Congratulations to homeless people in Fresno for their recent court victory. See more here (28 kb PDF).

On Wednesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee voted 3-2 to deny $500,000 funding to Mayor Newsom’s Community Justice Center.

While many San Franciscans have been led to believe that the Center would deal with problematic misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, such as drug-dealing charges, the Mayor’s Office has repeatedly touted the Center as a piece of a solution to homelessness, focusing on “quality of life” citations, which, in San Francisco’s law books, include various kinds of sleeping in public, asking for alms twice, and jaywalking. At the same time that the City was asked to devote $500,000 now to an untested and almost undefined project that will cost millions each year to run, the Mayor is proposing cuts to the municipal budget which will eliminate some of the very service to which the Community Justice Center was intended to send citees.

While the ideal of using treatment instead of punishment in cases where treatment is wanted and useful is right on, this has to be applied intelligently (and without a published plan, with constant City bureaucrat confusion between “treatment” and “services,” with the bizarre idea that all panhandlers need some kind of treatment other than an income, we’ve got no reason to believe that it will be), and it cannot come at the cost of decreased services overall or decreased accessibility to services for those who seek them out without the stick of the criminal justice system. Any such plan needs to come with a clear plan, and with funding for the treatment it will mandate.

Carolyn Tyler covers the story for ABC here.

The SF Print Collective and the Coalition on Homelessness invite you to join us for a mural celebration to raise awareness about justice for homeless people.

Saturday, May 10, 2008, 12-4 p.m.

Clarion Alley, San Francisco (between 17^th and 18^th Streets and Mission and Valencia)

Poster and T-shirt printing

Food and music

For more information, call 510‧332‧7839.

On March 20, I was visiting homeless friends at their camp on publicly-owned land along the west edge of southbound I-280, near 20th St. with my dog, Kilo. It was a warm sunny day and I fell asleep. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep. I awoke when I heard someone shout, “Get your dog! Get your dog!” I jumped up and ran out to the path to see my dog Kilo blocking the path from two California Highway Patrol officers.

One officer had a Taser out and pointed at Kilo, the second officer had his pistol out and pointed at Kilo, who was about 15 to 20 feet in front of the two officers.

“Please don’t shoot: My dog won’t bite.” I begged the officers three different times. Both officers became louder and more aggressive as they yelled at me: “Get your fucking dog or I’ll shoot it!”

Both officers took at least two steps towards Kilo, while I tried to get to Kilo. With courage in his heart, Kilo stood his ground.

This seemed to make the officers angry and the officer to my right yelled at me. “I said to get your fucking dog!” and he pointed his pistol at me. When Kilo saw the officer pointing his gun at me, he started to advance towards the officer with the gun. At that point both officers fired simultaneously. The Taser malfunctioned or something, because the darts never reached Kilo. The officer who had drawn his hand gun fired once, just as I was reaching for Kilo. I felt the blast on the back of my hands, I was so close. The bullet hit Kilo behind his head. Horrified, I saw my little buddy Kilo first sit, and then fall dead.

After they shot Kilo, they shouted at me, “Get on the ground,” which I did so they wouldn’t shoot me. They arrested me for suspicion of trespassing (on publicly owned land), handcuffed me, stuffed me into the back of their squad car, and hauled me off to the CHP station on 8^th Street. Animal Control came for Kilo’s body.

They cut a lock and chain on 20^th St. gate to gain entry to the area. They never announced their presence. They never asked any questions. They snuck up on the area Kilo and I were in—for what purpose, I don’t know. At the time of the shooting, there happened to be several other people at some other nearby camps, but none of them were confronted by officers. They came, shot Kilo, arrested me and left. That was it. As far as I know, they haven’t been back since.

What was so desperately urgent on that roadside that they couldn’t step back, use a radio, and wait for an Animal Control officer? If they feared for their safety, then why did they keep stepping toward him, escalating instead of de-escalating the situation? Why did they have to shoot my little buddy Kilo?

In an outlandish and brazenly dishonest article by Chuck Nevius, columnist for the SF Chronicle, the Coalition on Homelessness citation defense program was blamed for the overdose of James Hill, a man who passed away recently in the San Francisco Library’s Main Branch.

Nevius claims that if he had been convicted of open container, he would have been given treatment. In fact, there is no treatment attached to traffic court, nor any treatment being offered by the District Attorney. The most the District Attorney has provided is a list of services that includes phone numbers for all kinds of social services including treatment programs that are full, with waiting lists of over 500 people.

This is the latest in a long line of lies printed in Nevius’ column.

For example, on March 2, 2008, Nevius argued that panhandling is out of control because the Coalition on Homelessness defends panhandlers in court. Once again, before he ran the article, we informed him that we had only defended a handful of panhandlers (less than 2% of the number he suggests) over the year before he printed it. Not because we wouldn’t, but because that is how many show up at our office for defense. Others were misdemeanors and did not go to traffic court. He ran the misinformation anyway.

San Franciscans are deeply concerned with human dignity. The lack of safe and affordable housing will not be solved by making people without homes into criminals and falsely and recklessly blaming advocates for situations far beyond their realm of work.

