Earlier this month, former San Francisco Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani was attacked by a homeless person with a crowbar. The attacker, Garrett Doty, was one of a group of vagrants who had been blocking Carmignani’s mother’s driveway and acting in a threatening fashion. The attack sent the former fire chief to the hospital for emergency surgery with a hole in the back of his skull. He also had a broken jaw and required fifty stitches. This looked like a fairly open-and-shut case, but last night the San Fran District Attorney’s office suddenly dropped the charges against Doty and dismissed the case. How is this happening in a major American city? (NY Post)

San Francisco prosecutors have decided not to charge the transient accused of repeatedly bashing the city’s former fire commissioner in the skull with a crowbar — even after obtaining video of the man taking practice swings moments before the attack.

The District Attorney’s Office dropped the case against Don Carmignani’s alleged assailant Garrett Doty after deciding the homeless man was acting in “self-defense,” sources close to Carmignani told The Post Tuesday night.

Prosecutors heeded Doty’s arguments and ruled that the attack was not senseless — they said Carmignani instead instigated the vicious assault after deploying pepper spray on the homeless man who lived outside his mother’s property in the city’s affluent Marina District.

This is incredible. It’s not as if this was some sort of he said, he said situation. The entire incident was caught on security camera video. Doty was seen fishing the crowbar out of a trash can and taking practice swings with it before he was even approached.

Prosecutors are claiming that the case lacked merit because Doty’s attack was not “senseless” or “random.” They said that Carmignani had first deployed pepper spray at Doty. That isn’t evident from the video, but let’s just say for a moment that it’s true. There is a group of four homeless men, at least one of them armed, blocking access to the mother’s driveway. The mother calls 911 to ask for help because she’s afraid to go outside. (The vagrants had been threatening passers-by on the sidewalk.)

Nobody from 911 or homeless services shows up all day. Finally, acting out of frustration, her son goes outside and instructs them to get off of the property. When they refuse and one of them becomes aggressive, the son sprays some pepper spray at him.

At that point, the confrontation is still non-violent or at least certainly non-lethal. But the vagrant’s response is to start swinging a crowbar and chasing the son down the sidewalk until he bashes in his skull and nearly kills him. In what world would anyone consider that a proportional response? Doty was initially charged with assault with a deadly weapon and aggravated battery with serious bodily injury. What changed?

One associate of Carmignani who spoke on background to reporters summed the situation up fairly well. They pointed out that both the Mayor and the District Attorney are elected officials who are currently under a lot of pressure to respond to San Francisco’s spiraling crime, homelessness, and drug overdose crises. They are trying to avoid the perception that the mobs of drug addicts and homeless people are randomly attacking law-abiding citizens. (Which they obviously are on a daily basis.) Sending Doty to trial would have been politically inconvenient, so they decided to put him back out on the street and leave a former Fire Commissioner to heal up from the nearly fatal attack.

There’s no word as to whether or not the DA returned Doty’s crowbar to him before he was released. But it’s obvious whose side the current administration is on. The streets are full of frequently violent drug addicts and homeless people. And they are clearly a higher political priority to the District Attorney and the Mayor than the taxpayers who are no longer safe on the sidewalks outside their own homes. So if San Francisco’s residents choose to reelect these people yet again, don’t waste any energy on sympathizing with them. They’re getting exactly what they voted for.