Residents and Advocates Rally for Safer Streets in San Francisco
SAN FRANCISCO—Dozens of San Francisco residents and advocates protested in front of City Hall on April 16 against open-air drug markets and unsafe streets.
Protesters urged officials to take measures against visible drug abuse and drug-induced crimes.
The protesters held banners stating “Stop Open Air Drug Markets,” “Conservative Democrats For Rule Of Law,” “Save Our City,” and more.
Rally organizer Ricci Wynne told The Epoch Times data shows that the most prominent issues in San Francisco stem from drug use and drug dealing.
Wynne was formerly incarcerated for dealing drugs. He has since turned his life around and has become an advocate for addiction recovery and making his home city a safer place.
“It creates so much more crime that splinters off into that,” Wynne said. “I guarantee if we combat the drug crisis, a lot of these crimes will go down, and a lot of [overdose] deaths will go down.”
He said he used to work for a navigation center but had to resign since he disagreed with what they’re doing.
“These navigation centers are structured around the idea that you’re going to help somebody navigate their life, but they can go and use drugs as long as it’s not in a facility,” he said in a speech at the rally. “That just doesn’t work, right?”
Wynne added, “You can’t expect the taxpayers to keep funding your salary or your paycheck if there’s no results. There’s no results! We want to see results.”
The internet-initiated rally was themed “Save San Francisco” and was intended to bring people together and raise awareness of the drug crisis the city is facing.
Resident JJ Smith has been documenting issues related to drugs, crime, and homelessness in his neighborhood on social media.
“I’ve seen a lot of deaths. I’ve seen a lot of people’s bodies getting mutilated, such as people losing limbs,” he told The Epoch Times.
He said in a speech at the rally: “Some of these organizations, they’re supposed to have people walking the streets and speaking to people. … I don’t see that a lot.”
He added that the local homeless people and drug addicts need help.
“The residents of this community of the Tenderloin, they need help, and the businesses also need help,” Smith said at the rally. “And the city needs to step up and start doing the right things.”
New immigrant Kirill Skobelev walks from Civic Center, where he lives, to New Montgomery to work every weekday. When he went through Tenderloin, the most prominent open drug market in San Francisco, it was “mind-boggling to see what’s happening there,” he said.
“We have to prioritize those who live here over those who were intentionally coming here to actually destroy other people’s lives,” Skobelev said at the rally.
Skobelev said he is grateful for California, for cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco welcoming immigrants.
“We’ve got to save the city. We’ve got to make it safe,” he said.
“What is happening in San Francisco now, too much and for too long, is everybody is lowering their standards to accommodate other people’s drug habits,” San Francisco District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey said at the rally. “If San Francisco is going to make progress on this, we have to make sure that we’re doing everything on the supply side, meaning going after drug dealers, and the demand side, making sure that we’re helping people who are struggling with addiction, with treatment—on-demand treatment options.”
But Wynne doesn’t think it’s going to work.
“You can’t talk to one of these individuals that still have the needle hanging out of their arm and talk them into getting into rehab,” he told The Epoch Times. “It is very hard, because the addiction has a hold.”
San Francisco’s progressive policies soften the consequences for drug users and sellers, Jacqui Berlinn, a member of Mothers Against Drug Deaths, told Fox News in 2022.
Berlinn’s then 31-year-old son has been battling addiction and homelessness in different forms for years and has attempted rehabilitation several times, but failed.
Berlinn said her son once told her, “San Francisco is like hell because you can get everything that you want to stay addicted very, very easily and there’s no pressure to get well.”
Darren Mark Stallcup, founder of The World Peace Movement, lives in the Tenderloin district and thinks that the community is becoming uninhabitable.
“There’s so much fecal matter and just bodies everywhere. I’ve seen so many dead bodies this year,” Stallcup told The Epoch Times.
Stallcup has worked at many Whole Foods stores in San Francisco. He was just about to start working at the 8th and Market Street store when it closed down due to safety concerns.
He saw needles everywhere around the store, and sometimes he saw bodies on the sidewalk in front of the store.
According to Stallcup, the market price for 1 gram of fentanyl is $4, the lowest in any city in the United States, so small bills are involved in the transactions. This makes it unsafe to even touch the money used by the dealers or drug users, he said.
“I have overdosed just by handling some of the cash at Whole Foods, because a lot of these lower denomination bills, $1 and $5 bills, are contaminated with fentanyl,” he said.
He explained that the amount of fentanyl powder on the bills is enough to cause a micro overdose that will not kill, but can make one feel very sick, tired, and weak.
Stallcup sees several people a day overdosing from fentanyl.
“I don’t think the numbers of deaths the officials are releasing are accurate at all. I think thousands have already died and are currently dying,” he said.
Preliminary data provided by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner indicates that San Francisco recorded 620 accidental drug overdose deaths in the 2022 calendar year, compared to 640 deaths reported in 2021 and 725 in 2020.
Steve Ispas contributed to this report.
