This one took me a while to write (it’s 4000 words), but I hope you like it. It’s a dissertation on two recent massive pieces dealing with crime and District Attorneys in two major California cities. The first piece is about San Francisco, and was published in the Atlantic. The second piece is about Los Angeles, and was published on Bari Weiss’s Substack.

Excerpt from the free portion, about San Francisco:

Bowles describes an open-air safe space on Market Street dedicated to the care and “safe” drugging of addicts. Syringes are distributed to a zombie population of doped-up hoboes, in an area where tourists used to enjoy being sightseers. Nowadays, if some homeless (sorry, I mean “unhoused”) guy ends up bleeding on the sidewalk and an ambulance is called, advocacy groups stand by to advise the would-be patient that he doesn’t have to submit to treatment. He can stay right there in his druggie Shangri-La and die on the streets next month if he prefers. Many take the advice.

Excerpt from the paid portion:

As a personal note, though, I would like to add that cases where gang members are caught with guns are always cases that should get a prosecutor’s attention. We used to call such cases “murders waiting to happen.” It should not come as a shock to any elected D.A. that a policy of leniency to gang members with guns, especially when they have serious and/or violent felonies on their record, means some number of people are going to die as a result.

Become a subscriber and you’ll get to find out what I think of the effort to recall the D.A. in Los Angeles.