Community not Cops

Last Friday, I testified at City Hall against Mayor Newsom’s proposed budget cuts, which largely went to public health agencies, and other service providers to the city’s poor and homeless.  Supervisor Peskin was proposing alternative cuts which would have taken some of the weight away from the community-based organizations.  One of the things he proposed, was to ask the San Francisco Opera and Symphony to add an extra 1.75 to their ticket prices.  He explained that this would deal with a huge portion of the cuts, and that money could go back to the community organizations.

Using my legal name, I outed myself as someone who became a sex worker while trying to pay for an arts education, and as someone in support of the alternative budget cuts.  I am wholeheartedly in support in saving public health, even though it hurts to propose cuts to funding to the arts.  And I fear that tough times could pit communities against each other who might have once been allies.  However, the 1.75 added to opera tickets sounds like a great opportunity for the more affluent arts organizations to support the larger San Francisco community.

Now, with Newsom’s proposed cuts, at the clinic,  I was facing the reality that the outreach program was going to bear some of the biggest cuts.  It really concerned me how this was going to affect the sex worker community, especially those who we encounter during street-based outreach.  We are a peer-based outreach team.  We are the community reaching out to our own community – our peers and our friends.

We don’t just pass out harm reduction supplies – its not just that someone we see may have just run out of condoms and lube, or that someone may have had to use a dirty needle (because of course this happens), but that we are there for our community.  I can’t tell you how many times I have sat with a stranger while they cried because they had just had a bad date, or they want to change their situation and don’t know how, or because they just got a ticket they cannot pay for peeing in the street (and there was no public restroom).

I know from my own experience the difference it makes for me when someone is there when I am having a bad day.  It can mean feeling a tiny bit better so that I take care of myself.   This is harm reduction.  In hard times, it is even more important to the health of my community that we can be there for each other.

So, I suggested some additional re-budgeting: to the SFPD.

In fact, over the past three years, the total budget for the San Francisco Police Department has increased by several million dollars each year, according the San Francisco Budget Analyst’s office. From the 2005-2006 fiscal year to the 2006-20007 fiscal year, the SFPD police budget increased by 3% and over 23 million dollars.  From the last fiscal year to the current one, the SFPD budget increased 5%, and over 41 million dollars.

Where are these extra million dollars going?  This is what we can examine..

In the past several years, I have seen a drastic increase in police presence.  Sometimes on outreach shifts in the Polk, I will see four or five police cars circle around a block where sex work is happening.  Or I will see a team of beat cops giving a ticket to a homeless person.  What is this doing?

For sex workers, operating under this atmosphere of fear, they are needing to make quick decisions when negotiating with clients.  “Some of the things you need to say and do in order to ascertain if it’s a rapist might very much be at odds with you need to protect yourself from the police.” says Carol Leigh, aka Scarlot Harlot, founder of the Bay Area Sex Worker Action Network (BAYSWAN).

It can be harder to tell ascertain if a client is safe or not, when one has to make a fast decision before jumping into a car.  There isn’t time for negotiating condom use, or types of sexual acts that will occur.  Time to negotiate these things are vital to the safety of a sex worker.

Heightened police presence jeopardizes this, putting sex workers at higher risk for violence and HIV.

Aside from that, the new police presence has affected the ability of the outreach workers to do their work.  Nick Grace, an outreach worker with the St. James Infirmary, describes an incident on a  recent outreach shift,  in which he and his outreach partner watched two transgender women get stopped by a police officer in an undercover vehicle.  The officer informed them that they were committing a crime, but then told the women that they would go easy on them tonight, and let them go.

“They were really shaken by that,” said Grace, “They didn’t even want to get any outreach supplies because they were really scared.”

What happens when a street worker is too scared to get condoms and lube from an outreach worker?  Other outreach workers have expressed similar concerns:

“The other night, there were four cops to just one kid who I could just walk up and talk to,” said Father River Sims, founder of Temenos, a ministry that practices harm reduction outreach. “He’s scared to death, and he’s high and doesn’t know what to do.  When you get 4 or 5 cops for just one kid – I have never understood that.  All I have to do is walk up and talk to them.”

Perhaps some of the money for the SFPD can be redirected into community organizations that are doing harm reduction and HIV prevention work.  By reaching out to our own communities, we can keep them safe AND healthy.