If criminals have no compunction about targeting victims in broad daylight, would it then be safe to declare that that locale has a serious crime problem?
Because, as a recent video shared by conservative filmmaker Benny Johnson showed, Oakland, California, had all those hallmarks and then some.
Johnson and his crew were in Oakland filming a segment about the closing of a restaurant that was part of the West Coast fast-food chain, In-N-Out Burger. It was the only location of the massively popular In-N-Out franchise to permanently close, but it wasn’t shuttered due to lack of business. It shut down because what management called “ongoing issues with crime.”
WARNING: The following social media post contains language that some may find offensive.
I Just Got ROBBED At In-N-Out Burger 🍔 pic.twitter.com/gylc7z5O5T
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 18, 2024
Trending:
Sharing the video to the social media platform X, Johnson explained that In-N-Out has been “wildly popular, and [is] expanding everywhere.”
Everywhere, except Oakland, California.
Taking his viewers to the aforementioned city, Johnson stood in front of an abandoned In-N-Out, which was, according to Johnson, “a historic location. You can see the iconic building, but there’s a fence around it. The signs have been ripped down, and the windows are all boarded up.”
Will things in California soon get worse?
“Why did this In-N-Out Burger close?” Johnson rhetorically asked his viewers.
According to Johnson, it was because of “1,000 different criminal incidents of people being robbed while trying to get a burger in the drive-thru lane.” His video then showed a video clip of a figure in a black hoodie reaching through the smashed window of a parked car to seize the contents before fleeing — in broad daylight.
“Yeah,” Johnson continued, “In-N-Out got the f*** out of here.”
Then Johnson moved on the the broader trends behind this particular development, explaining that, “The reason that California has descended into a Third-World criminal hellhole is because of Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies that defund the police and that view the criminals as the victim, and not the tax-paying citizen.”
He wasn’t wrong, either.
When searching “Oakland, California,” one of the first auto-filled results included the word “crime,” and search results included an entire Wikipedia entry for “Crime in Oakland.”
As the Post Millennial reported, the city’s violent crime numbers have reached their highest levels since the ’90s, and those numbers have only risen since the Oakland In-N-Out closed its doors in March.
Even CNN had to admit that the scourge of crime in Oakland has turned the city into a “ghost town.”
“Speaking of being a victim,” he concluded the video, in an unexpected, but apropos twist, “we were literally robbed while we were filming this video,” showing footage of the broken windows in the car used by Johnson and his team.
As he said at the end of the video, “it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and the car gets smashed.”
Thankfully, a later X post from Johnson’s team member ALX revealed that he “was in the car when it happened, the rest of the team was probably about 20 feet away.”
According to ALX, “A car pulled up, someone jumped out, smashed the window and tried to take a bag, I had to rip it from his hands and told him to “f*ck off”. Oakland is a third world country.”
I was in the car when it happened, the rest of the team was probably about 20 feet away.
A car pulled up, someone jumped out, smashed the window and tried to take a bag, I had to rip it from his hands and told him to “f*ck off” 🤣
Oakland is a third world country. pic.twitter.com/mhNmE93qKj
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) April 18, 2024
The criminals in Oakland have become so brazen, they tried to steal luggage from a car in full sight of the owners.
And, as Johnson succinctly explained, it was all due to the soft-on-crime policies that benefit criminals while making life harder for the average citizen.
Even worse, the politicians and lawmakers advocating for these policies never suffer the worst of these wanton crime sprees.
Rather, the ordinary taxpayers have been the ones bearing the brunt of the majority of this crime.
They might not get directly victimized, but when the crime becomes so bad that it chases out successful businesses, that means less employment and business opportunities for the residents that remain.
If the crime has gotten so bad that ordinary people can no longer leave their cars unattended for five minutes, would it then be reasonable to call it a crisis?
