A woman and her two-year-old son were violently attacked by a disturbed homeless woman in Union Square in recent weeks, and now she and her husband have spoken to KRON 4 in an effort to get the public outraged about our city's very familiar, ongoing homeless problem. In related news, the city's Homeless Outreach Team is going to be scaling back its activities on the street for several months while the team revamps itself based on a new "street medicine" model.
The woman who was attacked, along with her baby boy, were not identified by name in KRON 4's report, but the suspect in the attack, who was apprehended, is a woman named Heather Chain who had previous battery charges against her. She'll be reappearing in court next week.
Chain allegedly ran up to the woman and child as the woman's husband had turned away and sucker punched both she and the boy hard enough that "you could hear the crack," the father says. The family is angry that a judge had previously allowed Chain to return to the street, and that the city government is "more focused on making this place the most expensive place in the world, making the Larry Ellisons of the world happy with the America's Cup and making Twitter happy, than they are with the meat and potatoes [of] protecting us."
Homeless czar Bevan Dufty called the incident "unacceptable" and says that the Union Square Business Improvement District will soon be getting its own homeless outreach worker to cover the area.
As for the city's Outreach Team, the Chronicle reports that they will be taking a few months off from working weekends and taking some workers off the streets as they transition to a new model, which will be focused more on providing medical care, sometimes while on the street, than it will be on shuttling people into temporary housing. The new model comes as a result of $3 million in extra funding for the team proposed earlier this year by Supervisor Mark Farrell, bringing their total budget to over $10 million. The Health Department is guiding the paradigm shift, which comes partly as a result of there being less housing overall to offer to homeless individuals.
The Homeless Outreach Team, founded under Mayor Newsom in 2004, had become a glorified "taxi service," moving individuals off the streets and into sobering centers or SROs, but now more of the team members on the streets will have medical training. The team should be fully back up and running by November 30.
