Francisco shouldn’t send first-time “smash-and-grab” convicts to state prison for five years, or for life because they’ve already got two felony drug convictions in their past.

  But they should penalize as many perpetrators as possible as quickly as possible.

  They should force first-time offenders to do a brief stint in city jail––30 days, say–– to strap on an ankle bracelet that monitors their location after their release, and to make restitution. For second-time offenders, “six months in jail to think about what they did,” plus two-years of monitoring, seems like a reasonable penalty to me.

  Alternatively, city officials could proceed to tolerate the window-smashing, causing more working people to be victimized and making their city a more lawless place. At some point, San Francisco residents will get so fed up that voters will elevate their own version of a Rudy Giuliani figure, embrace surveillance cameras, and otherwise react more harshly than would’ve seemed necessary if municipal officials had only exercised a modicum of common sense.

  The movement opposing over-incarceration is overdue, significant, and fragile. It can’t sustain another era of big-city progressives failing to keep crime at reasonable levels. L.A. has four million residents and had 27,535 car burglaries last year. 25,899 car burglaries in a city of less than a million people just isn’t reasonable.

  *Update: After this article was published Supervisor Campos emailed me, writing that “the NYT article you rely on is wrong in its reporting,” and adding, “We should target property crime and I have advocated as much.” I replied, “I am impatient to update my article if it misrepresents your position,” then asked followup questions: “What specifically did the Fresh York Times get wrong? With regard to the comments made by your colleague: Do you think six months in the city jail is an suitable penalty for someone caught in a smash-and-grab car burglary? What else, if anything, would you do about the smash-and-grab car burglary epidemic?”

  I’m glad to explain when we speak, but the main problem with the NYT article is that the reporter is asking me for my views on the most pressing issue facing SF based on a Chamber poll. He describes that issues as street conditions and I assumed he is talking about homelessness, which the Chamber poll found to be number one issue. My comment about not criminalizing the poor had to do w/ homelessness.

  Had he asked me about property crime in particular, I would have noted that I actually held a hearing on car break ins where I called for more enforcement by police. And if he had asked me about police staffing, which he didn’t even raise the issue, I would have noted that my problem w/ the Wiener treatment is twofold. One, he calls for more cops without any analysis of what the need is. I am a former police commissioner so I know it’s a complicated issue. Two, as the DA notes, the problem w/ car break-ins is that the police have made arrests only in four percent of the cases, well below the national average of fourteen percent. Thus, unless we do something about arrests, we are going to have a problem. Is it a deployment issue or staffing issue. In any event, blessed to talk.

  I’ll proceed attempting to find out what he believes the penalty ought to be for smash-and-grabs and update this article again if I’m successful.

  Update Two: Supervisor Campos explained in a phone interview Wednesday that he favors innovative ways to catch more perpetrators of smash-and-grab burglaries, but said he’s reluctant to react with incarceration. “Catching people is the priority,” he said. “I believe in alternatives to incarceration, but I still believe that there have to be consequences. What is the right level of penalty? Look, I believe in restorative justice. I don’t think the reaction is throwing people in jail. But I do believe there have to be consequences. You have to give people the capability to make amends to the community–to make the victim of the crime entire and to provide community service back to the community. We have to make sure that there is a price to be paid for what they did.” When I asked about second-time offenders, he said that the penalty had to be greater for them, but didn’t specify further.

Related movie: