Here's a fun little civics refresher for anyone who needs it: you do not own the public street in front of your house.

A longtime Portola/Bayview resident recently learned this lesson the hard way — not because she forgot, but because her neighbor apparently never got the memo. After parking her car in a perfectly legal, non-obstructive spot on a public street, she returned to find her passenger-side door handles deliberately damaged. No note. No conversation. Just property destruction from someone who apparently believes the curb outside their home is sovereign territory.

She called the police, of course. And of course, it's unlikely they'll actually respond. Because in San Francisco, vandalism is basically a victimless crime — at least as far as enforcement is concerned.

Let's be clear about what happened here: a law-abiding person parked legally on a public road, and someone committed a crime against her property because they were annoyed. And the city's response? Crickets. This is the kind of low-level lawlessness that erodes neighborhoods from the inside out. When there are zero consequences for petty crime, petty crime stops being petty — it becomes the norm.

As one local put it, "If someone doesn't want others parking in front of their house, they should move out of the city and find a private street where they have the authority to enforce it." Hard to argue with that logic.

Another SF resident made the shrewd observation that it's "pretty dumb to vandalize someone's property while also making it really obvious where they live." Fair point — the vandal essentially left a return address.

And that gets at the deeper absurdity. Some residents suggested staking out the spot with cameras to catch the perpetrator red-handed, noting that video evidence might actually get SFPD interested. The fact that citizens have to do their own detective work to get police attention for a straightforward property crime tells you everything about where this city's priorities are.

This isn't an isolated mentality, either. Others in the Bayview report similar territorial behavior — electric mopeds shoved off the street, intimidation over perfectly legal parking. It's a small-scale breakdown of the social contract, enabled by a city government that can't be bothered to enforce basic property protections.

A note on your windshield is neighborly. A conversation is mature. Destroying someone's car door handles is a crime. And a police department that shrugs it off is a department that's given up on the basics.