San Francisco Squalor: City Streets Strewn With Trash, Needles And Human Feces

[jd3189]

All I have to say is that some dramatic changes have to be put into effect. A great city like SF shouldn't have to have this big of a problem. Progressivism shouldn't lead to foolishness like this.

[dimondpark]

Originally Posted by Sun Belt

Jail is the first step. Legally document their criminal behavior.

Not being able to afford a place to live is NOT a crime.

Shitting in the streets in today's society should have a zero tolerance policy. You shit in the streets, you go to jail.

Yes, SF must be much, much stricter about this sort of thing. I think residents are far more upset about this than city leaders realize.

While in jail, you get free healthcare, medication and treatment. It's a great way to detox under supervision.

I totally agree with this 100%. Throw in vocational and skills training, job placement and a year of transitional housing for free with ongoing counseling and I think we might have a plan.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by twister244

Two solutions:

1.) Bring back mental institutions that were done away with 30 years ago (as previously discussed). That's the best case scenario for many of these people. Not saying it's ideal, just the best case.

2.) Don't let these people shit and shoot up on the streets. We have a camping ban in Denver for a reason. We don't want our streets to start looking like what's been described on this thread. It's completely unacceptable to allow anyone to take a crap in public, or openly use illegal drugs. And the movement to normalize this by giving out needles is completely mind blowing to me......

Yes. A thousand times yes. My city needs the same thing.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Sun Belt

Jail is the first step. Legally document their criminal behavior. Shitting in the streets in today's society should have a zero tolerance policy. You shit in the streets, you go to jail.

While in jail, you get free healthcare, medication and treatment. It's a great way to detox under supervision.

No room in jail:

SF’s unprecedented look at jail population quantifies racial disparity and mental health needs
By Joshua Sabatini on July 5, 2017 1:00 am

San Francisco spent $119.5 million across 60 different programs last year to try and keep people out of jail after they got caught up in the criminal justice system.

Last fiscal year, these programs served 82,400 participants . . . .

. . . city and community leaders are now in agreement on a path forward. They have acknowledged that not everyone in jail should be in jail and that improved services, along with better coordination among city departments, are needed.

The group’s demographic analysis shows that the people spending the most days in jail are disproportionately young and black.

In 2015, 53 percent of inmates in jail were black when they comprised about 5 percent of The City’s total population. Decades ago, when The City’s black population was 15 percent, blacks still comprised more than 50 percent of the jail population.

The majority of the jail population in 2015 was young — 56 percent were under the age of 35. Prisoners ages 18 to 25 comprised 28 percent of the jail population, but that age group made up only 12 percent of The City’s population.

Of the 13,544 total inmates who passed through the jails in 2015, 36 percent — or 4,918 — received treatment from the jail’s mental health services; 3,213 had more than one visit to the jail mental health service indicating a greater need; and 7 percent to 14 percent — between 1,025 and 1,900 — were diagnosed with a serious mental illness.

The percentage of those with serious mental illness in San Francisco’s jails is below the national average of 20 percent . . . .

Jailed inmates are receiving more attention than usual as a result of The City’s need to shut down County Jail Nos. 3 and 4 at the Hall of Justice due to what are widely considered deplorable conditions. A plan to build a new jail next door was defeated by those who argued that increased services, not new jail beds, was the correct response . . . .

Without County Jail Nos. 3, 4 and 6, the jail system has 1,238 beds that can accommodate an average daily population of 1,064 to 1,126. At the time of the analysis, the average daily population last year through June 2016 was 1,292, which means there would need to be a decrease by between 166 and 228 inmates to shutter the Hall of Justice jails without adding jail beds elsewhere . . . .

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sfs-unprec...-health-needs/

I'll never understand the notion that we need to stop jailing people because those in jail are disproportionately of one race or ethnicity if any observer with eyes open can see that that is the race of the people committing most of the crimes, and in SF it is. See the story I posted several pages back about the gentlement on his 11th go in the justice system about to be released on probation. This is the kind of person who SHOULD be in jail in SF but won't be because the justice system is excessively lenient and is not jailing people it should . . . and it could be argued it is not jailing people of a certain race whom it should jail just to keep the population of that race who are jailed down.

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by jd3189

All I have to say is that some dramatic changes have to be put into effect. A great city like SF shouldn't have to have this big of a problem. Progressivism shouldn't lead to foolishness like this.

