Supervisor Matt Dorsey Wants ‘100 arrests a night’ Going Forward

Seeking to end the open-air drug use along beleaguered 6th Street, D6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey has a plan. Dorsey wants SFPD to make “at least 100 arrests” in his South of Market jurisdiction per night. These arrests, he claims, will reportedly funnel the sick and suffering into “compulsory detox and treatment.” For this to work however, Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie must adopt Dorsey’s corrective mentality and pass new measures—but will he? 

Will Dorsey and Lurie see eye-to-eye?

“Dorsey, who is a recovering addict, said court-mandated treatment would be ‘life-changing’ for the many drug users who get high openly on the city’s streets, many of them looking dazed and bent over into seemingly uncomfortable positions. Dorsey said he’s encouraged by Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie’s emphasis on the need for lasting solutions to the drug crisis and that he believes his inquiry will lead to ‘enduring solutions’ that could help save lives.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Dorsey looks at 6th Street in downtown San Francisco and thinks, “It’s only getting worse.” Per ABC7, the District 6 supervisor requested City Hall shift to a more enforcement-driven approach to combat “lawlessness” on city streets. 

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On the surface, Matt Dorsey’s punitive resolution seems harsh yet forgiving. “Historically, most of the work that we’re doing is focused on drug dealers, and I think that’s something that needs to continue, but we also need to be making criminal justice interventions in public drug use,” he said. “We do need to be making arrests of drug users with an eye toward making sure that any criminal justice intervention we make is a medical and life saving intervention.”

But under further scrutiny, the Orwellian nature of this lock-‘em-up methodology shines through. Dorsey was behind Proposition F, which would have sneaked drug testing for welfare under the guise of a cash reward. Mandating drug testing for welfare and other living assistance programs isn’t just impractical. It introduces an insidious surveillance. 

This begs the question: what exactly is he looking for? 

A hierarchy of merit

Surveilling welfare recipients accrues a database whose only control is segregation. Had Prop F passed, California’s most vulnerable population would face inquest, perhaps voluntarily, without knowing where the government’s intrusion ends. “This is more carrot than stick,” Dorsey told the San Francisco Standard in July. He was speaking of the $400 benefits boost for passing a drug test, but it’s easy to extend the metaphor. “It’s a pretty promising approach.” 

Supervisor Matt Dorsey wasn’t shy about comparing people on welfare to donkeys (or whatever animal stand-in you prefer). It’s a dehumanization so quick, one might brush it off as poor choice of words, and it works. It works by instilling a hierarchy of merit. Do we deserve surveillance for being poor? Do we deserve punishment for relapse? Of course not, but that’s not what Dorsey is asking. It seems he’s asking whether addicts deserve a helping hand, and one needn’t look far to get a resounding “No.” 

“Treatment or incarceration,” opined @SFdeservesbetter. “Those should be the only options.”

Does Dorsey’s plan have legs?

Prop F failed, saving California untold dollars in drug testing equipment, staffing and facilities. In his most recent agenda, Matt Dorsey’s plan may suffer from the same practical shortcomings. If San Francisco County Jail cannot house the 2,000+ people Dorsey wants arrested each month, what then? All Dorsey might do with his punishing ambitions is reveal the depth of his hatred for addicts and the homeless. 

The culling would seem less like a culling if a team of substance abuse treatment centers would step forward. The Chronicle, the Standard, KTVU, ABC7, all covered this story. Not a single one lists any treatment center that would receive arrestees that choose detox. So far, only outgoing Mayor London Breed has endorsed Dorsey’s blind objective. 

When pressed for further elaboration, talk of a treatment plan disappears altogether. 

According to the Chronicle, Dorsey inquired with the Health Department and the County Jail to “tease out where we are with capacity.” 

The supervisor touts the Swiss city of Zürich as a law enforcement success story. Zürich saw an open-air drug market flourish throughout the Eighties and early Nineties. Dorsey admires their “zero-tolerance” law enforcement, adopted in 1992, which brought a sweeping end to the Zürich drug market. 

“Obviously I’m going to be supporting more coercive interventions, but I think that’s consistent with the Zurich model,” Dorsey told the Chronicle. I would imagine that in his perfect world, SF ships its drug-addled and homeless to San Quentin. Most if not all San Franciscans certainly are tired of watching fentanyl ravage our streets and kill our friends. The D6 supervisor would agree, but his solution has implications beyond his scope of reasoning. Applying a repressive rhetoric would only harm people further, all because of intolerance. 

“San Francisco is nowhere near zero tolerance,” said Dorsey.