Mayor London Breed has had enough.
Fed up with a surge in gun violence, brazen thefts and rampant drug deals, Breed said this week that she’ll boost police overtime to flood the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin with cops, disrupt sales of stolen goods and amend surveillance ordinances so that law enforcement can intervene in real time.
“It’s time,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday, local news outlets reported. “The reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement — more aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”
The police’s Tenderloin Station recently said in a tweet that it seized almost a kilogram of drugs, more than half of which was fentanyl. The department arrested 17 suspected drug dealers in the past week, including 14 that had previously been detained in San Francisco.
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“In recent months we’ve not only seen a number of high-profile incidents of brazen robberies and car break-ins, but also street behavior and criminal activity especially in the Tenderloin that has become far too normal and cannot continue to be tolerated,” Breed said.
The crackdown on Tenderloin, just off the downtown core and among the city’s densest neighborhoods, is likely to face opposition, Breed said.
“What I’m proposing today, and what I will be proposing in the future, will make a lot of people uncomfortable and I don’t care,” she said. “At the end of the day the safety of the people of San Francisco is the most important thing to me.”
[KPIX] — Victoria Pruitt