S.F. official confronts Mayor Breed over ending 'drug supermarkets'
Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin is increasingly confronting Mayor London Breed over San Francisco’s escalating drug crisis, signaling an inflection point in the city’s struggle to contain its open-air drug markets and skyrocketing overdoses.
Peskin demanded Tuesday that Breed shut down what he called “drug supermarkets” in 90 days — arguing the city has the resources to do so, but lacks the coordination and focus.
Breed agrees with Peskin that public drug dealing and use are unacceptable, but hasn’t agreed to Peskin’s plan to crack down on them by setting up an emergency operations center that would coordinate various departments, including San Francisco police and other law enforcement agencies.
The mayor has declined to commit to a 90-day timeline, saying she’s already working with state and federal agencies and coordinating city departments to address the crisis. Public health and criminal justice experts are doubtful the city could shut down illicit markets as quickly as Peskin wants, but said it was possible over time using a combination of approaches. The city remains divided over the issue, with some residents cheering officials’ efforts and others pushing back that criminalization won’t fix the problem and will only worsen overdose deaths.
At a Chamber of Commerce breakfast and the Board of Supervisors’ meeting Tuesday, both Breed and Peskin emphasized the need for collaboration and setting aside political differences to make change — but haven’t agreed on the exact solution.
Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle
Peskin’s aggressive approach, which came in the wake of a chaotic public questioning Tuesday of Breed in U.N. Plaza, shows he’s willing to take a stronger stand against the open-air drug markets that have proliferated around San Francisco’s urban core. The board president’s shift portends what could be a sustained period of political tug-of-war between the mayor and supervisors over San Francisco’s worsening drug crisis — with the 2024 mayoral election on the horizon, raising questions about Breed’s and even Peskin’s futures.
Peskin told The Chronicle he thought his public questioning of Breed at U.N. Plaza might elicit protests — and the chaos Tuesday reflected a broader problem.
“We’ve lost control over our public spaces,” he said. “I’m not gonna say that it was fun and pleasant, but my objective was to focus on the human misery and the chaos that is sitting in the shadow of City Hall. I think what happened yesterday did that.”
Peskin, a veteran of the city’s progressive political wing who was first elected supervisor 23 years ago, has seemed to move to the center on drug dealing and use on public streets, as well as related concerns about safety and crime.
Unlike some of his fellow progressives, who often advocate for harm reduction or systemic reforms, Peskin thinks police should be a big part of the solution to shutting down drug markets.
On Wednesday, he called for the mayor to order police to repeatedly arrest drug dealers.
“For people who say. ‘Yeah, but these people are gonna be arrested and released!’ my response is yes, fine, and then they will be rearrested and released,” Peskin said. “And to the extent that they can avail themselves of treatment or go into diversion, that is something that we embrace. … When drug dealers get that message, they will stop congregating in the center of our city.”
In an opinion piece in BeyondChron, a local news site, Peskin said he doesn’t support mass incarceration, but it’s “not going to hurt anyone to spend a few hours at our Hall of Justice.”
Under Peskin’s vision, the mayor would establish an ongoing emergency center that could become a coordinating force for public safety agencies: the police, the Sheriff’s Department, the District Attorney’s Office, the public health and public works departments, as well as the California Highway Patrol and the administrative National Guard staff, among others. Those agencies would work together daily from a centralized operations center, Peskin said.
So far, though, the mayor is taking a different approach.
Breed spokesperson Jeff Cretan said Wednesday that the mayor is continuing the daily work of addressing the issue, including meeting with state and federal officials, leading a weekly meeting on street conditions and tasking her emergency management department with centrally coordinating city efforts.
“The mayor’s committed to shutting down the drug markets as fast as possible, and it’s complicated,” he said.
Cretan said, “It’s not so simple as people might portray it” because of limited police resources. The department can’t fill positions as fast as it is losing officers.
Cretan pointed to progress such as increased police recruitment, more drug seizures in the Tenderloin in the past few months compared with prior years, and increased investments in behavioral health, treatment and prevention.
Breed said she welcomed collaboration and invited Peskin to meet more regularly with her administration about its response to the drug crisis. Peskin also said he will continue to ask the mayor for public updates every month and will continue to push for the emergency center and a commitment to close huge public drug markets in a 90-day period.
