Like the rubber stamp recently discovered by Liana Wilcox, producer of the San Francisco Public Press’ podcast “Civic,” when she was helping her mother clear a storage area.

“I was with my mom going through some of her keepsakes and found a stamp that read ‘Lesbian Money.’ My mom told me that she found it in our old church’s basement,” Wilcox said, adding that she feared the rubber stamp had a sinister connotation.

“I immediately thought it was some sort of exclusionary practice, but that didn’t feel right considering the church we went to, the First Congregational Church of San Francisco, called themselves ‘open and affirming,’” she said.

Wilcox mentioned the stamp during one of our staff meetings, and I said “Oh, no that was a way we tried to raise awareness about the LGBT community back in the old days.” 

As a young gay activist and budding journalist in Salt Lake City in the early 1980s, I vaguely remembered stamps like that one. I reached out to a dear friend to see if she remembered lesbian money. 

Becky Moss is a longtime LGBTQ+ community organizer in Salt Lake City. She and I co-hosted the radio show “Concerning Gays and Lesbians” in Utah in the early ’80s. Moss said activists around the U.S. were stamping bills to show the financial power and size of the greater queer community back in the late 1970s. 

“Separatist lesbian communes would stamp all of their bills before coming into town for supplies,” she said. “But I remember it being more widespread than that, it was really a nationwide thing.” 

A number of sources trace the first “Gay$$” and “Lesbian Money” stamps — sometimes marked with a pink triangle — as having originated in San Francisco in the mid 1970s. The pink triangle was used by the Nazis in Germany to identify gay men in concentration camps and was co-opted as the symbol of the early gay movement before the rainbow flag mostly supplanted it. 

Wherever the money stamping started, by 1986 it had drawn the ire of the Reagan Administration. The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois issued a cease-and-desist order to lesbian and gay bar owners in Chicago who were stamping all the bills coming through their businesses to the tune of $5 million a year. Government officials said the campaign violated federal law against defacing currency. But the legal action foundered at least in part because it was nearly impossible to determine who was responsible — anyone could stamp bills, anywhere. The Treasury Department also determined that most of the bills were still “fit for circulation.”  

Money stamping campaigns grew quickly to the point that finding some kind of queer stamp on currency was fairly common in the 1980s. It made an impact in an era when LGBTQ+ representation in film, television and the press were rare. 

Campaign Against Discrimination

Money stamping campaigns were also used to counter discrimination against people with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s. One campaign out of Utah unfolded when Moss visited a restaurant in a suburb of Salt Lake City in the late 1980s. 

“My sister, who had AIDS, and I were at a restaurant in Bountiful, Utah,” she said. “After the meal, the staff threw our plates in the garbage.”

The Salt Lake City branch of ACT-UP, the AIDS activist organization, decided to use an “AIDS Money” stamp to fight such blatant discrimination against those perceived to be infected with HIV.

“They all went to the restaurant and bought things like pie or french fries and then paid for them with the stamped money,” Moss said. “The activists made the point that the owner would now have to throw away all the plates used to serve them or stop the practice.” 

“AIDS Money” stamps remained part of the nationwide effort to raise awareness through the 1980s and ’90s. 

Becky’s sister Peggy Moss Tingey died of complications from AIDS in March 1995, just nine months after her young son Chase died from the virus. Both passed away just before the HIV protease drug cocktail was starting to become available. 

Other Stamping Activism

Recent money stamping campaigns included “I grew hemp” stamps, promoting marijuana legalization, placed on $1 bills near George Washington’s portrait. The idea was taken up by groups advocating for the Second Amendment — “gun owners money” — and even campaign finance reform, with the Ben and Jerry’s Foundation organizing “stamp money out of politics” stamps in 2012.

A campaign in 2016 used large stamps to place Harriet Tubman’s face over the $20 bill portrait of Andrew Jackson, after the Trump Administration overruled the Treasury Department’s plan to replace Jackson with Tubman by 2020.

While the LGBTQ+ movement used stamping to great effect, it was by no means the first to spread the word by customizing currency.

Before World War I, British suffragettes stamped pennies with the words, “Votes for Women.” Only a handful of the coins still exist. But just as the U.S. Treasury Department declined to withdraw bills with “Lesbian Money,” the British banking system declined to take the low-value marked pennies out of circulation.  

Without suffragettes breaking the first chain of patriarchal thinking by winning the right to vote, there would have been no LGBTQ+ rights movement. Discrimination against women — sexism — is the basis of hatred of different sexual orientations and gender identities.

Both the British women who had to strike each penny 13 times — engraving their words letter by letter — and those who inked rubber stamps over and over again used their spending power to wear down conspiracies of silence, one tiny message at a time.

The post Reporter’s Notebook: The Rebellious Legacy of ‘Lesbian Money’ appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

It has been seven months since Maya Laing and her brother Sebastian, who were 15 and 11 at the time, were violently taken from their grandmother’s Santa Cruz home by court order.

Judge Rebecca Connelly, who oversaw their custody case, rejected the siblings’ claims that their mother abused them, and last October she ordered them into reunification training to repair their fractured relationship with their mother.

A friend of Maya’s recorded and posted to social media a video of the siblings resisting while transport agents from Assisted Intervention physically overpowered them in October. That was the last time Maya and Sebastian’s father, his family and the children’s friends had any knowledge of their condition — until now.

On May 29, the siblings posted a series of videos to social media announcing that they had “escaped” their mother’s custody and describing what they endured during their transport and their four-day reunification training.

They said they were taken to an Airbnb where their mother awaited them along with reunification trainers Regina Marshall and Lynn Steinberg. They said they were placed in a room where doorknobs had been removed and where a mattress was pushed against the doorway to keep the door shut. They were guarded by the same transport agents who had overpowered them in Santa Cruz. At one point, the siblings said, one of the agents slept in a bed next to the one they shared. When they were caught exchanging whispered words of comfort, they were banned from speaking to each other.

They said that Steinberg told them that she would “break” them.

“They called us liars and psychopath,” Maya said in one video.

“They, like, threatened to send us to a camp, like a wilderness camp, where if we wouldn’t comply, we wouldn’t be given food or blankets,” Sebastian said.

In response to a written request for comment, Maya wrote that she and her brother viewed their transporters as “kidnappers that we were forced to placate.”

Maya also refuted an allegation by Steinberg that her father was involved in gathering the crowd that arrived to witness their removal from their grandmother’s home. “Our dad in no way orchestrated our protest to being taken. We did what was the only reasonable response to three aggressive strangers, backed up by police officers, coming after us and trying to drag us into a strange car in the middle of the night.”

Maya and Sebastian’s mother, Jessica Laing, responded to a request for comment by emailing a link to a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children webpage featuring two missing child posters of Maya and Sebastian.

Steinberg and Assisted Intervention did not respond to a recent request for comment for this article. In response to a request sent in January, Assisted Intervention sent a brief email stating, “Circumstances like this one are complex.”  

