A Safety Net for Kids in the Tenderloin
San Francisco police protect children on their way to school
Lesly attends De Marillac Academy, a Catholic school that serves mostly low-income students. The walk is seven blocks, riddled with drug addicts and dealers.
With the start of the school year, the San Francisco Police Department has increased efforts to buffer children from the potential harm of the Tenderloin's streets. Now, between 7:30 and 8 a.m., two officers are stationed at the corner of Leavenworth and Turk streets, a spot that the police say is one of the district's most popular for drug dealing.
The effect has been like a momentary truce. As children and parents line up for school buses, or make the walk to school, officers stroll up and down the block, repelling dealers and drug users.
"These three are waiting for us to leave," Officer Gregory Watts said, pointing to a cluster of men who had circled the block seven times. "How absurd. Let the kids wait for the bus in peace, you know?"
Farther up Leavenworth, Lesly's classmate Litzy Cortez and her mother, Olga, arrived to walk to school with Lesly and her mother. Litzy's ponytail was fastened to the side of her head with an elastic band that matched her maroon and plaid uniform. The two girls fell in line behind their mothers and walked another block to Eddy Street.
At the streetlight, a shoeless elderly woman wearing pink pajamas glared over their heads.
"The dirt is bad for the girls," the woman said, tilting back her head and dragging a finger across her neck. "Throat cancer."
The light turned, and the group forged ahead.
The girls described a crime scene they saw near Turk a couple of weeks ago. A man had been shot to death, and as they walked past, their mothers wondered if he was anybody they knew. The girls got close enough to see the body covered by a white sheet.
"There's a lot of cholos on this block," Litzy said. "You know, like gangs."
Lesly pointed across the street to the victim's memorial, a brick wall decorated with votive candles, flowers and empty bottles of Rémy Martin and Hennessy.
The girls arrived at Golden Gate Avenue, where a crossing guard, another recent addition, helped them cross. A few buildings down, they arrived at De Marillac's gated door.
As her mother waited to say goodbye, Litzy fiddled with the clasps on her backpack. She paused to think about why drugs and fighting are bad.
"The earth was made so we could have peace on it," she said, borrowing a lesson from school.
Lesly chimed in: "Yeah, and I think it is disrespecting God's property."
The girls bounded through the gate. At the corner of Turk and Leavenworth, the mothers smiled at the officers. In 10 minutes, the officers would leave, and the truce would end.
This article also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.
h. brown
Hey Lesly,
SF has the largest concentration of pedophiles on parole than anywhere else in the state. In the Tenderloin. That's why the present design of Boeddeker Park has the children's are separated from the place where the winos will surely gather. It has a nice basketball court too. And a podium for bands.
Nothing the matter with Boeddeker Park yet it's been essentially closed for the last couple of years. "Needs a redesign." they say. They also cut down all of the benches where the homeless sat outside the park and all the way down to Powell Street Cable Car turnaround where they took out a dozen benches or so.
Look at the new Boeddeker design. A friggin' clubhouse for cocktail parties. Not a single bench. Huge clubhous. The poor need their parks. Re-direct the Boeddeker funds into the Bay View Mr. Mayor.
Go Gigantes!
h.
d6 sanity
The TL has never been a healthy place to raise families and was not built with children or schools in mind. The infrastructure is not yet in place.
The only reason families (primarily poor and immigrant) reside in the heart of the TL is so people like this writer can live in the Mission, even if it is with perhaps three roommates.
Over the past 30 years, multi-generational families have been displaced from workable neighborhoods like the Mission and forced to relocate and intermingle with social challenges in way we have created through bad policy choices. The Police are simply a band-aid treatment.
Truth in Moderation
d6,
In your world, it's not the fault of the violent and the drug addicted that children are exposed to violence and drug addiction -- that would be too easy. Instead you create a bogeyman, say, "gentrification," and instead of addressing the problem as it is presented, you hold up the process for decades in order to hunt down your bogeyman.
Nice work. Thanks for leading the District Snipe Hunt. You and the D6 brigade are full of complaints, but never any workable solutions.
Mark Kraft
<i>"These three are waiting for us to leave. . . How absurd. Let the kids wait for the bus in peace, you know?"</i>
No, officer. The absurd thing is that having officers walking the beat stops the Tenderloin's drug dealers cold and makes the area a safer place to live, but the police only care to do the obvious thing a few hours a day.