To deal with the infamous night market in San Francisco’s Sixth Street corridor, the city is creating an outdoor triage center where officers can direct drug users to treatment or jail, officials confirmed Tuesday.
During a town hall meeting, San Francisco Assistant Police Chief David Lazar said the department will set up the triage center at a parking lot at 469 Stevenson St. near Jesse Street. The idea is to free up beat cops by having a jail transport van for dealers and users who get arrested while also providing services to drug users who want to get clean.
Lazar said Journey Home, the city’s program to bus homeless people out of town, will operate there. Staff from the sheriff’s office, the Department of Public Health, and the Fire Department will also be on-site to provide “other services.”
This will roll out in the next “couple of days” Lazar said.
The difficulty that police face right now is that when officers make an arrest, they have to drive people to jail and file paperwork before they can go out again. Lazar said it can take “four hours” for officers to be freed up, meaning less police visibility there as a result.
Lazar told The Standard after the meeting that the triage center will operate “during the day and into the evening,” but he didn’t share exact hours. He said SFPD hopes to eventually expand the center’s operations to be 24/7.
The Standard previously reported that SFPD chief Bill Scott advocated for the creation of an outdoor triage center during a meeting last month with Mayor Daniel Lurie, public works staff, and other city officials.
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the program.
Lazar said they would evaluate the program’s success based on whether the community reports feeling safer, calls for service near Sixth Street drop, and people actually ask for referrals to drug addiction treatment, bus tickets through Journey Home, or access to shelter beds.
“If we can get someone on the right path rather than arrest them, I’d rather do that than arrest them,” Lazar said. “If that’s not working at the moment, another way is to enforce the law.”
He added that if there are no available treatment beds, they will arrest drug users, although they will not be held in jail but instead cited and released.
“If treatment is not available and someone is under the influence in public, we’ll make an arrest,” Lazar said. “We’ve been doing that. But we won’t hold them, they’ll be out and about again.”
Lazar said the city would replicate the program in other problem areas if it works. When asked where else police would expand the program, Lazar replied, “I’m not even thinking about that.”
“We’re taking it week by week,” he said.
The opening of the triage center comes as San Francisco battles an increase in drug activity and crime in the area, despite a year-and-a-half-long crackdown on its toughest streets. Police made 110 drug arrests on the three-block stretch of Sixth between Market and Folsom streets in just the first three weeks of the year and over 200 arrests total along the corridor.
Jane Weil, who lives near Mission and Seventh streets, said she is “guardedly optimistic” about the triage center plan. Still, Weil wonders whether the drug market will just move again as police implement the program.
“I believe in the people talking,” she said. “I believe we need to change.”
Acknowledging concerns that criminal activity would simply move once the center is up and running, Lazar said police would continue to patrol wherever criminal activity is spotted.
“We have to go to where the problems are,” Lazar said.
But Southern Station Captain Luke Martin said he hopes that offering services at the triage center will help quell the demand for drugs and reduce criminal activity, rather than move it around.
“The idea is to avoid the displacement,” Martin said.