In the meantime, local supporters who spoke out at public events and on social media in reaction to Maya and Sebastian’s removal have gained ground. One month after Maya and Sebastian were taken, Santa Cruz lawmakers held a press conference outside their grandmother’s home to announce local legislation that would ban transport agents from getting physical with children. And as Viji Sundaram recently reported for the Public Press, Senate Bill 331, also called Piqui’s Law: Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence, was unanimously endorsed by California’s Senate Judiciary Committee last month. If the bill is approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the governor, it would establish judicial reporting requirements on reunification training and on expert testimony in child custody proceedings.

Several states are considering similar bills to comply with a provision in the federal Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022. The act promises states up to $25 million in grants if their reforms comply with national requirements.

If you or anyone you know is suffering from domestic abuse, help is available. The National Domestic Violence Hotline provides confidential assistance to anyone affected by domestic violence through a live chat and a free 24-hour hotline at 800-799-7233. The California Partnership to End Domestic Violence offers an online tool for finding local organizations and community resources by region.

The post Children Violently Removed by Court Order Resurface and Report Traumatic Experience appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

After 2½ years of meetings, community discussions, historical deep dives and policy generation, a panel tasked with proposing how San Francisco might atone for decades of discrimination against Black residents is ready to ask the city to step up and support equity rhetoric with action.

San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee is aiming to submit its final recommendations to the city on June 30, according to Brittni Chicuata, director of economic rights at the city’s Human Rights Commission. In the meantime, the city’s annual budget process is in full swing, which may affect funding and the timeline for whatever reparations policies the board decides to pursue.

The recommendations are nonbinding, meaning the Board of Supervisors may choose to support any number of the policies, or none at all. It can also amend them.

“Where the rubber hits the road is what that Board of Supervisors does,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP branch and health subcommittee lead for the reparations committee. “The ball is in their court.”

The recommendations, released only in draft form, number more than 100 and tackle disparities in educational achievement for Black students, differences in the median life expectancy for Black San Franciscans and the overrepresentation of Black people experiencing homelessness and incarceration.

In a March meeting, supervisors voiced support for reparations, unanimously voting to accept the draft in a nonbinding resolution. Of the proposed policies, some could be enacted quickly, while others would require more time. In some cases, advocacy at the state and federal level is required.

Breed must propose a city budget in June. Tinisch Hollins, vice chair of the reparations committee, said the group has been discussing how to secure funding in this year’s budget.

“We’ve been actively having conversations as a committee, looking at the recommendations that are what’s been called low-hanging fruit, that the city could potentially move forward on in this budget cycle,” Hollins said in an April interview. She noted that the majority of city departments have equity plans that could offer starting points for improving accountability and addressing the needs of Black residents.

“Since you have an equity plan, you can then reallocate or reconfigure your budget so that this becomes a priority for what you need to do,” she said.

An Office of Reparations

After its plan is submitted, the committee — which is authorized to operate until January 2024 — will continue meeting to discuss how the city can follow through on reparations.

Some community leaders are eager to ensure this work continues. Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill and Visitacion Valley, introduced legislation in March requesting $50 million to establish an Office of Reparations that would help implement policies and find people eligible for programs.

Walton is trying to get the proposal on the agenda at the board’s Budget and Appropriations Committee, which is the first step before a budget request would go to the full board for a vote.

“If we get the supplemental heard and passed, obviously that will go into this budget cycle,” he said. “And then my hope is, of course, to be able to extend and get resources into the next budget.”

However, Breed indicated in late April that she had “no plans at this time” to back the proposal.

In response to recent questions about the mayor’s thoughts on the reparations plan broadly and how implementation of any policies would work without an Office of Reparations, her office wrote in an email: “The policies presented in the plan will be considered once they are final.” Instead of commenting on policy proposals, the email pointed to other programs that address racial inequity, such as the Dream Keeper Initiative and guaranteed income programs. The Dream Keeper Initiative provides down payment loans for first-time Black home buyers. The reparations plan suggests turning these loans into grants for those who qualify, among other housing-specific policy changes.

Walton is still trying to gain support from Breed and Board of Supervisors colleagues. If he fails to win over the mayor, he will need a veto-proof majority of eight supervisors on his side.

Breed’s lack of support for the office was disappointing to at least one committee member the day after it was announced.

“I haven’t talked to any other committee members, but I imagine they’re all discouraged right now,” said James Lance Taylor, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, who also sits on the reparations committee.

However, in the April interview, Hollins expressed what she called a “cautious optimism” that reparations work would move forward.

“If we do our work at helping to identify what’s immediate need, what the opportunity is, and then we collaborate with both the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors, we’ll be able to start moving things downstream, even before we have an Office of Reparations, or whatever entity is going to be in place,” she said.

‘The Second Oldest Idea in Black Politics’

The committee’s draft plan spurred a wave of headlines across the country when it was made public. A proposal to give each eligible African American in the city a one-time payment of $5 million led to criticisms regarding cost, especially as the city faces a $780 million budget deficit in the next two years.

Support for reparations is skewed heavily by race. A 2021 Pew Research Center study shows that 77% of Black Americans support reparations, compared with 18% of whites.

Much like the California State Reparations Task Force, which recently voted to approve policy proposals for the state Legislature’s consideration, the San Francisco committee is running into the question: Why are reparations being considered in a state where slavery was never legal?

For his part, Taylor said the concept of reparations “is the second oldest idea in Black politics, the first one being abolition.”

Hollins said California shared responsibility with the rest of the country for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that compelled people in free states to capture those who had fled and send them back to enslavement out of state. California also at various times banned Black people from voting and failed to provide them with other legal rights and protections.

“California may have never had slavery as they put it, but the badges of slavery were here,” she said, adding that California “certainly supported all of the racist policies that excluded black people specifically, and that harm has had real consequences.”

Today, the lifespan of Black San Franciscans is 11 years shorter than the citywide average. Black households in San Francisco have a staggering low median income, $34,000 per year in 2019, compared with a citywide median of $112,000.

Urban Renewal

But slavery isn’t the only reason Black San Franciscans are pushing for reparations.

“Where people often think about slavery as the qualifying act that brings on the need for reparations, we know we have this very long history of deep housing discrimination and instability,” said Rachel Brahinsky, a professor of politics and urban studies at the University of San Francisco.

Starting in the 1930s, the federal government began denying Black borrowers loans based on a discriminatory housing practice known as redlining, in which certain areas — especially those with high concentrations of people of color — were deemed “high risk” for lending. Though redlining was a federal program, municipal officers as well as local bank officials, real estate agents and appraisers helped those creating the maps and designating risk. The maps informed local lending decisions in both the private and public sectors, which is how redlining contributed to racial disparities in homeownership, residential segregation and disinvestment from communities of color.

Brahinsky said racially restrictive covenants, which were rules written into property deeds that barred Black people from owning or renting these properties, as well as a practice in which real estate agents would encourage African Americans to move to certain parts of town when looking for homes, preserved segregation.

These policies contributed in part to the segregation of Black people into two main neighborhoods in San Francisco: the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point. Both neighborhoods were later subject to another discriminatory housing program known as urban renewal. Under this federal program, which purported to remove “blight” from cities, the government seized land using eminent domain, and cities razed buildings to make way for new construction.

