I think if I were dictator of SF, I would:
- force people who are either crazy or on fent into shelter / treatment. If you pass a drug test / sanity test, you're free to stay on the street if your heart desires. A lot of people will say stuff like "decades of research prove involuntary treatment doesn't work", but then they don't actually point to any research. It makes sense for alch, but I'm not confident that someone strongly addicted to fent CAN actually make voluntary decisions about their treatment. The strong evidence is just "they're literally sleeping in a pool of their own vomit, taking a drug that gives them necrosis until their limbs fall off, and typically the necrosis should kill them, but they're probably more likely to die from the OD". The fact that any human would choose that over treatment gives really strong evidence that they're not able to consent. To believe that involuntary treatment is bad is to believe that people, under sane mind, affirmatively consented to being tortured until they die for a dealer's profit.
- Constant and utmost kindness to victims of fent. Push people into treatment, be firm, but constantly enforce a "these are the victims" mentality with all officers & the public. You need to show people that forcing folks into treatment who can't decide for themselves is help, not harm.
- Build shelter outside the city. A lot of people will complain and say "oh well that sounds like you're just giving into the NIMBYs who don't want shelter next door". Yes. Correct. NIMBYs push back very strongly on shelter, which makes it much harder to build, and so we end up with less of it. Instead, buy land in places where people care less, and then push people into shelter there. When they exit shelter, the area around them should be less expensive than SF, which makes it easier for you to build other services. From a pure logistical point of view, it does not make sense to build shelter & services in one of the most expensive cities in the country, where people fight you at every turn to do so. Buy some land on the outskirts where it's cheap af, and build LOTS of shelter & services, instead of having a few multi-million dollar shelter beds in the middle of SF. It will feel like a loss, like you "gave in", but we're here for results, not "being right."
- Run a PSA that selling fent gets charged for murder if we can prove someone OD'd on something you sold, or attempted murder if not; and then actually press murder charges. If you sold brownies and put poison in them and someone died, you wouldn't just get to continue walking around. People don't want to reenact the drug war, but I genuinely think that fent is just literally a different beast. You actually have to bring dealers to justice. If you do not believe that we should arrest folks who poison and kill their victims for profit, at mass scale, then you probably should rethink your morals. Genuinely I can't imagine any crime worse than what the dealers do.
- Mass arrest the worst areas. Clear out 16th street, 6th street, and tenderloin. Get national guard if you can get them. Treat this like the crisis it is. If you can actually walk by these places and you don't think it's a crisis, you need to leave the city, go to literally any city in the world, and come back.
- Arrest fencers & the people that buy from them, you need to stop the top end of the chain.
- Prosecute bike theft as much as you prosecute car theft. Protecting bikes lets you win more points with transit & bike crowd, much of whom will fight you on all other parts of this plan. By protecting bikes, you split their coalition in two, those who want bikes & those who want bikes but only if you're also anti-police or something. That makes it easier to win on your other parts.
- aggressively use drones to scale law enforcement, I don't think drones are as bad as people think they are. People frequently bring up privacy concerns to this, but don't seem to understand that like law enforcement can literally buy a dataset of your exact location because you gave candy crush or whatnot your location. drones aren't all that privacy-infringing relative to the existing landscape; they're a lot better in ways. But they're very good at collecting evidence without putting lives in danger (the perp, the officer, or passers by).
- don't do "studies" when things seem obvious. Just go quick. Don't do "hearings" except when you succeeded. Just go quick. Give live updates of every accomplishment on all social platforms, and speak in obvious, public locations a lot. Don't wait weeks to do things, you gain trust from moving quickly.
- Talk to national media, not local journalism. Ignore them completely, most of the major ones have gone to paid-only models, which reduces their impact. You think they're mass media, but they're not anymore. Most people read national news (or podcasts / social media that's not region-specific), and San Francisco is a national story. Get yourself on the ezra klein show or other center-left (or left) media. Invite them to come literally to San Francisco, and literally take them to 16th street at night. Let people come to their own conclusions. Have at least two days a month where you work with a youtuber, podcaster, national news corespondent, or other non-local, or non-traditional news media.
i was going to make the joke that i vote for you for prez over either of these clowns haha … but then i realized i also sent you $50 for a prosthetic arm back in the day, so … i should maybe not be trusted to make important decisions