San Francisco ties welfare to drug-screening, boosts police powers in stunning tough-on-crime shift
San Francisco ties welfare to drug-screening, boosts police powers in stunning tough-on-crime shift
In a bid to address the city's drug crisis — and the crime and homelessness that come with it — San Francisco voters shifted right in Tuesday's primary, approving ballot measures that aim to boost enforcement powers.
The only thing that drug screening welfare applicants has ever done is shown that the percentage of welfare applicants that use drugs is much lower than the general population.
You fucking morons are literally adopting Florida's failures from a decade ago.
Man I forgot about the Florida drug screening thing from like 10-15 years ago. Been a wild decade though
The only thing that drug screening welfare applicants has ever done is shown that the percentage of welfare applicants that use drugs is much lower than the general population.
But it makes sense that usage rates would be lower if they had to stop taking to keep their presumably much-needed benefits.
Does that make it OK to use the welfare money for drugs?
Did Florida's system just cut them off when they found them using or did they offer them assistance options for getting clean? S.F.'s system plans to offer them assistance getting clean while they continue to receive the welfare.
Some of us see drug use as a health issue and not a moral imperative. Money is fungible, so if they’re using welfare dollars to buy drugs instead of smashing car windows to get their fix, that’s probably a net positive even if it isn’t ideal.
And if you’re just trying to get more people into treatment, I’m not sure piss testing the poor is remotely the most cost effective approach.
Yes. It does make it okay. Welfare should be given on no conditions. If they want to spend it on drugs and won't be able to afford food because of it, that is their choice. Why should people who get assistance be told how to spend that money? Should they also be restricted from buying beer with that money? How about sugary sodas? How far are you willing to go to tell people how they should be allowed to spend the money given to them when that is not a requirement for anyone else's money?
The system should also offer them assistance to break addictions regardless.
Drug treatment is important, yes, but making it a precondition for benefits will absolutely hurt the most vulnerable. If there was actually enough affordable housing available for everyone that needs it, there would be far less of a need for this kind of policy. It is well documented that providing housing before anything else sets people up for success. If someone has been living on the streets and suddenly has housing available, their life will improve so drastically thanks to the job and social opportunities that will become available, also making it less likely that drug abuse will continue.
This seems like a cop out to me. Just build houses for fuck’s sake.
Breed has been on the wrong side of so many issues. Most recently she made an incredibly tone-deaf statement denouncing the city council’s vote against the genocide in Gaza. I’m done with her.
https://voterguide.sfelections.org/local-ballot-measures/measure-a
This affordable housing measure also passed in the same election, for what it's worth.
The thing is, they don't want drug users to have houses. Sad but true
How would (forced) addiction treatment hurt the most vulnerable?
For one thing, it's extremely difficult to force someone out of an addiction. You usually have to want to quit in order for that to be an option. Otherwise you have to do something like torture them by making them go through a possibly extremely painful cold turkey withdrawal.
So I'd say torturing the most vulnerable would hurt them.
beyond that forced treatment is ethically questionable, conditioning other forms of help on sobriety puts people in a bind. it's hard for people to get and stay sober when they're suffering, physically and mentally.
housing/food/health care (to include mental health and psychiatric care) first means it's more likely that efforts toward sobriety will even work.
Forced addiction treatment isn't what's happening. They drug test the poor and then cut them off from benefits if they fail. It is a punishment.
The only way to be eligible for benefits again is to join a treatment program, many of which in the US are just religious ministries that care more about proselytizing than human outcomes. Even cults like the Church of Scientology runs drug treatment programs, with obvious motivations...
These people are exploited by pretty much everyone, including those who are tasked to help them. If your solution is to force them into anything, recovery or otherwise, you're just exploiting them further.
Given that neither her nor the council have anything to do with policy in Gaza and that both are going to be making statements purely to aim to appeal to chunks of the electorate, does it make sense to condition your vote on that?
If you were choosing a dentist, would you use their stated positions on the Levant to do so?
If I had a dentist who told me that they were okay with tens of thousands of children being murdered? Yeah, I might worry about their compassion as a healthcare provider.
I'm not a San Francisco resident, so I don't get a vote, I just have lots of connections to the region. She didn't have to denounce the city council's resolution against the genocide, she chose to, and that felt like a gut punch to me at the time. As for the relevance of it all, it was a non-binding (obviously) resolution taking a moral stand on an issue directly impacting hundreds if not thousands of residents in a pretty small city, so it matters.
I take your point, but if I asked my dentist if they thought it was okay to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of children because they were born on the wrong side of a border, and they said yes? I'd absolutely find a different doctor.
One of the worst parts of this, and one that will get people killed, is they loosened the restrictions on police chases. Now police can chase cars for crimes where there's no longer a threat of violence like robbery through the second densest city in the country. People are so indoctrinated by copaganda that they think police chases always end up with the cop catching the bad guy instead of how they usually end, with a fatal crash.