Not only that, people pay waaaaay too much to live there to deal with this crap. I remember back like four years ago when those mobs of teens were going around robbing people and otherwise just causing havoc in like Philly and in Chicago this woman was interviewed in Chicago saying something like "I pay 14k a year in property taxes, the city better do something or I am gone."

If youre paying 5k for a 1bedroom apartment, you should expect a certain lifestyle minimum. Like little crime and clean streets.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by mhays

Yes. A thousand times yes. My city needs the same thing.

Note my post above (post #71) about SF recently doubling the number of its beds for institutionalizing the mentally ill.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Sun Belt

Jail is the first step. Legally document their criminal behavior. Shitting in the streets in today's society should have a zero tolerance policy. You shit in the streets, you go to jail.

While in jail, you get free healthcare, medication and treatment. It's a great way to detox under supervision.

Your best post ever.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Not only that, people pay waaaaay too much to live there to deal with this crap. I remember back like four years ago when those mobs of teens were going around robbing people and otherwise just causing havocv in like Philly and in Chicago this woman was interview in Chicago saying something like "I pay 14k a year in property taxes, the city better do something or I am gone."

If youre paying 5k for a 1bedroom apartment, you should expect a certain lifestyle minimum. Like little crime and clean streets.

You can have a lifestyle free of grit for only a few thousand a year more and the city's rich do. Like I said above, live in a building with either a tall fence or 24 hour paid security and travel everywhere by Uber/Lyft or private car. Never ever take public transit of do much walking downtown.

Tons of people including most of the elected officials live this way. Our new Mayor just famously took a walk in the Tenderloin like she's never been there before. She possibly hasn't and likely won't be back soon.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by Sun Belt

While in jail, you get free healthcare, medication and treatment. It's a great way to detox under supervision.

As a matter of fact, SF contracts with non-profits for this:

Jail-Based Rehabilitation Programs
A program of Walden House

Working with both the San Francisco County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, HR360 has years of experience and a depth of expertise in custody-based rehabilitation programs, offering gender-responsive, evidence-based programs for substance use disorder treatment for both men and women.

Services and interventions delivered by HealthRIGHT 360 address criminal addictive thinking, relapse prevention, successful re-entry into society, stress reduction, anger management, domestic violence prevention, self esteem building, trauma counseling, written case management, reduced recidivism, and promotion of public safety in a correctional setting. The programs also emphasize the benefits and importance of continuing care after release from custody, and will work to link participants to treatment and supportive service programs in each county’s broad network of service providers in preparation for reentry.

Our men's program, Roads to Recovery, is currently only offered in San Francisco.

Our women's programs foster personal well-being, accountability, independence, life skills training, employability, and family and community cohesion. Sisters is offered in San Francisco jails . . . .

https://www.healthright360.org/progr...ation-programs

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

You can have a lifestyle free of grit for only a few thousand a year more and the city's rich do. Like I said above, live in a building with either a tall fence or 24 hour paid security and travel everywhere by Uber/Lyft or private car. Never ever take public transit of do much walking downtown.

Tons of people including most of the elected officials live this way. Our new Mayor just famously took a walk in the Tenderloin like she's never been there before. She possibly hasn't and likely won't be back soon.

Whats the point? I will pay a premium(I'm not rich, but a premium relative to my income) in order to live in a certain urban area so I can walk or take public transport etc. If I am basically living a suburban life in the city, why pay all the extra money?

[pdxtex]

concerning your new mayor.....an excerpt from a chronicle interview..."Breed said she is working on plans to address the mental health and housing crises as soon as she enters Room 200. While sitting at a cafe in the Fillmore District, the mayor-elect laid out specific goals for her first year in office: eliminate tent camps, expand the city’s police force, and cut the red tape suffocating the city’s ability to create more housing" wait what??? a tough talking, gen-x democrat that wants to hire more cops, crush nimbys, and get ride of tent camping hobos?? I might be in love....but what happened to the emergency? well I hope she is successful....full artcle https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/...o-13055908.php

[Pedestrian]

Let's look at the Bay Area mentality.

There have been a recent string of homicides on the BART system. One 18 year old girl was stabbed to death by a homeless crazy person. BART security is notorioulsy bad. A few years back they had to shamed by the local media into replacing fake security cameras with the real thing so they might have a chance at identifying the perps of crimes on the system.

But now after these killings, the system manager has proposed a package of responses and . . .

