At a rare open-air hearing at United Nations Plaza Tuesday, Mayor London Breed was expected to answer to the Board of Supervisors on the city’s drug crisis. But over shouts and heckling from onlookers, Board President Aaron Peskin cut the hearing short.
As city officials were preparing to leave, a woman threw a brick in the direction of the podium, striking a Galileo High School student who was with a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps class presenting flags for the meeting. The woman was reportedly accompanied by a man in a trenchcoat and was tackled by someone before being detained by law enforcement.
WATCH: Police officers restrain a woman who reportedly threw a brick toward city officials shortly after this afternoon's open-air meeting at UN Plaza was cut short by hecklers.
— The San Francisco Standard (@sfstandard) May 23, 2023
The brick hit a high school student.
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The JROTC student did not sustain any injuries from the brick, which hit her in the foot.
San Francisco Police Department confirmed that 26-year-old Elysia Katet from San Francisco has been arrested and booked into jail for child endangerment and assault with a deadly weapon.
Officials agreed to reconvene at City Hall for the remainder of the hearing. The brief hearing at U.N. Plaza involved coordination from multiple city departments and more than $4,000 in fees for media services and other logistics involved with the aborted outdoor broadcast.
More than a dozen people had gathered to observe the hearing, with some chanting “no more cops” and calling on the city to cut off the supply of fentanyl to San Francisco instead of arresting fentanyl users.
Breed was booed briefly before launching into a fiery set of opening remarks, calling for a new approach to the crisis and alluding to stiffer consequences for those involved in the drug trade. The city is planning a pilot program that could allow for tighter enforcement of laws against open-air drug use.
“I run into people day in and day out in the Tenderloin, and they say, ‘London, we would have never been allowed to get away with this stuff back in the day,'” Breed said. “And the fact is, it’s time for a change.”
The crowd became unruly shortly after the meeting began, with one man interrupting Peskin’s speech, yelling, “All of that sounds good. […] You have a big problem.”
“We are acknowledging that problem,” Peskin replied.
Peskin attempted to ask Breed a question about whether she would support his request for heightened coordination among local and regional agencies to stamp out drug-dealing, but Breed responded that the cacophonous hearing was the wrong forum for the discussion.
After the meeting abruptly ended, a person yelled “That’s it!” and others in the crowd let off a chorus of boos.
“They didn’t say anything of substance,” said Raul Gutierrez, who said he lives on the outskirts of the Tenderloin. “It was nothing. A waste of resources.”
Ahead of the hearing, multiple city agencies along with Urban Alchemy staff had collectively cleaned the area and shooed away the usual denizens, rendering it unusually quiet earlier in the day as workers set up a table with a Board of Supervisors tablecloth near a federal office building.
Leading up to the chaotic hearing, as smooth jazz played over loudspeakers, several onlookers shared their thoughts about the city’s fentanyl crisis.
“I’ve known more people who’ve overdosed and died from fentanyl than in the last 16 years I had been doing heroin,” said Thomas Brogan as he clutched a charred scrap of foil used for smoking fentanyl.
Brogan said to reduce overdose deaths more efficiently, the city should establish more methadone clinics so those who want to quit using fentanyl can do so with less risk of withdrawal symptoms.
“It’s hard to get off,” Brogan said. “People will leave the hospital and get high because the hospital can’t help them right.”