“The way that blight was defined, it was about peeling paint, it was about infrastructural problems,” Brahinsky said. “But it was also about people and was also about race very much.” She said that up to 20,000 people were displaced by the program in San Francisco.

“It drastically changed the community,” said Ericka Scott, a Black businesswoman who was raised in the Western Addition and now owns Honey Art Studio. “What was once said, originally, to remodel, redevelop, fix up the community, was really code for demolish the community, get people out of here and get new people in.”

Today, San Francisco’s Black population is an estimated 5.7%, compared with 13.4% at its peak in 1970.

Before urban renewal, the Fillmore was a thriving cultural hub with numerous jazz clubs and Black-owned businesses, and was known as the Harlem of the West. Scott’s gallery gives visitors a taste of what that was like through a series of photos from “Harlem of the West,” a book of photos by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts that chronicles the local jazz scene in its heyday.

Lily Robinson-Trezvant, 78, remembers hearing jazz music as she walked down the streets of the Fillmore during her childhood. Her family came to San Francisco in the wake of World War II. After living in military housing, her parents purchased a home.

“It was a beautiful two-story Victorian house. And it was perfect for our family,” she said. “They finally were living their dream. And just like they got it, they lost it.”

Robinson-Trezvant’s home was seized by the government, and her family moved to Plumas County near Reno, Nev. In compensation, they received “just nothing,” she said. “You couldn’t buy a house with what they gave us.” Her mother had a nervous breakdown. Eventually, the family returned to San Francisco, this time as renters, only to be displaced a second time when that home was torn down, she said.

In the years following demolitions, many plots of land remained vacant, said Lewis Watts, an archivist and co-author of “Harlem of the West.”

“For 20 or 30 years, the Fillmore almost looked like a ghost town. It would look like a war zone because there were a number of empty lots,” that remained undeveloped for years, he said.

Though it’s impossible to put a value on the trauma her family suffered, Robinson-Trezvant can point to the current value of her family’s first home. Unlike many buildings that were torn down, Robinson-Trezvant said her home was actually moved to the Mission District and she keeps tabs on it by checking real estate websites. The house is worth about $2.5 million today.

The Fillmore wasn’t the only African American community to be affected by redevelopment. Learning from what transpired further north, Black San Franciscans in Bayview-Hunters Point fought for redevelopment on their own terms, with some success. A group of Black women known as the Big Five secured $40 million in federal funding for new housing during redevelopment, but ultimately the neighborhood was hampered by a lack of investment in other areas, such as jobs, public transit and other factors like environmental racism.

[For a more in-depth exploration of how the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point were affected by urban renewal, listen to the full “Civic” episode.]

Looking ahead

At the time of the interview, Robinson-Trezvant had not been following the reparations plan closely. However, she now has a copy of the draft plan, and said she wanted to read it through before forming an opinion on it. When asked if the city could repair past harms to the Black community, she said, “Anything is possible if you try and you care.”

Taylor, the political science professor, said he believed some kind of reparations would be approved, because these conversations are happening simultaneously across the country, and at the national level.

“We’ve mobilized hundreds of people in the city,” he said. “We’ve mobilized cities around America, where we’re inspiring people all over the planet.” Particularly children, who someday will be responsible for carrying on this work.

“We planted the seed for the next generation,” he added. “So even if we don’t win this battle, ultimately, if America can ever be right, we will win the war.”

Read the draft reparations plan.

The next African American Reparations Advisory Committee meeting is June 5 at 5:30 p.m.

The post SF Reparations Plan Nears Submission, but Funding Not Yet Secure appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Rains this winter and early spring ended the drought in the Bay Area and brought a kind of weather whiplash that put San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management to the test. 
 
Early in the storm cycle, the department faced challenges communicating with the public, especially with people experiencing homelessness. Internal confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of its Emergency Operations Center until a major storm was under way. In at least one instance, flood barriers were deployed too late to prevent homes and businesses from being inundated. 
 
Despite those missteps, the city rallied a coordinated response from its Emergency Operations Center, where multiple city agencies, along with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. representatives, gathered to discuss and act on emerging issues in real time. 
 
It has been years since California faced this kind of barrage. The National Weather Service said that at least 14 powerful atmospheric rivers have slammed into California since October, triggering flooding and downing trees that have killed at least 22 people statewide, including two who were struck by falling trees in San Francisco.
 
And there could be more trouble to come: The Sierra snowpack is at a staggering 225% of normal, and while it will fill reservoirs, a fast spring melt could cause even more flooding. 
 
In a new “Civic” episode, we examine how the city responded to the first big deluge of the season and what it learned from that harried experience to improve response to subsequent storms. 

The biggest rainstorm hit San Francisco with 5.5 inches of rain on New Year’s Eve, when many city employees were away on vacation. Adrienne Bechelli, deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said city departments were able to mount a full response despite being short staffed. 
 
“The city tasks that were the most urgent priority were, of course, flood mitigation and clearing catch basins ensuring that all of our storm drains were clear,” she said. 

Emergency response teams also helped drivers whose vehicles were stranded in floodwaters and worked to get people living on the streets into emergency shelters, she said.  
 
Despite those efforts, some residents and businesses in the Mission District said the city was slow in providing information and failed to put up additional flood gates as it has done before previous storms. 

Blame game

On Jan. 3, Mayor London Breed began a news conference saying the city didn’t expect so much rain. 
 
“We were under the impression and notified by our National Weather Service that we could anticipate not even an inch of rain,” she said. Less than one inch of rain is not considered a threat according to the city’s winter storm and flood plan. 
 
Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, echoed the mayor’s claims and said the city scrambled to increase its response on New Year’s Eve: “Our city employees rallied and we activated our Emergency Operations Center late morning when we realized what was actually happening was a little different than the actual forecast.”
 
Brian Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in the Bay Area, disputed those claims. He said the forecast showed a strong system hitting San Francisco days before it arrived. 
 
“We started messaging that on the 26th and 27th, when we started putting out information for the New Year’s Eve system,” he said. “We issued a flood watch on December 28. So, we definitely saw something coming in.” 

The weather service issues flood watches when the risk of a hazardous weather or flood event increases significantly.
 
San Francisco’s own response protocol lays out an elaborate system to prepare for major storms. The city activated its emergency response on Dec. 28, after the National Weather Service issued its flood watch 96 hours ahead of the storm. 

Garcia said city leaders’ forecast concerns seemed to center on whether the New Year’s Eve fireworks show — which had been cancelled during the first two years of the pandemic — could proceed as planned over the bay near the Embarcadero. 
 
“There was a focus for all of us to see if the rain was going to clear out by then, on the briefing that we provided on December 28,” Garcia said. “We were talking about the wind and the rain across our entire area, including the city, and how nasty it was going to be. The fireworks were definitely a bit of a focus.” 
 
The city seemed to have moved past the “one inch of rain” forecast claim in late February, when Bechelli said the forecast didn’t hamper the city’s efforts. 
 
