Desmond Jagmohan was quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle:
When Breed ordered San Franciscans to stay home in March 2020 to slow the rapid spread of COVID-19, her decision came days before Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a statewide shelter-in-place order, Taylor noted. Breed, he said, “was leading more than the president or even the governor was, and they followed her example. … That gave her a great deal of credibility.”
Around that same time, Breed leveraged a 1% increase in violent crime from 2020 to 2021 to secure more funding for police. To combat drug-related crime in the Tenderloin, she declared a state of emergency in December 2021, leading to a larger presence of police officers and a surge in arrests and citations for low-level possession offenses.
UC Berkeley political science Professor Desmond Jagmohan said there’s a pattern of politicians — on both the left and right in the Bay Area — choosing to prioritize policing pandemic-related crime over tackling its core causes.
The full article is available here.