D.A. seeks $2.3 million for fentanyl task force
The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office plans to ask City Hall for $2.3 million in funding to create a new task force to tackle the city’s fentanyl epidemic after yet another staggering month of overdoses centered in the Tenderloin.
The proposal would pay the salaries of 10 new positions, including prosecutors and investigators focused solely on the scourge of a drug epidemic that killed nearly 700 people in San Francisco last year and 61 in January alone.
To meet the urgency of the crisis, San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the Tenderloin, said he’s including funding for the district attorney task force in a broader fentanylbased supplemental budget package he plans to introduce in March.
Supplemental budgets, which can be proposed by any member of the Board of Supervisors, are a rarely used tool intended to authorize funding inbetween budget cycles.
Haney said Friday that the city needs a more proactive response from its criminal justice system, particularly for zeroing in on the supply side of the drug trade.
“I had been asking the D.A. for what their strategy was, and it became clear that they
really needed a unit that could focus on this specifically — to respond in more strategic and coordinated ways,” Haney said. “The D.A. needs to be a leader on this; putting a stop to it.”
This proposal comes as San Francisco struggles to get a handle on the overdose epidemic, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic and the increased prevalence of fentanyl. The San Francisco Police Department seized more than four times the amount of fentanyl off the streets in 2020 compared to 2019. Still, more than 70% of the people who died last year had fentanyl in their system.
Many city leaders have blamed the city’s criminal justice system for cycling drug dealers in and out of jail, with seemingly little consequence. Boudin said the goal of the task force is to disrupt the cycle of recidivism by rooting out the sources of the city’s drug supplies.
To do that, the district attorney said the task force would prioritize prosecuting people at the middle and higher end of the drug trade, as opposed to their foot soldiers. It would also create positions for investigators to probe supplyside criminal enterprises and related financial crimes.
Boudin said the task force will centralize what had previously been more than a dozen fragmented prosecutors handling such cases. As a unit, the handful of specialized attorneys could keep track of what tactics are effective and who are the area’s most prolific sellers.
The investigators, he said, will work out of the District Attorney’s Office while partnering with both San Francisco and East Bay police departments. Law enforcement officials believe that most of the drugs sold in San Francisco are packaged and warehoused in the East Bay.
Boudin said the team would also tackle the hundreds of open cases the office filed in 2020 to track trends and root out suppliers.
In total, the task force would consist of six prosecutors, two investigators, two “sentencing planners” to help develop individualized jail and treatment plans, as well as pools of funding for data analysis and reporting.
“We need to be innovative, and we need to be determined to intervene in ways that can save lives and end the devastating loss of life that’s directly impacting our most vulnerable community and people of color,” Boudin said.
Haney said his team is still ironing out the details of the supplemental budget, but that it would add up to roughly $6 million in fentanylrelated programs. The district attorney’s task force will likely make up about a quarter of it, while the bulk will go to the Department of Public Health for treatment, outreach and overdose prevention, Haney said.
Once it’s introduced by Haney, the supplemental budget will require approval from the rest of the Board of Supervisors before then being handed off to the mayor’s office.
Jeff Cretan, a spokeman for Mayor London Breed, stressed that the city is still facing a $650 million deficit over the next two years and it will “challenge our ability to provide basic city services.”
“All departments, including the district attorney, will need to continue to prioritize their core public responsibilities with these severe constraints on staffing and resources,” he said.
The fentanyl task force was included as part of the District Attorney’s Office’s proposed budget to Breed for the next two fiscal years, which was submitted on Monday.
In a letter to Breed, Boudin said he would not meet the mayor’s instructions — issued to all departments who rely on the city’s general fund — to cut his budget by 7.5%. Instead, citing chronically low staffing levels, Boudin asked for additional funding for his office to fill vacant positions.
“Our budget submission simply requests that our office receive the minimum level of funding needed to perform our basic responsibilities, bringing us to the level of staffing we had when I assumed office,” Boudin said in the letter.
Haney, chair of the Budget and Finance Committee, said this should be a top priority for the city.
“This is an emergency — we’re losing two people a day, mostly to fentanyl,” Haney said. “There’s nothing in our city that is killing people at the rate that fentanyl is, and it’s growing. We have to stop it.”