View the San Francisco for Sunday, September 29, 2024
Mark Farrell: “I will max out police-academy classes, bring in a new Chief . and better management.” Former interim Mayor Mark Farrell’s No. 1 issue is public safety, and his No. 1 criticism of Mayor London Breed is her alleged destruction of the San Francisco Police Department.
Mark Farrell: “I will max out police-academy classes, bring in a new Chief ... and better management.” Former interim Mayor Mark Farrell’s No. 1 issue is public safety, and his No. 1 criticism of Mayor London Breed is her alleged destruction of the San Francisco Police Department.since he left office in 2018 and handed the reins to Breed, who he is now challenging to become The City’s next mayor. “We grew our police department to record staffing levels,” recounted Farrell, who served two terms on the Board of Supervisors before a stint as interim mayor in 2018 after Mayor Ed Lee’s death. Farrell claimed in the Sept. 19 debate that The City has lost almost 600 officers since he left office, “which means that over 25% of our police department has essentially been eviscerated since I left.” The Examiner investigated Farrell’s claims and found them to be generally accurate. According to city employment data, SFPD has several hundred fewer officers on the streets now, compared to five years ago. In fiscal year 2024, city employment data shows a drop of about 25% from fiscal year 2019. Police staffing is just part of a larger debate San Francisco is having around public safety in recent years, which included theas the most important issue in surveys conducted throughout the election, which features Breed, Farrell, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, Supervisor Ahsha Safai and Daniel Lurie, heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and founder of antipoverty nonprofit Tipping Point. Breed’s camp did not disagree with Farrell’s assessment of the numbers, but argued his plan to increase staffing is “no different” from Breed’s. It also pointed to his administration’s struggle to negotiate a new contract with the police union while serving as interim mayor in 2018. “In fact, he didn’t even show up to handle the negotiations and the POA publicly chastised him at the time in their newsletter,” said Joe Arellano, a spokesperson for Breed. “Once Mayor Breed took over after his six-months of failure, she delivered the best contract the City and SFPD has seen, and it’s the basis for the increases in applications and transfers to SFPD.” Unlike Breed, Farrell has promised to immediately fire Police Chief Bill Scott, and promises to set a new tone in The City that he believes will make it more attractive to new officers. “I will max out police academy classes, bring in a new Chief, new leadership, and better management to turbocharge our officer hiring and recruitment to fix the severe crisis that Mayor Breed and Aaron Peskin have allowed,” Farrell said in a statement.San Francisco Police Officer A. Nguyen speaking to a homeless man before a homeless encampment sweep on Waterloo Street by Loomis Street in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023.The Police Executive Research Forum surveys hundreds of police departments across the country to track staffing levels. It documented about a The decline was more pronounced among large police departments like San Francisco’s, however. And unlike their smaller counterparts, many large departments have yet to begin to recover from the wave of resignations and retirements they saw throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But San Francisco and other cities aren’t just struggling to hire more cops — they’re struggling to hire anyone at all. Government agencies around the country have seen a decline in interest from applicants and are havingIn San Francisco, the long-running problem with job vacancies became so severe that the civil grand jury released a report in 2023 that urged— work Breed’s administration claims to have undertaken. The report documented how the number of citywide job vacancies doubled during the pandemic. For example, the vacancy rate for registered-nurse positions at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital rose from 1.5% in 2020 to 12% in 2023.Mayoral candidate Mark Farrell has promised that he will immediately fire San Francisco police Chief Bill Scott, above, if he’s elected to City Hall in November.To recover from recent losses, Farrell proposes outsourcing background checks of prospective officers to an outside firm in order to onboard them faster. Farrell has committed to funding five police academies a year, up from the four currently funded in The City’s budget. Each police-academy class contains a varying number of recruits, not all of whom become full-time sworn officers. There were 15 people who graduated from the most recently completed academy, which began with 27 recruits. It is unclear when Farrell believes The City can achieve full police staffing, for which the recommended level is 2,074. For her part, Breed pledged earlier this year to achieve full police staffing in three years, and noted a slight. San Francisco has held two academy classes so far in 2024 and is set to begin its third soon, according to a police-department spokesperson. The next class will be its largest in five years. The City has four police academies budgeted for this year and can increase that number if there is a demand for another, according to Breed’s administration. Farrell’s public-safety plan goes beyond academies and background checks. He has also pledged to immediately fire police Chief Bill Scott, and select a replacement who he said “is going to fight with me as mayor to grow the police department budget once again.” It is true that Breed and allies on the Board of Supervisors pledged to redirect $120 million from the SFPD budget to support the Dream Keeper Initiative after the social unrest of 2020. However, advocates have argued that the promise of redirecting police funding went unfulfilled. Despite support for the Dream Keeper Initiative, the police-department budget has been growing, quickly. The department’s budget is $823 million this year, by far the highest it’s ever been, in large part due to a new contract negotiated between Breed’s administration and the police union that significantly increased officer pay and bonuses.Left-right: Daniel Lurie, Ahsha Safaí, Aaron Peskin and Mark Farrell during the mayoral debate at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco on Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024. noting that a surge in federal funding for local police departments led many to hire more cops in the 1990s, and those officers are now reaching retirement age. Dorsey and Peskin — who is polling behind Lurie, Farrell and Breed — co-authored a measure on the November ballot that would reestablish The program — which Breed and Farrell also support — would allow older officers to delay retirement. While they continue to work, officers would continue to receive their salaries while the retirement pay they would have received is stashed away in escrow until they finally retire. Critics have questioned the fiscal implications and practical benefits of the measure, but it has strong support among city