The Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment released the fifth edition of CalEnviroScreen in July, adding new measures such as diabetes rates and small pollution sources like gas stations, while also refreshing older data points like childhood lead exposure. The tool is used to rank California census tracts by environmental and health burden, and those rankings carry real financial weight.

Advocates in San Francisco say the update actually waters down scores for several vulnerable neighborhoods, making them appear cleaner on paper even though conditions on the ground haven’t improved. In earlier draft versions of the tool, six census tracts in Chinatown and the Tenderloin ranked in the top 25% statewide — a threshold that matters because California law requires a quarter of the state’s cap-and-invest revenue, generated from fees on polluting companies, to go toward communities identified as disadvantaged.

By the time the final version was published, those six tracts had fallen out of the top 25%. Other struggling areas, including parts of the Mission District and South of Market, never made the cut either. Meanwhile, dense urban pollution hot spots elsewhere in the state — including sections of southeast Los Angeles and Long Beach — continued to rank among the most burdened.

Eddie Ahn, executive director of the nonprofit Brightline Defense, didn’t mince words about the outcome, calling it evidence of deeper flaws in how the state approaches environmental scoring. State officials, however, say the shifts reflect routine data updates and technical corrections rather than any intentional downgrading of these communities. Amy Gilson, a spokesperson for the health hazard office, said CalEnviroScreen produces a relative ranking system, not an absolute measure of harm, and is designed to help identify the state’s most affected areas.

Some researchers argue the disagreement points to a structural issue with the tool itself. Benjamin Huynh, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said combining 23 different indicators — from air pollution to nearby dumps — into one composite score inevitably introduces judgment calls that can skew results. He noted that scientists have long cautioned against using these blended scores as the sole basis for high-stakes funding decisions, since they’re better suited for exploring patterns than making definitive policy calls.

Huynh pointed out that dense San Francisco neighborhoods may suffer from poor indoor air quality, a factor the statewide tool doesn’t measure because comparable data isn’t available everywhere. Gilson said the state’s approach is intended to keep the system transparent, broadly applicable and consistent with guidance from the National Academies of Sciences.

The stakes are significant. Disadvantaged communities have received more than $7.2 billion since 2015 through the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, though lawmakers continue to negotiate how much money flows into that fund each year. CalEnviroScreen rankings also influence other funding streams, including regional grant programs.

Pratibha Tekkey, director of community organizing at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said her organization has relied on funding tied to CalEnviroScreen rankings to distribute hundreds of air purifiers to residents. She worries the new scores don’t reflect what people in these neighborhoods actually experience day to day.

“You can’t just be a scientist looking at data points and deciding this is what it would be,” Tekkey said. “You have to see who is living there, what health challenges they face, what economic challenges they face.”

Malcolm Yeung, chief executive of the Chinatown Community Development Center, said the revised model puts crowded urban communities at an unfair disadvantage. He noted that Chinatown, despite being one of the most densely populated residential areas in California, no longer scores competitively under the new system.

State officials say they reviewed community feedback closely and made targeted corrections to indicators such as diesel exhaust, hazardous waste sites and fine-particle pollution, including accounting for additional emissions sources. Gilson said those adjustments produced only minor shifts in scores for most Bay Area tracts and had a limited effect on the region’s overall share of top-ranked areas.

Beyond the scoring tool itself, CalEPA is also revisiting how it formally defines a “disadvantaged community,” a designation that determines funding eligibility. The current proposal would include tracts ranked in the top 25% of the new CalEnviroScreen tool, tracts in the top 5% for pollution burden, tracts that overlapped with the previous version’s top 25%, and tribal lands. The agency held two public workshops in July, with the public comment period closing recently.

Brightline Defense has pushed for a broader definition, suggesting the state include tracts within a half-mile of top-ranked areas, raise the threshold to the top 35% overall, and factor in tracts that scored in the top 25% under a previous version of the tool. Ahn said in written comments that the agency should eventually pursue larger reforms to ensure funding can be targeted more precisely to communities with specific, localized needs.

Gilson said the state’s goal is to strike a balance between being inclusive and preserving the integrity of the designation so that funding isn’t spread too thin. She added that communities outside the top 25% aren’t necessarily locked out of state support, since other laws require prioritizing low-income areas regardless of their CalEnviroScreen ranking.

Any major overhaul of the underlying model, Gilson said, would require extensive research and evaluation. Feedback gathered from this round of criticism, she said, will help inform the next version of CalEnviroScreen, with work on that update expected to begin in 2027.

Original source: CalMatters

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Across the country, unapologetically left-leaning candidates are having a moment. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate hopeful Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and Randy Villegas in California’s 22nd Congressional District have all ridden a wave of populist enthusiasm to victory or contention. But in the race to succeed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in Congress, San Francisco voters are split between two Democrats who both describe themselves in progressive terms — and whose disagreement over housing policy may prove more consequential than any national trend.