Assistant District Attorney Paul Henderson is trying to lower the burden of proof necessary to convict people of “quality of life” infractions such as panhandling, sleeping in doorways, or drinking in public.

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In an outlandish and brazenly dishonest article by Chuck Nevius, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Coalition on Homelessness citation defense program is blamed for the overdose of James Hill, a man who passed away recently in the San Francisco Library’s Main Branch.

Nevius claims that if Mr. Hill had been convicted of possession of an open container, he would have been given treatment. In fact, there is no treatment attached to traffic court, nor any treatment being offered by the District Attorney. The most the District Attorney has provided is a list of services that includes phone numbers for treatment programs that are full, with waiting lists.

This is the latest in a long line of lies printed in Nevius’s column.

On October 11, 2007, Nevius ran a story stating that a study Gary Blasi of UCLA found that criminalizing homeless people decreased homelessness, when in fact the study found the exact opposite. Before press time, Nevius was informed of what the study really said, but he ignored that information and lied anyway. Then, on March 2, 2008, Nevius argued that panhandling was out of control because the Coalition on Homelessness defended panhandlers in court. Once again, before he ran the article, we informed him that we had only defended a handful of panhandlers (less than 2% of the number he suggests) over the course of the year. He ran the story with his false claim, anyway.

The Coalition is all of us. We need to hold this newspaper accountable.

Please write a letter to the editor with the following points:

• San Franciscans are deeply concerned with human dignity. The lack of safe and affordable housing will not be solved by making people without homes into criminals.
• Contrary to the article by Chuck Nevius, treatment was never offered through the court system to Mr. Hill. There is a severe lack of substance abuse treatment in San Francisco. There are hundreds waiting for treatment every day. The City is proposing cutting that treatment and community based mental health treatment again this year by 15%.
• It is irresponsible for a major daily paper to continue printing outlandish lies about poor people and the organizations and volunteers who defend their rights.
• Due process is a basic civil right in the United States that the Chronicle is challenging.
• If no lawyer had ever stepped forward to represent James Hill, he would be just as dead today, from just as fatal an overdose, following an endless cycle of jail, release, re-offense, and no treatment, because there were no realistic treatment options that James Hill could turn to. Lawyers are not resisting or interfering with access to treatment.
• San Francisco does not provide enough resources for homeless people—in particular, there is a lack of clean, safe, permanent housing. The roots of this problem lie in the abandonment by the Federal government of low-cost housing a little over two decades ago—a reduction of housing stock that has never been restored.

  Please send letter to the editor of Chronicle at letters@sfchronicle.com and CC it to 1) COH director Jennifer Friedenbach, 2) Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein and 3) Deputy Managing Editor Steve Proctor.

  We want to have a cadre of agency and individual statements in response to the Nevius attacks on homeless people.

  Please Act Now!

It all happened so fast that I couldn’t really react. I didn’t move an inch. I was spread-eagle on my bed and looking down the barrel of a gun—12 guns, actually. I was in a situation where I was so shocked that my mind was frozen. I felt shock waves after that for a long time. In some ways I still do. If another police officer came up to me, I’d let them know that I see them as someone who violates human rights and breaks the law, not someone who supports them.

In October of 2005, 12 armed San Francisco police officers broke through the door of my small SRO (single-room occupancy) apartment and held me at gunpoint on my own bed. In this so-called “mistaken identity,” the police could “mistake” my six-foot three-inch slender frame for that of a stout man just clearing five and a half feet. They could find my trimmed goatee a mirror image of a bushy grey beard. They could see my long, black trench coat as a short, brown sports coat.

On Sunday, January 27, San Francisco Police killed 55-year-old Leonard Michael Cole for panhandling. The San Francisco Chronicle reports, “…the death of the panhandler was as predictable as the sunrise.”

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One day after the created a story in Golden Gate Park, pulling up stock photos of needles and unabashedly blaming youth and poor people for what is essentially a park maintenance issue, the Mayor ordered the displacement of campers in Golden Gate Park at 4:00 a.m. each morning. Many folks were cited, and in fact camping and sleeping citations given to houseless folks across the city has tripled since the summer. Many were arrested on warrants. An effort to ensure youth in the Haight had access to showers failed in the context of intense hatred magnified by our largest local daily paper. The Mayor also introduced legislation to expand the definition of camping and the hours during which sleeping would be illegal. These dual efforts continue today: Both the sweeps and the hatred spewing from the same columnist who “discovered” people were living in the Park.

Of course, this was not the first such effort ordered by a big-city mayor. It wasn’t even the first this year in San Francisco. (more…)

“We should just gas all of the poor people sleeping in the parks!” The words slashed through the Board of Supervisors’ hearing and through the thick and stuffy rhetoric of politicians and advocates alike.

“Well, at least we’re being honest now,” I thought.

On July 31, Mayor Gavin Newsom introduced changes to the park codes, 3.12 and 3.13 specifically, that would change the definition of camping and outlaw sleeping in the park for an additional four hours. Right now, sleeping is not allowed in the park from 10 p.m.—6 a.m. Newsom’s amendment expands the no-sleeping hours from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.

It’s no secret that San Francisco is one of the most expensive places to live here in Amerikkka. It’s even less of a secret that it’s illegal to be poor here.

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