While San Francisco, along with the rest of the country, continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, the city has also been dealing with an epidemic: the rampant increase in drug overdoses.
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San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a state of emergency in the Tenderloin on Friday, which will allow city officials to bypass the bureaucracy and expedite the process of increasing social services to help mitigate overdoses.
KCBS Radio's Kathy Novak attended a press conference at city hall Friday to understand how the state of emergency will address the overwhelming amount of drug abuse in the Tenderloin, and to speak with city officials who have been championing this declaration during the pandemic.
"Mayor Breed had a community meeting with people who live in the Tenderloin and heard firsthand from people who have kids, and they said they have to walk into oncoming traffic to avoid people lying unconscious in the street with needles in their arm," Novak told KCBS Radio's "Bay Current" on Monday. "She is striking a balance, and there are people who feel unsafe, and as mayor, she has a responsibility to them."
Novak noted that Breed's announcement to ensure more police infrastructure comes as a surprise because of Breed’s prior promise to decrease police funding in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
"We had a national reckoning with police in the Black Lives Matter movement. There were commitments made for redirecting funding from the police," Novak added. "But her response was that it's not okay for people to not feel safe in their neighborhood."
District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney, one of the proponents of the state of emergency and a supporter of Breed’s proposed safe drug consumption site, told KCBS Radio that while he believes increased policing is not the answer to the drug epidemic, he admits that San Francisco needs to be aggressive when handling overdoses.
"This epidemic is tragically more deadly than COVID," Haney said after the press conference Friday. "But I don't believe in incarcerating people who are addicted to drugs. I don’t think we should be locking people up because they are addicted, and there are many other tools we can use to get people to help. Police should not be leading the response."
The state of emergency allows San Francisco to ensure that emergency programs are implemented quickly and can waive rules regarding zoning codes. The declaration of emergency must be ratified by the Board of Supervisors within the next seven days and can exist no longer than three months.
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