Keith Humphreys, a Stanford addiction medicine specialist, said a 90-day deadline is likely unrealistic. He pointed to successful policies in a few cities and countries that used sticks and carrots — not just threatening jail or coaxing people into voluntary social services. The goal wasn’t to arrest and jail everyone, but to change the dynamic.
“What deters people is the certainty of punishment much more than the severity,” Humphreys said. “If they knew that every time they stand on a street corner and deal, they get in trouble, that’s a deterrent.”
Other drug policy leaders oppose criminalization as part of the solution. Laura Guzman, acting executive director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition, said she was “very concerned” by Peskin’s tough-on-crime turn.
“People who are knowledgeable like Supervisor Peskin should know that this is the worst way to actually address overdoses,” she said. “… Do we want open-air drug markets and to see people in the misery they’re suffering? The answer is no. We know that arresting either people dealing or arresting drug users is not the answer.”
Guzman was “disgusted” by the city’s new proposal to potentially arrest users and said the city needs to fix the conditions it created by providing housing, overdose education and jobs with living wages.
David Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said historically failed drug policies focus either on supply through traditional law enforcement or demand through public health interventions.
“Where these markets are concerned, it doesn’t matter how much enforcement you do, it doesn’t matter how much prevention you do, it doesn’t work,” he said. “And that’s really why we need a different approach.”
Kennedy designed a successful intervention to end open-air drug markets causing harm to a community. He started in High Point, a city of around 100,000 residents in North Carolina, in 2004.
Under his model, police worked with community members, service providers and families of people selling drugs over months to understand the problem and investigate to build cases against sellers. Once they had evidence, they invited sellers to a community meeting where they said they wouldn’t arrest and charge them, but open-air drug sales must end in the affected neighborhood.
The result was that markets disappeared overnight and stayed that way with monitoring, Kennedy said. Some sellers took other jobs, others went underground. An analysis showed a reduction in violent crime in High Point.
Similar programs have been adapted and implemented in cities across the country since then. The program could be adapted to deal with San Francisco’s epidemic driven by the highly addictive and lethal opioid fentanyl, he said.
Peskin’s focus on closing drug markets is a reflection of the prevailing winds in city politics.
Jason McDaniel, associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University, said Peskin probably isn’t becoming more moderate, but his political focus might be changing in response to residents’ heightened anxieties over public safety. Those anxieties drove the recall of former District Attorney Chesa Boudin and the subsequent appointment and election of successor Brooke Jenkins, who has attempted to take a more traditional tough-on-crime posture.
Peskin said that even if many neighborhoods don’t have a major crime problem, the recall exacerbated the perception that San Francisco is moving in the wrong direction — and he sees closing open-air drug markets as one clear way the city can respond.
“This is real,” he said. “If we can show San Franciscans and people around the country that we can do this, I think it sends a much larger message that we’re still the city that knows how,” he added.
Peskin’s rhetoric and actions have stoked speculation from others inside City Hall that he might be contemplating a challenge against Breed’s 2024 re-election bid, as Supervisor Ahsha Safaí is already doing.
The supervisor told The Chronicle his only current focus is the job he has now and he has “no shortage of options” with what he can do when term restrictions force him out of office after 2024.
“One never knows what life brings you, but I have no plans to run for mayor,” he said.
David Ho, a political consultant who worked in support of Breed in her 2018 campaign but more recently has worked for progressives, has known Peskin for more than 20 years.
Ho said even Peskin’s critics would agree he would make a competent mayor because of his experience and ability to collaborate across the aisle, but whether he wants to run — and would win — are different questions.
“I just think he’s not going to get into a fight that he can’t win,” said Ho, pointing out only one progressive has won a mayoral race in recent memory.
Ho said Peskin’s demand that Breed shut down open-air drug markets in 90 days or less wasn’t reasonable and said Breed was “smart enough” to not pledge to fix drug markets — or anything else — on a deadline.
Peskin, for his part, remains resolute in his push for a 90-day goal to end public drug markets.
“I love this city, and this city is going through a rough patch,” Peskin told The Chronicle on Wednesday. “… If we are going to show our residents that we are moving in the right direction — this is the source of people’s anxiety. This is the source of our collective shame. Let’s do something about it.”
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
