San Franciscans have a new option for helping the homeless. This month, the mobile app for 311, the city services clearinghouse, introduced a feature that lets citizens report homeless people who need non-emergency medical treatment or who require intervention because of aggressive behavior. As a bonus, users can upload photos of the homeless person in question.
"Walking past someone suffering on the streets does not reflect our San Francisco values," said Mayor Ed Lee, who has vowed to remove the city's 6,800 homeless from the street before the Super Bowl. "Our residents want to help, and we are providing easy ways for them to do that."
Darcel Jackson, a formerly homeless ironworker who this year spent six months in a shelter, calls 311's new feature "a snitch app" and the latest tool in City Hall's campaign to crack down on the homeless.
"311 started out as a way to report potholes and graffiti, then somebody got the bright idea to tell on people," Jackson says. "The city's homeless policies are ineffective because they don't include the homeless."
The City Administrator's office confirmed that homeless people weren't consulted during the planning of the new 311 feature, although representatives from the Department of Public Health, the Department of Human Services, the Homeless Outreach Team, and the mayor's office spoke on their behalf.
Jackson sees this as another example of the bureaucratic groupthink that has bloated San Francisco's annual homeless services budget to $167 million, but made little headway in solving chronic homelessness.
That's why Jackson has developed an alternative app, See|Me, which connects homeless people to information about shelters, soup kitchens, legal and medical services, and job counseling.
"I had homeless people give me feedback about everything," Jackson says, including where to place download stations where technicians will help users install and navigate the app.
Jackson spent $200 out of pocket to launch the free app — hefty capital for a man who earns $62 per month. He raised another $1,000 at the app's Oct. 13 unveiling at The Hall on Market Street but says he's "starting to worry that we won't be able to raise the money to keep this going after all the work we put into it."
So far, tech companies haven't shown much interest in partnering with Jackson. Neither have city supervisors, none of whom attended the app's unveiling.
"For just a fraction of the city's homeless budget, this app could be funded every year," Jackson says.
Despite the cold shoulder from techies and politicos, Jackson is persevering. He hopes to get support from Sam Dodge, the city's new homeless czar. (Jackson says he tried for four months to schedule an appointment with Bevan Dufty, Dodge's recently resigned predecessor, but never got a response.) And he plans to launch an Oakland version of See|Me in February.
"I want this to pop up in cities across the country," Jackson says. "If we can make it work here, we can make it work anywhere in the world."
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