Mayor of the Tenderloin, page 16
When Captain Ewins was offered the job as Tenderloin captain, a draw was the neighborhood’s complication. “I like complicated. I like when there’s issues we have to tackle and come up with maybe new ways of dealing with it.” The police station itself is diverse, with “six transgender members in our department. I have the utmost respect for them.”
She was also impressed by “amazing” police relationships with so many organizations and learned that building on those relationships was part of her job. “A lot of the issues are not necessarily police-related. It’s really about how do we have conversations with people making the wrong decisions and trying to change their course. We have people that have thirty pages of crimes they’ve committed. Going to jail is somewhat of a Band-aid, because they’re not prosecuting.”
Since becoming Tenderloin captain, and after police work in the Mission District, among other San Francisco locations, Captain Ewins said she believes younger addicts came to San Francisco to get free services fast. “I think our willingness to be so open and giving in the city brings people here, and I don’t think that’s bad.”
Homelessness, she said, is changing, with unsheltered people now living throughout the city yet concentrated in the Tenderloin, which itself is concentrated. “We’re the densest district in such a small area, which brings complications but works itself out, for some reason. The SROs are very responsible and really try to make it a safe place for everyone. I work with them a lot. The Tenderloin is so different from any other district. I try to tell my bosses, it’s very complicated; we have the most amount of services, the most amount of drug dealing, the most amount of SROs, the most amount of kids. We don’t technically have schools, other than a private school, but we have a lot of day care and after-school programs. It’s an interesting attempt to balance all that, especially when you go to get methadone and there’s drug dealing right outside. Which is frustrating. How can we allow that to happen?”
Captain Ewins would arrest every dealer she could. “There are so many drug dealers, I wouldn’t have cops on the street if we took on every single drug dealer, there’s that many. It’s organized crime. We start arresting them, they send more. They inundate the district. To make it unmanageable, basically.” Dealers she knows and knows of are not local, she said. “None of them lives in the Tenderloin. It’s mainly Oakland [and] Richmond they come from. They use BART or they bring their own vehicles.”
Clearly, from her words and tone, she and Del do not see drug dealers in the same light.
His views about drug dealing remain in part pragmatic. Recently, while Del was talking to an acquaintance, a dealer walked by. “I say, ‘Hey, you a little late for work.’ Because she works this corner here,” he said, pointing to an intersection at Taylor and Eddy. She says, ‘Yeah, I know. I should have been here ten minutes ago.’ We laugh about it. But it was real. You expect to see your dealer at a certain time. They have to be here like clockwork. All it takes is one time going somewhere else and it’s better dope; you won’t go back to your dealer.”
In general, said Del, dealing wraps up the end of the afternoon. “All the hustles are closed by six. So why stay out here? The pawn shops are closed. The welfare department is closed. All the money sources are closed by five or six o’clock. Food stamps are closed, but you can still buy drugs with food stamps.” Dealers then return to being a family. “First they go pick up the kids at child care,” then head home. “This is a job. This is the thinking they’re forced to do because they can’t get in the Apple Store. I’m not trying to defend that lifestyle, but, yes, I am.”
When asked about differences Del suggested the two had, Captain Ewins answered, “Maybe the idea that I have zero patience for drug dealing. I do think people that are addicted at times need to be forced to stop. I don’t believe jail is necessarily a bad thing. There’s a lot of people that have come up to us and said, ‘Jail saved my life. Thank you for arresting me. I’m doing great now.’ I think our system is broken a little bit as far as rehabilitation goes. When people go to jail, they should be agreeing not only to go to jail for the offense they’ve committed but also in an agreement of getting their GED [or] to learn a skill. When you come out of jail, you should actually feel confident in your ability to get a job.”
She later added more praise for what in effect was for some people a jailbreak, an opportunity for them to get on “an even keel,” adding, “Maybe their family will take them back so they can get them into programs and have a good life. [But] that break doesn’t exist any longer.” People are not in jail long enough, in her opinion. “We forget about our responsibility to the community. We’ve had guys that should have been in jail here, then [were] murdered in Oakland. We give so many excuses why people do things and not enough ‘We got to save our communities.’ Again, it goes back to what are we doing with people that are incarcerated. We’re not getting them the mental healthcare they need and also not preparing them for a job.”
