Tag: manhattan institute

LA’s Sit/Lie Law in San Francisco

LA's Sit/Lie Law in San Francisco; photo by BayView Times/Sheet Roots
Photo by BayView Times/Sheet Roots

This article in the SF BayView doesn’t pretend to be neutral on the issue. It does, however, provide a helpful perspective on the proposed law:

If we want to compare Proposition L with another city’s sit/lie law, we should really look to our tougher, rougher, bigger neighbor to the south: Los Angeles. The enforcement program for the sit/lie law there was designed while our current chief of police Gascon was second in command. The San Francisco law looks and feels eerily familiar compared to the Los Angeles one…

The main features of the initiative were described in a 2002 internal LAPD memo entitled “Homeless Reduction Strategies.” The public relations campaign for SCI was designed by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow George L. Kelling, who was paid about $500,000 in consulting fees…

The San Francisco proponents of sit/lie are currently quoting arather long article by Manhattan Institute writer Heather Mac Donald, who has been described as “the thinking bigot’s Ann Coulter.” …

Much like the LA law, the major proponents of Prop L are financial, real estate and hotel interests and the upper police department brass. Both initiatives were introduced by seemingly liberal mayors. In both San Francisco and Los Angeles, the image of the white mother and baby under threat were used repeatedly in their public relations work.

Several SU readers have spoken out in support of Sit/Lie here, where I pointed out the Manhattan Institute’s connections with Giuliani’s remaking of Times Square.

What do you think? (Read the whole BayView article here.)

Giuliani’s Brain Spanks San Francisco

Giuliani's Brain Attacks San Francisco

The visionaries who saved Times Square have decided to lend their beneficence to our fair city, and show us once and for all how only “the will to enforce common norms of public behavior” can clean up areas like the Haight-Ashbury, ridding it of the gutter-punks and pit bulls.

But in the process, our Doms have to deliver some tough love, especially to those employed by “Homelessness, Inc.” here in the city. Yes, Daddy, we’ve been very bad. Hurt us! Give us what we deserve! We don’t want to hear that the solution to every civic problem is incarceration, but my, we do NEED to hear it.

One of the more precious quotes in the article suggests our reward if we obey:

Police officials and local entrepreneurs speak wistfully of the transformation of New York’s Times Square, and they still hope that it could happen here [in the Tenderloin].

They do prescribe one non-police action to achieve this shopper’s utopia:

Perhaps, too, such public passivity in the face of crime owes to the city’s lack of a tabloid newspaper; in New York, such grisly events, which were common in the early 1990s, sparked widespread outrage in no small part because papers like the New York Post made them front-page news.