“We were full out in terms of our operational response,” she said, shifting the focus to the city’s storm water capacity. “The built infrastructure of San Francisco is not built to handle five and a half inches of rain in a 24-hour period — we’re going to see inevitable flooding.” 
 
Garcia is ready to move on. “You’re always learning how to communicate better,” he said. “We continue to look forward to many years of a strong partnership with the great city of San Francisco.”
 
A representative from the Department of Emergency Management wrote in an email that the city hopes to bring National Weather Service representatives into the Emergency Operations Center during future storms. 

Seeking shelter

Following the New Year’s Eve storm, San Francisco Public Press reporters Yesica Prado and Madison Alvarado visited eight San Francisco neighborhoods over three days to talk to homeless people out in the rain. 
 
Prado said that access to shelters varies a lot by neighborhood.
 
“Some places, like in the Bayview, people are able to be more settled down versus being in the Civic Center or being in Japantown, where people are constantly on the move, and they will have to seek shelter if they want accommodations for the night,” she said.

Alvarado said nonprofits were scrambling to find spots for people and, in some cases, sent them across the city where there were beds available.  
 
“We were visiting a shelter and dining room down in the Bayview. We actually heard that at the end of the day the St. Anthony Foundation bused people down to Mother Brown’s in the Bayview, because they knew that there were shelter options down there,” she said. 

San Francisco added more beds to all its shelters in anticipation of a demand surge and worked with nonprofits and churches to add more, but Alvarado said finding information about where beds are available can be difficult for people without access to the internet. 
 
“If you don’t have a phone, you don’t know where you can go because you don’t know where they are,” she said. “Maybe you know of another shelter, but you don’t know how to get there.” 
 
During their reporting, they came across a man shivering on the sidewalk. 
 
“We noticed that nobody had actually approached him,” Prado said. “We didn’t ask for an interview. We went to ask ‘do you need any help?’ And then all he could muster is that, yeah, like he was cold. So we went back to our car, and we got some supplies for him, some dry clothes. But once we came back, he wasn’t really responsive. And that’s when we thought, he really needs some other kind of help.”
 
Prado and Alvarado said they looked online to see whom they should call. The Healthy Streets Operation Center website indicated that calls from concerned citizens would not be returned. Prado and Alvarado were reluctant to call 911, which they said they thought might bring a police response to a medical issue. So, they ended up calling 311, and a team designated to help homeless people showed up a few minutes later. 
 
Confusion over whom to call was understandable. During the Jan. 3 news conference, San Francisco Fire Chief Janine Nicholson discouraged people from using 911 for anything less than an emergency. 
 
“I can’t stress it enough,” she said. “Call 911 for life threatening emergencies only. We still have to run all of our critical 911 calls, whether it’s a cardiac arrest or a car accident or a fire.” 
 
But Bechelli said that calling 911 is the right choice: “Our 911 dispatchers are trained to send the right resource for that particular problem. If there is a medical emergency, they will send a medical response in order to help that person.”

Encampment sweeps continued 

Representatives from the Department of Emergency Management said that they reached out to people in encampments to offer them shelter ahead of and during the rain storms, and in some cases, to warn them that the place they were in was prone to flooding or other dangers. Meanwhile, the Department of Public Works continued to dismantle tent encampments during the inclement weather, as witnessed by our reporters. 
 
Alvarado spoke with a man named Duane who said he had been camping on 19th Street near Harrison Street for about a month, and that city workers kept asking him and other people nearby to move. 
 
“They were making us move every week, every week, back and forth, back and forth. No matter if it was raining,” he said. 
 
Our reporters said the city was offering temporary shelter stays to people in the two encampments they visited, but few of the people they spoke to said they were taking the offers. 
 
Duane said he thought congregate shelters and even navigation centers, which allow groups of friends to stay together, were too dangerous. “You got to deal with a bunch of crazy people. They pick fights with literally no reason,” he said. “It’s like, yeah, they offer you housing. But you gotta jump through hoops to get in.”

Mitigating floodwaters

The city has long known where flooding is most likely to happen and has some plans to mitigate it. After the December and January storms, residents and businesses affected by flooding were asked to fill out questionnaires to help the city track damage and potentially help San Franciscans get federal relief. 
 
Bechelli said 117 people submitted responses about flooding affecting their homes and 17 submitted responses about their businesses. Many responses came from people in the Marina, Mission, Bernal Heights, Glen Park, Castro, Potrero Hill and Dolores Heights neighborhoods, she said. 
 
Most had flood damage, but few had flood insurance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined to offer emergency grants to those affected, but will offer Small Business Administration Disaster Loan assistance. Applicants must apply in person at the War Memorial building on Van Ness Avenue. 
 
The city has plans to address some areas prone to flooding. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has allocated $632 million for three large drainage projects in low-lying areas. 

• The Wawona Street Stormwater Project in West Portal will be under construction until 2024.
• The Lower Alemany Area Rainwater Improvements Project in Bernal Heights will improve stormwater management near the Alemany Farmer’s Market, and the Interstate 280 and U.S. 101 interchange in Bernal Heights. Construction isn’t expected to begin before 2025 with completion in 2028.
• The Folsom Area Stormwater Improvement Project would cover multiple streets in the Mission to reduce flooding in one of the neighborhoods hardest hit in even moderate storms. The project is in the planning phase with no date set for construction to begin. 

In a more modest effort, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has distributed $2.5 million in grants to schools and nonprofits to fund rain gardens, green roofs and other green infrastructure projects to help slow down and redirect floodwaters.

Weather response report card

So, how did the city respond to our wild and wet winter? 
 
There were communication problems. 
 
It’s unclear why city officials and the national weather service got into an argument over the New Year’s Eve forecast. Confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of the city’s Emergency Operations Center.
 
Given conflicting instructions, San Franciscans may have been confused about when to call 911, especially around helping homeless people. 
 
Finding information about shelter locations generally requires access to a smartphone or the internet. Direct outreach to the homeless is limited by staffing constraints and the fact that those needing the information move around a lot. 
 
Overall, the city’s response to protecting people in need was hampered by the same factors that have led to so many people living on the streets: a lack of long-term housing and a focus on temporary shelters, which are often considered by the homeless to be worse than staying outside. 
 
The city knows where the most problematic flood areas are and has plans to mitigate many of them, but those infrastructure projects are years from completion. 

The New Year’s Eve storm was the city’s second wettest on record, only surpassed by a Nov. 11, 1994, storm that brought 5.54 inches of rain to San Francisco. It is too early to know whether California will break its previous record set in 1952-53 for wettest season based on snowfall. The total snowpack results are usually measured and reported April 1. 

Inconsistent weather patterns

For the last few years California has been experiencing a series of La Niña weather patterns, which normally mean drier than usual conditions. An El Niño pattern usually means a wetter than average winter. But within those two major patterns are lesser intra-seasonal oscillations that can change from month to month. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that variations in tropical rainfall can shift the wintertime jet stream and atmospheric circulation over the North Pacific and western North America, thereby overriding the dominant seasonal weather pattern.
 
