San Francisco voters who’ve grown tired of the crime, homelessness, and drug use plaguing their left-wing city overwhelmingly approved a pair of ballot measures on Tuesday that will expand police powers and require welfare recipients to be screened for drugs.
Proposition E, which authorizes police to use surveillance equipment — cameras, drones, and even facial-recognition technology — without prior permission from an oversight body, passed with 59,818 votes, or 59.9 percent. The proposition will also loosen restrictions on police chases and require that officers spend less time on paperwork and administrative duties.
Proposition F, which mandates that anyone receiving public-assistance benefits be screened for a substance-abuse disorder, passed with 63,295 votes, or 63 percent.
As part of the proposition, public-assistance recipients found to be drug-dependent could be offered treatment. If it is made “available at no cost, the recipient will be required to participate to continue receiving” public benefits, according to the proposition.
“Progressivism is out—for now,” the San Francisco Chronicles’ website read in bold letters on Wednesday morning, “Voters make it clear: S.F. can no longer be called a progressive city.”
The approval of both propositions was a big win for San Francisco’s embattled mayor, London Breed, who placed both measures on the primary ballot in an effort to tamp down on crime and to take aim at drug addiction and overdose deaths in the city. She told reporters on Tuesday that passage of the two measure will allow her administration to “continue the work we’re doing” to improve public safety, according to the Chronicle.
More than two-thirds or respondents to two recent polls said that San Francisco is on the wrong track. A recent poll commissioned by GrowSF, a moderate political group, found that 74 percent of San Francisco voters support the use of surveillance cameras to combat crime and 63 percent support the use of drones to follow criminal suspects.
San Francisco supervisor Matt Dorsey, a self-described liberal Democrat who has also been a supporter of law-and-order measures in the city, told National Review ahead of the vote that he supports drug screenings for “people who are at wildly disproportionate risk for substance-use disorder, and, because of the era we are in with fentanyl, at wildly disproportionate risk for deadly overdoses.”
Requiring drug tests for welfare benefits is a policy typically associated with Republican-led states. Opponents of Proposition F say that San Francisco lacks the treatment resources and supportive housing it needs for the measure to be effective, and that stripping addicts of public benefits will make people more destitute, increase homelessness, worsen the city’s crime problems, and have “deadly results.”
Dorsey said he believes there are enough “guardrails” to ensure that doesn’t happen.
San Francisco voters defeated another proposition, B, that was initially introduced by Dorsey as a clean mandate to increase staffing levels, but was amended with a tax provision that Dorsey called a “poison pill.” Prop B failed with only 32.6 percent of voters supporting it.
Dorsey pulled his support for Prop B after far-left supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who is challenging Breed for mayor, amended the proposition to tie police staffing increases to a tax increase or a new tax. Ahead of the vote, Dorsey called the amended proposition “craven political trickery” and a far-left “ploy for new taxes: a ‘Cop Tax Scheme.’”