Five years ago, a federal appeals court in San Francisco upended homelessness policies in California and across the West. In a 2018 ruling against the city of Boise, Idaho, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said cities could not enforce local laws against outdoor camping if they did not provide enough shelter beds for people living on the streets .

Since then, the ruling in that case, Martin v. Boise, makes it extremely difficult for cities to clear encampments in the nine states under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit. The decision has prompted state and local governments to address homelessness in new ways.

But billions of dollars in government spending have not solved the problem. And as tent cities have grown, political opposition has intensified even in cities with liberal voters. And that brings us back to San Francisco.

In recent weeks, a related legal battle – the latest in a series – has sparked an uproar that went so far that San Francisco Mayor London Breed was at a rally outside the federal courthouse last month as homeless advocates demonstrated , of corpses called near.

Even some San Franciscans are confused by the excitement. Here are some frequently asked questions about the situation.

What's this about?

The Coalition on Homelessness, an advocacy group, filed a federal lawsuit a year ago claiming that enforcement of San Francisco's public camping laws was unconstitutional because the number of people sleeping rough – nearly 4,400 each night at the most recent count – is widening The number of available animal shelter beds has been exceeded. In December, a federal judge issued an emergency order temporarily banning enforcement of city laws against encampments, raising the stakes as winter approached.

What do the two sides say?

San Francisco officials say the city's homeless situation is fundamentally different than that in Boise. The city has spent billions of dollars on housing and services for the homeless and created thousands of emergency shelters and housing units. But many campers refuse to sleep in available beds, the city says. Local laws prohibiting sleeping outside only apply for about four hours a day, not around the clock.

Advocates for homeless San Franciscans say the city has made little real effort to provide adequate housing and has instead criminalized homelessness. The fight comes as the cost of living in California continues to rise and affordable housing remains scarce.

Why has the rhetoric increased now?

The city this summer asked the Ninth Circuit to change the federal judge's interim order. One day in late August in San Francisco, as a three-judge panel heard the arguments, city officials and housing advocates staged dueling protests outside.

Breed, who had just returned from a ceremony to open an Ikea store in a commercially fragile part of the city, called it “inhumane” not to move people out of the tent camps. “We found bodies,” she shouted. “We found a dead baby in these tents.”

The same day, Gov. Gavin Newsom — a former mayor of San Francisco — announced that the state would send cities and counties an additional $38 million to “clean up encampments,” accusing the courts of “causing costly delays.” .

How did tech executives get involved?

Two days later, Elon Musk and other tech personalities on homeless plaintiffs represent Bono. Newsom, who is not normally a friend of Musk, later said on X that Musk “raised a key issue” and that the federal courts were the problem.

The governor, a liberal Democrat who is widely considered a 2028 presidential candidate, told The San Francisco Chronicle that he was once so frustrated with legal decisions protecting camps that he considered approaching the judiciary directly to deal with complaints from the to be dealt with by the public. “I literally talked about putting up a big sign with the judge's phone number saying, 'Call the judge,'” he said.

Anthony York, a Newsom spokesman, compared the governor's current stance to his previous criticism of conservative federal judges who have sought to overturn gun controls in California – another group of “ideologues” whose decisions threatened public safety.

What's new?

It is unclear when the Ninth Circuit will rule on the city's full appeal of the injunction. But late Tuesday, the court denied the city's request for modification, clarifying that homeless campers who are offered housing can be asked to move.

The next written arguments in the lawsuit are scheduled to be filed later this month, and it is unlikely there will be a hearing before then. Still, the outcry, even from Democrats like Breed and Newsom, is a sign that political pressure is increasing to reconsider the jurisprudence that emerged from the Boise decision.

Breed is fighting for re-election in 2024 and her poll numbers are declining; Political rivals see a great chance of defeating them. Critics on both ends of the political spectrum accused Breed and Newsom of trying to shift responsibility for the homeless problem to the courts.

For more:

Locke Historic District.Credit…Sarah Stierch/Wikimedia

Where we travel

Today's tip comes from Joe Macpherson:

“One of the places we like to visit during a fishing trip to the Delta is Locke, also known as the Locke Historic District, an unincorporated community in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta on River Road. The 14-acre town was first founded as a Chinese community between 1893 and 1915. There are a few restaurants, gardens, shops, museums and Strange Cargo, a funky old bookshop which, if open, is worth a visit.”

Tell us about your favorite places in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We will report more about this in future editions of the newsletter.

And before you go, some good news

While the Strokes have become something of a shorthand for New York's downtown rock scene of the early 2000s, on the opposite coast, in Southern California, the group is enjoying a new fan base that is distinctly Californian.