The weather service’s Garcia explains that if the intra-seasonal oscillations “all come together in the right way, they can override a strong entrenched signal. We can have El Niño years that are extremely dry. And conversely, we can have La Niña years that are extremely wet. It’s not unheard of, it’s just not the norm.” 
 
The La Niña pattern officially ended March 9. It’s unclear whether we’ll see an El Niño pattern by next fall or a neutral pattern.
 
“In California, we typically end major droughts with major floods,” Garcia said. “This has happened multiple times throughout California’s history. So, is this related to climate change at all? The way that it’s related to climate change are the extremes at which we’re seeing those higher heights and lower lows. It’s not happening any more frequently than historically, it’s just getting deeper and higher at the same time.”

CLARIFICATION 4/10/23: The Department of Emergency Management responded to this story to characterize the changing activation status of its Emergency Operations Center. Though only described as “open” during specified times, it is otherwise continuously in standby mode and monitoring events.

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A video showing the violent removal of two children from a Santa Cruz home has spurred calls to ban a controversial practice that pressures children to recant claims of abuse and embrace their alleged abuser.

As previously reported by the San Francisco Public Press, Maya Laing, 15, and Sebastian Laing, 11, were removed from their father’s custody in October after a family court judge ruled that the children lied — at their father’s behest — when they alleged their mother sexually abused them. The judge ordered that the children be taken to a reunification program in Los Angeles. Proponents say that reunification camps are necessary to “deprogram” a child from the preferred parent’s brainwashing that made them believe they were abused by the other parent.

Traumatizing transport

The process begins by transporting the child to the camp, which is typically away from their hometown or even out of state, according to Tina Swithin, who is fighting to ban reunification camps.

“I’ve heard stories of children being taken off of school buses on their way home by these transport agents,” Swithin said.

Transport agents are hired to take children away, and they are not deterred by unwillingness, as witnessed in the case of Maya and Sebastian Laing. The agents in this case work for a company called Assisted Intervention Inc. Protesters and elected officials said they were disturbed by the level of violence shown in an Oct. 20, 2022, video of transporters grabbing the children and forcing them into an awaiting car. Assisted Intervention representatives declined an interview request. An email response from the company called the situation “complex” and stated that the video “showed an incomplete picture of the events.”

Catherine Barrett, a licensed clinical forensic psychologist based in Los Angeles, said the incident amounts to kidnapping. She likened it to police arrest, which is even traumatic to adults she has treated.  

“You know, forcing arms, necks bent, that power and control and losing their autonomy and their sense of self-empowerment in that moment,” Barrett said. “What that type of kidnapping, interrogation, arrest, what that does to a child long term — how they believe that builds trust, how they believe that can rebuild a relationship to me is so astounding. It’s so abusive. It’s criminal.”

Politicians react

The transporters who took the Laing children were authorized “to physically take possession” of them under the order of Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Rebecca Connolly, said Santa Cruz Police Deputy Chief Jon Bush. 

But after the video went viral on social media, local elected officials acted to change that authority. Less than a month after the video’s release, Santa Cruz County supervisors unanimously passed a resolution amending the County Code to impose a no touch policy on youth transport agencies, aligning them with county rules governing social services agencies. The supervisors also urged California’s elected officials to regulate youth transport companies and reunification camps, which do not require a license to operate, unlike the state’s childcare and health care centers and schools. Richard Stapler, the chief of staff for State Sen. John Laird, whose district includes Santa Cruz County, wrote in an email that his office is looking at potential legislative proposals.

“We are very early in the legislative session, so there is considerable opportunity to address this unfortunate issue,” Stapler wrote.

He’s not the only California legislator concerned about reunification camps. As previously reported by the Public Press, State Sen. Susan Rubio authored a bill in 2021 that would have banned family reunification services that sever a child from a parent with whom the child is bonded or to whom the child is attached. Rubio rescinded the bill known as Piqui’s Law in response to harsh criticism from the California Judicial Council. She has said that she plans to amend and reintroduce the bill.

Surviving a reunification camp

The number of families sent to reunification programs is hard to determine. A 2017 study showed that Canadian judges ordered children into reunification in 27% of cases involving children who judges deem are unjustifiably resisting or rejecting parental contact. The study’s author, Shely Polak, an Ontario-based social worker who spent five years researching U.S. and Canadian reunification programs for her PhD dissertation, told The Washington Post that she thinks that prevalence is much higher in the U.S.

Ally Toyos, 20, and her younger sister were 13 and 11 when they alleged that their father was sexually abusing them. After three years of family court proceedings, a judge ruled that they were lying and ordered them to attend a reunification program in Montana run by Family Bridges.

“It’s really terrifying, because you have no idea what’s going to happen to you,” Toyos said. “I honestly thought that they were going to take us somewhere and like, I don’t know, do electroshock therapy or something to try to get us to be compliant.”

The sisters were taken to a motel in Bozeman where her father was waiting along with three reunification trainers from Family Bridges, a Bay Area-based company that charges between $25,000 and $40,000 for a four-day program, according to its website. The organization’s founder, Randy Rand, oversaw Toyos’ training, but couldn’t lead sessions because he isn’t a licensed therapist. The California Board of Psychology suspended Rand’s license in 2009, and disciplined him for “unprofessional conduct,” “gross negligence,” “violation of laws governing the practice of psychology” and “dishonesty.” Family Bridges did not respond to requests for comment. 

Toyos said she and her sister repeated their abuse allegations against their father at the beginning of the program, at which point they were warned that if they didn’t recant and embrace their father, they would be sent to a psychiatric facility or a wilderness camp for troubled teens, or put into foster care. They were told to write a letter to their mother claiming that they chose to enter a facility or foster care rather than comply. At that point, the sisters began cooperating with the trainers. Toyos said the trainers then spent four days showing videos and playing mind games meant to “deprogram” them.

“It sounds like no big deal, but you’re forced to say good things about your abuser,” Toyos said. “I would call it self-betrayal trauma. Like now, I feel like I second guess whether or not I feel unsafe around someone when I so clearly do.”

After the program, the girls were placed in their father’s permanent custody until each turned 18. Today, Toyos has no contact with her father.

Reunification outcomes unclear

There is little reliable data measuring the success of reunification programs following parental alienation claims. Psychologist Richard Warshak, who helped craft the Family Bridges program and whose self-produced videos and books are often required materials, asserts a 95% success rate for repairing relationships between children and their parents, with the number dropping to 83% once children return home. But a 2022 study published in the Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody & Child Development examined six reunification camps — including Family Bridges — and concluded that “many program tenets are questionable, and that outcome studies are too weakly designed and implemented to provide evidence of the programs’ effectiveness.”

