Several city departments are changing procedures in response to complaints from those living in encampments and their advocates, and from residential and commercial neighbors.

Here are some key changes:

• Berkeley will increase trash pickups to several times a week and do more frequent street cleaning to improve overall sanitation and living conditions.
• The city auditor is reviewing the effectiveness of the city’s homelessness services.
• The police department is reducing its involvement at encampment abatement operations.
• The fire department is providing unhoused people with basic fire safety guidelines.
• The city manager’s Homeless Response Team has taken steps to improve communication with residents at the largest encampments in West Berkeley through community meetings and new “Good Neighbor Guidelines” that explain what conditions would trigger a city intervention.
• The city has also applied to the state for an Encampment Resolution Funding Grant Award to lease a motel that it would use to provide temporary shelter.

In my capacity as a professional journalist, I reported for the Public Press on the aggressive October encampment cleaning that upended the lives of more than 50 people living near Eighth and Harrison streets and brought the city’s response to homelessness under scrutiny.

I was able to document and photograph the 12-hour encounter because it affected me, too. I am part of a community of people living in tents and vehicles who have been displaced from other encampments around the city, including the Berkeley Marina, the Gilman Underpass, Seabreeze, Ashby Shellmound, People’s Park, the Grayson Street Shelter, Here/There Camp, Shattuck Avenue and the Second Street camps. 

In the wake of photographic evidence from the October encampment cleaning, which exposed the city’s poor communication, lack of transparency, and failure to provide adequate shelter and support to unhoused people, city departments are under review.

Berkeley Senior Auditor Caitlin Palmer wrote in an email that, “We plan to work on the audit in the fall and hope to issue it sometime next year.”

The Berkeley city manager in July concluded an investigation of Berkeley police officers involved in the October encampment sweep who sent text messages that the Berkeley Police Accountability Board said showed “anti-homeless and racist remarks.” The city manager’s office, which hired an independent company to conduct the investigation, issued a report that the investigation found no wrongdoing. But the office has indicated that it will not release further details from the investigation, which it deems confidential.

Aiming for Clearer Communication

Peter Radu, assistant to the city manager, said the city acknowledged that it had mishandled encampment cleanings and used “overhanded” measures that included the destruction of personal property and giving vague, sometimes conflicting instructions to encampment residents. He acknowledged his own role in those events and said that he and the city wanted to work with unhoused people and homeless advocates to rectify the situation.

“I am genuinely sorry,” Radu said to community members gathered at Eighth and Harrison streets. “We’re trying to start something new, and work more with you as opposed to against you moving forward.”

On July 10, dozens of people gathered under and around a gray shade structure at Eighth and Harrison streets. Radu addressed the crowd of outreach workers and encampment residents to tell them that the City Council would soon approve a new shelter, referring to the planned motel conversion. He did not say whether the city would close the encampment, noting that Berkeley has more unhoused people than available shelter spaces, but said that residents in the area would be prioritized. The city has not announced a date for when it plans to begin operating the motel as a shelter.

“Call it a ‘closure’ or call it something else,” Radu wrote in an email asking for clarification about future plans for the encampment. “We do have (1) an opportunity to move people inside with a new resource, and (2) we do have infrastructure repair and construction needs in the area. People cannot live in construction zones.”

Radu’s efforts to establish trust have been met with mixed reactions from people living in the camp and their advocates. While some said they appreciated this newfound willingness to cooperate, others remained skeptical.

“You had consequences from your actions and now you are here,” said Chloe Madison, a camp resident on Eighth Street. “I’ve seen this side of you before, and I’ve also seen the guy who steals people’s homes.”

Many unhoused people say they continue to feel harassed no matter how much they do to avoid residential neighborhoods, because Berkeley staffers have shuffled them around the city with repeated encampment cleanups and closures.

“Just in the past few months, like Seabreeze. I’ve had like 10 camps in the last couple of years,” said Ron, a resident from the Second Street encampment. “You have herded us here.”

To address such grievances, Radu began working with two of the largest encampments in Berkeley, located near the intersections of Second and Page streets and Eighth and Harrison streets. He said the city and residents needed to find middle ground and take a collaborative approach to addressing the sanitation issues on the streets.

“There’s a competing need for space,” Radu said at an Eighth and Harrison streets community meeting. “So, we’re just trying to find a solution that keeps everybody safe and that allows the community to kind of have a shared use of this public space.”

In April, Radu held the first of three community meetings and presented a report to people living at the Second Street encampment, and said that if residents addressed safety concerns voluntarily, the city would not enter anyone’s vehicles or tents. He said that because of fire risk, residents would not be allowed to live in other kinds of makeshift structures.

Residents who attended the meeting said they were willing to work with the city, but many also shared their experiences of repeated property loss due to previous sweeps. Ron, who gave only his first name, recounted how he lost his belongings when he arrived late during the last cleaning at Second and Page streets. He said he jumped on the back of the garbage truck to salvage his personal belongings. He was able to save a few items.

“I was five minutes late, five minutes late, and I lost everything,” Ron said at the community meeting. “I had things that I carried from town to town. I had things in there for years.”

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Alice Barbee, who lives in the unhoused community at Eighth and Harrison streets, said the city previously gave instructions, which residents followed, and then discarded their possessions anyway.

“You say to get it all across the street if you want to keep it safe,” Barbee said. “But you come and you take that stuff, too. All of it and then call it trash?”

In May, residents of both communities asked for reassurance that no one would enter their households and throw away their possessions.

“We have not been as transparent and communicative as you guys would have liked and as we could have been,” Radu said to a gathering of Second Street residents. “I just want to acknowledge there were clearly misunderstandings and miscommunications on our account.”

In May, Radu tried collaborative cleaning at both encampments, asking residents to voluntarily address safety concerns highlighted in his reports. He deemed those events a success.

“We schedule a deep cleaning together and, voluntarily, give us what you don’t want,” Radu said to Eighth and Harrison residents, noting that the city staff had hauled away 11 tons of debris the previous week from the community living near Second and Page streets. “It was all voluntary. None of it was forcefully taken from anybody. We didn’t enter any tents.”

But the city does not have a policy for preserving the belongings of someone who is not on site when it conducts a cleaning operation. This means that residents living in tents or makeshift shelters risk losing their possessions when they leave their homes.

The city has also made agreements with surrounding businesses to keep people from camping on their sidewalks. Public notices are issued to residents camping outside of designated zones along Seventh and Eighth streets citing the city’s sidewalk ordinance and prohibition of bulky items in commercial corridors. The notices direct people to a shelter that closed in December and is no longer in operation.

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Sharing Public Space

In an effort to get everyone on the same page, Radu asked a few homeless advocates to give him feedback on a draft of unofficial guidelines to maintain general cleanliness in the neighborhood and improve interactions with the surrounding business community.

Radu said he hopes the “Good Neighbor Guidelines” will help establish a better working relationship between encampment residents and the city staff. He is seeking additional community input on the draft.

But the new procedures are challenging for a few residents who sleep on the open sidewalk and struggle with mental health issues. They are in survival mode and have trouble following rules about storing their belongings and discarding food scraps to avoid attracting vermin. And so, they are constantly at risk of having their possessions thrown away during weekly street cleanings.

