At Castro town hall, S.F. city agencies present tough-on-crime public safety approach

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The San Francisco mayor’s chief of health and human services told an audience in the Castro Thursday night that the city needs “to focus on the families, the residents, the small businesses who have people sleeping in their doorways.”

“We’ve spent a long time rightly focused on the folks in crisis, and we will continue to do that,” said Kunal Modi, the mayor’s chief of health and human services at at the Academy, an LGBTQ+ social club in the Castro where a bevy of department heads and city officials were on hand for the meeting of the Castro Merchants Association. 

But Modi made it clear that families and residents are on the agenda, and stressed that San Francisco is taking a firm approach on drug use and crime.

“Public health means the whole public,” said Modi. “We’re trying, on the health and human services side, to take that mandate seriously.”

Modi said that the city wants to do more conservatorships, which can be used to take drug users and mentally ill people off the street, compelling them to go through treatment.

It’s unclear if conservatorships have been used for substance-use disorders, but in October 2023, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 43, which made it possible for cities to use conservatorship for people with mental illness, chronic alcoholism or substance-use disorders.

The city, however, does not currently have enough “locked beds,” which are needed to expand use of conservatorships. It is currently working to add 100 more “locked beds” specifically to its current supply of 140-240, according to Modi. 

At San Francisco General Hospital, it has moved to shift some board-and-care beds to locked beds, eliciting outcry from patients and nurses.

“You can’t really go to a judge and say, ‘Let us take away all the autonomy from this person, but we have no plan for them,’” said District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who oversaw a hearing on the implementation of SB 43 in June. 

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said drug use is a priority for the DA’s office. “We’re dealing with the fentanyl crisis. We’re dealing with an overwhelming problem of the prior DA having essentially decriminalized drug dealing in our city, and people thinking that it was okay to do that,” Jenkins said. 

Her predecessor, Chesa Boudin, was elected as DA in 2019 and implemented criminal justice reform policies, but was recalled in 2022. At no point did he decriminalize drug dealing, but Jenkins frequently makes allusions to Boudin to mark a contrast with her approach — and she wasn’t the only one.

“We have enjoyed working with you,” Mandelman said as he introduced Jenkins. “It makes a difference who our DA is.” 

The DA’s office prosecutes both drug dealing and drug use. Under state law, the latter is typically a misdemeanor, but Jenkins explained that, as a result of Proposition 36 passing in November, after two misdemeanor charges for drug use, the third instance can be prosecuted as a felony. 

“We are going into court every day, trying to make sure that the bench understands the severity of the fentanyl crisis and that we must hold people responsible for what they are doing,” she said. 

She expressed frustration that judges sometimes decline to hold people in custody and give light sentences. Jenkins and her prosecutors often challenge how judges conduct themselves, at one point grinding court proceedings to a halt by blanket challenging a judge before she had heard a single case.

But no DA can do much, if anything, without cooperation from the police. The San Francisco Police Department’s deputy chief, Derrick Lew, was in attendance along with Mission Station acting Captain Manny Bonilla to explain the progress officers have made clearing out UN Plaza and other downtown areas that used to be filled with drug users and illegal street vending. 

In the past two years, Lew said, they’ve arrested nearly 8,000 people. However, it is unclear how many of those actually faced charges.  The jail population is back up to pre-pandemic levels after holding steady between 2020 and 2023.

Lew acknowledged that breaking up drug use downtown has created a “Whac-A-Mole” effect of people moving to other areas of the city, particularly the Mission. He emphasized, though, that breaking up crowds lets the police work more effectively and prevents street populations from growing. 

Meanwhile, in March, the city launched a new strategy for dealing with the Whac-A-Mole: Roving neighborhood teams consolidated between different departments, so people can go to one place for resources on medical attention, drug use treatment or homeless support.

In the Castro, that means a team is out there starting at 6 a.m. every day, spending the first hour evaluating how many tents and “problem individuals” they are seeing in their assignment area, which includes the Mission.

Then, the teams meet at 8:30 to go over the resources they have for that day and delegate people to meet up with the people they identified, said Adrienne Bechelli, who recently started overseeing the city’s neighborhood street teams. 

However, people tend to be transient, she said.

“When we send services, oftentimes, by the time those services arrive, they are no longer there,” she said. So the team tries to be “agile,” responding to what they’re currently seeing on the street.

As the panelists wrapped up, Mandelman read out an audience member’s question: “Crime is allegedly lower now, but it doesn’t feel like it. So what is going on?” It prompted a ripple of laughter through the room. 

Conditions have improved since a few years ago, Mandelman said, “but still there’s too many neighborhoods, too much of the time, where it does feel unsafe and it just feels unpleasant to be in these public spaces.” 

The crime rate is statistically lower, but changing that perception of street conditions — “I think that’s a big chunk of the work that’s still to be done,” Mandelman said.