San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who has Pelosi’s backing, portrays herself as a champion of working families who won’t be swayed by corporate political money or the tech industry that has thrown its support behind her rival, state Sen. Scott Wiener. Chan has called Wiener, a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate who made national headlines for legislation aimed at exposing the identities of ICE agents, a “corporate Democrat funded by billionaires.”

But Chan’s record — marked by opposition to development projects and rezoning efforts in her own district — could turn off some progressive voters, particularly newcomers to city politics. For decades, San Francisco residents have resisted new construction, often prioritizing neighborhood preservation over adding housing supply.

That resistance has helped fuel the city’s housing crisis. Rents have climbed to record highs as the Bay Area’s AI-driven tech boom pours money into the local economy; one recent industry report found the average one-bedroom apartment now rents for more than $4,000 a month.

“Progressivism in San Francisco has become tightly wound up with an identity that refuses to accept a lot of things,” said Jane Natoli, a housing advocate who lives in Chan’s district and supports Wiener. “For some reason, especially on housing, San Francisco progressives have mostly just said no.”

In June’s primary, voters favored both Wiener and Chan over Saikat Chakrabarti, a former aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who energized younger voters with rhetoric reminiscent of Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The tech entrepreneur agreed with Wiener on the need to build more housing but coupled that stance with a broader anti-establishment, anti-capitalist message.

“I liked him a lot because his approach to YIMBY politics was conciliatory,” said Alex Vanscoy, Chakrabarti’s former field director. Vanscoy now backs Chan, who has pledged to refuse money from corporate political action committees. “Taking lobbyist money is a very serious thing to me,” Chan said.

Both candidates agree that affordability is the top concern for San Franciscans and that the city faces a housing shortage across every income level. Where they diverge sharply is on what role the state and federal governments should play in solving it.

**What’s driving the housing crisis?**

Wiener believes the state must require — not simply encourage — local governments to build more housing, particularly in cities and counties that have long resisted new development. A leading voice in the YIMBY and “abundance” movements, he authored legislation, now law, that cut red tape for certain housing permits, a move that pleased both labor groups and developers. Local officials have told the Legislature that the streamlining law has slashed average permitting timelines from years down to three to six months.

Chan, by contrast, has largely opposed new housing and development proposals in her district, saying her priority is protecting tenants from eviction and shielding small businesses from the disruption of construction. She often points to the “urban renewal” of the Fillmore District from the 1950s through the 1970s, which devastated San Francisco’s Black community, as a cautionary tale she doesn’t want repeated elsewhere. That painful history, in fact, helped give rise to the city’s modern progressive movement.

“I think we’re starting to see the real dividing line,” said Eric Kingsbury, a Wiener supporter and chair of the San Francisco County Central Committee, the local arm of the Democratic Party. “I really expect to see a lot of discomfort, because if you’re pro-housing and you’re a progressive person, you have a candidate in this race, and that’s Scott Wiener.”

Chan, one of the board’s four most progressive supervisors, recently voted against Mayor Daniel Lurie’s residential rezoning plan — a state-mandated overhaul designed to allow taller, denser housing near transit stops and major corridors. She previously led a lawsuit against the state, arguing its housing mandates unfairly targeted San Francisco. Chan said she opposed Lurie’s plan because it lacked sufficient protections against the demolition of rent-controlled housing and the displacement of tenants and small businesses.

“We can still demand accountability, we can still conduct environmental reviews, and at the same time make government more efficient,” Chan said.

“It’s ridiculous when people say I’m against development,” said Norman Yee, a former San Francisco supervisor who supports Chan. “All she wants is to make sure, first, that tenants aren’t displaced, and second, that community concerns are addressed.”

In 2021, Chan helped block a nearly 500-unit mixed-income housing proposal slated for a vacant parking lot just a block from a BART station — a decision that drew a scathing rebuke from the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board, which accused the city’s then-eight progressive supervisors of sabotaging “seemingly every serious attempt to address this city’s housing crisis.”

Beyond housing, Chan also fought a plan to add dedicated bus lanes along a corridor that, before the pandemic, carried one of the busiest bus routes in the country, objecting to the loss of parking spaces and warning of harm to small businesses during construction. The city’s transit agency approved the project anyway.

Chan has also pushed back against Sacramento’s growing role in local planning and zoning decisions, arguing that corporate developers and Wall Street real estate interests have persuaded lawmakers like Wiener to let them bypass local review processes. Wiener has dismissed the charge as misleading and “trivial.”

Chan points to her support for a recently opened affordable senior housing project — 98 units built on the site of a former funeral home — as proof she isn’t anti-development. No existing tenants were displaced, she noted, since the building went up on vacant land.

“I always joke that if anyone got displaced from that site, it would be a ghost from the funeral home,” Chan said.

In her campaign launch video, Chan promises to deliver “real affordable housing, not Sacramento’s version that destroys our neighborhoods.”

Wiener countered that the project, which opened last November, was made possible largely because of his own Senate Bill 35 — a landmark law he authored to speed up housing permits — along with roughly $60 million in state funding.

