In a nearly three-hour hearing on Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors learned about tumultuous conditions in San Francisco county jails: Deputies attacked by inmates, an influx in mentally ill inmates and frequent lockdowns, to name a few.
And several directed blame principally to the mayor’s office and bad policy-making.
“Most certainly, we know that the staffing issues, things that are happening in our jails are also a direct result of bad policy,” concluded Supervisor Shamann Walton, who pointed to similar issues at juvenile hall.
The city’s jail population has increased rapidly in recent months, reaching pre-pandemic levels of more than 1,100 on any given day. This, supervisors said, is at least in part due to increased arrests and crackdowns on public drug use and dealing on the city’s streets as ordered by Mayor London Breed several times over the past two years.
“We knew that we had a workforce crisis in the sheriff’s office; we’ve known this for so long … We knew that this effort to arrest not only dealers, but drug users, was going to lead to a much larger jail population of very sick people,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen during the hearing at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. “We knew we had a severe budget crisis coming … So my number one question is: What was the plan?”
Ronen said that the plan to ramp up arrests came as a collaboration between the mayor, the district attorney, and the police department; only the mayor’s office sent a representative, at Ronen’s insistence, though they gave little in the way of answers.
Supervisor Ahsha Safaí appeared to also shift blame to the mayor: “There can’t be this big push from the mayor’s office to do this and then not provide you the resources, and put sheriff’s deputies in harm’s way, and those that are being incarcerated in harm’s way,” he said. “So doesn’t this feel like this is a staffing and or policy issue?”
The Sheriff’s Office, according to union president Ken Lomba, has a history of being “grossly understaffed,” an issue he said has only gotten worse in recent years. After being understaffed by some 48 deputies in 2019, the department’s shortfall has grown to 175 deputies, he said.
“This shows that the effort for recruiting and hiring and staffing has not been there,” said Lomba, who said that the Sheriff’s Office is “running on fumes.” He said the sheriff has not prioritized hiring, thereby putting deputies and inmates at risk in the jails.
Lomba said more jail beds are needed to ease crowding, and more deputies are needed to staff the extra space. Currently, he said, mandatory overtime and continued attrition have left deputies exhausted and less able to perform their duties.
Staff shortages and a decreasing budget featured prominently in Sheriff Paul Miyamoto’s presentation today.
“I know we have a crisis right now … I absolutely understand that we need to get more people,” Miyamoto said. “And I am frustrated, just as everyone else is here, that we have limitations on that, whether they’re budgetary, whether they’re restrictions placed on me by the comptroller’s office to hire people.”
Inspector General Terry Wiley, the newly hired watchdog of the Sheriff’s Office, said that the composition of the inmates has also changed, with larger numbers of inmates detoxing from drugs or struggling with mental-health issues than before. Presumably, the changed jail population is the result of the administration’s new efforts to arrest drug dealers and users.
This corroborates previous Mission Local reporting about the conditions inside San Francisco jails. Those locked up have said there is a “new breed of inmate” that requires far more attention than deputies or health officials can currently provide.
The whirlwind of issues have contributed to frequent lockdowns in recent weeks, which harm inmates further: During lockdown, inmates cannot participate in programming such as rehabilitation services, and access to public defenders and family visits is limited.
Supervisor Dean Preston, like Ronen, seemed frustrated, and echoed his colleagues’ unanswered question about how many drug users were being arrested.
A press release from the mayor’s office in December 2023 said that nearly 800 people had been arrested in six months for public drug use — almost 15 percent more than the number arrested for drug sales.
The mayor’s office board liaison Tom Paulino who appeared at the hearing on Tuesday did not say how many drug users were being arrested currently, but promised to do so soon. But multiple supervisors connected the two-year blitz targeting drug use to the now “untenable” situation in the jails.
“This is a complete indictment of the War on Drugs 2.0, and of deciding to gut bail reform, gut programs that were actually starting to work and taking steps backward. This is what you get,” Preston said. “Forty percent increase in incarceration, fewer people released on bail, people’s lives and families being ruined for being held when they shouldn’t be. Fifty percent of the people in jail are Black — that stat should tell everyone exactly what’s going on.”
Solutions to short staffing, however, were mixed.
Wiley agreed that staffing shortages had contributed to lockdowns, and that over-reliance on overtime was unsustainable. He added that as jail populations have increased, and the district attorney has pushed to incarcerate those who might have previously been released or diverted to programs, “the jail staffing has not been proportionate in its increase.”
Wiley suggested that the Sheriff’s Office pull its deputies who have been redeployed to “non-chartered” roles, such as assisting the police department to patrol the streets, back into the jails.
Miyamoto seemed reluctant to consider this option.
“It’s not all based on being short-staffed. It’s also, as we’ve mentioned, who we have incarcerated right now,” Miyamoto said, pointing to a “lack of respect” in jails and safety issues.
Lomba, for his part, disagreed, saying the department simply needed to hire more deputies and fill the gaps in jails. All nine supervisors who spoke on Tuesday seemed inclined to agree.
“I didn’t hear the sheriff’s department point out any solutions to this,” Lomba said. “I didn’t hear a lot of answers to your questions.”
Thanks for being in the thick of it Eleni.
Campers
The trouble in the jails is because Breed’s people on the street went from arresting nobody to arresting everyone.
