Violence In California Reaches "Epidemic" Levels As Our Society Rapidly Deteriorates All Around Us

[Addict2sex]

Violence In California Reaches "Epidemic" Levels As Our Society Rapidly Deteriorates All Around Us


Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

I can’t understand why anyone would still want to live in California. Yes, there are lots of high paying jobs and the weather is very nice, but crime is completely and utterly out of control. As you will see below, a new report that has just been issued is warning that violence in the state has now reached “epidemic” levels. The police are doing what they can to try to contain the violence, but at this point they are vastly outnumbered by the predators. Sadly, this is the end result of literally decades of cultural rot, and what is happening in California is going to happen to the rest of the nation if we do not take urgent action to turn things around.



Originally, I was going to write about something else today. Tens of thousands of rail and port workers were threatening to go on strike, and this could definitely cause some substantial economic disruptions…

America is bracing for chaos as tens of thousands of railway, port, and hospital workers look set to strike over the winter – plunging the country into further disruption.
As many as 60,000 railway workers, 15,000 nurses, and 22,000 West Coast port workers are plotting mass walkouts as they seek better working conditions.
Several US freight railroads said they were preparing for widespread strike and service interruptions Friday, a deadline set by two holdout labor groups in protracted talks with railroad carriers about better benefits.

But even though these strikes could cause severe short-term problems, they will eventually be resolved.

And were resolved right before the strike was set to take place]

So in the greater scheme of things, they really aren’t a major concern.

On the other hand, our cultural decay is a massive ongoing crisis that isn’t going to go away.

As I mentioned earlier, a brand new report that was just released is warning that violence in the state of California has risen to “epidemic” levels…

The Golden State is losing its luster. A troubling new report labels physical and sexual violence in pandemic-era California a statewide “epidemic.” To put it simply, violence is on an alarming rise.
According to the new annual report from the California Study on Violence Experiences across the Lifespan (CalVEX), violence statistics have seen a significant increase since COVID-19 emerged. The report, conducted by scientists at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, reports more than one in six Californians (18%) experienced either physical or sexual violence in just the past year.

If you live in one of the biggest cities in California, this isn’t news to you.

Once upon a time, the state was a place of great beauty and great tranquility, but now it has been transformed into a crime-infested hellhole.

I was particularly alarmed by the numbers on sexual violence in this new report…

While more than 1.5 million adults in California admit to committing acts of sexual violence in the past year, men were more than two times as likely as women to report that they perpetrated sexual violence and intimate partner violence.
Women also showed greater mental health impacts and life disruptions due to violent experiences, with 82 percent of women reporting anxiety or depression as a result of physically aggressive, coercive or forced sexual behavior.

Of course much of this violence is being fueled by illegal mind-altering drugs.


I will never understand why people would willingly do that to themselves.

Today, we are facing the biggest drug crisis that we have ever seen in American history, and addicts will often do whatever it takes to get another fix.

Sadly, this is one of the factors that is contributing to skyrocketing rates of shoplifting all over the nation…

We are all painfully aware of the huge rise in shoplifting and even violent robberies of stores. We watch the videos of thugs brazenly raiding stores, and read about the organized crime rings that have sprung up to profit from the trend. Shoplifting has become a big, if criminal business. Chances are that if you use eBay to purchase a wide range of products at reduced prices you have unwittingly purchased stolen goods. No good way for eBay to stop the practice.

One homeless man that originally came from Alabama recently admitted that he regularly shoplifts in order to fund his heroin use…



Some of these drugs are so immensely powerful that they literally put people into catatonic states for an extended period of time…

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1569726738355339266

I will never understand why people would willingly do that to themselves.

Today, we are facing the biggest drug crisis that we have ever seen in American history, and addicts will often do whatever it takes to get another fix.

Sadly, this is one of the factors that is contributing to skyrocketing rates of shoplifting all over the nation…

We are all painfully aware of the huge rise in shoplifting and even violent robberies of stores. We watch the videos of thugs brazenly raiding stores, and read about the organized crime rings that have sprung up to profit from the trend. Shoplifting has become a big, if criminal business. Chances are that if you use eBay to purchase a wide range of products at reduced prices you have unwittingly purchased stolen goods. No good way for eBay to stop the practice.

One homeless man that originally came from Alabama recently admitted that he regularly shoplifts in order to fund his heroin use…

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1490130669875253250

There have been homeless addicts in the streets of San Francisco for years, but now we have reached a point where they are seemingly everywhere.

The following is what one reporter witnessed during a recent journey through the city…

I saw complete hopelessness in the eyes of haunted souls dragging themselves down the street looking for their next fix.
I saw men and women of all ages hunched over on the sidewalks with open wounds all over their bodies.
I saw the filthy tent cities stinking with human excrement and strewn with needles and pipes.
I saw children staring in horror at people dying right in front of them.

At one time, such activity was limited to the bad portions of the city.

But now addicts that have been drugged out of their minds are pulling down their pants and crapping in the streets right in front of some of the most expensive real estate in San Francisco.

This has made the wealthy people really angry, and Mayor Breed says that she is finally going to “get serious” about this crisis.

Of course “getting serious” doesn’t mean arresting a bunch of people and throwing them into prison.

That just wouldn’t be very “progressive”.

Instead, authorities in San Francisco are getting ready to launch a “soft-touch” program that will seek to “interrupt” drug trafficking…

City supervisors released a resolution for a vague ‘soft-touch’ initiative called ‘San Francisco Recovers.’
And here’s the catch, and it’s a doozy: the plan is being touted as, ‘a way that nobody’s going to jail but we’re doing an effective job of interrupting the drug market and drug scenes.’
Is this a sick joke?

Yes, it certainly sounds like a sick joke to me.

