Tag: Coalition on Homelessness

Your community needs you at the Police Commission hearing on Tasers: this Wednesday, Feb. 23, 5:30 p.m., in Room 400, City Hall. A study found that in the first year of Taser usage, sudden deaths in custody go up 550 percent and officer shootings more than double. The United Nations and Amnesty International consider Tasers to be torture devices, and the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild, and the NAACP oppose their use. It is certain that Taser usage does not lead to fewer shootings.

As the police continue to shoot unarmed and mentally disabled people, including a man in a wheelchair, the community is speaking out against these incidents of excessive force. On Martin Luther King Day, Monday, Jan. 17, about 150 San Franciscans and Bay Area activists expressed their outrage with a march and rally in San Francisco.

At a meeting with the Coalition on Homelessness, Police Chief George Gascon confided he knew a sit/lie law was unnecessary “scapegoating” (Gascon’s word), but he was under tremendous pressure from Haight Street businesses to promote it. Many Haight merchants, however, oppose sit/lie, Prop L.

The end game for the ballot proposition known as “sit/lie” is to not just rid the city of homeless people but, more importantly, to shift the power balance in San Francisco to the right. The biggest funder of Prop L, millionaire Ron Conway, says: “We must take our city back … This is about survival.” Pushing Prop L with a passion is one-time Republican political action committee fundraiser C.W. Nevius, now a Chronicle columnist, who parrots arguments proposed by an ultra-right-wing think tank, the Manhattan Institute.

A march called Real Deal or No Deal, expected to be the biggest of the season, will take off at 3 p.m. Wednesday from Hallidie Plaza to City Hall. San Franciscans hit hard by the recession will join with city workers and the working poor to march against Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed city budget.