“If what you want to do is make it harder and more expensive to build housing, or even impossible, then that’s not progressive,” Wiener said. “That’s conservative.”

It remains unclear whether San Francisco voters who backed Chakrabarti, who won about 18% of the primary vote in June, will now consolidate behind Chan or Wiener heading into November.

**Other flashpoints**

Housing isn’t the only issue shaping the race.

Wiener, who is Jewish, drew criticism from some progressives after initially declining to use the word “genocide” to describe the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Following public pressure after a tense candidate forum, Wiener reversed course, explaining his shift in a video posted to social media.

The about-face proved awkward and alienated enough members of the Jewish community that Wiener stepped down as chair of the Legislature’s Jewish caucus. Others dismissed the change as symbolic and overdue. Months later, pro-Palestinian demonstrators confronted him so aggressively during the city’s Trans March that he was forced to leave the event.

Wiener’s wavering on the word “genocide” has bred distrust among younger voters, said Kaizen Betts-LaCroix, another former Chakrabarti staffer now supporting Chan. Betts-LaCroix said Chan’s unequivocal opposition to U.S. military aid for Israel, along with her refusal to accept corporate PAC money, are the main reasons behind the endorsement.

Wiener’s campaign has also faced backlash over aggressive attack tactics, including repeating a misleading claim that Chakrabarti actually lived in Maryland, and a now-deleted AI parody chatbot that impersonated Chan and mocked her record of blocking housing and other development projects.

Pelosi, who has used her considerable influence to boost Chan’s candidacy, quickly condemned the chatbot and rallied prominent Democrats — including seven congresswomen and former Mayor Willie Brown — to join her in denouncing it.

“Women have spent generations fighting to have our voices heard in the halls of power,” Pelosi wrote on social media. “We shouldn’t have to now fight AI for putting words in our mouths.”

Within days, Wiener’s campaign took down the site, pulled billboards promoting it, and apologized for offending voters, acknowledging that the stunt had “missed the mark.”

Original source: CalMatters

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While much of the country watches insurgent left-wing candidates like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani energize voters, San Francisco’s own version of that political moment looks different. Here, the choice isn’t between establishment and outsider — it’s between two Democrats who both claim the progressive mantle but disagree fundamentally on how to solve the city’s housing affordability crisis.

San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who has Pelosi’s backing, has cast herself as a champion of working-class renters and small businesses, someone unswayed by corporate money or the tech industry dollars fueling her rival’s campaign. She has repeatedly labeled state Sen. Scott Wiener — a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate who drew national attention for legislation aimed at unmasking ICE agents — as a “corporate Democrat bankrolled by billionaires.”

But Chan’s record of blocking housing developments and resisting zoning reforms in her district may not sit well with younger or newer voters who see unchecked rent increases as the more urgent crisis. San Francisco has a long history of favoring neighborhood preservation over new construction, a pattern many observers say helped create the shortage the city faces today. Rents have climbed to record highs amid the Bay Area’s artificial intelligence boom, with one industry report putting the median one-bedroom rental above $4,000 a month.

“Progressivism in San Francisco has really become very tied to this identity where it doesn’t say ‘yes’ to a lot of stuff,” said Jane Natoli, a housing advocate who lives in Chan’s district and supports Wiener. “For whatever reason, especially on issues such as housing, San Francisco progressives have largely said ‘no.'”

In June’s primary, voters passed over former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aide Saikat Chakrabarti, who drew enthusiasm from younger, more left-leaning voters with a message that blended Bernie Sanders-style populism with strong support for new housing construction. Alex Vanscoy, who served as Chakrabarti’s field director, said he appreciated the candidate’s approach because it combined an anti-corporate stance with support for building more homes. Now Vanscoy backs Chan, who has pledged to refuse corporate PAC money. “Taking money from lobbyists is a huge issue to me,” Chan has said.

Wiener and Chan both agree that affordability tops the list of concerns for San Francisco residents and that the city needs more housing at every income level. Where they diverge sharply is on what role state and federal government should play in getting that housing built.

Wiener argues local governments — particularly ones that have long slow-walked new development — need to be held to their housing commitments, not simply allowed to promise progress without delivering it. As one of the state’s leading voices in the “abundance” and Yes In My Backyard movements, he authored legislation, since signed into law, that streamlined permitting for certain housing projects. City officials have told state lawmakers the changes cut typical permit wait times from years down to three to six months.

Chan, by contrast, has consistently opposed development and zoning changes she believes threaten existing tenants and neighborhood small businesses. She has pointed to the destructive “urban renewal” of the Fillmore District in the mid-20th century — displacement that devastated the city’s Black community — as a cautionary tale she doesn’t want repeated elsewhere. That history, in fact, helped shape the very brand of progressive politics now on display in this race.

“I think we’re starting to see the real divide show up,” said Eric Kingsbury, who chairs the San Francisco Democratic Party’s county committee and backs Wiener. “I would really expect to see a lot of discomfort, because if you are pro-housing and you’re an otherwise progressive person, you have a candidate in this race, and it’s Scott Wiener.”