Good luck with all that.

If major cities such as San Francisco actually want to have a chance of turning things around, they need to send the police out to round up all the drug dealers.

Unfortunately, police forces in many of our biggest cities are rapidly getting smaller.

In fact, a whopping 122 officers have left the Seattle Police Department in 2022 alone…

The liberal city of Seattle is losing police officers amid a major spike in crime, 770 KTTH reported.
“We’re screwed,” former King County Sheriff John Urqhart said, according to 770 KTTH.
In total, 122 officers have left the Seattle Police Department in 2022, including six that left in August, 770 KTTH reported, citing a police source. Since the city council voted to defund the police department in 2020, nearly 500 police officers have left the force.

I wouldn’t want to be a police officer in a major west coast city at this point either.

They are underpaid, the politicians treat them with tremendous disdain, and they are often hindered by absolutely ridiculous regulations which keep them from doing their jobs effectively.

We like to think that we are so “advanced”, but the truth is that if you compare video footage from major cities on the west coast from decades ago to video footage from today there is absolutely no comparison.

Our society is melting down right in front of our eyes, and if we stay on the path that we are currently on there is no future for our country.

But the politicians insist that people like me have it all wrong.

They continue to tell us that things are better than ever and that a glorious future for our nation is dead ahead.

You can believe that if you want, but the truth of what is really happening to our society is on display for the whole world to see.

America is dying, and we are quickly running out of time to turn things around.

* * *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

 

[jcpro]

We are accepting this kind of behavior as normal. 25-30 years ago we did not. Are we better off now?

 

[NotADcotor]

Aside from one link to an actual newspaper, the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. not a single link is from a real news source and the one that is, is foreign and a bit tangential to the main point or for the other link, anecdotal evidence.

I am sure you could or whoever you copies and pasted this from could have used actual citations.

Well fine. I have it on good authority that the OP has sex with ducks, yeah ducks, they do it in the rain, ducks, yeah ducks, their web feet drive him insane.

There. Citation.

 

[Addict2sex]

San Francisco Homeless Insider Tells All

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

Why progressives defend and finance open drug scenes...

In my new book, San Fransicko, I describe why progressives create and defend what European researchers call “open drug scenes,” which are places in cities where drug dealers and buyers meet, and many addicts live in tents. Progressives call these scenes “homeless encampments,” and not only defend them but have encouraged their growth, which is why the homeless population in California grew 31 percent since 2000. This was mostly a West Coast phenomenon until recently. But now, the newly elected progressive mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu, has decided to keep open a drug scene at Mass and Cass avenues, even though it has resulted in several deaths from drug overdoses and homicides.

Progressives defend their approach as compassionate. Not everybody who is homeless is an addict, they say. Many are just down on their luck. Others turn to drugs after living on the street. What they need is our help. We should not ask people living in homeless encampments to go somewhere else. Homeless shelters are often more dangerous than living on the street. We should provide the people living in tents with money, food, clean needles, and whatever else they need to stay alive and comfortable. And we should provide everyone with their own apartment unit if that’s what they want.

But this “harm reduction” approach is obviously failing. Cities already do a good job taking care of temporarily homeless people not addicted to drugs. Drug dealers stab and sometimes murder addicts who don’t pay. Women forced into prostitution to support their addictions are raped. Addicts are dying from overdose and poisoning. The addicts living in the open drug scenes commit many crimes including open drug use, sleeping on sidewalks, and defecating in public. Many steal to maintain their habits. The hands-off approach has meant that addicts do not spend any amount of time in jail or hospital where they can be off of drugs, and seek recovery.

Now, even a growing number of people who have worked or still work within the homeless services sector are speaking out. A longtime San Francisco homeless service provider who read San Fransicko, and said they mostly agreed with it, reached out to me to share their views. At first this person said they wanted to speak on the record. But as the interview went on, and the person criticized their colleagues, they asked to remain anonymous, fearing retribution.

Why “Housing First” Failed



The main progressive approach for addressing homelessness, not just in San Francisco but in progressive cities around the nation, is “Housing First,” which is the notion that taxpayers should give, no questions asked, apartment units to anyone who says they are homeless, and asks for one. What actually works to reduce the addiction that forces many people onto the streets is making housing contingent on abstinence. But Housing First advocates oppose “contingency management,” as it’s called, because, they say, “Housing is a right,” and it should not be condition on behavior change.

But such a policy is absurdly unrealistic, said the San Francisco homeless expert. “To pretend that this city could build enough permanent supportive housing for every homeless person who needs it is ludicrous,” the person said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I lived in a land where there was plenty of housing. But now people are dying on our streets and it feels like we’re not doing very much about it.”

The underlying problem with Housing First is that it enables addiction. “The National Academies of Sciences review [which showed that giving people apartments did not improve health or other life outcomes] you cited shows that. San Francisco has more permanent supportive housing units per capita than any other city, and we doubled spending on homelessness, but the homeless population rose 13%, even as it went down in the US. And so we doubled our spending and the problem got worse. But if you say that, you get attacked.”

How did progressives, who claim to be evidence-based, ever get so committed to Housing First? “Malcolm Gladwell’s [2006 New Yorker article] “Million Dollar Murray,” really helped popularize this idea,” the person said. “But it was based on an anecdote of one person. It works for who it works for but is not scalable. [Governor] Gavin [Newsom] made a mistake [as San Francisco’s Mayor 2004-2011] which was that we stopped investing in shelter. But that’s because all the best minds were saying, ‘This is what’s going to work.’”

One of the claims made defenders of the open drug scenes is that people who live in them are mostly locals who were priced out of their homes and apartments and decided to pitch a tent on the street. In San Fransicko, I cite a significant body of evidence to show that this is false, and that many people come to San Francisco from around the U.S. for the city’s unusually high cash welfare benefits, free housing, and tolerance of open drug scenes.

