Are the Feds and SFPD really serious in thinking that by incarcerating low and mid level level drug dealers life in the City will improve? This is just another political stunt in the failed War on Drugs going back to the Nixon Presidency. Makes good headlines for the “Nightcrawler” crowd and not much else.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 8.7.2019
San Francisco’s newly appointed top federal prosecutor announced a sweeping initiative Wednesday to arrest and charge dope peddlers in the city’s notoriously drug-plagued Tenderloin neighborhood.
The effort to clean up the district — named the “Federal Initiative for the Tenderloin,” or FIT — comprises 15 federal agencies, including the U.S. attorney’s office, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security.
U.S. Attorney David Anderson (pictured below) unveiled the effort as federal authorities were making arrests following federal charges against 32 defendants — mostly Honduran nationals — who were accused in a complex Bay Area drug trafficking operation that allegedly extended from the southern U.S. border to Seattle.
“The Tenderloin has become a magnet for retail drug trafficking to an extraordinary degree,” Anderson said at a news conference. “It is my belief that those people living, working and visiting the Tenderloin neighborhood should not be required to run a gauntlet of crime.”
He said the effort will last at least one year and will target dealers and their suppliers who bring in large amounts of heroin, crack and powder cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine. The operation will not focus on people possessing small amounts of drugs for personal use, Anderson said.
Chris Nielsen, the DEA special agent in charge of the San Francisco field division, said the federal charges unsealed Wednesday against 32 defendants “peddling their poison” in the neighborhood stemmed from an investigation that began in 2017. Agents obtained search warrants and wiretaps, and used street-level undercover operations to expose two “highly organized” trafficking operations.
Wednesday’s announcement was welcomed by some neighborhood residents, including Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic. He applauded the effort and personally thanked Anderson.
“If we had members of my community here, they’d probably be breaking down crying right now,” Shaw said. “This is going to make a big difference. This is going to send a whole new message.”
San Francisco District Six Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the Tenderloin, said Wednesday that the federal initiative should focus on high-level investigations, while he “will fight to make sure this initiative is also connected to a larger comprehensive, collaborative plan to meaningfully address street-level drug dealing and the deadly drug use epidemic.”
