On September 29, an 11-year-old girl was attacked on Turk Street on her way to school. Her older brother intervened, but she still ended up in emergency care with wounds to her face and trauma that was difficult to heal. The night before, a 61-year-old man was shot through a window in a donut shop on Golden Gate Avenue and killed. Two weeks later, at least six gunmen fired between 30 and 40 shots around the corner and sent three people to the hospital.
Those three incidents, all a block apart, barely made the local news. Why? Because they all happened in the tenderloin.
Current policies and the city’s approach to combating violence in the tenderloin are failing. Residents deserve better.
According to the San Francisco Police Department, 34 firearm incidents had been reported in the neighborhood as of October this year, an increase of 161% over the same period last year. And there have been more shootings since then. The Tenderloin Police Station tweeted that there had been six separate shootings in November.
The 30 blocks that make up the tenderloin house more than 30,000 people with an average income of less than $ 40,000, and at least a quarter live below the poverty line. The neighborhood is low-income, affordable, and multi-ethnic – full of children, families, seniors, the disabled, and immigrants. Residents are people trying to run business, raise their children and go to school, while crime and violence are a regular occurrence in their community. Finally, the tenderloin welcomed newcomers from the Middle East who want to build a new life for their families away from war and violence. The young girl who was attacked had recently moved to the United States as her family tried to build a new, safer life for themselves away from the dangers they faced in their home country. Through our organization, we’ve seen local residents take the initiative to clean their own streets, ensure local youth have a voice, and work to improve the safety of all local residents. But community organizing cannot prevent violence on its own.
The neighborhood has become a containment zone for the city’s most persistent problems and the city must wage the fight to address its most pressing problems.
Take the drug trade, for example. Tenderloin’s regional open-air drug market only increased in intensity during the pandemic, inflicting violence, trauma and death on residents, including people struggling with their own addictions. Fentanyl has overtaken heroin as the most widely consumed drug on the streets, with the San Francisco overdose expected to continue its upward trend and nearly quadruple in the past four years. Over 700 people now die each year from overdoses across the city – 42% of those deaths occur in the Tenderloin area and South of Market. In response to this worrying trend, the city set up a task force made up of police, prosecutors, public defenders and members of the tenderloin community, who released their recommendations last July after a year and a half on how best to tackle drug trafficking in the neighborhood. But those of us in the neighborhood have not yet seen any action related to the solutions outlined in the Task Force’s final report.
The city can do more and has done more in the recent past. Last spring, when the COVID-19 pandemic intensified, there were over 450 tents full of people on the narrow sidewalks and alleys of the Tenderloin, who offered protection on site – with little access to basic services such as toilets, water, showers, sanitation Facilities and garbage collection.
Mayor London Breed responded to the community’s call for help with a tenderloin neighborhood plan that enabled a coordinated emergency response through the inter-agency COVID command center. The city departments worked together to quickly move hundreds of people from homelessness on the street to accommodation in hotels and “Safe Sleeping Locations”. After a month, the tents on the sidewalks were reduced to fewer than 20 and all the people who had lived in them were moved to better accommodations – with basic services and a warm, dry and safe place to sleep.
The tenderloin now needs an emergency response to the current security conditions. The city must use the same urgent, cross-agency coordinated efforts it made during the pandemic to manage the immediate crisis and implement long-term system solutions, starting with the recommendations of the Task Force’s San Francisco Street-Level Drug Dealing Report.
The Tenderloin is just as much a part of San Francisco as Pacific Heights, Noe Valley or any other neighborhood in San Francisco. Its inhabitants deserve to be treated with the same protection and respect. Community leaders and children from Redding Elementary School recently went to town hall to deliver a letter to Mayor Breed asking for help and were dying to be heard. The Tenderloin has the potential to transform itself into a healthy and safe neighborhood for its residents, but only with the help of community engagement and a dedicated city tour. The city owes it to the tenderloin – the people who live, work and play here every day – for leading these efforts.
Simon Bertrang is Executive Director in the Tenderloin Community Benefit District.
