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Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas‘: HERE.
In 1997, Gwendolyn Westbrook was arrested after being accused of embezzling thousands of dollars from the San Francisco port parking lot collections that she had been hired to monitor.
By 2022, she was running a homeless nonprofit that took in $36 million in grants while operating a tent city that took over a block and filled a neighborhood with violence and human waste..
Now she’s under arrest. Again.
Westbrook, the CEO of the United Council of Human Services, is currently accused of misappropriating $1.2 million and a lawsuit claims that she told staffers about buying a Tesla for herself, handing out luxury cars to other family members, vacationing in Aruba and driving around for some unstated reason with a “a trunk full of high-priced jewelry”.
“I guess it’s because I’m a black woman,” Westbrook had said of critics. “I think it’s racism. They don’t want a black woman running this organization.”
Westbrook has been indicted by San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins: also a black woman.
But the real question is why was Westbrook entrusted with millions of dollars and allowed to run a disastrous organization despite her past history at the San Francisco port? The answer lies with the reason why Westbrook got the job as an senior manager assistant at the Port of San Francisco in the first place.
The CEO of the homeless organization had been raised by Idaree Westbrook, an ally of the notorious Willie Brown, the former mayor and operator of the political machine that had turned the likes of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, his former mistress, into statewide players.
Idaree had founded the San Francisco Black Leadership Forum which her adopted daughter took over and, as a San Francisco Chronicle story mentioned, its “endorsement is considered a key factor in local political races”. Gwendolyn Westbrook was forced to step down after the port scandal, but six years later she was running a local soup kitchen named Mother Brown’s Kitchen that morphed into the United Council of Human Services. By 2014, San Francisco authorized a homeless shelter with 100 beds next door over the protests of the neighbors.
Locals complained of screaming at all hours of the day and night, vomit, drunkenness, human waste and domestic violence. “They are just very mean people,” Westbrook accused, who “just don’t want to help other people get one up.”
Police shut down a charity gambling event that included blackjack tables funding the group.
An audit was requested in 2015 and released in 2017 which found that the ‘Council’ had received $1.5 million in city funds and had not kept a proper record of where the money was going. Over $88,000 in expenses couldn’t be properly accounted for, the board lacked members and existing board members didn’t seem to know what the organization was doing.
But the director of homeless services claimed that, “I feel this is kind of a success story.” And the money just went on pouring in.
Then came a ‘Safe Overnight Parking Pilot Program’ for vagrants to sleep in their cars.
A year later the pandemic hit and Westbrook came up with her greatest idea yet.
Westbrook set up socially distanced’ tents for the homeless in a park to create ‘safe sleeping villages.’
Nobody cares about homeless people,” she claimed. “They won’t come to their rescue. We had to do something for our community and that’s what we came up with.”
San Francisco adopted the ‘safe sleeping model’ at a modest price of $61,000 per tent per year.
By 2021, taxpayers were paying $16 million a year to keep the homeless in tents. Something that they were already doing on their own. As the Chronicle noted, the annual cost for one of these tents was “2½ times the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.”
A supervisor called the cost “eye-popping” and argued that “we need to understand why that is”. Meanwhile the media and activists hailed Westbrook as a wonderfully compassionate genius.
“We’re going to fight to keep what we got. We’re going to keep our people in this neighborhood, and it doesn’t matter who’s going to like it,” Westbrook warned.
A lot of people didn’t like it.
By 2022, the ‘safe sleeping site’ with its tents, public toilets and showers had taken over a street, blocking food deliveries to stores and intimidating the locals. Business owners couldn’t get to their own shops and faced violence and ugliness. One man was threatened with a baseball bat, others complained about human waste, describing having to wash down the sides of their businesses after they were used as bathrooms.
Not to mention the garbage dumping and the drug dealing.
That same year, city auditors took a look at the organization’s $28 million in public funds and forwarded their results to the FBI. Housing was being used for employees of the organization and allegedly for Westbrook’s family members. The organization had collected over $100,000 in rent, even though it wasn’t supposed to be collecting rent, and $177,000 in credit card payments couldn’t be documented. Westbrook meanwhile had been donating money to local politicians.
Including Mayor London Breed.
Westbrook claimed that it was all a “damn lie” and blamed racism. When asked how her original port case had ended, the CEO claimed that she did not remember despite having pled guilty.
But it was San Francisco officials who chose not to remember, to ignore every red flag along the way, to provide millions in funding to a woman who had been accused of embezzlement, to ignore the failed audits and the neighborhood complaints until the toll passed $1 million.
The millions in the United Council of Human Services case are a drop in the bucket of billions in California. The Los Angeles Homeless Authority couldn’t account for $2.5 billion in spending. The story was a familiar one with an influential CEO who provided a multi-million dollar contract to her husband, hired her friends and protected Mayor Karen Bass.
