'I was, I guess I would say, heartbroken, angry and not surprised.' ucsfbhhi director Dr. MKushel discusses the viral video of a man spraying an unhoused woman with a hose, and what it reveals about San Francisco's responses to homelessness.
Dr. Margot Kushel had an all too familiar feeling when, earlier this week, she saw the viral video of a San Francisco art gallery owner spraying an unhoused woman with a hose.
A nearby business owner recorded a video of Foster Gwin Gallery owner Collier Gwin spraying the woman, which quickly attracted local and national attention after it was uploaded to multiple social media platforms on Monday. I also think it is indicative, in some ways, of the state of our discourse around homelessness that we continue to blame the individuals who are experiencing homelessness for what has been a really widespread societal failure.
I think it's really astonishing how de-centered people experiencing homelessness are in these conversations. So much of our discourse, and sometimes even our policy discussion around homelessness, centers on the needs and the desires of the housed population to not have to see suffering, as opposed to looking at it from the perspective of the unhoused population.
I think what people aren't seeing is how persistent and common experiences of violent victimization are for people experiencing homelessness. Once again, our discourse around it is around, like, housed populations' fear of people who are experiencing homelessness.
The gallery owner, in particular, said he made dozens of calls to police. But 311 data from the area doesn't show a similar volume of homelessness concerns. Is the instinct to call 911 a product of that criminalization and dehumanization that you mentioned? If someone is having a mental health crisis, we should be calling in other forms of things that San Francisco is building up mechanisms to call for help for someone in a mental health crisis. Someone existing in public is not a crime, right? if you have no other place to live, you have no other place to exist, your existence is not a crime.
One thing you mentioned earlier is that people who are unhoused need to have a say, or a voice in policy decisions. How can San Francisco better prevent violence against its unhoused residents, and how can the city also better involve its unhoused residents in these policy discussions? I think that, perhaps, the housed community does not realize, although they should, that, of course, people experiencing homelessness are aware of this discourse. Right? They are aware. They are living it every day. Their behaviors are criminalized. They realize that the public just wants them gone, and sees them as less than human. And that is just a devastating, devastating way that adds to what is already a very traumatic experience.
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