San Francisco’s crisis looks like New York’s future

“A major medical association is pulling its annual convention out of the city — saying its members no longer feel safe,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. It’s a loss of approximately $40 million for the city and a warning to other cities with similar policies, like New York: You could be next.

Beautiful, hilly San Francisco has become known as the city where 20 pounds of poop was dumped on a sidewalk last week in a clear bag and remained there for hours. As The Post noted, “human waste-related complaints in San Francisco have skyrocketed 400 percent from 2008 to 2018,” and “In 2017 alone, more than 21,000 reports were received.”

What happened in San Francisco is obvious. It stopped prosecuting quality-of-life offenses and, unsurprisingly, the quality of life for the city’s residents and visitors decreased sharply.

In 2015, San Francisco courts stopped enforcing bench warrants for such offenses. Police continued writing up tickets for public drunkenness or sleeping in parks, but when the accused failed to show up to their court appearance, a judge simply dismissed the outstanding warrant.

New York started following San Francisco’s lead in 2016 when Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. announced his office would no longer be prosecuting offenses such as public urination. Both cities have accepted that they’ll continue to have a large number of people living on their streets and inevitably using their sidewalks as a toilet.