Democrats tearing themselves apart as crime rates spiral

It was when a man was shot outside her corner shop three weeks ago that Chrissy Thomas finally snapped.

Her 16-year-old daughter had left just minutes before, after popping in to say hello on the way back from school.

“I can’t let her live in an environment like this,” she said, from behind a plexiglass screen, as a homeless man knocked over a display of crisps and another lit up a crack pipe and started smoking outside.

“We have to see a change. It’s a free-for-all out there.”

Last week, she took action, joining more than 120,000 San Franciscans who went to the polls to oust a district attorney they felt was too soft and had let this Democrat-run and famously liberal city slide too far to the left.

But the dismissal of Chesa Boudin, a member of the Democrat party, speaks to a wider trend in major cities across the country - people such as Ms Thomas do not think Joe Biden’s party is doing enough to tackle crime. 

“Boudin’s recall proves Democrats have lost the public’s trust on crime,” a Washington Post op-ed declared last week.

But the party is struggling to find a cohesive response, with socialist and moderate wings bitterly opposed about the best way to tackle the issue in a year when they face being heavily punished at the ballot box during key mid-term elections. 

In April, the pollster Gallup found concern over crime was at its highest level since 2016, with 53 per cent of Americans saying they worried "a great deal" about it. An ABC/Washington Post poll in May showed Americans trusted the Republican Party over the Democrats to handle crime by 12 percentage points.

In San Francisco, Mr Boudin was elected district attorney in 2019 with a pledge to send fewer people to jail and increase referrals for treatment instead.

What the city ended up with was a spiralling crime rate and a population fearful for their safety. 

Ms Thomas points to the streets where you can see human faeces on the pavement and needles in the gutter.

It feels a long way from the Golden Gate Bridge, the historic trams and the pioneering tech hubs which San Francisco is famous for, though they are all within walking distance.

“We get robbed three times a day, at least. I had to stop someone stealing a pack of beer just before you arrived,” Ms Thomas said, shoulders slumped. “This is a residential area. We pay a lot of money to live here and we’re getting no support. He (Mr Boudin) went too far, and he paid the price.”

San Francisco is an important bellwether city for the political left in America.

It was here that Kamala Harris, the vice-president, served as district attorney between 2004 and 2010. It was also where Gavin Newsom, the California governor, was mayor between 2004 and 2011. The city is represented on a national stage by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives.

Mr Boudin was to the left of all of them. But his attempts to make the city safer have, by a number of metrics, failed. Murders have increased in the last two years, burglaries are up more than 45 per cent and car break-ins are up by 32 per cent in 2022.

More people died in San Francisco last year from fentanyl overdoses than Covid-19, yet Mr Boudin did not convict a single person in 2021 for dealing the lethal opioid.

Walking along the streets of Tenderloin, near the city hall, hundreds of people are living rough - black, white, men, women, young and old.

Preliminary data from an official count found in May found that about 7,750 people are homeless in San Francisco, though other agencies say the number could be double that.

A recent poll in the San Francisco Examiner found that 66 per cent of voters felt less safe than they did 10 years ago, with 64 per cent indicating the presence of homeless and mentally ill people on the street as their top concern.

New York is another major city facing a crime wave that Democrats are struggling to manage, due to factional divides.

In 2020, the number of shootings there more than doubled to 1,531 from the previous year, then climbed again to 1,562 in 2021 - the highest figure in 15 years.

Eric Adams, the newly-elected Democrat mayor, put the issue at the top of his priority list. However, his "tough on crime" stance has been met with disapproval from the far left of his party.

Mr Adams has revived a controversial plain clothes anti-crime unit which was shut down in 2020 after being involved in a “disproportionate” number of shootings and complaints by the public.

The unit made stop and search a key pillar of its operations, but its resurrection has been criticised by a number of left-wing lawyers and lawmakers, who have lamented the “focus on discredited punitive and surveillance-based strategies.”

Now a proxy war is underway between the socialist wing of the party and the moderates in the upcoming state assembly elections.

Mr Adams has lent his support to longstanding incumbents Inez Dickens, in Harlem, and Michael Benedetto, in the Bronx.

But the two are facing stiff opposition from candidates backed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a left-wing firebrand and a congresswoman with a significant national profile.

She has endorsed housing activist Delsenia Glover in the 70th Assembly District against Ms Dickens, while Jonathan Soto, her former staffer, will contest the 82nd district against Mr Benedetto.

The political posturing played out at the Met Gala, where last year Ms Ocasio Cortez wore a white dress emblazoned with "tax the rich", while at this year’s event, Mr Adams had a jacket that said "end gun violence".

Critics say the Democrat party is being ripped apart from the inside.

“AOC is with my opponent. They support the same things like defunding the police,” said Mr Benedetto.

“Mayor Adams is making a statement that he wants level-headed Democrats to move New York City ahead. I share the same values as Mayor Adams. We want good education and safe streets,” he added.

“We are Democrats. We are not socialists,” Ms Dickens said emphatically at a recent rally. “AOC and the socialists are trying to take over New York.”

Back in San Francisco, Lonnie Webster, who works for a non-profit organisation called Urban Alchemy that employs a number of former homeless people and prisoners, gave a long sigh as he watched yet another man start puffing on a crack pipe.

“These radical policies might sound like a good idea, but in practice, look at it - they don’t work. I’m from Oklahoma, a Republican state. This wouldn’t be happening there.”