San Francisco's Diabolical Mayor Denim Dan Guts Public Health for Cops & Private Incarceration
- Jason Wyman
- Feb 18
- 3 min read
San Francisco's Mayor, Daniel Lurie (of the Levi Strauss family,) is a diabolical. Or more precisely that is the word that best describes his latest political bullshit: Cutting San Francisco's Department of Public Health by $57,000,000. These cuts are almost exclusively to programs that ensure public health is provided in equitable, community-minded ways to the residents of San Francisco. It includes things like HIV funding, workforce development programs that get women and Black, Latine/x/a/o, Indigenous, and trans folks into the medical field, behavioral health programs, culturally-responsive health access programs, and harm reduction services. These cuts will devastate the communities I care about, and it will deepen structural disparities and further entrench inequities.
I know all of this because I have been educating myself about the San Francisco Budget, and what I am learning reveals that the agenda of San Francisco's Billionaire Bro Mayor is exactly aligned with the Orange One's Federal Agenda. It's almost like they are both taking pages out of the same playbook.
A very direct example of this comes through a program called Rapid Enforcement, Support, Evaluation, and Triage (aka RESET), which I knew absolutely nothing about until last week when I attended a San Francisco Board of Supervisors Meeting. I was asked to attend the meeting by organizers working to protect Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. We were there to give testimony during public comment about the critical importance of protecting MCCLA (and by extension all of the Cultural Centers in San Francisco.)
I arrived at around 3pm to the Board Chambers thinking it would be only a short while before giving testimony. That short wait turned into almost four hours, and I had to sit through a bunch of other city business before I could testify. It was in those crucial four hours that I learned about RESET.
RESET is essentially a sobering center that will serve up to 26 people per day. It will cost San Francisco $14,5000,000 per year. It will be administered through the Sheriff's Department and run by a private, for-profit LLC. The cost breaks down to approximately $1500 per person per day.
The way the program will work is that police will aggressively target people using substances publicly. They will then force them to choose between jail or RESET. Supposedly, in the RESET program they will be given the opportunity to sober up and then connected with interim recovery services.
The problem? The Mayor is gutting the organizations that are offering culturally-responsive, deeply impactful programs and services that are preventing people from both the streets and addiction. Organizations like Miss Major Alexander L. Lee Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) Black Trans Cultural Center. TGIJP provides leadership development and economic opportunities to Black and/or Brown trans and gender-diverse community members (many of whom are formerly incarcerated) through direct assistance, emergency housing, healthcare, and more. The cost of their services? Approximately $350,000. All of which is on the chopping block.
This is structural racism. It is taking from already funded, community-run, non-profit organizations and giving that money to the Sheriff's Department, who then gives it to a PRIVATE, FOR-PROFIT LLC. As the Mayor put it, this "fundamentally transforms" the relationship between the City and the Community, communities already targeted by law enforcement. This firmly places the City's recovery and addiction services within law enforcement and private, for-profit incarceration. And in fact, according to the Mayor, RESET will facilitate "real collaboration between law enforcement and public health." We are further entrenching public health as a carceral, for-profit system here in San Francisco. This is a system he wants to "scale up" in neighborhoods across San Francisco. Again, this is literally structural racism.
And that is exactly what is happening at the federal level.
ICE (aka law enforcement) is ramping up the rounding up (and killing) of immigrant, brown, Indigenous, and Black neighbors. They are taking them to private, for-profit detention centers. And those detention centers are scaling up across all of the United States at "a speed and volume we have never seen before."
That last quote, though, is actually from the Mayor speaking at his Press Conference announcing the RESET program. He was referencing ramping up arrests for public substance use. Both the Mayor and the Orange One are clearly aligned on "scaling up" private, for-profit incarceration and detention.
The Mayor has "said from day one public safety is my top priority." But the questions must be asked: Who exactly is he keeping safe? And from whom is he keeping them safe?
I'm pretty sure the answer to the first is most easily answered in the shared interests between him and the Orange One: PROFITS. And if that's true, then the answer to the second question is Us All, The People.
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