All The Homeless News That Fits
No one can say last month lacked for local mainstream media stories spotlighting homelessness. Predictably, a couple of standard corporate media practices are currently driving stories about constructive efforts to alleviate the grim consequences of homelessness out of the dailies’ front pages and the TV newscasts. Most recently this has been the case with homeless families, whose numbers everyone agrees is the fastest growing subset of the national and local homeless populations.
One aforementioned dynamic is the first basic truth everyone learns about how commercial media operates: if it bleeds, it leads (and thereby generates more advertising dollars, Amen). The second is what happens when issues like homelessness are managed through an expensive (and taxpayer financed) overlay of political public relations: message control.
Our first exhibits are San Francisco’s recent horrifying homeless deaths: Treyshun Harris and his brothers Taronta and Joshoa Greely near Pier 7; and Johnell Kirk, Jr. on the 200 block of the Financial District’s Beale Street. These dramas are further underscored by the still-unfolding public tragedies for two more local homeless people named Lashaun Harris and Scott Kinney.
Fire and Water
Halloween’s real-life horror story ignited at 3:55 am on a dark and deserted Beale Street the morning of November 1st—far from earlier revelries in the Castro—where Johnell Kirk was doused with gasoline and set ablaze on the sidewalk as he slept. He then jumped to his feet, and screamed until the ambulance arrived. The 43-year-old Kirk suffered burns over 85% of his body and by 5:00 pm he was pronounced dead at St. Francis Memorial Hospital.
But all of San Francisco was still reeling from the heartrending shock of the nationally notorious tragedy less than two weeks earlier; the afternoon of Wednesday, October 19th, when three homeless children—brothers aged six, two, and 16 months—were cast into 37-foot-deep waters from a pedestrian pier that juts 750 feet out into the cold and treacherous currents of San Francisco Bay.
Yes, these senseless deaths are tragic and horrifying, but what continues to screw our guts into knots is that the homeless people arrested for these crimes—Scott Darden Kinney, 35, and 23-year-old homeless mother Lashaun Harris—were compelled to such dire acts as a consequence of their severe mental illnesses. What’s more, both of these crimes were arguably preventable—had Kinney or Harris access to housing linked to appropriate and effective mental health services.
Crime, Punishment, and Politics
Here are textbook examples of the societal costs of un- and under-treated mental illnesses, yet nowhere has this question been raised in news coverage of these crimes. And in one case our District Attorney, Kamala Harris, is holding her options open—seemingly waiting to see where the pendulum of public opinion will rest once the news media stops swinging it.
First, we have two cases where homeless people have allegedly murdered homeless people. Second, both Kinney and Harris have treatment histories for schizophrenia, and both had stopped taking their medications.
For the fatal torching of Johnell Kirk—a chronically homeless man who had been drifting in and out of San Francisco for the past six years—Scott Kinney will be tried for murder. For the downing deaths of her three children, Lashaun Harris faces three counts of murder under special circumstances, meaning the District Attorney is still weighing whether or not to seek the death penalty in the homeless mom’s trial. (see Hearing Voices).
As this STREET SHEET goes to press, public affairs staff at the DA’s office won’t confirm or deny whether Lashaun Harris’s life now hangs in the balance, despite the fact that time and again San Franciscans have demonstrated strong and vociferous opposition to capital punishment. (Please sign the online petition urging DA Kamala Harris to spare Lashaun’s life here)
Yet while infanticide can prompt elected officials to weigh politically perilous actions, ghastly outcomes such as these are seldom, or ever, considered when advocates like the Coalition on Homelessness are urging policymakers to fund efforts to alleviate homelessness, let alone prevent it.
Sadly, it also seems both Kirk and Harris have already been tried in the press; we now wait only for the courts to sanction the media’s verdicts.
SF Homeless Policy and Other Rituals of Destruction
Why? It has a lot to do with how we value human lives. Or, more correctly, how we selectively devalue homeless lives.
It also has to do with how San Francisco’s homeless policies have now become an active campaign to drive homeless people out of town—operating just beneath the camouflage afforded by slick and well-coordinated public relations efforts in the mainstream press.
Lashaun Harris’s children died the same day that Mayor Newsom held an earlier press conference to make some rather vague statements, and offer very little concrete action, regarding the City’s efforts to house homeless families. This one clearly backfired, because the obvious intent here was to preempt a press conference, rally, and vigil that COH’s Housing First for Families campaign held the following day at City Hall. Somehow, even with tragedy illustrating the desperation of homeless families’ need, we still can’t get the Mayor’s office to increase new family housing units planned for coming years from 7% to 25% of the total number. To his credit, Mayor Newsom has agreed to meet some of our other demands, but we haven’t seen any action on them yet (see ‘Housing First’ For San Francisco’s Homeless Families).
