Community Justice Center
New Expenditure
Imagine a place where you can go and be provided with connections to job opportunities, mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and social services of various types. Public Defender Jeff Adachi says of the proposed Community Justice Center, “If you have something of quality to offer, people will come.” Only two tiny catches sit within this mirage: in order to “come” you must get arrested, and the services you have “come” to receive have all been cut in Mayor Gavin Newsom’s ruthless budget.
Conveniently targeting the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods, the next areas of San Francisco under fire for massive gentrification, the Community Justice Center would have a court right on hand so that defendants who commit crimes such as drug dealing, petty theft, prostitution, or other non-violent offenses or felonies would have no waiting period between when the crime is allegedly committed and their scheduled appearance in court.
In an article entitled “Courting the Community” published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsom described the Community Justice Center: “The center will provide accountability for lower-level criminal behavior, and at the same time address the root issues associated with this behavior, such as substance abuse, mental illness or lack of shelter. The center is based on the principle of immediacy—immediacy of consequences and immediacy of service. The key is to have everything under one roof: criminal justice agencies, service providers and members of the bench… the center promises to give relief to the neighborhoods most affected by quality of life crimes.”
The idea is that the City avoids the risk of losing the defendants during the wait time between the receipt of the ticket and the scheduled appearance in court. In Newsom’s vision, instead, an arrest lands you on the “Go Directly to Jail” spot, which ironically just might be one of the last places someone experiencing homelessness can go for a free bed here in San Francisco now that shelters and clinics are being closed down faster than one can spit out the words “Community Justice Center.”
The Mayor’s pet project will potentially cost $500,000 for the space, and then up to $3 million annually to operate. His priorities of law enforcement and urban renewal glare in flashing red lights during a year when he has cut public health services by 22%.
Of course, not all advocates for the CJC are so Machiavellian: Superior Court Judges Howard Kahn and David Ballati, and Commissioner Ron Albers were among the legitimately concerned members of the judiciary who worked on the proposal. At the June 10 Board of Supervisors meeting, Judge Kahn addressed the genesis of the proposal:
“The Mayor put this on the table: He wanted to come up with an infractions court—That was what was presented to the judges by the Mayor and District Attorney Kamala Harris in a meeting I attended in February of 2007”—a plan that Mayor Newsom claimed would be the “next step” in solving homelessness. But the judges were unable to endorse the idea, and were emphatic that the court would not be a “homeless” court, despite Mayoral claims to the contrary: “We were polite: We said it wasn’t going to work. We listened for a little while longer as the Mayor’s Office tried to tinker with that idea. We were polite: We said it wasn’t going to work, and we said if the idea is to improve public safety and improve people’s lives, let us take over… I cannot help it if the Mayor or anybody else exercises their free speech rights to publicize things that are… inaccurate. But this is the courts’ program. The only person who will be sitting on the bench is a judicial officer.”
Unfortunately, it must be remembered that if the Community Justice Center is viewed as a service system, then the front end of that system is trained in the lethal use of firearms: not in social services. Moreover, the force is indirectly under the command of a Mayor who has made homelessness one of the focuses of his campaigns, and who has been known to call police captains to demand the harassment of legal panhandlers. While the judges may not wish for their planned court to be used as a homeless court, it is designed such that a focused police force could use it primarily for camping and panhandling cases, effectively undermining the judges’ plans.
But a more immediate concern faces those who might be affected by the court: While Supervisor Bevan Dufty, a proponent of the Community Justice Center, touted it as an opportunity to “provide meaningful tools that will change people’s lives,” and Mayor Newsom described the CJC as a place that “could save lives,” the rest of the Board and many activists argued back: What about the tools already proven to work that are already changing lives? What about Ella Hill Hutch and Buster’s Place? What about the tools provided by Conard House to people with mental illnesses, who will now have to rely on the emergency room to fulfill their needs, which will not cease alongside the cuts? Indeed, the needs of the most marginalized population of the city will not go away simply because the services do.
At the meeting, Supervisor Tom Ammiano commented on the proposal to implement the Community Justice Center while simultaneously slicing funding to public services when he said, “There are so many things on the chopping block that this seems out of whack.”
So, after hours of public comment, the Board voted 7-3 to send the Community Justice Center back to the Budget Committee. And yet, the Community Justice Center will not go to the same crematorium where many of our most important programs and services currently await their fate.
On June 17, the City held the state-mandated Beilenson Hearings occurred, which require that the Mayor and Board hold a hearing when indigent mental health services are in peril. Coincidentally, 5 p.m. of the same day also marked the deadline for when the Mayor or four Supervisors could place ordinances on the November ballot.
Using his power unilaterally, the Mayor placed the Community Justice Center on the ballot, leaving it for the voters to decide its fate in November.
In an attempt to combat the devastating cuts to services that benefit low-income people, Supervisors Tom Ammiano, Ross Mirkarimi, Aaron Peskin, and Chris Daly proposed the “Treatment on Demand Act” ordinance, which would require the City to provide an adequate number of residential and substance abuse treatment slots. If the Treatment on Demand Act were to pass in conjunction with the Community Justice Center ordinance, the former ordinance could potentially guarantee that those defendants sent to the new facility would actually receive some of the services the Mayor gives the illusion the new center will offer. The Community Justice Center legislation, on the other hand, provides no funding for treatment.
The Community Justice Center would guarantee that at least some services would be available to those “lucky” enough to be arrested, the question remains as to why services need to be inextricably bound to the justice system. Do we want to be the type of city that boasts of services you can receive upon arrest, or would we rather be proactive in offering services to people in order to prevent them from landing in jail? This is a decision the people of San Francisco will be making this coming November.
In handing over the fate of his dream facility to the voters, Newsom makes the assumption that we will buy into his myth that the Community Justice Center will offer something other than a faster ticket to jail, and a cost of $3 million annually, which could be used to maintain services that have already proven to be effective. As citizens, we must continue to combat the notion that any “justice” lies in the Community Justice Center, while continuing to demand the return of the truly just services that currently sit on the chopping block.
MeganMercurio