A plan for S.F. to take rape victims seriously at last

Late last month, a string of women testified at a City Hall hearing that they’d reported being raped or sexually assaulted in San Francisco and that the brush-off by city officials made the trauma even worse.

On Tuesday, Supervisor Hillary Ronen will introduce the first part of a three-pronged plan to ensure that these crimes get the attention they deserve. She’ll propose creating a new Office of Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention, which her staff believes would be the first city agency of its kind in the country.

It appears that such departments are increasingly common at colleges and universities, which are struggling with how to respond to reports of campus rape, but Ronen said the city of San Francisco desperately needs its own version.

She’s also planning a stillvague November ballot measure that would improve the way San Francisco General Hospital treats rape and assault victims who show up to have evidence taken. The third prong, also still murky, would involve tackling rape in the workplace, which Ronen said is more common, particularly for low-income women, than one would think.

Despite its liberal and innovative reputation, San Francisco is “failing as a city” to

respond to rape, the supervisor said, adding that some city officials appear to be stuck in the 1950s in the way they respond to victims of the crime.

“There is blaming the victim, like, ‘Well, everyone bears some responsibility here,’ ” Ronen said, paraphrasing what some police officers have told victims, especially those who have been drugged while out drinking and lose consciousness before being raped. “They’ve been drugged — how do they bear responsibility? There’s a failure to take this seriously and investigate properly.”

At the April 25 hearing, women told of failures throughout the city’s medical and criminal justice systems. They described having to wait hours at San Francisco General Hospital to have blood and urine samples taken as evidence.

They described police officers failing to interview potential witnesses promptly or gather evidence, such as camera footage from the bar where an alleged drugging occurred, or making dismissive comments about how it’s a “he-said, she-said” situation. They described prosecutors sitting on cases.

(Side note: Police in San Francisco lately have been saying there’s not much they can do about the city’s car break-ins, open-air injection drug use, blatant drug dealing or bicycle chop shops. And now add some cases of rape to the list. So what are they working on exactly? One wonders.)

Representatives from San Francisco General, the Police Department and the District Attorney’s Office who were at the hearing acknowledged mistakes and vowed to do better.

Ronen’s plan would give women and men who’ve been raped or sexually assaulted a place to turn if those agencies don’t improve. The new department would be overseen by the Human Rights Commission and would have a director and two staff members charged with taking reports from victims who hit walls elsewhere, and advocating for them.

The department also would compile annual reports on how various city agencies are handling reports of rape and sexual assault.

Sheryl Davis, executive director of the Human Rights Commission, said she strongly supports the idea of the new department.

“It signals for folks who’ve really been struggling with it that there’s a safe space where it’s somebody’s job to focus on that,” she said.

Ronen said she’s meeting with Mayor Mark Farrell next week in hopes of persuading him to include funding for the new department — about $400,000 — in his budget for the new fiscal year, which begins July 1.

Seeing as how Ronen played a key role in ending Supervisor London Breed’s tenure as acting mayor after Mayor Ed Lee’s death and installing Farrell as the interim mayor, here’s betting she gets her funding.

The ordinance’s cosponsors are Supervisors Catherine Stefani, Sandra Fewer and Jane Kim.

Another supporter of the legislation is a city government worker. She testified at the hearing as Jane Doe and told of being drugged and raped two years ago by a man she met in a bar.

She said she had to wait for hours in the basement of San Francisco General to be examined. Police, she said, then discouraged her from filing a report, asking if she “really wanted this guy arrested.” Then a prosecutor told her it wasn’t even a “he-said, she-said” case, but a “he-said, shedoesn’t-remember” case — even though she told him she remembered being raped.

Police failed to obtain camera footage from the bar before the footage was erased. And they waited months to interview a potential witness.

“It’s a disgrace. It’s just been shocking at every turn,” the woman said Monday. “There’s just no will or strategy on the part of law enforcement to prosecute drug-facilitated rape.”

She’s a longtime friend and colleague of Ronen’s and said she’s glad someone at City Hall is finally taking the crime seriously.

“What Supervisor Ronen is doing is vital,” she said. “I’m so relieved and encouraged that she is taking leadership on this issue.”

More showers: Lava Mae, the nonprofit that provides mobile showers to homeless people, is expanding to Oakland.

The nonprofit got its start in San Francisco in 2013 after its founder, Doniece Sandoval, learned there were just 16 showers for the city’s thousands of homeless people. She began by turning decommissioned Muni buses into mobile shower stalls with toilets and changing areas, and has since provided more than 45,000 showers to more than 12,000 people throughout San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Now add Oakland to the list. Lava Mae’s mobile showers will set up shop from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at 27th Street and Northgate Avenue on Mondays and Thursdays and the same time at Sixth and Castro streets on Tuesdays and Fridays. Kaiser Permanente is helping fund the expansion.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement that Lava Mae “embodies the best of Oakland’s sense of compassion and community.”