Chan, among the board’s most left-leaning supervisors, recently voted against Mayor Daniel Lurie’s rezoning plan, a state-mandated effort to allow taller, denser housing near transit corridors. She previously supported a lawsuit challenging the state’s housing mandates as unfairly targeting San Francisco, and she has said her opposition to Lurie’s plan stems from its lack of protections against the loss of rent-controlled units and the displacement of tenants and merchants.

“We can still have accountability, we can still have environmental review and improve government efficiency at the same time,” Chan said.

Former Supervisor Norman Yee, a Chan supporter, pushed back on the idea that she opposes growth altogether. “I think for people to say that she’s anti-development is kind of ridiculous,” Yee said. “All she wants is to make sure that number one, tenants don’t get displaced, and two, to make sure that community concerns are addressed.”

Still, Chan’s record includes helping derail a proposed 500-unit mixed-income project near a BART station in 2021 — a decision that prompted a scathing San Francisco Chronicle editorial accusing the board’s progressive majority of undermining nearly every serious attempt to address the housing shortage. She has also opposed transit improvements, including a dedicated bus lane on Geary Boulevard, over concerns about lost parking and disruption to nearby businesses. The city’s transit agency approved the project regardless.

Chan maintains that state intervention in local zoning serves corporate developers and Wall Street real estate interests more than everyday residents, an argument Wiener dismisses as unfounded and outdated. She points to her support for a 98-unit affordable senior housing project — built on the site of a vacant funeral home, meaning no renters were displaced — as evidence she isn’t opposed to development done the right way. “I always make this joke that if anybody got evicted from the site, it was a ghost from the funeral home,” Chan said. In campaign materials, she has promised to “build real affordable housing, not the Sacramento version that destroys our neighborhoods.”

Wiener counters that the same project was made possible in large part by his own Senate Bill 35, a state law designed to speed up housing approvals, along with roughly $60 million in state funding. “If you’re trying to make it harder and more expensive to build housing, or even impossible to build, then that’s not progressive,” Wiener said. “That’s conservative.”

Whether the roughly 18% of primary voters who backed Chakrabarti will now side with Chan or Wiener remains an open question heading into November.

Housing isn’t the only flashpoint in the race. Wiener, who is Jewish, drew criticism from some progressives after initially declining to describe the humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a genocide. Following a heated candidate forum and mounting public pressure, he reversed course, explaining his shift in a video posted to social media. That reversal proved costly: he stepped down as chair of the Legislative Jewish Caucus after backlash from members of the Jewish community, while others dismissed the change as insincere. Months later, pro-Palestinian demonstrators confronted him so forcefully at the city’s trans march that he left the event early.

Kaizen Betts-LaCroix, another former Chakrabarti staffer now supporting Chan, said Wiener’s shifting position on Gaza has damaged his credibility with younger voters, adding that Chan’s firm opposition to military aid for Israel and her refusal of corporate PAC money were key reasons for their support.

Wiener’s campaign has also faced its own controversies, including repeating a since-debunked claim that Chakrabarti actually lived in Maryland, and launching a satirical AI chatbot mimicking Chan that mocked her housing record. Pelosi quickly condemned the chatbot, rallying several prominent Democrats — including seven congresswomen and former Mayor Willie Brown — in opposition. “Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power,” Pelosi wrote on social media. “We should not have to now fight against artificial intelligence putting words in our mouths.” Within days, Wiener’s campaign took the chatbot offline, removed related billboards and apologized, acknowledging the effort had “missed the mark.”

Original source: CalMatters

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By Sylvie Sturm

In December 2021, San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed declared a 90-day state of emergency in the Tenderloin, the neighborhood most damaged by the city’s drug crisis. It was a fiery speech in which she vowed to be “less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.” She swore to increase treatment services while also calling for police to crack down on drug dealers and force drug users off the street and into either treatment or incarceration — their choice.

Breed was voicing a frustration that has overtaken San Francisco after more than a decade of living with a rampaging opioid crisis. Opioid-related overdose deaths have been surging since the mid-2010s when fentanyl hit the streets. Between 2015 and 2020, deaths involving fentanyl in San Francisco increased 4,600% to nearly a dozen each week. And it’s having disproportionate consequences on people of color. San Francisco has the highest accidental overdose rate in California among counties with a population greater than 100,000. Deaths among Black residents are more than five times the countywide rate; San Francisco has the third-highest opioid-related county death rate among Latinos. 

It’s been two years since Breed’s speech, and fatal overdoses remain just as rampant. And as deaths keep mounting, so does the interest in a controversial approach that harm reduction advocates have been promoting for over a decade: supervised consumption sites. Also known as overdose prevention centers, these facilities are safe places where people can have their drugs tested for fentanyl and consume under supervision with lifesaving medical care nearby should the need arise. 

Overdose prevention centers have been operating for decades in places like my former hometown of Vancouver, Canada, as well as Australia and some countries in Europe. Across more than 170 working centers, not a single overdose death has been recorded. 

