By Michael Gibson
Thursday, April 01, 2021
‘Hey, where are you?” Hannah Ege texted her husband,
Sheria Musyoka. He’d left on a morning jog and had been gone for an hour and a
half. Hannah was home, taking care of their three-year-old son. She began to
freak out. She called and texted and called again. He never answered.
Speeding and drunk — at just shy of eight in the morning
— Jerry Lyons barreled through a red light at an intersection in a stolen Ford
Explorer. Lyons struck and killed Musyoka, a 26-year-old Dartmouth grad who had
moved to San Francisco only ten days earlier with his wife and their son. After
clipping Musyoka, Lyons collided with another car, causing an eight-car pileup
that sent several other people to the hospital.
The San Francisco police arrested Lyons on multiple
charges that morning in February, but this was not the first time he’d been
arrested for drunk driving in a stolen car. On December 3, he had been arrested
for driving under the influence, driving a stolen vehicle, and driving without
a license. Before that, he’d been released from prison after serving time for a
grand-theft conviction; in fact, Lyons had been arrested at least seven times
in the Bay Area since his release from prison, and his rap sheet goes back a
decade. Still, San Francisco’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, delayed pressing
charges against Lyons until a toxicology report confirmed that he had been
inebriated, which, more than a month and a half later in January, it did. Lyons
then had 14 days to turn himself in to the DA’s office. On the 13th day, he
killed Musyoka. While COVID-era difficulties might have accounted for the
medical examiner’s slow speed in returning test results, a different DA could
have chosen to move forward sooner — taking necessary precautions — and charged
Lyons with a DUI based on observable factors alone, such as the results of
Lyons’s field sobriety test, his erratic driving in a stolen vehicle, and close
scrutiny of his behavior.
Hannah Ege expressed her grief and pain to a local TV
news station, railing at the district attorney’s reluctance to lock up repeat
offenders. Whom does she blame for her husband’s death? “The DA,” she said.
“This freak accident was no freak accident. It was someone who was out in the
public who should not have been out in public.”
The Lyons mayhem is not an isolated case in the city by
the bay. On New Year’s Eve, a parolee on the run from a robbery — also in a
stolen car — sped through a red light, striking and killing two women,
60-year-old Elizabeth Platt and 27-year-old Hanako Abe, who were in the
crosswalk. The driver, Troy McAlister, had been released twice by the district
attorney in the previous year: the first time because Boudin refuses to pursue
three-strike cases, of which McAlister’s was one; the second — as recently as
December 20, when the SFPD arrested McAlister for driving a stolen car —
because Boudin kicked the case to the state parole officers, who did nothing.
Welcome to San Francisco’s latest idiocy, a new
experiment in governance where everything is allowed but nothing is permitted.
A paradox, you might say, but take a walk down Market Street, down that great
avenue in a great city in a great nation, and note the desolation of the empty streets,
the used needles tossed on the sidewalks, and the boarded-up windows on
storefronts. Consider that, at various unpredictable times in the last year, it
has been illegal — for the sake of public safety during COVID — to run a
mom-and-pop corner shop or to serve food at sidewalk cafés. Reflect for a
moment that, since time immemorial, it has been illegal to build any new
housing, because of the most onerous and confusing zoning laws in the
known universe. Mark Zuckerberg can apparently influence national elections by
tweaking algorithms, but he is powerless before the planning commission when it
comes to building apartments for his employees. The city has banned plastic
straws, plastic bags, and McDonald’s Happy Meals with toys. And yet, all the
while, drug dealers sell their wares — COVID or no COVID — openly and freely at
all hours of the day and night, users shoot up or pop fentanyl in public and
defecate on the street, robbers pillage cars and homes with the ease of
Visigoth raiders, and the district attorney frees repeat offenders who go on to
sow disorder, pain, devastation, and grief. A profound melancholy hangs in the
air of this city, punctuated only by the shrieks of a junkie dreaming of demons
or by the rat-tat-tat-bam of the occasional firework. (Or was
that a gun?) This is anarcho-tyranny. Everything is allowed, nothing is
permitted.
How did it come to this? On January 8, 2020, Mayor London
Breed swore in Chesa Boudin as the new district attorney of San Francisco in
front of a packed house at the Herbst Theater. Boudin won the election by a
nose in a runoff, with oily promises to feel the pain of all parties to a
crime, both victims and perpetrators. He made pledges to enact “restorative
justice” and prison reform through “decarceration.” U.S. Supreme Court justice
Sonia Sotomayor recorded a congratulatory video message, which was played at
the swearing-in ceremony for Boudin and the crowd. “Chesa, you have undertaken
a remarkable challenge today,” the justice said. “The hope you reflect is a great
beacon to many.”
