There were those who came with questions, those who came to lecture, and those with prepared notes that they held between their trembling hands as they spoke. Some 80 residents from across San Francisco filed into City College’s student union on Tuesday night and took their seats in bright orange plastic chairs to talk about Tasers and whether the San...
Covering the Police is an effort to look more closely at how police work in the Mission and elsewhere in the city. It is a collaboration with U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Monday after a car drove into a crowd of protestors in Charlottesville, a hate letter was delivered to the home of San Francisco resident, Debbie Lee —...
Covering the Police is an effort to look more closely at how police work in the Mission and elsewhere in the city. It is a collaboration with U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. On the foggy Wednesday morning after last week’s public hearing in which more than 100 residents made it clear that they largely oppose Tasers and distrust the police,...
Covering the Police is an effort to look more closely at how police work in the Mission and elsewhere in the city. It is a collaboration with U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Residents from all over San Francisco made it very clear at a public hearing Tuesday night that they do not want the police to carry Tasers. But...
More than 100 people turned out for a community meeting on Tasers Tuesday night, first breaking into small groups of roughly 25 each, and then convening in a fiery public comment session that at one point erupted into activists chanting, “No Tasers!” and drowning out Police Commissioner Sonia E. Melara’s calls for order. The police commission has voted against the...
The 911 call: a “transient” loitering in Golden Gate Park, where neighbors have been complaining about narcotics use and noise. I arrive with a baton, some pepper spray and a firearm. But mostly, I’m supposed to use my words. I do. “Sir, you can’t be loitering here,” I say. “I didn’t do anything — I live here,” he shouts. “I...
This is part of an effort to Cover the Police — a collaboration with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism to look at how the police operate in the Mission District and elsewhere in the city. Bayview Station Captain Raj Vaswani said at a Tuesday community meeting at the Bayview Station that he would double foot patrols in the...
Mission District business owners along 24th Street said the police chief’s decision to quadruple the number of foot patrols in the next week will be a welcome change — especially after what many say has been a multi-year absence of foot patrols. Even near the 16th Street BART plaza, where merchants have had more recent interaction with police, business owners...
A man holding a knife to his own throat elicited a large police response Sunday morning at 23rd and Mission streets, according to eyewitnesses. Around 10:20 a.m. Sunday, witness David Ortiz described seeing a man who looked like he might have been around 60 years old and homeless in the middle of the street on 23rd and Mission streets, holding...
The San Francisco Police Department will nearly quadruple the number of foot patrols operating from Mission Police Station, which covers the Mission and Castro districts, starting Sept. 9, Chief William Scott announced today at a press conference. The department would not release the number of foot patrols currently operating in the Mission, but did say that right now there...
City leaders told an audience of more than 100 community members Monday night that they would maintain a daily police presence in Dolores Park and devise more proactive measures to address the conditions that lead to an Aug. 3 shooting that injured three people. One of those measures may include updating the footbridge connecting Dolores Park to Church Street, where...
Police arrested a young man brandishing a metal pipe on Albion Street today at around 10:45 a.m. One witness said the man looked mentally unstable, as he backed down Albion Street toward 17th, facing the police, brandishing the pipe and screaming that the cops were going to put him in jail or kill him. The officers calmly reassured him that...
San Francisco is sandwiched between two major earthquake faults. You can’t see them. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there. Some fault lines lie deep beneath the earth. But some are man-made; earlier this month, one of the latter variety ruptured in Dolores Park. A confrontation near the footbridge over the J-Church tracks at 19th St. culminated in a brazen,...
At a recent meeting on community relations, San Francisco Police Officers Jennifer Jackson and Torrie Barnes were there to listen to the community and get input on how to improve the SFPD’s annual report to the San Francisco community. The problem: not many in the community showed up. So they’re going to give it another try. Here is a link...
The San Francisco Chronicle reports: Mark Murphy lives less than a block from Dolores Park where gunfire from a triple shooting was heard throughout the Western edge of San Francisco’s Mission District on Thursday, and confirmed an uptick in violence in the area that locals have been complaining about for months. Murphy is saddened but not surprised by the shocking...