Drug dealing, she said, makes for a dangerous life. “A lot of times people get killed. A lot of times they get beaten because either they sold too much or they didn’t come through for the drug dealer. The majority of our homicides here have been drug-related. We get a lot of guns off the dealers. We get a lot of guns out of people’s cars that are traveling through. This is the location everyone goes to, so when you steal something, you rob somebody, or you have a stolen car, they all come this way.”
“Everyone always wants to talk about suspects and the hard times they’ve had in their lives, but no one really talks about the victims in the Tenderloin who have hard lives. Young kids who beat up people and rob them or barge into a store and fill a trash bag with loot. [They may have been] victims themselves in their lives, but it doesn’t make it acceptable to victimize other people.”
“The people Del is talking about, the homeless people or the people trying to go to our [detox] program, they can’t, because every time they walk down the block, they get offered drugs. That’s a victim, to me. Drug dealers are victimizing. They’re victimizing the kids that have to see people shooting up constantly [or smell] that weird smoke [from crack] when they’re walking down the street.”
Yet she and her officers had similar conversations with dealers that Del did. “We approached drug dealers and asked, ‘Would you rather have a job or continue selling drugs?’ They’re like, ‘We want a job.’
‘Okay, let’s have a job fair. We’ll get you a job.’ So you give somebody the opportunity, but they don’t necessarily have the ability to follow through. The idea of getting up at eight in the morning, going to a job, getting along with others, not smoking pot, and actually having that kind of lifestyle is difficult for people. Job preparation idea is not there.”
In a later interview, she elaborated on one challenge, which Del knows well; dealers often have no other work experience. “What they’ve known their entire lives is how to sell drugs.” She looked dismayed and said the “worst case” for her staff was a man now on parole, whose father brought him to the Tenderloin at the age of twelve to sell drugs. “That’s all he knows.” The situation is similar, she said, to long-term unhoused people. Living on the streets is maybe “their security blanket.”
In the cauldron of the Tenderloin, where does Del fit?
She answered as if not for the first time. “Del is a good example of a person that got himself out. He’s the first person that’s going to admit his own mistakes. He doesn’t make any excuses and doesn’t allow anyone to give excuses either. He holds people accountable. Sometimes I don’t agree on his approach. He can be really aggressive, and that can shut people off. When you talk about racism and bias, of course he gets very upset because he’s seen all parts of it, whether it be city government or communities. He gets very worked up.”
After two years heading the Tenderloin station, Captain Ewins was promoted to commander of the Muni Task Force, charged with assuring safety on San Francisco’s transit system. “It was hard for me to leave,” she said in her charmless new surroundings, which resembled her old ones. “The Tenderloin is unique in that you answer to so many different people. I miss that working relationship. Like Del. If Del was pissed, he would tell me. Then we’d talk it out or explain or change whatever we’re doing. It’s nice to have that other perspective outside the police department.”
“[As for] the complexities of homelessness, there’s so many different levels. Unfortunately, I think what we’ve been doing in the past is treating it as if it’s at one level.” The approach now, she said, is to assess differences, some problems being “more extreme than others.
“How do you get around California’s laws in regard to you don’t have to take medication? Finally we’re looking at the fact that conservatorship may be a good answer for some people, which I completely agree with—because some people are not capable of keeping themselves safe, especially women. Women have, obviously, a much harder time, being on the street and being safe. There’s some real horror stories. It’s heartbreaking.” She paused. “Having to exchange sex for a safe place to sleep, or a safe place to stay, to take a shower—rape is not out of the ordinary for a lot of women on the street, just the amount of violence associated with drugs in general. How do you finance your drug habit? Prostitution becomes involved. It’s such a horrible place for women.”
If unsheltered women exist who are not addicted to either alcohol or drugs, she added, “I haven’t met them. There are some women that used to be users, as well as men, but they’re still homeless. And keep in mind, what they tell me and what the truth is can vary, because they don’t want to tell me they’re using. You create relationships with these people and sometimes they don’t want to disappoint you.”
As for Del, she concluded, “He’s a great advocate. Most people don’t know how many people he’s helped individually. He’ll be hard on people because he has high expectations for them. He’s done a lot of good.”
