A San Francisco man has been charged with murder after shooting and killing a nonprofit worker at close range.
Edmund Bowen is accused of having shot and killed Joey Alexander after Alexander asked him to stop using drugs in public. Alexander was a member of Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit where ex-convicts attempt to deescalate situations in the city’s worst neighborhoods.
While Urban Alchemy’s heavy presence around City Hall and the Tenderloin District may allow them to defuse scuffles and verbal conflicts, they are unarmed, which makes it impossible for them to resolve violent situations. According to District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, a moderate Democrat who replaced the disgraced far-left ex-DA Chesa Boudin on a tough-on-crime platform, the city is 500 police officers short.
San Francisco has swung to the right on crime in recent years, after seeing the predictable results of electing Boudin in 2019 and buying into Defund the Police lunacy in 2020. Still, entrenched left-wing nonprofits such as the ACLU have attempted to enable drug addicts by consistently lobbying against enforcement and mandatory rehab. Earlier this year, Mayor Daniel Lurie banned nonprofits from distributing drug paraphernalia in public, rejecting the euphemistically-titled “harm reduction” approach to rehab that enables addiction.
The shooting and killing of Joey Alexander resulted from a similar permissive approach to drug use in the city. For all Democrats’ talk of pie-in-the-sky “alternatives to policing” since the Black Lives Matter fanaticism of 2020, certain situations are impossible to resolve without the threat of violence. Asking a nonprofit to deal with unstable drug users while being unarmed puts them in a position that risks tragic outcomes like this.
It remains to be seen whether Mayor Lurie will continue to support Urban Alchemy going forward. He has proven more skeptical of nonprofits than his predecessor, Mayor London Breed, and ran for office on a technocratic, outsider platform. The last six years in the city have been a slow process of voters slowly rediscovering the need for public order — a lesson they periodically relearn and forget
