Something odd is going on in San Francisco.
Yes, I could sit here and talk about the gentrification of the Mission and SOMA and the TL and rising rents and the tech sector, all of which may be wholly or partially responsible for what I’ve been seeing, but that’s a macro view. Today I’m interested in the micro.
When you’re out on the streets late night after night, you start to pick up a feel for what the city feels like after the bars let out. The junkies and crackheads and tweekers that congregate by the civic center BART and 16th & Mission, alongside the homeless can collectors, the schizophrenics talking to light posts, screaming about things that only make sense to them and the voices in their heads…
…all of a sudden there are less of them, at least in the usual spots after midnight. The ones I do see are often being jacked up by the cops – for what, I don’t know, as I haven’t stopped to ask.
But something is clearly going on.
It feels like some directive from the chief of police, the mayor’s office, or somewhere up high has been implemented in the past month or two as a matter of policy. If you’re familiar with what the city looks like at night you can feel a not-so-subtle shift in the policing out here on the streets. The 16th and Mission BART station looks like a ghost town after the trains stop running, and the people that I do see sitting on the benches seem to be getting hassled. It’s not the same cops either, or on one particular street corner – it seems to be the whole of the Mission and South of Market.
Maybe it’s the Sit/Lie ordinance that’s being enforced, or maybe the cops are out doing sweeps and enforcing stayaway orders from the courts, I don’t know, but all of a sudden it feels as if the people on the street – marginalized already – are being swept into the corners.
I saw a woman get rolled by the police just this morning at 5th and Mission. She was walking down the street, yelling at no one in particular, towing a giant beat-up roller bag – a sadly far too frequent sight in SOMA. I barely noticed, until I saw a squad car back up in reverse down Mission Street and start following her. When the car came back to the corner, the two officers parked the car and got out to accost her, but by then I was so far in the other direction that I couldn’t see what happened next.
Maybe they had come out specifically for her because she had just punched someone in the face a block back. Maybe she fit a description.
But given the general vibe I’ve seen the cops have out on the streets lately, I’d say it was more likely that they were just stopping her for being nuts.
If we had some sort of way to get the mentally ill or the homeless or the drug addicted into a situation where we as a society could treat them, I’d have less of a problem with this, except I know that that’s not how the state works. There is no real money for long-term treatment of the mentally ill in California, or America, for that matter.
We’re not interested in spending money on funding that problem, choosing to build more prisons instead.
All I know is for the last month or so in the 6th Street corridor, up and down Market Street, and all throughout the Mission, I’m seeing more and more street people sitting on the sidewalk in handcuffs. I don’t know what it’s about, but it sure does feel targeted.
Perhaps it’s nothing, or perhaps it’s been going on much longer than I’ve thought.
All I know is that the cops are out, and if you look like you’ve got nowhere to go in San Francisco, they want to talk to you.
