By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
In a scenario that could only happen in some city guided by the Far Left, San Francisco has reportedly announced a pilot program that, according to Fox News, “will pay high-risk individuals to not shoot anyone as gun crimes tick up in the city.”
San Francisco is a city that has been successfully sued twice for attempting gun bans, once by the Second Amendment Foundation and the second time by SAF and the National Rifle Association.
Fox News is reporting about an experimental project launched by the Dream Keeper Fellowship which will pay 10 people “who are at high risk of being on either end of a shooting $300 each month to not be involved in such crimes.” The Fellowship, said Fox, “is being rolled out by the Human Rights Commission and Office of Economic and Workforce Development and is funded through the Dream Keeper Initiative, which is San Francisco’s program that works to redirect funding into the Black community. It will launch in October.”
Newsweek quoted Sheryl Davis, executive director of the Human Rights Commission, about this program. The magazine said participants in the program “will be paired with life coaches from the city’s Street Violence Intervention Program and will be considered ‘community ambassadors’ who work to prevent violence.”
The story harkens back to the 1971 Clint Eastwood film “Dirty Harry,” in which the San Francisco mayor, played by John Vernon, observed, “The city doesn’t pay people not to commit crimes. Instead, we pay a police department…” How times have changed since Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan fought crime with his big .44 Magnum Model 29 Smith & Wesson.
Fact has overshadowed screen fiction. As reported by Fox News, embattled Gov. Gavin Newsom has asked the federal government “for permission to use tax dollars to pay for the program through Medicaid. Meanwhile, a similar proposal is also working through California’s Legislature, with the state Senate already passing the bill.”
This isn’t the first time such an idea has been tried. According to Washington Examiner online opinion Editor David Freddoso, “I wrote about this extremely stupid idea and its application in New York City last month. When the San Francisco Examiner says that this program ‘already has shown promise in other parts of California,’ it’s actually quite misleading. As Seth Barron wrote in the New York Post, the program has been tried in Stockton, where ‘only’ 29% of the payees were subsequently arrested for new gun crimes. It was also tried in Sacramento, where its promoters boast that ‘only’ 44% of participants were subsequently arrested on new charges — well, as long as you don’t count about one-third of the participants who dropped out or were arrested in its first six months. (D’oh!)”
San Francisco has been a hub of California gun control politics for decades. But paying would-be killers to not shoot other people is a relatively new approach, and if Freddoso is right, this program could be an abject failure.
