A Publication of the Coalition on Homelessness
On Thursday, October 7, 2021 at 11 a.m., the Coalition on Homelessness will host a webinar to unveil a scathing report regarding the city’s encampment response carried out by Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC). The report draws on recently acquired access to publicly released data and the results of in-person monitoring of the city’s encampment removal operations, which reveal dramatic failures. Perpetual displacement, lack of meaningful efforts to offer adequate and appropriate services,
As the pandemic continues and the shelter-in-place (SIP) hotels made available to unhoused community members begin to shut down, the most marginalized are suddenly being forced back onto the streets. As this occurs, one can only imagine the influx of calls to 911 dispatchers requesting the presence of police for nonviolent unhoused folks.
That is why it is so critical for San Francisco to implement the Compassionate Alternative Response Team, or CART,
As I look out the window sill here,
I see birds circling high above the ground.
Free, floating as high as he wants,
To be ever so gently,
Free, free, free.
Now if I could trade places with that bird that soars,
Never to be trapped inside these doors,
I’d fly high and free to unknown places,
Above treetops and snow-capped places,
“Homes not barricades!! Homes not barricades!!”
These are the words chanted by protesters marching through the streets of the Tenderloin. Some were carrying police barricades, while others held signs that read ‘DEFUND SFPD,” “Rent is Theft” and “Black Homes Matter”. Others were equipped with medical supplies and sustenance, and in the back you could hear the Brass Liberation orchestra playing their instruments brightly to the beat of the chants.
Community organizations such as House the Bay,
Near the seven-hour mark of the July 8 meeting of the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Appropriations Committee on the San Francisco Police Department budget for the next fiscal year, I realized I simply could not go on. After two long presentations, dozens of questions from supervisors and almost five hours of public comment, the end was not in sight. I was exhausted.
This was, for some organizers, the goal. Many of the over 400 callers used a script,
Black Lives Matter and other abolitionist groups are leading communities across the country to recognize that the criminal justice system is a powerhouse of violence and white supremacy. Policing was racist at birth, with its origins in scalping Indigenous people and kidnapping Black people escaping slavery. It has a long history of keeping non-white, non-property owning people “under foot” and disempowered. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow and up to the present, police budgets across the country have continued to grow,
