City Hall Digest: Supes Push Confusing Messaging on SFPD and Nurses are Forced to Return Drugs to Patients Post-Treatment

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

Supervisors Criticize Police Performance, But Want More Officers In Their Districts

Last week, the budget committee of the Board of Supervisors (which includes Supervisors Connie Chan as Chair, Rafael Mandelman, Ahsha Safaí, Shamann Walton, and Hillary Ronen) voted unanimously to send a $27.6 million supplemental for the police to the full board for a vote, in a tense and hours-long meeting. The supplemental will help cover the enormous spending by the San Francisco Police Department on overtime, which is a direct result of their immense staffing shortfall. 

We’ve been advocating for this supplemental and are supportive of the committee passing it to the full Board of Supervisors. This supplemental, though, is just one piece of a larger puzzle to fix our police department’s performance citywide.

While the budget committee’s vote was in unanimous agreement to send the supplemental onward, some supervisors harshly criticized the department for lack of officer coverage in their districts—even though they are all aware that the department is severely understaffed in all stations but one. Supervisors Ronen, Walton, and Safaí all lamented the department’s lack of presence in their own districts while vociferously criticizing the department for how they used their overtime. 

For example, Supervisor Ronen, moved to tears at one point, highlighted the fact that SFPD has spent roughly double the amount of overtime on providing retail store security than on extending shifts for dealing with arrests. Ronen also criticized Assistant Chief David Lazar for not sending more officers to BART stations at 16th and 24th streets despite “months” of her “begging” for them. Commentators were quick to point out on social media that Ronen has been one of the most vocal anti-police supervisors and has explicitly called for the department to be reduced in size in her tweets and in City Hall.

This type of hypocrisy is as transparent to the SFPD as it is to observers of this committee meeting. On top of budget shortfalls and staffing shortages, the SFPD is receiving conflicting messages: you’re doing a terrible job, but we need you. You’re doing too much of this and we want more of that. Supervisor Ronen is demanding officers in the Mission, Supervisor Walton is demanding more officers in the Bayview, and the Mayor is demanding officers downtown. 

This lack of clear direction coupled with understaffing is causing morale issues, which in turn may be aggravating existing cultural issues. For example, according to Mission Local, younger officers say being surrounded by veteran officers who are jaded and mentally checked out sets a bad example for them. There’s also internal concerns that younger officers are “accustomed to doing as little as possible”—an obvious concern for the public. 

All of this may explain the inconsistent clearance rates (the rate at which SFPD solves crime) over the last 10 years. 

Getting better results from our police department is going to first take support from our elected officials, and then a multi-year recruiting effort by the SFPD to ensure that this sort of budget supplemental doesn’t have to happen again.

Nurses Face Impossible Decisions When it Comes to Treating Patients with Substance Use Disorder

The failure of our city’s elected leadership to act meaningfully on the fentanyl crisis is having ripple effects—particularly in hospitals like Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where nurses dealing with patients who use drugs are increasingly faced with ethical dilemmas over drugs they find in patients’ belongings.

Hospital policy prevents nurses from confiscating users’ personal belongings—even if those belongings include hard drugs like fentanyl. This has become a cause of cognitive dissonance for nurses, as the hospital has a zero-tolerance policy for something as mundane as smoking on campus. But fentanyl— the most potent street drug to date that kills two San Franciscans per day—must be returned to patients. Nurses are left wondering whether their returning drugs to users will result in their deaths, and also feel as if they can’t do otherwise because of the lack of procedures to deal with drugs. 

Heather Bollinger, a nurse at Zuckerberg, said of the situation: “We have these crazy lines in the sand. You're not allowed to smoke a cigarette anywhere on our campus, but I can't take away your fentanyl?”

Both hospital leadership and city leadership are failing our frontline workers in a big way. Workers who already sacrifice so much to heal our city should not be faced with this dilemma at all.

The Board of Education Made a Lofty Promise—Have They Lived Up to It?

Late last year, the Board of Education promised to spend half of their meeting time discussing or otherwise taking action to improve student outcomes. 
Our latest blog post, done in partnership with the parents at Families for San Francisco, analyzes how the board has been spending their time and whether this promise has been met.

TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?