[Mayor Frank] Jordan's failure to provide leadership in attacking
the root causes of homelessness has actually led many in our
neighborhoods to conclude that our city is incapable of solving the
problems that face us. As a believer in activist government, I view
this as perhaps the most critical failure of the past four years.
Willie L. Brown, Jr.,
November 30, 1995
Talk to homeless people these days, and they’ll tell you they’re
feeling a tad unsettled. They’ll tell you that the police have
been doling out a lot of tickets, and not to Giants’ games.
The Coalition on Homelessness reports that there’s been a surge
in car towing in China Basin and an increased police presence in the
area, where for many years people have lived in their cars
relatively undisturbed. As preparations progress on the massive
Mission Bay build-out, it’s likely that blue uniforms will be even
more in evidence in the former Santa Fe Pacific wasteland.
The Coalition has also chronicled an increase in citations issued
to street people in the Haight, where — it argues — a new police
captain, James Dudley, is beginning his command with a bang. As San
Francisco districts go, the Park Station serves a fairly low crime
area, according to monthly police figures. But an article in the
August Street Sheet notes that the "sweeps" of the past
two and a half months have addressed not crimes but misdemeanors.
And police have kept a low profile, eschewing the traditional
confiscation of property that tends to anger outside observers. As a
result, there have been no incendiary videos showing city employees
"gleefully tearing shopping carts out of the hands of homeless
‘running away for their lives’ kids."
People on the street talk about other parts of the city as well.
Their observations are not scientific, merely anecdotal: the story
of a man in SOMA who was cited four times in one day for sitting on
the sidewalk; a woman who asks for spare jackets but adds, "We
may not be here when you come back."
Adam Arms, an attorney for the Coalition, offers statistics: in
1999 the SFPD issued 23,000 citations for quality of life violations
— trespassing, blocking the sidewalk, camping in the parks. Do the
math. Spread out evenly, this comes to more than 60 citations a day,
or about 5 every two hours. And 12,000 more were handed out during
the first half of this year, suggesting that we’ll begin the new
millennium with a brand new record, one that will put Mayor Jordan’s
16,000 Matrix citations in 1995 to deep head-hanging shame.
There’s a lot of talk these days, among people off the street,
about these perceived threats to their quality of life. Sometimes
they have a point. It’s understandable when a shopkeeper tired of
cleaning feces off his stoop posts a yellow "No
Trespassing" sign to prevent unwanted visitors from sleeping in
his doorway. But to carry this line of thinking farther toward its
logical conclusion, as Council of District Merchants head Chris
Dittenhafer did at a housing conference conducted by Our Mayor’s
Committee 2000 last May, is to
approach unconstitutionality. Dittenhafer sketched out a
situation where "an individual spends lots of time and energy
and money starting a business." Before he knows it, "his
success attracts a panhandler who takes some of the money people
would spend in his store." The next step: the shopkeeper finds
a natural ally in the cop who is trying to preserve order in the
neighborhood. And it becomes all too comfortable to bust
unsavory-looking people just for standing or sitting on the
sidewalk.
It also becomes all too illegal. A person on the sidewalk in
front of a store is not trespassing; he is simply occupying one
small part of public property. And if passersby must walk around
him, that’s legal, too. It’s spelled out in nice, clear language
in the very first part of the San Francisco Police Code: "No
person shall wilfully and substantially obstruct the free passage of
any person or persons on any street, sidewalk, passageway or other
public place." The courts take adverbs very seriously. The
operative one here is "wilfully." The courts take their
constitutional mandate very seriously as well. For this reason, the
code includes a careful caveat: "It is not intended that this
Section shall apply where its application would result in an
interference with or inhibition of any exercise of the
constitutionally protected right of freedom of speech or
assembly." In other words, they think that just hangin’ is
OK.
<>
Oh yes, this week’s lead photograph, which was taken about noon
on Wednesday, August 9, at the corner of 5th and Bryant.
No doubt, it was just a social visit. When asked, no one at the
Southern police station could come up with any information about the
incident.