“The Guidelines are rules the City wants people to follow. The guidelines say ‘Please,’ but behind that ‘please’ is the threat that if they are not followed, eviction, arrest, or a citation will result,” wrote Osha Neumann, a Berkeley civil rights attorney, in an email seeking his comment on the guidelines. “The City needs to realize that a great number of the people out there have significant disabilities, mental and physical, which make following rules difficult.”

The Public Press asked for reactions to the guidelines from Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín and all of the City Council members, about half of whom replied by email. Councilmembers Sophie Hahn, Ben Barlett, Rigel Robinson, and Mark Humbert declined to comment on the city’s response to homelessness despite multiple requests.

“These are temporary, common sense guidelines specifically for this neighborhood during the transition to the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote on behalf of the mayor. “These guidelines will help ensure the safety and security of encampment residents and neighbors.”

Councilwoman Susan Wengraf wrote that she agrees with what Berkeley city staff is doing and that “Berkeley is moving in the right direction.”

Councilwoman Kate Harrison wrote that “it is critically important that while the City makes these requests of unhoused and housed people in our community, it simultaneously provides the necessary facilities and services that allow people to follow them.”

Councilman Terry Taplin has already promulgated a version of these unofficial rules on his website as his district also grapples with homelessness. “The Good Neighbor policy both increases transparency around what triggers a city intervention and provides recommendations to better manage the public right of way better and improve traffic and fire safety,” he wrote, adding that the city could take further steps to improve encampment sanitation.

“Conditions can be improved by waste pump-out services,” he wrote, also noting that the city’s Homelessness Services Panel of Experts has also recommended expediting the search for a new parking lot for the safe parking program. But no money was earmarked for it on this budget cycle, according to Radu.

Harrison and Taplin agree that the city needs to implement other changes, such as providing more permanent supportive housing and transitional housing programs citywide, in addition to resolving sanitation issues.

The state grant would allow the city to lease the motel for two years, and the city hopes funds from Berkeley’s Measure P, which passed in 2019, would pay for three additional years.

“We are working with the County and our nonprofit service providers in finding solutions that enable us to provide access to shelter and services beyond the Super 8 motel,” Elgstrand wrote. “Even if this one location reaches full occupancy, we will continue to do everything we can to target resources to the residents of this encampment.”

Looking for Representatives to Show Up

Despite recent developments, some encampment residents said they felt frustrated and abandoned by Berkeley city officials. They wondered why City Council members and the mayor attended a recent Gilman District Business Summit to talk with business owners but had not attended any of the encampment community meetings.

“As long as you ostracize people, and their issues are not as important as others, then anger and resentment starts to come in,” Merced Dominguez said at an Eighth and Harrison community meeting, adding that she wanted to see the Gilman District’s Councilwoman Rashi Kesarwani attend a future meeting. “We just want to have a dialogue with her to work something out. This is what she was voted in to do.”

Kesarwani replied to a request for comment with a general statement but did not directly answer questions about recent policy changes and how Berkeley staff is responding to homelessness in her district despite multiple requests.

Madison, another encampment resident, expressed her frustrations over email, writing that she hadn’t heard about the business summit and questioned the timing of that meeting, which portrayed unhoused people disparagingly, blaming them for criminal behavior and causing others in the neighborhood to feel fearful.

“For you to attempt to approach us in good faith only days later is super skeevy,” she wrote to Radu. “Super cool how we’re all lumped into being scary crime doers when all I do all day is attempt to further my career in a way that works with my mental and physical health.” She added that “excluding us from that meeting allows those narratives to perpetuate.”

Radu responded to Madison that he had recommended including encampment members and community advocates at the meeting with business owners, but that the decision was not up to him.

“You’ll understand that I don’t get to make all those decisions, but since then I HAVE recommended to the business leaders that they reach out to you and try to have conversations,” he wrote, adding that “I agree completely with you that the format of the business meeting was not conducive to such trust.”

Some encampment residents are accepting, cautiously, what appear to be goodwill gestures.

“For a long time, I think it was a big battle. You guys don’t want to talk to us or work with us,” said Sarah Teague, a Second Street encampment resident, at one of the recent meetings.

“But you guys are making the initiative to come down here and talk to us personally. That’s a huge breakthrough,” she said. “I think it’s a big giant leap of faith for everybody.”

Full disclosure: Radu asked for Yesica Prado’s feedback on the Good Neighbor Guidelines and accepted a few suggestions to clarify wording but did not incorporate her other recommendations.

The post Berkeley Says It Was Aggressive in Homeless Encampment Sweeps, Promises Reforms appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“People are fed up with it,” said San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott at a news conference on Friday. “We are fed up with it. And our attention needs to be on the people who are causing the problems, not on each other.”

But the emphasis on law enforcement for addressing the city’s drug crisis has distressed public defense attorneys and harm reduction advocates who fear the move may worsen the rate of fatal overdoses.

“Right now, we’re losing four people a day to overdose deaths on the street, and that’s up from two a day from last year,” said Sujung Kim, an attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. “Driving everything underground is part of what makes it so unsafe.”

Kim said she would love to see fewer people addicted to drugs, but cracking down on street level dealing will only worsen fatalities because people will be less likely to call 911 for fear of arrest, and it will drive drug users to buy from unfamiliar sources, heightening the risk of overdose.

Research has shown that incarceration increases risk of overdose. According to a study by the Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Corrections that was published last month in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment, people recently released from incarceration face a risk of opioid overdose 10 times greater than the general public.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement on April 21 that he was sending the National Guard and Highway Patrol to San Francisco stated that the new law enforcement partnership would not target drug users, only drug dealers and traffickers.

Scott reiterated that the operation would target drug dealers. But he suggested that police would also focus on open drug use, saying, “It’s not OK — not only to deal drugs on the streets, but to use drugs on the streets.”

Matthew Beevers, deputy adjutant general of the California National Guard, said at Friday’s news conference that he wanted to “dispel rumors” that the military’s involvement would include “boots on the ground in San Francisco.” Instead, he said, the soldiers and airmen would synthesize information gathered by all enforcement agencies into “actionable information that we can map.”

They would track “cartel networks both operating in the city and outside the city — understand those networks, build a common operating picture of it, and then work to dismantle those networks,” Beevers said.

Gary McCoy, vice president of policy and public affairs for HealthRight 360, which is contracted to run numerous harm reduction programs in the city, said he understood the pressure facing city officials and law enforcement, but believed it to be the wrong approach.

“I think that folks are just very frustrated with where we’re at right now, with what they’re seeing that’s more visible in the streets,” McCoy said. “But really, the challenges that we’re seeing on the streets right now are largely due to the war on drugs, and it’s been the punitive approaches to people who use drugs and the high rates of incarceration.”

McCoy advocates reducing drug demand by stepping up access to long-term treatment, and by taking a more forgiving approach to recovery, in which individuals are not kicked out of residential treatment facilities for briefly returning to drug use. He added that 90-day residential treatment programs were not enough to get people with substance use disorder stabilized. Although a new two-year “step-down” facility just opened on Treasure Island offering 70 spots, a lot more is needed, he said.

