Mission Mission

Whiteboy in a muscle shirt and long cargo shorts with big gauges in his ears: “Fuckin’, if you’re thugged out, EXPECT to get stabbed!”

Nice, dude.

On the eve of the big debate amongst his possible successors as District 9 Supervisor, Tom Ammiano asked the city for half a mil to help combat violence here in the Mission. SF Gate has the scoop:

The Board of Supervisors is considering spending an extra $500,000 to reduce violence in the Mission District, which has faced a wave of violence this year. But Mayor Gavin Newsom wants the supervisors to first work with his office to decide whether the money already spent in the neighborhood needs to be redeployed on more effective measures.

More effective measures? Sounds prudent, but can it be done? Link.

Photo by rondd5.

Oh, you’re just going into Little Star for a minute? Oh, okay, bro.

Says the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition blog:

The Corado family are one of the last remaining long-term Latino working-class tenants in their building. The landlord has tripled the rent on the other vacant units and will resort to anything to force the Corado family out of their home. She has locked them out of their home three times in one week, smeared blood and feces on their front door, and falsely accused them of physical assault almost causing a wrongful arrest of an innocent tenant.

The organization is throwing a party tomorrow evening (featuring tamales and chocolate) to support the family. Link.

Sitting on the good old bus 49 over the weekend, I came across something that is rarely seen in San Francisco – a bus driver who fought for his fare. All too often the driver doesn’t even glance at my MUNI pass and I go for days without actually needing it, wondering why I even waste the $45 dollars each month. That is a lot of ice cream at Bi-rite, well, not really all that much.

But this driver was tenacious. He kicked a middle aged man off the bus for using a senior pass. When someone got in through the back door, the driver refused to budge the bus until this man showed him his transfer. Because this man pretended he didn’t know the bus driver was talking to him for a full minute (sitting down), flashed his transfer (and sat back down), went to the front of the bus to show his expired transfer (and sat back down), and then finally came up with the necessary $1.50 (and sat back down!), we sat on the street for a good 3 minutes not moving. My ride from 26th street to 16th street took 15 minutes.

On one hand, I had places to go and things to see.

On the other hand, I was secretly happy.

But then I think about how incredibly long it would take to get the bus moving if everyone went in through the front door: stops at 24^th and 16^th street would probably take at least an extra minute or two. And then I get angry at the people who go out the front door who have clear access to the back doors and who are in no way physically challenged. I am even occasionally upset with the old people who insist on pulling carts everywhere – if you have enough gumption to pull a wheeled basket up onto the bus, you are strong enough to exit through the back door.

Bus rides are often long and angry for me.

And then I read how poor MUNI is, and how they are thinking of raising the monthly fare. Couldn’t I just send 10 people to the front of the bus to pay their fare and add my extra $15 dollars that way? Maybe by making people follow the few simple rules about entering, exiting, and paying fares, not only would we have a better funded system, but is possible it would no longer be one of the slowest public transport systems in the nation.

I need a bike.

Jenn brings this to our attention:

Crime in the Mission

Seven people have been murdered in San Francisco’s Mission District in the past three weeks. We talk with community members, the mayor’s office and the police about what can be done to stem the increase in violence in the neighborhood.
Host: Michael Krasny

Link. Or, listen live. Also, right after, at 10am, David Simon, creator of The Wire is on.

A few Mission Mission readers, as well as Mission Mission itself, attended the meeting. Reader dogfella weighed in first:

Overall somewhat disorganized and not really sure what the goal of the meeting was other than a soapbox.

Various community-based organizations used the soapbox to preach one thing: Instead of spending more and more money on more and more cops, put at least some small part of it toward more outreach programs. People are upset that patrols focus on Medjool and the Valencia corridor instead of the more residential parts of the neighborhood, where schoolchildren are getting stabbed up on a regular basis. Instead of SWAT teams and K-9 units, they want rec centers to be open later.

Reader dogfella also calls attention to the poor turnout:

Considering that 7 people were killed in the last week, turnout of about 110 people (incl. city officials, non-profits) seems pretty dismal.

To put that in perspective:
*SFGate reports that Glen Park’s community meeting in response to a stabbing / store robbery had 300 attendees.

*Last year when SF was going to increase street cleaning in the Mission to 2x’s a week per side, over 100 people stormed city hall and Tom Ammiano’s office to protest that the city was adding street cleaning to increase ticket revenues (never mind the crazy amounts of garbage on the streets).

So where was everybody? John offers this theory, which I hope is erroneous: “the mission has been taken over by hipsters. That’s why nobody went to that meeting, hipsters dream about ‘change,’ they preach about it, but they always expect others to deliver those changes.”

Next up, reader zinzin offers another, possibly related possibility:

the meeting was primarily for the Brown people that live in the hood, have lived here since the 50’s – the Latino community from whom the artists / punks / hipsters / yuppies stole the neighborhood – because it’s them that are having their kids killing one another.

for the most part (i’m sure there are exceptions)…no one from any of these newer groups can really understand what it must be like to have your kids in the life, blamming away at one another with guns. kids!

Blam! Is this why turnout was poor? The punks and yuppies don’t get it? Too surreal, all these grisly murders? Do we need a concerted effort to get everyone in the neighborhood more engaged with everybody else? Maybe so.

At the meeting, I met an older dude named Mike who’s been a Mission resident for decades. He said he’d seen it all before — the violence, the efforts to curb it. So I asked if any particular elements of past efforts had seemed valuable at all, and without batting an eye, he said yep. There once was a lady cop who rode her bike around the neighborhood, meeting people and making friends and generally getting engaged with the community. She made neighbors feel at ease, everyone felt good about everything, and then they shipped her off to another precinct.

In any case, Mike sees this kind of police presence as supremely valuable, and one can see why. An engaged police officer is a better police officer, and an engaged neighbor is a better neighbor. Better cops, better neighbors — better neighborhood.

Update: Photos by dogfella.

From CBS 5:

“All of the law enforcement in the world is not going to create a peaceful environment,” said Mayor Newsom. “I don’t want to get into the details of these investigations, but you got folks from all over the Bay Area who happen to be in San Francisco doing things that they shouldn’t be doing.”

Link.

Who’s with him? Link.

SpotCrime gathers crime data using both news reports and publicly available government info, and pairs it with Google Maps and cute little icons. You can sort by date range and type of crime. Link to their San Francisco map. Thanks, Colin!