It was not quite three weeks ago when Mayor London Breed assailed “the bullshit that is destroying our city” and moved to deploy more cops into the Tenderloin to make things right.
It was not quite two weeks ago when the Board of Supervisors, in a fraught, 10-and-a-half hour meeting, approved the mayor’s declaration of an emergency.
There is still, according to people involved in banging out this plan, “no solid plan.”
The “linkage site,” where street drug-users will be directed — not by cops as initially proposed, but by city or nonprofit workers — may not be a tent but, instead, an actual building. As of Dec. 29, no lease had been signed on any physical site, despite what Department of Emergency Management boss Mary Ellen Carroll told the Board last month.
So, there’s a lot up in the air here: Thus far, it’s a conceptual site offering conceptual services.
Also up in the air is the controversial role of law enforcement. It’s not entirely clear what cops will do or even what they should do. Chief Bill Scott said police officers will be “engaging” with the community, which sounds exactly like something a police officer would say.
Whatever the “plan” is at the top, cops on the street are saying the objective, as they see it, is to simply be visible; the “plan” at the moment is for police to be police.
In a sane and rational world, all this would be okay. It’d be ridiculous to expect a comprehensive strategy to undo generations of drugs and filth and crime and misery in the Tenderloin at this point in the process.
The Tenderloin has, for decades, served as this city’s de facto containment zone; San Francisco’s strategic reserve of drugs, filth, crime and misery. Altering that in a lasting way would require serious discussions about what obligations should be taken up by other parts of the city, and the crafting of deeply organized and well-resourced initiatives to target and remedy the myriad governmental failures of the last half-century.
But we’re not doing that. Instead, following Breed’s bombastic Dec. 14 press conference, we’re essentially cobbling ideas together on the fly — with those expressing any consternation regarding this half-baked process being cast as intransigent. “My fear,” says one of the planners, “is that everything is happening so fast, that we’re not being as thoughtful as we should be.”
That’s for sure, and it starts at the top: Our mayor has, for years, pushed for supervised consumption sites and other novel ideas to counter this city’s mounting overdose death toll, a plague that has touched her own family. And, behind the scenes, she still is. But her recent blunt calls for more cops and “jail or treatment,” a so-called “tough love” approach that garnered national attention, could undermine her longstanding, heartfelt goals.
Calls for compassionate, practical solutions and increased law enforcement aren’t like chocolate and peanut butter. They’re potentially contradictory, and could cancel each other out.
In 2017, Breed, then president of the Board of Supervisors, created a citywide task force to examine the implementation of supervised drug consumption sites. Getting one of these established without triggering a federal raid has been a longstanding challenge. But New York has managed to do it, and now-Mayor Breed remains supportive of strategies allowing for drug use in controlled environments rather, than forcing people into dangerous and solitary places.
Under Breed, the city has obtained a brick-and-mortar structure on Geary. And, we’re told, potential legal blowback from the federal “Crackhouse laws” may be sidestepped with something as simple as an adjacent, nonpermanent structure. Additional “pop-up” consumption sites may be deployed soon.
(Will there be discreet drug use in the future “linkage site”? Will this opportunity be sold to street drug users as a motivating factor for them to go there and, perhaps, avail themselves of other services to turn their lives around? Again, nobody is saying so on the record.)
So, let’s give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. There is certainly political gamesmanship being laid on thick, but Breed wants things to improve in the Tenderloin, and is supportive of new approaches.
City officials tasked with carrying out the mayor’s “plan” were “walking back what she said so hard it looked like John Cleese and the Ministry of Silly Walks.”
With that said, it’s not as if she needs to cloak her practical and compassionate goals with law-and-order rhetoric to appease the local electorate. Safe consumption sites poll better here than any politician: 77 percent of San Franciscans supported safe-injection sites in this 2019 Dignity Health poll.
So the tough talk and calls for more cops and “making life hell” for street drug users — that’s political theater, a sop for people who like slapping their palm on the table and shouting “about damn time!” and fodder for a lazy, bogus media storyline about a liberal, big-city mayor’s “pivot.”
For the city workers, nonprofit employees, and community members who’ll be expected to do the work on the ground to make meaningful change happen in the Tenderloin, this is maddening.
