The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project's latest interactive map illustrates the incidences of police citations for minor quality-of-life crimes, an effort from that progressive-leaning group to emphasize the ways that begging and living on the streets are systemically criminalized in San Francisco. As you can see by playing around with settings and toggles on that, lots of these citations are clustered around the TL, SoMa, and the Mission.
One interesting, and odd, note is that a particular citation — for "Danger of Leading an Immoral Life" — is so antiquated in its phrasing yet so frequently used by SFPD today.
As 48Hills discovers, drawing on a 1972 academic paper, the "Immoral Life" citation was often used to round up the hippie runaways of yesteryear. From 48 Hills:
The tendency to define antisocial behavior in terms of moral values is nowhere more evident than in statutes regulating juvenile conduct. In California, Welfare and Institutions Code sections 600, 601, and 602 permit juvenile courts to assume jurisdiction over juvenile who are dependent or neglected;' who are in danger of leading an idle, lewd, dissolute, or immoral life, or who are beyond parental control;2 or who have violated state or federal law.' While these sections reflect the state's concern for preventing and treating delinquency, they also permit broad juvenile court intrusion into the personal affairs of a very large number of minors. Since section 601 is phrased broadly and permits flexible interpretation by judges, even innocent juvenile conduct may be within its reach.
Now sections 601 and 602 are used, according to SFPD representative Giselle Talkoff, for when “a parent contacts us, and their kid is out of control, truant, drug addicted and they need help." 601 and 602 offenders aren't supposed to be detained or booked, but as 48 Hills observes, the citations include results that indicate juveniles were booked or arrested.
The "oddity," Talkoff says, might come from an old report-writing code — it's just "The way we get juveniles in the system," added to another crime. So, it sounds as if the citation is prevalent, but superficial, just a way of dog-earing cases involving other alleged offenses. According to Talkoff, there's a drop-down menu on their reports that "“needs to be updated." Maybe the language could use an update, too.
