Here’s when CHP officers will arrive
Gov. Gavin Newsom will deploy California Highway Patrol officers to combat open-air drug dealing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods starting Monday.
The CHP officers will investigate opioid trafficking cases and train local police on identifying drugs and intoxicated drivers and others engaging in drug crimes. They will also help local police patrol the neighborhoods to deter and disrupt drug dealing, which could include arresting dealers, California Highway Patrol Commissioner Sean Duryee said Friday.
Duryee declined to say exactly how many officers will be deployed, citing officer safety concerns, but noted there are 75 CHP officers already stationed in San Francisco. He said the officers who volunteered for this operation are from San Francisco. The governor’s office didn’t say when the operation will end.
Fourteen members of the California National Guard will also assist to crack down on the supply of fentanyl, the powerful opioid that’s caused a spike in overdose deaths during the pandemic, but they won’t be deployed on the ground in San Francisco. Instead, they will help with intelligence gathering to map drug cartels and build investigations, which they do in other areas including San Diego, Maj. Gen. Matthew Beevers said.
State Attorney General Rob Bonta also announced that the California Department of Justice will provide legal help in prosecuting cases in any operations that cross jurisdictions.
“This is not about criminalizing people struggling with substance use — this is about taking down the prominent poison peddlers and their connected crime rings that prey on the most vulnerable, and harm our residents and our reputation,” Newsom said in a statement. “While it’s true that San Francisco is safer than many cities its size, we cannot let this rampant crime continue.”
Newsom’s polarizing plan comes amid heated debates among residents and state lawmakers over how to address the overdose crisis. Locally, the move to bring more law enforcement into the city has drawn cheers from increasingly vocal moderates and resistance from criminal justice reform and public health advocates who argue that more cops on the streets won’t solve the causes of drug dealing or addiction and could criminalize people who use drugs, pushing back against the governor’s assurance.
Newsom announced state intervention a week ago but offered scant details until Friday. The move followed his visit to the Tenderloin last week and requests for state and federal help from local officials, including Mayor London Breed and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, to curb the crisis. Overdose deaths in the city jumped more than 40% in the first three months of this year compared with last year.
“They heard the pleas and the cries of the community asking for help, asking for something different. Well this is something different, and I am looking forward to a real change in our city,” Breed said Friday at a news conference at City Hall flanked by state and local law enforcement leaders, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and Peskin.
Breed said accountability is essential and the initiative will send a strong message to criminals “holding communities hostage.” And in a recurring recent refrain, she rejected the negative narrative of a crime-ridden San Francisco by describing positive events this week.
“It’s time for us to write our own narrative about what San Francisco is because we live it and breathe it every single day,” she said.
It’s not clear whether CHP presence will have any immediate or lasting impact on San Francisco’s long-troubled areas.
Newsom sent the CHP to Oakland for three weekends in September 2021 to enforce traffic laws as the city dealt with a wave of violent crime. After the operation, then-Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said sideshow activity dropped during that month. But a year and a half later, Oakland continues to struggle with sideshows and fatal freeway shootings.
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said success will be measured not necessarily in arrests, but by whether there is lasting change on the streets.
“The last thing we want to do is clean the streets up for a week, two weeks, a month and then everybody goes back to their regular way of doing things and it starts all over again,” he said. “We have to sustain this effort.”
Breed said “I hope” the operation will have more success than past efforts such as a U.S. attorney-led initiative in the Tenderloin that resulted in hundreds of charges from mid-2019 to the end of 2020, but not lasting change on the streets.
Breed has been trying since December 2021 to crack down on open-air drug dealing in the Tenderloin, with mixed success. She deployed more officers in the neighborhood, most recently at the request of business owners, which led to some cleared blocks, according to proponents. Breed has said vacancies in the Police Department are hindering her efforts, and poured money into beefing up the police budget to try to retain and recruit officers.
Jenkins, whom Breed appointed, pledged to be tougher on fentanyl dealers than her predecessor and won a November election to fill the remainder of Chesa Boudin’s term after he was recalled.
Officials said last year that in the first three months after Jenkins’ appointment, drug seizures, arrests and felony narcotics cases filed all jumped compared with the year before. The share of resolved cases that ended in a jail or prison sentence climbed, and narcotics cases leapt this year.
Breed and Jenkins also support treatment for people addicted to drugs, which the mayor has increased, but have said there should also be accountability.
Critics say more enforcement won’t fix what they believe is fundamentally a social issue.
“If a drug dealer is arrested, someone might take their place the day after,” said Brian Cox, a deputy San Francisco public defender. “It isn’t solving the underlying issue or treating the reason why people are using drugs. … What we should be focusing on is solving those social problems.”
Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former police spokesperson who represents SoMa and is in recovery from drug addiction, disagreed that street-level dealers are easily replaceable and wants to see more prosecution of them.
“It’s time to focus on the lives of drug addicts and not the livelihoods of drug dealers,” Dorsey said.
Peskin, who has asked Newsom and Breed to take more action against street drug peddlers, said “we have to send out the message that this kind of open-air drug dealing behavior is not going to be tolerated” by also arresting and booking people for selling on the streets.
Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the Tenderloin, was not available for comment Friday, but tweeted Tuesday that Newsom’s plan was a “radical proposal” and sent letters to state officials and city departments demanding information about any deployments in his district.
Preston has consistently opposed Breed’s proposals for more police funding. Instead, he proposed spending $10 million on non-police public safety measures, including more community ambassadors and a street dealing intervention team that would prevent violence, connect dealers who are addicted to treatment and transition people off the streets, possibly through alternative employment.
Del Seymour, a Tenderloin business owner and nonprofit leader in recovery who once sold drugs, does not support more cops on the streets, but welcomes state coordination to go after suppliers. However, if the intervention was successful, he also predicted repercussions for people struggling with substance use in the Tenderloin, such as higher prices that could lead to property crime and more acute withdrawal for people addicted to drugs if the supply is disrupted.
“It’s going to be a mess down there if this works,” he said.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
