Conservative author Shelby Steele and his filmmaker son Eli were given a San Francisco welcome when vandals broke into their car Wednesday and stole roughly $30,000 of camera equipment as they were in the city shooting a documentary.
Eli said they had left their rented SUV at the top of the city’s famous Lombard Street for just 10 minutes and returned at around 11 a.m. to find three of its windows smashed in and gear missing.
“You hear about how bad San Francisco is. I was filming a shot of my father, Shelby Steele, and in the ten minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen,” the younger Steele tweeted alongside photos of the bashed-in windows.
He later said he discovered more equipment was stolen — totaling in value between $25,000 to $30,000 — on top of damage to the rental car.
Eli claimed that police did nothing.
“Called 911 & they hung up twice,” he tweeted. “…SF police doing nothing. It’s so bad that my friend is calling gang members for help.”
As they assessed the damage, they saw more alleged robbers pulling up in a Mercedes and peeking into parked cars, he said.
“We yelled at them. They pulled a gun on my friend,” Eli tweeted. “He’s filing his report now. Not one police officer showed up.”
A couple hours later, the documentarian shared an update from the police station, where he claimed every person there was there for the same thing — they all had their cars broken into.
The father-and-son duo filed their report to a cop who took down all their info and allegedly told them to not expect anything to come of the report because police in San Francisco “have been defanged,” according to Eli.
The Twitter thread attracted the attention of the platform’s owner Elon Musk.
“Many Twitter employees feel unsafe coming to work in downtown SF and have had their car windows smashed,” Musk replied to the thread. “They also got such a null response from the police that they rarely even bother reporting crimes anymore, because nothing happens.”
Eli said he didn’t blame Musk’s employees “one bit.”
“But at what point do we say enough is enough, and demand the services that our taxpayer dollars pay for?” he responded.
San Francisco has been plagued by worsening property crime over the past several months including car break-ins and shoplifting which has prompted numerous major retailers to lock up products or pull out of the city completely.
