Dear LPSF Discuss Members,
For those of you on the Activists list you already received the Police Petition update this is for all the other LPSF discuss members and Activists not at the Saturday meeting so everyone has a chance to be up to speed on what's happening. Excuse the duplicate mailings for those of you on both lists.
At Saturdays 6-10-06 LPSF meeting we approved the drafted Law Enforcement Police Petition and discussed methods of bringing it to the people for circulating and signatures.
The intent is to have the SFPD redeploy its members more effectively from non-essential and non-priority duties and victimless crime details. The redeployed officers would be assigned to clearing major crime felonies backlogged at the SFPD. Currently there is a 5 1/2 year uncleared backlog of some 265 homicides - 1,000 rapes - 15,000 armed robberies. It is very likely several of these crimes have been committed by the same person.
Due to various SFPD work rules regulations, police union seniority regulations, San Francisco politics and ineffective assignment by the command staff of capable officers this backlog has grown excessive.
Secondly and just as importantly demanding community neighborhood beat foot patrols in high crime districts 24/7 by experienced officers.Not just one shot hot spot patrols as is happening right now.
The Petition is designed to address this issues by Petition signature demand by allowing anyone who is a San Francisco resident, regardless of age, to sign the petition. Once sufficient signatures are gathered they will be presented to a joint meeting of at least the Mayor, President Board Supervisors, Chief of Police and President Police Commission. The intent is to demand the redeployment of underutilized officers.
Shortly we will be sending out a press release to various news organizations about our petition and why.
We will send a separate courtesy letter to the mayor, each member of the board of supervisors, the police chief, each police commission member and the president police officers association. The letter will spell out why we are doing this and why we feel it is necessary to do this. Most respectfully written of course.
We will be presently posting various community, religious, social, political groups on the LPSF and LPSF Activists list asking for any help from anyone who has an entree into those groups and to help us get before that group to present our Petition for their endorsement and signatures and circulation. We are seeking the broadest possible support from a spectrum of all San Francisco neighborhoods.
Once we have collected 15,000 - 20,000 signatures we will then consider if this is sufficient at the time based on the community groups and signatures supporting the Petition. Obviously the more the merrier. 50,000 to 100,000 would be glorious and definitely get the attention of everyone at City Hall and the Hall of Justice.
Any help you can provide us will be gratefully accepted. Please read over the Petition.
And as soon as possible we will have it posted as a PDF on the www.LPSF.org web site with a signatures page for easy access of additional copies and more signature pages.
As soon as they are ready separate PDF's will be posted in Hispanic and Mandarin and Cantonese and other languages as we get them translated such as Vietnamese - Korean - Tagalog - Russian and so on.
If you know of someone who can assist in the translation to those languages please let us know. We would like to start the translation work as soon as possible.
This is the URL for the posted Law Enforcement Petition of 6-10-06 on the LPSF activists list. I have also attached it as a word.doc If you have trouble with the URL try cut and paste.
http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/lpsf- activists/ files/Law% 20Enforcement% 20Redeployment% 20Petition% 206-10-06. doc
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian
Chair, Initiatives Committee
noon8window.pdf (36 Bytes)