Last Night in the Lower Haight

I live in the lower Haight, and had been planning to go to the Tuesday evening community safety meeting at Homilton Square Baptist Church (Oak and Steiner). The meeting was in reaction to the shooting on Haight two weeks ago, but the morning gunfire in broad daylight at the intersection of Haight and Webster turned things a
bit more urgent. The meeting hall was steamy-hot and packed to the gills with angry residents.

Ross Mirkarimi had been on the handbills, but there were two surprise guests: Bevan Dufty and police chief Heather Fong. The atmosphere was tense and pissed; most people were shocked at the morning's violence, upset that nobody seems to ever do anything about the guys who deal crack every day on the 400 block of Haight Street, and determined to do something, anything, to try to head off the latest spate of shooting.

I sat up near the front, near where the KRON and KTVU camera crews were interviewing the organizers. They stayed for about forty minutes, and disappeared - I assume to get back in time to make the ten o'clock newscasts.

The first part of the meeting was essentially set aside for resident venting, and boy did we ever. One weary girl noted that her first Saturday night in the neighborhood after moving from New York had been gunshots and a front-door carjacking. Another guy complained about people buying weed from pot clubs and dealing it openly on the street to people too dumb to pay $300 to the sketchy doctors who advertise in the back of the Guardian. And a woman fought back tears as she talked about how her children walk to school, every morning, crossing the intersection of Haight and Webster. If this morning had gone down ten minutes earlier, those kids would have been in the line of fire.

In true city style, the meeting veered off the agenda after about twenty minutes, when a pointed question about the police department brought Captain Kelly from North Station to the front, where he described what the cops are up to in the Haight, and pointed out that most of what they do we don't see. He was good - calm, focused,
informational. He had an interesting back-and-forth with former supervisor Bill Maher (taking a break from his HBO show), who grilled him about whether cops are actually showing up as witnesses when dealers and thugs are tried, and whether or not the community can help with stay-away orders. Apparently one of the biggest problems is gangbangers coming to our area from other parts of the city, Oakland, and Richmond, and fighting over the corner of Haight and Webster. I don't get the logic behind this, but perhaps that's why I'm a broke freelancer instead of a wealthy crack dealer. Anyway, stay-away orders are supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

Kelly was followed by Chief Heather Fong who has one hell of a speaking voice. It was weird hearing a small Chinese woman with big glasses speak like Charlton Heston coming down from Mount Zion, but that's what she sounds like. She talked at length about beat cops and the work they're doing trying to integrate with the DA, the public housing authority, and the judges. Someone asked her when she was going to tell Gavin that she supported more foot cops in the Lower Haight. "I already did," she said.

After her, Julia Potter from the Mayor's office spoke for a bit-- she'd only heard about the meeting a few hours before, but wanted to come by and throw in what they're up to. I zoned out a bit here, but perked up when she drew crowd ire by mentioning that she and her staff had taken a trip to New York to look at how they'd done community policing and reduced crime. Apparently all of the copies of The Tipping Point were out of the library, so they needed to fly to Manhattan to learn what every criminologist in the country has been studying for fifteen years. Good financial planning there, Gavin!

Various people from the community then talked about various programs and work that us locals can do to help. My favorites were Reverend Trammell, who is organizing a peace march, and Sandra Bolton of the Community Response Network, who is organizing outreach days at the Hayes Valley projects from February 13-Feb. 17 (I'll be at one of them). She's a charismatic woman, and made the very good point that if you don't have a resume, it's hard to get a job, and if the community rooms where you're supposed to go to learn how to write a resume are always locked and the computers are running Windows Me, you're probably going to get up to no good. Amen to that.

The other fun fact I learned is that John Muir Elementary has a PTA now...for the first time in fifty years. And that's the only PTA at any school in the Western Addition. And you don't actually have to have a child in school to be on the PTA. Man, this city is screwed up. They're in desperate need of volunteers, by the way, so if you can help out, please do so. Some other people talked about other projects, and someone managed to work in a totally out-of-place reference to the Iraq war, but by and large most of the suggestions seemed pretty worthy. That said, let's move on to the main event:

Ross Mirkarimi! He's got a really deep voice and a pretty good tan considering how cold it's been. He talked for about twenty minutes and made the following promises:

1) There will be a security camera at Haight and Webster, despite the city having already spent all of the money allocated for cameras. He swore up and down to find the funding to make it happen.

2) If the housing authority can't get it together and start enforcing its own regulations within one year of today (that's January 30, 2008 for those who are going to keep track) he's going to introduce legislation to have the city take over all of the public housing. This will help with security and administration, because apparently
the city cops have some trouble with jurisdiction because the projects are on federal land. Man, that's confusing; thank God I didn't go to law school.

3) Someone asked him if there could be additional criminal penalties for dealing drugs near a medical marijuana provider. He said yes, and that he'd look into making it a city law.

Mirkarimi also threw off the line of the night: "All of the prevention things you guys are talking about are great and necessary, but right now I want a reprieve from the bullets."

After Ross came Bevan Dufty, who dropped the bomb that he's moving to the Lower Haight in a couple of weeks, with his partner and 4 month old child. Bevan Dufty has a child? Who knew? Where was the SFist gossip section on this hot piece of gossip? He also mentioned that cop cars with laptops have no connection to the Internet, so it's impossible to track down criminals by looking at their MySpace pages.(OK, I made the MySpace part up, but it is kind of appalling that the cop laptops aren't networked. I distinctly saw Rev. Trammell say "Jesus" when Dufty dropped that little tidbit).

The meeting ended with a prayer from Trammell, who has a wonderful, mellow presense. The meeting...well, we'll see what gets done. It was nice to see Fong and Mirkarimi make some concrete promises, and I hope that those promises make a difference.

If you're a Lower Haighter and you're interested in helping out in the neighborhood, please sign up for the mailing list at lowerhaight.org. All of the people who are trying to improve the community are on that list, and despite all of my snark here, I do think that we can make a difference and help to calm things down around here.