Friends and allies gather to listen to one of the speakers at Saturday’s celebration.

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On Wednesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee voted 3-2 to deny $500,000 funding to Mayor Newsom’s Community Justice Center.

While many San Franciscans have been led to believe that the Center would deal with problematic misdemeanors and non-violent felonies, such as drug-dealing charges, the Mayor’s Office has repeatedly touted the Center as a piece of a solution to homelessness, focusing on “quality of life” citations, which, in San Francisco’s law books, include various kinds of sleeping in public, asking for alms twice, and jaywalking. At the same time that the City was asked to devote $500,000 now to an untested and almost undefined project that will cost millions each year to run, the Mayor is proposing cuts to the municipal budget which will eliminate some of the very service to which the Community Justice Center was intended to send citees.

While the ideal of using treatment instead of punishment in cases where treatment is wanted and useful is right on, this has to be applied intelligently (and without a published plan, with constant City bureaucrat confusion between “treatment” and “services,” with the bizarre idea that all panhandlers need some kind of treatment other than an income, we’ve got no reason to believe that it will be), and it cannot come at the cost of decreased services overall or decreased accessibility to services for those who seek them out without the stick of the criminal justice system. Any such plan needs to come with a clear plan, and with funding for the treatment it will mandate.

Carolyn Tyler covers the story for ABC here.

The SF Print Collective and the Coalition on Homelessness invite you to join us for a mural celebration to raise awareness about justice for homeless people.

Saturday, May 10, 2008, 12-4 p.m.

Clarion Alley, San Francisco (between 17^th and 18^th Streets and Mission and Valencia)

Poster and T-shirt printing

Food and music

For more information, call 510‧332‧7839.

98 we hate!

99 is fine!

Spread the word!

Vote June third!

I recited this cheesy poem for artist and videographer, T.J. Walkup, hoping its doggerel claws would sink into his brain. I wanted to warn him in an unforgettable way about the savagely deceptive ballot measure Prop. 98. No rock star Obama or Clinton appears on the June 3 ballot. There is strong concern that low voter turnout could result in Prop 98 permanently wiping out rent control across California.

“The California Property Owners and Farmland Protection Act” seeks to prohibit governmental use of eminent domain to seize and transfer private homes to a private developer. However, the prop does not stop there.

Trolling the web, T.J. discovered a pro-Prop. 98 site linked to a “low-end” YouTube video. Comedian Drew Carey was paid to tell a “sad story” about a developer scheme using eminent domain to displace “poor Hispanic and Black kids” from a fitness center. The motive for this child abuse? These builders wanted to construct “mixed income housing.” To T.J. it suggested, “they were doing something for the greater good of the community, but taking the community out while they were doing it.”

“I’m not a lawyer,” T.J. told me. “[On the surface,] this looks harmless.

“The most evil thing about [Prop. 98] is that it’s written to deceive people who have reasonable intelligence or better. It presents itself such that a person like myself struggles for the logic [in] what’s going on.”

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As San Francisco’s June budget proposal for the 2008-09 fiscal year looms ahead, advocates of public services must come together and assert our voices, demanding that the services, which benefit the most marginalized populations of the city, not be cut. The Mayor’s office projects a $300 million deficit, and, at this point, the budget lies in Newsom’s control.

As the City moves forward to shut down shelters and eliminate mental health services, we must intervene and demand that our supervisors stand up to the war being waged against those of us whose very existence depends on the services the Mayor wants to eradicate.

If the Mayor’s 2007-08 budget is any indication of what lies ahead, then the city can anticipate cuts and the elimination of programs that serve populations in need such as the homeless community, low-income families, people living with HIV/AIDS, low-income seniors, people caught in the justice system, and immigrants.

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Ella Hill Hutch Community Center employees don’t know if—or when—they will be forced to close their shelter for homeless people. As of two weeks ago, the staff were bracing for a June 29 closing date, but no final decision on the Center’s fate has yet been made, said shelter manager Trina Johnson. This comes in the wake of the March 31 closing of Buster’s Place, the city’s only 24-hour resource center for homeless people.

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I remember having a beer bottle keychain. It was heavy and metal and hard to lose. It opened up its fair share of longnecks and it would jangle my keys like chimes when I pulled it from my pocket.

I used to have a lot of keys. They’d weigh down my worn out jeans and poke holes through the pockets. They’d end up collecting trinkets—weird plastic chains with bottle openers or flashlights or cartoon characters dangled off of them. The bigger and heavier they were the better. That way, I wouldn’t lose them. But over time my key ring’s gotten smaller and smaller and it seems like I just can’t keep a hold of nothin’ but the bottle opener.

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Draft legislation reforming the City’s housing subsidy program for families, a program which had placed strain on the ability for homeless families to find housing, was released by Supervisor Chris Daly’s office on April 18 for review by SRO Families United, a collaborative effort of community housing advocacy organizations. If passed, this legislation will call for an increase in the subsidy from $500 to $1,000 per month per family, and an end to the arbitrary two-year time limit placed on these subsidies, in favor of need-based time limits that vary from family to family.

Upon inspection, the organization will send the draft back to Daly’s office. If passed, this bill will be a long-time victory for SRO Families United, which has fought for an improvement and expansion of the subsidy program.

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On March 20, I was visiting homeless friends at their camp on publicly-owned land along the west edge of southbound I-280, near 20th St. with my dog, Kilo. It was a warm sunny day and I fell asleep. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep. I awoke when I heard someone shout, “Get your dog! Get your dog!” I jumped up and ran out to the path to see my dog Kilo blocking the path from two California Highway Patrol officers.

One officer had a Taser out and pointed at Kilo, the second officer had his pistol out and pointed at Kilo, who was about 15 to 20 feet in front of the two officers.

“Please don’t shoot: My dog won’t bite.” I begged the officers three different times. Both officers became louder and more aggressive as they yelled at me: “Get your fucking dog or I’ll shoot it!”

Both officers took at least two steps towards Kilo, while I tried to get to Kilo. With courage in his heart, Kilo stood his ground.

This seemed to make the officers angry and the officer to my right yelled at me. “I said to get your fucking dog!” and he pointed his pistol at me. When Kilo saw the officer pointing his gun at me, he started to advance towards the officer with the gun. At that point both officers fired simultaneously. The Taser malfunctioned or something, because the darts never reached Kilo. The officer who had drawn his hand gun fired once, just as I was reaching for Kilo. I felt the blast on the back of my hands, I was so close. The bullet hit Kilo behind his head. Horrified, I saw my little buddy Kilo first sit, and then fall dead.

After they shot Kilo, they shouted at me, “Get on the ground,” which I did so they wouldn’t shoot me. They arrested me for suspicion of trespassing (on publicly owned land), handcuffed me, stuffed me into the back of their squad car, and hauled me off to the CHP station on 8^th Street. Animal Control came for Kilo’s body.

They cut a lock and chain on 20^th St. gate to gain entry to the area. They never announced their presence. They never asked any questions. They snuck up on the area Kilo and I were in—for what purpose, I don’t know. At the time of the shooting, there happened to be several other people at some other nearby camps, but none of them were confronted by officers. They came, shot Kilo, arrested me and left. That was it. As far as I know, they haven’t been back since.

What was so desperately urgent on that roadside that they couldn’t step back, use a radio, and wait for an Animal Control officer? If they feared for their safety, then why did they keep stepping toward him, escalating instead of de-escalating the situation? Why did they have to shoot my little buddy Kilo?