'Another white man:' San Francisco mayor, supervisor spar over drug arrest plan

SAN FRANCISCO - There's plenty of disagreement over San Francisco's new concerted policy of detaining drug users to get them into treatment.

And this played out in full form Tuesday at a Board of Supervisors meeting between Mayor London Breed, a Black woman who supports the move, and Supervisor Dean Preston, a white man who does not.

"Will you follow your own Department of Public Health's advice and end punitive policies specifically incarcerating and arresting drug users?" Preston asked. "Or will you ramp up these strategies… causing even more overdose deaths?"

Breed countered: "Here we go. Another white man addressing Black and brown people as though you're the savior of those people and you speak for them." 

Breed told the supervisors this week that her sister died from a drug overdose, and she asked Preston if he had personally talked to drug addicts.

"At the end of the day, you've never lived in it, you've never experienced it," Breed said. "You don't know what these people and their family members are dealing with."

Preston responded: "I spend time every day speaking with constituents. I don't spend as much time as you do meeting with business interests who have made it clear they want to arrest and incarcerate drug users in San Francisco." 

On Wednesday, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott told KTVU that he backs Breed's plan and that "we have to get back to the basics of arresting people" so that users see that The City isn't a laissez-faire environment simply to do drugs out in the open. 

Scott also said that as of Wednesday, police had arrested 41 people; 67% of whom were white.