Fending For Ourselves
Human decency and an outright refusal to tolerate criminality is what made the difference.
I just finished reading a story published in the San Francisco Business Times. You can read it here, but you may find it behind a paywall. I’m going to try posting as much of it as I can here without breaking any ethical or legal rules, because it’s too important not to share.
The story was written by K. Cyrus Sanandaji, founder and managing director of Presidio Bay Ventures, a San Francisco-based commercial real estate development and investment firm. He’s a resident of the Marina District, an affluent, mostly-White area of the city that, in years past, had a reputation of being a safe place to live.
Not anymore. Stories like these have become far too common in the past few years all over San Francisco, in both good neighborhoods and bad:
Earlier this year, Sanandaji and his family became victims of San Francisco’s descent into squalor. The story in the San Francisco Business Times is his account of the incident and his prognosis for where the city is headed. It’s a harrowing must-read.
The incident occurs as follows:
On June 10, my wife and I prepared to leave for the airport with our 13-month-old son for a 2:20 p.m. international flight. We were excited to finally celebrate our wedding, long postponed by the Covid-19 pandemic. At 11:30 a.m., we staged our suitcases, stroller, baby car seat and diaper bag inside our front foyer, awaiting an Uber. A friend had come that morning to help with our son, and given the staggering rise in property crime, had agreed to check on our home in the Marina during our absence.
While my wife was upstairs with our baby, the friend and I stood in the foyer, about 6 feet from the front door. We turned to face the security alarm as I explained how to activate it. In the brief moment that our backs were turned, someone crept up to the house, opened the door, snatched my laptop bag and took off.
I didn’t realize my briefcase was missing until a few minutes later, when we started loading bags into the Uber. A frantic search ensued. The missing bag held our passports, my laptop, tablet and a stack of euros, divided in envelopes to pay various wedding vendors. Realizing my AirPods were also in the bag, I checked the Find My iPhone app. There was my briefcase, five blocks away at Fillmore and Chestnut.
“My bag has been stolen!” I said to the Uber driver, showing him the phone.
“Well, let’s go get it,” he replied.
What follows is a hot pursuit for his stolen belongings, with the help of the heroic Uber driver. It sounds like something out of a movie and, long story short, Sanandaji manages to get most of his belongings back, at the cost of a minor injury to himself and the thief’s escape. They caught up to him in the Tenderloin District, an area which always had a reputation of being one of the more dangerous parts of the city, but has become even more so recently:
After recovering his belongings, minus cash and an iPad, the police were called. What one of the officers said to Sanandaji, after the ordeal he went through, left me speechless:
When the police arrived, they were flabbergasted: “You got robbed in Marina and tracked the suspect to the Tenderloin, where you tackled him to get your stuff back?” One officer berated me for my foolishness: “Don’t you know how many people in the Tenderloin are armed?”
Once upon a time, the officer’s admonishment might’ve made sense. In a society with real peace and order, most certainly. However, given what was stolen, in no way can anyone blame Sanandaji for rightfully tracking down what belonged to him, whether we’re living in an orderly or disorderly world. I certainly would’ve done the same. While property isn’t worth your life, if citizens aren’t allowed to even attempt to recover what belongs to them, then the concept of property rights has no meaning. Had Sanandaji and his Uber driver not caught the thief when they did, it’s possible he would’ve lost more than just cash and an iPad, as his bag contained items far more valuable and irreplaceable.
For the officer to show so little empathy for Sanandaji is appalling. There’s a saying: When seconds count, police are minutes away. As a law enforcement officer, he should understand that reality better than anyone. More important, given the anarcho-tyranny and dysfunction of San Francisco, the police, who’ve proven wholly ineffective at protecting the public, are in no position to lecture anyone to stand idly by as crime ravages their city. If the authorities won’t handle a problem, someone else will. And they might do a better job.
Still, the story had something of a happy ending and Sanandaji notes the silver-lining, which is that total strangers came to his aid when he needed it the most, an assurance that despite all the talk of social decline, civil war, political polarization, etc., most of us would rather help each other to live in peace and safety:
If this story has a moral, it resides in the decency of the human spirit — the incredible Uber driver, police officer [a second officer not only displayed empathy for his ordeal, he gave him a lights-and-sirens drive to the airport] and United Airlines team — who showed kindness in a crisis and made sure we didn’t miss our international wedding with a 13-month old and another baby on the way.
