neighborhood. The march was the perfect tactic for a community trying to reverse long-held but erroneous public attitudes about it.
CAC activists were thrilled by the success of the event. We felt the march had not only accomplished its goals but also galvanized community activism around fighting crime. Attendance at CAC meetings increased steadily, and it seemed as if police visibility rose in the area. Crime appeared to be the new issue necessary to maintain resident activism after the historic rezoning victory. The North of Market Planning Coalition began increasing its emphasis on crime, which soon became its chief focus and organizing vehicle. A Safe Streets Committee was formed. Although it was unclear whether the neighborhood’s anticrime efforts were actually reducing crime, many residents felt empowered because top police brass appeared to take their concerns seriously.
By 1987 we still had not received the hoped-for assistance for attacking crime’s economic underpinnings, but most of us attributed this lack to the pro-downtown policies of the reigning Feinstein administration. We believed that a new, progressive mayor would deliver neighborhood-oriented economic assistance to the Tenderloin, and when Art Agnos succeeded Feinstein in January 1988, we all thought the Tenderloin was poised for a major turnaround. I shifted away from the crime issue after 1986 and returned to focusing on housing and homelessness, but I continued to support the neighborhood’s campaign against crime and won a formal commendation in 1986 from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for my crime-fighting efforts.
On March 1, 1990, Mayor Agnos announced that a police station would open in the Tenderloin. I was initially excited by the announcement, as the community had finally received something tangible after years of anti-crime advocacy. I saw the police station as a building block that would be followed by additional government efforts to improve the neighborhood’s social and economic climate. But I soon learned that the police station was all the Tenderloin would ever get.
The problem was that the Agnos administration did not look beyond the portion of the neighborhood’s agenda demanding more police. The other anti-crime strategies on the table—such as employment, job training, economic development, and assistance in attracting new business—were essentially viewed as throw-ins garnishing the primary demand for a more visible police presence. Our failure to develop an achievable action plan for attaining goals other than “more police” allowed outsiders to think such goals were not central to our overall agenda. I know from talking to Agnos soon after the station opened that he truly believed he had given the Tenderloin what it wanted most. He seemed surprised to learn that we had never claimed the crime problem could be solved solely or even largely by police, and that the community considered the rest of the anti-crime agenda even more important. He did not have to tell me that for elected Officials striving to make an immediate, visible anti-crime impact, providing additional police officers or a police station is a comparatively inexpensive strategy that always takes precedence over more systemic, nonpunitive anti-crime initiatives. Responding to the demand for more police frees politicians from committing the resources necessary for a more comprehensive anti-crime program.
The announcement of the new police station (which opened in a temporary location before moving to its current space in 2000) marked the high (or low) point of the Tenderloin 1980s anti-crime efforts. Leroy Looper, as shrewd a tactical activist as ever walked the streets of a major city, saw his own expectations for a government-assisted economic revival of the Tenderloin fall victim to the “more police, more arrests” approach. Looper’s Reality House West had opened a Sizzler restaurant in the Cadillac Hotel’s commercial space in the mid-1980s in an attempt to jump-start the Tenderloin’s economic revitalization. Looper always assumed that city government would appreciate this investment in the neighborhood and would assist similar businesses seeking success in the economically depressed community. This government assistance never materialized, leaving the Sizzler on its own to survive in a difficult business environment.
Looper’s vision of new employment opportunities and job training for Tenderloin residents was central to his crime-prevention strategy, and the Sizzler fulfilled both objectives. Unfortunately, Looper and the rest of us learned that even self-identified progressive politicians have come to address crime solely in punitive terms. The Sizzler closed down around the same time the neighborhood police station opened—a sad but fitting parallel that perfectly captures how even the best-intentioned progressive-led anti-crime campaigns inevitably fall prey to Officials’ preference for law-and-order solutions.
Where did we go wrong? The answer lies in our failure to follow the fundamental tenet of tactical activism: we responded to the crime problem without ensuring that crime reduction remained part of a larger campaign for neighborhood revitalization. By putting an economic development and social action agenda under the rubric of crime prevention without making specific demands for these positive goals, we allowed law-and-order-minded residents, law-enforcement personnel, and politicians with repressive agendas to narrow our demands to “more police, more arrests.” Such an agenda is insufficient for a community desperately needing government-aided and private economic revitalization.
Simply put, the Tenderloin’s grassroots anti-crime campaign failed to frame the crime problem in a way that would lead to concrete improvements in the lives of residents. Although the number of arrests and police officers both rose in the Tenderloin, there was no focused advocacy to force government to address the preconditions causing crime. When I speak of preconditions, I am not referring simply to pervasive inner-city problems such as poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination, which progressives frequently stress as the underlying causes of crime. I mean preconditions that realistically could have been addressed to increase neighborhood safety. For example, the city could have installed more street and sidewalk lighting, passed laws mandating outside lights on all buildings, and reduced vacant storefronts by providing tax breaks or subsidies, or both, to encourage new businesses to move to the Tenderloin.
We could have eliminated bus shelters and telephone booths used by drug dealers, and taken civil legal action against property owners who allowed nuisance activities in and around their premises. Increased funding to expand neighborhood cultural facilities would have increased the presence of the legitimate nighttime activities necessary to crowd out problem behavior. We also could have figured out ways for property owners to contribute more money to clean streets and sidewalks, making the neighborhood more pedestrian friendly.
Sadly, most if not all of these changes could have been achieved during the late 1980s. Our failure to achieve them resulted from tactical and strategic errors, not political weakness. Neighborhood plans included many of these ideas, yet residents rarely transcended the push for more police.
Signs of Progress
Tenderloin activists learned from the strategic errors of the 1980s, and in the past decade did initiate many of the non-law-and-order strategies noted above to reduce neighborhood crime. Crime remains unacceptably high, but there is recognition that reducing this problem must be part of a broader action plan for the neighborhood.
The Tenderloin’s learning curve is part of a broader trend. Democratic Party politicians are finally recognizing that they cannot deliver for their constituents while diverting massive numbers of dollars toward imprisoning nonviolent drug users and small-time sellers. In 2004 Oakland mayor Jerry Brown appeared in television ads opposing a November ballot measure to modify the state’s costly three-strikes law. This law was designed to stop violent predators from leaving prison after their third offense, but the “third strike” also included nonviolent property crimes such as stealing a loaf of bread. Brown’s opposition helped narrowly defeat the measure.
But after Brown returned to the governor’s office in 2011, he took aim at budget-busting prison costs. He transferred nonviolent offenders from state prison to county jails, and backed Prop 36, a revision to three strikes on the November 2012 ballot. The measure passed by nearly 70 percent of the vote, indicating that voters are revisiting costly criminal justice strategies they once handily
