San Francisco Mayor Breed’s drug crisis meeting interrupted by boos, shouting, brick thrown in crowd

By BETTY YU

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    SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — A long-planned and unprecedented Board of Supervisors meeting was held at UN Plaza, the epicenter of San Francisco’s open-air drug market crisis.

It was meant to draw urgency to the deteriorating street conditions and worsening drug problem, but it was cut short soon after it began.

“I run into people day in and day out in the Tenderloin and they say ‘London, we would have never been able to get away with this stuff back in the day,’ and the fact is it’s time for a change,” said Mayor London Breed. “We want to get people help, but we will not continue to allow things to just occur as they have been.”

Breed spoke forcefully as she called for a tougher approach to dealing with brazen drug usage and dealing during the special off-site session.

It wasn’t hard for KPIX 5 cameras to find people opening using drugs nearby, in the shadow of City Hall.

“I think they should just give us housing. There’s 276,000 millionaires in San Francisco,” said one woman as she openly used drugs.

The outdoor meeting was called by Supervisor Aaron Peskin who said while the problem isn’t new, it’s become so visible that many San Franciscans don’t feel safe.

Within minutes, the meeting turned chaotic. Members of the public shouted down Peskin and the mayor.

Peskin had just begun to ask the mayor to set up an emergency operations center that would coordinate city agencies around shutting down open-air drug markets within 90 days. He said that the city does not a resources problem, it has a coordination problem.

“We have tried over and over again and what we are doing is not working, and in fact our local resources have increased,” said Breed. “But it has not dealt with the problem based on the magnitude of what we are experiencing.”

“I am putting everything on the line. I am doing this job without fear of losing it because at the end of the day when you know what it feels like to grow up in chaos you want nothing more than change,” she said.

The mayor also spoke passionately about the next generation growing up in the city.

“Why should someone else’s rights be put before their needs and their safety and what they deserve, too, in a place like San Francisco that claims to be so compassionate and liberal. What about them?” she said.

After it became clear to the mayor that she would not be able to answer questions thoroughly and completely, someone threw a brick in the crowd, injuring a teen, before being detained by police.

The meeting continued at City Hall.

“We must and we will hold people accountable when their behavior on the street is disruptive to residents, families and small businesses, enough is enough,” she said. “We are proposing changes to our state law and we will be enacting local programs to try and end this disruptive behavior.”

The mayor also noted that many people who need services are refusing them, which complicates the problem. There’s also a severe SFPD staffing shortage.

She urged the board to work together and approve her public safety budget and support programs and legislation to change our laws. She also asked supervisors to support arrests for those who are struggling with addiction, especially when they break the law, so that they can receive mandated treatment.

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