Armed residents of the CHOP shot two teenage boys just before it was shut down. The shooting killed Antonio Mays Jr., a sixteen-year-old, and left his fourteen-year-old companion in serious condition. It appears that on June 29, 2020, Mays and his companion "trespassed" in the CHOP in a Jeep and provoked its "security." Some residents of the CHOP opened fire on the Jeep. After looking in on the boys bleeding inside the vehicle a CHOP member could be heard saying, "Yo, you wanna get pistol-whipped?" Due to the CHOP's autonomous nature and habit of preventing law enforcement from entering, no one could arrive on the scene until hours afterward. By then, Mays was dead.
Radical left-wing protesters also created an autonomous zone in Portland in December 2020 after a black family was evicted from their home for defaulting on a second mortgage. Occupiers took over several blocks, including the house, in protest. In response, the mayor of Portland authorized the police to use "all lawful means" to end the occupation and declared, "There will be no autonomous zone in Portland." Police violently clashed with protesters but failed to take back the city blocks. Finally, the city cut a deal with the protesters and paid to let the family stay in the home. Said one occupier, "This isn't like what we've seen before. It's a negotiation and a win, and that is something we're just not used to."
In the spring of 2021 anarchists created yet another autonomous zone, this time in Minneapolis, at the intersection near where George Floyd was killed. Local black-owned businesses suffered because customers were unwilling to enter the zone. Many of the occupiers were not from the community that had been taken over. Some weren't even from the city. Two white occupiers prevented a television news crew from entering. After a local African American resident, and member of the local church, saw the segment, he was outraged, and invited the news crew to accompany him into the zone. But once again, anarchists threatened them and told them to leave. "This is supposed to be sacred ground, not ground to push people out," said a local African American church leader upset by the anarchist rule, "but ground for all of us to come together."
Then, as in Seattle, two men were shot. The anarchists prevented first responders from coming into the zone, and one of the men died. The mayor of Minneapolis initially said police would not move to break up the zone until the trial of George Floyd's killer is completed but then reversed himself.
Some have protested elected officials at their homes. In San Francisco, radical left activists protested Mayor Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were "all white people. But that didn't bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people's houses to burn their houses down."
San Francisco police sergeant Kelly Kruger described the anti-police violence she and her colleagues experienced in 2020. "After the protests after the Floyd killing, they threw fecal matter on us and chanted 'Save a life! Kill a cop!' and threw urine," said Kruger. "I thought it was horrible about Floyd, and it was not okay, and any reasonable cop is going to be ashamed or sad about that."
The same occurred in other progressive cities. Marchers set fire to the Oakland Courthouse, smashed police station windows, and chanted "OPD [Oakland Police Department], back the fuck up," pointed lasers at the eyes of Oakland police officers, threw rocks, and punched officers, one of whom was injured. One man was arrested for concealing a machete in a protest sign. In Seattle, protesters urged police officers to commit suicide, and threw rocks, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails at them. And others made death threats against Seattle's mayor, called her a white supremacist, and protested her at her home. On December 7, 2020, Jenny Durkan announced she would not run for reelection in 2021.
 
During California governor Jerry Brown's time in office, voters passed several reforms aimed at reducing the size of the prison population. In 2012, voters passed a change to the Three Strikes law so that the third strike imposes a life sentence only if the new felony was serious or violent. In addition to lowering punishments for drug possession, Proposition 47, which voters passed in 2014, redefined shoplifting, forgery, petty theft, and receiving stolen property as misdemeanors when the value in question does not exceed $950. In 2016, voters approved a proposition that shortened the time it took for some nonviolent offenders to be eligible for parole and which released nonviolent offenders into drug treatment and rehabilitation.
Property crimes rose in San Francisco starting in 2012. Larceny, which is shoplifting and other petty theft, rose 50 percent, from roughly 3,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to about 4,500 in 2019. Property crimes as a whole, which include larceny, motor vehicle theft, and burglary, rose from 4,000 incidents per 100,000 people in 2011 to 5,500 in 2019. One study suggests that Proposition 47 increased the rate of auto theft 17 percent and the rate of larceny (non-auto property) theft 9 percent, but discerning between causation and correlation may not be possible.
Upon taking office in January 2020, Boudin followed through on his campaign promises. Instead of prosecuting and incarcerating people for breaking car windows to steal money and other items from inside, Boudin proposed creating a $1.5 million fund to reimburse car owners. But there were over 25,000 car break-ins reported in 2019. If every break-in cost just $250 in repairs, the fund would need four times that amount. And what would prevent people from falsely claiming to have been robbed in order to get city money?
Boudin's main goal is deincarceration. "The challenge going forward," said Boudin, "is how do we close a jail?" Many believe that most in jail are there for nonviolent offenses but the most recent available data shows that two-thirds of the people in San Francisco's jail were there for violent crimes or weapons possession, not petty, nonviolent, or "victimless" crime. Just 4 percent are there for drug crime.
