by Griffin Jones and Eleni Balakrishnan : missionlocal – excerpt
San Francisco’s efforts to eradicate downtown open-air drug markets and reduce historic overdose rates ramped up in the last month with announcements that police and 130 sheriff’s deputies will be deployed to increase arrests.
The new push is part of an ongoing strategy that will, as of today, include the opening of an in-person Drug Market Agency Coordination Center near Civic Center to coordinate “engagement, enforcement, and treatment” of drug use and sales, according to the mayor’s office.
Will it work? It depends on the goal.
Interviews conducted by Mission Local with 14 public defenders, district attorneys, criminal justice experts and public health workers locally and around the country yielded a common refrain: Waves of arrests for misdemeanor drug crimes have been tried — and have failed.
That is, they failed if the aim of arrests was to curb addiction, reduce suffering and save lives.
However, some said, if the goal is to sweep drug use from public view, then there is an outside chance a wave of arrests could work…
Noting the effects of broken windows policing in New York City in the early ‘90s, a practice widely considered to be harmful by civil rights activists, Moskos said that, in testing the protocol first on the subway, the city found that the presence of cops alone was an effective damper on subway crime …(more)
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Broken Windows Policy: https://guides.lib.jjay.cuny.edu/nypd/brokenwindows