Video shows San Francisco school children navigating through corridor of drug addicts
A shocking video shows San Francisco school children having to pick their way through a filthy, open-air drug den of homeless addicts after getting off a school bus at the end of the day.
The video, posed by Ricci Wynne, shows the elementary school kids filing off the 14 transit line in the Golden Gate City at 8th Street and Mission by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company building past dozens of sickly users nodding out on the sidewalk.
‘This is no back ally,’ he says in the tweet. ‘This is the main artery of the city that has been hijacked bye [SIC] drug dealers and now is Pure filth,’ Wynne said in the tweet.
‘I’m just trying to bring the images of the streets and the conditions to [the public],’ he said in a separate video. ‘Bring the awareness up…I’m trying to push for a change and try to see if we can get the streets back because we’re losing out here.’
The kids appear chipper as they head back home after their classes in a stark contrast to the junkies scowling as the sit on the garbage-strewn pavement shooting up.
‘Now ask yourself this question, would you want your children to walk through this squalor just to get home from school? @JoeBiden @VP @SpeakerPelosi @SenFeinstein @LondonBreed @SFPDChief #DoBetter #democrats #politics #Drugs #California #crime #DoYourJob #NA.’
Wynne, who describes himself as a ‘career criminal’ and a recovering drug addict, frequently posts videos of addicts on the streets or the piles of garbage and used needles that they leave behind.
Ricci Wynne, 37, a career criminal and recovering addict, aims to bring awareness of San Francisco’s drug problem with his video
Wynne recorded kids coming home from school walking through an open-air drug market on the city’s street
School children were forced to file passed homeless addicts who gathered on the sidewalk at 8th Street and Mission to do drugs
Wynne believes the city has failed in its approached to dealing with drug addiction
He said that his goal is to ‘take back the street’ and hold politicians accountable for their failed policy
The open-air drug den in the video which the young children are forced to walk through is just a block away from the city’s notorious taxpayer-funded Linkage Center, which quickly became a site for addicts to take illicit drugs on the street in broad daylight.
The Tenderloin Linkage Center was set up in January in a bid to direct the city’s homeless drug addicts towards services that could help them, including medical care and rehab.
It was opened after Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin district and calling for police to crackdown on open drug uses and dealing.
‘It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…comes to an end,’ she said at the time. ‘It comes to an end when we take the steps with more aggressive law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies and less tolerant of the bullsh** that destroyed our city.’
It is situated close to San Francisco’s famous Union Square and Civic Center, with many locals claiming the facility has made the once pristine tourist destination a grimy hotspot for crime and drug-taking.
Images of the site taken by DailyMail.com earlier this year showed a woman slumped over in a wheelchair, her pants down around her ankles, preparing to inject a needle into her thigh. The woman sitting on the ground next to her had a needle to her neck. Many others are sitting on the ground among trash, empty food containers and dirty blankets, as they fumble in with drug paraphernalia in the cold weather.
The site, which is said to have cost $19 million in taxpayer cash, treated just one in every 1,000 users and failed to cut fatal overdose numbers. Only 0.1 percent of those using the site Between January and April, just 18 of the 23,367 drug users who visited the site were referred for treatment.
Furthermore, the rate of fatal overdoses has not declined in a meaningful way: in January the office of the chief medical examiner reported 49 deaths, and last month there were 45.
And the center even went on to quietly drop the word ‘linkage’ from its title, because so few of the drug abusers who visited were being linked to any meaningful form of help.
After fierce backlash, the center will close by the end of the year after Breed said its lease will not be renewed.
Instead, Breed has talked about opening up a ‘safe consumption site’, and proposed spending $4 million on projects in the Tenderloin next year such as street or park improvements.
Figures show that fewer than one in 1,000 visitors to the center have actually received treatment or a referral to rehab
Drone footage shot in January shows San Francisco’s homeless and drug addicted population inside the center, which is estimated to have consumed much of the $10 million set aside to tackle crime in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood
San Francisco has become a drug-abusing Wild West with syringes littering pavements and drug dealers, selling heroin or the deadly opioid fentanyl, easily recognizable dressed in black with matching backpacks. Above: a person in a wheelchair shoots up, just outside the Linkage Center on January 22
But San Francisco can’t seem to shake its light touch when it comes to drug use.
Two weeks ago, the city announced that it will open a ‘sobering center’ where people zonked out on drugs can go come down off their highs and try to get treatment, but the facility only has room for 20 beds.
Staunchly-Democrat San Francisco has now become as well known for its open-air drug taking and homeless problem as the Golden Gate and Alcatraz.
Last month, the city’s district attorney, Chesa Boudin, was recalled after voters lost faith with his progressive policies.
Boudin has been widely blamed for rising crime and homelessness in the Bay Area since the start of the pandemic – where brazen looters ransacking stores and breaking into cars has become commonplace.
The crime wave has worsened from last year – which was one of the worst crime years in decades – with the city’s murder rate rising 11 percent, and rapes up by nearly 10 percent.
Boudin’s time in office has also seen a marked rise in vagrancy – a stand-out issue in the Bay Area, where homelessness and drug use has increased in earnest during the pandemic.
San Francisco police report 20 murders so far this year – an 11 percent increase from the 18 reported in the same time last year.
Larceny theft, meanwhile – which represents the majority of the recent ‘smash and grabs’ – has skyrocketed under Boudin, with 13,424 cases reported this year, a 20.4 percent rise from the 11,151 reported last year.
Assaults have also been on the rise, with 11 percent with 1,035 cases reported so far this year, with rapes also up by 10 percent.