San Francisco Police Chief: Budget Cuts, Lax Prosecution Aren't Making Our Job 'Easier'

On Friday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Don Lemon Tonight,” San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said that cuts to the police budget and the refusal to prosecute certain offenses by San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin “definitely don’t make things easier” in fighting crime.

Host Don Lemon asked, “Mayor Breed pushed for cuts to police budgets after George Floyd. You have a progressive prosecutor who ran on promises to not prosecute prostitution, drug use, and dealing. Aren’t those the things that are keeping you from, as the mayor is saying, cutting out the B.S. that’s destroying your city?”

Scott responded, “Well, those things definitely don’t make things easier. But look, as far as cutting our budget, our budget, I’ve been — this is going into my sixth year here as the police chief and every year we’re fighting for budgets, and if it’s not one thing, it’s the other. So, that’s nothing new. The mayor declaring that the cuts this year will go to aid the African American community was just the focus of what was needed at that time. But we have the same discussion every year, just a different issue. So, as far as prosecutions and all that, the thing from the police department, our officers and our department, we need to be consistent in terms of what we do. And what I try to do Don, as the chief of police here, is keep us focused on what we need to do. People are asking for help. They don’t want to see this behavior in their neighborhoods and we should do our jobs the best we can, give the prosecutors the best cases that we can give them and do that consistently. And we really can’t worry about the things outside our control and we can’t make excuses. We just have to do our jobs the best we can and stay focused on that.”

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