(Corine Gatti, Headline USA) Crime-infested San Francisco was clearly in damage control last week, hiring a tourism boss to reclaim the City by the Bay to its former glory days before the Left destroyed the city with their failed crime policies, the New York Post reported.
After launcing a $6 million campaign in May, the San Francisco Travel Association, the city’s tourism and marketing division, hired Scott Beck as its new president and CEO on Thursday.
Beck—who has held similar posts in Toronto and Salt Lake City—will begin Oct. 30, succeeding 18-year tourism and marketing veteran Joe D’Alessandro, who saw the city re-emerge from the dot-com bubble burst to become the hub of social-media and venture-capital startups, only to see the pendulum quickly swing as many fled the city during the COVID lockdowns and social-justice reckonings of 2020.
Beck’s hiring follows a string of high-end store closures—including the flagship stores of companies like Nordstrom’s and T-Mobile, which were unable to protect their profitability due to smash-and-grab retail theft.
He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he hoped to reverse the “ongoing narrative about San Francisco as a monolithic experience, when it’s clearly not”—despite a recent analysis by San Francisco’s comptroller that found its business district has become a s**t show, quite literally in some instances.
Even the city’s mayor London Breed hired a poop patrol team in 2018 to clean up the sidewalks and admitted that she’s never seen so much waste on the sidewalks.
The new hire blamed the media coverage for the city’s soft-on-crime policies, adding, it was “not 100% accurate,” although San Francisco’s homeless population and open-air drug markets gained national notoriety on theirs own merits.
Most recently, workers SF’s Nancy Pelosi Federal Building were advised to remain home “for the foreseeable future” because of crime in the area, which has little to do with the media.
Meanwhile, in a desperate attempt to showcase the alarming state of urban decay in the city, a street guide who turned out to be a former city commissioner attempted to launch a unique tour called “Doom Loop Walking Tour.” However, he soon resigned from his post, likely out of frustration at the government’s lack of response to the problem.
A recent Gallup poll found 46% of Americans felt San Francisco was not a safe place to live or visit, while safety was viewed differently by Democrats and Republicans, with 74% of Democrats perceiving the city as safe and 32% of Republicans agreeing.
San Francisco mayoral spokesman Jeff Cretan claimed that there was a political divide due to the “pervasive impact of right-wing attacks,” including those by the media.