However, Sanandaji harbors no illusions about the reality this shocking incident revealed about a place he’s called home for over a decade:
But this is also a story of how our institutions and leaders have failed San Franciscans.
San Francisco is at a tipping point, where public safety, the cleanliness of our streets and the overall quality of life have become the paramount concerns. We can no longer rest on our laurels, touting the beauty of the Golden Gate Bridge, our trendy restaurants, iconic cable cars, refined museums and Victorian painted ladies. Rose-colored spectacles and misplaced idealism no longer serve us. San Francisco is a troubled city with so much promise. But, like many, I am worried about its future.
Criminals scope out residential neighborhoods opportunistically in what the police call the “hot prowl.” They shoplift and smash-and-grab from retail stores with impunity. Our homeless encampments are a humanitarian disaster, rife with addiction, mental illness, open-air drug bazaars and trash. Between January 1 and July 17, assaults rose 12 percent, larceny theft 15%, and rape nearly 7%, while the homicide rate has remained constant, compared to the same period last year, according to the San Francisco Police Department Crime Dashboard.
I often speak of the media’s role in all this. Their coverage too often trends from total media blackout on reporting on crime to outright sympathizing with the criminal class. Sanandaji seems to share the view the media is a big part of the problem:
Within two weeks of our robbery, a man was shot and killed two blocks from our house. A few weeks after that, thieves held up a prominent business leader near his front doorstep. San Francisco media is notorious for not reporting these types of incidents. This keeps everyone in the dark — in terms of the trends in crime and the aftermath. Citizens don’t know what’s happening nor how successful our police and prosecutors are at solving crimes and sentencing perpetrators.
He moves to acknowledging the political divide as a major impediment towards resolving these issues, describing the country as increasingly under the influence of two radical camps: “Wokeistan” on the Left and “MAGAstan” on the Right, to use Eric Weinstein’s terminology:
Addressing the quality of life crisis in San Francisco will require more open and honest conversations about the root causes of our frustrations. The political discourse has become so divisive and polarized we can’t seem to find common ground on what constitutes common sense. The rise of the extreme right represented by the MAGA movement was matched by an equally radical movement on the far left represented by the so-called “woke” progressives, perhaps as a counter reaction, or in response, to the same social, political, economic, racial provocations. Fundamentally, this is reflective of a broader loss or active abandonment of basic reason and rational thought. The left has abandoned the basic principles of mathematics while the right has renounced scientific principles. These are facts, not opinions — yet we're distorting reality to advance ideological (and religious) dogma at the cost of pragmatic progress.
I want to address the points Sanandaji makes here. I agree that both Wokeism and MAGA, increasingly, represent influential radicalism which increases the likelihood of the emergence of authoritarianism in our future. However, it is MAGA, not Wokeism, that’s the counter-reaction. Wokeism is a movement which predates MAGA by decades, having been known by other names, including cultural Marxism. As such, it was Wokeism that was matched by MAGA, not the reverse. This seems like a trivial detail, but it’s not.
Whatever MAGA’s issues and there are a few, the movement did sense, accurately, that even as crime hit historic lows in the years leading up to Donald Trump’s emergence as presidential candidate, the rule of law was unraveling and a sea change was coming with respect to how our politics and society viewed crime and disorder. The fall of crime in America wasn’t the result of arresting and incarcerating fewer criminals, nor was it the result of putting more social workers on the streets over cops. As crime declined, so did the country’s attitude towards criminal justice and policing. We’re seeing the results of that today.
More:
Between the radical fringe on the right and left is a vast, silent, fed-up majority, who feel further and further alienated from a broken system. This majority wants rational, moderate, and pragmatic compromise. They want policies that pursue criminal justice and social welfare reform but also uphold the law and public safety. Instead, we saw a Board of Education obsessed with an agenda to rename schools and the former District Attorney Chesa Boudin running a social experiment at the expense of our entire community. Both were recalled. The voters have made it crystal clear: It’s time for common-sense governance.