Juicebox, Southern California's premier Strokes tribute band that draws enthusiastic multi-generational audiences, is leading something of a Strokes resurgence on the West Coast. The group's fans, as well as most of its members, are predominantly Latino.

As Eric Ducker wrote in the New York Times last week, the Strokes themselves have a large presence in Latin America, and it follows that Los Angeles, where more than 4.9 million people identify as Hispanic or Latino, has many Latino Strokes should have fans. But the band's particular appeal among first-generation Americans, Ducker writes, is also tied to their story of self-invention, an appealing message for those who have complicated feelings about their identity and the culture to which they belong.

“As people have moved away or outgrown certain subcultures or music scenes, it seems like in Los Angeles, Latinos have moved in to take the reins,” says José G. Anguiano, professor of Latina/o studies. said about the resurgence. “What's really cool is that they're taking the reins, not just in terms of being a fan, but fronting these tribute bands and producing their own music. They participate fully in these subcultures in every way.”

The post California Democrats Need Courts to Let Them Clear Homeless Camps appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Efforts to address the dueling mental health and substance abuse crises on California’s streets have ramped up in recent years. The latest and showiest of these efforts is the Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment Court, put forth by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Pitched as an “upstream diversion” to prevent people with severe mental illness from ending up incarcerated or conserved, CARE Courts would work like this: First, any family member, case worker, or first-responder, including police, who believes a person needs intervention for mental health or substance use issues, could make a referral to a civil court. The person in need of care would then receive a clinical evaluation by their county behavioral health system. A public defender and case manager would then be assigned, and a CARE plan would be drafted, which could include a 12-month plan for medication, housing , and behavioral health treatment.

The plan is flashy. It’s well-branded. But dig just a little under the surface, and things don’t look so shiny. For a bill centered around care, it’s remarkably careless. And if San Francisco officials were hoping CARE Courts will sweep in to solve our issues for us, consider that idea dead in the water.

San Francisco has long battled with the ethical quandary of whether it is more humane to force someone who is very ill into involuntary treatment or grant them the freedom to make their own decisions about their life and care. Much of the discussion around CARE Courts centers on this debate. And these are valuable conversations to have.

But it’s doubtful CARE Courts will even get that far.

The most glaring flaw is a lack of funding and key infrastructure. The bill creates an entirely new system that can be used to compel treatment but includes only $65 million to support court expansion. It relies on already oversubscribed county programs to somehow accommodate an influx of new patients in need of court-mandated drug abuse treatment, mental health care and housing.

That a lack of resources is available to accommodate these mandates is obvious. Our existing systems to address the intersection of mental health and substance use issues can hardly operate. People accepted to mental health diversion programs are languishing in the county jail for months waiting for a bed to open. The lead judge of San Francisco’s Adult Drug Court said at a March Board of Supervisors hearing that due to this shortage, his staff has abandoned hope of getting anyone with both diagnoses into a treatment program. And a Damning Board of Supervisors hearing last week discussed five people who have taken more than 1,700 ambulance rides in the past five years, costing the city upward of $4 million. When mental health professionals tried to preserve one person, there was nowhere to put them.

California — and in particular, San Francisco — is already suffering from a severe shortage of behavioral health workers. In interviews with employees from both nonprofit and city health programs, we were told repeatedly that there simply isn’t anyone to hire for a growing number of vacant positions.

Across the bay, it’s not much better. A civil grand jury report on Alameda County’s behavioral health found understaffing on crisis phone lines, and incarceration used in place of psychiatric treatment.

When asked about the lack of funding attached to this bill, Newsom’s senior counselor Jason Elliott said that, “The whole thing only succeeds if we massively expand the behavioral health clinical network.” He noted that since Newsom took office in 2020, $4.5 billion has been allocated for this purpose across the state. “I have a hard time with the argument that we haven’t invested enough sufficiently to be able to do CARE Court,” he said.

But the results have been slow to appear: In the past two years, San Francisco has added only 180 new psychiatric treatment beds. It currently has none to spare. And CARE Courts would be implemented next year.

With this lack of attention to resources, it’s almost certain that CARE Court will fall flat. If San Francisco, a city with a $14 billion annual budget, can’t find a single bed for someone racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in ambulance rides, how will smaller, less wealthy, counties fare with these new requirements?

This, of course, begs the question: If people could already access health resources, why would they even need a court order?

Until we provide more housing and treatment beds, train, hire and fund behavioral health workers, and improve access to care for people at every step of their journey to recovery, we may never find out.

Correction: An earlier version of this column misstated the amount the state had allocated for behavioral health.

This commentary is from The Chronicle’s editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.