The insider agreed. “People come here because they think they can. It’s bullshit that ‘Only 30 percent [of homeless] are from out of town.’ At least 20,000 homeless people come through town every year. Talk to the people on the street. There’s no way 70 percent of the homeless are from here. Ask them the name of their high school and they guess, ‘Washington? The one around the corner?’ But you can’t even talk about that without being called a fascist.”




The people living on the street suffer from serious addiction, this person said. “During the first point in time count [census of homeless population] in 2007, one-third had a disability, mental illness, or addiction, while last time, it was over two-thirds. The population fundamentally changed, whether from the drugs, or the time on the street. It doesn’t matter because a lot of the problems on the street are drugs-related. Neither San Francisco nor any other municipality can solve the housing policy without changing federal policy.”

Life in the open drug scenes is brutal, this person confirmed. “Most homeless encampments are not communities but have paper-thin relationships based on their disease. It’s hard to have healthy relationships when you’re just trying to keep your head above water because you’re so dope dependent.”

What San Francisco and other progressive cities are doing isn’t working. “People in those encampments have food brought to them, port-a-potties brought to them, and all they need to do is put drugs in their arm all day. They get really really sick and they die. Portugal didn’t make it so you can do whatever you want. The consequences of your action are treatment driven, but there are consequences. Here there are no consequences. And so we make it worse.”

This person was harshly critical of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health for allowing drug overdoses to rise to over 700 per year. “They say, ‘It’s not our fault because it’s fentanyl.” But it’s only gotten worse.”

This person stressed they were in favor of harm reduction policies like giving addicts clean needles in exchange for them giving back dirty ones, but not just giving out needles. “I’m all in favor of needle exchange, but not of needle distribution. Ask people to return the needles they’ve been given. There are people who don’t have it together enough. I get that. But when you tell people we’re going to give you whatever you want, to do whatever you want… Sleeping on a sidewalk is a crime. There are things you can’t do. You can’t shoot up on the street. The laws are there for a reason.”

Why Progressives Create Homelessness

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1420091422745661443

Open drug scenes look like natural disasters, but they are the result of specific city policies. These policies including giving money, food, and drug paraphernalia to addicts to support their addiction. But even if progressives didn’t give people those things, many addicts would still live in open drug scenes. As such, the main reason “homelessness” is so much worse in progressive West Coast cities is because progressives hotly oppose efforts by cities to close the open drug scenes and move addicts into shelters and rehab.

By blocking the closing of open drug scenes, which is referred to as “clearing an encampment,” people in need of help don’t get it. “The San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness recently [July 2021] protested an encampment clearing where a woman was pregnant,” the insider told me. “As soon as everybody left, the woman went into a shelter, after having been on the streets for three months. She went indoors. It’s like, ‘What are you fighting for? The right of this person to stay on private property and be pregnant?’”

One of the questions I tried to answer in San Fransicko was when it was that street addicts started living in tents. I concluded that it started with the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in 2011, when progressive activists in San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities lived in tents in front of government buildings to protest capitalism. This person confirmed this account. “You’re right that the tents popped up after Occupy,” they said. “But it wasn’t just that the Occupy activists gave the homeless their tents. It was that the homeless saw well-heeled whites sleeping in tents. It got moralized.”

The most influential homeless advocate in San Francisco, and perhaps the United States as a whole, is the head of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, Jennifer Friedenbach. Over the last three decades, Friedenbach has taken control over San Francisco’s homelessness budget and other policies. She blocks the closure of open drug scenes, calls people who disagree with her fascists and racists, and organizes protests at the homes of politicians.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1394690712264843266

A typical example of Friedenbach’s tactics could be seen in posters she promoted in May. The headline read, “See a tent? Just fucking leave it alone, thanks. Maybe instead of complaining about a homeless person’s only shelter from the elements, you could do something about the economic conditions that put them there in the first place?”

The main reason San Francisco lacks sufficient homeless shelters is because Friedenbach and other Housing First advocates have long opposed them. They have demanded that money go to providing people with their own apartment units. The reason, Friedenbach explained to me, is that “if you ask unhoused people, they’re not screaming for shelter. They’re screaming for housing.”

In the spring of 2021, Friedenbach published an op-ed opposing a proposal considered by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to create, within eighteen months, sufficient homeless shelters and outdoor “Safe Sleeping Sites” for all of the city’s unsheltered homeless. “One can simply take a look to New York City,” she wrote. “Their department spends about $1.3 billion dollars of its budget on providing shelter for their unhoused population while thousands remain on the street. . . . As a result, New York has a higher rate of homelessness than San Francisco.”

But the claim was misleading. New York shelters the vast majority of its homeless, whereas San Francisco leaves the vast majority of its homeless unsheltered. “New York [City] has made the decision that everyone should have an exit from the street,” noted Rafael Mandelman, a San Francisco county supervisor. “San Francisco has consciously chosen not to make that commitment. And the conditions on New York’s streets versus San Francisco streets are somewhat reflective of what that means.”




Friedenbach controls how San Francisco spends its astonishing $850 million annual budget. “Jenny built her power base by becoming a master of the budget’s “add back” process,” said the San Francisco insider. “The night before the budget is announced, it gets reviewed by the Board of Supervisors, but they’re trying to get out of there by midnight, and that’s when these ‘community asks.’ The board goes and trims stuff out of the mayor’s budget and does “add backs'' of money for struggling nonprofits. Jenny has mastered that process. And so if you’re a nonprofit executive director, and you want money in the add back process, which everyone does, you have to go through Jenny.”

