San Francisco Supervisors David Campos and John Avalos met with community leaders in the city’s Mission District today to discuss possible solutions to the recent wave of violence in the neighborhood.
The Mission Peace Collaborative, a group of neighborhood and youth groups, met this afternoon with the supervisors as well as representatives from the offices of Mayor Ed Lee, Supervisor Jane Kim, and state Sen. Leland Yee.
The meeting was a response to two fatal shootings and several other violent outbursts in the Mission and Potrero Hill neighborhoods in the past week.
The most recent was a shooting Wednesday that injured a man in the 2800 block of Harrison Street, near 24th Street, police said.
The victim in that shooting was taken to San Francisco General Hospital and is expected to survive.
Two men were killed on Saturday in apparent gang-related shootings.
Aldo Troncoso, 24, was fatally shot at about 2:25 a.m. Saturday near the intersection of 17th and Mission streets, police said.
Then at about 7:40 p.m., Aldo Hernandez, 25, was found fatally shot in the driver’s seat of a car on Dakota Street near 23rd Street in the city’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.
Another shooting and a stabbing have also occurred in the past week in the Mission District.
Valerie Tulier, director of Mission Beacon, the group that hosted the meeting, said the community is “united in trying to address this crisis.”
The collaborative discussed possible solutions to the violence, including encouraging job growth in the area.
“Economics is one of the root causes of violence,” Tulier said.
The group also called on the supervisors to restore funding that has been cut to mental health, substance abuse and after-school programs.
Ricardo Garcia-Acosta, program director of the Northwest Community Response Network in San Francisco, questioned the city’s use of gang injunctions to stem the violence.
“We’re seeing firsthand that it hasn’t been effective,” Garcia-Acosta said.
He asked the supervisors to hold a hearing to look at the efficacy of the injunctions.
Campos told the group that there are “no easy solutions” to the problem, but agreed that violence prevention work by the community groups has to be protected in the budget.
Avalos said he thought there were some resources that could be transferred from the Police Department to the community-based groups to help deter violence.
Campos said after the meeting that he spoke Wednesday to Police Chief Jeff Godown about the recent surge in violence, and was told that the department is going to dedicate more resources to the area.
The police gang task force is working all of the cases, some of which may be connected.
“That’s the fear, and there’s at least one that’s likely (connected),” Campos said.
He said he met with the police chief and the community groups because “we want to prevent further retaliation from taking place.”
Anyone with information about any of the recent violence is encouraged to call the Police Department’s anonymous tip line at (415) 575-4444 or send a tip by text message to TIP411.
Dan McMenamin, Bay City News
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