City Hall Digest: Mass Arrests at Annual Skate Event and City Hall’s Response to Chronicle Investigation

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.

Police Priorities Questioned in Wake of Mass Arrests at Annual Skate Event

Recently, skaters descended on the cliff-like hill that borders Dolores Park for the annual Dolores Hill Bomb, and the event went south very quickly. This event has long been controversial—it’s seen by supporters as a definitively San Franciscan event and a source of pride for the skating community, and by detractors as counterculture mayhem that’s resulted in death and serious injury. 

Police in riot gear attempted to disperse the crowd and arrest unruly participants, but their presence agitated attendees, and the event descended into chaos. The purpose of the event, the dynamics of people-versus-police, and questions about police priorities all came into sharp relief after the San Francisco Police Department mounted a militarized response to an officer being injured while attempting to contain the crowd.

Ultimately, there were 32 arrests and 80 juveniles cited, along with $70,000 in property damage after participants vandalized several Muni train cars. Beyond the physical and fiscal tolls, there was a furious response from the public, including a protest in response to the police’s tactics and a rowdy Police Commission hearing where members of the public lambasted the police. Elected officials, for the most part, remained silent on the topic with the exception of Supervisors Rafael Mandelman, who expressed support for the response and Dean Preston, who opposed it. 

The man hours spent by police arresting a crowd that largely consisted of teengers presents a jarring contrast to their response to illegal behavior that occurs in public in San Francisco on a daily basis, like the open-air drug markets and fencing operations. If the police can muster this kind of response to shut down a collection of skateboarders, where is the commensurate response for the drug dealing that’s so prevalent in the Tenderloin or SoMa?

To be clear: we are not trying to minimize the behavior of Hill Bomb participants before the police’s aggressive response. And while we recognize that drug operations are more complicated than deploying a squad of officers in riot gear, SFPD’s aggressive response to the Dolores Hill Bomb raises questions about the city’s lack of urgency in responding to other public safety problems.

City Hall’s Telling Response to Chronicle Investigation on Fentanyl Dealing

Last week, the San Francisco Chronicle published a five-part series detailing the city’s drug trade, centered on the fact that many of the individuals dealing fentanyl and other drugs are Honduran nationals driven by desperation to escape cycles of violence and poverty in their own country. 

Because we rely on our elected officials to take action to solve the drug crisis, we looked to see what their public responses were to the series—only District Six Supervisor Matt Dorsey responded. We were hopeful that this impactful reporting could be used as a catalyst to publicly discuss actions being taken by other elected officials. 

Each article is filled with well-reported details. One in particular stood out: the Chronicle found that while some dealers struggle financially, others can make as much as $350,000 or more annually. This finding prompted Supervisor Dorsey to rhetorically ask, “shouldn’t ONLY indigent defendants deserve publicly funded counsel?”

Acting on this, Supervisor Dorsey requested that the Board of Supervisors’ independent financial analysts look at whether there are any policies in place to determine whether defendants accused of dealing drugs are actually eligible to receive free legal representation from the Public Defender’s office, as opposed to private counsel. The request also sought data on how much the Public Defender’s office has spent over the last four fiscal years defending drug dealers.

The series also focuses on the reality that many drug dealers in San Francisco are from Honduras, and the Chronicle received some blowback for highlighting this fact. To be clear, these Honduran migrants are not the source of San Francisco’s drug crisis. Rather, they’re simply the latest group to capitalize on the city’s decades of unsuccessful drug policy. San Francisco has never developed a comprehensive strategy to treat people with substance use disorder to reduce demand for illegal drugs. This allowed open-air markets to grow and spread throughout San Francisco, and allowed Honduran migrants to leverage these failures and corner the market.

We’re glad that the Chronicle has dedicated such an enormous amount of resources toward telling this story and investigating how the city’s drug markets function. In the future, we hope to see equal resources dedicated toward reporting how San Francisco let this crisis spiral to this point.

Portugal Questions Its Drug Policies Amidst Dwindling Resources

Recently, The Washington Post reported that Portugal was having “second thoughts” on its landmark drug decriminalization policy due to increasing unrest from citizens who were tired of seeing public drug usage, an ineffective law enforcement response, and a broken intake system that now has users waiting around a year to enter treatment. 

In 2001, Portugal bucked worldwide trends and decriminalized consumption of all drugs for personal use, opting for harm reduction and treatment instead of incarceration for users. By some metrics, the country succeeded for years with the new policy—HIV transmissions plummeted, and because people were no longer sent to prison for using drugs, jail populations fell 16.5 percent. 

But the Post found that the decriminalization path hasn’t been a cure-all—overdose rates countrywide recently hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon between 2019 and 2023. Crime increased sharply from 2021 to 2022, which the police partly blame on increased drug use. 

Portugal is struggling to utilize law enforcement effectively. Officers cannot make arrests for using drugs—they only have the power to issue citations for users to appear at local commissions for drug dissuasion, where users are usually referred to treatment. However, funding for treatment beds has withered over the last few years from $76 million to about $16 million—causing a wait times to enter treatment to soar to over a year. This compounding problem essentially renders law enforcement toothless, and open drug use has become more notable. 

Additionally, Portugal’s harm reduction ideology is beginning to sound a lot like San Francisco’s all-or-nothing tone—that a hands-off approach with clean supplies and optional treatment is the only way to go and anything else is authoritarian and dystopian. 

Finally, the Post found that many people with substance use disorder in cities like Porto and Lisbon are not seeking treatment. Drug users are offered all the clean using supplies possible, but treatment is always spoken of as an option, and the Post reporters paint a picture that looks familiar to the average San Franciscan—drug users are simply not accepting treatment when offered. 

We’ve heavily referenced the success of Portugal as a model, and have certainly not been the first ones to call attention to Portugal as a beacon of positive drug policy—and we still believe SF can learn a tremendous amount from their model. However, Portugal’s recent issues call attention to the fact that drug addiction, as a societal problem, can only be tamped down and never eradicated—regardless of the ideology of the policies used to address it. 

Sustained funding for public health initiatives is as critical as the initial push towards change. When this funding deteriorates, so does the situation on the street, and public tolerance frays. This is why San Francisco must continue to make investments in treatment beds, intake capabilities, and post-treatment care. Furthermore, these public health programs only work when the people who need help are willing to accept it. We need to consider what happens when someone refuses treatment, as is often the case with the most visible, and vulnerable, people living on the streets.