In meetings with community members, city officials tasked with carrying out the mayor’s “plan” were “walking back what she said so hard it looked like John Cleese and the Ministry of Silly Walks,” said one attendee.
“When the mayor talks to me about how much we need safe-consumption sites I think, ‘Great, this mayor is looking at evidence-based solutions,’” says a longtime Tenderloin service provider. “But when she talks about increased policing and arresting people with substance-abuse disorders, I get cognitive dissonance. I feel like I’m not talking to the same person about how to manage this problem.”
If cognitive dissonance, bruised feelings and broken trust were the worst possible outcome here, everyone could live with that. The past several weeks have been a master class on how to not introduce and craft sound policy. But, again, if even a little positive change comes from it, these will seem like superficial gripes.
But that’s far from the worst-case scenario here. Sending in the cops because of spiking overdose deaths could lead to even more deaths.
“Safe-consumption sites and drug treatment and various harm-reduction — it’s all been shown to work,” says Alex Kral, an epidemiologist whose research regarding safe-consumption sites has been touted by the city. “But there have never been any papers showing increased law enforcement works. Research, in fact, shows the contrary: Law enforcement actually hurts when it gets to drug use and overdoses and death.”
Kral has been pushing for safe-consumption sites in San Francisco for at least 14 years, during which time, thousands of people have overdosed. If one or more is established here and if this becomes accepted, mainstream practice, he sees that as an unmitigated positive. But clumsy use of law-enforcement could undercut this. Cops could simply flush drug dealers and users to other parts of the city, and into dangerous and solitary places where they’re more likely to die of an overdose. Compelling users into supervised sites or treatment under pain of incarceration, Kral says, is doomed to fail.
“That is forced drug treatment; that works for some people, but generally, it does not work. Only a small fraction of people who now want drug treatment can now get it. Why would you waste that precious resource on people who are not ready or willing?” he asks.
“There are probably close to 200 safe-consumption sites around the world, and I am not aware of any other place where they have made suggestions about things like, the police can take you to this site or take you to jail. If police are forcing you to go to jail or go to this service, the service is seen as an agent of the police.”
If there is some Swiss watch of a “plan,” it hasn’t yet trickled down to the cops on the street. And the ones I’ve talked to are also extremely skeptical of the efficacy of any so-called crackdown.
There have, in recent years, been joint operations with the feds that led to dozens of dope-dealers being arrested and even deported. “But that hasn’t changed anything,” said a veteran San Francisco street cop.
When you stomp on a big puddle, you just make a bunch of smaller puddles. The Tenderloin is this city’s big puddle. Will “success” here be defined as a reduction in visible drug-use and misery, with a predictable uptick in neighboring areas and on BART trains?
“We have to acknowledge that police cannot fix everything. Across many large cities, police have been used to prop up policies that were not so good, and where people who were poor and Black and disenfranchised suffered,” said a longtime officer. Non-police solutions, he continued, “are worth a shot. Whatever police are doing out there, it’s not working. Cops are out there working every day but the Tenderloin is progressively declining anyway. You can’t change human nature just because some cops are out there.”
The Tenderloin is this city’s living embodiment of unintended consequences. This should be front-of-mind for everyone attached to the effort to change this. As the man whose picture graces the larger bills changing hands on Tenderloin street corners once purportedly said: “When you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
If you want to decrease the drug addiction problem, get tough on those selling fentanyl.
SF can do it, since other cities have:
https://kesq.com/news/crime/2021/11/08/socal-prosecutors-step-up-charges-for-those-dealing-in-fentanyl/
Once again Joe you are wrong and pandering. It is shameful how you insult the city with your assimilation with with silly walks.
This problem is real and created by people like you enabling and embracing codependency. Grow up and be honest. These are incorrigible people NOT FROM OUR COMMUNITY, who 90% will NEVER recover.
The beneficiaries are out of Townes NGO scammers.
Joe grow and write an adult piece that is objective and honest.
The problem needs to be addressed State wide with kibbutz’s full of drugs and social incurables who reside off site in community of their own creation and amoral values.