Anger boils over on BART security plan
By Adam Brinklow Aug 10, 2018, 2:50pm PDT

BART Board of Directors declined to approve some of the largest and most sweeping new security policies presented to them on Thursday. Passenger sentiment at the hearing was so decisively against most of the new suggestions that one director demanded the next meeting be held in another city . . . .

BART General Manager Grace Crunican suggested the new security plan in response to a series of homicides on BART, including the murder of 18-year-old Oakland woman Nia Wilson, who was stabbed to death at MacArthur Station in July in an attack that also injured her older sister.

. . . on the largest and most expensive suggestions, including a computer surveillance system that would track riders in real time, the board declined to make a decision on a 7-2 vote, with Keller and Oakland Representative Robert Raburn in the minority.

The majority of people who showed up for public comment said the new security measures worry them almost as much as BART crime itself—if not more . . . .

“Is ICE gonna get access to your data? You can’t answer that. Don’t green light $30 million taxpayer money based on two paragraphs of text,” said Hofer.

And rider Daryl Owens reminded board members, “Oscar Grant wasn’t that long ago,” alleging that attempts at improving security can result in collateral damage . . . .

Latifah Simon, whose district stretches from San Francisco to El Cerrito, said, “I receive emails from young women who say at night BART is a no man’s land,” but also that “there’s a false choice between safety and human rights: We can do both.”

The majority of the board decided to put off the vote until they obtain more input from the community . . . .

https://sf.curbed.com/2018/8/10/1767...ote-nia-wilson

What were these scary human rights abusive measures?

- Putting BART police officers on a schedule of six 10-hour shifts each week and foregoing one previous weekly day off, a “temporary measure [to] immediately boost the visible presence of law enforcement.”
- Adding eight new fare inspectors to night shifts to “increase the non-sworn police presence in stations.”
- Installing video monitors at station entrances “to remind readers the area is under video surveillance.” This would begin with a trial run at Civic Center Station.
- Installing three new emergency call boxes on every BART platform that allow passengers to connect straight to BART PD dispatch instead of going through the station agent or using their personal phones to call. Using the call box phones would also activate a security camera.
- Boosting “station hardening efforts”—e.g., additions such as five-foot barriers around paid areas and around elevators that make it more difficult for people to sneak on and off without paying.
- Switching all BART cameras to digital, a process Crunican says will take four and a half years and $15 million.
- Leveling a ban on panhandling at BART stations and on platforms.

And

- something called a Physical Security Information Management system:

A fully upgraded system would be capable of monitoring thousands of simultaneous video streams and automating response recommendation to BPD dispatch. The system automatically detects when normal patterns are disrupted, and it then sends an alert to dispatch to monitor the area. Systemwide implementation could take 12 months. Estimated cost is $4 million for implementation and $1.3 million in ongoing costs.

https://sf.curbed.com/2018/8/7/17660...ice-nia-wilson

Can't have any of that--better just to have murders.

This is what any effort to control crime, grit and filth in the Bay Area is up against . . . which is why we have something close to anarchy.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by pdxtex

concerning your new mayor.....an excerpt from a chronicle interview..."Breed said she is working on plans to address the mental health and housing crises as soon as she enters Room 200. While sitting at a cafe in the Fillmore District, the mayor-elect laid out specific goals for her first year in office: eliminate tent camps, expand the city’s police force, and cut the red tape suffocating the city’s ability to create more housing" wait what??? a tough talking, gen-x democrat that wants to hire more cops, crush nimbys, and get ride of tent camping hobos?? I might be in love....but what happened to the emergency? well I hope she is successful....full artcle https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/...o-13055908.php

Yup. I voted for her. She's a liberal Democratic black woman who grew up in the "projects". She would be a way out lib in most of America. In SF, she was the most moderate candidate (there were 3) and the most outspoken about doing something about the issues which are the subject of this thread.

But yet . . . she's a politician. Will she really do what she promised? Time will tell. I have my doubts.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Whats the point? I will pay a premium(I'm not rich, but a premium relative to my income) in order to live in a certain urban area so I can walk or take public transport etc. If I am basically living a suburban life in the city, why pay all the extra money?

You definitley wouldn't be living a suburban life. You'd have world class restaurants, opera, symphony, ballet, clubs, nightlife, shopping, medical facilities and all the rest of it just a $6 Uber ride away. Lots of Silicon Valley's rich have pied-a-terre's in the city (their main homes are in the hills closer to the corporate HQs) to take advantage of all this (and the richest have large Pacific Heights mansions). But they don't take the bus and they don't walk the streets.