This person said that Friedenbach also operates behind the scenes. “She controls fake front groups like the Homeless Service Providers’ Coalition and the Justice Budget Coalition,” said the insider. “She knows the issue well. A lot of people look to her.”

But more importantly, Friedenbach, like many progressive defenders of open drug scenes, demonize the people who stand up to her. “They shut down the discussion,” the insider said. “Everybody is just like, ‘Police bad. Public health good.’ It’s Animal Farm. But the city’s homeless outreach team can’t do their jobs without the cops. That’s the stuff that shuts down any meaningful discussion.”

Why do they do it? Radical anti-system ideology. “There’s a San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness hat which says, ‘Coalition on Homelessness: On The Frontlines of Class Warfare,’” said the insider. “They feel like they’re fighting class warfare. They tell people to not take shelter.”

I documented in San Fransicko that Friedenbach and other homeless advocates are motivated in significant measure by their belief that capitalism, not addiction, is responsible for the suffering on the streets. After I appeared on Joe Rogan, a clinical psychologist who for two decades ran programs for homeless veterans at the San Francisco Veterans Administration Medical Center, which included homeless vets, emailed me.

“I agree with all you say about the ‘homeless’ people who are actually mislabeled mentally ill and drug addicts,” wrote Dr. Mark Zaslav. “I like your comparison of the ‘ideology’ of people who “advocate” for the homeless to a religion gone haywire. But I wanted, as a psychologist, to add another point for your consideration. This is the fact that this leftwing religion is based on split-off hatred and contempt for civilization itself. When I attended substance abuse conferences in San Francisco run by community leaders, it became clear to me that these people had no understanding of mental health disorders like addiction – they regarded “homeless” addicts as heroes of some kind.

“Thus, each drug addict defecating on the streets in the Tenderloin was a massive middle finger to some imagined white male with a briefcase. The premise of your solutions, which make so much sense, assume that adherents to the now reigning ideology want things solved. They do not. They want people inconvenienced by addicts – the homeless become quote literal scared cows who roam society reminding everyone of the sins of capitalism.

“You mentioned Noam Chomsky. These people are angry and full of hate. They have tapped into a form of blindness among the voters of places like San Francisco or California itself – these are angry people endlessly telling themselves they are compassionate while projecting their hatred toward the ‘bourgeoise.’ I am afraid this does not end well. “

The San Francisco homelessness insider agreed, and despaired over the religious fervor in which the people who work at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, the San Francisco Public Health Department, and many elected members of the Board of Supervisors are gripped. “Maybe homelessness is part of capitalism and racism,” said this person. “I can’t solve that and neither can any nonprofit organization. I can’t stand seeing people suffering on the streets. What are we going to do right now?”

 

[Addict2sex]

.The Criminal Order Beneath The 'Chaos' Of San Francisco's Tenderloin


Authored by Leighton Woodhouse via RealClearInvestigations,

The epicenter of the political earthquakes rattling San Francisco’s progressive establishment is a 30-square-block neighborhood in the center of downtown known as the Tenderloin.


Adjacent to some of the city’s most famous attractions, including the high-end shopping district Union Square, the old money redoubt of Nob Hill, historic Chinatown, and the city’s gold-capped City Hall, it is home to a giant, open-air drug bazaar. Tents fill the sidewalks. Addicts sit on curbs and lean against walls, nodding off to their fentanyl and heroin fixes, or wander around in meth-induced psychotic states. Drug dealers stake out their turf and sell in broad daylight, while the immigrant families in the five-story, pre-war apartment buildings shepherd their kids to school, trying to maintain as normal an existence as they can.

“If you happen to be walking through the Tenderloin and you feel unsafe, imagine what it feels like to live there,” said Joel Engardio, head of Stop Crime SF, a civilian public safety group. “The Tenderloin has one of the largest percentages of children in the city. It’s untenable, inexcusable to ask them to confront this hellscape.”

“The Tenderloin is out of control,” said Tom Ostly, a former San Francisco prosecutor who used to work there and lives nearby. “It has never been worse than it is now.”

Nancy Tung, a prosecutor who once handled drug enforcement in San Francisco, called it “ground zero for human misery.” Kathy Looper, who has run a low-income, single resident occupancy hotel in the Tenderloin for more than 45 years, said, “It feels like we’re in Gotham,” adding that she once considered putting a spotlight on her hotel roof and projecting a Batman signal into the sky.

The crime and disorder of the Tenderloin may appear to be symptoms of deep and mysterious sociological forces. Chesa Boudin, who was ousted last week as San Francisco’s district attorney because of his lenient policies, argued, “We can’t arrest and prosecute our way out of the problems that are afflicting the Tenderloin.”

But there is a fairly straightforward kind of order beneath the chaos: an illicit market economy operating in plain sight. The Tenderloin is home to two sprawling, overlapping transnational organized crime networks – one centered on drugs and the other on theft – which thrive in that neighborhood because of the near-total absence of the enforcement of laws.



Crowded onto its street corners and inside the tents congesting the sidewalk, countless petty criminals play their roles in a structured and symbiotic criminal enterprise. Its denizens fall into four main groups: the boosters, typically homeless and addicted, who steal from local stores; the street fences who buy the stolen merchandise; the dealers who sell them drugs for the money they make from the fences; and, at the top of the stack, the drug cartel that supplies the dealers and the wholesale fences that resell the goods acquired by street fences. Each has a role to play in keeping the machine moving, and the police know exactly how to disrupt it.

Experts say the city could, in fact, arrest and prosecute its way out of most of the problems in the Tenderloin if it chose to. It thrives, instead, as a zone of lawless sovereignty in the heart of a major American city – the criminal version of the area commanded by Seattle anarchists in the so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, in 2020. Where those extra-legal districts were eventually dismantled, the Tenderloin’s structure is entrenched.



