San Francisco police are beefing up law enforcement presence in the Castro LGBTQ neighborhood after a recent string of violent incidents, Police Chief William Scott and gay Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman told the Bay Area Reporter. But the news comes as grants that have helped neighborhood upkeep are under threat due to the city’s budget deficit.
Scott, a straight ally, said citywide police resources will be brought to bear to assist the efforts of Mission Station Captain Liza Johansen, also a straight ally, including motorcycle officers. The station oversees most of the Castro.
“We do hear all the concerns of [board] president Mandelman and many of the constituents he has in the Castro,” Scott said in an April 29 phone interview with the B.A.R. where he was joined by Johansen. “Some of the violent crimes … those were significant events. Not only are they traumatic, but they have a lasting impact on people. The outcomes, in terms of the arrests [in the theater beating and the Easter assault], were good. The DA is following up with prosecutions. There are consequences when someone comes into a community as beautiful as the Castro and commits these crimes.”
“If we have people being robbed, assaulted, stabbed – we’ll put resources in to address that,” Scott continued. “Sometimes it takes away our ability to manage lesser offenses. … Violent crime across the city is down. It frees up resources to do other things.”
Mandelman, who represents the Castro as part of District 8 on the board, said he had two recent meetings with Mayor Daniel Lurie about conditions in the neighborhood. Mandelman said that Lurie promised, “more officers, more foot beats, more drug enforcement, more motorcycle cops – more of everything.”
Lurie stated the B.A.R., “In every trip to the Castro, whether I’m talking to officers on the street, outreach workers helping people who are struggling, or business owners serving the community, I hear about the importance of safe and clean streets. And that’s exactly what our administration is delivering for the community, just as we’ve done on Sixth Street and in the Mission.
“With our integrated street teams and law enforcement, we are dedicating the resources to make sure residents and visitors feel safe every day, and we will absolutely ensure this community has the tools and resources to have safe, clean and vibrant streets,” Lurie continued.
It’s all being rolled out “over the next month,” Mandelman said in late April. He plans for a public safety meeting in July.
“I definitely hope this month we will have seen an increase in enforcement action,” he said. “If I haven’t seen that, I will be even more concerned than I already am.”
That pledge didn’t come fast enough for employees and patrons of the Blind Butcher on 18th Street, however. Another Sunday funday was just getting underway April 27 when James Nordine, a bartender at the restaurant, said he had to fend off a man wielding a knife.
It’s the latest in a string of disturbing violence in the city’s LGBTQ neighborhood in recent months. The assailant has not been found.
“He ran behind the bar, he went to the cash register, and I was shoving him back,” Nordine, a gay man who has worked in the neighborhood for several years, told the B.A.R. “He was trying to open it, but we were fighting him off. He went straight to the register, so that’s what he was going for. It’s not like he walked in and looked around.”
After he could not get into the cash register, the assailant “ended up getting past me and got to the end of the bar, grabbed the bar knife, and started waving it at me and the customers,” Nordine said. “I grabbed a bottle and was holding it in case he turned at me.”
Nordine said the man then dropped the knife and he chased him out, at which point the assailant got on a bus. The whole thing took “literally a minute or two,” he said.
San Francisco Police Department Public Information Officer Paulina Henderson stated to the B.A.R. that at 12:53 p.m. that day, “Officers arrived on scene and contacted employees of the business who advised the suspect fled the scene prior to police arrival and they retrieved the knife from the suspect. There were no injuries as a result of the incident. Officers searched the area to no avail and were advised by management no further police assistance was requested at this time.”
The incident was one week after a man was hit in the face and reportedly had a seizure at the intersection of Castro and Market streets on Easter Sunday. That came five and a half weeks after a Walgreens employee and an alleged thief were both arrested after an early morning fight at 18th and Castro streets, and seven weeks after a beloved bar doorman was beaten in front of the neighborhood’s iconic Castro Theatre.
The B.A.R. also reported that three other alleged incidents have occurred in the area as well, but these were not reported to police.
Perception of safety is down
It was after the Easter Sunday assault that Mandelman in a public statement linked deteriorating street conditions in the Castro to efforts to improve street conditions elsewhere in the city. “I have supported and continue to support Mayor Lurie’s efforts to restore order in some of our more troubled neighborhoods,” he stated. “However, it seems plain to me that these efforts have led to the displacement of people with severe mental health and substance abuse challenges to the Castro. This cannot continue.”
Dave Burke, a straight ally who is the public safety liaison for District 8, wanted to distinguish between correlation and causation vis a vis the violent incidents that’ve happened, and unhoused people, or people using narcotics publicly.
“I would not want to link up the instances of violence we’ve had because they’re all very different,” Burke said. “What they have in common is they share the geographic area – it’s not like a series of burglaries where you can tie a pattern together. Each of these instances of violence is extremely different.”