San Francisco advocates who are working to establish such centers say this harm reduction approach is a surefire way to save lives and local elected officials are supportive of the idea. But some locals are still pushing back, arguing that more robust recovery and treatment options are needed, not permissive approaches to drug consumption.

The city opened a temporary center to in early 2022 to help people who use drugs and unhoused residents access supportive services. San Francisco Department of Public Health statistics showed that during its 11 months in operation, the center was visited more than 100,000 times, reversed 300 overdoses, and helped more than 1,000 people get shelter or housing. Nevertheless, the Tenderloin Linkage Center, as it was called, closed a month earlier than planned. 

The site, which was located on a downtown plaza surrounded by theaters, museums and tourist attractions, had quickly turned into an unofficial overdose prevention center. Business owners and residents complained that drug use and drug dealing in the neighborhood increased after the center opened. And while opponents typically argue that overdose prevention centers don’t offer enough avenues to treatment, critics of the Tenderloin center said the city should not have allowed drug use at a site where it also offered connections to treatment services. 

When I visited the site shortly after the center shut down, I met Adriel Cota, a former center client who is unhoused and uses drugs. He talked about all the benefits he got from the center — including daily laundry, meals, shower facilities and accommodations for his dog. But he always believed the Tenderloin center was set up to fail because of its business- and tourist-heavy location.

As overdose fatalities accumulate, there is a crucial need for clarity around the perceived benefits and drawbacks of such facilities. 

In November 2021, New York City announced the opening of the country’s first sanctioned overdose prevention center. And now San Francisco appears poised to follow suit. On Feb. 28, 2023, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved legislation introduced by the mayor to allow nonprofits to operate drug overdose prevention sites with private funding. At least three organizations in San Francisco have indicated a willingness to raise the funds needed to open centers without the city’s financial support. Among them is the Gubbio Project, a charity located in a church that provides unhoused residents with daytime shelter and cots on which to rest. Its director, Lydia Branston, said the site is ready to accommodate an overdose prevention center as soon as the organization settles a contract with the property owner.

As a 2023 California Health Equity Fellow, I will assess the impact of a new San Francisco overdose prevention center on its surrounding neighborhood.

Through my reporting, I will gather data and connect with people whose experiences can help paint a picture of a San Francisco neighborhood before and after the introduction of an overdose prevention center, with a focus on its impact on fatalities, drug-related hospitalizations, and the overall health of the surrounding community and its residents, especially those most harmed by the opioid epidemic.

I hope my reporting will help residents and policymakers in city, county, state and federal governments to make better informed decisions in their fight to ease a rampant opioid crisis.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Supervisors in San Francisco held a heated debate Tuesday over whether to give city police the ability to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations, with both sides accusing the other of reckless fearmongering.

Police oversight groups are urging the 11-member Board of Supervisors to reject the idea, saying it would lead to further militarization of a police force already too aggressive with poor and minority communities. They said the parameters under which use would be allowed are too vague.

The San Francisco Police Department said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns. But the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie said in a statement.

“Robots equipped in this manner would only be used in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives,” she said.

The proposed policy does not lay out specifics for how the weapons can and cannot be equipped, leaving open the option to arm them. “Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD,” it says.

The city’s board members are staunch Democrats who favor gun control, reproductive freedoms and civil rights protections, but they are deeply divided on support for law enforcement.

Several supervisors said it shocked them that a city accustomed to protesting the use of military drones would entertain the idea of allowing a robot to possibly kill a person. But others said police were making a reasonable request and were only carving out permission in case of catastrophe.

“Everything that was said in this hearing, I don’t see how a robot being armed with certain weaponry would save lives,” said Shamann Walton, president of the Board of Supervisors.

The vote comes under a new California law that requires police and sheriffs departments to inventory military-grade equipment and seek approval for their use. San Francisco police currently have a dozen functioning ground robots used to assess bombs or provide eyes in low visibility situations, the department says. They were acquired between 2010 and 2017.

The state law was authored last year by San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu while he was an assembly member. It is aimed at giving the public a forum and voice in the acquisition and use of military-grade weapons that have a negative effect on communities, according to the legislation.

San Francisco police did not immediately respond to a question about how the robots were acquired, but a federal program has dispensed grenade launchers, camouflage uniforms, bayonets, armored vehicles and other surplus military equipment to help local law enforcement.

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump signed an order reviving the Pentagon program after his predecessor, Barack Obama, curtailed it in 2015, triggered in part by outrage over the use of military gear during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown.

The first time a robot was used to deliver explosives in the U.S. was in 2016, when Dallas police sent in an armed robot that killed a holed-up sniper who had killed five officers in an ambush.

Like many places around the U.S., San Francisco is trying to balance public safety with treasured civilian rights such as privacy and the ability to live free of excessive police oversight. In September, supervisors agreed to a trial run allowing police to access in real time private surveillance camera feeds in certain circumstances.

