San Francisco has devolved from a town where people leave their cars empty and pleading notes taped on to avoid getting their windows smashed to a town where those people get their windows smashed regardless.
Over the weekend, some TikTok user posted a video of a small lot in San Francisco where every car had had at least one window smashed. Wall Street Silver called it “the sad state of San Francisco right now” due to “criminals targeting people with bags of valuables.”
The clip appears to be from some kind of repair lot, so maybe it isn’t that surprising to see so many broken windows. But watch the clip, and maybe you’ll see something arguably even worse going on than just an extremely busy auto glass repair shop.
This is the sad state of San Francisco right now.
🔊
Every car in this lot has its windows smashed due to criminals targeting people with bags of valuables 🚨🚨🚨
People in San Francisco have started leaving their windows and rear doors open so thieves can see there is nothing… pic.twitter.com/CfZaV1bdl6
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) August 19, 2023
I’ll get to the “arguably worse” part in just a moment.
It may be old news by now that San Francisco residents have taken to desperate measures like the ones below to avoid having their windows smashed, but there’s a bad-to-worse-to-awful element, as you’re about to see.
I parked my convertible on a downtown street in San Francisco, CA yesterday with the Top Down. Was only going to be in the building for 20 minutes. the car parked next to me had this note on it's window. Am I naive or is the other driver paranoid? pic.twitter.com/v4fCKTZYFA
— RMEDIA (@RMEDIA18) October 14, 2018
No, Mr. RMEDIA, the driver was not being paranoid. Notes like that one are just smart thinking in a city that last year endured more than 31,000 smash-and-grab incidents. According to the report, fewer than 2% were solved. Whether the perpetrators were actually punished is… well, no, let’s not be silly. Those poor youths just need another chance, amirite?
I looked it up, and there are about 460,000 cars and trucks registered in the city. That means about one out of every 15 were broken into in a single year.
What we’ve seen in San Francisco these last few years is the direct result of the city’s failure to conduct “broken windows policing,” like Rudy Giuliani and former police commissioner Bill Bratton brought to New York City in the ’90s.
The broken windows theory fell out of favor in the 2010s, and America’s Democrat-run cities have seen a resurgence in broken windows. Coincidence?
Here’s another broken one:
Classic San Francisco: taping a note over your already-broken window asking for everyone to leave the rest of your car alone, and STILL starting the request with “Please.” pic.twitter.com/goOwDaY3SK
— Ally Williams (@allykwilliams) June 15, 2020
“Please Don’t Brake [sic] the window There is nothing Inside”
It’s like leaving the door to your house wide open because there’s nothing left worth stealing inside and doors are expensive to replace.
This next note is both sad and angry, begging thieves to break into a car “that looks like they can afford it.”
San Francisco pic.twitter.com/MsUIKkF8cS
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) November 30, 2022
Note the date on that first tweet, please. It’s from 2018, just as San Francisco’s totally inexplicable (cough, cough) crime wave was just getting rolling. So-called “lifestyle crimes” like open-air drug abuse, public pooping, shoplifting, and smash-and-grab car burglaries were at first written off as just small prices to pay for the privilege of living in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
Now it isn’t so pretty any longer with homeless encampments — outdoor fentanyl bazaars, really — becoming a fact of life, even in the better parts of downtown. As reported previously here at PJ Media, major retailers are pulling out of the city, and that includes luxury stores on fabled Market Street.
What strikes me about today’s video, though, is this: It isn’t just thieves who have noticed. Watching the clip a second time, I couldn’t help but notice how many rear windows were smashed. Every other photo and video I’d seen before today showed broken side windows, as opportunistic thieves went for purses, backpacks, and stray smartphones left on seats.
At least to my eyes, those broken rear windows look more like the work of vandals breaking stuff because they want to — and because they know they’re unlikely to be caught and even less likely to be punished.
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