Hey Tom —
If I haven’t told you before, I’m telling you now: Please stop typing with your face.
Best,
JE
In October, Tenderloin residents, including many families with young children, decided to take action and organize to demand a city solution to safety issues in the neighborhood. Several Zoom meetings were held to discuss how to present their demands and make sure they would be heard. On November 6, residents marched from La Cocina to Civic Center Plaza, directly across from City Hall, where they were joined by others. There were multiple speakers who spoke in their language of choice. After each person spoke, volunteers provided interpretation in Arabic, Spanish and English so everyone could participate equally.
Before, during and after the rally, an open letter to Mayor Breed was circulated (full text of the letter posted below) and was signed by hundreds of people. Both the rally and the letter focused on Tenderloin Safety Concerns and specifically mentioned a physical attack on a middle school student and a mass shooting on Golden Gate Avenue. As you can read in the letter, no mention was made of homeless people, drug users or even dealers. Individuals and “types of people” were not the problem. The problem was, and continues to be, public safety.
A group of residents delivered the letter to the Mayor and asked for a private meeting with her. The meeting was held on December 10 at the Main Library. Interpretation was provided by SFPL so English, Spanish, Arabic and Vietnamese speaking communities would be included in the conversation. Press was not allowed at the event. (The Mayor asked Heather Knight to leave, though she received a recording of at least some of the meeting.) Again, the meeting was about public safety and the right to be able to walk around one’s neighborhood to get to work, school and parks; to buy food and medicine; to visit friends or relatives; and simply to get exercise and be part of a public community.
The Mayor spoke for a bit but said she was mostly there to listen to the community. At that private meeting, some residents spoke about crowded, trash- and shit-covered sidewalks. I believe there was some specific reference to homeless people and drug users, but I don’t believe they were being specifically targeted.
Both in the general details of the non-plan (a draft of which apparently existed on December 23, though no one had bothered to share it with any of the Supervisors) and virtually all of the subsequent press coverage of the plan and the Board’s discussion and vote, the public safety issues that community members had met with the Mayor to discuss had disappeared.
Homeless people and drug users, regularly conflated, have become the problem that the Mayor, the Board and the Department of Emergency Management have set out to “solve.” Dealers, assaults, stabbings and shootings, or any other serious threats to public safety, have been removed from the discussion. The emergency those residents wanted the city to address was public safety, and that has been ignored.
Tenderloin safety issues are so significant that State Assemblymember Phil Ting is looking to move his office from the State Building to some other location, and they work in a Highway Patrol-guarded building and have only a short walk to and from BART. The safety issues are so significant that a dozen or so community members had a closed door meeting with the State Attorney General.
The Mayor’s declaration is the second state of emergency she’s declared in the past two years. The first one was citywide. In large measure the relief components of that declaration excluded the Tenderloin: it took six months to get a food pantry; it took more than a year to get one small actual shared space approved and built so that 3,500 kids could get some exercise; no street was converted to a full-time Slow Street, not even a small alley that serves no significant vehicular needs; despite a commitment from senior Rec and Park staff, no designated children’s recreation space was created on the northern half of Civic Center Plaza.
The second state of emergency is Tenderloin specific and still doesn’t address the emergency. It has only pitted groups against each other. There are no easy solutions to the current situation in the neighborhood. There are many different communities living there, many with long histories of urgent circumstances. It is likely that not all have mutual respect or concern for some of the other communities. For some that might be cold-hearted selfishness, but for many it is undoubtedly something else that informs their thinking and motivates them to ask for the city’s help. It is urgent that the city work to create an environment where we can all live and see what “something else” look like.
November 5, 2021
To: Honorable Mayor London Breed
Re: Tenderloin Safety Concerns
We are immigrants and refugees. We are children and mothers and fathers. We are small business owners and the people San Francisco claims to respect and protect and celebrate. We are the Tenderloin and you have failed us.
On September 29, an 11 year-old girl who recently moved to the United States was attacked while walking to school in the morning. Families have been unable to get an adequate response from the city to ensure our children’s safety. Two weeks later, between 30 and 40 rounds of bullets were fired at Golden Gate & Hyde at 8:30pm. In the building next to the shooting, families were coming home from the park, people were getting in from walking their dogs, adult sons were visiting their elderly mothers. There were at least six gunmen and four people injured. This was a mass shooting that barely made the news because it happened in a poor neighborhood. These are just two of the countless horrific incidents that have happened in our neighborhood.
