And this could’ve happened at any time in the past 55 or so years Civic Center has been a haphazard place for a long time, and there’s a reason we hold government meetings indoors. Raucous people would’ve overwhelmed this meeting if the subject matter was fentanyl overdoses or conditional use authorizations or selecting the city’s official mineral. It remains mystifying what Peskin or anyone felt could be accomplished in holding this meeting out-of-doors on the plaza, where the predictable heckler’s veto was, in fact, superseded by a heckler’s tossed brick.Īnd this predictable and predicted meltdown was not, as was claimed afterward, a sign of a devolution of San Francisco public space. Last week, San Francisco took in the spectacle of Board President Aaron Peskin holding the monthly mayoral question session on UN Plaza, and asking Mayor London Breed pointed queries about the city’s surge in overdose deaths. Moments later, Board President Aaron Peskin pulled the plug on the outdoor session, citing raucous behavior, and moved the proceedings indoors. “That policy literally kills people in the long run.” Mayor London Breed addresses an unruly crowd at a mayoral question session addressing the fentanyl crisis and held on UN Plaza. ![]() “Our study found that continuing to forcibly displace people who are experiencing homelessness, as is being proposed in San Francisco, is responsible for up to 25 percent more deaths in a 10-year period,” said Alex Kral, an epidemiologist from the East Bay independent nonprofit research institute RTI international, and one of the paper’s many authors. And yes, this paper included data from San Francisco. And this - this has consequences of its own.Īn April paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the wanton and continual involuntary displacement of homeless people - jerking people around, in non-scientific terms - may contribute to a mortality spike of between 15.6 percent and 24.4 percent over a 10-year period. It sounds more like appeasing anger over the deplorable state of San Francisco’s streets in an exercise of cruel futility at the expense of the city’s most vulnerable. If the plan is to detain dope-sick, suffering drug users for several hours and proselytize to them about turning their lives around via services they’re not able or willing to accept - while the city’s services aren’t presently able to accommodate even people who are able and willing - that doesn’t sound like a winner. ![]() But they haven’t, because they found that detaining incapacitated people for a few hours a pop to be a labor-intensive and poor use of police resources, and did little to alter the situation on the streets. This would be done under statutes that police tell me, like Dorothy Gayle, they’ve had the power to use all along. At present, there is no tent, and the current iteration of the plan floating about the political ether - which is still, clearly, amorphous and a work in progress - directs cops to arrest and temporarily detain incapacitated drug users, who are a risk to themselves and others.
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