The following portrait of the Tenderloin crime syndicate is based on dozens of conversations with law enforcement officers, prosecutors, recovering street addicts, parents of addicts, and community activists over many months, as well as direct observation of the area.

“Everyone knows what’s going on. The cops, mayor, and D.A.,” said Tom Wolf, a recovering addict. “Everyone knows it's organized and cartel-backed. They just don't think it's worth it to stop it, because nothing’s going to change anyway. They've surrendered.”




The Dealers
The drug pushers are easy to spot: Unlike the users, they look healthy and wear clean clothes. They’re almost universally young men, mostly Honduran (on the streets of San Francisco they’re called “Hondos”). You see them standing on street corners on every block in the Tenderloin selling pills out of prescription drug bottles and white and colored powders out of plastic sandwich bags – fentanyl, meth, heroin, cocaine.

The dealers stand in packs of eight to ten on a corner, in their jeans and hoodies, with their stashes in their backpacks. According to both drug enforcement authorities and recovering addicts, each works for a different supplier and each supplier leads back to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel. They compete for customers, but they also look out for each other: If someone tries to rob one of them, Wolf explained, they all jump in to defend him. Dealers have their assigned corners – like Turk and Hyde, across the street from a playground, or Golden Gate and Hyde, or United Nations Plaza. They mostly live in apartments on East Oakland’s International Boulevard, according to Ostly, and take the BART train to the Civic Center station each morning with the other commuters. Both civilians and police officers have observed them splitting up bindles of drugs and divvying up cash in plain view of commuters on the BART trains.

During his tenure, Chesa Boudin resisted calls to prosecute these dealers, instead referring to them as victims of human trafficking. (Boudin, whose replacement is to be named by Mayor London Breed, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

“There’s not a whole lot to support it,” Nancy Tung said of Boudin’s human trafficking claim. The dealers are usually smuggled into the United States by the cartel. When they arrive in San Francisco or another American city, they owe the cartel for getting them there – typically $10,000 to $15,000, which they can earn in a couple of weeks byselling the cartel’s drugs, both law enforcement and recovered addicts say. Once they repay the cartel, they’re free to do whatever they want. Usually, they stick with drug dealing, because no other job can make them that much money with so little risk. Dealers in the Tenderloin typically make about $1,000 a day for an eight- to 12-hour shift.

Under Boudin, drug dealing was a low-risk business. Lou Barberini, a retired San Francisco police officer who worked narcotics in the 1990s and 2000s in the Tenderloin, said dealers used to shield drug deals with their hands or bodies as they sold them. Wolf, the recovering addict, said that before the pandemic, they would hold their drugs in baggies concealed in their mouths and spit them out when they made a sale.

“Now,” Barberini said, “they display what they have in their hand, and the person will select what they’re going to buy.” The worst consequence of being arrested is losing your stash, so for high volume transactions they might duck behind a car. That’s about the extent of the precautions they feel it necessary to take.




Continue to next post

 

[Addict2sex]

The Boosters
The buyers, or addicts, are usually homeless and unsheltered, and, like the Bay Area, racially diverse. They’re often gaunt if they’re not obese, hunched over, in ill-fitting clothes draped across their limbs. They’re like a heat-seeking missile when looking for their next fix, and as listless as a nursed baby after they’ve found it. They would stand out in any other neighborhood, but in the Tenderloin it’s the non-users who are conspicuous, and the users who blend into the crowd.

Finding drugs in the Tenderloin is about as hard as ordering a kebab from a food cart. On any corner, dealers holler out their inventory like hot dog vendors at a ballpark: “Green is fire! Shards! Chiva! Nickel!” (Translation: “The green pills or powder are great! I also have meth, heroin, and crack.”) Or “Fenty! Bars!” (As in: “Get your fentanyl! I got some Xanax!”)

The addicts often suffer from schizophrenia, depression, or bipolar disorder, which is often induced by meth. They are almost always unemployable. Cash flow is thus a daily concern.

Typically, they turn to professional shoplifting, known as “boosting.” Boosting is “basically a job” for addicts, said Lieutenant Kevin Domby of the California Highway Patrol. To fuel their addiction, boosters need to bring in up to $60 daily. Since they usually get a dollar or two per item, no matter the value of whatever they’re stealing, they have to steal as many as 60 items a day. There are roughly 6,000 homeless people in the Tenderloin and adjacent SoMa neighborhoods. (The last official, citywide count, in 2019, reported just over 8,000 homeless, and pretty much everyone says that figure has jumped in the past three years.) Tom Wolf estimated that about one in five of the homeless in the Tenderloin, or 1,200 people, are boosters. That means thousands, if not tens of thousands, of items are being stolen daily.

“I still get letters from Target,” said Gina McDonald, a former addict and the mother of a Tenderloin user who’s now in rehabilitation. Her daughter started boosting years ago to feed her addiction, and her mom has been hearing from the retailers’ lawyers ever since.

Like drug use and drug dealing, shoplifting has been effectively decriminalized in San Francisco, and some chains have reduced their presence in the city. California’s Proposition 47, passed in 2014, reduced shoplifting of less than $950 in goods from felonies to misdemeanors. On top of that reduction in severity, Boudin scaled back prosecution of these crimes.

Together, Prop 47 and the DA’s non-enforcement policy have removed any incentive for police officers to make arrests for shoplifting, which, in turn, has made it far less likely that retailers will even call the police in the first place. For that reason, it’s difficult to estimate the actual scale of the problem. But you get a pretty good sense how normalized it has become.

