February 12, 2007
Deadly Weekend in the City
It seems like every Monday, we have to recap the weekend's shootings as they've been averaging about one or two a weekend. This weekend, there was two on Sunday, both in broad daylight, and two more early this morning.
The first one occured about 10:15 on Sunday morning (again with the morning shootings) when the victim, Anthony Hunter Jr., was just cleaning out his van when two men approached on foot and fired away. Hunter got about half a block before dropping and the suspects ran the other way. According to Ross Mirkarimi, there was about twenty-five shell casings at the scene of the crime. This all happened around Eddy Street at Yerba Buena Plaza East. Hunter did not survive.
Two hours later, at Ammel Park townhomes on Grove Street, about five blocks away from the other shooting, a Honda Civic with three people inside pulled alongside a thirteen year old girl and her friends and after a brief discussion, a man stepped out of the car and fired away, injuring the girl. Police think the shootings might be related. Both shootings occurred near two other shootings that have taken place this year.
This morning, a man was shot on at Haight and Fillmore, which is kind of scary in that SFist has spent a lot of time at that corner, at about 2 in the morning. Fifteen minutes later, another man was shot in a car at Grove and Baker streets. He was still able to drive off to Haight and Fillmore, where cops were still investigating the previous shooting (!), and crashed into a bus shelter. He was later transported to the hospital where he died of injuries.
There was also a shooting in Fremont, injuring five and killing two.
After the jump, we have an e-mail from a SFist reader who was an eyewitness to the shooting of the thirteen year old girl.
Image from ABC 7 news web site.
i know, i know. another one and like you guys said, are they even news anymore? but when it's right in front of you, i'm gonna say,"yeah, it is."
and it's true - they don't care what time of day it is. it happenedat 12:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday. on grove, right at laguna. just 2 short blocks from the main strip of shops.
a girl was shot, believed to be a teenager. i heard about 5-6 rapid gunshots and looked out my window and saw a kid fleeing the scene. when i was giving the officer my statement, she told me it was the second shooting so far this afternoon, the other one being close by. i hear gunshots in this neighborhood almost every night, and the thing is-- i don't feel any less safe. maybe it's because i lived in nyc for a decade or maybe it's just me, but safe or not, it's something that needs to change.
i spoke to a woman on the corner who grew up here during the 80s crack epidemic and is now studying criminal justice. she told me about how the neighborhood was before crack and how it changed and all the funerals she had been to for her friends' kids. she said it basically all comes down to turf wars. the kid i saw fleeing the scene appeared and the cop came and told me she thought he might have been with the girl and ran for help, but the woman who grew up there told me about how a lot of the time the shooters flee and then come back to the scene when the crowd appears so they are there with everyone else and don't seem suspicious. they do it so they can make sure the person is really dead so they don't have to come back later and finish the job. it's all just really fucked up.
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Meanwhile, the mayor is too busy dealing with his own addictions.
That's three Tony's killed in a month.
How many murders is this? 20? More? I noticed the Chronicle has stopped giving the homicide tally for 07. I think criminals have caught on that you can kill someone here without the risk of being arrested.
perhaps I am a bit oversimplistic in my thinking, but, living in the lower haight, it seems to me that ALL IT TAKES IS AN INCREASED POLICE PRESENCE ON A 2-3 BLOCK RADIUS.
why aren't they doing anything?
this steady two-a-week shooting habit is the mayor's fault? puh-leeze.
The lack of beat cops and neighborhood policing has inflamed an already adversial relationship between the SFPD and the community. The chief of police has resisted putting more beat cops on the street, the kind that can actually build the necessary relationships. The Mayor has backed her in this resistance. So yes, the Mayor has a lot of do with this.
Yeah, I noticed the Chronicle stopped reporting the number of homicides this year.
Also, we can't blame the mayor for all the violence, but he is ultimately responsible for SFPD. And if SFPD fails to apprehend murder suspects or find enough evidence to secure a conviction, then the mayor has a problem he needs to address. So far, he's been ducking and dodging the issue. Sorry, but press conferences don't count.
fair enough, as long as the guys with guns and bad ideas know they can spread the blame.
It is well known that the mayor stated he should be recalled if the crime rate keeps rising...
from SF Chronicle 8/31/06:
Two years ago amid a streak of violence on the streets of San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom said on a local radio show that if the homicide rates continued to climb, voters could start a campaign to recall him and that he might even sign the petition himself.
"I'll tell you what," Newsom said, "...begin the campaign to recall me. And you know what? I may be right there as a co-signer of that effort."
That year, 88 people were killed in the city and in 2005 the murder rate reached a decade high with 96 deaths. Following Sunday's bloodshed when there were five homicides in just one day, this year's tally reached 63 and could be headed for another record.
No blame needs to be spread when you're not held accountable to begin with. And this goes both for the good guys AND the bad guys.
if a recall will stop the killings, if someone just says that a recall will stop the killings, i'll support it and sign.
You can blame the mayor, or blame the SFPD, NO criminal in San Francisco is thinking of either when he/she pulls that trigger and shows no value for human life. Killing someone is a choice another person makes. Apprehending the criminal is the job of the major or SFPD's job. The problem is the SFPD is drastically understaffed (Chronicle reported shortage of over 300 officers today) and that the communities where these crimes often take place are not very cooperative with the police. Meanwhile the city is still reprimanding 30 officers that police the toughest district and considering firing them over an internal racy comedic movie they made!
