There are some policy issues at play, particularly the ones that essentially allow people who are in difficult circumstances to completely avoid any kind of consequences for anti-social behavior. For example, Chesa Boudin’s refusal to prosecute quality of life crimes because they would negatively impact those who already have very little. That’s great in principle, but in practice it means that society has no effective way to deal with people who can’t or won’t abide by the basic tenants of societal living. Everyone else’s just has to suck it up and deal with it.
Beyond that, though, there’s a whole complex web of other causes that have converged at this moment in time. These include:
- A massive meth epidemic, which in turn fuels an epidemic in theft and visible mental illness.
- Ditto for the opioid epidemic.
- Inadequate mental healthcare, especially inpatient services.
- Laws and case precedent that makes involuntary commitment of the mentally ill next to impossible.
- The Martin v. Boise ruling, which disallows police from stopping people from camping in public if there isn’t a viable alternative, such as shelter space.
- An extremely vocal activist community that will fight tooth and nail against anything they perceive to be “the man” or “the system” committing anything they perceive to be “injustice” against anyone they consider to be “the downtrodden”. Often these are reasonable things, like sweeping a homeless camp that is openly using intravenous drugs from a public park or the playground of an elementary school.
- Police that avoid anything that could draw the ire of the activist community, or draw condemnation from city leadership. In practice this works out to be just about everything you would normally expect the police to do.
- A populace with a strong sense of learned helplessness who won’t even bother to call the police because they know the police won’t come anyhow.
- A culture that disincentives people from speaking out about social problems, except when blaming systemic causes, for fear of being perceived to be conservative.
Edit:
On top of all that, you also have the systemic stuff, like:
- Severe lack of affordable housing with massively inadequate government intervention.
- Everything that COVID brought.
- Police that run the gamut from exemplary to active white nationalists.
Each of those feeds and is fed by all of the others.