In August the Castro Merchant’s Association sent a letter to San Francisco city leaders threatening to stop paying taxes if the city didn’t do more to deal with crime, drugs and homelessness in the neighborhood. “Our community is struggling to recover from lost business revenue, from burglaries and never-ending vandalism/graffiti (often committed by unhoused persons) and we implore you to take action,” the letter read.

This week another historic San Francisco neighborhood had reached its limit with the disorder. Residents of the Fillmore district gathered at Third Baptist Church to call for more city involvement in the problems the neighborhood is facing.

At a meeting Monday night at San Francisco’s Third Baptist Church, Rev. Amos Brown and other Black community leaders called on the city to fix what they described as an escalating homelessness and drug problem. These issues, they said, disproportionately hurt the historically Black Fillmore District, an already vulnerable community.

Several dozen people attended the meeting, with its tone alternating between desperation and anger. Speaker after speaker sounded the same note, calling for an increased police presence. Further, they want to require homeless drug addicts to get treatment and prevent them from camping on the street.

“My grandma used to say, ‘Your freedom ends where my nose begins,’” said Brown, who is also president of the San Francisco branch of the NAACP and a former local politician. “When homeless folks cause problems, their freedom ends. That’s not being mean, it’s being what I call engaging in responsible compassion.”

Community members said the parking lot of the Fillmore District’s Safeway is ground zero, and that Safeway was turning a blind eye to the problems. They cited cars blasting music, human feces everywhere, harassment from drug dealers, syringes in planters and having to witness “X-rated acts.” With Rosa Parks Elementary School a block away, they worry that this sets the wrong example for children and that the community will be adversely affected for years.

The last straw for many in this neighborhood happened in July when two homeless men assaulted a local nonprofit leader and put him in the hospital.

[James] Spingola was attacked by two people after asking them to leave the property and was hit multiple times with a two-by-four.

“My only thought was how do I survive this,” Spingola said. “I think the hit in the head knocked me out. The hit in the face was actually trying to put me to sleep, and then I found myself getting hit in the back and that was waking me up.”…

“I grabbed one of them and put them up under me and that’s how I survived this. Then my coworkers came running out, and if they hadn’t been here, I’d really be in trouble,” Spingola said.

The SF Chronicle reports crime is up in the area which includes Fillmore.

According to the San Francisco Police Department’s crime statistics, larceny crimes — such as shoplifting — along with arson and assaults have increased this year in the Northern District, which includes the Fillmore, compared with a year earlier. There were 5,995 larceny thefts so far this year compared with 5,496 last year. There have been 62 arson cases so far this year compared with 35 in 2021.

Those are the incidents that were reported but you have to wonder how many incidents are never witnesses or never get brought to the attention of police. CBS Bay Area spoke to Yulanda Williams, a recently retired police officer who grew up in the city.

“The most egregious things that I have witnessed is the blatant drug sales out in the area, the drug usage, actually seeing people with hypodermic needles in their arms,” she said. “Also, seeing the filth and all of the trash that’s in the parking lot.”

Residents would like to see more attention paid to Fillmore and more police on patrol but Assistant chief David Lazar pointed out why that’s not likely to happen at present: “The reality is the San Francisco Police Department is short about 540 officers. This is unprecedented. This really is a staffing crisis that we have here in San Francisco.”

It’s no secret why police have been leaving the city in record numbers. There were warnings about this as far back as August of 2020:

As politicians debate the future of San Francisco policing, there is another discussion going in the station houses: the record number of officers resigning…

SFPD is on track to lose nearly twice as many cops this year as it did last year and close to four times as many as in 2018.

“This is just the beginning. Dozens are actively in the hiring process with other agencies,” said Tony Montoya, president of the Police Officers Association.

“The members are upset that the social experiment being conducted in San Francisco is failing, and they would rather work someplace that values them,” said Montoya, a constant critic of City Hall’s calls for police reform, which after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis has taken the form of shifting money from the police budget to social causes.

More than two years later some of the politicians have figured out that turning on police and slashing budgets without a plan was a bad idea but the damage had been done and the city is still trying to recover.