Reed was a victim of a triple shooting, which also struck two San Francisco residents — leaving them with non-life threatening injuries — in broad daylight.
Between January and June of this year, burglaries increased 38.8 percent compared to the same period pre-pandemic in 2019, according to SFPD data, assaults are also up 9.4 percent.
A new safety program, born out of a collaboration between the Tenderloin, Mid-Market, and Civic Center Community Benefit Districts, the Mid-Market Business Association, Urban Alchemy, BART, SFPD, and the office of Mayor London Breed, attempts to answer to some stakeholders’ needs by adding “vibrancy” and “safety” to the neighborhoods.
An equitable safety plan should “center victims and survivors who are least represented in conversations around public safety,” says Tinisch Hollins, Executive Director of Californians for Safety and Justice.
She also consistently disappoints activists, who say she leans on police to solve the city’s problems. They point to a scandal last year, in which unearthed texts showed Breed asking Police Chief Scott and others to clear homeless of the city’s sidewalks because they were out too late or she was “in the area having lunch.” They also point out that despite Breed’s pledging to redirect significant funding from the SFPD budget into Black communities, her proposed budget for next year actually increases police funding.
The Mid-Market Vibrancy and Safety Plan is “very consistent with what the mayor has done over the past several years, which is paying lip service to this idea of responding to public health crises with public health professionals.
Though the SFPD press office would not say how many more officers have been working in the neighborhood since they were initially deployed on May 19, the Chronicle reported that the program includes 26 sworn officers: 18 during the day and 8 in patrol cars at night.
That might seem like a satisfying concession for social justice advocates: after all, Urban Alchemy ambassadors are deployed to the area to connect people to social services, rather than arrest them.
Steve Gibson, interim director of the Mid-Market Business Association, says that the original proposal for a safety plan drafted by the Business Association and neighborhood community benefit districts did not include SFPD — that, he says, was the mayor’s idea.
The Mid-Market Vibrancy and Safety plan will likely be effective in solving business owner’s problems: afterall, a visible police presence is a fairly strong incentive to get petty criminals, poor folks, and unhoused people to move to a different area or hide their hardship from public view.
However, focusing on the needs of the most marginalized — addressing drug crime by focusing investment in addiction treatment, for example, or extending support to victims of violent crime who may be, themselves, perpetrators of petty theft or drug use, promotes healing for everyone.