CHAPTER 24
INVENTIONS
IN APRIL 2017, Del paused in his burgeoning efforts to expand Code Tenderloin and welcomed back to San Francisco his British friend, Shash Deshmukh. In fact, Shash returned in large part to see Del again and put their laptops together to work on Code Tenderloin’s next steps. Whatever steps already had been made, Del credited to Shash, to Shash’s embarrassment. Whenever Shash congratulated Del on whatever piece of news, Del wrote back, in capital letters, “YOU CREATED THIS!”
Shash downplayed his role. “In starting a company, it’s not the idea, it’s the execution.” He added, “If I wasn’t there, there’d be someone else,” but he added, “When I make a commitment to something, I’m pretty OCD about it. Like this is my vacation, but I’m here. I want to do something, even if it’s small, because it works. I’ve met the people.” Blushing, he turned to Del. “I’m not a religious person, but I firmly believe you’re doing God’s work.”
Shash continued to wonder how San Franciscans adapted themselves to the undiminished homelessness in their midst, especially on sidewalks. “It may have happened incrementally,” he said softly. “I get why people adopted strange scenarios of walking diagonally or dodging things. But at what point do you actually say, ‘No, this is wrong’?”
The situation weighed heavily on how he compared his and Del’s enterprises. “Look at us now!” he said to Del, as they opened their laptops for work. “Three years down the line, I did my fancy schmancy, but what have I got to show for it? Created six jobs, made a product—which now is closed down. But you, Del, took a little bit of the ideas we talked about, and in the last three years you got eighty people jobs. Real jobs, not just start-uppy jobs. These people woke up with a different life.” He added with affection, “You tell me who’s more successful.”
A MUCH EARLIER ENTERPRISE of Del’s has eluded success, at least so far. He, among other people, was living in San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal, then a bus depot. The benches served as beds. Because Del was addicted at the time, it is not clear when he set to work scribbling an idea—perhaps wildly lucrative—on scraps of paper. Years later, his voice holding a note of challenge, he pulled newspaper articles decades old from a folder. “That’s my invention. Sit back and put your seatbelt on. I, Del Seymour, invented the OnStar system.” Go ahead and smile, he said, but look at the clippings.
The first, from the San Francisco Chronicle, in the popular Herb Caen column, is dated December 15, 1992. “SF’s Del Seymour has a patent pending on a four hundred dollar anti-carjacking device that can be activated by telephone, whereupon a siren sounds and a voice commands the carjacker to ‘Leave immediately.’ . . . Seymour has the financing, some of it from the Small Business Administration, and hopes to market the gadget early next year.”
The front page of a January 1993 Oakland Tribune featured the banner “Foiling Carjackers” and a photograph of Del, mustachioed. “Del Seymour Installs an Anti-Carjacking Device.” Del’s invention, stated the article, “belongs to that rare class of gadgets created solely in response to carjackings. Alarm installer Del Seymour invented it after a carjacking last year left him too scared to ride in a car.”
The carjacking occurred one night outside a liquor store in West Oakland. With a laugh of sorts, Del said he had been involved in so many dangerous dramas, especially involving drugs, that having his van stolen at gunpoint “was not the worst thing that happened to me that day.”
Police got word of the theft—Del doubted, considering his outstanding arrest warrants, it was he who alerted them—and chased the van some sixty miles, to the town of Dixon. There it flipped off the road and rolled several times. At some point the driver flew out a window and died. In the glove compartment, police found a DMV license issued to Deleano Seymour.
Next of kin was traced to Del’s wife, Lachelle. The coroner called to inform her Del had died. Word spread. Knowing nothing of the chase or the driver’s death, Del had his own concerns. “I was hiding from everybody.” After a couple weeks, however, he made his way to Oakland’s DMV to replace his license. In the loud, cavernous place, a woman’s voice suddenly screamed his name over the noise. The voice came from a sister-in-law, who ran up to him and shouted, “You’re dead!” She told him the entire family thought he had been killed in an accident, with one friend so distraught that he had not eaten.
The incident led Del to figure out what to do if someone tried to carjack him again. Consequently, he said, “I invented the OnStar system. In the Tenderloin.”
As his invention progressed, Del received grant money from the Urban League, the Black Chamber of Commerce, and the city of San Francisco. “Mayor Frank Jordan gave me a big-ass check, this big,” said Del, holding his arms wide. The amount eludes him: $10,000 or $100,000? He shrugged. Doesn’t matter, at least now.
