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.”