leaders, including Breed and Farrell. Daniel Lurie, who polls show is neck-and-neck with Breed and Farrell, has introduced a police-staffing plan that includes building housing for first responders and providing rental subsidies, child care and transportation benefits to officers.Methadone tablets in the hands of registered nurse Jessica “Hoops” at the Bridge Clinic for opioid use treatment at Zuckerberg General Hospital in San Francisco on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. California regulations around methadone, an opioid-addiction treatment that experts consider a lifesaving medication, are now in line with federal guidelines.on Friday, a measure introduced by San Francisco Assemblymember Matt Haney earlier this year. Patients treated for opioid addiction can now take home up to 72 hours worth of methadone doses, and doctors outside of specifically certified methadone programs can distribute the medication. “We’ve reached a point where the treatment for opioid addiction is much harder to get than the deadly drugs themselves,” Haney said in a statement. “Dealers are much better at getting fentanyl and heroin into people’s hands than we are at getting them addiction medication. We have to reverse that entirely if we want to save people’s lives.”The 6-year-old Bridge Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital offers addiction treatment for substances including alcohol and stimulants, but about half of its patients struggle with opioid addiction. The clinic just expanded its hours over the summer, offering in-person afternoon appointments Monday through Friday for patients seeking treatment for addiction. It will do so again next month when it begins offering morning appointments on-site rather than just via telehealth. Crucially, it’s the only clinic in The City — and one of only a handful in the state — that offers up to three days worth of methadone doses to patients suffering from opioid addictions without being an officially licensed opioid treatment program. The patients can’t yet take those doses home, but will soon be able to under the new state regulations. “The Bridge Clinic is a clinic that is really focused on making it as easy as possible for people who use drugs to get the medications that can be life-saving for them,” said Dr. Hannah Snyder, the clinic’s director. “We use medications to treat any substance-use disorder, opioids or alcohol or stimulants, anything like that.”Dr. Hannah Snyder, Director of the Bridge Clinic for opioid use treatment at Zuckerberg General Hospital in San Francisco on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. Federal regulators loosened restrictions earlier this year around distributing doses of methadone, which is one of two medications — alongside buprenorphine — that public-health officials are increasingly turning to in order to combat the opioid crisis. Haney’s legislation moves California’s guidelines on methadone closer to the new federal standard. Before now, only one of San Francisco’s seven licensed clinics — the Opiate Treatment Outpatient Program at San Francisco General — had been able to send patients home with the medication due to a pandemic exception that was extended this year. The Bridge Clinic is not a licensed opioid treatment program, but Snyder said that the former state guidelines on the medication did not prohibit the Bridge Clinic from giving patients three days of doses in person. Most clinics, she noted, don’t offer this due to administrative challenges of providing methadone. The Bridge Clinic’s purpose is in its name: Clinicians seek to connect patients seeking opioid-addiction treatment — especially those who find themselves in emergencies — with programs. Around 25% of its patients come to it through the emergency department. “If a person wants to be on methadone and comes to ... and they don’t have enough spots in the morning, they’re all full, those patients can be redirected to the Bridge Clinic, and we can get them started on methadone that day, so that a person isn’t turned away and is able to actually get the services that they need,” she said On average, the clinic sees two patients per day who are starting methadone treatment but awaiting connection with another programs. Instead of liquid doses, which some patients say they don’t like the taste of, the clinic provides the medication in pill form. “We have more tools than we had before,” said Alexander Logan, who has worked at the clinic for the last four years. “I would say being able to start methadone in our clinic is a game-changer because, for a lot of folks, methadone is the best tool.”Dr. Alexander Logan at the Bridge Clinic for opioid use treatment at Zuckerberg General Hospital in San Francisco on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024. It’s one that San Francisco public-health officials have increasingly sought to rely upon in the aftermath of last year,since officials started recording data in 2020. While the San Francisco Department of Public Health has removed barriers to buprenorphine access through a variety of methods, expanded access to methadone was harder to attain up until nowLogan said the inability of the majority of San Francisco clinics to prescribe take-home methadone doses has been a hindrance for patients who say they feel it’s the best option. “Friday is a tough time to work in the addiction world, because so much of our ability to get people on life-saving treatment depends on our ability to access that treatment that day,” he said. “Right now, if someone comes into my clinic on Friday for whom methadone is the best choice, I can’t do it because I could give you a dose now, but then you’re going to be on your own over the weekend.” Logan said Haney’s legislation will address this gap, providing patients a safety net outside of traditional clinic hours. “We frequently start people on methadone in the hospital and get them up to an appropriate dose, and when they leave, that linkage to ongoing care is a fragile moment for them,” he said. “We’ve had lots of people who were able to get on stable on meds in the hospital, and then something goes wrong in that linkage period.” Ciela Oncina, a substance-use navigator for the clinic who also works with the emergency department at Zuckerberg, said she sees this play out firsthand. “We want people to get the help they need, and we want to have them feel that they can come to us for help,” she said. “In order to build that trusting relationship with them, we need to be able to offer what we say we can offer.” Oncina said the looser restrictions will allow other parts of patients’ lives to come into focus once they’re most pressing needs are being met more smoothly. “Every day we see patients who are struggling with a lot of different things — struggling to find housing, they’re struggling with food insecurity, they have family members that are sick, they have kids that they’re taking care of,” she said. “The list goes on, and on, and on and on.” Now that the bill has been signed, Snyder said, the clinic has only a few bureaucratic hoops to jump through before they can begin implementing the new standards in a matter of weeks.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. 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