by Aaron Peskin on July 17, 2023 (BeyondChron.org)
Mayor London Breed had two real choices to address the open-air drug supermarkets in San Francisco – focus on taking drug dealers off our streets or focus on arresting drug users.
She made the choice to arrest drug users, without the adequate infrastructure to treat this population suffering from a medically-recognized disease. The results are increasingly devastating for highly-impacted neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and the Mission District because this policy of arresting addicts is obviously failing and her choice is turning deadly for the users, who are put through a short stay in the criminal justice system without treatment and then sent through a revolving door with their dealers waiting for them on the outside.
We can do so much better to make San Francisco safer.
And better starts with focusing on shutting down the open-air drug supermarkets, taking drug dealers off the streets, and then making sure those dealers are offered a clear choice to take a better path through job training, education, drug treatment and other programs proven to divert people from crime. To the extent that some, if not many, of these young dealers are the victims of human trafficking, better means rescuing them and re-uniting them with their families.
Better needs to continue with closing down the open-air markets for selling stolen goods – a brazen insult to the growing number of small businesses suffering from retail theft, not to mention the now tens of thousands of San Francians who have had their property stolen – only to see that property openly “fenced” on the street while the police busy themselves with arresting drug users.
Better means hiring and training more police officers who reflect the diversity of our city, but also making sure those police officers are deployed wisely so they are responding to serious and violent crimes while other highly-trained workers can respond to non-violent issues.
Better means more, and certainly a more consistent focus on the root causes of crime – and embracing proven solutions like job training, mentoring, and a more effective transition for those leaving jail and prison.
Better means embracing smart technology with the appropriate safeguards. For example, with appropriate civil rights safeguards we can monitor the top 75 crime “hotspots” with real time cameras – so we know where the drug and stolen supermarkets are operating and can shut them down faster than the dealers can set them up.
Better means making sure our police are focused first on the handful of career criminals making life miserable for too many San Franciscans. Our police efforts need to be targeted more effectively to the small number of offenders responsible for an outsized percentage of overall crime. Estimates vary, but as little as 5 percent of offenders could be responsible for over 50 percent of all crimes. We can start by focusing on proven ways to put these small number of people causing so much harm into proven programs that put them back on the right track.
Better demands that the State of California and the Federal Government respond with full force to this crisis. The state has sent in the Highway Patrol and coordination from the National Guard. But they can do more, including using UC police to help patrol the UC law school campus in the Tenderloin, and the National Guard can help by setting up an emergency drug treatment hospital until we can build our own 250-bed drug treatment health center, which we desperately need. We have yet to see promised help from the Federal Government and the Mayor needs to keep the pressure up until that help arrives.
And better demands coordinating all of the efforts of San Francisco public safety agencies and departments with the numerous outside agencies through a unified command and accountability center – not with the current chaos of shifting policies that seem to rely on press releases, bold statements like declaring a ‘state of emergency’ and then broken promises.
Crime is a complicated problem – and we need to approach making San Francisco safer smartly. We need to learn from the failures of the past, particularly the reliance on mass incarceration that was both racist and ineffective.
We need to understand that simply arresting drug dealers, or people selling stolen goods, isn’t a complete answer either – particularly if we don’t use their entry into the criminal justice system as a starting point to surround suspects with the support they need to get out of it permanently.
But closing down open-air drug and stolen good supermarkets is just common sense. And certainly compared to the abject-failure of using precious police resources to arrest drug users, it is an approach to public safety that embraces the common decency of our city.
We can be safe – and compassionate. It isn’t a choice between one and the other. But we need to choose strategies that work and it is absolutely clear, the Mayor’s choice to focus on arresting drug users, not drug dealers, is failing everyone.
Aaron Peskin is President of the SF Board of Supervisors
