Breed’s Tenderloin crackdown assailed
Critics: Jailing addicts, mentally ill isn’t a solution
“Arresting people who are addicted to drugs, jailing people who have mental health struggles ... will not solve these problems, and they are certainly not the only tools available.” D.A. Chesa Boudin
District Attorney Chesa Boudin joined other elected officials and activists Monday to criticize Mayor London Breed’s plan to flood San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood with police and crack down on drug dealers as well as people who use drugs in the open.
Breed announced a series of initiatives last week, including asking for overtime spending for police, seeking more social workers and public toilets for the Tenderloin, and declaring a state of emergency there. Breed said the city will continue to offer services and housing to people on the street and those struggling with addiction but will get tough on those who refuse shelter and treatment.
Boudin, Board of Supervisors President Shamann Walton and Public Defender Mano Raju said at a news conference Monday that the plan was flawed because it relied on failed policies to deal with problems.
The leaders and professionals who provide addiction treatment or harmreduction services called for the mayor to quickly ramp up “evidence-based” alternatives, including treatment, housing, education and jobs. The city has been chronically short on treatment beds for the thousands of people who suffer from homelessness, addiction and mental illness.
Boudin’s decision to join the news conference underscores the fact that while many city leaders agree on the biggest challenges facing San Francisco, they have fundamental disagreements about how to solve them. While leaders are divided about the best way forward, some Tenderloin residents and business owners have been pleading for safer and cleaner streets for months in the face of shootings and open-air drug use.
Boudin said during the news conference that he is “outraged” at the human suffering, flagrant violations of laws and safety concerns faced by families in the Tenderloin. But he also said, “We can’t arrest and prosecute our way out of problems that are afflicting the Tenderloin.
“Arresting people who are addicted to drugs, jailing people who have mental health struggles, putting folks who are vending hot dogs or other food on the streets in cages will not solve these problems, and they are certainly not the only tools available,” he said.
Past city reports have shown nearly three-quarters of people in jail struggled with substance use and mental illness,
and nearly one-third were homeless. Boudin said the city lacked enough treatment and housing, with some inmates waiting months to get into rehabilitation programs, and urged more investment into mental health care and opening a supervised drug-use site.
“Right now in San Francisco it’s easier to get high than it is to get help. That has to change,” he said. “I will do everything in my power to make the Tenderloin safe for all of San Francisco.”
Boudin noted that his office has been “prosecuting drug sales and possession with intent to sell at higher rates than my predecessor in 2018 and 2019” and plans to continue enforcing the law.
Asked whether he would prosecute drug users, he said possession is a misdemeanor, meaning someone arrested for the crime is given a citation, then told to come to court. He said that given “what we know about addiction, the chances of those people even showing up to court is very small,” reflecting that the approach wasn’t a “useful response” to a public health crisis.
Boudin said his focus was on serious and violent crimes, especially with limited court capacity under the pandemic.
“The last thing we need is to clog up every available court with a misdemeanor possession-of-a-pipe charge,” he said.
The police chief, sheriff and Supervisors Ahsha Safaí and Catherine Stefani stood beside Breed last week when she pledged to give people who use drugs on the streets the option to go to a yet-to-be-set up linkage center where the city will provide referrals to treatment and shelter — or go to jail.
Breed warned Friday that the city would “be a lot more aggressive with implementing the existing laws on the books in order to get people off the streets,” including a controversial city ordinance that prohibits people from lying or sitting on sidewalks, which usually affects homeless people.
Her administration is working on adding more resources: The city has approved buying or leasing nearly 1,200 of the 1,500 permanent supportive housing units planned over the next two years. It has also opened 87 substance use and mental health treatment beds — just under a quarter of those planned under a law to reform the city’s behavioral health system. A drug sobering center and a supervised drug-consumption site where people would be able to use drugs under medical professionals’ care are planned for next year.
Critics said these interventions and more are needed.
Walton said the board had urged the mayor to declare a state of emergency for the overdose crisis — not “increase law enforcement budgets here in San Francisco and arrest people who use drugs when we currently don’t have adequate resources to address their needs.”
The board will hold a special meeting to decide whether to ratify the mayor’s emergency declaration, which would lift bureaucratic barriers so the city can quickly open the linkage site and start police enforcement in full force, at 2 p.m. Thursday. Walton told The Chronicle he hadn’t decided how he would vote, and didn’t
know the votes of his 10 colleagues, but wanted to “explore alternatives to what was being proposed.”
Supervisor Matt Haney supports the mayor’s emergency declaration. He told The Chronicle last week he supports policing to go after the drug supply, but not criminalizing users.
“I don’t support putting people in jail or prison because they’re addicted,” said Haney, who didn’t join Monday’s news conference.
Instead, he said he wants to
“get people inside” with alternatives such as the supervised drug-use site and sobering center, treatment, and a massive increase in street outreach workers to connect people with help.
Del Seymour, a Tenderloin community member for 35 years, said during Monday’s news conference that getting arrested 12 times in the late 1990s “made me no less of a dope fiend until I got drug rehab.”
Todd Meshekey, sitting on
the corner of Jones and Turk streets Monday, said, “We need police,” but was skeptical that flooding the neighborhood would make a difference in his personal struggles or the neighborhood’s issues.
“It’s impossible,” he said. “Drugs have been here before us, they’ll be here after us. Why should they keep bothering us?”
Meshekey said he uses methamphetamine and marijuana and has been homeless for 20 years across the country, 15 in San Francisco. He said he’s been arrested and incarcerated in every city, but that San Francisco’s approach was more lax.
“In other cities you can’t do what we’re doing right now,” he said, before puffing from a pipe.
Meshekey said he doesn’t want to keep using drugs, which he said have messed up his life, and that he has stopped before, but said recovery is a “long road.”
The former restaurant server said his New Year’s plan is to get a job and “change everything.”