In light of the pending citywide park closure law making its way to the books, Uppercasing takes a look at a week in the numbers of the San Francisco Police Department's Park Station.
The new law, which will close all city parks to the public overnight (here, and here) with the explicit intent to discourage dumping trash in parks and unifying city park law, and the implicit aim of further prohibiting overnight sleeping and camping in the parks, has yet to hit the books. In other words, the SFPD hasn't even been able to enforce it yet. But, as people have pointed out, sleeping and camping in parks is already prohibited by city law, which suggests that overnight camping in parks is less an issue of legality than it is of enforcement, and the availability of manpower to enforce it. So for the week of December 5 to December 11, we captured in numbers the data issued and available to the public in the Park Station's weekly newsletter. Bear in mind that these are, as said, citations issued only under current laws against sleeping in public and in parks. Anecdotally, the number of citations listed in the newsletter this week and lately reflects a substantial uptick in the number of sleeping violations recorded. (Numbers listed below are counted by incident, not by number of tickets issued.) Parks noted this week in camping and sleeping violations included the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park's Sharon Meadows and music concourse, Alvord Lake, Alamo Square, and frequently, including a two-camp mass breakup, Buena Vista Park. Total "arrests" (arrests and citations issued): 133 Sleeping and/or camping violations in parks: 47 "Quality of life" citations outside parks (civil sidewalks and/or trespassing): 47 In other words, 71% of the cited incidents enforced by the SFPD's Park Station in the preceding week were camping, sleeping or trespassing violations, and fully a third of the total incidents–Which also included citations for drinking in public, lighting campfires, littering, loitering, and vandalism—were specifically for in-park violations of sleeping bans already in effect. This was during a week which also saw "incidents" (the newsletter's vocabulary for crimes in which no citation was made) like domestic abuse, car theft, burglary, robbery, and assault. When the city's new park closure law goes into effect, its effectiveness will have, it seems, a lot to do with the kind of manpower required to enforce it, and how strongly the city feels about either diverting police power away from other kinds of crime, on the one hand, or about adding new officers (starting at $80,000 to $112,000 a year) to its payroll, on the other. What do you think? Have you seen a decrease in public sleeping violations? Or maybe just an increase in the overall number of violations, cited or uncited, that's driving an increase in cited violations? Where would you like to see the SFPD's money spent?
The new law, which will close all city parks to the public overnight (here, and here) with the explicit intent to discourage dumping trash in parks and unifying city park law, and the implicit aim of further prohibiting overnight sleeping and camping in the parks, has yet to hit the books. In other words, the SFPD hasn't even been able to enforce it yet. But, as people have pointed out, sleeping and camping in parks is already prohibited by city law, which suggests that overnight camping in parks is less an issue of legality than it is of enforcement, and the availability of manpower to enforce it. So for the week of December 5 to December 11, we captured in numbers the data issued and available to the public in the Park Station's weekly newsletter. Bear in mind that these are, as said, citations issued only under current laws against sleeping in public and in parks. Anecdotally, the number of citations listed in the newsletter this week and lately reflects a substantial uptick in the number of sleeping violations recorded. (Numbers listed below are counted by incident, not by number of tickets issued.) Parks noted this week in camping and sleeping violations included the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park's Sharon Meadows and music concourse, Alvord Lake, Alamo Square, and frequently, including a two-camp mass breakup, Buena Vista Park. Total "arrests" (arrests and citations issued): 133 Sleeping and/or camping violations in parks: 47 "Quality of life" citations outside parks (civil sidewalks and/or trespassing): 47 In other words, 71% of the cited incidents enforced by the SFPD's Park Station in the preceding week were camping, sleeping or trespassing violations, and fully a third of the total incidents–Which also included citations for drinking in public, lighting campfires, littering, loitering, and vandalism—were specifically for in-park violations of sleeping bans already in effect. This was during a week which also saw "incidents" (the newsletter's vocabulary for crimes in which no citation was made) like domestic abuse, car theft, burglary, robbery, and assault. When the city's new park closure law goes into effect, its effectiveness will have, it seems, a lot to do with the kind of manpower required to enforce it, and how strongly the city feels about either diverting police power away from other kinds of crime, on the one hand, or about adding new officers (starting at $80,000 to $112,000 a year) to its payroll, on the other. What do you think? Have you seen a decrease in public sleeping violations? Or maybe just an increase in the overall number of violations, cited or uncited, that's driving an increase in cited violations? Where would you like to see the SFPD's money spent?