Read the first three articles and listen to the “Civic” podcasts associated with this series:

Part one: “Coercive Control Victims Face Skeptical Judges, Court Transcripts Show”

Part two: “When Judges Dismiss Claims of Domestic Abuse, Children Can Die”

Part three: “Family Courts Rely on Dubious Theory to Dismiss Child Abuse Claims”

The post Children’s Violent Removal From Santa Cruz Home Raises Calls to End Reunification Camps appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

It’s been four months since a viral video exposed the violent court-ordered removal of two Santa Cruz children from their father’s family home. The disturbing scene prompted protests on courthouse steps demanding “justice for Maya and Sebastian” and “free Maya and Sebastian,” as well as calls for action by local elected officials. But the children have yet to return.

Maya, 15, and Sebastian, 11, told a family court therapist that they were being sexually abused by their mother. They were removed from their father’s custody in October after their family court judge ruled that the children were lying and that their father was the actual child abuser because he manipulated them into making the false allegations. The judge also ordered the children into a program that would convince them to recant their allegations and reunite with their mother. Their father, Justin Laing, is unable to comment due to a gag order.

Disbelieving a child’s allegation of abuse based on the notion that the other parent brainwashed them into lying is a hotly debated legal tactic called parental alienation.

A growing chorus of international media coverage, medical groups and judicial bodies are expressing doubts over the validity of this legal defense tactic and of its practitioners.

It appears to let many abusers off the hook, according to Joan Meier, a professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School. She pointed to a 2004 study indicating that between 50% and 73% of child sexual abuse allegations during custody litigation are considered likely valid by custody evaluators and child welfare personnel. But courts on average find only 2% of child abuse claims valid.

“So, you can see by this comparison that it is extremely likely that many, many sexually abused children are being sent to their sexual abuser by courts,” Meier said. 

Despite the controversy, family courts routinely rely on parental alienation testimony.  

Survivor turns advocate

Twenty-year-old Ally Toyos — who recently changed her name from Cable — said years of abuse were added to her life when parental alienation proponent Robert Evans testified that she and her sister had been brainwashed into lying about their father’s alleged sexual, physical and emotional abuse. She was 13 and her sister was 11 when they first made the allegations of abuse.

“He actually called in to testify from Florida,” Toyos said. “And I had never met him. My mom had never met him.”

The judge determined that her mother’s brainwashing constituted psychological abuse. So, three years after they made their initial allegations, the girls were placed in their father’s custody where Toyos said his abuse persisted until they were able to leave when they each turned 18.

Today, Toyos belongs to a Bay Area organization called Center for Judicial Excellence, which fights harmful family court decisions. As previously reported in the Public Press, the group’s efforts to mandate education for judges and court personnel to better assess allegations of child abuse have been unsuccessful so far, thanks in part to resistance from the California Judicial Council, which represents judges and other judiciary branch staff.

Dubious origins

Parental alienation was conceived in the mid-1980s by Richard Gardner, an unpaid, part-time clinical professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University. He claimed without evidence that vindictive mothers psychologically abuse their children by brainwashing them into lying in 90% of cases where fathers are accused of sexual abuse. He diagnosed it as a psychological syndrome — a finding that never made it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and was roundly rejected by the psychiatric community. Nevertheless, Gardner was a prolific expert witness in child custody cases, testifying in roughly 400 cases in 25 states — the vast majority of which advocated putting children in the custody of the parent that they claimed abused them.

A 1996 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry journal article stated that Gardner’s book, “Protocols for the Sex-Abuse Evaluation,” was “a recipe for finding allegations of sexual abuse false, under the guise of clinical and scientific objectivity. One suspects it will be a bestseller among defence attorneys.”

Legal approach in dispute

Toronto-based lawyer Brian Ludmer regularly relies on parental alienation theory in his law practice in Canada and is called upon to act as a strategic advisor on parental alienation in cases across North America. When a child abuse accusation arises, he files a counter claim on his client’s behalf and brings in parental alienation experts to testify that the accusations are due to the other parent’s psychological abuse and manipulation of their child. He said he’s never had a client whose child abuse allegations were “substantiated as true.”

He said he believes that parents routinely psychologically abuse children by manipulating them into making false allegations of abuse. But the prevalence of sexual abuse within the family unit is another matter.

“This is so rare,” he said. “How many are so sick that they would abuse their own children rather than somebody else’s children, right? Because genetically, we have a protective instinct for own children.”

But U.S. Department of Justice data shows that half of predators committing sexual assault against kids younger than 6 are family members.

Los Angeles-based child forensic psychiatrist Catherine Barrett said focusing on the child rather than the alleged sexual abuser plays into the hands of abusive parents who claim parental alienation as a distraction to derail proceedings.

“We have a child that has been abused that has now become a pawn of the courts,” Barrett said.

Studies sow doubt

Several international studies have also generated significant uncertainty around the theory. One recent study disputed the idea that bad-mouthing one parent promotes alienation toward the other at all. In fact, it will probably backfire against the disparaging parent. The study revealed that when alienation does occur, it’s more likely due to upsetting behavior by the rejected parent like substance use, uncontrolled mental illness and child abuse.

The theory’s validity is also undermined by being unequally applied between men and women. Meier’s 2019 study revealed that when a mother alleges child abuse and the father counter claims parental alienation, the chances of her losing custody virtually doubles. When fathers allege that mothers are abusive, they are not dismissed as readily when mothers counter claim alienation.

The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner has taken notice of this and is investigating the trend. The office announced a call for feedback by Dec. 15, 2022, on custody cases involving violence against women and children with a special focus on parental alienation.

Read the three other articles and listen to the “Civic” podcasts associated with this series:

Part one: “Coercive Control Victims Face Skeptical Judges, Court Transcripts Show”

Part two: “When Judges Dismiss Claims of Domestic Abuse, Children Can Die”

Part four: “Children’s Violent Removal From Santa Cruz Home Raises Calls to End Reunification Camps”

CORRECTION 2/24/23: Ally Toyos was 13 and her sister was 11 when they first alleged that their father had abused them. This story has been updated to clarify the timing of that event. Three years later, he was granted full custody of the girls until they became adults at 18.

The post Family Courts Rely on Dubious Theory to Dismiss Child Abuse Claims appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Lawmakers, experts and advocates across California are pushing for legislation that would make judges take regular training in recognizing domestic violence and child abuse. The crusade is an attempt to lessen the chances that a judge will place a child in the custody of a dangerous parent.

Family court judges routinely decide that domestic abuse claims are not credible and grant custody to the allegedly abusive parent. But making the wrong call can end with children losing their lives.

Pallavi Dhawan, director of domestic violence policy for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, said that mothers can end up being punished for claiming in family court that the father is abusing the child.

“The fathers will often counterclaim that the mother is trying to alienate the father from the child,” Dhawan said. “And so the judge will oftentimes give weight to that counterclaim and then punish the mother and give the father custody or visitation rights when the mother is seeking sole custody, believing that the mother is fabricating the claim.”

Fathers who initiate claims of abuse against mothers do not get the same treatment, according to a 2019 study on child custody by Joan Meier, director of the National Family Law Violence Center at George Washington University. The study showed that courts lack impartiality and neutrality when domestic abuse is alleged.  It concluded that there is an “apparent systemic gender bias against women” in U.S. family courts.