The invention—”100 percent my technology”—came to the attention of General Motors. “To make the story long, I was flying back and forth to Florida, dealing with their engineers [who] approached me to buy the technology.” At the time, he said, Florida was a center of rental car carjacking. “I gave them all the information. I was young and dumb. Or younger and dumber. They wined and dined me, brought prostitutes every night to the room. I was staying in a three-room suite on top of the Hyatt in Fort Lauderdale. Oh, they knew what they were doing. I’m the one didn’t know what I was doing.” (And, added Deleana and Regina later, the story would have ended differently had their father not been on drugs, smart as he is.)
Del spent his grant money on production. “Paying developers, photographers, to prepare the projects to get the prototype boards made and all that.” He realized GM knew he could not finance full production. “So you got this system and you ain’t got enough money. I’m General Motors. What I do, I steal your system. All companies do this.” Del assumed GM planned to take a dollar off every system it sold and save it to pay him off when he sued. He did get a lawyer, with the unforgettable name of John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy, who had his own issues, never filed a lawsuit and later committed suicide.
As Del summarized his situation with General Motors, “They weren’t interested, but three years later my device comes out in their cars.” This from Wikipedia: “OnStar was formed in 1996 as a collaboration between GM, Electronic Data Systems and Hughes Electronics Corporation.”1
Del gave up fighting but continues to hope someday he will be compensated.
CHAPTER 25
A BUSINESS ADDRESS
AS VIRTUALLY ANY urban business owner will attest, especially the owner of a business with a street-level entrance, local homelessness and the panoply of conditions associated with it constitute major challenges. In San Francisco, at one end of the equation, owners of hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists are upset because the tourists are upset: aghast at witnessing incoherent wraiths, or repulsed by filth and open drug use, or frightened by angry and seemingly insane behavior, perhaps all of the above. The tourists go home, vowing not to return.
In neighborhoods where tourists less frequently venture, homelessness may take on a more intimate character. The same raggedy-looking man slumps over a coffee shop table evening after evening, until closing time. A woman in apparent distress squats by a shop door, her bundles nearby. A specter of a man lost to himself wanders the middle of a street, yelling. In the Tenderloin, multiply such scenes, add drug dealing, not necessarily by people who are homeless but by people who prey on those who are.
To cope, some small businesses joined forces. One example, the Tenderloin’s Larkin Street Association in May 2017 invited Del to address its members about his expertise. Del, of course, planned to promote Code Tenderloin.
While ten or so people, mostly middle-aged white men, sat at a long table in a Larkin Street restaurant, while employees in the background prepped lunch, Del introduced himself and Tenderloin dilemmas with almost brutal candor. He started with his familiar riffs: of arriving in San Francisco on a highway one day, soon living under it, of his addiction and homelessness. He went on almost in a cadence. “I’ve laid on every sidewalk in the Tenderloin. I’ve been arrested fourteen times by the San Francisco police for drug sales. So I know a little bit about what I’m talking about.”
She was also impressed by “amazing” police relationships with so many organizations and learned that building on those relationships was part of her job. “A lot of the issues are not necessarily police-related. It’s really about how do we have conversations with people making the wrong decisions and trying to change their course. We have people that have thirty pages of crimes they’ve committed. Going to jail is somewhat of a Band-aid, because they’re not prosecuting.”
Since becoming Tenderloin captain, and after police work in the Mission District, among other San Francisco locations, Captain Ewins said she believes younger addicts came to San Francisco to get free services fast. “I think our willingness to be so open and giving in the city brings people here, and I don’t think that’s bad.”
Homelessness, she said, is changing, with unsheltered people now living throughout the city yet concentrated in the Tenderloin, which itself is concentrated. “We’re the densest district in such a small area, which brings complications but works itself out, for some reason. The SROs are very responsible and really try to make it a safe place for everyone. I work with them a lot. The Tenderloin is so different from any other district. I try to tell my bosses, it’s very complicated; we have the most amount of services, the most amount of drug dealing, the most amount of SROs, the most amount of kids. We don’t technically have schools, other than a private school, but we have a lot of day care and after-school programs. It’s an interesting attempt to balance all that, especially when you go to get methadone and there’s drug dealing right outside. Which is frustrating. How can we allow that to happen?”
Captain Ewins would arrest every dealer she could. “There are so many drug dealers, I wouldn’t have cops on the street if we took on every single drug dealer, there’s that many. It’s organized crime. We start arresting them, they send more. They inundate the district. To make it unmanageable, basically.” Dealers she knows and knows of are not local, she said. “None of them lives in the Tenderloin. It’s mainly Oakland [and] Richmond they come from. They use BART or they bring their own vehicles.”
Clearly, from her words and tone, she and Del do not see drug dealers in the same light.
His views about drug dealing remain in part pragmatic. Recently, while Del was talking to an acquaintance, a dealer walked by. “I say, ‘Hey, you a little late for work.’ Because she works this corner here,” he said, pointing to an intersection at Taylor and Eddy. She says, ‘Yeah, I know. I should have been here ten minutes ago.’ We laugh about it. But it was real. You expect to see your dealer at a certain time. They have to be here like clockwork. All it takes is one time going somewhere else and it’s better dope; you won’t go back to your dealer.”
In general, said Del, dealing wraps up the end of the afternoon. “All the hustles are closed by six. So why stay out here? The pawn shops are closed. The welfare department is closed. All the money sources are closed by five or six o’clock. Food stamps are closed, but you can still buy drugs with food stamps.” Dealers then return to being a family. “First they go pick up the kids at child care,” then head home. “This is a job. This is the thinking they’re forced to do because they can’t get in the Apple Store. I’m not trying to defend that lifestyle, but, yes, I am.”
When asked about differences Del suggested the two had, Captain Ewins answered, “Maybe the idea that I have zero patience for drug dealing. I do think people that are addicted at times need to be forced to stop. I don’t believe jail is necessarily a bad thing. There’s a lot of people that have come up to us and said, ‘Jail saved my life. Thank you for arresting me. I’m doing great now.’ I think our system is broken a little bit as far as rehabilitation goes. When people go to jail, they should be agreeing not only to go to jail for the offense they’ve committed but also in an agreement of getting their GED [or] to learn a skill. When you come out of jail, you should actually feel confident in your ability to get a job.”
She later added more praise for what in effect was for some people a jailbreak, an opportunity for them to get on “an even keel,” adding, “Maybe their family will take them back so they can get them into programs and have a good life. [But] that break doesn’t exist any longer.” People are not in jail long enough, in her opinion. “We forget about our responsibility to the community. We’ve had guys that should have been in jail here, then [were] murdered in Oakland. We give so many excuses why people do things and not enough ‘We got to save our communities.’ Again, it goes back to what are we doing with people that are incarcerated. We’re not getting them the mental healthcare they need and also not preparing them for a job.”
Drug dealing, she said, makes for a dangerous life. “A lot of times people get killed. A lot of times they get beaten because either they sold too much or they didn’t come through for the drug dealer. The majority of our homicides here have been drug-related. We get a lot of guns off the dealers. We get a lot of guns out of people’s cars that are traveling through. This is the location everyone goes to, so when you steal something, you rob somebody, or you have a stolen car, they all come this way.”
“Everyone always wants to talk about suspects and the hard times they’ve had in their lives, but no one really talks about the victims in the Tenderloin who have hard lives. Young kids who beat up people and rob them or barge into a store and fill a trash bag with loot. [They may have been] victims themselves in their lives, but it doesn’t make it acceptable to victimize other people.”
“The people Del is talking about, the homeless people or the people trying to go to our [detox] program, they can’t, because every time they walk down the block, they get offered drugs. That’s a victim, to me. Drug dealers are victimizing. They’re victimizing the kids that have to see people shooting up constantly [or smell] that weird smoke [from crack] when they’re walking down the street.”
Yet she and her officers had similar conversations with dealers that Del did. “We approached drug dealers and asked, ‘Would you rather have a job or continue selling drugs?’ They’re like, ‘We want a job.’
‘Okay, let’s have a job fair. We’ll get you a job.’ So you give somebody the opportunity, but they don’t necessarily have the ability to follow through. The idea of getting up at eight in the morning, going to a job, getting along with others, not smoking pot, and actually having that kind of lifestyle is difficult for people. Job preparation idea is not there.”
In a later interview, she elaborated on one challenge, which Del knows well; dealers often have no other work experience. “What they’ve known their entire lives is how to sell drugs.” She looked dismayed and said the “worst case” for her staff was a man now on parole, whose father brought him to the Tenderloin at the age of twelve to sell drugs. “That’s all he knows.” The situation is similar, she said, to long-term unhoused people. Living on the streets is maybe “their security blanket.”
In the cauldron of the Tenderloin, where does Del fit?
She answered as if not for the first time. “Del is a good example of a person that got himself out. He’s the first person that’s going to admit his own mistakes. He doesn’t make any excuses and doesn’t allow anyone to give excuses either. He holds people accountable. Sometimes I don’t agree on his approach. He can be really aggressive, and that can shut people off. When you talk about racism and bias, of course he gets very upset because he’s seen all parts of it, whether it be city government or communities. He gets very worked up.”
After two years heading the Tenderloin station, Captain Ewins was promoted to commander of the Muni Task Force, charged with assuring safety on San Francisco’s transit system. “It was hard for me to leave,” she said in her charmless new surroundings, which resembled her old ones. “The Tenderloin is unique in that you answer to so many different people. I miss that working relationship. Like Del. If Del was pissed, he would tell me. Then we’d talk it out or explain or change whatever we’re doing. It’s nice to have that other perspective outside the police department.”
“[As for] the complexities of homelessness, there’s so many different levels. Unfortunately, I think what we’ve been doing in the past is treating it as if it’s at one level.” The approach now, she said, is to assess differences, some problems being “more extreme than others.
“How do you get around California’s laws in regard to you don’t have to take medication? Finally we’re looking at the fact that conservatorship may be a good answer for some people, which I completely agree with—because some people are not capable of keeping themselves safe, especially women. Women have, obviously, a much harder time, being on the street and being safe. There’s some real horror stories. It’s heartbreaking.” She paused. “Having to exchange sex for a safe place to sleep, or a safe place to stay, to take a shower—rape is not out of the ordinary for a lot of women on the street, just the amount of violence associated with drugs in general. How do you finance your drug habit? Prostitution becomes involved. It’s such a horrible place for women.”
If unsheltered women exist who are not addicted to either alcohol or drugs, she added, “I haven’t met them. There are some women that used to be users, as well as men, but they’re still homeless. And keep in mind, what they tell me and what the truth is can vary, because they don’t want to tell me they’re using. You create relationships with these people and sometimes they don’t want to disappoint you.”
As for Del, she concluded, “He’s a great advocate. Most people don’t know how many people he’s helped individually. He’ll be hard on people because he has high expectations for them. He’s done a lot of good.”
CHAPTER 24
INVENTIONS
IN APRIL 2017, Del paused in his burgeoning efforts to expand Code Tenderloin and welcomed back to San Francisco his British friend, Shash Deshmukh. In fact, Shash returned in large part to see Del again and put their laptops together to work on Code Tenderloin’s next steps. Whatever steps already had been made, Del credited to Shash, to Shash’s embarrassment. Whenever Shash congratulated Del on whatever piece of news, Del wrote back, in capital letters, “YOU CREATED THIS!”
Shash downplayed his role. “In starting a company, it’s not the idea, it’s the execution.” He added, “If I wasn’t there, there’d be someone else,” but he added, “When I make a commitment to something, I’m pretty OCD about it. Like this is my vacation, but I’m here. I want to do something, even if it’s small, because it works. I’ve met the people.” Blushing, he turned to Del. “I’m not a religious person, but I firmly believe you’re doing God’s work.”
Shash continued to wonder how San Franciscans adapted themselves to the undiminished homelessness in their midst, especially on sidewalks. “It may have happened incrementally,” he said softly. “I get why people adopted strange scenarios of walking diagonally or dodging things. But at what point do you actually say, ‘No, this is wrong’?”
The situation weighed heavily on how he compared his and Del’s enterprises. “Look at us now!” he said to Del, as they opened their laptops for work. “Three years down the line, I did my fancy schmancy, but what have I got to show for it? Created six jobs, made a product—which now is closed down. But you, Del, took a little bit of the ideas we talked about, and in the last three years you got eighty people jobs. Real jobs, not just start-uppy jobs. These people woke up with a different life.” He added with affection, “You tell me who’s more successful.”
