Recap of Monday’s Muni safety hearing
Photo by Flickr user Steve Rhodes
Our first attempt at spreading a Twitter hashtag goes straight to the dustbin of history. Oh, well. We tried.
Lucky for us (and you), there are some amazing blogs and great newspeople out there attending these middle-of-the-day hearings so that you can keep reading Muni Diaries and Perez stay at work and wish you weren’t. Here are some tidbits from a few:
(Streetsblog SF) Police enforcement on Muni is getting a major overhaul after years of inconsistent officer deployment. Under a revised Memorandum of Understanding between the Police Department and the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, officers will be required to ride lines that most frequently have problems with crime. Station captains will now regularly present Muni crime statistics for their districts at Comstat meetings, where they will be grilled on why crime has increased or decreased. …
At the beginning of the hearing, which was called by Supervisor Bevan Dufty, several Muni riders told stories of experiencing and witnessing violent attacks and robberies on the city’s transit system. One rider, Tim Bishop, said he was attacked in January on a T-Third line vehicle by youths who were shouting anti-gay epithets. When he confronted them, he was beaten unconscious and repeatedly kicked in the head.
(City Insider, an SFGate blog) Deputy Police Chief John Murphy, Muni’s new security boss, detailed plans to significantly improve Muni safety. He said that as opposed to officers randomly boarding buses, a new Memorandum of Understanding between the police department and Muni outlines that officers will be deployed according to the “zone strategy” now used for all crime in the city. Basically, that means tracking crime hot spots on Muni and deploying officers accordingly.
And an audio report of the hearing, from KCBS.
So there you have it. Now that you’ve been a good online citizen and read these reports, how do you feel about Monday’s hearing?
They’ve already made promises in their MOU and already broken them. It’s already in their MOU to board twice a shift for each officer, and that went well for a while when first implemented many moons ago…then faded away to nothing. So realistically, how long do you think they will keep this current promise which is really just a response to their earlier failure to keep their past promise? How long will they keep this up as directed in the new MOU? The common definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over and expecting different results.
No, I want a dedicated police force on the Transit that is not beholden to SFPD but is a separate political entity and beholden strictly to the Transit (SFMTA) and serving its customers and not beholden to the POA or SFPD. We all know that eventually the money that has been secured this round by SFPD is gonna be redirected to its (granted) more serious citywide concerns once the whole thing blows over… or once Dufty or Ammiano get their coveted Mayoralship. No, I want Transit Police not SFPD babysitting.