Protesters derailed San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s question-and-answer session Tuesday on the city’s ongoing open-air drug dealing epidemic, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The meeting, which was held in an area of the city plagued by criminal activity, would have allowed the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to grill Breed on her administration’s response to the epidemic amid a 41% spike in overdose deaths between January and March when compared to the same period in 2022, ABC 7 reported. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin ended the meeting in roughly 10 minutes after Breed was booed and repeatedly interrupted by protesters, according to the Chronicle.
Breed was loudly booed as she entered the podium and opened by saying that drug use in the area is not a new problem, the Chronicle reported. (RELATED: Almost Two Dozen Major Retailers Have Fled Downtown San Francisco Amid Skyrocketing Crime)
“We are willing to let people get away with murder,” Breed said. “We have tried over and over again. and what we are doing is not working,” she told the audience.
Breed’s remarks during the meeting were met with mixed responses, with people yelling “No more cops!” and one man holding up a sign that saying “London greed hates poor people,” the Chronicle reported.
Peskin asked Breed during the meeting to create an Emergency Operations Center, which would be tasked with shutting down all open-air drug dealing in the area within 90 days, according to the Chronicle.
“Resources have expanded considerably. I am doing this job without fear of losing it,” Breed said.
At the public meeting’s conclusion, Breed met in the board’s chamber where she reportedly refused to fully back the idea of an operation center, but invited Peskin to be more involved in future coordinated efforts to tamp down on open-air drug dealing.
Protesters in a crowd at U.N. Plaza interrupted a plan to grill Mayor London Breed Tuesday about her administration’s response to San Francisco’s flourishing public drug markets — in one of the areas where they’ve been most visible. https://t.co/AZXMYjwbOs
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) May 23, 2023
Breed has been under scrutiny for facilitating a now shuttered open-air drug market called the linkage in the heart of the tenderloin district. The “linkage center,” meant to link addicts with treatment, was closed after failing to link an impactful number of drug users to treatment.
The San Francisco Mayor’s Office did not immediately respond to Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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