By Christin Evans, HANC Board

“How do we make our community safer for all?” was the opening question for our panelists at HANC’s May meeting.  Police Commissioner John Hamasaki kicked off the discussion, “Last year, before George Floyd, the Police Commission adopted a resolution to transfer homeless related calls away from SFPD. That’s something we all should agree about because police should be reserved for serious criminal activity, danger [and] violence….  Across the country and San Francisco, for too long we’ve relied on the police to fill in all the gaps in social services, in mental health and substance abuse.  And that has been an abysmal failure putting a burden on police they don’t have the training for and the negative implications of that for the community.” 

Last year, the city launched a pilot initiative of Street Crisis Response teams (SCRTs). Each team includes a Fire Department paramedic, a behavioral health clinician, and a peer counselor. The SCRTs have primarily responded to 911 calls (rated Priority B or C) where a person is experiencing a mental health crisis.  The teams have already alleviated call volumes from police response.   Recently Mayor Breed announced an expansion of the concept and said she would propose in her 2021-22 budget that the city add Street Wellness Response teams (SWRTs) who would respond to priority B and C “wellness check” calls. 

But the mayor’s proposal is not the only police alternative being discussed, Jen Snyder from Supervisor Dean Preston’s office said the Supervisor supports the Compassionate Alternative Response Team (CART) campaign which has asked for $4.8 million in next year’s budget to pilot a community response to homelessness.  Sara Shortt, the Director of Policy and Community Organizing at Community Housing Partnership (CHP), one of the many organizations backing CART, said “CART is the alternative to police response and it is a community model of responding to homelessness.  To be frank, one of the biggest needs for it arose out of the folks who call the police because there’s the visible presence of homeless people. And sometimes it's ‘they are blocking my doorway’ or ‘there is an encampment.’  Police are not equipped to solve the problem other than moving people along. It's not their training nor do they have the access to the right resources. CART teams will have the right tools to effectively respond.”

Additionally, Supervisor Preston has proposed to add ten “Community Ambassadors” to District 5, some of whom would be assigned to the Haight Ashbury.  The Community Ambassador Program (CAP) was launched in the Bayview in 2010 and is a part of the Office of Civic Engagement & Immigrant Affairs (OCEIA), and recently made headlines for being deployed as a safety measure in Chinatown to deter Asian hate incidents.  Community Ambassadors already operate in the Mission, Visitacion Valley/Portola, and Mid-Market areas.  The proposal would be to have the Community Ambassadors walk Haight street, assisting tourists with directions, making calls when needed for wellness checks and perhaps even serve as a deterrent to the thieves who boldly break into cars along the street.  CAP Director, Rich Whipple, “We are in neighborhoods with high social service needs, with high foot traffic and activity around a commercial corridor.  We partner with community organizations to do our trainings.”  The ambassadors typically come from the community they’ll serve who are participants in the JOBS NOW! skills training program.

Even SFPD Commander Peter Walsh was not in disagreement that alternatives to police are needed “[The term] “community policing” is really a broad umbrella.  It gets thrown around a lot. Some people see it as having beat officers walking up the Haight Ashbury.  Others see it as looking at how we work around environmental things like a dark alley that might attract nuisances or crime. It really encompasses all of that and getting the community involved.”  He made the point that SFPD isn’t always best suited to address the calls they have been assigned and he’d like to see accountability for other city departments so that people better understand how DPW or Crisis Teams respond to calls and how effective they are at addressing the community’s concerns.

Note that HANC plans to continue to participate in the budget discussions this month about the various police alternatives proposed. At a future meeting we will plan to give an update on which alternatives are funded and will next be deployed in our community.