A vacant city-owned warehouse is going to become the “drunk tank” for people on drugs, as arresting people and trying to sober them up is Mayor Lurie’s latest attempt to cut down on drug use on San Francisco streets.
Now ten months in office, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie has tried a number of strategies to combat San Francisco’s fentanyl scourge. Early on in his tenure, he passed his fentanyl “emergency ordinance,” and you can judge for yourself whether that has made any substantial difference in street conditions in the nine months since. He also enacted his Sixth Street crime crackdown, though many feel that just pushed the drug trade to the Mission District.
Lurie’s latest strategy also involves Sixth Street, and the vacant city-owned building at 444 Sixth Street seen above. The Chronicle has the news today that Lurie’s new plan is to arrest drug users and put them into a sobering center, once that above building has been remodeled to serve as that facility. This sounds like a somewhat more structured plan than then-Mayor London Breed’s 2023 strategy to arrest people who are high on drugs, and the Chronicle describes it as a "coercive approach," as people arrested would be forced to speak with addiction and recovery counselors.
“If you do drugs on our streets, we will arrest you. And with this new resource, we will give you a real chance to enter recovery,” Lurie said in a statement to the Chronicle.
(Of course, that is very similar to tough talk Lurie has used in those big SFPD raids that have sometimes produced no drug charge convictions, and in some cases, not even any criminal charges.)
According to the Chronicle, the sobering center “will feature 16 to 25 reclining chairs where detainees will be placed to rest.” It will be overseen by the SF Sheriff’s Office (they run County Jail too) and run by some yet-unnamed city contractor. Once suspects are booked, they’ll be forced to sit and get sober, and be connected with addiction counselors and/or and case managers. The Chron mentions the likelihood that suspects will also be prescribed methadone or buprenorphine, which are both opioid addiction drugs, and the case workers will attempt to connect them with shelters or residential treatment.
And while people will be “arrested” for using drugs or being publicly intoxicated, these do not sound like real arrests. Suspects will not be booked or charged, just required to stay at the sobering center for a few hours and sober up. Though people who try to leave early could potentially be arrested for real and jailed, while the Chronicle reports that those who stay would be allowed to stay for up to 23 hours.
Currently, people arrested on petty drug charges often just get arrested, and released within a few hours with likely just a misdemeanor charge. The Chron notes that Lurie’s office currently runs “stabilization centers” for drug users, but those are voluntary, and it seems unlikely that many drug users choose that path of treatment.
Lurie’s new approach is billed as saving time for police officers, who would not have to book or jail suspects, which can be an hours-long process. Officers would apparently just drop off the drug user and continue on their beat. And of course, the sobering up part of this arrest is mandatory.
“A lot of our programs and services are voluntary, meaning it’s a challenge to bring them off the street and into health and care,” Sheriff Paul Miyamoto told the Chronicle. “This is going to be a game changer in regards to filling that gap.”
But we’ve heard this “game changer” language before, and it seems not too many games have been changed. The low capacity of this facility would likely limit its impact, though maybe there will be more facilities opened. And as London Breed learned the hard way, San Franciscians need to see results on so-called fentanyl crackdowns to believe these things have have any effectiveness.
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
