SAN FRANCISCO — Officials say San Francisco is in the grips of an auto burglary epidemic. No other place in the country — not New York, Chicago or Los Angeles — had as many “smash-and-grabs” per capita as San Francisco did last year.
“We have an auto burglary problem in San Francisco,” then-Police Chief Greg Suhr said in October after a California Highway Patrol officer’s personal gun was stolen from his car. The gun was recovered, but the burglaries have grown far beyond a simple annoyance. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee recently put some of the blame on local judges, who he said needed to get tougher on those arrested for the break-ins.
The nearly 26,500 reported burglaries have also become a flash point in the debate over Proposition 47, a big portion of Gov. Jerry Brown’s prison policy package that reduced some nonviolent crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. There were 19,871 reported auto burglaries in 2014, almost double from the 10,369 in 2011 — and not everyone calls the police when they wake up to a burglarized vehicle.
Police are making arrests in about 2 percent of the reported burglaries. The district attorney’s office says 80 percent of the arrests end in some form of punishment.
The San Francisco police officers’ union has run radio ads blaming Proposition 47 for the spike and noting that District Attorney George Gascon helped draft the law. Gascon’s office counters that other California cities haven’t experienced the same increase in auto burglaries.
Proposition 47 is not to blame for the surge, district attorney spokesman Max Szabo said. The measure made a theft of valuables worth less than $950 a misdemeanor.