The post Don’t depend on Newsom’s CARE Courts to avoid wasting San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

The Justice Department has secured a number of Wi-Fi access points that may allow administrators to access industrial control equipment, according to a tip from The Register.

Four unsecured wireless networks named Boiler Pump 1 through Boiler Pump 4 were freely accessible in the Royal Courts of Justice (RCJ) until The Register informed officials what was going on.

The nets were all visible from the ground floor of the Queen’s Building, an extension of the original 1960s neo-Gothic courthouse. The RCJ is home to the UK’s highest civil courts, including the Court of Appeal.

A source told us that connecting to the passwordless access points exposed a login page for what appeared to be an industrial control system developed by Armstrong Fluid Technology. Armstrong’s website contains PDF copies of equipment manuals with default administrator passwords, which Armstrong calls “Level 2” access.

“Level 1 allows the user to change the operating parameters and reset them to the factory settings, but not save them as the factory settings in the manual, just before we reveal the fairly simple Level 2 password, which we will not reveal here.

A malicious person who connected to the unsecured access point and looked at the branding of the pumps login portal could easily have added two and two and given administrator access to the pumps. Their shutdown could have caused the water pipes to freeze overnight as winter sets in, potentially forcing the building to shut down * and delays in legal proceedings.

Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service spokesman Jake Conneely told The Register, “The staff has taken immediate action to ensure that these facilities are inaccessible and that security is maintained across the courts.”

We have been informed that the WLAN access points have been deactivated until further notice.

A tech-savvy attacker could use the access to the pumps as a starting point for further network exploitation. Such pivots of harmless devices are routine for ransomware attackers as well as for hostile nation states, as compromises with a focus on digital supply chains have shown in recent years. One such attack was targeted at Accellion’s Internet-connected file transfer devices.

A knowledgeable source from a pentesting company who did not name The Register because they did not speak on behalf of their employer confirmed that HVAC system components typically come with a Wi-Fi access point for local access by maintenance companies . They suggested wiring the boiler pump control into a larger building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) facility that permanent staff can remotely access.

The existence of the vulnerability is surprising: As the largest and most prestigious civil court in the country, the RCJ complex is a public space, which means that those responsible for the RCJ HVAC systems should expect others to be able to use the unsecured wireless access points . They may also have been visible from a public road that runs behind the Queen’s Building.

Airport-style security checkpoints at the main entrance of the RCJ will search anyone who enters. The age-old right of every Briton to enter a courtroom and sit in the public stands to watch the proceedings means that physical access to the Queen’s Building is impossible.

As far as we know, pump access has not been maliciously exploited – but if you’ve had a particularly cold day in court recently, it may be worth asking why. ®

Boot note

* Or maybe not, as the Evening Standard’s court correspondent said today:

It’s ridiculously cold at Inner London Crown Court this morning where the jury has been told they can keep their hands, coats and gloves on if they want.

If this happened in an office building, or maybe the Justice Department headquarters, people would be angry …

– Tristan Kirk (@kirkkorner) November 22, 2021

The post Royal Courts of Justice HVAC techniques had unsecured Wi-Fi AP • The Register appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Doug Dow, owner of Doug’s Top Hat Chimney Sweep, brushed the walls of a fireplace in the country club area last week. Dow is a retired Lincoln firefighter.

With a running vacuum cleaner Doug Dow, owner of Doug’s Top Hat Chimney Sweep, cleaned the walls of a fireplace in the country club area last week.

Doug Dow’s chimney sweep brush is the busiest this time of year.

The retired Lincoln firefighter works full-time cleaning chimneys and regularly does five jobs a day at Doug’s Top Hat Chimney Sweep.

“I’m trying to slow down, but I’m out of luck,” said the 66-year-old.

Lincoln firefighters Bob Reynolds and Derald Murrell founded the company in 1978, and Dow joined 10 years later.

He ran Top Hat Chimney Sweeps with Lincoln firefighter Greg Contreras for several years, but now they both run separate businesses called Top Hat.

When Dow was working as a firefighter driving oil rigs out of Station 9 in Bethany, he did six or seven sweeping jobs a day on his days off.

Doug Dow

Courtesy photo

Driving rigs made him feel like a racing driver, he said. As a chimney sweep, he feels like a family dentist.

“It’s like brushing your teeth,” said Dow. “You brush out the inside of the chimney and clean all the soot in there.”

He never guarantees that there won’t be a problem after cleaning a chimney, but his goal is to mitigate a problem by reducing the combustible material inside that could start a fire, he said.

Over the weekend, a dirty wood stove lit a fire and caused $ 10,000 damage to a Martell home, Lancaster County Sheriff Terry Wagner said.

The post Retired Lincoln fireman retains busy as chimney sweep | Crime and Courts appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.