When San Francisco Mayor London Breed gave her state of the city speech yesterday, she said, “We can do it all and we don’t have to choose.” What she meant was that San Francisco can address the twin issues of poverty and crime at the same time—kind of like walking and chewing gum.
Let’s call it the hybrid model: cities can make financial investments in poor communities in the hope of deterring people from criminal activity, while simultaneously strengthening police departments, something Breed promised to do. This holy grail appears in Oakland, too, notably in moderates like Mayor Libby Schaaf, who have sought to increase the number of sworn officers in OPD while making major investments (usually with Federal and state money) in homelessness and programs geared toward the poor.
It’s only natural for politicians to make grandiose promises. That’s how they get elected, or re-elected (Breed will most likely run for re-election next year). Goals such as the hybrid model appeal to large swathes of the population, but they suffer from one huge problem: a lack of money. Breed is hardly alone among big-city mayors facing the twin challenges of poverty and police staffing levels. New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle, Portland and many others, including Oakland, are in the same situation. Clearly, if it was easy to achieve a hybrid model, other cities would already have done it. The fact that they haven’t shows that promises of “we can do it all” may be little more than rhetoric.
One thing that I wish mayors and other elected officials would do is emphasize the cultural factors involved in poverty and crime, especially the absence of purposeful parenting. It would be nice if, occasionally, mayors told some hard truths to the poor communities they’re trying to elevate. Yes, I refer to personal responsibility. I know it’s easy to come across as some kind of social Darwinist here, but what’s missing from this entire conversation about alleviating “the root causes of crime” is the part of the equation that’s hardest to talk about: the fact that a child is born into poverty doesn’t automatically doom that child to a life of crime. There have been plenty of people in America who immigrated here with nothing (my ancestors, for example) or who, through no fault of their own, struggled with the often-cruel inequities of a capitalist system. But most of those poor people never resorted to congenital lives of crime, the way we see so many people doing these days.
Until mayors like Breed can initiate these candid conversations, attempts at “doing it all” seem destined to fail.
Steve Heimoff