Violent repeat offenders were getting an easy ride. In Ess Eff, that was business as usual.
Newsom spokesman Nathan Ballard believes Newsom should get credit for putting an end to Juvenile Probation Department policy as soon as he found out about it in May. It's true, Newsom showed more sense than the geniuses who saw no better use of city funds than to fly convicted drug dealers to their home countries -- rather than turn them in to ICE.
But it's hard to give Newsom kudos for not knowing what some San Francisco cops knew: that some drug rings had figured out a way to game the city's juvenile justice system.
Shouldn't the mayor have known? I asked former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara, now a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Yes, he said, "the mayor runs the police department."
And: "It's just incredible to think they were spending all that money to help criminals evade being deported." And McNamara has no kind words for federal officials who were too busy to hold Ramos when they had the chance. For a year now, the folks at ICE have been telling me that recent arrests have been the result of concerted targeting of the worst offenders. Yet Ramos wasn't bad enough for them?
"What we're being beat up on is not fair in a sense," Ballard said. "The city did not give Ramos sanctuary. He was turned over to the federal authorities." ICE officials now say that they did not receive word from the sheriff's department until after Ramos was released.
I guess Ballard wants critics to forget the two times Ess Eff's sanctuary-city policy shielded Ramos and instead direct their ire toward the feds. The feds, you see, may (or may not have) screwed up and done by default what city workers, until May, had been doing on purpose.
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