“The ideal number of step-down beds would be three to four times the amount of residential treatment beds, because you’re cycling more people out of residential treatment,” he said. “We’re getting there. The city’s made fast improvements to that stock.”

There are currently a total of 245 residential treatment beds in San Francisco and 193 step-down beds.

Studying Divergent Approaches

Alex Kral is an epidemiologist with independent research institute RTI International who has been studying harm reduction programs for more than 30 years. Kral said he was baffled by the law enforcement approach because no research has shown that expending resources and efforts on reducing drug supply has led to either reduced demand or reduced health complications related to drug use. Since the adoption of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, he said, resources dedicated to drug supply law enforcement have “far outspent” measures to prevent drug addiction, provide treatment and reduce harm. Meanwhile, “We’ve just seen things get worse and worse and worse.”

“I get it,” Kral said. “If you don’t understand much about drug use or drug markets or any of that, it makes sense to me that people are like ‘Well, if we just prevent there being drugs in the community, it will stop.’ But this is not how it’s ever worked in any society in the world. And definitely the U.S. is a prime example of a place where this has turned out miserably for 50 years.”

In 2008, the Brookings Institution analyzed three approaches to global counternarcotics policies: “the punishment model” of the U.S., which uses incarceration to deter use; “the depenalization model” used in Italy and Spain, which keeps illicit drugs illegal but does not punish personal use below certain amounts; and “the decriminalization model” used in the Netherlands. Findings were most critical of the punishment model of the U.S., where incarceration rates have soared — to more than 350,000 in 2023 from fewer than 50,000 people in 1980 — costing billions in taxes while few prisoners have access to any form of drug treatment.

Drug courts, which were meant to divert defendants into treatment, largely failed at providing treatment to those who truly needed it, and filled up limited spaces with court-mandated patients who did not always need the care, according to research by Physicians for Human Rights.

Mayor London Breed said at Friday’s news conference that the operation in San Francisco differs from the war on drugs of the 1980s, because back then, “everything was about arrest, lock people up.” Now, she said, the city provides “extremely generous” social services.

Nevertheless, the Public Defender’s Office has seen increased prosecutions for low-level drug sales, which are “filling up our jails,” Kim said. And defendants are often subsistence drug dealers, meaning they sell drugs to fund their own addictions.

District Attorney’s Aggressive Tactics

Andi Gernaey is harm reduction director of the St. James Infirmary. Gernaey leads a team that travels by van to the Mission District to distribute hygiene kits, harm reduction supplies, food and other necessities.

Gernaey said the crackdown is in keeping with “draconian” measures from law enforcement that have been seen since Brooke Jenkins took over as San Francisco’s district attorney, including installing barriers along certain streets in the Mission to disrupt sex work.

“A lot of time they just use it as an excuse to harass people and search people and detain people, and then they end up not filing formal charges because they’re more like nuisance charges than what holds up in court,” Gernaey said.

Not knowing what’s planned for the stepped-up enforcement is causing anxiety among the team members, who worry that officers will not understand what they are doing there. Gernaey said they advised the team to be wary.

“If we are approached by police or military,” Gernaey told the workers, “just like, don’t say anything, say you’ll get your supervisor, and then I’ll talk with them because we’re allowed to do what we’re doing.”

Sean Duryee, commissioner of the California Highway Patrol, said at Friday’s conference that his officers would be patrolling and executing arrests. He did not disclose the number of officers involved in the operation but said that 75 officers are currently assigned to San Francisco with nine more arriving in June.

Jenkins said the operation would help combat the “human trafficking defense.” She said suspects often speciously claim to have been forced into selling drugs under threats to them or their families.

“I am very excited at the prospect of having additional resources to be able to dispel the notion that people are not here dealing drugs of their own accord, because that is clearly what is happening,” Jenkins said.

Kim said that as an attorney at the Public Defender’s Office, she had heard “horrific” firsthand accounts from people arrested for dealing drugs, some as young as 17, who had witnessed gang violence in Central America and knew what MS-13 was capable of.

“Brooke Jenkins could deny all she wants, but two of her attorneys lost cases last year where the juries heard their stories,” Kim said. “One of them, they had to pay coyotes to come over here to escape violence, and they were under threat of death, forced to sell drugs. And the juries believed the defense. I’m not saying it’s every single case, but it happens more often than people might know.”

This article is part of a series on San Francisco’s overdose crisis and prevention efforts, underwritten by a California Health Equity Fellowship grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post Military-Style Drug War in Tenderloin Sparks Fears That More Drug Users Could Overdose appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The California Public Utilities Commission did not even consistently collect the most basic industry information, such as ride requests and miles driven, the report from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority shows.

The state’s spotty information about company operations makes it more difficult for policy makers, especially at the local level, to address top priorities like road safety, air quality and access to transportation for people with disabilities, the study says.

Cities bear the brunt of congestion and other industry side effects — particularly San Francisco, which had by far the greatest ride concentration of any municipality in the state, with more than 820,000 trips per square mile in the year ending Aug. 30, 2020. But they have little jurisdiction over the ride-hailing giants, which are regulated by the state.

“The lack of accurate, timely and transparent data has left localities without necessary information to support a basic understanding” of ride-hailing company operations within their borders, the study said. 

According to the report, the commission let Uber and Lyft submit inconsistent and incomplete data in their mandatory annual reports to the agency.  

The problems are exacerbated “if not directly caused by” the commission’s unclear reporting requirements and “lack of quality assurance or enforcement of quality standards,” it said.

On Tuesday, Joe Castiglione, deputy director for technology, data and analysis at the Transportation Authority, presented the study to its board.

“TNC 2020: A Profile of Ride-Hailing in California,” is the first broad analysis of annual reports from Uber and Lyft, which are the dominant players in a sector known as transportation network companies. It covers September 2019 to August 2020, the interval for which the most complete data is available.

Although the transportation agency’s initial goal was to examine ride-hailing’s effects on the state’s people and environment, it also found “pervasive” problems with the commission’s data collection practices.

Among the study’s findings:

• Lyft filed only 36% of the required data with the commission, while Uber reported more than 99%, suggesting that the commission enforced the reporting rules inconsistently. 
• Even basic data on company activity was self-contradictory, with Lyft stating two different figures for its total completed trips that varied by 49.7 million trips, or 81%. Uber’s totals varied by 9.3 million trips, or 6%.
• If San Francisco had accurate figures, Castiglione told the board, it could better assess whether Uber and Lyft are paying the city a per-trip surcharge that funds public transportation.
• Uber produced an estimated 494,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, an amount comparable to that released by the 2020 Caldwell Fire in Northern California, which burned 81,000 acres. Almost a third of those vehicle emissions occurred with no passengers aboard. Because Lyft’s mileage data was incomplete, its emissions could not be estimated.
• While ride-hailing companies promised to reduce congestion through shared travel, the data shows that just 14% of calls are for “pooled” rides, and only 7% are filled.
• Only about half of all requests for wheelchair-accessible vehicles were served. Uber completed 47%, and Lyft 53%.
• Lyft reported three times as many public safety incidents on a per-trip basis as Uber did. These include collisions, assaults, harassments, drunk driving complaints and traffic citations. Lyft reported 30 times as many assaults and harassments as Uber did on a per-trip basis.