[pip]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

Aside from one of the most comprehensive health care systems for its poor in the country, San Francisco specifically provides services to its addicts:


https://sf.curbed.com/2018/5/9/17336...nge-numbers-sf

Recently it was seriously proposed that, besides free needles at the safe injection sites, the city needs to provide free heroin. After all, why encourage both illicit drug sales and the use of contaminated "tar" heroin when the city could hand out the clean, pure stuff and prevent all manner of infections as well as overdoses from heroin of uncertain potency.

Link please

[jd3189]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

You definitley wouldn't be living a suburban life. You'd have world class restaurants, opera, symphony, ballet, clubs, nightlife, shopping, medical facilities and all the rest of it just a $6 Uber ride away. Lots of Silicon Valley's rich have pied-a-terre's in the city (their main homes are in the hills closer to the corporate HQs) to take advantage of all this (and the richest have large Pacific Heights mansions). But they don't take the bus and they don't walk the streets.

Sounds like life in SF for the rich is like a more extreme Miami. Not even NYC is like this for the most part.

[Pedestrian]

Originally Posted by pip

Link please

The free heroin proposal was in a response to an article on the safe injection sites but I don't remember where I saw it. I do remember it got some favorable reaction but I doubt the city's authorities are ready to go that far and, of course, it wouldn't be legal under Federal or state law.

What they are ready to do is free buprenorphine and that's apparently legal (as methdone wouldn't be under these circumstances):

SF mayor’s bold plan to treat heroin addicts on the street
Kevin Fagan May 17, 2018 Updated: May 17, 2018 3:56 a.m.

San Francisco’s mayor wants to create a special medical team — the first of its kind in the nation — to spread out onto the city’s streets and give homeless people a drug that one expert calls “blindingly effective” at abruptly stopping heroin cravings.

Mayor Mark Farrell is set to announce Thursday that he is including $6 million in his current budget proposal to fund the 10-person team over the next two years, with the aim of prescribing the medication buprenorphine to at least 250 street addicts . . . .

The Department of Public Health, which will run the team, began testing out the effectiveness of prescribing buprenorphine in tent camps in 2016 — and since then, nearly 60 percent of the approximately 200 people who began taking the drug are still working on being clean, officials said. That is remarkable considering more than 80 percent of heroin users relapse into addiction after starting treatment; most then give treatment another try.

The department estimates there are 11,000 heroin addicts in San Francisco who use needles. There is no accurate count on how many of those are homeless, but it is believed to be in the thousands. The Public Works Department alone picks up more than 12,500 discarded needles every month at homeless hot spots and encampments . . . .

Under federal law, methadone can be prescribed and disseminated only at a special methadone clinic. But buprenorphine can be prescribed by a doctor and handed out immediately at a pharmacy, and the drug can be given to an addict in a one-week pack of daily doses, which means he or she won’t have to return for resupply right away.

In a pinch, the street team can go fetch the medication and give it to the addict on the spot — an important capability, given the notorious inability of chronically homeless people to keep appointments. But driving a user quickly to a pharmacy has worked very well, said Dr. Barry Zevin, who led the buprenorphine test program, and as head of the public health Street Medicine division would oversee the new team . . . .

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/...n-12920781.php

[Eightball]

bro i don't think ya'll understand how much mental health hospitals cost. on the coasts it like 250k per patient per year. way cheaper to just get them apartments and provide services in the community. way more humane too. of course supply is an issue as well as their "home training"

[pip]

Originally Posted by Pedestrian

[b]The free heroin proposal was in a response to an article on the safe injection sites but I don't remember where I saw it.[b/] I do remember it got some favorable reaction but I doubt the city's authorities are ready to go that far and, of course, it wouldn't be legal under Federal or state law.

What they are ready to do is free buprenorphine and that's apparently legal (as methdone wouldn't be under these circumstances):

if it was seriously proposed like you said it should show up on a google search

[Pedestrian]

^^Lengthy discussion of the subject here:

The streets’ sickest, costliest: the mentally ill
What would it take for San Francisco to create enough mental health services to permanently meet the needs of its thousands of mentally ill homeless people?

https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-...mental-health/

Hope it isn't behind a firewall for non-subscribers.