The last few years have seen the emergence of what I like to call the “pro-civilization” faction, to borrow a term used by Michael Shellenberger. This camp includes people like Shellenberger himself, a candidate for California governor earlier in the year and an energy and environment scholar, Eric Weinstein, also a scholar, and emerging voices like Michelle Tandler, an entrepreneur. All three are residents of California and Shellenberger and Tandler call the San Francisco Bay Area home. Like most people of the region and state and of their social class, they are not conservatives nor right-wingers. Many of them are Democrats and would describe their politics as liberal, though there are certainly many conservatives and right-wingers in this group.
What brings them together isn’t just shared opposition to Woke leftist politics. It’s also an agreement that the country that’s been handed down to us deserves to be preserved and defended, along with the belief that civilization exists for a reason and that imperfect civilization is preferable to perfect anarchy and barbarism. In some ways, they are the real “conservatives.” We live in a time of a great unraveling, induced by a radical left-wing regime in Washington and throughout the entire American power structure and, regardless of their political leanings, the pro-civilizationalists want to stop it from happening.
As much as I admire this group, I have to admit I’m quite cynical about how much influence they ultimately have. Nor am I confident they truly represent the “silent majority” as described by Sanandaji. I certainly hope he’s right. But my faith is low. Still, it’s good to know there are some people like that out there still, even if their numbers are ultimately insignificant. What matters is that they’re speaking up, refusing to remain silent as civilization becomes increasingly dysfunctional and unstable.
Sanandaji concludes on an upbeat note:
But my story is a microcosm of what’s possible: The power of ordinary, kind, decent people to overcome adversity: Navruz Yuldashev, an Uber driver; Vinesh Govindbhai, a police officer; and a handful of United ticketing agents saved my wedding. I’m eternally grateful. By coming together and embracing both common sense and our power to vote, I believe San Franciscans can restore our social contract.
It’s easy to say, “Silly Californians, getting what they deserve.” I get the sentiment. But when they do wake up to reality and start calling for change, it ought to be taken seriously. The ousting of pro-crime prosecutor Chesa Boudin earlier this year alone proves that yes, backlashes still happen. As hard as they tried to blame it on the Right, we all know the Bay Area, especially San Francisco, is a left-wing monolith. These weren’t Republicans who got fed up with the crime and disorder.
Some readers might also say, “He’s wealthy and privileged, who cares what he thinks?” That’s exactly the point: as someone who’s likely liberal, lives in one of the most progressive cities in the country, and is in the upper-class, Sanandaji is exactly who should be speaking up! We once complained about how the elites are out of touch with Middle Americans. If that’s true and it is, we should see it as a good thing when they agree with us about the problems in this country. The unfortunate fact is, it’s only people in positions of power and influence who ultimately force change in this country. Instead of chastising them for being late to the show, we should encourage them to continue speaking out, if only to prevent the Regime from gaslighting the public and chalking up concerns about crime to “right-wing fear-mongering.”
Regardless of our political differences, the only effective counter to anarcho-tyranny is through the building of resilient communities all over full of people who agree, if on nothing else, the importance of public order and safety. The only reason why Sanandaji’s story had a happy ending is because so many people, including a police officer, came to his aid. There’s no way he could’ve done it all on his own, no matter how hard he tried. He may have ended up in more serious trouble at great personal cost. Human decency and an outright refusal to tolerate criminality is what made the difference. Imagine if we applied the principle to the entire country? The forces of anarcho-tyranny would have no answer for it.
If we’re truly on our own, it’s time we start acting like it. This means we have to put skin in the game. Relying on the authorities, the professionals, is no alternative, as they’ve proven unable and unwilling to preserve public order. We can either choose to be victimized or we can choose to fight back. If you’re afraid of fighting back because of the risk you’d be exposed to, just remember: at some point in the near future, you may not have a choice. The crime situation in this country will not get better any time soon.
As always, be prudent and reasonable. This is hardly a call to take unreasonable chances with your life. It’s just a reminder that things won’t get better on their own and that nobody’s coming to save you. None of this will save the country, but it might save you, your family, and your community and allow you to weather the coming storm.
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentLoyalist.
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