The Police Commission-Four’s Unspoken Issue

All of us started our lives having been dealt a different hand of cards.  While I appreciate that I was born with a parental four aces and an economic double pair, I am acutely aware that many people don’t even receive five cards.  Without either of these advantages, the street environment often lures young adults down a perilous direction of crime, which forces law enforcement into the equation.  This engagement with police very much creates a chicken-and-egg problem.  Do the crimes the weaker handed players commit trigger police engagement, or do police, fueled by inherent biases, ignore the crimes of the advantaged just to pick on the socioeconomic disadvantaged?

San Francisco progressives and the San Francisco Police Commission-Four,^[i] have been hyper focused on trying to prove SFPD’s interactions with the public are skewed against people of color.  This false narrative motivates the policies the Police Commission-Four are trying to implement:

a)     Limit SFPD’s ability to view violent gangsters’ social media accounts,

b)    creating steps to disallow SFPD from running after suspects unless they are absolutely, positively sure the person committed a felony, and

c)     Police commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone’s (MCO’s) crusade to eliminate vehicle code sections that SFPD can enforce.

MCO and crew have relied almost exclusively on the statistics generated the by Racial and Identifying Profiling (RIPA) Advisory Board.  This board, with the self-fulfilling name, – nonsensically claims an epidemic of children under 9 years of age are being arrested for driving vehicles despite California laws not allowing police officers to arrest children of that age.  Would you trust any study that claimed Steph Curry led the NFL in touchdowns?

Daily, SFPD publishes a report of crimes from the previous day called the Big 19. The purpose of the report is to provide SFPD officers and the public with knowledge of recent major crimes so they can possibly piece together crime patterns. 

Citizens that have access to the Big 19^[ii] – a public document–have been exposed to criminals’ interactions with the public that greatly differ from what the progressives and the Police Commission-Four are portraying.  As a rebuttal to Commissioner MCO’s statistics, numerous readers have asked me to assemble the grossly disproportionate demographics of the people presented in the Big 19 that are committing the most egregious crimes in San Francisco.

Below, are the Big 19 stats for July.  Readers should interpret the statistics while factoring in how the cards one is dealt–their environment– affects both their opportunities and their life’s path.  Readers should ask: has the progressives’ and the Police Commission-Four’s scapegoating of SFPD to justify depolicing and decriminalization policies been a successful solution for San Franciscans safety?  

Clarifications and Assumptions:

1)    The FBI’s crime categorizes five violent crimes: homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, and human trafficking, which SFPD’s crime statistics presentation parallels.   If you recall from my recent article, drug trafficking and gun offenses do not go into crime statistics.  Descriptions of homicide suspects and rape suspects are rarely disclosed in the Big 19 as not to alert a person of interest that they are a suspect.  Despite the abundance of massage parlors in San Francisco, there are generally fewer than 50 human trafficking arrests per year. Thus, for the month of July 2023, I have assembled only robbery and aggravated assault suspect descriptions.

2)    As a reminder, if someone takes something from you with “force” or “fear,” that is a defined as a “robbery.”  If someone breaks into your house while you are away, you were “burglarized,” not “robbed.” With homicides and aggravated assaults, the suspect and victim usually know each other.  With robberies, by their very nature, the robber does not want the victim to know him/her so he/she cannot be identified. And thus, robberies, because of their randomness, are the most traumatizing crime on victims.

3)    The Big 19 is limiting towards Caucasians, Blacks, and “Hispanics.”   In approximately 20% of the robberies, the suspect’s description is described as “unknown” or “other.”    For instance, how should 9-1-1 callers describe a robbery suspect if they are of multiracial descent like commissioner MCO (French, Russian, Cuban, and African American)?   The inclusion of accurate multiracial descriptions of those suspects might dilute the statistics assembled from The Big 19.  

4)    Robberies are the purest demographic statistic.  Per numerous robbery inspectors I have spoken to, fewer than 5 of the 3,000+ average SF robberies that occur are solved because SFPD rolled into a robbery in progress.  Thus, to make arrests, 99.9% of the time SFPD must rely exclusively on independent victims’ and independent witnesses’ descriptions that identify the robbers.  And not surprisingly, to prove or disprove police prejudice, RIPA has never conducted a study comparing the victims’/witnesses’ demographic descriptions to the demographic descriptions of the robbery suspects law enforcement arrested.

5)    There are two ways to count robbery and aggravated assaults: 1) by incident and by suspect.  The issue is how do you compare a single victim robbed by a single robber versus four people conspiring to rob a victim?  In both incidents you have one crime, yet four people robbing a victim is indicative of how many bad people exist.  Therefore, I have presented both.

6)    Crimes do not always appear on the Big 19 the day after they occur.  Sometimes they are not added until 48 or 72 hours later.

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^[i]  The “Police Commission-Four” are the three Board of Supervisor-appointed commissioners: 1) former public defender Cindy Elias, 2) public defender Ilona Solomon Yanez’s husband, and 3) Kevin Benedicto.  The fourth commissioner is Max Carter-Oberstone who duped the mayor into believing he was a moderate. 

^[ii] For whatever reason, The Big 19 may contain greater or fewer than 19 crimes.