The San Francisco Public Defender’s office sent a letter Monday to the board saying that granting police “the ability to kill community members remotely” goes against the city’s progressive values. The office would like the board to reinstate language barring police from using robots against any person in an act of force.

On the other side of the San Francisco Bay, the Oakland Police Department has dropped a similar proposal after public backlash.

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When I began my recent reporting project on the drug overdose deaths in San Francisco in October, the ongoing crisis was already being thoroughly covered and documented by other reporters. The devastation was difficult to ignore, and more than 1,300 people have fatally overdosed in San Francisco over the last two years. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, had saturated the city’s drug supply. But it seemed too easy to blame fentanyl when people in nearby counties were not dying at the same rates. 

“The risk didn’t just magically appear overnight as fentanyl descended on the city,” said Kristen Marshall, a former project manager with the DOPE Project, the largest single-city naloxone distribution program in the country. “It makes the villain of this drug. But the drug didn’t cause it right. The drug didn’t cause the overdose crisis.”

So, what had caused the overdose crisis? A group of mothers had organized to protest what they considered San Francisco’s lenient approach to drug dealing. Some public officials said the city was pushing harm reduction too far while harm reduction advocates worried about the return of a “war on drugs.” Those advocates said the drug overdose epidemic required immediate and long-term solutions to systemic issues like homelessness and racism. I thought data was needed to understand what factors were to blame. 

Within weeks I realized my question was too broad, and I struggled to know what data to ask for. In a group meeting, my reporting advisor said that we need to put in our data requests as soon as possible. The idea was that whatever data I received would turn into a piece. So, I asked for anything that might be helpful, hoping that would lead me somewhere. 

Getting the data 

But even data that seemed like it should be easy to obtain was difficult to get hold of. For example, several people I interviewed mentioned a dramatic decline in heroin overdose deaths from roughly 2000 to 2010. A few sources even sent me a graph made by a city employee describing this drop. But I was told the data did not exist. In other instances, I was told to wait for official city reports to publish or discuss publicly, or the data came with so many caveats that it was unusable. In one instance, I asked for data and the official said they didn’t want to alarm people. 

When other cities responded to my data requests within weeks, I wondered if focusing on San Francisco was the right approach when there’s so much less attention on other places to begin with. 

The San Francisco district attorney’s office and BART police sent me the most comprehensive and compelling data, but I struggled to write a story with only numbers and without individuals impacted. 

The history of harm reduction 

Slowly but surely, I landed on stories on several topics: the history of harm reduction in San Francisco, hotel workers who respond to overdoses regularly, and a new center opened in San Francisco to connect people to drug treatment or housing. 

My data for the history of harm reduction came from digging through reports published by the city since 2017 detailing the rise of overdose deaths. I also reached out to harm reduction groups, including the DOPE Project, who reported 81 overdose reversals in 2006, a figure that rose to 8,985 for 2021. I spoke with a physician who told me, “Nothing is going to reduce death to the extent that getting 10,000 doses of naloxone out there in San Francisco in the early 2000s will ever do.” 

But prescription drug overdose deaths were still high while heroin overdose deaths were declining. The data helped me understand that history and what led to the fentanyl overdose crisis ravaging San Francisco today. 

The Linkage Center 

In the midst of my project, San Francisco Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood. As part of the emergency declaration, the city opened a site called the Linkage Center to connect people to basic services like food and showers as well as drug treatment and housing. The city also published weekly reports on overdoses reversed as well as the number of people placed in housing or treatment. I reviewed each report, created a spreadsheet, and plugged in the numbers on referrals to drug treatment, completed linkages for drug treatment, completed linkages for temporary or transitional housing, and completed linkages for permanent supportive housing. In the end, the spreadsheet was boiled down to these two sentences: 

“Between Jan. 31 and March 27, the center had more than 20,100 visits from people seeking everything from drug treatment and housing placement to job and mental health counseling. Fewer than 15 of those visits resulted in ‘completed linkages’ for drug treatment services, in which placements were confirmed.” 

But to me, the data also showed how complicated measuring success is, because so few people were entering treatment programs through the center. Meanwhile, overdoses were being reversed every day, and the people running the site saw the high number of people showing up each day as a success. 

The Whitcomb Hotel 

I started reporting on overdose deaths at the Whitcomb Hotel after one interview where a former director of housing services at Five Keys described overdoses at the site at the start of the pandemic. After requesting data from the city’s medical examiner’s office, I learned at least 18 people fatally overdosed there from April 2020, when it opened, to April 2022. More people appeared to have died at Hotel Whitcomb than any other single, non-hospital site in San Francisco. 

But this also was not the full story; staff described skepticism that the number was accurate because they were reversing overdoses so regularly. I originally saw this as a story about the family members of people who died at the hotel. But in my reporting, I learned that staff at the hotel were also suffering. Some had overdosed, and many were dealing with addiction. 

City pivots as overdoses remain high

Fewer people died of drug overdoses in 2021 than in 2020, but the number of people overdosing and dying in San Francisco every month is still staggeringly high. The emergency declaration declared in the Tenderloin is over, and a state bill could soon clear the way for the city to open a supervised consumption site if passed and signed into law.

