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San Francisco, a city long associated with exotic ideas, has been experimenting with a radical notion -- cracking down on car thieves.

Unlike some of the city's other adventures, this one is actually working out.

Car break-ins are down 85% from 2023, and are down 50% the first three months of 2026, compared to the first three months of 2025.

This is good news for residents and tourists, and bad news for auto repair shops that did a brisk business in new car windows.

Smash-and-grab break-ins were such an ingrained part of San Francisco life that an argot grew up around them:

Breaking into cars is known as "bipping," and the shards of glass left behind are called "San Francisco diamonds."

Residents were putting up signs warning tourists of frequent break-ins -- the equivalent of the "no radio" signs that New Yorkers once put in their cars to deter thieves in the bad old days of the 1980s and 1990s.

The success in fighting this scourge is a sign that urban disorder isn't inevitable and needn't be tolerated even in a famously left-wing jurisdiction. A broader decline in crime in San Francisco shows that the city, if nothing else, still has an instinct for basic self-preservation.

In 2023, the city began a counteroffensive against the break-in artists that included setting bait cars to lure them into committing the crime in view of cops, using public security cameras to identify getaway cars and deploying drones to track them after thefts, and targeted sting operations against crews of thieves.

San Francisco voters aided the effort by passing so-called Proposition E in March 2024, empowering the police to employ new crime-fighting technology.

The upshot is that increasing arrests takes repeat offenders off the streets and creates a deterrent against other offenders, leading to less crime.

This is a long-established, intuitive dynamic, but the City by the Bay turned its back on it, and paid the price. One of the wealthiest cities in the world put up with surging property crimes, as well as levels of homelessness and public drug use that made it feel at times like Calcutta.

The first step toward a return to rationality came when San Francisco voters in 2022 recalled the city's soft-on-crime ideologue masquerading as a district attorney, Chesa Boudin. Then, in 2024, Mayor London Breed lost her re-election bid to reformer Daniel Lurie, who effectively attacked her record on disorder.

Lurie is hardly Rudy Giuliani, but says sensible things about crime and appointed a good police chief. Meanwhile, new DA Brooke Jenkins isn't as allergic to jailing people as Boudin.

Since the pandemic, various categories of crime have been plummeting and hit two-decade lows. They've continued to fall this year. In part, San Francisco is riding a nationwide trend of declining crime, but clearly tougher-minded policies have had an effect.

The city has also cleared out homeless encampments and pulled back on its outlandishly permissive approach to public drug use that was terrible for addicts and corrosive of civic life.

All of this is to the good, but San Francisco is still operating within the limits of an overwhelmingly progressive context. If the city's leadership has become more responsible, judges still tend to be reflexively opposed to imposing serious consequences on offenders, and at the state level, California laws remain absurdly lenient.

The exception to the favorable trends in the city is murder. Last year, San Francisco had its lowest number of homicides since 1954. This year is trending higher, although violent crime has never been the city's main problem and the numbers are relatively low (28 murders in 2025).

Ultimately, reality is the most important factor in the affairs of men, and San Francisco ignored it for too long, believing it was compassionate to accommodate aberrant behavior. Eventually, it became too much even for the city of Harvey Milk and Nancy Pelosi. That means there must be hope for every jurisdiction in America.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2026 by King Features Syndicate