Change cannot come soon enough for Kelsey Kolberg. The clothing store manager was recently smoking outside her shop on Haight Street when a transient accosted her after demanding a cigarette. Kolberg said the man slapped her cigarette out of her hand, grabbed her wrists and started wrestling with her while passersby and other transients looked on.
“They did nothing to help stop him,” Kolberg, 35, said. She said the man was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor.
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum, who has studied San Francisco’s crime trends, said cracking down on street-level crimes helps prevent more violent incidents.
New York City has been widely credited with being the first big city to introduce “quality of life” enforcement of such crimes as disorderly conduct, public drinking, prostitution and panhandling in the early 1990s. Under a “zero tolerance” policy, police made more arrests and crime dropped. Washington, D.C., Chicago and Tampa, Fla. soon followed suit.
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