Meanwhile, San Francisco has a new district attorney who has pledged to hold serious drug dealers accountable and a serious staffing shortage in its jails. 

I still think data could help tell the story of what direction San Francisco should go in over the next few years, but that data is hard to get or know how to ask for. 

And there are other cities confronting the fentanyl overdose crisis worth turning to next. 

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Three people were arrested while the majority got away after the large-scale theft Saturday night shocked shoppers at the Nordstrom at the Broadway Plaza outdoor mall in Walnut Creek, police said in a statement Sunday.

Two employees were assaulted and one was hit with pepper spray during what police called “clearly a planned event.”

NBC Bay Area reporter Jodi Hernandez tweeted that she saw the thieves rush into the store in the downtown shopping district in the city some 20 miles (32 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco.

“About 25 cars just blocked the street and rushed into the Walnut Creek Nordstrom making off with goods before getting in cars and speeding away,” Hernandez said on Twitter.

Cellphone video from the scene showed masked people streaming out of the store, carrying bags and boxes, jumping into the cars and fleeing the scene.

Brett Barrette, the manager of a nearby PF Chang’s restaurant, began locking doors at his establishment while watching the chaos unfold.

“We probably saw 50 to 80 people in ski masks, crowbars, a bunch of weapons,” Barrette told ABC 7 News.

The Walnut Creek Police Department said a firearm was recovered from one of the three arrested suspects.

Nordstrom employees began calling 911 around 9 p.m. as thieves entered the store and began stealing merchandise, police said.

“Walnut Creek Police investigators are in the process of reviewing surveillance footage to attempt to identify other suspects responsible for this brazen act,” the department said in Sunday’s statement.

Nordstrom was open as usual on Sunday.

The incident came a day after several high-end stores in San Francisco’s Union Square were broken into by a large group of people who smashed windows, stole merchandise, and then ran to waiting cars, police said.

Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Yves Saint Laurent, Burberry, and Dolce & Gabbana were all targeted Friday night, Fox 2 News reported.

San Francisco Police Officer Robert Rueca said in a statement posted on social media that officers responded to reports of possible looting and vandalism at Union Square stores Friday night and arrested several people.

Stores in Union Square, a posh shopping district popular with tourists, have been targeted for years by well-organized thieves who at times have rammed vehicles into storefronts to break glass doors and windows and enter the buildings during non-business hours.

In July, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that allows prosecutors to charge those who work with others to steal merchandise.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco’s district attorney said Wednesday he is suing three California companies that make and distribute “ghost guns,” the untraceable, build-it-yourself weaponry that accounted for nearly half the firearms recovered in gun killings in the city last year.

District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced the lawsuit at a news conference, alongside advocates of tougher gun laws.

The suit names Blackhawk Manufacturing Group, GS Performance and MDX Corp., three companies that are not based in San Francisco but are responsible for producing a large share of the firearms found in the city and elsewhere in the state, Boudin said.

“Guns are flooding our streets. Enough is enough,” Boudin said. “It is not enough to wait until after someone has been shot and killed by a firearm. We must get to the root of the problem.”

Boudin’s lawsuit comes amid mounting criticism over his response to rising crime rates and a wave of anti-Asian violence in the city, which has been routinely video-recorded and spread virally. Critics say the city’s most powerful law enforcement officer is intolerably lenient, particularly toward those responsible for rampant theft, drug abuse and street crimes.

Critics say Boudin, a progressive who ran on police reform, has repeatedly declined to file charges in cases where the perpetrators went on to commit more serious crimes. Supporters praise him for following through on his criminal justice reform promises.

Like the pandemic, the furor shows no sign of abating. One attempt to recall Boudin fell short last week when organizers failed to collect enough signatures, but the other attempt lives on with a deadline for signatures in October. If voters ultimately oust Boudin, Mayor London Breed, whose politics are more moderate, will choose a replacement.

The lawsuit, filed jointly with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and law firm Keker, Van Nest & Peters, alleges that the companies violated state laws that require them to apply for serial numbers and that they misled consumers into believing the weapons were legal. It seeks a court order that would bar the companies from shipping their products in California and also seeks monetary penalties.

Messages left with all three companies seeking comment were not immediately returned Wednesday.

Police in San Francisco and other cities across the country have seen an explosion in the numbers of ghost guns seized over the past year.

In San Francisco, police seized 164 ghost guns in 2020, a 2,600% increase from the six confiscated in 2016.

In 2020, California accounted for 65% of all ghost guns seized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a statement from Boudin’s office said.

Earlier this month, two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies badly wounded in an ambush shooting last year sued a Nevada company, Polymer80 Inc., for making the parts for a ghost gun used in the attack.

The companies named in the San Francisco lawsuit tout on their websites how little time it takes to build their guns and that no background checks are needed, said Hannah Shearer, litigation director at Giffords Law Center, which is co-counsel in the case.