However, the study noted that the firms may be reporting differently, “pointing to the need for increased review by regulators.”

The ride-hailing firms have said that more than 99% of their trips end without safety issues, and that they have added security features to their apps. Uber, for example, offers “share my trip,” which lets riders send their location to friends or family. Lyft has a similar option.

The state commission has also released the firms’ 2021 data filings, but the local study said they appeared to be even less complete, and so heavily redacted they could not be fully evaluated.

The Transportation Authority emphasized that the commission, which also regulates driverless vehicles across California, has been heavily redacting its reports on them as well, even though cities need quality data on how the nascent services may affect them.

In 2013 the commission became the first agency in the nation to legalize ride-hailing, and is the only state agency that collects comprehensive data on the industry.

Terrie Prosper, the commission’s spokeswoman, said in an email that the agency was aware of the city’s concerns. “CPUC staff have been working with the TNCs to rectify many of the concerns for the 2020 data and for subsequent reporting years,” she said. 

Uber and Lyft spokespeople said in emails Monday that they had complied with the commission’s requests for information, but questioned the study’s overall conclusions. They did not respond to questions about specific findings.

The commission’s faulty data collection came to light in October 2021, after the Public Press obtained data on assaults and harassments from the 2020 annual safety filings for Uber and Lyft under the California Public Records Act. It was the first public disclosure of any annual ride-hailing safety reports, revealing that numbers the firms submitted to the commission varied widely.

The commission confirmed in a ruling in January 2022 that it had let the ride-hailing giants use varying definitions of sexual assault since at least 2017, and this “could impact the total number and types of incidents reported in their annual reports.”

The commission in June 2022 voted to require uniform definitions in reporting assault complaints. It did not address other categories of data.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston, one of several Transportation Authority board members, at the hearing Tuesday expressed frustration with the state commission.  

“We basically privatized and deregulated transportation, and this is what we get: clogged street, no accountability, no data,” he said. “This is a joke. I mean, a cruel joke in terms of data integrity.” 

Read more about the ride-hailing industry and the record of state regulators in our ongoing series, “Ride Hailing’s Dark Data.”

The post Local Planners Say State Failed to Track Safety Incidents on Uber and Lyft appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio, D-Baldwin Park, the bill — Piqui’s Law: Keeping Children Safe from Family Violence — “gives voice to the 920 children that are calling out to us from their graves,” the lawmaker said in introductory remarks before the committee. One way the state could do that, she said, would be to better train court staff and judges.

The bill is named after Piqui, a 5-year-old boy murdered by his father, who suffocated his son while he was sleeping in his car seat in 2017 during an unsupervised visit.

Piqui’s mother, Ana Estevez, gave tearful testimony, saying her son would not have died had the judge approved her request for sole custody and issued a restraining order against her abusive ex-husband.

Piqui’s Law would direct the Judicial Council of California — the policy-making body of the California courts responsible for ensuring the impartial administration of justice — to expand training for judges on domestic violence and child abuse as part of continuing education requirements.

If approved by both houses of the Legislature and signed by the governor, Senate Bill 331 would establish judicial reporting requirements on these trainings and expert testimony in child custody proceedings.

“One thing is clear,” Rubio said. “We need to educate” the judiciary on domestic violence issues.

Another controversial provision in the bill would prohibit courts from ordering family reunification therapy for children of estranged parents. Judges sometimes forcibly send children to camps that often last no more than four days and cost $25,000 to $40,000, to persuade them to bond with the parent they say abused them. Frequently, the children are taken to other states, where they are prevented from having contact with the other parent. Afterward, court ordered separation could last for months or years.

Through tears, with her mother, Jill Montes, by her side, 10-year-old Zoe Winenger testified at the April 25 committee hearing that she was traumatized at a reunification camp. On her way home after the hearing, she told her mother that testifying was the best thing she had done in her life, according to Rubio’s office.

Some at the hearing defended reunification therapy. One father said that without the judge in his case ordering it, he would not have gotten custody of his daughter. “Reunification therapy does in fact work,” he said.

In a press release after the hearing, Rubio said: “Protecting our children should always be a priority, but the legal system failed Piqui and so many other children. SB 331 will begin a systematic change in family court to prevent another family from suffering such pain.”

This is the second time the senator has introduced such a bill. Last year, pushback from the Judicial Council, which objected to the provision that mandated additional training for family court judges, forced Rubio to withdraw her bill. SB 331 is an amended version of that bill.

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.

The post State Bill to Keep Children Safe in Custody Battles Passes First Hurdle appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

These tragedies were disproportionately suffered by marginalized groups. The biggest increase in deaths occurred among those who lacked housing. People listed as having “no fixed address” accounted for 61 overdose deaths in the first quarter, up from 26 during the same period in 2022. Black residents accounted for 33% of fatal overdoses in the first quarter this year, despite representing only 5% of the city’s population.

Addiction experts say the recent increase in overdose deaths could be linked to the closure of the Tenderloin Linkage Center, a temporary facility that operated in United Nations Plaza from January to December 2022 to help drug users and people without housing access supportive services.

Gary McCoy is vice president of policy and public affairs for HealthRight 360, the organization that ran health services for the Tenderloin site. The center also became an unofficial overdose prevention center, and McCoy connects the rise in overdoses to its closure.

“When TLC was open, and we had a safe place for folks to go, the numbers went down,” McCoy said. “So yeah, it’s pretty telling data.”

Department of Public Health statistics showed that from January to November 2022, the center received 100,000 visits and reversed 300 overdoses. Despite those results, the city shut down the site a month earlier than planned in part due to complaints from business owners and residents who said that drug use and dealing increased after the center opened.

City officials planned to open more supervised consumption sites as part of San Francisco’s 2022 overdose prevention plan, but City Attorney David Chiu advised against this since state and federal laws prohibit them.

Five days after the medical examiner’s report was released, Gov. Gavin Newsom made an unannounced tour of the Tenderloin with state Attorney General Rob Bonta. In a video posted online Wednesday, Twitter user JJ Smith approached Newsom as he strode down Ellis Street, asking him what he was doing about the fentanyl crisis.

“That’s why we’re here. You tell me what to do,” Newsom said as he continued walking.

The health department did not address questions about a link between the closure of the Tenderloin Center and a rise in deaths. Instead it emailed a response pointing to measures the city is taking to address the overdose crisis, including distributing more than 5,000 kits of the overdose reversal drug naloxone and the recent opening of a 70-bed residential facility at Treasure Island for people transitioning out of treatment programs.

State legislators passed a bill last June that would have allowed supervised consumption sites in San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles, but Newsom vetoed it in August, saying he would not back such a move “without strong, engaged local leadership and well-documented, vetted, and thoughtful operational and sustainability plans.”

