Freelance Multimedia Journalist
January 2023
On the brink of a new year, Mayor London Breed's office gave contractor HealthRight 360 the green light to erect
a Linkage Center at the Civic Center. Located across from City Hall, it is also one of the epicenters of San Francisco (if not the Bay Area, California and the country's) drug havens. Although the advertised intention was to welcome the unhoused, especially addicts, without restrictions and 'link' them to services, renowned reporter Michael Schellenberger and I suspected otherwise.
Behind a flimsy fence surrounded by blue construction tarp, I discovered that Director Gary McCoy and his staff did little if any linking. Armed with my cellphone, I lined up and went inside undercover. What I documented shocked and angered the public at all levels who felt misled by a faux health initiative paid for through their tax dollars.
The free exchange of drugs and use thereof was rampant. People who came in with drugs were not screened out. Some were not even shy about it as they were admitted despite their honesty over personal possession. And the people that should be kept furthest away from these harm reduction sites, the dealers victimizing the most vulnerable, were everywhere. They were dealing death in plain sight.
Walking away, it seemed the definition of harm reduction was so thinly stretched if not twisted that when this story broke, the Linkage Center that ultimately linked no one was shuttered shortly after it opened.
In Feburary 2024, amidst a raging national fentanyl epidemic, California's Department of Health Services placed HealthRight 360 under a microscope when two overdose deaths occured in one month.
August 2021
Toward the end of July of 2023, I teamed up with Independent Consumer Finance Reporter Erica Sandberg to investigate the lingering impacts of California's Proposition 47.
Dressed in plain clothes, we casually walked into a local Target store in downtown San Francisco, CA. Short of a highly organized plan, we randomly picked an item on the shelf to boost--steal. Erica then grabbed it and I followed closely behind with my camera. The goal of this firsthand experiment was to see what repercussions thieves suffered (if any) in an environment where Prop. 47 had been dominant for years (since Nov. 2014).
As depicted in select still shots from my video, not a darn thing. Erica walked away unscathed with a coffee maker. She then turned around and returned it because the goal was to see if she could make it out of the store and how far, not to actually steal. More disturbing, while I was filming, we were surrounded by actual thieves who were genuinely stealing! One of them bumped into me as he fled down the escalators and out the doors, also without incident.
In conclusion, even national chain retailers like Target who have an abundance of resources, stock and security, could not keep up with the flexibility Prop. 47 permitted for rampant theft under $950.
In 2024, thousands of similar incidents like this reoccurring every year throughout California at every level has eventually led to a ballot initiative to Recall or Repeal Prop 47.
Not all views expressed and works published by Michael Schellenberger beyond this article are shared or endorsed by me.
Not all views expressed and works published by Erica Sandberg beyond this article are shared or endorsed by me.