San Francisco residents needed to understand that some amount of crime was inevitable given the city's wealth, said Boudin in 2020. "We have some of the richest people in the history of the world in this city. Fortunes never imaginable ten or twenty or fifty years ago. . . . When we have those extremes in close proximity, there's going to be some level of property crime. That's a reality."
Boudin opposed efforts by the mayor and the city attorney to prevent drug dealers who had already been arrested from entering the Tenderloin. "Until the city is serious about treating addiction and the root causes of drug use and selling," said Boudin in a statement, "these recycled, punishment-focused approaches are unlikely to succeed at doing anything more than making headlines."
Home burglaries rose in early 2021 in San Francisco. Homeowners started posting on Twitter videos from their security cameras of people breaking into homes and garages. "When I first moved here we had a car break-in problem," said Michael Solana, a writer who works for a venture capital fund. "Now we have a home invasion problem. These things are wearing on people." Boudin attributed the rise of burglaries in San Francisco to the decline of tourism and "people in desperate economic circumstances." Progressive supervisor Hillary Ronen agreed. "We know that [economic insecurity and inequality] is one of the root causes of property crimes specifically," she said.
But Tom Wolf and others argued that the robberies were, like the shoplifting, done by people seeking money to buy drugs and feed their addictions. "The drugstores have been shoplifted to death and that's all because of drug use," said Tom. "I know. I used to do the same thing when I was out there. That's what you do. You 'boost.' And then you go and you sell your stuff down at UN Plaza," an open-air drug scene.
In a May 2021 city supervisors' meeting, a representative from CVS called San Francisco "the epicenter of organized retail crime in the country" and claimed that 85 percent of the shoplifting is committed by organized theft rings. Police broke up one such ring in October 2020 and recovered $8 million of stolen merchandise.
The problem goes beyond property crime. Boudin declined to prosecute two men who went on to kill people. One man had been repeatedly arrested for stealing cars, despite having just been released from prison earlier in the year, and appeared to be abusing meth. On New Year's Eve, 2020, the man killed two people while driving intoxicated. Police found inside of his car a semiautomatic handgun and twenty-three grams of methamphetamine. On February 4, another intoxicated driver killed a pedestrian in a stolen car. The San Francisco police had arrested him in October 2020 for possessing a stolen car, a tool for stealing cars, and what appeared to be meth. Boudin chose not to pursue charges. In December, the California Highway Patrol arrested the man again for driving a stolen vehicle under the influence. Again he was not prosecuted.
The accident victim, an immigrant from Kenya, and his wife had moved to San Francisco two weeks before the fatal crash. "I blame the DA," said the widow of the victim. The suspect, she said, "was someone who was out in the public who shouldn't have been in the public. It was completely avoidable."
Tom said he could feel the difference on the streets. "Drug dealing is unabated and it's not one guy, it's fifty guys dealing fentanyl and meth," he said. "And it's going unabated because the district attorney says, 'These are the nonviolent, quality-of-life crimes,' and 'I'm not going to prosecute them.'"
In October 2020, San Francisco police officers discovered a body on fire in a neighborhood frequented by heavy drug users. "Officers on patrol saw a fire, thought it was a debris fire," said an officer. "They came up and saw it was a person."
Said Deli Board owner Adam Mesnick, "It makes no sense that the district attorney will tell you that he has more fear of a Honduran dealer's family having challenges than a local family whose kid OD'd on fentanyl. I mean, it's absurd. This guy protects dealers."
District Attorney Boudin was offering weaker sentences than even defense attorneys were requesting, according to Vicki Westbrook of San Francisco. "There's a defense attorney who said, 'It used to be that I would argue for this deal in court with the DA but now I don't say anything because the DA is going to offer me a deal better than what I would have suggested. Somebody shot up the street with an automatic weapon. The first offer was six months in jail or time served plus two years of probation or something. And then [the DA] said, "How about thirty days in jail?"'"
Vicki laughed. "You really can do anything in San Francisco," she said. "If you do get arrested, chances are you're going to be out of jail in less than thirty days for damn near everything except maybe killing somebody and maybe even then, too. It's hard to say at this point."
The situation was similar in other progressive West Coast cities. "It's a free-for-all here in Seattle," said Vickie Beach. "You can commit crimes and not get in trouble. I don't even know if we can get back to what it used to be, especially with the law they're trying to pass saying that if you're homeless and mentally ill and commit a crime you don't get in trouble."
In early 2021, a San Francisco resident posted on Twitter a photo of a bare mattress propped up against a building on a sidewalk intersection in the neighborhood of Diamond Heights. The words "Legalize Crime" were scrawled on it.