Alex Kral, an epidemiologist with independent research institute RTI International who has been studying harm reduction programs and supervised consumption sites for more than 30 years, called Newsom’s decision “disappointing.” In recent years, Kral provided expert testimony on their effectiveness in public hearings at City Hall and in Sacramento. 

“A couple of years before that, when he was campaigning, he said he would sign such a law,” Kral said. “And then he went back on it. And, you know, that was really a shame. And it’s really set us back.”

Kral said he provided San Francisco’s heath department with results of his study of the Tenderloin Center, which showed that it did not increase public drug use or the prevalence of discarded paraphernalia, but that it did reduce drug-related emergency department visits.

Nevertheless, Mayor London Breed expressed disappointment in the Tenderloin Center because fewer than 1% of its clients were provided opportunities to enter treatment.

In December 2021, Breed declared a “state of emergency” authorizing a crackdown on drugs in the Tenderloin. A few months leading up to the linkage center’s closure, police began leaning into a more punitive approach, which Breed lauded in a recent blog post, noting statistics showed that from Oct. 1, 2022, to April 6, 2023, police made 379 arrests for drug possession or sale in the Tenderloin.

But McCoy said the subsequent rise in overdose deaths shows that cracking down on possession is not an effective method for reducing drug use or the harm it causes.

“We’ve increased enforcement, police officers have been arresting and citing people for using drugs and having paraphernalia, the district attorney has increased her punitive efforts,” McCoy said. “And the rates of cases charged for people who use drugs, and our numbers, are going up.”

Furthermore, he said, focusing on the number of people who enter treatment is not an accurate measure of success.

“It takes consistent contact and communication to have those conversations,” he said. “It’s not overnight, although it could be sometimes, but it’s often not.”

During the last days the center was open, people who had been placed in housing and received services returned to express their gratitude.

“They were coming in on the last day, and bringing us flowers and thank you cards,” McCoy said. “It was very emotional.” He said some of those who received assistance were, “upset that what had helped them is no longer going to exist for other people.”

Former client Adriel Cota said the center helped by giving him clean drug consumption supplies. Staff were on hand to reverse overdoses should the need arise. But Cota said he was acutely aware of the perception caused by all the medical emergency activity at the center.

“I know there were a lot of ODs here,” he said. “Paramedics were here almost on the daily but, you know, that’s kind of what this was for. Out of all the ODs I know, everyone survived.”

Cota, who does not have housing, said the center provided him with services that were unavailable elsewhere, were located far away or limited access to once or twice a week.

“Here, every day they had food,” Cota said. “If you would take a shower, they’d wash your clothes, and before you go, get out of the shower, your clothes will be ready. Now, I’ll have to figure it out as best as I can.”

This article is part of a series on San Francisco’s overdose crisis and prevention efforts, underwritten by a California Health Equity Fellowship grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post With Overdose Deaths Surging, Critics Chide City, State for Curbing Safe Consumption Centers 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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In a unanimous decision issued Friday, a three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco said the commission’s lengthy and open-ended administrative procedures violate the strict timelines of the California Public Records Act.

The ruling could bring more accountability to the commission, which has faced criticism of excessive secrecy and ineffectiveness, advocates said. It regulates corporations ranging from utilities to ride-hailing services.

The commission had claimed that a century-old law — intended to prevent abusive litigation by railroad barons fighting regulations — required people requesting records to undergo a convoluted administrative process before they could sue the agency to compel the release of public records.

Citing that section of the Public Utilities Code, the agency over the years has blocked requests for records on its handling of disasters such as Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s Camp fire, the failed San Onofre nuclear power plant and thousands of collisions and assaults on Uber and Lyft rides.

But the court roundly rejected the agency’s argument, holding that the procedures set forth in the utilities code “do not apply to the PRA,” or Public Records Act.

“[T]he procedural scheme, and specifically the rehearing process, set forth in the Public Utilities Code is not only entirely different than, it is at odds with, the procedural provisions of the PRA and the Legislature’s intent in enacting them,” the court said.

More widely, the court said “any” administrative process that state and local agencies adopt to handle records requests “must comply with the language and purpose of the PRA.” If agencies fail to complete their internal reviews within the deadlines of the records act, it said, requesters may seek court review without further delay.

But the court also held that the specific records requested in this case — correspondence between the commission and the governor’s office concerning the devastating 2018 Camp fire — were confidential and need not be released.

Citing prior holdings on similar records, the court said releasing the governor’s correspondence with the commission would interfere with the ability of government officials to speak frankly.

How the Public Utilities Commission circumvents the California Public Records Act

David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for government transparency, said that although the court found the governor’s correspondence to be confidential, the ruling was an important advance.

“The decision is a real win for transparency,” said Snyder, whose organization joined with the Associated Press and the Center for Investigative Reporting in supporting the lawsuit. They had filed a brief in the case that said the commission has a history of “unlawful delays” in responding to requests.

“The court has made clear that an agency’s administrative procedures can’t trump the Public Records Act, and that an agency like the PUC cannot indefinitely delay processing a public records request,” Snyder said.

Terrie Prosper, the commission’s director of news and outreach, and Christofer Nolan, a lawyer representing the agency in the case, did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Steve Zansberg, the Denver attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of television station ABC-10 in Sacramento and its reporter Brandon Rittiman, said his clients were gratified that the decision will make it easier for people to seek judicial review in cases where the agency delays or denies their requests.

“No one should have to wait, as did my clients, for months and months to be able to ask a court to review that agency’s decision to deny records access,” he said in a statement.

As the court put it, “The delay that occurred here was egregious by any measure.”

On Nov. 19, 2020, Rittiman requested copies of communications between Marybel Batjer, president of the commission at the time, and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office concerning the Camp fire. The Butte County blaze destroyed 18,000 structures and killed at least 85 people. PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one of causing the fire.

Rittiman was investigating why the agency waived a $200-million fine against PG&E and whether the governor’s office influenced that decision.

The agency said the records were confidential; Rittiman filed an administrative appeal. When seven months had passed and the agency had made no decision, Rittiman sued, the court noted.

The agency then sought to get his case dismissed because he had not completed its administrative process, but the state Supreme Court ordered a review.

The commission has long maintained that those requesting records could not sue it for failing to comply with the Public Records Act until they underwent two internal administrative appeals of their claim. As its legal basis, the agency cited the 100-year-old law intended to prevent abusive litigation by railroad interests.

But as the lawsuit noted, the agency’s appeals system provided no deadline, allowing it to indefinitely delay its decisions on whether to release records, despite the Act’s requirement that agencies decide within 24 days. In this way, the agency prevented people from having a court independently review their cases, even as their requests languished at the agency.

Enacted in 1968, the California Public Records Act is modeled on the federal Freedom of Information Act. The state law declares that “access to information concerning the conduct of the people’s business is a fundamental and necessary right.”

It says all state agencies “shall” determine whether the requested records are releasable within 24 days, immediately notify the requester and “promptly” release them. If an agency withholds records, it says, the requester may seek court review “at the earliest possible time.”

Voters reinforced the law in 2004 when they overwhelmingly passed Proposition 59, which embedded similar words in the state Constitution.