I occasionally get in the police dash cam rabbit hole. It's crazy how most states have realized how dangerous car chases are and don't chase at all. BOLO the car and go arrest them the next day.
Then there Arkansas and Georgia where all the cops are just itching to get into a 130mph chase through neighborhoods willing to pit at any speed risking their life, the suspects life, and the hundreds sometimes thousands of people they go screaming past during a chase.
I used to work for a local TV station and every year they did this thing called "Crimestoppers" where we'd ride along with a cop all night just in case something happened. This is not a huge city, but there's enough crime that something ended up on camera. I didn't hate doing it. I'm no cop-lover, but the guy they paired me with was a good enough conversationalist to talk to all night at least... but I was terrified of ending up in a car chase situation. Cars make me anxious as it is. Thankfully, that never happened.
That same measure also allows the use of drones and other technology to follow and track the suspects, so may not necessarily mean more automobile persuits. We'll have to wait and see I guesa.
The way I always hear it is that they are only ever chasing murderers and violent offenders and you should want them to catch those grandma-killers before they get you, too.
That's how it was before, for the police to chase their had to be a reasonable suspicion that the criminal was in there way to commit another violent crime. So if a robbery happened and the police arrive and the criminal takes off the reasonable assumption is theyre heading back home, not off to commit another violent crime, so the police would not pursue them. Now they can pursue them and endanger all the people on the road just to protect the property of the store owner.
Cop shows and movies distort our perception of them but the reality is that most police chases end in a crash and serious injury if not death. This chance goes up even higher with dense cities with a lot of pedestrians around like San Francisco. So they should only be used if they're preventing someone from murdering or seriously injuring someone else. A car at high speeds is just as , if not more dangerous than a gun and should be used as such.
"tough on crime" is just a euphemism for authoritarian
The NIMBY class will always project its insecurity more greatly than the remainder of the populace.
People vote left wing
Left wing policies make city better
Better city attracts more people
More people increases costs
Increased costs filter for rich people
Rich people vote authoritarian.
And to be clear, they vote authoritarian because they are the authoritarians. In a capitalistic society money is authority. Those with money rule.
People assume rich people are voting against their self interests somehow, but they're not. Money serves them and allows them to be exempt from most of the laws and rules.
They vote on laws that let them keep and make more money, at the expense of you not making as much. Then they use that wealth and influence to do it more.
Which is why we're past due to be eating the rich.
You skipped the essential NIMBY step between these two:
Better city attracts more people
More people increases costs
Costs scale way out of proportion with population because of artificial constraints imposed by those lucky enough to be here first.
This is the opposite of the advice in the book, The End of Policing. Book was so good that I bought copies for people close to me.
Just take care of people. We can afford to. It costs less than enforcement costs.
From the article:
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Just take care of people. We can afford to.
Sure we can, but we won't, because to certain people in power the cruelty is the purpose.
I mean the book is spot on, but taking care of people is socialism and that's a dirty word nowadays.
Plus scared and disconnected people buy more stuff so we suffer for the sake of capitalism.
It helps them to have an enemy to blame for... whatever. They move the target a lot, but the poor are in the worst position to fight back. And the powers that be don't want a fair fight; they want to punch down and then brag about how right they were and that that's why you should re-elect them. Because they're sociopaths.
Just take care of people. We can afford to
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That's unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That’s unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
The costs for locking up homeless people is greater than the cost of providing housing. The following quote is from a slapdash search; I haven't read the document because my original source is a book, The End of Policing, and that book had multiple citations that I'm not listing here.
As identified in the chart above, the total cost of incarceration is estimated to be 25% higher than the total cost of providing equivalent supportive services to prevent recidivism.
Local tech billionares are recently dumping more money into the city politics to shift it ot the right. The CEO of Y combinator, a hugely influential silicon valley incubator is notoriously antagonist and recently drunkenly said the local city council should "die slow."
Awwww I like hacker news why does ycombinator have to be evil
Measures supporting low income housing, more ethics laws for city officials, turning office space into residential space, and $6B for mental health care also passed in the election. Those definitely don't seem like things that the right would support.
Hes right of San Fransisco progressive politics. Basically bog standard tech bro liberals, i.e "Yimby but not actually where I live, also don't tax me in any real way and where are all my cops at?"
The 7 city council members he told to die were all progressives. He opposes actual progressive reforms, and is willing to spend his billions and his massive influence to fight them.
The rest of the propositions you mentioned were pretty liberal but the office space one was lead by the right. It allowed for fast tracking transforming office space from commercial to residential, which sounds good on paper, until you realize that fast track already existed for affordable housing. All the proposition did was fast track developers plans to turn the space into non-affordable housing, which San Francisco already has plenty of, and removes the incentives to build affordable housing out of that space.