“They’ve made it possible for anyone in the state to buy all the parts needed to build a firearm, no questions asked and get it shipped in a convenient package with instructions, like an Ikea piece of furniture,” said Shearer.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco’s iconic cable cars were rolling and ringing their bells on the city’s hills again Monday after being sidelined for 16 months by the pandemic.

At Powell and Market, one of the cable car’s stops, a line of people snaked around waiting to ride a car to Ghirardelli Square or Fisherman’s Wharf.

“Our cable cars are part of what makes San Francisco a world-class destination, and their return is just the latest sign that our city is bouncing back,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Breed said it will be free to ride the cable cars in August and asked people to be patient because the service won’t follow a regular schedule until September when the historic trolleys will resume full service in all three lines and start charging a riding fee.

Frank Miller, of San Antonio, said he and six members of his family arrived in San Francisco last week and have already visited some of the city’s top landmarks. They rode a ferry to Angel Island and visited Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf but Miller said riding the cable cars was a highlight for him.

“I grew up watching ‘Full House’ so, everybody knows the cable cars. We definitely want to ride the trolley cars through the city,” said Miller, 40, who was waiting with his family to ride from Powell Street and Market to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Before the pandemic, 25 million tourists visited San Francisco annually, with many of them riding the cable cars that are as synonymous with the city as Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge.

About 17,000 riders a day packed onto the cable cars daily before they were parked in March 2020 as the city locked down and sheltered in place. It was the longest shutdown since the 1980s, when the system was fully reconstructed, according to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco city workers will be required to be vaccinated against the coronavirus when a vaccine receives full federal approval.

The policy covering 35,000 municipal workers may be the first by any city or county in the U.S. Employees who refuse to get vaccinated and don’t get an exemption could be fired, according to the policy posted to the city government’s website Wednesday.

The three COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the U.S. are being dispensed under emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.

They are expected to receive full approval in several months. San Francisco city employees will then have 10 weeks to get their shots.

San Francisco, a compact city of nearly 900,000 residents, has had some of the strictest pandemic-related restrictions in the country. The city was among the first in the nation to order a lockdown last year and its vaccination rates are some of the highest in the nation. At least 80% of residents are partially vaccinated and 70% of those 12 and older are fully vaccinated, according to Mayor London Breed.

The vaccination policy for city employees covers a wide range of jobs but it does not include teachers, who are school district employees.

“It’s really a decision for the health and safety of our employees and our public that we serve,” Carol Isen, San Francisco director of human resources, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s about protecting the city as an employer from what we deem to be unacceptable risk.”

Starting Monday, employees will have 30 days to report to the city their current vaccination status, including showing proof of vaccination by uploading a photo of their vaccination card or the QR code generated by the state’s digital verification system, Isen said.

Isen did not return a message from The Associated Press seeking comment Thursday.

Under California law, employers can require their staff to get vaccinated as long as that requirement doesn’t interfere with the employees’ rights, said Leonard H. Sansanowicz, a Los Angeles employment attorney.

“You’ve got this inherent tension between an employee’s right to privacy, and right to freedom over their bodies, and the employers need for safety in the workplace,” Sansanowicz said.

The Department of Fair Employment and Housing issued guidelines in March that set forth the rationale for employers to mandate staff get vaccinated and that included requiring employers to accommodate those city workers who won’t get a vaccine due to religious beliefs or medical reasons, he said.

Los Angeles County, which employs about 110,000 people, is not currently considering mandating employees get a vaccine, said Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.

“That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be some places where there may be a need earlier on to in fact think about increasing vaccination coverage,” she said.

Ferrer said some high-risk settings in the county, including hospitals and nursing homes, are already requiring their employees to be vaccinated.

In San Francisco, about 55% of city employees have said they are at least partially vaccinated, according to the Department of Human Resources. About 5% of employees have said they are not vaccinated. The vaccination status of the remaining 40% is not known.

SEIU 1021, the union that represents city employees, called on the city to have an “inclusive and collaborative approach” when enforcing the new policy.

“There are numerous cultural, religious, and health status factors that must be considered as we implement vaccination policies,” said SEIU 1021 San Francisco Regional Vice President Theresa Rutherford. “We can not force the front-line essential workers who have put themselves out there and risked their lives during the pandemic in a position to be worried about providing for their families or having their jobs or livelihood threatened.”

The city is the second-largest employer in San Francisco after the University of California, San Francisco. Earlier this month, the University of California reversed course said it will require all students, staff and faculty to be vaccinated against the coronavirus this fall.

UC has more than 280,000 students and 227,000 faculty and staff, and expects to return to mostly in-person instruction at its 10 campuses starting in August.

Dr. Grant Colfax, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, told the Chronicle protecting the workforce was especially important with the highly infectious delta variant gaining traction across the United States.

“Given that the delta variant is here and likely to increase in terms of its prevalence across the city, we need to do everything we can to protect our city workforce and the public we serve, especially as the city reopens,” Colfax said.

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