The commission, too, has roots in a voter-backed constitutional amendment. The agency was created in 1879 as the Railroad Commission but was corrupted by the Southern Pacific Railroad, says a history written by commission staff. In 1911, voters following Gov. Hiram Johnson’s reform platform granted the agency greater autonomy with the intent of insulating it from undue influences. Its authority was extended to other utilities, and in 1946 it was renamed.

The agency is led by five commissioners appointed by the governor to six-year terms. They oversee 1,402 employees and a $1.1-billion budget.

The commission’s policy on records requests — known as General Order 66-D — says requesters must complete the internal administrative reviews before they can seek judicial review of the agency’s withholding of records.

But the court concluded that just as the Legislature had used its “plenary” power to pass the public utilities code of the early 20th century, it used the same sweeping authority in 1968 to pass the records act, which it clearly intended to apply to the commission.

The court declared that “the PRA fixes the bounds” of the commission’s authority to adopt internal procedures for records requests. The agency’s open-ended process, it said, “cannot be squared” with the records act’s much tighter timeframe.

“In short, the PRA calls for the handling of record requests and the resolution of disputes over such requests with alacrity,” the panel said, and permits requesters to sue to enforce the act.

“The PUC has for so many years operated in a black box,” said the First Amendment Coalition’s Snyder. “The public has not had as much access to its inner workings. Hopefully this will open the door, at least a bit, to greater transparency and, thus, greater accountability for the Public Utilities Commission.”

For more coverage on this topic, see Ride Hailing’s Dark Data. This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Support also came from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The post Court Says California Utilities Commission Must Obey State Public Records Act appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Fires in encampments, tents and other makeshift shelters occurred more frequently in recent years, reporting from the San Francisco Public Press and Mission Local shows. But incident counts alone do not offer a clear explanation of what is happening on the street.  

In late February, as temperatures dropped, a fire at a freeway overpass killed one woman and critically injured three people. KQED reported that the woman killed was survived by three children.  

While people without shelter do use fire to keep warm, fire incidents don’t seem to be linked very closely to temperature.  

“I kind of found less seasonal variation in them than I had expected,” said Mission Local data reporter Will Jarrett. “It’s used for cooking a lot and that kind of thing. So, I don’t think it’s necessarily entirely about heat, although that is obviously a big one.” 

The reporters also found that clues about a fire’s origin or nature were only reflected in detailed fire department “narratives” that are not as readily available as information like time, date and location of a blaze. Even basic data needed to be pulled out of static documents to be analyzed. 

“They would give us reports, like full PDF reports, when we asked for spreadsheets,” said Public Press data reporter Jenny Kwon. The data would be sent in rounds rather than all at once, “and sometimes not even within the date range that we requested.” 

In some cases, the information recorded in the fire department’s database did not match the experience of its victim. Jarrett said one victim Mission Local spoke with said their tent had been set on fire from the outside while they were sleeping 

“They had some burns, but they weren’t too badly hurt,” he said. “It could have been worse, but still pretty terrible. And then when we looked up the fire in the dataset, it was classified as a garbage fire, and there was no indication of injury or possessions that had been damaged.” 

Using flames in or near tents carries risk, but it is a risk many people are willing to take.  

“It’s really hard for these fires to cease if people don’t have the basic materials to actually make this safer, like be able to cook in a safer way, stay warm in a safer way,” said Yesica Prado, a multimedia journalist who has been covering homelessness for the Public Press. “We were seeing in the data, we saw that from 2019 to 2021, the fires is still kind of on the rise, you know. They haven’t really dropped down.” 

Clearing encampments or forbidding people from using heat or light sources when outdoors is not likely to be effective, Kwon, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, said.  

“It’s not, again, addressing the main reasons they’re starting fires, which is for survival purposes,” they said. “And it’s not actually advocating for the safety of the victims of these fires who are unhoused.” 

Prado and Kwon have also investigated ways to address the problem of tent, encampment and other outdoor fires. A related complication is that fire victims who live on the street feel they are not given the same consideration and empathy as housed fire victims. 

“I feel like there has been a lot of fires happening in California,” Prado said. “We have all these kinds of things set up to help fire victims, and right now, we just don’t have anything locally to help the people that are on the streets.” 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post What Reporters Learned Mapping Encampment Fires appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

As encampment fires spiked in Oakland and San Francisco during the first year of the pandemic, they fell by half in the Rangers community to just six. One reason for the disparity? The Rangers beefed up fire precautions. The community’s last tent fire occurred 18 months ago, and when a vehicle caught fire in December 2021, residents were prepared. They used fire extinguishers to put out the blaze.

A mother of three who was caught under a freeway overpass in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood didn’t have the good fortune to live in a community with the Rangers’ tools and preparation. A February fire killed her and severely injured three others.

Encampment fires are a fact of life due to the exposed conditions unhoused residents live in, and have led to painful consequences for residents of encampments like the pair of sites along a freeway exit in Berkeley known as Seabreeze, who were removed by state officials last summer after a series of fires. But the Rangers’ camp demonstrates that there’s hope for controlling these incidents without official intervention. The key to their success has been fire preparedness, including measures like installing smoke alarms and keeping fire extinguishers on hand, according to Derrick Soo, leader of the Rangers community.

“Fire safety measures are a necessity, including at encampments, because every human life is valuable,” said Paul-Kealoha Blake, a member of Berkeley’s Homeless Commission and a volunteer with the nonprofit Consider the Homeless! “Encampment fires are an issue because they endanger both the resident of the structure that’s on fire and endangers the encampment.”

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About a year ago, former Berkeley councilmember Cheryl Davila pushed to create an official program to address encampment fires. Davila proposed using existing homeless services funding to distribute fire extinguishers and fire prevention tools through social service providers. The City Council tabled the proposal in March 2021.

Fire preparedness is essential “to protect the safety of our people and preemptively stop the spread of preventable fires,” said Davila in a report to the council last year.

As an example of work the city could build on, she pointed to outreach done by residents and homeless advocacy nonprofits that have distributed chemical fire extinguishers to people living in tents and vehicles.

Those tools might have helped residents of a large Wood Street encampment in Oakland, where multiple vehicles caught fire on March 1, including an RV. Within a week, another encampment less than a mile away also went up in flames. Fires increased 14% in Oakland during the first year of the pandemic to 611 from the previous year’s 535, tent encampment fires are projected to decline slightly in the second year.

During the first year of the pandemic, fire incidents associated with homeless encampments in Berkeley rose at a similar rate, climbing 18% to 133 from 113 the previous year. About a third of those fires were at the Seabreeze Camp on the Interstate 80 University Avenue exit, where passersby reported smoke, cooking, trash fires and tent fires.

Residents at the Seabreeze camp used extinguishers to control some of their fires, but each time one was used, it had to be replaced or refilled, which made it difficult for volunteers to abate all fires without support from the city.

In this camp and many other locations, residents approach fires differently than the Rangers.

On the edge of the freeway

On a cold, windy evening at Seabreeze Camp, Mama West looked for spare poles to fix her sleeping quarters and prevent her tent from blowing away. 

