San Francisco is a famously tolerant place but tolerance for anti-social behavior ought to have some limits. If you want to live on the street, do drugs, steal to feed your habit and generally throw away your own life, that's tragic. But if, in the midst of all that, you present a danger to other people around you, especially to children, shouldn't the city step in?

Put another way, how many times can a deranged woman harass and threaten mothers and their young children before that person gets taken off the street? The answer in San Francisco appears to be that there are no limits.

Kim Andrews grew up in San Diego where her father worked for UC San Diego and she attended the school for many years as a student and briefly as a track star. But that was a long time ago. Today, Andrews is a homeless person who cycles through the system and routinely harasses families on the street, threatening to kill children and their mothers. She has been arrested six times just this year. Her last arrest was for harassing the mother of a young child.

Andrews was arrested in connection with a July 19 incident in which she allegedly threatened a mother with a toddler and screamed, “You’re going to die” while holding a lighter and a bottle of Lysol, Park Station Capt. Jack Hart said Thursday. Andrews allegedly developed a “fixation” on the child, he said, as the child and mother walked near McLaren Lodge, headquarters for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, on Stanyan Street at JFK Drive...

It was the second time Andrews was arrested this week.

On Tuesday, police officers allegedly saw Andrews “following closely behind a woman and her young child” around 7:50 a.m. in the Inner Sunset neighborhood at Irving Street and 14th Avenue, said San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Paulina Henderson.

The lighter and the Lysol was obviously intended to be a makeshift flamethrower. This is someone who could do real damage at any moment. But according to neighbors, Andrews has been doing this sort of thing for years. 

A group of fed-up parents have been keeping tabs on Andrews’ behavior since 2020 — putting up flyers in their neighborhoods and tracking the police reports filed against her on a now-defunct site called “SF Safe Playgrounds.”

At least 40 police reports have been filed against her in recent years, the group’s tally shows.

Since 2020, she has also been arrested and booked into jail dozens of times for battery, trespassing, robbery, shoplifting and attacking officers, records show.

Forty police reports and counting, many of which involve young children. 

Andrews was arrested in July and released, supposedly because prosecutors wanted more time to gather information on her. They recently said they had what they needed and a warrant was issued for her arrest. Will anything come of this? Not if the public defender's office can help it.

Deputy San Francisco Public Defender Charlie Dickson, who is representing Andrews, said attorneys were “working to get her the support she needs.”

“Ms. Andrews is a kind person who has been experiencing homelessness,” Dickson said, adding that Andrews “needs and deserves care and compassion, not incarceration.”

She's not a kind person, she's a deranged drug addict who threatens to murder children and their mothers on the street. Charlie Dickson gets paid to make sure she stays out there, harassing complete strangers. The SF Chronicle recounts at least one instance of a mother who left San Francisco after two terrifying encounters with Kim Andrews.

For Megan Grasser, recent attempts to address Andrews’ behavior have come too late. Grasser packed up and left San Francisco in early 2021 after two encounters with Andrews near her Inner Richmond home of more than a decade.

The first occurred when Grasser was nine months pregnant in late 2020. The second came three months later, when Grasser realized Andrews was chasing her and her dog across Geary Boulevard. Andrews allegedly spewed a series of vile comments and then formed her hand into the shape of a gun, put it to Grasser’s head and said, “I was sent here to kill you,” Grasser recalled in an interview.

Nearly four years later, Grasser said she still feels anxious recalling the episode.

The real problem with San Francisco is not that it has problems. Everywhere has problems. The problem with San Francisco is that it is designed to ignore and downplay certain types of problems over and over. The victims keep piling up and the victimizers get one pass after another because no one wants to take responsibility for saying no more.

I suspect this won't be the end of the Kim Andrews saga. She'll be back on the street sooner or later and the cycle of deranged threats and civic indifference will go on.

Update: Two photos of Kim Andrews, one from her college days and one more recent. Don't do drugs, kids.

🚨🇺🇸 FORMER COLLEGE ATHLETE TURNED HOMELESS WOMAN TERRORIZES SAN FRANCISCO

Kim Ann Andrews, once a promising track athlete, now lives on the streets of San Francisco, where she has been repeatedly accused of threatening children and exhibiting aggressive behavior.

Despite… pic.twitter.com/7mOlv7m8s4

— Alex Kennedy (@therealmindman) August 21, 2024