The consequences for dismissing claims of abuse can be dire. The Center for Judicial Excellence, an organization advocating for judicial accountability and child safety in family courts, said that 864 children have been murdered by separating or divorcing parents in the United States since 2008. For more than a decade, the center has tracked these deaths through news coverage in which divorce, separation, custody, visitation or child support was mentioned.

San Francisco resident Lesley Hu is the mother of one of nine children in California who died in 2021 at the hands of an abusive parent during a divorce.

Hu was married to Stephen O’Loughlin for five years before separating in 2015. They agreed to share custody of their then-3-year-old son Pierce. But when O’Loughlin insisted without evidence that Pierce was vaccine intolerant — even though the boy’s pediatrician said that he was a normal, healthy child — Hu appealed for medical custody in San Francisco family court.

In 2021, the judge in the case initially gave Hu sole custody. But he reversed himself and ordered a shared custody arrangement while giving O’Loughlin time to find evidence that Pierce was vaccine intolerance. That was Jan. 12, 2021. Pierce stayed with his father that night. The following day, O’Loughlin murdered their son and killed himself.

“Steve shot Pierce while he was sleeping and then he hung himself. That didn’t succeed, so he had to shoot himself like an utter coward,” Hu said.

Research by Lisa Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship,” showed that in 20% to 30% of cases of domestic homicide, there are no prior physical acts of violence. During a webinar for the organization Domestic Shelters, Fontes said family courts can enable domestic abusers to further victimize their former partner and children during divorce or separation.

“The court system, the legal system, is supposed to be here to make us all safer, it’s supposed to be here to assure our rights,” Fontes said. “And so, it’s particularly tormenting for both the target of coercive control and children to find that the courts are not protecting them, that they are serving as an arm of further abuse by the domestic abuser. So, we really need to educate judges, attorneys and the general public about legal abuse.”

California state Sen. Susan Rubio introduced a bill in June 2022 known as Piqui’s law that would mandate training for judges on child abuse and domestic violence. She rescinded the bill last month after encountering strong pushback from the Judicial Council of California.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Piqui’s bill, the Judicial Council of California wrote that the bill “represents an impermissible interference in the operations of the judicial branch,” and that it creates “serious concerns about impartiality and neutrality.”

Supporters of the measure aren’t backing down. Among them is Kathleen Russell, founding executive director of the Center for Judicial Excellence.

“We’re regrouping and going to be reintroducing Piqui’s law next year,” Russell said.

The post When Judges Dismiss Claims of Domestic Abuse, Children Can Die appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

On average in the U.S., more than 1 in 3 women, and 1 in 4 men, will experience physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Nevertheless, when victims turn to family court for protection from their abusers, they often face skeptical judges. And that’s especially true when the abuse doesn’t leave a mark.

That’s what San Francisco Public Press reporter Viji Sundaram found through her reporting on a new movement to protect victims of what experts call coercive control. (See: “Coercive Control: Abuse That Leaves No Marks.”)

“He kept telling her, ‘How can I believe this?’” Sundaram said of one judge’s reaction to a victim’s request for a temporary restraining order to keep her partner away from her. “Just because a woman is staying within an abusive situation, it doesn’t mean she is not abused. And that is what the judge did not seem to understand.”

In San Francisco, the Department on the Status of Women reported in 2019 that crisis hotlines and 911 got more than 15,700 domestic violence-related calls over the previous year. 

And it only got worse during the pandemic. Lockdowns limited victims’ ability to safely contact the outside world for help. The isolation increases the opportunity for abuse, aggression and coercion. 

A study by the National Commission on COVID-19 and criminal justice shows that domestic violence cases in the U.S. increased by over 8% following lockdown orders in 2020.

That spike also hit San Francisco, according to an organization that assists domestic abuse survivors called Women Organized to Make Abuse Nonexistent, or W.O.M.A.N. Inc. The group reported that in 2020, its San Francisco crisis hotline got 11,000 calls and its Domestic Violence Information Referral Center website had 125,000 hits.

At a San Francisco Board of Supervisors public hearing in May 2020, Beverly Upton, the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium director, described the escalating problem of domestic violence in the early days of the pandemic lockdown in March 2020: “The first couple of weeks, we saw W.O.M.A.N. Inc’s numbers alone go up 130%,” Upton said. “So that was, you know, quite alarming.” 

The form of domestic abuse called coercive control can be harder to detect than physical violence. Behaviors like isolating a spouse from friends and family, depriving them of basic needs, spying on them, sexual coercion, intimidation, repeatedly degrading and humiliating them — these are all examples of coercive control. 

But the lack of physical evidence often pushes domestic abuse into a gray zone that even survivors sometimes fail to grasp, according to Sundaram.

“In fact, one woman told me when I was going to interview her, ‘You know, I wish he had hit me. Then I would have had a good reason to leave him,’” Sundaram said.

Coercive control is no less ruinous for victims than physical violence, according to Evan Stark, the man who pioneered the concept. A sociologist, forensic social worker and award-winning author of “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life,” Stark said his research found that around 25% of abusive relationships involve violence that’s either nonexistent or below the radar — meaning they don’t result in serious injury or hospitalization. But abuse that does exist is equally harmful.

Stark’s work focuses on the cumulative effects of this treatment: “What I call the death by 1,000 cuts — the push and shove, the grab, something that wouldn’t impress a judge, wouldn’t impress a police officer, but whose cumulative weight was such that it could lead to a feeling of being imprisoned.”

Despite such research, according to the domestic violence and sexual assault prevention organization No More, 65% of domestic abuse survivors who come forward report no one helping them when they do. They report that law enforcement treats domestic abuse as a “domestic dispute” rather than an act of escalating violence.

In January 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that integrated coercive control into the state’s Domestic Violence Prevention Act. Senate Bill 1141 expanded the Family Code to allow the abusive behavior to be used as evidence in family court hearings. It was meant to empower survivors trying to protect themselves and their children during appeals for restraining orders and child custody. But getting family court judges to embrace the new legislation has been slow going.

A 2019 study by Joan Meier, a law professor and director of the National Family Law Violence Center at George Washington University, shows an apparent “systemic gender bias against women” in U.S. family courts. Her study found that women often grapple with the high cost of legal help and are penalized by courts that favor fathers. 

One woman using the name Sarah to protect herself from her abusive ex-spouse and father of her two children said she’s been fighting that bias in court for two years.

During her 10-year relationship, Sarah was subjected to threats of violence, absolute control over every aspect of her life, and destruction of property during bursts of rage. Three incidents that involved police even led to the temporary confiscation of his firearms. Their children also endured his volatile need for control. In one incident he physically overpowered their 4-year-old son, pinning him down to a bed by his neck.

Sarah applied for a restraining order in family court. As court transcripts show, the judge said he didn’t believe her testimony.

“The court finds that there are credibility issues that causes the court to doubt as to whether or not abuse as defined by the Domestic Violence Prevention Act has occurred,” the judge said. “The court will deny the request for a domestic violence restraining order.”

The ruling left Sarah dumbfounded.

