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April 14, 2023

A shocking video of a baby born on a San Francisco street highlights the city’s collapse.

By Andrea Widburg

Apparently, San Francisco mayor London Breed has been feeling downright smug about the fact that Cash App founder Bob Lee did not die at the hands of a random homeless person but, instead, was allegedly murdered by someone he knew. That would be a decent boast if San Francisco were an otherwise clean and well-run city…but it’s not. It’s still a decayed basket case, as is vividly illustrated by a widely circulated video showing a homeless woman and her baby moments after she gave birth on the street.

Bob Lee’s terrible death made headlines across America. The instant assumption was that, given San Francisco’s descent into a Dante-esque inferno of drugs, filth, and human degradation, he was the victim of a random street crime. However, yesterday, the San Francisco police arrested Nima Momeni, a tech consultant who knew Bob Lee.

Mayor Breed was pleased with the case’s outcome, which she claims proves that the city is in great shape and that it’s the perceptions about the city that are wrong. Her claim would surprise a lot of the city’s residents.

In June 2021, car break-ins had seen a 750% year-over-year increase. Half a year later, the local media were reporting that, in a single month, San Francisco had 3,000 car break-ins. In December 2022, a survey showed that more than half of San Francisco residents had been victims of theft or larceny, with car break-ins topping the list. Admittedly, that’s not violent crime, but it’s a quality-of-life problem.

In November 2021, Lee Ohanian at the Hoover Institution wrote that San Francisco is one of the most crime-ridden cities in America:

San Franciscans face about a 1-in-16 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime, which makes the city more dangerous than 98 percent of US cities, both small and large. To put this in perspective, Compton, California, the infamous home of drug gang turf wars, and which today remains more dangerous than 90 percent of all US cities, is almost twice as safe as San Francisco.

This contention clashes with other outlets claiming in the wake of Lee’s death that San Francisco is a relatively safe city. However, as even the linked outlet admits, using woke, semi-literate English, there’s a “disconnect between San Francisco’s reasonable safety on paper and the lived experiences of the people who live there.” In other words, life there is dystopian and, I’m betting, most crimes don’t get reported because, with a “defund the police,” shrunken police department, and a prosecutor’s office that still hasn’t recovered from Chesa Boudin’s radical left tenure, doing so is a waste of time.

What really stands out about San Francisco isn’t the murders; it’s the homelessness:

These are the people who fill the streets and subways, leaving behind excrement, urine puddles, and drug paraphernalia, and who, along with the pro-shoplifters who plague San Francisco, even managed to drive away Whole Foods. They are broken people, and San Francisco is a broken society for incentivizing their presence there, rather than instituting a carrot-and-stick program of arrests and true treatment alternatives. However, with a giant homeless budget, the real money in San Francisco is in keeping the street people on the street.

Nothing more perfectly illustrates how broken San Francisco is than footage of a drug-addicted homeless woman giving birth on the streets of San Francisco, near the Tenderloin:

 

 

If the video doesn’t show well (and we have problems with Instagram embeds), you can see it here. The description says, “Woman gives birth on the street after smoking crack all afternoon according to the witness who filmed the video.”

That video is so horrible, it’s hard to believe it’s true. However, a local news outlet has verified that what’s shown in the video actually happened.

Of course, many women have had fast deliveries and found themselves on lawns or airplanes, or in cars or lobbies, giving birth. With this video, though, it’s easy to tell that this happened on the streets of the Tenderloin, just minutes away from Union Square, and that the woman was probably sitting on that piece of cardboard behind her when her water broke. To her credit, we can see that she cares about her baby’s life and well-being, so maybe there is hope for both of them.

But this is no way to run a once-great city in a once-great country. It’s like a snapshot of the downfall of Rome.

Image: A homeless woman gives birth on the sidewalks of San Francisco. Instagram screen grab.

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