by Tim Redmond : 48hills – excerpt
A new crackdown on small-time dealers makes no sense—and it can’t possibly work.
Following the mayor’s political playbook, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins yesterday announced that she was going to reject a number of existing plea bargains in drug cases and seek more jail time for the sale of relatively small amounts of narcotics.
The decision flies in the face of a half-century or more of data on the impacts of the “War on Drugs” and the carceral approach to a public health issue…
It also makes no sense in San Francisco right now, when there is no room in the jails and no evidence that more arrests of small-time sellers will have any impact on fentanyl overdoses…
A conviction for drug sales is a deportable offense; under former DA Chesa Boudin, many of those cases were reduced to accessory charges—which can involve the same sentence, but without the threat of deportation.
Meanwhile, Sup. Shamann Walton said today that the city isn’t devoting anywhere near the police resources needed to address a growing homicide problem in Bay View Hunters Point:..(more)
Let’s see. We are out of cops. teachers and bus drivers. We seem to be short on just about every essential workers a city needs to function. I bet the one thing we are full of is planners. People who are working diligently to prepare a wonderful city for us that we can look forward to living in 20 years or 30 years from now, if we live that long.
If this isn’t a classic case of multiple deck chair rearranging I don’t know what is. No way are we prepared to add another 10 thousand or even 5 thousand more people to this mess. SF has become the Peyton Place of souls who go to dine on each other. In fact, the Ship of Fools may be the best description, the Hotel California. Everyone is welcome in but you can never leave.