We are the densest residential neighborhood in the city with the most children and seniors per capita yet we have been completely forgotten. We have been treated as a containment zone for decades and it is time to stop. We know you did not cause the conditions in the Tenderloin, but we demand you put an end to them. We need you to treat this like an emergency. We demand immediate and transparent coordination between the agencies tasked with ensuring our safety. We demand that the city, your office, and you do your job. We are willing to work with you to come up with solutions but we cannot do it on our own. We would like for you to meet with us directly and are looking forward to your response.
Sincerely,
The Families, Residents, and Small Business Owners of the Tenderloin
Nosotros somos inmigrantes y refugiados. Nosotros somos hijos, madres y padres. Nosotros somos propietarios de pequeñas empresas y la gente cual San Francisco reclama que respeta, protege, y celebra. Nosotros somos Tenderloin, y ustedes nos han fallado.
El 29 de septiembre, una niña de solamente 11 años, quien recientemente se mudó a Los Estados Unidos, fue atacada en la mañana mientras que ella caminaba a la escuela. Las familias todavía no han recibido una respuesta adecuada de la ciudad para asegurar la seguridad de nuestros hijos. Dos semanas después, 30 a 40 balas fueron disparadas en Golden Gate y Hyde a las 8:30 de la tarde. En el edificio a lado del tiroteo, familias estaban regresando del parque a casa, personas estaban regresando después de caminar sus perros, hijos visitaron a padres, que la mayoría son de la tercera edad. Había al menos seis pistoleros, y cuatro personas heridas. Este fue un tiroteo masivo y no salió a la luz pública porque sucedió en un vecindario de bajos recursos. Estos eventos solamente son dos en las innumerables tragedias que han ocurrido en nuestro vecindario.
Nosotros somos el vecindario más congestionado en la ciudad, con el porcentaje de niños y la tercera edad más alta en la ciudad, pero de todos modos nos ignoran. Por décadas, hemos sido tratados como una zona de contención, y ahora es tiempo de parar. Entendemos que tú no causaste las condiciones en el Tenderloin, pero demandamos que pongan fin a estas condiciones. Nosotros necesitamos que usted trate esta situación como una emergencia. Demandamos una coordinación inmediata y transparente entre las agencias encargadas de nuestra seguridad. Demandamos que la ciudad, su oficina y usted hagan su trabajo. Estamos dispuestos a trabajar con usted para encontrar soluciones, pero no podemos hacerlo por nuestra cuenta.
Atentamente,
Las familias, residentes y propietarios de pequeñas empresas de Tenderloin
There’s way too many people hanging out on the sidewalk like it’s a backyard barbeque. The sidewalk is not a destination.
Are they really all drug dealers? I can’t believe there’s enough drug users to support that many dealers. If they are dealers, they’ve got terrible business sense.
They don’t seem dangerous to me but I can see how their presence would be threatening to some, especially elderly and folks trying to raise families. But I don’t have any idea what it takes to make a person turn to violent crime. What happens if their economic situation gets really desperate and they outnumber everyone else on the streets?
Trust me dude, it’s not that you couldn’t beat them in a fist fight, it’s that you don’t want to get near them. They are crawling with diseases and body fluids. We call it going to the zoo as you drive from Civic center over to Russian Hill. It is unnecessary, but the optics of rounding up living people is hard to stomach. The tide in what is acceptable will turn when there is an outbreak of some bug that is highly transmissable to the rest of the residents and visitors to SF (Ala the worry in San Diego woth shigella that never materialized). Suddenly the kid gloves will come off and the Fed style hazmat gloves go on for a true removal/relocation. We just have to wait for it to get that disgusting first.
There are very few folks on this thread that have spent as much time working within the Tenderloin community as I have. Not bragging, but it is what it is…internet activists and a few service providers is what I am feeling from these posts. I bet that I will not see many of you outside walking within the community of the Tenderloin anytime soon.