Instead, Mayor Newsom currently labors to reify the Bush administration’s smoke-and-mirrors focus on “chronic” homelessness (see Federal Homeless Policy Update). Federally-defined “chronic homelessness” is a phenomenon almost exclusively impacting single adults. Not coincidentally, this minority subset of the overall homeless population (read: substance abusing, mentally ill, and/or panhandling single homeless adults) are the same unfortunates the local tourist industry and other business concerns regularly scapegoat for lost revenue. The Mayor’s Office of Communications (another taxpayer-financed entity) crows loud and proud the successes of Newsom’s “Housing First” homelessness policy, but we have yet to see it extended to homeless families like Lashaun Harris’s.
Ironically, it would also seem the mayor’s Housing First policy, Project Homeless Connect program, and Homeless Outreach Team(s) haven’t managed to filter down to actual chronically homeless single adults like Johnell Kirk and Scott Kinney. Arguments can be made here that by simply housing either or both of these men, that tragedy could have also been averted. And now there’s a NATIONAL Project Homeless Connect slated to take place December 8th.
Madness: As Above, So Below
Then there’s the whole other issue of effective and accessible mental health treatment in San Francisco, a situation the Coalition has fought long and hard to improve. In June, 1999 we documented that about a third of homeless people seeking mental health treatment here never manage to get any, and that problem hasn’t improved substantially since. Instead, year after year we are forced to rally against proposed city budgets promising to further cut the inadequate remnants of whatever mental health services we have left.
San Francisco’s Community Behavioral Health Services seems incapable of locating a local contract agency to provide accountable mental health case management services, so that has now become the province of San Francisco’s Behavioral Health Court (BHC)—but only after an exponential cost overlay. This amounts to a public admission that the City is absolutely failing to provide effective, voluntary, community-based mental health services. So poor people with psychiatric diagnoses are permitted to decompensate to such extent that their disordered behavior finally runs afoul of law enforcement. Then a judge can prioritize mentally ill offenders’ placement above the throngs already waiting for treatment. And taxpayers pay premium prices for a basic service that is often too little, too late.
What’s worse is that Behavioral Health Court was flown in under the radar of San Francisco’s Mental Health Board—a state-mandated body charged with advising the City on mental health policies, initiatives, and programs. What’s key is the fact that the state mandates city-initiated policies and programs are submitted for the Mental Health Board’s comment and input before they’re enacted. But Judge Kahn of the BHC announced that it was in its inaugural session earlier in same day he appeared to make a presentation to San Francisco’s Mental Health Board, Janurary 8th, 2003, the first any of us on the Board had heard about it.
This prompted a couple of queries. Street Sheet asked if the court was employing any performance criteria and where could we get a copy, or even to outline the calendar under which they planned to evaluate the Behavioral Court. Judge Kahn actually stammered for a few minutes before admitting that no such performance criteria of evaluation schedules yet existed, but they planned to develop them because they planned to also seek private sector funding. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that’s a pretty cavalier attitude to be taking with the futures of disabled people.
Meanwhile, in 2001 the Coalition on Homelessness and the Mental Health Board initiated a process to develop a 24 hour, PRE-crisis mental health facility: Someplace to go before the voices or the fear or the sadness, or all three gang up to drive someone to another tragedy. Since 2002 the Coalition and the Mental Health Board have also been on record as unanimously recommending that the Mobile Crisis Treatment Team be expanded to 24 hours. (See It’s Time for 24 Hour Mental Health Drop-In Services)
Both of these projects enjoy wide support from local agencies and individuals, but the federal and state government’s long trend of defunding human and health services, while pumping more and more money into law enforcement, leaves our criminal justice system as the only publicly funded institution that’s never hurting for resources or capacity. So Sheriff Mike Hennesey’s jail becomes our largest local mental health provider, and SFPD becomes the default primary responder for people in psychiatric crisis. Seems like a heavy-handed and costly pound of cure for what a mere ounce of prevention might easily avert.
Prevention is universally regarded as both efficacious and cost-effective in any system of care or service, so it’s even more unfortunate that’s not what we read about in the newspaper. Instead, we see headlines about preventable, senseless tragedies presented within a total absence of context about where and how we as a city, state and nation—how we as a concerned community—have failed to prevent these awful consequences.
Questions? We’ve Got ‘Em
District Attorney Harris was recently quoted with regard to Johnell Kirk’s slaying, actually declaring “We’re not going to have a city where people can treat other humans as trash in the street.”
Indeed. Why then, madam District Attorney, does San Francisco resurrect laws from the 1850s like CPC 647(j) Illegal Lodging, and then prosecute homeless people for it in a town that doesn’t have enough housing OR shelter beds available for all its homeless residents (see San Francisco Shelter System’s Latest Crisis)?
As long as we’re asking, why do we even consider organizing a 35 member SFPD Operation Outreach team to manage homeless people, while domestic violence survivors are routinely told there aren’t enough manpower resources available to protect them from retaliations by their attackers?
Is it actually hurtful to SFPD members’ feelings that we criticize this kind of thinking, convinced that those 35 officers might be better assigned to addressing the alarming increase in murder rates and violence plaguing San Francisco’s communities of color in the Bayview and Western Addition?
COH has documented the particular brutality of one SFPD Operation Outreach officer, Sue Lavin (See Bad Cop-No Doughnut) Now we see her featured as some kind of hero in a KNTV Thanksgiving eve feel-good news feature about how she assisted homeless families in their housing search. Are we expected to believe this is some kind of coincidence?