Today, in San Francisco, you can walk into a Walgreens, a Safeway, a Target or a CVS, take hundreds of dollars of products off the shelf in front of customers and employees, walk out the door, and then come back a few hours later and do it all over again. “We’ll see the same folks go into multiple retailers, multiple times a day,” said Ben Dugan of the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail. “The stores are their ATMs.”


The Fences
But stolen goods aren’t money, so the boosters take their goods to the fences. They’re often middle-aged Latino men or elderly Chinese men and women. Fences sometimes roam around the Tenderloin or United Nations Plaza looking for boosters, or they might work out of a nondescript storefront. Some sell the stolen goods out of their own stores in the Tenderloin or in Chinatown, while others source for larger wholesale fencing organizations that launder the goods through online retailers on Amazon, EBay, or Facebook Marketplace.

Often, Domby says, fences will text the boosters on WhatsApp or Snapchat or on a private Instagram page and tell them what products they’re in the market for: Tide Pods or cold medicines with long expiration dates or makeup or razor blades. Then, the boosters fill those orders, stealing as much as they need to get their next fix. “Boosters will go into a pharmacy with a shopping list,” Dugan told me.

The fences and the dealers work in a kind of synergy with each other – so much so that they sometimes collaborate directly. “The dealers will post up where the fences are,” Dugan said. “Fences will direct the thief to the drug dealers.”

The fences, like the boosters they buy from, are the lowest rung on a towering totem pole. Most are middlemen. Some buy stuff not just from boosters but also from burglars and muggers. (In 2019, the San Francisco Police Department and then-District Attorney George Gascón retrieved more than $2 million in personal and commercial property from a couple that ran their fencing operation out of their Tenderloin camera repair shop.)

Some fences sell the stolen goods directly to the public, laying boosted deodorant and frozen shrimp – so freshly stolen it hasn’t yet thawed – out on a blanket on the street in UN Plaza, or at the flea market in Berkeley. But more typically, they sell to a bigger fence, who can move a high volume of product out of the Tenderloin quickly and efficiently. Ostly compared street-level boosters and fences to street walkers in the prostitution business. A tier above the street addicts is a more specialized, entrepreneurial tier of boosters – the equivalent of escorts, per Ostly’s analogy.

The Larceny Industry
There are at least two or three levels of fences above the street-level fences. At the top are the wholesale fences. They buy from the mid-tier fences who buy from the street-level fences who buy directly from the boosters, who use their paltry profits to buy drugs from the dealers.

San Francisco’s addiction crisis provides the larceny industry with a permanent low-wage workforce. Drug addicts there and in other cities are, in effect, the exploited sweatshop workers of an international organized retail theft network that operates on an industrial scale.

The fences at the wholesale level amass $100,000 to $200,000 worth of merchandise each day, which they sell to a “diverter.” The diverter repackages the stolen goods in counterfeit packaging and sells the products online. Nationally, just five diverters dominate the trade in stolen merchandise from the national drug store chains. Those five companies sell more than $20 million in product a year.

Wholesale fences also sell their goods to fences overseas. Consumer electronics are often shipped to Vietnam or China to be sold in black markets there. Luxury accessories are sent to Russia.

In 2020, a major multi-agency bust called Operation Proof of Purchasetook down a $50 million fencing operation centered in the Tenderloin. When the police seized the warehouse in the North Bay, it took about 40 officers to photograph and box all the inventory, and numerous semi trucks and box trucks to move it all. Officers recovered more than $1.6 million in razor blades alone.

The operation wasn’t just large, it was meticulous. “Just a terrifically organized operation for distribution,” said Lieutenant Domby, who assisted in the operation. “If a box was marked 400 boxes of pills for aspirin, there would be 400 boxes inside.”

“The fences have better inventory control and logistics than the retailers they're stealing from,” Ostly said.

Wolf told me that the way the organized retail theft business operates is “common knowledge” on the street. “Even the street addicts know how this works,” he said.



'Nothing Has Been Done'
Taken together, the dealers, boosters, and fences comprise a vast illicit industry that generates the cash that pays a Mexican drug cartel to import narcotics into San Francisco’s streets. Those drugs kill two people a day directly. The organized robberies and thefts they spawn create thousands more victims, from targets of muggings, burglaries, and home invasions to working class, elderly San Franciscans whose local pharmacies keep shutting down or reducing hours, to retail employees who are laid off as those stores are closed.

Ostly, who was fired by Boudin the day after he took office, believes the rampant criminality in the Tenderloin is “ninety percent because of Boudin.” Tung, who ran unsuccessfully in 2019 against Boudin, said, “San Francisco has completely lost the deterrent effect of prosecution. You have to have some reason for people not to commit crime. People are weighing what’s going to happen, and in San Francisco, nothing is going to happen to you—not if you sell drugs, even if you mix them lethally, not if you break into cars, stores, homes.”

Randy Shaw, who runs the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which operates many of the low-income, single-room occupancy hotels in the area, isn’t a fan of Boudin, but he says the city’s mayor and police department are largely responsible for the area’s problems. “Police have been blaming DAs since the 1980s; this is nothing new,” he said. “Chesa has done a great job taking the flack off the SFPD because all of the recall movement people want to make sure he’s blamed for everything,” he said before the June 7 recall vote. He said that after Mayor Breed invoked a “State of Emergency” in the Tenderloin last year (which has now lapsed), “there literally has been no increase in police at all. None. The crackdown she’s getting credit for in the national media has never happened. Nothing has been done.” Shaw wants to see the drug dealers arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned. Breed’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Joel Engardio of Stop Crime SF is also dismayed at what he sees as the human tragedy that city officials are allowing to unfold. “If you’re not going to arrest and prosecute the dealers, people are going to continue to die,” he said. “I don’t believe we should prosecute users. Users need help and treatment. But dealers are committing manslaughter every time they sell fentanyl.”

