Quantcast

George Gascon Declares Futile War on Drugs and Hookers in the 'Loin

george-gascon.jpg
Police Chief George Gascon, formerly of Mesa, AZ.
Has anyone heard of this thing called the War on Drugs started by President Nixon, in which drug dealers and users get thrown in jail in order to clean up our streets and save our great nation from ruin, only to have them be replaced by different dealers and users the next day? Well, our new police chief George Gascon apparently sides with Nixon and Reagan on this debate, and recently announced a sweep of the Tenderloin in which 300 people were arrested in an effort to rid the area of drugs and prostitution. Good fucking luck!

As KCBS reports, just an hour after Gascon's announcement of the sweep, everyone scuttled back outside and deals were going down one block away from the police station. They quote a chaplain at the San Francisco Rescue Mission as saying, "I would not be surprised if we were [still talking about ridding this area of drugs] 20 years from now. This is reality."

As for prostitution, we'd like to point Gascon to this 2006 special report from the Chron, "Diary of a Sex Slave," in which Sun Spa Massage at Geary and Hyde (a noted nexus of Korean sex slave trafficking -- please see some tasteful Yelp reviews here), remained fully operational a year after a *federal* raid on the place. Not to be pessimists, but this ain't Mesa, Arizona! It's gonna take a lot more than Text-a-Tip and a few police sweeps to clean up a neighborhood filled with hooker hotels and SROs. We know, some of us have lived there. It's like a self-sustaining ecosystem of crack, meth, crackheads and tweakers.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@sfist.com with further questions, comments or tips.
By Jay Barmann in on September 3, 2009 11:30 AM

Comments [rss]