San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Safe haven for dealers
“There’s one,” the police sergeant said as we drove through the Tenderloin. “There’s one of them there. That guy, see him?”
And another. And another. Sgt. Kevin Healy was showing me known drug dealers, and they were everywhere — swarming the neighborhood, chatting and smiling. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world.
That’s because they don’t. Not in San Francisco.
“It’s almost impossible to get convicted in this city,” said Healy, who works in the Police Department’s narcotics division. “The message needs to be sent that it’s not OK to be selling drugs. It’s not allowed anywhere else. Where else can you walk up to someone you don’t know and purchase crack and heroin? Is there such a place?”
San Franciscans love to think their city is like nowhere else, but this distinguishing factor isn’t anything to brag about.
When Gov. Jerry Brown recently nixed San Francisco’s plan to test the country’s first safe injection site where drug users can legally shoot up, he wrote in his veto letter that the plan was “all carrot and no stick.”
While I thought his veto was wrongheaded, he has a point. This city doesn’t seem to know the definition of the word “stick,” let alone consequence or accountability. Unless, of course, you’ve parked your car at a meter for five minutes too long. Then you can expect an immediate stick in the form of a high-priced ticket.
As a safe injection site now appears at least a year off, city officials must come up with other ways to combat San Francisco’s dire drug crisis. Obviously, far more drug treatment services are needed. But one area officials barely mention is an obvious one: cracking down on the people supplying the devastating drugs. Police say drug dealers from the East Bay ride BART into San Francisco every day to prey on the addicts slumped on our sidewalks, and yet the city that claims to so desperately want to help those addicts often looks the other way.
You can walk through the Tenderloin, Civic Center, South of Market and the Mission and easily spot men handing over little plastic baggies with drugs in exchange for cash like it’s no big thing. In broad daylight. In front of pedestrians. Even in front of police.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said he’s recently gotten complaints from homeless people that they’re afraid to use the restrooms in Dolores Park because they’ve been taken over by drug dealers.
Lava Mae, the nonprofit that turns trailers and old Muni buses into showers and restrooms for homeless people, is stationed outside the Main Library every Tuesday. Staffers say they used to see one or two drug dealers milling around, but in just the past month, that’s risen to 10 to 15.
The dealers are so brazen, they plant themselves in Lava Mae’s chairs and deal beneath the nonprofit’s awning. The nonprofit has already canceled its Friday morning sessions outside the library because of the prolific dealers and is debating whether to continue on Tuesdays.
The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp., too, has been making frequent complaints to police. Formerly homeless people need to access its offices on Turk Street to make rent payments, but are often reluctant to enter because drug dealers are stationed outside.
Is this really OK with City Hall? That we make it easier to buy heroin, meth and crack than to obtain a beer and wine license for a new restaurant? That we say we want to help end people’s addictions, but allow drug dealers unfettered access to them when they try to take a shower, pay their rent check or just walk around their neighborhood?
I asked Mayor London Breed about her plans to combat drug dealing. She gave a pretty unsatisfying answer, centering it around her workforce development team trying to offer them jobs.
“The goal is to say, ‘Hey, do you want an opportunity to do something where you can make just as much money?’ ” she said. “What I’m trying to do is offer some individuals who are selling drugs an alternative.”
That’s nice and all, but it also might be the most San Francisco answer ever. If her effort works, great. But I’m dubious. According to police, most of these guys aren’t city residents. They’re riding BART in from Oakland and Richmond because we have so many addicts and the perception is they can get away with selling them drugs.
“The arrests happen, and people are back on the streets,” Breed said. “I don’t have a lot of control over that part, which is definitely frustrating.”
The San Francisco Police Department is trying and seems to have been reinvigorated recently in its effort to arrest dealers. Anybody who follows various stations’ Twitter accounts sees regular posts detailing arrests with mugshots and pictures of evidence: lots of cash and lots of drugs.
Healy has recently been helping officers conduct undercover operations around Eddy Street and Van Ness Avenue, posing as a drug user complete with track marks on his arms or the black smudges on his fingers common among people addicted to crack. Uniformed officers hiding nearby record the deals on video in hopes of making the cases stronger once they wind their way through the court system.
Healy thinks Superior Court judges need to impose wide-reaching stay-away orders, demanding these dealers stay out of the entire Tenderloin and parts of South of Market. They should be arrested for appearing there again, he said — over and over until they stop bothering.
It’s not uncommon for drug dealers to be arrested multiple times in one year — and to keep being released, returning to the same neighborhoods to deal their illegal wares. According to the district attorney’s office, it prosecutes 88 percent of drugdealing cases, but the courts regularly release the suspects while their cases are pending.
On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union charged in a lawsuit that the San Francisco Police Department was racist in its arrests of drug dealers from 2013 to 2015, targeting African Americans selling drugs but ignoring dealers of other races.
Obviously, such selective policing cannot be tolerated, and City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s office shot back that the department is “one of the most diverse, forwardthinking and transparent law enforcement agencies in the country.”
I walked with Officer Brian Donohue, who works out of Northern Station, around Van Ness Avenue, Polk Street and parts of the Tenderloin on a recent afternoon. Unlike so many of our city leaders, it’s clear Donohue is really trying to combat the problem. He’s worked with Healy and his partner, Officer Calvin Wang, to build cases against a raft of drug dealers, almost none of whom has a San Francisco address.
He called the Tenderloin and surrounding neighborhoods “an openair narcotics market” where dealers wrap drugs in plastic so they can easily swallow them if they see police. Another trick is filling little plastic magnetic key holders with drugs and sticking them to cars, mailboxes and trash cans until somebody appears to make a purchase.
They often use bus shelters or parked cars to hide behind. They often stand on corners where the streets are one-way so if they see a police car coming, they can walk the direction the car can’t drive.
“They’re clever,” Donohue said. “A lot of the people they sell to are homeless folks. It is rare to meet anyone who says, ‘No, I don’t want to beat it,’ but it’s so readily available.”
As we walked south on Larkin Street, we saw a wall with numerous people slumped up against it, passed out and with dirty needles strewn around them. One man looked dead, and Donohue stopped to make sure he wasn’t.
“Are you good? Good?” he said loudly, rousting the man. “Hey, come on sir.”
The man finally woke up, and Donohue asked whether he needed an ambulance. He declined. Donohue told him to dispose of his dirty needles and move along. The man said his name is Jeffrey, that he’s 33 and homeless. He said he’s from the East Bay, but sleeps on the streets of San Francisco. He said he’s been using heroin and crystal meth every day for years.
“I hate it, doing this,” he said. “As bad as it is, it’s kind of addicting out here. They’re a little more lenient. That’s good and bad.”
He said he’d just purchased the drugs nearby for $10 but didn’t want to say how he got the money.
We kept walking, but not before Donohue told Jeffrey: “Remember what I told you, dude. It doesn’t have to be like this.”
Donohue intentionally avoided making arrests while I was with him. But he texted later that in the subsequent days that he’d made several more.
“I think only a few will be held to answer,” he texted. “It’s discouraging, but I knew the challenge signing up. If I can do the best job I can coupled with a great arrest report, then I’ve done the best I know how.”
If only the rest of San Francisco did its best too, people like Jeffrey might have a chance.
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf