• The problem with San Francisco poop maps, yes let's attack maps not the

    From Progressive Liberalism@21:1/5 to All on Mon May 20 02:15:04 2019
    XPost: alt.travel, alt.politics.democrats, alt.activism.community
    XPost: alt.journalism.newspapers

    It happened again. Last week, Forbes published a piece under the
    headline “Mapping San Francisco’s Human Waste Challenge,”
    allegedly pinpointing the locations of over 132,000 cases of
    human poop on the city’s public sidewalks since 2011.

    Adam Andrzejewski, onetime Republican candidate for governor of
    Illinois, penned the op-ed for Forbes. His nonprofit Open the
    Books (which pledges to “capture and post every dime taxed and
    spent at every level of government across America”) compiled the
    map using SF Department of Public Works (DPW) reports.

    Andrzejewski isn’t the first to chronicle what happens when San
    Francisco’s number one public problem turns out to be number two.

    In 2014, software engineer Jennifer Wong created the site Human
    Wasteland to record and map feces-related 311 complaints. Wong
    says that its intent is to “bring attention to the issue of
    homelessness.”

    In late 2018, Realty Hop did much the same, expelling maps for
    San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City, and revealing that SF
    had more than ten times the number of crapshoots as NYC and
    nearly 21 times as many as Chicago in 2017.

    San Jose Mercury News noted in 2018 that the maps have taken on
    a political context, with right-wing commentators sometimes
    citing them as a way to criticize San Francisco’s homeless
    policies.

    According to Andrzejewski, “Since 2011, there have been at least
    118,352 reported instances of human fecal matter on city
    streets. [...] Last year, the number of reports spiked to an all-
    time high at 28,084.”

    Nobody doubts that San Francisco’s streets are getting dirtier.
    Last year, then-Mayor Mark Farrell directed an extra $12.8
    million toward street cleaning in response to public complaints,
    including a five-person “poop patrol” specifically aimed at
    feces-related complaints.

    However, alleged human poop maps have a problem, which may be
    posed in the form of a disgusting conundrum: How do you
    distinguish human poop on a city sidewalk from, say, dog poop?

    The answer, according to DPW spokesperson Rachel Gordon, is you
    don’t.

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    “We do not differentiate between the origins of the waste,”
    Gordon told Curbed SF via email. “We treat all as a priority for
    cleaning.”

    Gordon adds, “We do believe that dogs are responsible for many
    of the incidents” and that DPW is launching a new public program
    dubbed “Doo the Right Thing” to encourage people to clean up
    after their dogs.

    Sources like the SF Controller’s office’s Street and Sidewalk
    Maintenance Standards report chronicle thousands of feces
    complaints each year, but never distinguish the specific nature
    of the deposits.

    San Francisco Animal Care and Control estimated that San
    Francisco was home to as many as 150,000 dogs in 2016.

    Andrzejewski tells Curbed SF that, despite Gordon’s comments,
    the data used for the latest map is very particular about the
    nature of the incidents.

    “The city specifically tagged the cases as ‘human waste’ in the
    database after 311 call reporting. It’s the city disclosure that
    we mapped. We did not manipulate the data,” says Andrzejewski.

    However, in response to this Gordon told Curbed SF once again
    that “311 classifies it as human or animal waste” when a call
    comes in.

    In practical terms this is not a particularly important
    distinction: Regardless of where it all came from, residents
    want it cleaned up; an influx of complaints about street waste
    is not made any less dire by splitting hairs about its source.

    Nor should anyone lose sight of the fact that, by the city's
    latest count, SF had 7.499 residents on the streets in 2017 (new
    count due later this year), and far too few of them have ready
    access to bathroom facilities.

    Nevertheless, with the politics of homelessness being what they
    are, it seems consequential if alleged human poop maps are
    inflating SF’s manmade messes, and that political commentators
    will no doubt make much of the extra margin.

    https://sf.curbed.com/2019/4/23/18511865/sf-poop-human-waste-map- forbes-dpw-dog
     

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