For the past six years, Mama West lived on this strip of land along the University Avenue freeway exit in Berkeley. Residents and advocates named the community after a nearby market. Seabreeze is also an apt descriptor: The winds can reach 30 miles per hour here near the Berkeley Marina, and fire is a necessity to maintain warmth.

As the sun set, her partner, Drew, got ready to start a blaze in their fire pit, a metal tub wide and high enough to shield a sizable bonfire. He found fuel from a neighbor, Shawna, who keeps stacks of chopped-up pallets in front of her tent.

In early July 2021, the Seabreeze Camp was scheduled to be dismantled by Caltrans due to the growing issues with trash and fires. Berkeley city staff also cited problems like crime and domestic disputes.

On Aug. 9, Gov. Gavin Newsom joined the transportation agency staff in clearing part of the encampment before holding a briefing on his California Comeback Plan, which dedicates $12 billion to housing, shelter and services for people experiencing homelessness, plus $50 million for local governments to resolve encampments.

After the cleanup at the “downstairs” section of Seabreeze where people camped under the freeway, “11 residents accepted services,” said Will Arnold, a spokesman for Caltrans. Several others were displaced onto city streets without securing housing services.

A week later, when the Seabreeze “upstairs” cleanup took place, another 17 residents who lived on the islands along the University exit and Frontage Road had nowhere to go. They relocated to city sidewalks and a nearby freeway exit. About two dozen, including Mama West, moved into hotel rooms through Project Roomkey, which places unhoused residents in hotels. Two people accepted a four-person tent at the 24-hour Horizon Transitional Village shelter, according to a Berkeleyside report and a reporter’s visit to the indoor tent site.

Those who declined shelter beds pointed to bans on guests, pets, cooking and substance use. In addition, they said, showers are available only twice a week and lights stay on all the time. “Several people have turned down Horizon because their outside tents are bigger than the indoor tent that sits on the concrete floor inside,” wrote activist and civil rights attorney Andrea Henson in an email. “For some with severe disabilities and chronic pain this makes a difference.”

A civil rights lawsuit filed against Caltrans in August on behalf of Seabreeze encampment charged that some “did not receive any offer of housing at all” and others “had disabilities that prevented them from accessing alternative shelter.” The plaintiffs won a preliminary injunction allowing them to remain at the former Shellmound camp, located at the Ashby freeway exit, for six months. Caltrans has appealed. On March 23, the injunction is set to expire, and another hearing is scheduled to determine a four-month extension. Plaintiffs also ask to return to the Seabreeze camp, saying it’s a safer and more accessible location to connect remaining residents to housing services.

Mitigating fire risk

After gathering fuel, Drew loaded the fire pit with wood scraps and a Burger King bag filled with cardboard clamshell containers and paper wrappers. His torch lighter ignited the flames, and he placed a metal rack with an empty skillet on top. But he forgot the water he intended to boil, and stepped into the darkness of the tent, searching for a water jug.

“Do not leave your skillet unattended without water!” yelled Mama West when she spotted the pan. She threw it in the sand and covered the fire pit with the skeleton of a metal chair, protecting other items from coming close to the open flames.

In 2021, Mama West’s tent has caught fire three times as winds spread the flames from fires set by neighbors for cooking and warmth. Once, a small barbecue grill was knocked from the cooking table.

About a month before this dinner, Mama West lost one of her puppies in a tent fire that began while she stepped outside to make a cup of tea in her fire pit. Suddenly, smoke poured from her tent, and she dashed inside to rescue her six puppies and adult dog. She doesn’t know what set the tent ablaze.

The greatest loss for her was not her personal identification documents and other belongings, but her dog Patches and the puppies she considered “grandbabies.” Berkeley’s Animal Control      put her dogs up for adoption and charged Mama West with animal endangerment in the death of her puppy. She fought to get the charge dropped, but her animals were not returned.

Seabreeze Camp residents successfully fought for years against Caltrans efforts to clear the parcel where they lived, but their eventual displacement felt inevitable. The agency’s policy calls for evicting residents immediately when encampments pose an imminent threat to safety or relocating them over a longer timeline when the risk is high but not critical.

“Immediate threats include modifications to structures that increase the risk of collapse, encampments that physically block traffic or pathways and put people in the encampments or the traveling public at risk of imminent danger,” Hector Chichilla, a Caltrans spokesman, wrote in an email, adding that fire risk may also fall under this category. 

The pandemic put a crimp in the encampment removal policy. Cleanups fell to less than a quarter of their pre-pandemic numbers in 2020 before rebounding in 2021.

In Berkeley, the most common fire calls associated with unhoused individuals and encampments are survival-related fires — those used for cooking and warming — the notes in Berkeley Fire Department reports show. Warming fires almost doubled to 35 during the first year of the pandemic, while cooking fires fell by about half to 33. Advocates and homeless communities concerned about fires say the city could do more to help them, especially given its efforts elsewhere.

The Berkeley Fire Department has often made donations of surplus equipment and vehicles to residents in need in countries as far afield as Argentina and South Africa. They have also donated locally, helping the Berkeley School District, Berkeley Boosters Association and the Northern California city of McCloud.

Berkeley does run an emergency weather shelter, but by December 2021, it was at capacity, hosting only 19 residents due to COVID-19 restrictions. In late January, the city also relocated 27 unhoused people to hotel rooms at the Berkeley Inn through a special winter housing program, but less than a month later, almost all were returned to the streets, where temperatures dropped below 40 degrees. Many lacked tents, as their property was seized during sweeps Jan. 26 and Feb. 1.

“We don’t have enough shelter space,” said Blake of the homeless commission. “It’s all full. And the Horizon shelter has no heat.”

Dinner al fresco

As the moon lit up the night sky above their tent, Drew returned with a clear jug and put the skillet back on the fire rack, boiling water for soup with instant noodles. Mama West heated a foil plate of prepared rice, broccoli and teriyaki chicken from a homeless-services nonprofit.

While the food warmed up, Mama West stashed her groceries from weekly donations in the mended tent to keep them safe from rats. Plastic bags and bins filled half the tent, leaving the edge of the mattress open for the two to sit. After she and Drew reorganized the food bins, Mama West put her prized keyboard back inside. She loves making music.

With the food secured, dinner was ready. They sat on the mattress and laid out dishes to share on top of their metal ice chest. Mama West dug into the chicken teriyaki plate with her fingers and Drew slurped his chicken noodles, watching the fire crackle.  

Fire prevention: community solutions

In deep East Oakland, leader Derick Soo set up a fire safety system for the 77th Avenue Rangers and advocated for temporary access to a nearby fire hydrant. Kyle Mitchell, a lawyer and Soo’s friend, helped out. 

Mitchell has purchased fire suppression tools for the Rangers like extinguishers, alarms, Thermoses and power banks. The power banks allow people to charge devices and provide light, so residents can avoid the danger of open flames or wildcat hookups to electricity poles. He also distributed 20-gallon jugs of water to unhoused residents throughout Oakland, and advocated for water access at encampments to become an official city program.