The general mistrust of communities and police (aka Pawns) is not and will never be strong enough to build a good rapport with a community until more African American and Latino officers police African American and Latino communities. A move like this would drastically decrease the number of complaints against racist police and police brutalities and force communities to come to the realization that the criminals they defend are the reason the violence plagues their communities.
Then comes the idea of video cameras on 8 street corners in the city to stop crime. Lets see, Im a drug dealer, they put a camera on 24th and Mission, so... I move to 24th and Capp. I move to 24th and South Vaness. I move to 25 and Mission.
A huge problem is most criminals grew up in single parent households and with a bad education. We need to pursue better education for the children, more boots on the ground in bad neighborhoods, and have more "minority" officers patrol "minority neighborhoods."
well said, Dave!
I attended a community meeting in the Lower Haight a couple weeks ago that was very well attended by SFPD: Captain Dillon from the northern precint, about a dozen other officers, and Chief Fong herself. For what it's worth, they were successful in convincing me that they're doing what they can with the limited resources at their disposal.
Overall, there was an impressive turnout from other parts of city government - Supervisors Mirkarimi and Dufty, and top people from the City Attorney's office and the Mayor's office.
But the "discussion" focused on the Hayes Valley South public housing project, and both the Housing Authority and the property management company that runs the Hayes Valley South were notably absent. Too bad, since they're the people that can have the most direct impact on the situation from the city government side.
Same problem on the community side. There was fiercely contested pissing match to find out which yuppie has lived in the neighborhood the longest and seen the most murders and is the most outraged, but no actual residents of Hayes Valley South had anything to say, and it didn't look like any of them were even there.
The recent violence in the Fillmore/Hayes Valley/Lower Haight area is about selling drugs in and around public housing projects, where the Housing Authority and their property management contractors are the first lines of defense. They need to be held accountable.
I attended a community meeting in the Lower Haight a couple weeks ago that was very well attended by SFPD: Captain Dillon from the northern precint, about a dozen other officers, and Chief Fong herself. For what it's worth, they were successful in convincing me that they're doing what they can with the limited resources at their disposal. Overall, there was an impressive turnout from other parts of city government - Supervisors Mirkarimi and Dufty, and top people from the City Attorney's office and the Mayor's office. But the "discussion" focused on the Hayes Valley South public housing project, and both the Housing Authority and the property management company that runs the Hayes Valley South were notably absent. Too bad, since they're the people that can have the most direct impact on the situation from the city government side. Same problem on the community side. There was fiercely contested pissing match to find out which yuppie has lived in the neighborhood the longest and seen the most murders and is the most outraged, but no actual residents of Hayes Valley South had anything to say, and it didn't look like any of them were even there. The recent violence in the Fillmore/Hayes Valley/Lower Haight area is about selling drugs in and around public housing projects, where the Housing Authority and their property management contractors are the first lines of defense. They need to be held accountable.
At the risk of repeating myself (my previous comment disappeared), the idea of demographically matched police officers sort of falls flat when you look at the census. Tract 168, which is most of the Lower Haight police beat, is 15% black, 67% white, and 7-8% each Asian and Hispanic, according to the 2000 census.
It's possible we might be able to produce a police officer with this mix of ethnicities, through grafting.
Slosh,
I was at that community meeting, and wrote the report for SFist - you missed the woman who lives in Hayes Valley South who stood up and made an impassioned speech about how they're literally at war within their own homes, and how some law-abiding residents there are basically prisoners of the crack dealers.
That said, it was deplorable that nobody representing the Housing Authority was there. I was an insomniac last night, heard the shots out my open window (I'm a block from Haight/Fillmore) and my first thought was "Jesus, *another* one?"
one of the things about people not attending meetings is that there isn't enough of an awareness of when they happen, even when people try to be proactive. the word doesn't get around enough to the people who should be there. for example - i live right at the corner of one of the sunday daylight shootings. i emailed the hayes valley neighborhood association & the contact for the northern district monthly community/police meetings to see if any extra meetings would be organized and never heard back from either. as for the meeting in the lower haight, i didn't even know about it until after the fact. i had been working long hours and didn't really have a chance to read sfist or any news sites. i didn't see any flyers posted on the streets and don't know of any email list to sign up for, and i'm sure i'm not the only one. maybe there were flyers and i just didn't see them, and there probably are email lists i don't know about, but i think that's the problem - even though one would assume the word would spread fast, there is not enough of an awareness in the communities of these events. i'm not speaking of government officials, the housing authority or any of that - i just mean the citizens in general. so maybe some more people need to step up to the plate and make sure those people are aware so they can be there next time. the only way the cops are going to do what they should be doing is by the persistence of large groups of people, and as much as they aren't doing their jobs, it is OUR job to make sure they do.
getting info about meetings is a real problem. I never hear of any significant meetings until the morning of, or after the fact. makes me wonder how anybody finds out about community meetings in the first place.
plus, if you look for info on sf.gov, there aint shit as far as a central meeting calendar. and I've tried! you have to go into each dept page and search, maybe stumble upon their respective meeting schedules, if they have one...
sure it's up to citizens to hold their govt accountable, but when meeting info is essentially hidden, accountability is effectively derailed. so how do you do that? sfist? got anybody on that beat?
Folks,
For Lower Haight information, join the Google group at lowerhaight.org. Anything and everything to do with the neighborhood is posted there.
Also, for the community meeting, there were flyers in the front door of nearly every business on the 400 and 500 blocks of Haight Street, plus telephone poles.
For information about the Lower Haight, plus the mailing list:
lowerhaight.org
Everything that goes on, community-wise, is posted there.