Today in dystopia

Two things today. Well, three I think. First, let’s take a look at this post from Twitter (I will not call it by the other name):

39 million views for this, a completely pedestrian “SF is zombie dystopia” tweet. I don’t know why either. Sam Padilla is some tech guy with around 9,000 followers, so I’m not sure why this is the tweet that captured Twitter’s imagination (however, given the current makeup of Twitter, I’m not entirely surprised).

Deva Hazarika, who appears to be another, better tech guy, had the correct response:

Exactly! Bad part of town is bad! It’s like Sam Padilla walked through the monitor lizard enclosure and said “Damn why do these monitor lizards keep biting me???” Look, if you walk on 6th Street from Soma to Hayes Valley (as he identified later in the thread) you’re gonna see some fucked up shit. As I’ve said repeatedly, every major city in America has a really bad part. The thing about San Francisco is that it’s so compact that the bad parts are right up against the tourist parts and the living parts and the shopping parts. I was just in LA and I saw a bunch of tent encampments and dystopian shit but not on the same block as my hotel (although if you stay in Downtown LA it’s a different story).

Here I go with the standard disclaimer (the same one Deva makes above): SF is so far from perfect it’s not even in the same area code, it has a lot of problems and a lot of those problems are not being handled well, but the entire city is not 6th and Market.

SPEAKING OF PROBLEMS, let’s watch a video together!

This was posted on The Site Which Shall Not Be Named by user “NoCapFights” (1.7 million followers, posts videos without attribution) but that’s not the important part here. I just want you to appreciate the Thin Blue Line in action!

It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here, but it appears the woman in the white tank is accusing the woman in the brown jacket of stealing her phone. We need help resolving this dispute! Luckily SFPD arrives on the scene. Brown jacket says “I was gonna give it to her.” She pulls the phone out and hands it to White Tank, who then, unaccountably, KICKS BROWN JACKET IN THE LEG.

So we have a cascading series of crimes here. There’s a possible theft of a phone by Party A, followed by a definite battery by Party B, since you can’t kick someone even if they stole your phone. WHAT DO THE COPS DO?

1. Detain Party A for theft. Question Party B about the circumstances. Determine what, if any, charges are appropriate.

2. Detain Party B for battery, which occurred directly in front of them.

3. Detain both parties and cite them both for breaking the law.

4. Separate them and send Party A on her way with a little wave.

If you know anything about San Francisco policing, you’ll know the correct answer is, of course, 4. “Nothing to see here, go on your way.” Party A walks away. Officer Starbies never had to put his drink down. Another successful day on the streets!

Maybe it’s not the same as boosting some Head & Shoulders from Walgreens, but this kind of shit is exactly why bad guys think they can get away with anything in San Francisco. Because the cops keep proving they can. And they knew they were being filmed! Imagine what they don’t do when there are no cameras around.

AND FINALLY, Bay to Breakers, or what’s left of it, is this Sunday. If you’ve lived here long enough you remember when B2B was a kind of free-for-all, good-natured only-in-SF thing where people drank and danced and generally had a good time and nobody got hurt. Except for some vicious hangovers. And then, like everything else, it got ruined because some people couldn’t be chill and fucked up a good thing for the rest of us. Anyway, I’m mostly posting about it just to put this picture up. Taken by Chronicle writer/SF booster/all around good guy Peter Hartlaub, it remains the single greatest Bay to Breakers image in history. And it turns 10 this year!

Have a good weekend, everybody!