THE FERGUSON EFFECT COMES TO SAN FRANCISCO:

“It’s as hard right now to be a cop maybe as it’s ever been,” San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr to the Chronicle Editorial Board Tuesday. At the time, Suhr was resisting calls demanding that he resign. Five local protesters had given up their hunger strike to force his departure to atone for officer-involved shootings of four minority men in the previous two years. Four supervisors had jumped onto that bandwagon, but Suhr enjoyed Mayor Ed Lee’s support. Until Thursday, that is, when a San Francisco cop shot and killed Jessica Williams, 29, an unarmed auto theft suspect in The Bayview. By the end of the day, Suhr had met with the mayor and resigned. It’s as hard right now to be a police chief in a major American city as it has ever been.

New York City can at least look to the Giuliani-Bloomberg interlude between the quarter century of decline culminating in the Dinkins years and now resumed under Bill de Blasio as proof that a city can reform itself and subdue its criminal class. In sharp contrast, San Francisco never had that post-1970s counter-revolution; it’s resembled Taxi Driver-era New York for decades — with even more homeless people — so the Ferguson Effect in San Francisco will likely only make a failed city even more unlivable.