Mayor Breed got a lot of good publicity by announcing she was going to get the drugs out of the Tenderloin section of San Fran. She forgot to mention that the drug dealers would move just a few blocks, to SoMa, and open shop there. Yes, this may inconvenience some of the drug customers, but the supply is the same.
“A recent rash of shootings on a South of Market alley overrun by drug dealing is turning the area into a new hotspot for gun violence.
In a less than two-week span ending March 1, three people were shot and injured on the same block of Minna Street between Sixth and Seventh streets, just across the road from where police found a 16-year-old girl dead from a possible drug overdose last month. The victims included a gig worker who was shot while delivering food for DoorDash on an electric scooter, according to police.”
After a couple of generations of tolerating druggies and dealers, the pronouncement by Breed was taken as a joke. San Fran is collapsing and the leadership is living in a brain fog—not the famous San Fran fog.
SoMa Sees Spike in Shootings as Police, Urban Alchemy Push Drug Dealers Out of Tenderloin
San Francisco Standard, 3/2/22
A recent rash of shootings on a South of Market alley overrun by drug dealing is turning the area into a new hotspot for gun violence.
In a less than two-week span ending March 1, three people were shot and injured on the same block of Minna Street between Sixth and Seventh streets, just across the road from where police found a 16-year-old girl dead from a possible drug overdose last month. The victims included a gig worker who was shot while delivering food for DoorDash on an electric scooter, according to police.
Records show the wounded were among nine people shot so far this year in a part of town known to police as the Southern District, an area that stretches southeast from SoMa toward the Embarcadero and also includes Mission Bay. (The Standard identified one more shooting than reflected in police data.)
As of last week, the Southern had recorded more shootings than any other police district in the city—and it was the only district reporting an increase in gun violence so far in 2022. The numbers in the Southern also far exceed the one and two shootings the district reported in early 2020 and 2021, respectively, and nearly as many shootings have occurred this year as the Southern saw in all of last year.
While it’s unclear how many of the shootings were related to drugs, most of the shootings erupted just south of Market Street—an area that has seen more drug activity since Mayor London Breed declared an emergency in the Tenderloin last December. Police and community ambassadors with the nonprofit Urban Alchemy have ramped up their presence in the Tenderloin, which has pushed dealers to different corners in the neighborhood and deeper into SoMa.
Reese Isbell, a resident of a new condominium building at the corner of Seventh and Minna streets, has seen the neighborhood change for the worse since moving there last July.
When he first arrived, most of the drug dealing happened up Seventh Street, closer to Market Street or outside the federal building on Mission Street, Reese said. But since the holidays, drug dealers and users have “overtaken” the corner outside his building on Minna Street.
“My concern is that everyday, going in and out of my house, my front door is overwhelmed by people asking people to take drugs and buy drugs, and then we have potential overdoses happening all the time,” Reese said. “It’s just not safe.”
Reese, who is a mayoral appointee to a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission board, has helped organize neighbors around the issue of drug dealing. He said he was not surprised to hear about the uptick in shootings on his block.
“That’s part of the drug dealing situation—a potential for violence,” Reese said.
Police Chief Bill Scott addressed the rise in shootings in the Southern District at the Police Commission last Wednesday. At the meeting, the chief said only one of the shootings may have been connected to drugs, but he called the trend “concerning.””
“We will continue to try to drill down on why we think these things are the way they are, but right now we can’t say that it’s associated with anything to do with the Tenderloin,” Scott said.
