Heather Knight's perp walk

After a muddled recent column on the city's transportation issues, the Chronicle's Heather Knight is painfully muddling through the homeless and drug crisis on city streets.

Of those who died of overdoses in the first eight months of this year, 28% were homeless. Seventy percent died in the heart of the city — the Tenderloin, South of Market, Nob Hill and the Inner Mission. Older Black men living alone in residential hotels are dying at rates far higher than their portion of the city population.

And yet most of us will see these statistics, think they’re a shame, and quickly move on. It doesn’t really affect us, we think. And for too long, City Hall has mostly agreed.

Wrong! "City Hall" has spent hundreds of millions dealing with the city's homeless problem in the last 20 years. I've been writing about it myself for 15 years (see this and this) long before Knight started writing for the Chronicle.

Knight:

But until Friday morning, I had no idea, even after years of reporting at City Hall, how to access drug treatment in San Francisco if I or a loved one needed it. How would the guy sprawled out on a Hyde Street sidewalk, high out of his mind, have any clue?

For liberals like Knight, every social problem has a "program" or policy solution. Anyone who understands drug addiction knows that advocating "drug treatment" is meaningless for addicts who don't want to stop using, which is what addiction means.

Before an addict gets in a treatment program, he/she must be ready to quit using drugs. Some addicts simply aren't ready to quit using before they die of an overdose.

Of course treatment should be readily available and outreach to addicts to let them know that it's available:

[Dr. Hali]Hammer also wants to make it faster to get treatment once someone’s asked for it. It now takes a few days to enter outpatient treatment like a methadone clinic and close to a week to get a residential treatment slot — a lapse during which somebody can easily slip back into a drug habit. “The truth is we lose a significant number of people when they have to wait at all,” Hammer said.

Agreed. once an addict decides to quit, treatment should be quickly available. 

Still, how many addicts are ready to even ask for treatment? (Knight's emphasis on treatment for addicts is like her focus last year on issuing traffic tickets to prevent traffic fatalities.) 

More:

Though many progressive politicians dismiss any kind of law enforcement when it comes to our city’s drug crisis, Hammer said she supports arresting drug dealers. (It’s odd that this is even controversial in San Francisco, but there you go!)

That link takes you to an earlier Knight column citing only Jerry Brown's opposition to safe injection sites and a stupid comment from Mayor Breed about offering jobs to drug dealers! 

There in fact don't seem to be "many progressive politicians" who oppose arresting drug dealers. Knight names only District Attorney Chesea Boudin, who supposedly doesn't want to prosecute small-time drug dealers.

City "progressives" were guilty of political negligence in the past, even after Gavin Newsom got Care Not Cash passed and elected mayor on the homeless issue in spite of consistent opposition from the Bay Guardian left that accused him of waging war on the homeless! (Oh Gavin, you're such a bitch!)

That column Knight links above, by the way, features a walk through the Tenderloin with a city cop, which illustrates the point about addiction:

One man looked dead, and Donohue stopped to make sure he wasn’t. “Are you good? Good?” he said loudly, rousting the man. “Hey, come on sir.”

The man finally woke up, and Donohue asked whether he needed an ambulance. He declined. Donohue told him to dispose of his dirty needles and move along. The man said his name is Jeffrey, that he’s 33 and homeless. He said he’s from the East Bay, but sleeps on the streets of San Francisco. He said he’s been using heroin and crystal meth every day for years.

The moral of that story: shooting up on the streets in San Francisco should be a bust. That's what "progressive" and moderate politicians should be able to agree on. 

That would also have the advantage of combining "law enforcement" with drug treatment. 

Arrest addicts who shoot up in public and make them kick in jail---under medical supervision, of course.