January/February 1998

Letters
Poor Policing is the real problem

To The Editor:

Your reportage in the Short Takes section of your July/August 1997 issue regarding the attacks on Vietnamese families who have recently moved into San Francisco's public housing projects as being "integration effort[s] with little forethought" is irresponsible in the extreme. It also reflects the kind of thinking that makes progressives such easy targets for so-called conservative forces regarding the debate over public housing in this country.  The people who have engaged in this type of behavior are simply hoodlums and represent a criminal element that appears to be in ascendancy, if not vogue, in too many public housing developments today.

The Vietnamese are not aliens from Mars. Many of them have been living in San Francisco (mainly in the Tenderloin District) in noticeable numbers for at least twenty years. To assert that they are attempting to "integrate" public housing is a misuse of that term. They, unlike blacks, were never systematically denied access to the city's public housing projects as a matter of policy as blacks were during the late 1930s, throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s. This procedure was finally abandoned when the local chapter of the NAACP successfully sued the San Francisco Public Housing Authority Commission, which had an openly established practice of maintaining segregated black and white public housing developments and claimed, with no supporting evidence, that allowing people of different races to live together would spark widespread violence.

Although I have not lived in my hometown since 1993 and, consequently, do not have any firsthand knowledge of these violent incidents, I believe that the obstacles facing the Vietnamese and other new residents comes mainly from an ignorant and criminally oriented tiny minority. As for any others, they should simply be told that one does not need to understand Vietnamese culture in order to treat one's neighbors in a civil and polite manner.

What seems to be holding sway currently is the absurd notion that San Francisco's public housing belongs extensively, if not exclusively, to black people and that others may not reside in these developments unless and until they have been given some sort of accreditation in the form of a city-sponsored "integration program" replete with so-called community counselors and paid peacemakers. What really appears to be failing is San Francisco's ability to provide adequate police protection to the Vietnamese and black residents of these communities, not an "integration effort with little forethought."