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SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past four years, San Francisco has grappled with the daunting challenges of homelessness, crime, and the fentanyl epidemic.
But instead of tackling income inequality, housing affordability, and other root causes of these persistent problems, the city has doubled down on arrests, displacement, and surveillance, often at the expense of residents’ privacy and due process rights.
“This year, voters have made it clear that they are deeply frustrated with the quality of life in San Francisco and want city leaders to do more to improve public safety and street conditions,” said Abdi Soltani, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California. “Daniel Lurie has pledged to address these concerns by increasing emergency shelter and creating temporary housing, funding mental health and substance use treatment, and requiring transparency around police use of surveillance. We support these approaches and look forward to working with the mayor-elect to realize this vision for the city.”
While Lurie has pledged to create 1,500 emergency shelter beds during his first six months in office and 2,500 temporary housing units within two years, we also call on him to suspend aggressive enforcement against homeless encampments and immediately end the city’s unlawful practice of seizing and destroying unhoused people’s property.
We also urge Lurie to stop enforcing criminal penalties against unhoused residents. Citing and arresting people simply for being homeless will push them into the criminal legal system and have a disproportionate impact on Black and Latino residents who make up 25% and 34%, respectively, of San Francisco’s unhoused population.
To reduce drug overdose deaths in San Francisco, it’s critical that Lurie follows through on his plan to invest in alternatives to incarceration, such as mental health and substance use treatment programs. California voters approved Prop. 36, which increases penalties for some drug charges and gives judges the option of ordering defendants into treatment but does not provide new funding for treatment beds.
Lurie has proposed creating crisis centers and said he supports allowing trained professionals to respond to people experiencing a mental health crisis. Such a program could save lives.
He’s also vowed to ensure that the San Francisco Police Department regularly reports publicly on how it deploys surveillance tools, the outcomes of their use, and the potential impacts on civil liberties.