Burke gave, for example, the circumstances behind the Castro Theatre attack, which was reportedly “precipitated by an incident at the bar” where the victim was a doorman, and the Easter Sunday attack, which was reportedly random.
“These are two acts of violence completely unrelated to one another,” Burke said. “What I would say is we are seeing more people in the Castro. We are seeing more unhoused people being pushed up due to efforts in places like the Tenderloin and South of Market. … It’s hard to say one causes the other. Violence is still very rare in this neighborhood – which is underlined with how upset we all get when it happens.”
Castro residents and workers feel that things have not been safe and are getting worse.
“I would say things in the Castro have gotten worse,” Mark Bowen, a gay man who is a manager at Midnight Sun, told the B.A.R. “Not exponentially, but definitely worse. Downtown has gotten better.”
Bowen expressed frustration that it can be difficult to get in touch with law enforcement, or others who may be able to help, particularly in situations where “people … may not have a weapon but are threatening people.”
“You call 311, it takes forever, then they tell you to call 911,” he said. “It should be easier to report.”
Michael Moreno lives in the Castro and used to work at the Mix bar with the victim in the theater beating, who has been identified only as Tony.
“It’s just patrol of the area,” he told a B.A.R. reporter at Midnight Sun. “The response time from the police department is horrible – something that should take 15 minutes is already over and done with.”
Nordine said the police responded pretty promptly to the incident April 27, but that this hasn’t always been the case.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve had someone threaten me with a knife,” Nordine said, adding after a past incident at Moby Dick, where he used to bartend, “it took police over an hour to arrive.”
Police chief weighs in
Scott said he faces a problem with resources. Asked why foot beats are almost always during the daytime, Scott replied that, “We are still short with officers.”
Indeed, the city has a shortage of about 500 police officers.
“Some of the work we do, we do on an overtime basis,” Scott said. “We have to backfill on overtime. Unfortunately, managing that means we can’t deploy officers 24 hours a day, seven days a week in some locations, so we try to be very strategic, whether it’s citywide response or Captain Johansen, who has to manage her budget on overtime, knowing we don’t have enough.
“The waking hours most people are out … even in the Castro, where there’s a thriving nightlife, the daytime, is the swing watch hours of 12 to 8 [p.m.], 11 [a.m. to 7 [p.m.], those are the hours when most people are out,” Scott said. “We’ve researched this.”
Queer District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder held a hearing April 30 on the SFPD’s overtime practices. A city audit released in December revealing overtime spending doubled over five years to more than $108 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year has sparked criticism from city leaders and the public.
As they deploy more police resources to the Castro in the coming weeks, both Scott and Johansen stressed to the B.A.R. that they are trying to be unpredictable in doing so.
“We try not to be predictable,” Scott said. “We just don’t have enough officers to fill all the shifts we’d like to at this time.”
Scott said the first thing to do when balancing a neighborhood’s needs with those of the city’s, given the resources, is to “listen.”
“We definitely hear everybody, but then we have to prioritize,” he said. “And I will say this: we’ve had some success in terms of our outcomes.”
Scott touted that violent crime is at a generational low-point in the city.
Asked what she would do given the resources, Johansen said it’s time to see what results these latest interventions will have first.
“We just got resources from other parts of the city, so I hope that is going to make a significant impact,” she said, adding she’ll reassess in 30-60 days.
“I try not to be predictable with our resources,” Johansen added. “Changing when and how we do enforcement is vital. If, for whatever reason, there’s a different population moving into a neighborhood, we try to be creative in our approach.”
Scott is optimistic about the reorganization of street crisis response.
“We believe these street teams will make a big difference and will work nicely with our plans,” he said.
SFPD Sergeant Stephen Tacchini gave a preview of enforcement operations at the April meeting of the Castro Merchants Association, where he stated that undercover officers and California Highway Patrol will be “going out in the community and grabbing everyone that’s wanted,” as well as doing blitz operations to combat organized retail theft.
City street teams reorganized
Santiago Lerma, a straight ally, is conductor of the city’s street team in the Mission neighborhood. Lurie’s office recently reorganized nine previously siloed organizations across seven departments – police, fire, sheriff, public works, public health, Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and emergency management – so that neighborhoods will have a unified street outreach team. Lerma’s team, like the police precinct, covers both the Mission district and much of the Castro.
“The large city teams were dissolved and smaller neighborhood teams were created with all the components that made up the teams before. … One of the benefits of the neighborhood model is we have our own team that can do small resolutions of encampments,” as well as other issues that may be reported to 311, such as graffiti, Lerma told the B.A.R. “It can be nimble. We can respond to 311 calls in real time.”
This has led to improvements in preventing tent encampments from springing up on sidewalks, said Lerma, who used to work for Hillary Ronen as a legislative aide when she was District 9 supervisor.
Lerma said that the change was announced March 25. “One thing I do want to make clear is the Castro did not lose any resources with this restructuring,” he said.
