It’s 7:09 a.m., 53° and partly sunny, projected high of 62°. BRRR! Ten degrees colder than yesterday. Details are here.
Unless you’ve been living in a hole in the ground which also has no news access, you’ve probably noticed that there’s going to be another protest in and around various BART stations tonight, protesting the shooting of a homeless man named Charles Hill by BART police earlier this summer. According to the Examiner, this protest is going to focus more on protest, less on shutting down BART stations. Recap of last week’s protest, and the protesters’ demands, here.
If you want to be on the safe side, though, avoid trips that require getting on or off BART at Civic Center and Powell — those two seem to be shut down the most frequently during these protests, followed by Montgomery and Embarcadero.
Also: Yesterday we published an open letter to the city from one of Charles Hill’s doctors at San Francisco General. If you haven’t read it yet, you should — it, and the comments on it, make for fascinating reading.
Writes the doctor, Rupa Marya:
Charles was a member of the invisible class of people in SF — mentally ill, homeless and not reliably connected to the help he needed. While I had seen him agitated before and while I can’t speak to all of his behavior, I never would have described him as threatening in such a way as to warrant the use of deadly force. We often have to deal with agitated sometimes even violent patients in the hospital. Through teamwork, tools and training, we have not had to fatally wound our patients in order to subdue them. I understand the police are there to protect us and react to the situation around them, but I wonder why the officer who shot Charles did not aim for the leg if he felt the need to use a gun, instead of his vital organs. I wonder if he possessed other training methods to subdue an agitated man with a knife or bottle.
Writes one anonymous commenter:
Kinda hard to take someone in on a psych hold when they are armed with two bladed weapons and do not follow commands. I am not required to prolong the encounter to reason with an armed subject, and I am also taught that anyone within 21 feet, armed with a knife or any other bladed weapon, is an immediate deadly threat. That distance was actually just recently upped to 30 ft.
To all the naysayers: You have the right to protest, and I’ll defend that right. However I’d like you to do two things. 1) go fire a handgun at a target. Be calm, go shoot some rounds. Then have a friend come up and wrestle you for a full 60 seconds to get your heart pumping. Go shoot again at the target, and aim for a 4-6 inch wide space. Think you can hit it?
Meanwhile, KALW did a great story a few days ago about a man who makes his morning commute from Oakland to SF via kayak, dodging container ships along the way. He won’t move to SF, he says, because he loves his commute so much.