For fire suppression, smoke detectors are effective, and with 10-year batteries, will last a long time. Because fire extinguishers are expensive to buy and refill, Mitchell taught unhoused residents how to cheaply refill them with pressurized water and soap. They can be refilled at gas stations or with a bicycle pump, but they are heavy – and this soap-and-water mixture won’t work on electrical or gas fires, although those incidents rarely occur at encampments due to their lack of amenities.

Soo uses a power solar grid that holds 4,000 watts with eight batteries, and a diesel generator for extra power to charge residents’ devices and two community refrigerators at night. Diesel is much less flammable than gasoline.

For heat, camp residents use gadgets fueled by propane because the power required to generate heat is more than any power bank or individual solar grid can provide. Propane is portable, abundant and long-lasting compared to other alternatives.

Fire prevention tools are distributed to Oakland residents living in homes and apartments, but on the streets, unhoused residents are responsible for devising their own solutions. Nonprofits and volunteers like Mitchell work to bridge that gap and distribute these much-needed essentials.

These tools can make a difference, especially when it’s cold. During the pandemic, fire incidents surged in winter, when temperatures dropped. Oakland averaged about 70 fires per month from November 2020 to March 2021, compared with 58 a year earlier. In 2021, fires continued to climb, spiking to 99 in March –– the highest monthly incident rate in the last three years.

The numbers are likely an underestimate, as Oakland Fire Department reports showed only encampment fires, not trash fires, vehicle fires, or other types of fires connected to unhoused residents.

Camp residents have identified several affordable tools and other alternatives for safe heating, like a portable propane heater that turns off when tipped over, or a diesel air heater. Soo heats his home with a turkey air fryer running on a small propane tank that can last him a month, but it costs him a whopping 60% more than a year ago.

Soo used to pay $15 for a 20-pound refill. Now he pays $24. The coronavirus pandemic increased demand for outdoor activities and recreational camping, and portable propane tanks were also often out of stock. Other options when propane is not available and money is tight are bottles filled with hot water or heated stones, according to Mitchell.

Soo has experimented with fire retardant paint on fabric and plywood surfaces. But even with these modifications, tents are not very resistant to any of the elements. 

“Typically, here on this street, tents last about two months because of the wind,” said Soo. “Wind just tears them up. Tents don’t hold very well even when you put tarps on them.”

Because of tents’ minimal weather protection and lack of security, Soo is designing Conestoga huts for the Rangers. These tiny homes, which look like the back of a covered wagon, will be built on a platform and have electricity, hot water, windows, showers and a mini kitchen. Each home has a water tank and infrared water heater. The rounded roof/wall uses plastic for waterproofing and tar paper for fire resistance under a heavy-duty tarp.

While these homes can be a solution to providing safe shelter, they are still temporary. Since 2016, Soo has been advocating for the sanctioning of his camp, and he also helps camp residents get connected to housing services. By March, the occupancy of the camp had dwindled down to half, and the city canceled their mobile shower service. But this has not defeated him, and Soo built a solar shower.

“Camps are a necessity because some folks have only known violent streets,” said Soo. “People don’t know a village community.”

The post Grassroots Nonprofits and Homeless Communities Create Their Own Fire Prevention Solutions appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Walk into Animal Care and Control’s bright and clean new facility on Bryant Street and you might be greeted by a human volunteer or an adoptable dog. But behind the scenes, officers are investigating alerts about possible abuse, errant wildlife and distressed animals. Animal Care and Control is an emergency service, and officers have been on the job throughout the pandemic, even having to cut hours temporarily as employees fell ill. Though call volume dropped dramatically with the first shelter-in-place order, as workers in many other sectors return to the job and are out and about more, and as kitten season approaches, the facility could see an increase in activity. For the staff on duty, each day can bring surprises.  

“That’s what makes the job so exciting, is that you have no idea what the day holds,” Lieutenant Eleanor Sadler said. “So you’re responding to all these calls. And it’s, you know, a sick pigeon that just looks sad on somebody’s doorstep or a raccoon hanging by its foot from a fence or hit-by-a-car possum, or squirrel in a chimney. There’s just a million variations of the trouble the animals can get into that they just needed a little bit of help with.” 

Sadler has decades of experience as an officer responding to calls, but she also works with the public in a less tactile way. She is the voice behind the widely popular Officer Edith Twitter account. With the likeness of a former resident Amazon parrot as its avatar, the account posts photos and insights that range from comedic to heartwarming to insightful.  

When Sadler first took over the account, “it was me and, like, 100 people, and it was just nonsense. And then I got retweeted by a local journalist,” she said. “And then suddenly, there was a massive input of followers, and things started getting really fun. And I started trying to figure out what works, what represents the agency well or is also interesting to people.” 

Neither the Twitter account nor the parts of the facility that are open to the public capture the entirety of what animal control officers do day to day.  

“You can’t ever really know what we do until you have this kind of conversation. It’s like, people have no idea that we arrest for animal cruelty,” Sadler said. “But they also don’t see the officer that picks up the 2-week-old kitten and it’s in bad condition but they’re like, ‘we’re on the fence about euthanizing this guy, we don’t think he’s gonna make it,’ and then the officer is like, ‘I’m going to take him home.’ They spend every two hours waking up making formula, warming them up, feeding them, peeing them. You know, it’s not just a job. It’s like a vocation for the people that are here.” 

Animals can end up at the shelter many different ways. They can be surrendered by an owner or found loose. Wildlife may need to be removed from an unsafe situation. Sometimes pets need a temporary home, like when the owner goes to the hospital, dies or is incarcerated. Some pet owners find themselves overwhelmed by multiplying animals. Officers also investigate allegations of animal abuse and may seize an animal in a welfare investigation. 

“We have hundreds of complaints a year. The majority are either a misunderstanding or just false. And then periodically, we get one that’s really serious. And we have to investigate it thoroughly and put all the pieces together,” Sadler said. “Our main goal is to make sure these people cannot have animals again.” 

Last year, a suspect in such a case was arrested after a lengthy investigation found he had inflicted multiple broken bones on his golden retriever puppy. The man pleaded guilty to misdemeanor animal cruelty and neglect.  

In many cases, however, officers play less of a law enforcement role and more of an educational one. They teach residents why it’s detrimental to feed wildlife, and how to handle an unexpected animal.  

“The general rule of thumb is to move slower than you think you have to be, quieter than you think you have to be. And don’t panic,” Sadler said. “If it’s an animal that we need to deal with, call us. And we will help you. But don’t put yourself in danger.” 

Where domestic animals are concerned, the Animal Care and Control center on Bryant Street could be the place prospective pet owners find a new companion. But domestic or no, pets can also be too much to handle. Animal Control is equipped to help in both situations. 

“If you’re interested in adopting an animal, go to a shelter or rescue group. If you’re overwhelmed in the animal you have, there is no shame in surrendering them. Doing what’s right is most important. And if you are unable to take care of an animal properly, there are people who will do that and they won’t shame you or judge you,” Sadler said. “We are a resource for people and we want people to use this resource.” 

For animal-related emergencies, Animal Care and Control can be reached 6 a.m. to midnight at 415-554-9400.  

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

The post Beyond Cute: SF Animal Control Enforces the Law, Educates, Helps Wildlife appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.