San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F.’s biggest failure
On a recent sunny day in San Francisco, I found myself in a situation most of us who live in California have confronted. Walking down a busy street, I came across an unhoused man lying facedown in the asphalt. Over and over, he screamed for help, one arm plaintively raised to the sky, the other limp at his side. A wheelchair that appeared to be his sat discarded on the sidewalk a few yards away.
A stream of cars and pedestrians passed by without stopping. To be fair, he was no waif. Lifting him into the chair, if that’s what he even wanted, would have been extremely difficult under the best of conditions — and these were not. The man was almost certainly either under the influence or suffering from mental illness.
He needed more help than any one stranger could give him. So I got out my phone and thought about whom to call.
If a recent story in the Atlantic is to be believed, residents of San Francisco, befitting our progressive values, have no shortage of compassionate options to navigate situations like this. We have the “Street Crisis Response Team, EMS-6, Street Overdose Response Team, San Francisco Homeless Outreach Team, Street Medicine and Shelter Health, DPH Mobile Crisis Team, Street Wellness Response Team, and Compassionate Alternative Response Team.”
But are any these options actually available on demand?
In one of the most heart-wrenching anecdotes in the Atlantic piece, the author describes an addled man lying naked outside a Safeway. A woman calls for help. But, tellingly, despite our city’s so-called wealth of services, it is police who respond. And do nothing.
It could have been worse.
When I was living in downtown Los Angeles several years ago, a homeless man, in a state of emotional distress, climbed to the top of a tall billboard near my apartment. Police officers who arrived on the scene tasered him; he fell several stories to his death before a crowd of onlookers.
Just last month, San Francisco police officers showed up to a dispute between two allegedly unhoused men — and shot them both dead.
For all our supposed compassion in California, it is police who remain the primary point of contact with those suffering in our streets. And they are ill-equipped to handle the task.
All of this was on my mind as I tried to figure out what to do.
If I called 911, would the police come? What if they found drugs on him? Would an arrest record make it even harder for him to get a home one day? Or would the confrontation end with violence if he gave the officers trouble?
In the middle of these deliberations, a voice suddenly sprang up behind me.
“Keep walking,” it said.
I turned and saw a different homeless man staring back at me.
“Keep walking,” he repeated, “or I’m going to f— you up.”
His expression indicated he was serious. And I had no idea what to do.
Was the man standing up for his friend on the ground? Or were the two in conflict? Should I risk a fight to try to figure out how to help?
I could think of no answers — and the man before me was in no mood to talk. So I walked away.
“Do something.”
We hear the phrase repeatedly endlessly here in San Francisco and elsewhere in California in regard to the abject conditions on our streets. But what does it mean?
Any examination has to start with what California voters intended when they passed the endlessly controversial Proposition 47 in 2014. If we take voters at their word, they wanted to do as the bill says — to stop treating crimes of poverty and drug possession as felonies.
Unfortunately, while voting is undoubtedly one of the most assertive forms of mass communication, its message is rarely definitive. There is always wiggle room for misinterpretation — or willful misreading.
When I recently spoke with conservative state attorney general candidate Eric Early, he argued that Californians didn’t know what they were signing up for with Prop. 47, thanks to the proposition’s misleading ballot title: “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act.”
He’s not alone. And he’s certainly right that for a bill designed to ease or eliminate sentencing for low-level crimes, that title is Orwellian.
But in 2020, voters shot down the much clearer “Criminal Sentencing, Parole and DNA Collection Initiative” — which would have rolled back Prop. 47’s reforms — by a 62%-38% margin.
The majority of Californians have repeatedly stated that they do not want crimes born of poverty, mental illness and addiction resolved with jail cells.
But is that the end of it?
“If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it.”
The cynical implication of that line, pulled from the Atlantic piece, is that San Franciscans have willfully fashioned their city a civil libertarian paradise for the troubled. Misfits from across the country can draw from our city’s alleged font of resources or misbehave as selfdestructively they see fit. In our naive compassion, we are happy to let them do as they please.
At least until this week’s recall. Putting aside the blatant myths that San Francisco is a migration destination for the criminally indigent or a wellspring of social services capable of offering help to all who seek it, is anyone in this city really fine with rampant theft — even out of necessity? Or with people using the sidewalks as toilets? Or with addicts dying on the street with a needle in their arm?
It’s safe to say we are not. Unstated, but implicit in our voting record, is a broad desire for alternatives to the old status quo of siccing police on poor people, the addicted, the homeless and throwing them behind bars. Voters, in the most direct way we are able, have repeatedly asked for policymakers for new proactive, compassionate solutions.
Instead — and this is true across California — the governmental response in the eight years since Prop. 47 passed has largely been to let chaos reign and argue about its causes. Police rarely respond to low-level crimes or street crises, but neither does anyone else. Meaningful alternatives have been ignored or slowwalked to the point of despair.
This is not what anyone signed up for. Voters in most major metropolitan areas in California have passed measures allotting billions for supportive homeless housing and treatment services. They have also passed police accountability measures that strongly imply a desire to lessen non-emergency police interactions with the public — which have a history of ineffective, racially fraught and/or violent outcomes.
It’s safe to say that, at a bare minimum, Californians want to be able to call someone — not police — who can contact those on the street, intervene if they are in crisis or causing trouble, institute a mental health hold if necessary and/or connect them with food, housing, treatment and social services as needed.
This service obviously isn’t the end all be all of crime and homelessness prevention (which, are two separate problems). But it is a prerequisite for meaningfully and compassionately improving our streets and restoring a basic sense of agency over our city’s condition.
Unlike most other cities in California, San Francisco has made inroads into building this infrastructure. Mayor London Breed’s recent budget noted that the city’s Street Crisis Response Team soon intends to field all behavioral 911 calls where no weapon is involved. It currently handles 46%-57% of such calls.
This progress, if it comes to fruition, would be welcome. But the fact that we’re still ramping up capacity while endlessly arguing over our district attorney and police staffing is gutting.
We’re eight years in waiting and voters still don’t have the most basic infrastructure we have repeatedly demanded. In its absence, hopelessness pervades — and a desire by some to return to the old status quo has risen.
Right now, the only sense of agency most San Franciscans feel over their city’s condition is recall. And that’s our biggest failure.