 

[Addict2sex]

Aside from one link to an actual newspaper, the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. not a single link is from a real news source and the one that is, is foreign and a bit tangential to the main point or for the other link, anecdotal evidence.

I am sure you could or whoever you copies and pasted this from could have used actual citations.

Well fine. I have it on good authority that the OP has sex with ducks, yeah ducks, they do it in the rain, ducks, yeah ducks, their web feet drive him insane.

There. Citation.

An NBC journalist embraced a rare moment of self-awareness when she admitted, “people don’t trust us, they don’t believe us.”

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1548691746229460994

Kathy Tur made the comments in response to a new Gallup poll which finds that, “Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news.”

“Hear me out for a second here — have you considered not lying?” remarked Chris Menahan. That’s a rhetorical question — of course the answer is no. The media’s only concern is how to best package the regime’s lies in a way that’s “effective.”

With the public showing a total lack of trust in the media, the baton has been handed to so-called ‘fact checkers’, who are just offshoots of legacy media outlets, to try to control the narrative by ‘debunking’ dissenting views.

However, now they’re losing credibility too, leading them to try to pressure Big Tech to ban their competition, with fact checkers explicitly stating their reason for doing so is that no one is interested in watching ‘fact checker’ content on platforms like YouTube.

As we highlighted last month, CNN’s ratings continue to collapse, down 63% from just a year ago, and CNN+ was a dismal failure.

The network’s new leader is now ordering hyper-partisan hacks to stop giving their biased opinions on everything and concentrate on delivering actual news.

 

[Valcazar]

I am sure you could or whoever you copies and pasted this from could have used actual citations.

From the Press Release about the study linked in the original OP.

The researchers advocate for new policies that strengthen social and economic safety nets, programs in violence prevention, and mental health services across the state. Such a multi-level approach, Raj says, would not only address the current violence crisis, but also support post-pandemic rebuilding and make the state more resilient to other health, environmental and socioeconomic stressors to come.

The researchers who actually studied this don't seem to agree with "Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog"

 

[squeezer]

These threads are reminding me of CM's covid threads and rants during the height of the pandemic. LMAO

 

[mandrill]

These threads are reminding me of CM's covid threads and rants during the height of the pandemic. LMAO

Those were the days when the righties had balls, Squee. Those were true heroic times and we will not ken their ilk again in our lifetime.

The righties nowadays are but small marmots, stoats and ferrets compared to the lions and tigers that righties were in that far off golden age.

 

[Butler1000]

As someone who visited SC recently the problem is really bad. And not just in the cities. We were in small town areas too and wealthy ones. The income disparity and homeless problem was rampant. And in many cases these are working poor prople who can't afford rent. Its unsustainable.

If the expected recession hits we could see get as bad as the Great Depression.

 

[Frankfooter]

As someone who visited SC recently the problem is really bad. And not just in the cities. We were in small town areas too and wealthy ones. The income disparity and homeless problem was rampant. And in many cases these are working poor prople who can't afford rent. Its unsustainable.

If the expected recession hits we could see get as bad as the Great Depression.

Yup, so time for the righties to call to fix income disparity with more income disparities and maybe a wall or two and maybe some workhouses or labour camps for bonus.

 

[NotADcotor]

An NBC journalist embraced a rare moment of self-awareness when she admitted, “people don’t trust us, they don’t believe us.”

So the solution is to instead put your trust in some rando on the internet. Sure bruv. People are slobering idiots.

Mainstream media do make mistakes, they are not Chuck Norris but anyone who picks rando webpages over say, The Economist or the Globe and Mail... there is no hope for such people.
It is like people who point out truthfully that Doctors make mistakes [which they do] so when they get the cancer they go to people like David Avacado "Earth is flat and the center of the solar system/vaccines are bad except for urine vaccines/gravity is a social construct and a toxin unless you hang upside down" Wolfe. Natural News or Canada man. That is not a step forward, it's a step back.

Also the real thing is, people don't trust media unless it confirms their biases in which case it's a very trusted source. Ditto an outlet might be pure cancer, till it puts out an article that confirms the way you want to view the world in which case it is a very solid source of evidence. Even if it doesn't back up your view, much like covidiots you can either misunderstand it till it does, stop reading it once you figure it backs you up because reading the full article is for queerfags, or just share it around like Natural News does under the assumption that few of your cultists will actually read the article.

 

[y2kmark]

Violence In California Reaches "Epidemic" Levels As Our Society Rapidly Deteriorates All Around Us


Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

I can’t understand why anyone would still want to live in California. Yes, there are lots of high paying jobs and the weather is very nice, but crime is completely and utterly out of control. As you will see below, a new report that has just been issued is warning that violence in the state has now reached “epidemic” levels. The police are doing what they can to try to contain the violence, but at this point they are vastly outnumbered by the predators. Sadly, this is the end result of literally decades of cultural rot, and what is happening in California is going to happen to the rest of the nation if we do not take urgent action to turn things around.

View attachment 172999

Originally, I was going to write about something else today. Tens of thousands of rail and port workers were threatening to go on strike, and this could definitely cause some substantial economic disruptions…


But even though these strikes could cause severe short-term problems, they will eventually be resolved.

And were resolved right before the strike was set to take place]

So in the greater scheme of things, they really aren’t a major concern.

On the other hand, our cultural decay is a massive ongoing crisis that isn’t going to go away.

As I mentioned earlier, a brand new report that was just released is warning that violence in the state of California has risen to “epidemic” levels…


If you live in one of the biggest cities in California, this isn’t news to you.

Once upon a time, the state was a place of great beauty and great tranquility, but now it has been transformed into a crime-infested hellhole.

