Mission Local is publishing a daily campaign dispatch for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Mark Farrell. Read earlier dispatches here.
By many measures, San Francisco is safer than it has been in a long time. Homicides, compared to historic trends, are low. As of last year, property crime is on the decline, as are burglary, larceny and arson.
But, for mayoral contender Mark Farrell, crime appears to be more about sentiment than data.
When asked about the city’s crime trends, Farrell disregarded the statistics. “Just ask anybody in the city if they feel safer,” he said. “Universally, across the board, in every single neighborhood, the answer I receive is ‘no.’”
Speaking by phone on Monday, Farrell touched on some of the top items on his agenda: Increasing police staffing, clearing homeless encampments, and replacing the police chief. All are measures to tackle his No. 1 campaign issue: Public safety.
“When I was in office before, public safety wasn’t much of a concern,” he said. Farrell served as supervisor from 2011 to 2018 and, briefly, as interim mayor in 2018, when San Franciscans were more concerned with gentrification and housing affordability than with crime and chaos. That, even though property crime was 12 percent higher in 2014 than it is now, and violent crime 25 percent higher.
Perhaps, suggested political consultant Eric Jaye, Farrell and his fellow officials simply did not make crime out to be an election wedge all those years ago.
Crime is down; fear of crime is going up, said Jaye. “That’s not an accident. It’s a political strategy.”
Acknowledging that crime is down is not to say that there are not legitimate public-safety concerns. Car break-ins, retail theft, drug markets — these are regular occurrences for San Franciscans.
But according to Jaye, playing into these is a strategy, and one that Farrell would not be the first to employ.
Mayor London Breed and her allies heightened fears around crime for political gain, as Jaye wrote last year in an op-ed for the San Francisco Examiner. This doom-loop narrative in the run-up to Chesa Boudin’s recall allowed Breed to eventually pick a new District Attorney.
However, it is a strategy that she appears to have abandoned. Breed has left the doom loop for the “enlightenment period,” as Mission Local noted in last week’s campaign dispatch.
As such, Breed has gone back to the books and started to rely on the numbers once more. They paint a positive picture of public safety under her watch.
Meanwhile, Farrell continues to use Breed’s former strategy — against her.
“It’s not the worst way to campaign,” said Jaye. But, he said, “it’s a terrible way to govern.”
Yes indeed. A terrible way to govern. Watching London Breed’s and Mark Farrell’s gross competition by touting, abusing, boasting, twisting and skewing their own “native” San Franciscan stories is puke worthy. Now, more than ever, our beloved San Francisco needs solutions and leaders who collaborate in problem solving. It’s equal parts heart breaking and infuriating that neither candidates Breed and Farrell don’t fathom this.
I feel sorry for those who are so easily fooled by Mark Farrell.
Supervisor Mark Farrell settles ethics fine for $25K, commissioner says he lacks ‘integrity’ | San Francisco News | sfexaminer.com
#1. Competency in running an organization.
Dear Mark Farrell, I’m sorry but you really haven’t offered anything to buttress your attitude of treating Tenderloin fentanyl dealers as the second coming of the Sinaloa drug cartel.
In the EU now, been in London, Madrid, Seville, Lisbon, Porto, as well as rural areas, few security guards at store doors, no tents, few folks living rough on the streets, no broken glass in parking lots, leave bags in rental car in Spain and Portugal, not a problem, buses metro subways, not seen one gate jumper, we’re older, people always offer a seat on mass transit. I love my hometown SF, but regardless of data, quality of life has really slipped.
So is this tough-on-crime Mark Farrell the same one who wrote a letter of support for domestic abuser Nate Ballard? https://twitter.com/sf_mills/status/1757430357056770184
Crime is down because we are finally cracking down on crime.
“disregarded the statistics”. He’s reading the room correctly. Things have been left to slide for far too long. Now it’s not as simple as pointing at the naked numbers. These days, we got small businesses having suffered through multiple burglaries. Being forced to close when insurance carriers drop their policies. Grocery stores and pharmacies with isles of merch locked away in cabinets. Press the button and wait. Let checkout know it’s your bottle of $30 wine they need to fetch from customer service. This is the reality people experience, and it wasn’t like this ten years ago, not five. As a result, your voter “sentiment” is in a place where we look at the data jockeys as sitting on our shoulders, peeing down our backs telling us it’s raining.
Such hysteria. Voting in a right-winger like Farrell will not solve the ever-expanding wealth disparity. Hire more cops, clog the legal system, and fill the jails with shoplifters? Data—your bogeyman—shows it has never worked, only backfired.
Anyway, this great city just isn’t the hellscape you guys bloviate about.
In this race we’re finding out who has low expectations and low standards for San Francisco. Boarded-up buildings on every major commercial corridor, people living in tents on major public thoroughfares, hundreds of ODs per year, atrocious downtown vacancy rates, stores that people depend on closing or locking up goods behind plastic barriers, it’s all fine to let fester while the board focuses on solving wealth disparities by ending capitalism and funneling money to unaccountable nonprofits.
We’ll find out in November whether that’s a winning political strategy!
@Chaz: You’re just blowing smoke up peoples’ skirts.
Here’s some more from the trenches – how about a virtual stroll around town and a look at the state of our local bike shops? Below at least the one’s I visited more recently: Elevation on Judah, closed earlier this year after break-ins and insurance drop. Was it Huckleberry, when they were on Market still, who paid tens of thousands out of their own pocket to stay open after break-ins? If you visited a Sports Basement over the last few years you’d see evidence of break-in attempts all the time. The location at Stonestown Mall has three windows boarded up as of today. Nomad on Irving, shop door boarded up for months after break-in attempt. One shop I won’t mention has the owner spooked to the point you won’t find anything in the shop window suggesting it’s even a bike shop and curtains drawn to block looks inside.
But, hey data! /s
The short-term statistics might have improved but broader quality of life hasn’t.
I agree with Farrell. Whether crime is up or down, it is still crime and it still matters. I want a mayor who understands this.
Literally no one is saying “crime doesn’t matter.”
You want your next mayor running a campaign based on a strawman apparently.