I think this is well written insightful piece. The problem with is anything but simple. Those trying to pigeonhole it, have no idea what drives the addicts, other than the obvious chemical addiction. Breakthrough takes far more work than just taking the substance away.
There is no mention in this discussion of SF Dept of Health’s using homelessness as a behavioral modification tool for those with untreated psychosis coupled with substance abuse. This is the population that winds up getting arrested and staying in jail because Jail has become in effect the psychiatric emergency room for people whose brains have been destroyed by repeated episodes of psychosis. Why is the director of “behavioral health” not even a psychiatrist? Why does SF export the seriously mentally ill to treatment facilities as far south as Santa Barbara? And why are so many in prison “incompetent to stand trial” and not able to get a treatment bed while their families are told to abandon them?
It is easier to write a catchy title or headline for a press release than to solve the problem described in the headline. Anytime the title of the plan is followed by vague platitudes you can bet it is a political distraction and not a well thought out realistic plan. Handing out emergency powers to government officials has resulted in more divisiveness and distrust of the government. If you look up the meaning of the word “emergency” it means “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.” The problms are serious and dangerous but hardly unexecpted and the response has not been immediate, so does this meet the criteria of an “emergency? .
30k per year!! thats sooo much money! My SSI is 1/3 of that!
This was not an argument AGAINST boosting SSI, rather FOR solving an acute public problem. It should be public policy that nobody in SF should have to try to live on less than $30K/yr.
Nobody should live on less than 30K annually in SF? I truly dislike spending ALL of my income on rent. Also I am being faced with eviction through the Ellis Act. Thus I am one more person being forced to leave SF. Soon no one will be left who makes under $30,000.00 per year. Not in SF!
How about we dispense with the homeless industrial complex and simply transfer cash grants on the order of $30K/yr to poor people and addicts while offering up some government provided supportive service for those who need them?
So long as there are contracts to be had, then the primary interests at play will be those of the service providers and advocates, not homeless people, poor people, substance users and those facing psych challenges.
It is cheaper to just give “clients” money than to maintain this corrupt artifice, even if it does not work out perfectly for every recipient.
Agreed.
Just give the poor the money.
Yeah – some will use to it continue on into an OD spiral.
But many will get a solid re-boot of their lives.
Make it an extra 20K if one is off the streets and in a stable situation after 4 months.
What happens when the line for free money gets 5,000,000 long? And it will.
In recent years in the TL, I see lots of drug dealers and very little police presence and the overdose rate has been off the charts. Harm Reduction without law enforcement is not working in SF for sure. I think you need both harm reduction and law enforcement working together.
You mentioned that if we stop drug dealing to such a great degree in the TL, it will push the drug dealers to other parts of the Bay Area. I say that is a good thing. Right now, if you are looking to score meth, fentanyl, heroine, or whatever drug you are looking for, you know exactly where to go to find it. The Tenderloin. It is a local, national, and international destination for drug dealers and users. Well, that easy to find, one stop shop place needs to be closed down. Make it a little harder to sell and buy drugs.
Joe, love your work, but you’re conflating two problems here — just as Breed is doing — and demanding that she solve only one.
Problem one is overdoses. But problem two is the increasing amount of, literal, crap on our streets, which is also a metaphor for the increase in crime and break-ins. More police and more enforcement won’t help with problem one — but they sure can help with problem two.
There is no plan because there is no real local solution. No one disagrees that there’s a very serious and tragic problem, and that status quo is killing hundreds of people and causing countless suffering among others.
But this idea that you can incarcerate the problem away is insane. It’s not compassionate, it doesn’t get people help (in fact it makes their recovery and ability to re-enter society harder), and it’s not cheaper.
It’s also the symptoms of a far more vast problem from across the region, state and country. Until there’s real movement on a broader scale, there’s no solution on a local level, only attempts at managing it and mitigating harm.
But it’s a lot easier for the rest of the country, state, region and even other SF neighborhoods to export the people struggling to this part of the city.
Aside from all that, I’ve yet to see any real discussion of what success would mean. Like it or not, the situation in the tl does keep rent much more affordable than it otherwise would be. While it’s not a reason to not work to help the people suffering, that conversation needs to take into account the impact many low income families will face from the de facto gentrification of the neighborhood, and include better support and guarantees for them.