The more money California spends on fixing ‘homelessness’, the worse the problem grows. But the money isn’t going to the homeless. Had all the homeless spending gone to the homeless, they could have been buying themselves luxury cars, trunks full of jewels and trips to Aruba.
So how many of those Conmen are using the Homeless to Line their Pockets and Fatten their Wallets? Yes Americans do care for the homeless its a some Crooks(The United Nations)who live their lifestyles when the Homeless are stuck out in the Cold
Gwendolyn Worstcrook should live in the image on the left, not the one on the right. There’s even a public toilet for her to use.
No, she NEEDS o be living on some variant o the old time GreyBar Hoel, with the hole in the concree slab to place her “personal” waste.
Make certain all her pals and enablers are in neighbouring cells, so they can get together and wail about their “discrimination” sagas……
I live in LA. Homelessness grows.
We subsidize it so it grows
President Reagan said “The surest way to get MORE of something is for the Government to subsidize it”!
Maybe an isolated “ranch” or something would be better for the homeless drug addicts! For those who HONESTLY want a better life you can clean them up, try drug rehabilitation, and help them obtain employment. For those who DON’T – just have an area where they can liver – FREE RANGE – toss them some food every now and then along with any confiscated drugs – let nature take its course! Harsh? Maybe!
Yes, homelessness doubled when Governor Newscum doubled its government subsidy.
Willie was smart enough not to get caught. The others not.
Keynes already showed in the 1930s that the only solution is subsidized rent. But that takes some high level rational thinking, which makes it quite difficult to achieve.
Willie was smart enough to let the others do the dirty work and then have their backs, pay for their lawyers, when they were caught
amd good ol’ Kammie ws his “special reward”. How sweet!!!!
Good job she wasn’ near smart enough to learn HIS tricks. She’s a rank amateur griphter compared to Slick Willie……
Willie Brown was the real Slick Willie, not Billdo Clinton.
And subsidized rent works. Sure, half the formerly homeless use drugs and many of them are nuts and criminals but drug use hurts themselves a lot more than the people around them and the worst nuts and criminals weed themselves out of supportive housing. The majority of those subsidized more or less conform to society or rehabilitate themselves and move on to better lives. Everybody is better off when they’re off the streets.
There are highly regimented facilities for the hopeless cases but there aren’t nearly bough of them and there are too many stupid laws which prevent them from being involuntarily committed. Our streets and parks don’t have to be blighted with those freaks, and yes, most of them are freaks. Most freaks can be managed with supportive housing, though.
Exactly. Thanks Jeff !!!!!!!
What baffles me is these homeless grifting scams in California are well known. The main sleaze media doesn’t report on it, because they are owned by the scammers. Californians in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco put up with the disgusting homeless and the mess and human waste. Will it take an epidemic from the homeless to wake people up? The downtown LA Union Rescue Mission’s Andy Biggs ended up with flesh eating bacteria and had to have a leg amputated. In the 1990’s I was desperate for a job and there was a computer administrator position I interviewed for a the URM. It was a cold, dark rainy day, I drove through a sea of homeless, a gate opened for me. I was asked if I minded working with homeless. Hells bells, I needed a job, of course I went into denial and lied, no problem. fortunately I wasn’t hired and got hired by LA County Sheriff’s Department instead.
In the 1990’s, the homeless crisis was still concentrated to this area of downtown LA, Skid Row. Now it’s crawled into the suburbs of LA County,
And when they report on it, the information gets buried
The LA Times did a self-reported survey of the homeless in which the majority admitted that they were mentally ill or abusing substances, and yet the only thing you hear about is the high cost of housing
Christpher rupho has written extensively on the Homeless Indistrial Complex…. Should be required reading to all civic employees, but it won’t be.
we’ve been writing extensively about the Homeless Industrial Complex
Worse yet is that they will double down on solutions that have repeatedly failed. I think it’s intentional for the reason you’ve already stated: “the Homeless Industrial Complex.”
Far too many people are comfortable making a living off of other peoples misery. It’s the same mindset and justification liberals have used for decades to lock minorities, particularly blacks, into poverty and profit off of it.
Think of how many billions of dollars a year the government spends on welfare programs. All that money isn’t going to the poor! I’ll bet that at least 60% of it goes to government employees who run and administer the various welfare programs.
Lastly, I can absolutely assure you that those government employees (i.e., parasites) have zero interest in ending poverty and homelessness in America today, tomorrow or in the foreseeable future. How would they earn a living if that happened?
Nothing will wake the public up. We will end up like India, with millions living homeless, sleeping in the streets.
Maybe so, and with a thousand times the crime.
Did you know Skid Row is named after the timber skids that used to be in Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle to get timber down a big hill into Puget Sound for the ships to pick up? Apparently the area was known for its drunken sots. I used to think of NYC’s Bowery bums when encountered that term but it’s based on Seattle drunkards and drunken derelicts.
The only reason I know that is because I used to live in Seattle. It used to be a great city but apparently the “woke” left rule it now.