Suddenly, dinner for 800 turned into dinner for 1,300.
By design.
Sheriff had offered to take the SFO Security Force under his wing which would have taken neigh-on 200 jobs out of the Mayor’s Domain.
So, against the advice of Stanford Researchers (“the Death Rate for OD’s will skyrocket” – it did) she doubled down on Revenge and overloaded the jails with more crazies.
No more talk of Sheriff’s deputies at SFO anymore now.
Probably just a coincidence.
Like all 3 of the Police Commissioners still Loyal to London called in sick again today which means no Window on SFPD on SFGTV and I was set to go comment too.
lol
h.
“Revenge”. Mayor Spite, right. I call her that on the occasion after she went ballistic over an outdoor rave that some kids staged on the Kelly’s Cove parking lot.
This is on Mayor Breed – arresting addicts but ignoring how jails were going to have to deal with ppl going cold turkey.
Meanwhile, in lala land – “‘programs that were actually starting to work’ … . Preston said.” By what metric? Overdose deaths remaining on the up, treatment referrals below 1%.
Need to stop placing blame and figure out the solution instead of making it a Political Area
this is why i didn’t vote for london breed or brooke jenkins. their policies are directly responsible for these conditions, just like all the public health and criminal justice reform experts warned.
Campers,
Our Sheriff’s and Public Defenders have been best in Country for the last 50 years or so because we the People choose them at the polls.
Mano Raju and Matt Gonzalez sort through over 20,000 cases a year and the department that Jeff Adachi staffed and designed is generally considered to be as good as any Top Law Firm in the nation.
Paul Miyamoto was the most respected Sheriff’s Deputy from the time he joined the department largely because of his great physical strength and mastery of Martial Arts which he teaches to this day to classes in Chinatown and when there has been any serious trouble to the extent that deputies have to form a wedge to gain access to an area Miyamoto was always at the tip of the spear.
Paul was (maybe still is ?) the guy inside of the dragon’s head of the Largest Dragon in the Annual Chinese New Year’s Parade and his kids must be getting grown but the last 3 I remember are Triplets.
We need a man or woman like Mano Raju or Matt Gonzalez or Paul Miyamoto to head our Police Department and we need the People to choose that Chief.
In the end it’s all about Recruitment and Training and when you see a Sheriff’s Deputy at work you are looking at someone hired by the best’
Just had to get that in there cause I was a Special ed (‘Reform School’) teacher here and you deal with a lot of Law Enforcement and defense attorneys and …
The insanity in our jails is a byproduct of political moves by the Mayor.
They in no way are the Fault of the Sheriff and his Force of Deputies who rock.
h.
The Mayor just want there to be a perceived image that she is being tough on crime. Meanwhile I cannot see any difference at all on the streets. It’s as bad as it’s ever been. I really hope she doesn’t get the vote. I also think the new DA is not helping along with Chief Scott. I worked by the mayors residence. I don’t know who pays for it but she consistently has one or 2 suburbans constantly running sitting in front of her house. I don’t know who pays for that. And she is wearing these lizard skin heels I don’t trust her at all.
These morons are the reason we need political change in San Francisco.
What was the plan? The plan was to get dangerous people off the streets and into jail!
I’m sorry to hear that they’re dangerous even while incarcerated. But CLEARLY that makes the rest of us safer. These useless supervisors aren’t intelligent enough to understand that.
Donatello,
The difference in arresting a dealer and a junkie strung out on whatever and putting both in jail is that the dealer will not immediately go into withdrawal and become a raving lunatic without their fix but an addict will and everyone involved knows that and SF has been the center of studies which prove just that.
On the streets the junkies are the ones lying against the walls.
In the jails they’re the ones climbing the walls.
I’ve worked places in Juvie where we had rubber rooms to put them in and it took up to a half dozen staff to get them there.
Way to detox is through programs like Boudin was pursuing and they were working by the metric that the jail population and crime were both down.
Answer is to decriminalize drugs and take the dealer and the cop out of the picture.
Same with prostitution.
Legalize the Sex Trade and take the pimp and the cop out of the picture.
Many things like this that you disapprove of are personal choices tho tough roads to choose they should not be illegal.
Not the same for wealthy addicts.
Some, like Matt Dorey and Arnold Townsend had steady productive work and you wouldn’t know they were doing all of this at the same time unless they told you.
I speak from the experience of decades in the field and holding a Masters in Special Education working with the ‘Severely Emotionally Disturbed’.
You speak from raw emotion.
Go Niners !!
h.
If we’re going to talk about “bad policy,” the root cause of all this is the bad policy of giving up on enforcement for years, letting downtown be taken over by open drug dealing and use, and becoming internationally known as a destination for drug tourism.
cardinal: please point to a place that successfully arrested its way out of a public health problem.
You’re missing OP’s point, but here you go: Recently, Thailand, the Philippines. It is worth pointing out that noone’s advocating in favor of extra-judicial enforcement as practiced by the latter.
You are citing Rodrigo Duterte’s “KILL ‘EM ALL” program?
As a success?
Wow.
This funny. A bunch of opinions of people that have not been in that county jail in the past year 3 months or 5 years. I’ve been there, it’s very nice, don’t be fooled. You actually get a mat, 2 man cell, and the best food. I rank this county 5 star accomodations. I could commit a crime, bring a cell phone and post photos.