“But this idea that you can incarcerate the problem away is insane. It’s not compassionate, it doesn’t get people help (in fact it makes their recovery and ability to re-enter society harder), and it’s not cheaper.”
Is letting people die on the streets more compassionate? Does persisting the TL squalor do anything to aid in recovery or reintegration? The answer to both those question is unambiguously No. Kindly, I think your statement has become a rallying cry but doesn’t seem that grounded in San Francisco’s reality.
Completely agree with EC. Here in SF, we practice faux compassion — it’s mean to put people in jail for breaking the laws, so we just let them destroy themselves on the sidewalks in front of us while stepping over them daily. That’s compassion, San Francisco style.
Our street-dwellers need some tough love, and less tolerance. Some of them can even be saved, if we get to them and break the cycle before their brains and bodies have been destroyed by their bad choices and addictions. Now THAT would be compassion… it just might not be the “live and let live” that makes many people okay with the status quo.
It’s okay to give people a fixed set of options, and it’s okay that they may not like any of those options. We have hundreds, maybe thousands of people who may not “like” any of the options which actually benefit them. In that case, maybe they can go somewhere else, but we don’t need to let them destroy themselves on our streets or at our expense.
Neither of us disagree that status quo isn’t ok, and isn’t compassionate.
But this idea that incarceration is the solution is what is being proposed. We’ve been doing it for decades, and we know that it doesn’t work. It tears apart families, it costs far more, it creates criminal records that make it even more difficult to re-enter society, and at its face — the deprivation of basic liberty, it is unjust in non-violent cases.
We have laws to protect society. Someone shooting up on the street, as unpleasant to see, and tragic as it may be, is not a direct risk to your safety. Do some people in altered states behave violently? Sure, and far more often than not, those people are suffering from untreated mental illness that is the basis of that behavior, and isn’t solved by throwing them in a prison cell.
The far, far majority of homeless people are non-violent. They’re far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators, and yes, they often will take more aggressive postures so that people leave them alone. That’s still a big leap to actual violence.
They’re people, just like you are. You can’t simply snap your fingers and make them disappear (humanity has had a bad track record attempting this). We can’t solve this on a local level, when we’re the outlet for so many other jurisdictions. We should be making a case to both the state and federal level, and collecting better data to not only engage the people needing this help, but to better understand their history so we know better how to help prevent others from suffering similar difficulties.
“people in altered states “. Seriously. This isn’t the 90s any more. Get a clue and read up on what P2P Meth and Fentanyl do to a person.
I think it may be inaccurate to imply Breed has no plan. It appears to me she has a plan, the same plan that Lee, Newsom, Brown, Jordan, Agnos and Feinstein had: fight bullshit with bullshit. It’s worked for over 40 years; why stop now?
The “Homeless Industrial Complex” and the so called journalists and their supposed good ideas. The best idea possible enforce current laws and arrest people. Last time I checked it’s fairly difficult to overdose if you are in jail. From this first step we can start to talk about the next step in this process.
Can’t we take a harm reduction approach to those suffering from addiction (often people sprawled on the sidewalk or huddled in a corner), and a law enforcement approach to those who are dealing (often groups of men gathered at street corners)? It seems like we can and should be able to have different, simultaneous ways we address the issues in the TL.
Speaking of “cognitive dissonance”: Wouldn’t a problem want solving, not managing? Speaks volumes about the attitudes of the service providers. That’s how tags like “Homeless Industrial Complex” are being earned.
As far as Harm Reduction is concerned and how it has been “shown” how it works. In my experience, this is being pitched by rolling out one or two (as in, quantity: one, two) recovered addicts with heartwarming stories as the basis for claiming how this shows Harm Reduction works. Meanwhile: At scale misery in the Tenderloin, Soma, Castro et al.
And the chances for Breed’s initiative? Somebody said the higher-ups in the Dem’s party where pushing not to feed Fox News prior to the upcoming Midterms. If that’s the case, this is just theater, and the hoopla will just fade away as usual in a few months. That’s my guess.