I was particularly alarmed by the numbers on sexual violence in this new report…


Of course much of this violence is being fueled by illegal mind-altering drugs.


I will never understand why people would willingly do that to themselves.

Today, we are facing the biggest drug crisis that we have ever seen in American history, and addicts will often do whatever it takes to get another fix.

Sadly, this is one of the factors that is contributing to skyrocketing rates of shoplifting all over the nation…


One homeless man that originally came from Alabama recently admitted that he regularly shoplifts in order to fund his heroin use…



Some of these drugs are so immensely powerful that they literally put people into catatonic states for an extended period of time…

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1569726738355339266

I will never understand why people would willingly do that to themselves.

Today, we are facing the biggest drug crisis that we have ever seen in American history, and addicts will often do whatever it takes to get another fix.

Sadly, this is one of the factors that is contributing to skyrocketing rates of shoplifting all over the nation…


One homeless man that originally came from Alabama recently admitted that he regularly shoplifts in order to fund his heroin use…

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1490130669875253250

There have been homeless addicts in the streets of San Francisco for years, but now we have reached a point where they are seemingly everywhere.

The following is what one reporter witnessed during a recent journey through the city…


At one time, such activity was limited to the bad portions of the city.

But now addicts that have been drugged out of their minds are pulling down their pants and crapping in the streets right in front of some of the most expensive real estate in San Francisco.

This has made the wealthy people really angry, and Mayor Breed says that she is finally going to “get serious” about this crisis.

Of course “getting serious” doesn’t mean arresting a bunch of people and throwing them into prison.

That just wouldn’t be very “progressive”.

Instead, authorities in San Francisco are getting ready to launch a “soft-touch” program that will seek to “interrupt” drug trafficking…


Yes, it certainly sounds like a sick joke to me.

Good luck with all that.

If major cities such as San Francisco actually want to have a chance of turning things around, they need to send the police out to round up all the drug dealers.

Unfortunately, police forces in many of our biggest cities are rapidly getting smaller.

In fact, a whopping 122 officers have left the Seattle Police Department in 2022 alone…


I wouldn’t want to be a police officer in a major west coast city at this point either.

They are underpaid, the politicians treat them with tremendous disdain, and they are often hindered by absolutely ridiculous regulations which keep them from doing their jobs effectively.

We like to think that we are so “advanced”, but the truth is that if you compare video footage from major cities on the west coast from decades ago to video footage from today there is absolutely no comparison.

Our society is melting down right in front of our eyes, and if we stay on the path that we are currently on there is no future for our country.

But the politicians insist that people like me have it all wrong.

They continue to tell us that things are better than ever and that a glorious future for our nation is dead ahead.

You can believe that if you want, but the truth of what is really happening to our society is on display for the whole world to see.

America is dying, and we are quickly running out of time to turn things around.

* * *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

The religious fanatics have been predicting the Apocalypse was right around the corner for over 2000 years. Think they should give it a rest...

 

[JohnLarue]

The religious fanatics have been predicting the Apocalypse was right around the corner for over 2000 years. Think they should give it a rest...

actually there has always been a certain segment of the population predicting the Apocalypse.
It's been that way since shortly after mankind learned how to communicate

They just happen to have chosen Climate Change this time around

 

[Frankfooter]

They just happen to have chosen Climate Change this time around

Climate change disasters cost Canada $2.1 billion last year.

 

[silentkisser]

There is a lot going on in this thread. It starts off talking about violent crime but spends a lot of the time focusing on homelessness and petty theft like shoplifting. There is talk about drug abuse, which is a serious problem...But there is little discussion about rehab, except to state with authority that "progressives" oppose sending them to treatment facilities. What makes me laugh is I remember a major story covered by a ton of outlets about the shoplifting in SF, where losses might have amounted to half a million bucks...However, does anyone make headlines for rampant wage theft? Companies of all sizes steal wages from employee (by not paying OT, cutting benefits or other compensation they deserve). Some studies say wage theft is greater than the total of all other theft (auto, robbery, burglaries etc.).

Anyways, the point of all this is that there are major social issues in the US and Canada. The level of income disparity continues to soar, but what makes it worse is the affluent fight tooth and nail to pay their fair share. They constantly vote to slash funding to schools and social services that just perpetuate the cycle of poverty. In the first post of this thread, it asks why anyone would take these mind altering drugs. And to be honest, that's a question I've asked myself. If you knew heroine was super addictive, could kill you or easily ruin your life, why would you take it??? Well, I am a middle class white person, so that math never added up. Now, if I was poor with no education or prospects, getting that easy high makes sense. You probably don't really care if your next fix kill you.

What a lot of this comes down to is a choice politicians made decades ago: Do we try to care for the lowest folks, or ignore them. And they chose ignore. They slashed funding for welfare (remember Reagan slamming welfare queens???) and social services. They started to police communities of POC with zero tolerance and enacted drug laws that punished minorities harsher than whites. It broke up communities, sent millions to prison and ruined lives. These all helped create gangs and violence, addiction and homelessness. But sure, blame it on progressives.

 

[SchlongConery]

Aside from one link to an actual newspaper, the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. not a single link is from a real news source and the one that is, is foreign and a bit tangential to the main point or for the other link, anecdotal evidence.

I am sure you could or whoever you copies and pasted this from could have used actual citations.

Well fine. I have it on good authority that the OP has sex with ducks, yeah ducks, they do it in the rain, ducks, yeah ducks, their web feet drive him insane.

There. Citation.

Why so judgmental on a fellow TERB member and his sexual inclinations? ;-)

 

[NotADcotor]

Why so judgmental on a fellow TERB member and his sexual inclinations? ;-)

Hey who said I was judging.

 

[SchlongConery]

Hey who said I was judging.

So... you are ok with Duck Fuckers?