The task before Boudin was already monumental. Before he
assumed his office, San Francisco ranked No. 1 in the nation in property crime.
On average, thieves broke 60 car windows per day, with impunity. In 2014,
California voters approved Proposition 47, a reform measure that reduced many
felonies to ticketed misdemeanors, such as theft of less than $950 and
hard-drug possession. There were more drug addicts on the streets than there
were students in the schools. Tent encampments of homeless people had sprouted
in every nook and alley and under every highway overpass. Commuters faced a
daily gauntlet in the form of an appalling humanitarian crisis in the streets.
But Boudin immediately refused to take any responsibility
for these issues. Among his first acts was to fire seven veteran prosecutors
who were not on board with his radical views. (Over 30 prosecutors have left
during his tenure because they don’t want to work for him.) Next, Boudin
abolished the cash-bail system, so offenders are able to walk free after
arrest. He rarely brings a case to trial: Out of the 6,333 cases to land on his
desk since taking office, he has gone to trial only 23 times. This is one-tenth
the rate of his predecessor, George Gascón, who was hardly tough on crime.
Since the killing of George Floyd, there has been a shortage of cops, as
officers retire in record numbers. San Francisco has also moved to defund the
police, with plans to shift $120 million in law-enforcement funding to
restorative-justice programs, housing support, and a guaranteed-income pilot,
among other ideas.
To where does Boudin’s “great beacon” point? Over the
last year, there have been more deaths from drug overdoses in San Francisco
than from COVID-19. Walgreens has closed ten of its drugstores in the city
because its shelves were being pillaged freely by shoplifters. According to
SFPD’s CompStat, compared with last year, arson has increased 52 percent,
motor-vehicle theft is up 21 percent, and burglaries have seen a 59 percent
increase. One largely Asian neighborhood, the Richmond district, has reported a
342 percent spike in burglaries this year compared with last. Admittedly, some
numbers are down, such as those for larceny and robbery. But police attribute
these declines to the pandemic, since there are fewer opportunities for
would-be criminals to commit such crimes as people shelter in place. One
neighborhood association sent a letter in February to Boudin and Mayor Breed,
begging them to restore public safety. The association also posted it on the
Internet. “Our neighborhood can’t wait another day,” they wrote. “Our homes are
repeatedly broken into and robbed. Our merchants suffer unsustainable losses
from theft and smashed windows. Employees are threatened with guns. Residents
are robbed at gunpoint on our own streets. The sound of gunshots is no longer
unusual.”
To see for myself, I took a walk from City Hall through
Civic Center Plaza to the Tenderloin, the city’s most distressing neighborhood.
At noon on a sunny Saturday, under the sculpture of Lady Justice on City Hall’s
façade, men walked around like specters, with soiled blankets draped over their
heads. Others were keeled over in pain or in an intoxicated euphoria — I
couldn’t quite tell which side of the balance. I saw a cluster of people
bringing a drug to a boil in an improvised tinfoil bowl, while others stuck
needles in their hands, in their thighs, and in the space between their toes. I
was saddened by the vacant stare of a man on a stairwell wiping himself with
the pages of a magazine, as an elderly woman paused to plan a path around him.
I then came upon a giant fenced-in tent encampment on Fulton Street, which I
later learned the city is paying more than $61,000 per tent per year to
maintain as a way to keep homeless people from spreading COVID-19. Like a clock
that doesn’t strike, Lady Justice was silent.
And so it is that San Francisco sits poised, I daresay,
for its Bernie Goetz moment. Goetz, you may recall, brandished a gun and shot
four assailants while trying to defend himself on a New York City subway in
1984. In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gekko told us that greed was
good and Wall Street boomed, while the rest of New York was a shadowy, smutty
Gotham with no hero to protect the innocent. Goetz became a defiant symbol of
the era, the breaking point of an anxious city on the edge of civic mayhem. In
fiction, the violent legend of American Psycho was born. The
Bonfire of the Vanities had arrived.
Now, what rough beast slouches its way towards San
Francisco? With a district attorney who won’t prosecute crimes, how long will
it be until an anxious Google engineer defends himself from being harassed by a
madman? Will envious arsonists light the Salesforce Tower on fire as a
jacked-up mob courses through the streets burning and looting the Painted
Ladies?
A desperate sun struggles through the fog. There may be
one ray of hope. The city has recently approved the effort to recall Chesa
Boudin from office. Locals could begin downloading signature-gathering
petitions on March 12. If 10 percent of registered voters sign the petition,
all voters may get the chance to vote the bum out. But even if they do, it will
remain tragic for Musyoka, Platt, Abe, and others like them that the day did
not come soon enough.
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