The political agenda and tone of San Francisco’s ruling class is dramatically shifting right. This is exemplified by devastating school funding cuts, the Recall Chesa Boudin campaign, and quite prominently, Mayor London Breed’s infamous “Tenderloin Emergency Intervention Plan.” On Dec. 14, 2021, Breed announced an initiative to create a “safer San Francisco,” where she detailed a plan to “be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bulls**t that has destroyed our city.”
The community is eager to fight back. The Party for Socialism and Liberation organized a press conference on Jan. 4, supported by the Idriss Stelley Foundation, POOR Magazine, St. James Infirmary, ANSWER Coalition, Eviction Response Network, No New SF Jail Coalition, and District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston, to demand an end to the mayor’s war on the Tenderloin and that the Board of Supervisors revoke the emergency ordinance which grants Breed sweeping powers.
Speakers rallied outside city hall to decry the mayor’s legacy of under-funding service programs proven to help people. Celestina Pearl, outreach manager for St. James Infirmary, an organization that provides and advocates for health services for sex workers, drug users and others, said, “We need funding for the people who are already doing this work on the streets. And those people are not the cops.”
Dominated by the Democratic Party, San Fransisco’s politics are lauded as some of the most progressive in the nation. Yet, over the years, the city’s poor and oppressed experienced innumerable attacks, each seemingly more vicious than the last.
ANSWER Coalition co-founder Gloria La Riva explained how such a pro-police push could happen in so-called progressive San Francisco: “At the board of supervisors hearing on this matter, some of the supervisors tried to polish their progressive credentials … then they turned around and supported Mayor London Breed’s proposal. San Francisco politics is too often seen as a stepping stone for higher political office. Too often these politicians go along with policies that perpetuate pro-rich, pro-developer, anti-poor policies.”
Mayor Breed followed her announcement with a state of emergency declaration for the Tenderloin District just three days later, which granted her virtually unchecked powers to launch a police crackdown under the guise of helping stop the overdose crisis and making the neighborhood safer for children. Quick to respond, community members, advocates and organizers denounced the emergency order as nothing more than an increase in funding and power to the San Francisco Police Department and the mayor herself.
The ordinance was ratified by the board of supervisors last year, early in the morning of Dec. 24, after roughly six hours of public comment from hundreds of San Franciscans. The majority of callers, many of them Tenderloin residents, spoke out passionately against this measure. Only supervisors Dean Preston and Shamann Walton voted against the declaration.
Breed’s words in her “safer San Francisco” statement demonized impoverished people as “looters” and “open-air drug users,” giving people “the choice between going to the location we have identified for them or going to jail.”
Breed referred to recent theft at stores like Louis Vuitton in nearby Union Square to justify her reactionary policies toward street vendors, under the pretense of stopping the sales of stolen goods. And no sooner than the state of emergency was ratified, SFPD began to fine and impound hot dog vendors in Union Square. Breed is using this state of emergency to go after the people most impacted economically and otherwise by the COVID-19 crisis: the homeless, as well as street vendors, who are largely people of color and immigrants.
The mayor’s distorted and dehumanizing picture of the homeless in San Francisco refuses to take responsibility for the poverty and illness that city policies have created and perpetuated. Meanwhile, the homeless mortality rate tripled during a time when people are forced to congregate in tent camps and are repeatedly victims of sweeps.
The board of supervisors once again discussed the emergency ordinance at length at their meeting later that day, and again more public commenters spoke out against the mayor’s draconian measure. The ordinance was not struck down, but supervisors approved a motion to revisit the discussion on Feb. 8.
PSL organizers living in the Tenderloin and its surrounding areas are circulating a petition with viable solutions to address the systemic causes of poverty and crime:
- End the exploitation, alienation, poverty and competition that fuel violence.
- Fund social work and violence interruption programs.
- House the homeless.
- Make San Fransisco a true sanctuary city: full rights for all immigrants.
- Demilitarize and defund the police.
- Build empowered working-class, youth and neighborhood organizations (independent from real estate and business interest groups).
Featured image: Photo from the Jan. 4 press conference. Liberation photo
