San Francisco Supervisor Demands More Cops After Backing ‘Defund the Police’

San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen (D) is demanding that more police be hired to fight rampant crime in her district — after she joined the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 in its demand to “defund the police.”

Ronen, who represents the city’s Mission district and Bernal Heights, not only backed “defund the police” at the time, but claimed that she had been doing so for many years, before it became politically fashionable on the left:

Now, however, with crime rampant in the city, Ronen is singing a different tune, “begging” the city to send more police to her district instead of prioritizing retail theft. Fox News quoted her speech last Wednesday:

“I’ve been begging this department to give the Mission what it deserves in terms of police presence all year long,” Ronen said. “And I have been told time and time and time and time again there are no officers that we can send to Mission.”

“It hurts. And I feel betrayed by the department. I feel betrayed by the mayor. I feel betrayed by the priorities of the city,” the Democratic politician added.

Petty theft is so bad in San Francisco that a CNN crew was robbed almost immediately after it parked in the city to conduct interviews — despite the fact that they had brought their own security to guard their equipment:

In one recent case, a young man who advocated for criminal justice reform in the city was found to be a gang hitman who now faces sentencing for murdering a supposed rival who, as it turns out, was not in a gang at all.

Amid the violence and chaos, which has included the “mass looting” of high-end stores near Union Square, Mayor London Breed abandoned her own pledge to cut police funding and budgeted for more police in the city.

However, lenient prosecution policies at the state and local level, combined with homeless and rampant public drug use, have continued to make life more dangerous in a city once regarded as America’s most beautiful.

Ronen was among those who backed radical left-wing prosecutor Chesa Boudin, who was recalled by San Francisco voters in 2022 over his lax “criminal justice reform” policies in the midst of the crime wave.

She holds a law degree from the University of California Berkeley, and is also among the backers of a proposal to pay $5 million in reparations to long-term black residents of the city, though California was a free state.

President Joe Biden, who also endorsed demands to defund the police in 2020– in his terms, to “redirect” police funding — is now claiming that Republicans, not Democrats, are behind efforts to “defund the police.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.