Truly astonishing moment at the June 23 Budget Committee hearing. The director of Public Health, Barbara Garcia, actually testified that San Francisco General Hospital would be better off with private security guards instead of sheriff’s deputies — because the deputies were only able to follow the law.
You can watch the video here. The discussion starts at 4:49. It begins with Sup. Scott Wiener, is his quiet Scott Wiener way, asking Garcia to talk about the plan to contract out hospital security.
Garcia first insisted that this was a way to save $2 million that would prevent further cuts to health programs. That’s always the primary argument for contracting out.
But then she went a step further. An outside company, she said, could provide better security — because the (low paid, poorly trained) guards will be able to operate without the restrictions of being peace officers. “There are some restrictions on [the deputy sheriffs’] ability to restrain patients,” she said.
That wasn’t a slip of the tongue — Gregg Sass, the chief financial officer, repeated it again. “If a patient isn’t breaking the law,” he said, “a deputy sheriff won’t intervene.” More: “Private security can intervene. They’re not bound by the same limits that a deputy sheriff is bound by.”
Both Garcia and Sass noted that they wanted security officers who reported directly to them, not to an elected sheriff.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a little weird?
The money thing I understand. I don’t agree — often these supposed savings don’t show up in the end, and besides, do we really want people who get paid $13 an hour without benefits handling security at SF General? But I understand the argument.
On the other hand, the notion that peace officers have to follow rules, and so we should have people who don’t have to follow rules instead strikes me as pretty disturbing. And I’m not sure how true it is: Can a security guard hold and restrain a patient who hasn’t broken the law and isn’t covered by a legal order like a 5150?
I don’t think so. The folks at SEIU Local 1021 don’t think so, either: A flier the group put out notes that:
The issue of Sheriff’s Dept. having legal restraints applies equally to all employees. If there is no 5150 or 5250, no-one has a right to restrain the patient against their will; but a well trained Institutional Policeman can gently persuade a patient with Alzheimer’s to return to their unit.
And I have to say, the notion of having the Department of Public Health oversee a security force (instead of the Sheriff or the Police Department) is disturbing, too. The worst problems in police abuse tend to come from little fiefdoms that aren’t propertly managed — the BART Police, for example, and housing and transit cops in other jurisdictions. Nobody at DPH is trained to manage a security force.
What, exactly, are these (low paid, poorly trained) security guards going to do — grab patients who complain about waiting six hours to see a doctor and “restrain” them? What happens when somebody actually does commit a crime (or brings a gun or a knife into the hospital)? The guards can’t make an arrest. So they call the cops — who come, in due time, but maybe not quickly enough to prevent a disaster. And, of course, we then pay the cops to come and make the arrest.
I haven’t been able to reach Eileen Shields, the public information officer at the Health Department, but I can tell you: The language that her boss used at the Budget and Finance Committee was pretty frightening.
UPDATE: Shields sent me over Garcia’s memo on this, which lays out the case. It pretty much says it all:
There are times when patients are unable to control their behavior due to acute medical
illness, such as delirium or brain injury. These patients may present a
serious risk to their own safety as well as to the safety of other
patients and hospital staff.
These situations are not the result of – nor do they result in – illegal
activity. This puts the Sheriff’s deputies, whose responsibility is to
uphold the law, in a difficult situation when they are confronted with
potentially harmful (but not illegal) situations caused by acute,
non-psychiatric medical conditions. Outside security firms do not operate
under the same constraints. Instead, they function as members of the
health care team whose responsibility is to enforce hospital policy. They
are charged with ensuring a safe environment and can act with greater
freedom to ensure safety within the limits of the law but without the
additional requirements and expectations placed upon a law enforcement
officer.