“Even though, you know, I’ve never damaged property, cell phones, laptops, doors, etc., the judge just found me not credible, which I thought was shocking,” Sarah said. “And it was almost as if he didn’t care. He really didn’t care to look at the facts. He didn’t care to look at the history.”

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Foghorns sounding on the Golden Gate Bridge signal that San Francisco’s “natural air conditioning” is rolling in, keeping San Francisco cool. During summer, the fog prevents triple-digit heat in the East Bay from roasting the city’s homes and businesses.

That pattern is changing. Since the 1970s, San Francisco’s average temperature has increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, city leaders are developing new strategies to keep people safe, with infrastructure designed for much cooler weather. The question is whether San Francisco is ready for the next deadly heat wave.

During the summer, chilly waters off the Northern California coast create a cool marine layer that is pulled inland like a blanket by the warmer air in the East Bay. On the other side of that weather pattern, an upper ridge of high pressure usually indicates where temperatures will be hottest.

On Labor Day 2017, the cool marine layer never reached San Francisco, and temperatures predicted to be in the upper 80s, soared to a record-breaking 106.

National Weather Service Meteorologist Brian Garcia said his agency didn’t see it coming — prediction models were off.

“It looked like the peak of that ridge was going to set up over the East Bay,” he said. “We were looking at temperatures upwards of 115 for Livermore.”

The ridge ended up 30 miles to the west — right on top of San Francisco. Any possible ocean breezes were blocked by a wall of high-pressure air.

The extreme heat took the lives of three elderly San Franciscans and three more people on the Peninsula. Most died alone in overheated buildings. None of them had called 911. Dozens of other people in San Francisco were taken to hospitals with serious heat-related illnesses, overwhelming local emergency medical services.

Threat Starts at Lower Temperature in SF

Most San Franciscans live without air conditioning. The 2020 Census found that in the metro area that includes San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, only 47% of households had air conditioning. That percentage is certainly lower in San Francisco, which is typically cooler than the East Bay. 

Adrienne Bechelli, deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said people in the city are at higher risk with even moderate heat.

“Our thresholds in San Francisco are much lower than in other comparable cities nationwide, or even in other neighboring counties, because a lot of homes don’t have air conditioning in our work or commercial spaces,” she said. “So, our spectrum starts with pre-planning — depending on the incident — in the high 70s, but usually low 80s.”

Bechelli said setting heat protocols in motion starts with the forecast.

“A couple of days out, when we get that spot report from the National Weather Service, we will hold various levels of meetings with our key city partners, as well as other community stakeholders,” she said. “That would include policy-level meetings, as well as operational coordination meetings.”

Agencies participating in such meetings include the Department of Public Health, the Human Services Agency, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the Recreation and Parks Department, as well as the police, fire and sheriff’s departments. Elected leaders and representatives from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and the San Francisco Unified School District would also take part.

While the Department of Emergency Management coordinates the effort, no one person in San Francisco makes the decision as to which level of response is appropriate.

On average, San Francisco has three days a year over 90 degrees. By comparison, San Jose sees 16.

San Jose Deputy City Manager Kip Harkness is the person who makes decisions about heat emergencies when San Jose’s Emergency Operations Center is activated during an extended heat wave.

“We believe that it’s important to have the authority to act at the appropriate and lowest level possible,” he said.

In most situations, San Jose agencies independently decide to do things like open cooling centers, Harkness said.

“Now, it’s just standard protocol,” he said. “If it got longer or larger, we’d pull everybody together. And we’d work through what additional resources were needed to support the people in the field.”

San Francisco’s response system can’t be set in motion by one official, Bechelli said.

“We do so much pre-planning, where we have all of these specific thresholds and triggers where all the city departments responsible during extreme heat know what that threshold or trigger is,” she said. “The Department of Emergency Management holds that authority to ask other city departments to activate their extreme heat operations protocols at a lower threshold.”

Keeping Track of Heat

When San Francisco officials found themselves scrambling on Labor Day in 2017 to deal with an unexpected, deadly heatwave, many were asking why the forecast was off by 20 degrees.

Garcia, the National Weather Service meteorologist, said the problem was one of scale.

“When we look at models, typically they are in 3-kilometer, 12-kilometer or larger grid boxes,” he said. “And around here, in 3 kilometers, you can go from sea level to 5,000 feet up Mount Tam, and it’s a completely different climate regime.”

Garcia said the system has improved over the last five years, and now the models are based less on a precise forecast and more on probabilities.

“So, instead of saying, hey, it’s going to be 85 degrees in the city, we’ll be able to say the probability of it being 85 degrees in the city is 90%. The probability of it being 105 in the city is 5%,” he said.

Since 2017, the National Weather Service office in Monterey has been reaching out proactively to local municipalities as soon as it sees the threat of rising heat.

Cooling Near You

In the past, San Francisco would open cooling centers and encourage people to travel to them to get out of the heat. That proved a challenge for some seniors, disabled people and families who had to leave their neighborhoods to find a place to cool down. 

Bechelli said the city now offers three categories of weather relief centers.

“The first are overall public locations, things like shopping malls, museums, local parks, local swimming pools, locations that are accessible year-round to the public,” she said. The second category includes city-operated facilities, such as libraries and community buildings. The third category includes sites that people use in their neighborhoods, such as YMCAs, senior and community centers and homeless shelters. The Department of Emergency Management coordinates with all those groups and tries to get the word out to people who need to use them.

When heat and wildfire smoke came to the city during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people avoided leaving hot houses to go to weather relief centers. Bechelli said that fears about COVID-19 and smoke could put people with underlying health risks in serious danger.

“Extreme heat is much more serious than extreme smoke for most people,” she said.

That’s also true when sheltering at home. Opening a window to bring in cooler, but smoky air is less dangerous than being shut up in a hot room for long periods of time.

Bechelli said she is confident the city is focused on managing increasing numbers of heat waves as the climate warms.

“As emergency managers, we do everything in our power to try to stay out ahead of the hazards that impact our communities,” she said. “We always have areas for improvement, we always are looking for specific corrective actions that we can implement to make our citywide response even better. But I definitely feel confident that we are better established to respond to an extreme heat event now than we were in 2017.”

Heat Safety How to stay safe in the heat: Stay somewhere cool Drink plenty of water Wear light clothing and hats Take a shower Close blinds during the day, open blinds at night Avoid: • Being outside between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. (when it is the hottest) • Strenuous activity • Eating or drinking sugar, alcohol, caffeine and high-protein foods Drink water and cool down right away if you: Feel tired, weak or dizzy Have a headache or muscle cramps Are sweating heavily Faint Look pale You may be experiencing heat exhaustion, which can become heat stroke if not addressed promptly. Get immediate medical attention if someone: Has difficulty breathing, a headache or nausea Has a fever (body temperature of 103 F or higher) Has red, hot, dry skin without sweating Is confused, delirious or hallucinating Is dizzy, unconscious or unresponsive They may be experiencing heat stroke, which can be deadly. Call 911 if someone is having a medical emergency. From SF72.org

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