Is locating housing for homeless families what we’re paying SFPD officers to do these days? Or is it facilitating those one-way bus tickets out of town for single homeless adults? Or is it arresting people who can’t access our local health and human service bureaucracies before madness or some other desperation lands them in Behavioral Health Court?
Isn’t their primary job to deter violent crime? Couldn’t officer Lavin become everybody’s hero if SFPD would only assign her to protecting domestic violence survivors or assisting violent crime investigations?
Why do we still permit the Mayor and the Department of Human Services to treat homeless families-homeless children for the love of all that’s good-with the same indifference and neglect that so characterized former Mayor Willie Brown’s whack-a-mole homelessness non-policy?
Is it any more humane and compassionate to allow homeless childrens’ futures to be threatened and thwarted by the sanctioned neglect of public institutions than by a parent’s mental illness?
Does a SFPD officer named Sue Lavin possess miracle case-management prowess to “cut through the red tape” (quote from the 11/24 KNTV news segment) preventing homeless families from accessing housing? Is SFPD emerging as the lead agency addressing the crisis of homeless families? If so, will Lt. Lazar or someone at the mayor’s office at least connect the dots for us and start referring some of the homeless families from COH’s Housing First for Families campaign who have been rallying over at City Hall to HER?
Are we supposed to believe that Project Homeless Connect or Care Not Cash, or the City’s Homeless Outreach team (HOT) SFPD Homeless Outreach Teams can provide the kind of timely intervention required to avert tragedies like the Harris and Kinney deaths?
And wouldn’t it be great if at least some of these questions were raised in news coverage of homeless issues, instead of this propaganda blitz of cheerleading pieces for the mayor and city departments punctuated by sensationalized accounts of homeless-on-homeless and/or homeless-on-housed mayhem?
Isn’t the point of all news media to serve the public’s interest? And if homeless and poor people aren’t part of the public, then what in the hell are we?
On the personal side:
SFPD Discovers Homeless Hate Crimes
Homeless people have yet to find protected class recognition under current hate crime legislation, but count on SFPD to be on the job regardless. They’re investigating a Halloween posting on Craigslist calling for like-minded people to assemble South of Market for mayhem: “Bring your bats, clubs, pipes, pitchforks and TORCHES!!! Halloween night we are going to wear masks and bash the homeless in SOMA!! Meet at 12th/Folsom at midnight for the first annual bashing event.”
When KTVU’s Kraig Debro requested a COH representative’s reaction for a live segment (at 5 am, for crying out loud), somehow all the many media trainings I’ve shown up for in my years at COH surfaced in my sleep-deprived consciousness. When asked if I thought the origin of the Craigslist post was a drunk or some kids thinking they were pulling a prank, my deadpan response went: “I don’t see this as significantly different from Bill O’Reilly’s recent call for Al Quaeda to bomb Coit Tower. It’s irresponsible hate-mongering masquerading as entertainment.” Unfortunately, no one I know watches the news at 5 am, so I just have to have a little faith that the comment got past KTVU’s censors.
But I was so personally inspired by SFPD’s inquiry that I attempted contacting the investigators to share information I’ve gathered on locals who have made it their mission to congest Craigslist and other internet message boards with homeless hate threads and postings since the beginning of the Care Not Cash campaign. My limited online research skills even netted identities of a couple of not-so-very-clever, copy-and-paste “community advocates” (one of them a former SF Republican Party Central Committee member), who augmented such online efforts by bombarding our office email accounts with multiple messages in the same narrow-minded and spiteful vein. I guess you could call it political viral marketing.
I like to regard myself as a community-minded citizen, so I left a voicemail outlining all this at SFPD’s Public Affairs desk (which is where I’m invariably directed whenever I call SFPD). Now it’s going on two weeks, and since no one has yet returned my call I’m forced to ponder whether this “investigation” was another aspect of SFPD’s positive public relations spin to better obscure their own ongoing antagonism toward homeless people.
That’s because the Coalition’s 18 years defending the civil and human rights of homeless people has demonstrated time and again, and everything we’ve discussed here further illustrates, that “treat[ing] other humans as trash in the street” is the mostly unspoken, yet central tenet of San Francisco’s homelessness policy.
On a much more positive note (no, really), this IS the holiday season—a time for family gatherings, making kids smile, spoiling your pets (See Giving Thought), spending way too much money, and all those seasonal expressions of charity and compassion. Personally, it’s a kind of seasonal ambiance that kindles my admittedly naïve and idealistic hopes we might treat each other in such a kind fashion the whole year ‘round. So before I’m completely written off as a cranky, crazy, old scold, please permit me to tell you all that I sincerely hope each and every one of you good souls out there has an absolutely splendid whatever-it-may-be-that-you-observe. Let’s all pray 2006 is marked by an abundance of peace and justice for all.
We also hope to see you all at the annual Homeless Deaths Memorial in Civic Center Plaza on the evening of December 21st. Be sure to dress warm, and bring a candle and a friend.
Chance
