A thirteen-year old was arrested for leading San Francisco cops on a crime spree over the weekend — as billionaires launched a $4 million campaign to address its crime-riddled, “doom loop” image.
San Francisco Police Officers Association posted a tongue-in-cheek comment on X about the teenager who was detained on Saturday after she and an accomplice allegedly stole a vehicle and led them on a wild police chase.
Police said the “Baby Bipper”— a slang term used in the Bay Area for someone who breaks into cars— crashed the stolen car into two others near the Bay Bridge on-ramp at about 8:30 a.m. on Saturday.
“What did you do this AM,” the association asked on their post.
“This Mountain View 13 yr-old allegedly helped boost a car & rolled through Central to go bippin’.
“She refused to pull over for SFPD & put lives in danger by choosing to cause a police pursuit, lost control of her stolen ride & smashed 2 other cars.”
A few hours after that incident, San Francisco Mayor London Breed attended a mural project at the East Cut Crossing area of the city for a new $4 million “It Starts Here” ad campaign that hopes to combat the city’s “doom-loop” reputation.
Billionaires, including Ripple CEO Chris Larsen, raised the money to attack the negative narratives of the city as being too expensive more most to afford to live in yet overrun by homeless and drug addicted people, unsafe for tourists and abandoned by retailers.
“This is to instill hope and to get people excited about San Francisco. And part of it is, you have to counter some of the negativity with some of the positivity of what is going on,” Breed told NBC Bay Area.
The TV ads show a picturesque views of the Golden Gate Bridge, followed by flashes of San Francisco’s contribution to cultural history with events like the Summer of Love, while heralding the city as the birthplace of Silicon Valley and tech companies including Apple, Google and Uber.
The narrator of the two-minute ad concludes the cinematic presentation with, “If it changes everything in an instant. Well, then chances are, it was dreamt up and built up here in San Francisco. And the best is yet to come.”
The “It Starts Here” campaign follows the city’s massive $6 million launch of “Always San Francisco”— another TV ad campaign that aired in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston and Houston markets with the hope to recover the loss in tourism dollars last year.
Funding for that campaign came from the city, grants from the state tourism bureau and the tourism industry, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Longtime San Francisco resident Ricci Lee Wynne told The Post that while millions of dollars are being pumped into flashy ads that paint the city in a positive light, tourists and business owners might be in for a rude awakening once they land.
Wynne, who has a condo in the busy South of Market, or SoMa, District, has amassed hundreds of raw footage and pictures of addicts overdosing near his building, criminals walking naked in broad daylight and homeless men and women in need of medical and mental health care.
Wynne has been attacked himself by drug dealers who are constantly selling everything from fentanyl to heroin near his block. Just a few blocks from Wynne’s home is a 24/7 open-air drug market in front of the Nancy Pelosi federal building.
He said rather than wasting millions of dollars on ads, the city should focus on helping small businesses stay afloat as more and more big-box retailers leave the downtown area.
“People are watching these nice ads, but when they get here what they see is essentially what they call ‘poverty porn,’” Wynne said.
“These billionaires and millionaires are putting up this vision of San Francisco as a world-class destination, but when they get here, everything is closed in the downtown area by 7 or 8 p.m. because of the crime.
“There are no stores open or they are closed for good, and the only place to eat after 9 p.m. is a pizza shop or some run-down places. People are not likely going come back if you don’t first fix what’s wrong.”
Meanwhile, city workers from the Public Wroks Department were recently issued bulletproof vests to protect them from attacks as they hand citations out to vendors operating without proper licenses.
Some of the city workers have been punched and kicked in the stomach, have had items thrown at them and even received death threats as they work the streets, city officials said.
“They have been subject to attacks, verbal and physical assaults,” San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott told local ABC7 KGO. “So it really makes it difficult to do their jobs.”
