Healthcare Workers for Abolition
Healthcare Workers for Abolition (formerly DPH Must Divest) is a coalition that seeks to remove San Francisco Sheriff’s Department from the city’s Department of Public Health (DPH) clinics and San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH). We aim to reinvest the divested funds in our community and systems committed to trauma informed care, de-escalation, and community accountability.
Abolish policing in healthcare.
Listen to DPH Must Divest members Norman Archer and Ana Delgado talk about the work of our coalition and the importance of abolition in healthcare.
Story by Norman Archer for Beyond Do No Harm's Storytelling Media Project / Transcript of Video / Illustrated by Hoai An Pham, if you are a healthcare worker who has worked to interrupt criminalization submit your story using the following form
Core Principles
Safety for All
Patients, visitors, and staff have the right to be safe in our hospitals and clinics, whether they are receiving or providing care. This means safety not only from interpersonal violence, but also from violence enacted by the healthcare system, the police, and the state.
Policing in our healthcare spaces threatens the safety, privacy, and wellbeing of our patients and staff, while failing to protect all of us from violence and harm. We keep each other safe by building our collective capacity to prevent and respond to violence, and by investing in staffing and resources to actually meet the needs of patients and healthcare workers.
Solidarity Not Criminalization
From mandated reporting to involuntary mental health holds, healthcare workers can serve as an extension of white supremacy, policing, and prisons. Our complicity in this violence prevents us from practicing the deepest form of medicine: solidarity.
Instead of surveillance, coercion, and control, we call for a healthcare system that centers the rights and autonomy of our patients. We envision a world in which healthcare workers are accountable to each other and the people we care for, not the institutions that employ us.
Invest in Community, Invest in Care
Politicians tell us that more money for policing means a healthier community. But we know that each dollar spent on caging and controlling our communities is a dollar that could be spent on addressing the root causes of health inequity.
We know what we need to survive and thrive: accessible and high-quality healthcare, housing, and education for everyone. Instead of pouring billions of dollars into systems of policing and punishment that do nothing to meet our needs, we demand investment in services and resources for the people, by the people.
Presence Not Absence
An abolitionist healthcare system is one in which we have true systems of safety and accountability that meet our needs and render systems of surveillance, coercion, policing or incarceration obsolete. We envision a life- affirming healthcare system that uplifts the dignity and self-determination of all.
We will not wait for those in power to enact abolition in our everyday work and lives. By building our collective capacity for trauma-informed care, de-escalation, and violence prevention, we are putting abolition into practice every day and chipping away at the systems that divide, disappear, and kill us.
Justice is Our Demand
Policing and militarism in the United States and abroad serve the same purpose: to use violence and the threat of violence to control the lives of people deemed to be disposable by capitalism. An abolitionist future is one in which no one is disposable.
There is no health equity without sovereignty. We struggle for a world where all people have a right to self- determination, living freely from the violence of colonialism and imperialism. We affirm the right of oppressed people to fight for their liberation.
Stories from our hospital
TW: Racism, violence
“I have seen first-hand how the presence of the deputy sheriffs can create a hostile and unsafe environment for our patients, including an incident in which a sheriff and team of armed offices entered the clinic without staff permission, verbally abused, and pointed a taser at a patient peacefully interacting with their care team.
As a nurse, I am a first and foremost an advocate for the safety and wellbeing of the patients I care for. Therefore, I feel it is an extension of my job to advocate for divestment from a police force as our first line of security and call for investment in trauma-informed security personnel who are specifically trained to protect staff AND uphold a safe space for patients.”
— UCSF Nurse
“One morning while working as the family medicine intern on the pediatric inpatient service, I arrived onto the ward to discover that the overnight staff called the sheriff on a 5-year-old black boy for misbehaving. The staff complained that the child was refusing to listen to instructions and that he was acting out. They felt that an “authority figure” such as a sheriff could calm the boy. The details of the interaction between the sheriff and boy are unknown to me, but I recall that the boy was alone that night, no mother in sight, she was working the graveyard shift.
Acts of anti-black racism such as this occur all too often at our hospital, further perpetuated by the presence of sheriffs on campus. Their presence impacts the mental and physical health of our most vulnerable patients, and the path to pursuing alternative forms of community “policing” for all patients. We cannot continue traumatizing our patients and perpetuating these systems of oppression. I stand with my colleagues in our call to end the San Francisco General Hospital’s relationship to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. It has never been clearer than in this moment that the sheriff and police have no place in our communities, and especially not in the pediatric ward.”
— UCSF Provider
“I have unfortunately seen patients at the hospital I am employed for being targeted, followed, and even stopped for identification, when others are not. These are people whose conditions are so dire during a pandemic they still need to come to a hospital for care. These are people who are at their most vulnerable seeking medical care, and still being harassed by police officers who target based on race, substance abuse and/or homeless status. This is a form of racial oppression when a patient cannot have equal basic needs meet, and their health can be dependent on it. Healthcare should not be made anymore intimating then it is especially during a world-wide crisis. This fear is due to [SFSD] and other police departments officers bias’s and racial targeting. I don’t feel personally safe when officers are at a hospital and have been triggered by their presence in a negative way. I am a healthcare employee, so it pains me to think how patients feel.”
— Community Member
“SFSD came to ‘deescalate’ a Black mother who was having paranoid delusions and had yelled at a staff member, who then called the sheriff. When SFSD arrived, she became understandably more upset and they confronted her about her behavior, yelling at her to ‘calm down’. They didn't deescalate. Even though she was having a mental health crisis, no one tried to help her. They only criminalized her…they just told her to leave…SFSD made everything worse. We need a team that actually cares about people and tries to help, not criminalize them.”
— UCSF Provider
“On surgery rotation, a teenage gunshot wound victim post-op w/ delayed abdominal incision closure (i.e. the whole stomach was still open) was HANDCUFFED to his bed with 2 cops sitting outside his room. He was crying when I talked to him one day. As I held his hand, he sobbingly asked if we can get the cops to uncuff him. Our team asked those cops outside but was met with resistance and found him cuffed again the next day. Absolutely dehumanizing and unnecessary.”
— UCSF Medical Student
Talk to us.
Tell us why you think San Francisco Sheriff’s Department should not be present in SFGH and DPH Clinics. If you are including a personal story, please do not include any personal protected health information. Please indicate if you want your story to be anonymous or private.
Tell us about other examples of how the health system polices people.
Share other comments or questions with us.
You can email us at dphmustdivest@gmail.com with requests.