“What was already in place is still in place, but with this model we can shift more,” Lerma added. “We’re working a lot in the 16th and Mission [streets] area. Those alleys are really, really bad. If we see things moving, we can shift those resources and we work in conjunction with police down there, too, so we try to stagger our outreach. Go in first, offer services, make sure people have choices, then the police go through and enforce any laws.”
An SFPD mobile command unit has been at 16th and Mission streets, near the BART station.
Patrick Batt, a gay man who owns AutoErotica on 18th Street, told the B.A.R. that on different visits to the Roxie Theater nearby 16th and Mission streets he has seen a marked difference.
“The day before they put the police substation in there, I went to the Roxie,” Batt said. “While waiting for the 49 [bus], I thought, ‘If I were a tourist and saw what was going on here, I would have a negative reaction about San Francisco.’”
Asked what was going on, Batt said people were asking for money to buy narcotics, as well as exhibiting “odd behavior.”
“Last night [April 24] it was just a world of difference,” Batt said.
Asked how the neighborhood teams would know when resources should be shifted – if it's a combination of objective statistics, observation from team members, or word-of-mouth complaints – Lerma answered, “I think it’s a combination of all those things.”
“I personally spend a lot of time out on the street watching it, looking at the street, figuring out what’s going on, and then we do have metrics,” he said. “We can look at 311, look at 911, I communicate with the precinct captain [Johansen] pretty often. If there’s an uptick in criminal behaviors, she’ll let me know anyway, so a combination of various metrics and just also the feeling on the street.”
Lerma said that there are three neighborhood teams up and running – covering the Mission, Tenderloin, and Northern police station precincts – and others will launch in early May.
CBD grant money threatened
That being said, the city may have some trouble holding the line where it is currently amid a budget deficit approaching $1 billion – and possibly more, as the city reckons with cuts in federal funding from the Trump administration.
Lurie told the B.A.R. April 17 that no decisions have been made about where the budget will be cut, but that if the city has “to do more with less, we will.”
Andrea Aiello, a lesbian who is the executive director of the Castro Community Benefit District, warned that the CBD could lose over a third of its funding. A $100,000 annual grant to clean Jane Warner Plaza, the public parklet at 17th, Castro, and Market streets, and a $415,000 grant for four full-time Castro Cares community ambassadors both may be on the chopping block.
Aiello said the plaza grant was promised by then-mayor Gavin Newsom when the intersection became a public space. Since it’s not a parcel, the CBD doesn’t have authorization to take care of it otherwise. The CBD is funded through parcel fees on residents and businesses in the footprint of the district.
Asked what would happen if the plaza grant fell through, “Jane Warner Plaza would be just full of trash,” she said.
“It would be a blight-ridden problem,” she warned, adding cutting the funds “is certainly not in line with the mayor’s vision of revitalizing the city and revitalizing public spaces.”
The ambassadors, Aiello said, help with street conditions in the Castro generally.
If that grant didn’t get renewed, “There would be less of our team available to help the merchants when they need some help. … Oftentimes they don’t call the police, they call us,” Aiello said. “I believe the ambassadors, because they’re so visible, add a sense of security or whatever to the neighborhood because it makes it feel like a well-cared for neighborhood and it makes people feel safer.”
Between January and March, for example, ambassadors intervened in cases of 231 people “trespassing” in businesses’ doorways, Aiello told the B.A.R.
Lookout bartender Michael Breshears stated, “Cutting funding for Castro Cares would be harmful to the community and the individuals it serves. The mayor's campaign centered on humane solutions to the very problems that Castro Cares addresses. Underfunding this program would run against his promises.”
Aiello said the CBD sent 103 letters signed by Castro businesses to Lurie’s office.
Public safety meeting coming in July
Lurie and Mandelman have been hyper-focused on driving home the message that urban governance has to deliver for residents, and improve people’s quality of life, after half a decade of bad headlines, often from San Francisco.
While downtown has been a focus as the city moves to improve its image, it’s District 8 that has the highest voter participation within the city, and city leaders have conceded they are balancing various needs with limited resources to try and accomplish the best result.
Mandelman said he is aiming to have some kind of public safety meeting in the Castro in July, in consultation with community organizations, such as the CBD.
Asked why so far out, Mandelman said, “I think we’re heading into Pride season and, as a practical matter, I think trying to organize something – not just me but the other organizations – I feel like July probably makes the most sense.”
Nordine at Blind Butcher said changes can’t come fast enough for him and other workers and residents.
“I am OK,” he said about how he is doing two days after the Sunday incident. “I was a little shaken up, but what’s concerning is how OK I am, how desensitized everyone who works in this industry is to these things. That’s just really not OK.”
Henderson stated that regarding the Blind Butcher case, “Anyone with information is asked to contact the SFPD at 415-575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with SFPD.”
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