San Francisco Blog

year, according to Captain Kevin Cashman with the SFPD’s Gang Task Force.

“The amount of guns people are carrying on the street is up incredibly,” he said.

While guns have been seized in almost every city neighborhood the vast majority come from the usual suspects: of the 183 guns taken into custody by the Gang Task Force, 61 were from arrests made in Bayview, 38 from Ingleside, 29 from the Western Addition, and 24 from the Mission. Every other neighborhood was in the single digits.

In case it matters, 146 were handguns, 13 were assault rifles, and 24 were shotguns. Cashman said the gang task force’s ratios are basically consistent with city numbers as a whole.

The river of bullets running through our Summer of Love is enabling what police say is the new face of homicide: strangers killing strangers. Fights in nightclubs, drug deals gone bad, angry street encounters –easy access to firearms and a culture of violence turn what might ordinarily just be fights into murder.

Looked at another way: organized killing is down, disorganized killing is way up.
In response, police are reorganizing: as new academy graduates take up positions at district stations, 20 experienced officers were transferred over to the Gang Task Force, which now has 50 members. (By way of comparison, the Gang Task Force had 30 members three years ago when it cleaned the Down Below Gang out of Sunnydale.) They’re teaming up with the Narcotics Division to put undercover officers in the middle of drug and gun sales, and then arrest everyone involved.

“We may hit ‘em Monday Wednesday and Friday, Narcotics hits em Tuesday and Thursday, and we both hit ‘em Saturday,” Cashman said. “There’s almost a schedule like that, as a matter of fact.”

That, said Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice Director Lenore Anderson, prevents homicides from happening. “We’ve seen a strong connection between illegal activities like narcotics dealing and homicides,” she said. “The more police beef up the units that specifically deal with the former situations, the more of the latter we prevent.”

It also has a secondary benefit: police nation-wide are running up against a “stop snitching” campaign that encourages witnesses not to talk to police. Even without that pressure, many witnesses in high crime areas feel justifiably threatened if they cooperate with law enforcement. But when undercover officers make arrests in drug or gun stings, the officers themselves are the primary witnesses. Police are less reliant on reluctant witnesses and usually get convictions, Cashman said.

The bad news, according to a spokesman for the mayor’s office, is that there’s no new money for these efforts. “They’re redirecting existing funds that were approved in the city budget.”

Those resources have to come from somewhere. The biggest losers are the kind of highly visible community policing efforts that many on the Board of Supervisors are pushing for. Twenty more officers dedicated to making arrests city-wide means fewer experienced cops walking the beat and getting to know their communities.
It also means that if this new push doesn’t turn the tide … if the Summer of Guns turns into the Winter of our Discontent … then the police are tapped out.

It’s evidently a lot cheaper to put guns on the street than to get them off. The human cost is pretty high, too.