You could argue that reducing the red tape for market rate housing would help increase the supply and therefore reduce the cost for everyone, but that's a standard right wing pro-developer argument. The left would say that SF has been building tons of market rate housing for years with no decrease in rent and that the only way to make housing affordable is to build affordable housing. You can either build it through state funding and building, like the affordable housing proposition A does, or by incentiving developers to build it, because the base incentive of the market is to build the most expensive housing possible to maximize profits.
I mean, I agree that the NIMBY bastards on the city council should be kicked out, but not to pave the way for a cop-loving bootlicker.
The SF City Council sucks donkey balls but at least they stand up to copaganda.
Hasn't the failed war on drugs shown the narrative that drugs cause the homelessness and crime and are not just another symptom of the underlying problems is a lie?
Guess not to the general public.
If the more progressive policies are helping, that impact is getting drowned out by other factors pushing parts of town in the other direction.
As someone who lives in the SF / Oakland area, I can attest to people constantly talking about drugs, crime and homelessness going in the wrong direction. People bring it up without being prompted.
My theory is that more progressive addiction policies work, but that’s just one variable. And there are other things impacting day to day vibe in the city that are overshadowing the stuff that’s working.
When people go to the ballot box, nuance often goes out the door. When things aren’t great, they vote for whatever is different.
Of course they're going to talk about crime, what else are they going to talk about, the weather that never changes?
In all seriousness though I do think it's the lack of other issues that's driving this. Most other issues liberals care about have come to a secure consensus in the city, abortion and LGBT rights are as secure as they can get, marijuana and even mushrooms are basically legal, the last gun store has closed, the city has a good recycling and composting system and a green energy option, the parks and schools get decent funding etc. The only thing left is affordable housing and crime. Since the minutia of housing policy is boring that just leaves crime for the media and people to talk about, so even if crime itself is stable or even declining, people's awareness of it increases.
You can see this during the pandemic where homelesness and crime were just as bad if not worse, but people were focusing on other things.
The lack of other issues also demobilizes the average liberal voter who already has everything they want and doesn't see a need to vote, so the election becomes dominated by people who care about that one remaining issue.
Whether they are a cause or symptom, people shooting up in the streets and leaving needles everywhere is unacceptable.
They wouldn’t have to shoot up in the streets if SF still had the safe injection sites up. People who shoot up in the streets do so mostly because they want to get found if they OD.
Making it illegal to be high won’t make addicts want to stop getting high, it will just push them into dark corners where they die when they OD. Imo that’s way more unacceptable.
All of history has shown that getting tough by criminalizing drug use doesn't solve the problem.
Policing a certain demographic more always works
Depends on who it's working for. It works quite well for the people who want to drive up real estate prices.
So if they test positive for drugs, that means you'll set them up with support programs, right? Treat the underlying issue, correct? Not just write them off and let the problem grow even more..... right???
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Yes?
This is what happens when less than 25% of the population comes out to vote.
Turnout in the last election in SF was 44.4%. Not fantastic, but much better than the rest of the state.
That's why they pushed these referendums this election cycle, they knew it would be low turnout
That is a pretty sad turnout. The votes reflect the choices of about 92K registered democrats, vs. roughly 13K registered rebublicans though, so it's not like this is some right wing takeover.
Oh good, I would hate to see a vulnerable struggling poor person get support that they don’t “deserve” because they didn’t fix their life yet.
Sincerely, 1/3 of this country. :/
From what I understand, drug screening usually ends up costing more than it saves because, unlike what the propagandists would have you believe, the vast majority of people on welfare aren't on drugs.
Read the article:
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Ah so the real estate developers are finally ready to finish their gentrification efforts. They must've forced out the last remaining owners in the area so now they can crack down and turn it into overpriced bullshit
The individual homeowners in California have developers over a barrel lol
Prop 13 gives all the power to home owners, as does the glut of local regulations and permits.
It's why we have a housing crisis. Can't build any more homes.
These Trump areas need to just fall into the ocean. It is sick what they want to do to poor people.
San Francisco, California is now a Trump area? What the fuck are you talking about?
And why does your gibberish have so many upvotes??
Seriously. Who the fuck is up voting this completely detached from reality shit? This is honestly a really bad look for Lemmy. It reminds me of "The_Donald" subreddit from back in the day. Different end of the political spectrum but behaving pretty similar.
I wonder how much money would be saved if they stopped means testing the poor and spent all their money helping people instead of paying cops to terrorize them.
Cops in SF don't do shit. They effectively went on strike a couple of years ago.
This has had both good and bad effects.
SF has cops? Jk but yeah, Its so obvious that the people making comments like that don't live here. The rage bait is strong with this topic for sure.
I stand corrected!
Finalllllyyy
The city that walks through literal human shit is finally tired of that.
So it's trying to get rid of the rest of its poor people basically