FAQ
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.
Why abolition?
Efforts at reform can never eliminate the basic facts that law enforcement officers are trained to see people in crisis as "threats" rather than people who need support and healing, and that the histories and structures of law enforcement continue to perpetuate racist violence in the US. We want to build an environment in the hospital where conflicts are avoided through compassionate care and meeting people's needs upfront. When conflicts do arise, we want them handled by people skilled in deescalation and trauma informed care. This can only occur if we completely abolish all forms of policing within our health systems and invest in new, visionary models of community safety.
Why now?
Although similar efforts to remove the sheriffs from SFGH have been tried in the past, we are now in an unprecedented moment. Our medical systems have proven, in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic, that they can adapt and transform long-entrenched systems of practice incredibly quickly, when committed. Furthermore, we have entered a moment of widespread awareness about the harms of policing. SFGH has the opportunity to be a national leader in this growing movement by creating new safety systems that based in healing and care, not law enforcement.
What is the history?
The systems of law enforcement in the US derive from slave patrols (gangs that caught and punished enslaved people who ran away or defended their rights), protection of the property of the wealthy, and suppression of workers' rights. The SF Sheriff's Department was created in 1850 and its first Sheriff was chosen for his "reputation" (which included slaying Indigenous and Mexican people in Texas). During the Civil Rights movement and hospital integration in the 1950s and 1960s, hospitals started forming "security departments.” Undoubtedly racism and a desire for social control by the elites drove this shift. Some of these initial departments included law enforcement officers and others incorporated them over time. In. San Francisco, the SF Sheriff's Department replaced the Institutional Police as the security presence in SFGH and SFDPH in 2002.
But don't the sheriffs keep us safe?
There is no clear evidence to prove that the sheriffs' presence keeps us safer than we would be without law enforcement presence. Incidents such as the sheriff's assault on Fernando Guanill in the hospital's emergency room and the over 100 use of force cases incidents would be avoided with an alternative response system. Unarmed, plain clothes mental health or social work professionals with training in nonviolent de-escalation and restorative justice would be able to handle the vast majority of what the sheriffs do provide on a day-to-day basis, meanwhile avoiding the risk of further traumatization to our patients and staff.