A MUCH EARLIER ENTERPRISE of Del’s has eluded success, at least so far. He, among other people, was living in San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal, then a bus depot. The benches served as beds. Because Del was addicted at the time, it is not clear when he set to work scribbling an idea—perhaps wildly lucrative—on scraps of paper. Years later, his voice holding a note of challenge, he pulled newspaper articles decades old from a folder. “That’s my invention. Sit back and put your seatbelt on. I, Del Seymour, invented the OnStar system.” Go ahead and smile, he said, but look at the clippings.
The first, from the San Francisco Chronicle, in the popular Herb Caen column, is dated December 15, 1992. “SF’s Del Seymour has a patent pending on a four hundred dollar anti-carjacking device that can be activated by telephone, whereupon a siren sounds and a voice commands the carjacker to ‘Leave immediately.’ . . . Seymour has the financing, some of it from the Small Business Administration, and hopes to market the gadget early next year.”
The front page of a January 1993 Oakland Tribune featured the banner “Foiling Carjackers” and a photograph of Del, mustachioed. “Del Seymour Installs an Anti-Carjacking Device.” Del’s invention, stated the article, “belongs to that rare class of gadgets created solely in response to carjackings. Alarm installer Del Seymour invented it after a carjacking last year left him too scared to ride in a car.”
The carjacking occurred one night outside a liquor store in West Oakland. With a laugh of sorts, Del said he had been involved in so many dangerous dramas, especially involving drugs, that having his van stolen at gunpoint “was not the worst thing that happened to me that day.”
Police got word of the theft—Del doubted, considering his outstanding arrest warrants, it was he who alerted them—and chased the van some sixty miles, to the town of Dixon. There it flipped off the road and rolled several times. At some point the driver flew out a window and died. In the glove compartment, police found a DMV license issued to Deleano Seymour.
Next of kin was traced to Del’s wife, Lachelle. The coroner called to inform her Del had died. Word spread. Knowing nothing of the chase or the driver’s death, Del had his own concerns. “I was hiding from everybody.” After a couple weeks, however, he made his way to Oakland’s DMV to replace his license. In the loud, cavernous place, a woman’s voice suddenly screamed his name over the noise. The voice came from a sister-in-law, who ran up to him and shouted, “You’re dead!” She told him the entire family thought he had been killed in an accident, with one friend so distraught that he had not eaten.
The incident led Del to figure out what to do if someone tried to carjack him again. Consequently, he said, “I invented the OnStar system. In the Tenderloin.”
As his invention progressed, Del received grant money from the Urban League, the Black Chamber of Commerce, and the city of San Francisco. “Mayor Frank Jordan gave me a big-ass check, this big,” said Del, holding his arms wide. The amount eludes him: $10,000 or $100,000? He shrugged. Doesn’t matter, at least now.
The invention—”100 percent my technology”—came to the attention of General Motors. “To make the story long, I was flying back and forth to Florida, dealing with their engineers [who] approached me to buy the technology.” At the time, he said, Florida was a center of rental car carjacking. “I gave them all the information. I was young and dumb. Or younger and dumber. They wined and dined me, brought prostitutes every night to the room. I was staying in a three-room suite on top of the Hyatt in Fort Lauderdale. Oh, they knew what they were doing. I’m the one didn’t know what I was doing.” (And, added Deleana and Regina later, the story would have ended differently had their father not been on drugs, smart as he is.)
Del spent his grant money on production. “Paying developers, photographers, to prepare the projects to get the prototype boards made and all that.” He realized GM knew he could not finance full production. “So you got this system and you ain’t got enough money. I’m General Motors. What I do, I steal your system. All companies do this.” Del assumed GM planned to take a dollar off every system it sold and save it to pay him off when he sued. He did get a lawyer, with the unforgettable name of John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy, who had his own issues, never filed a lawsuit and later committed suicide.
As Del summarized his situation with General Motors, “They weren’t interested, but three years later my device comes out in their cars.” This from Wikipedia: “OnStar was formed in 1996 as a collaboration between GM, Electronic Data Systems and Hughes Electronics Corporation.”1
Del gave up fighting but continues to hope someday he will be compensated.
CHAPTER 25
A BUSINESS ADDRESS
AS VIRTUALLY ANY urban business owner will attest, especially the owner of a business with a street-level entrance, local homelessness and the panoply of conditions associated with it constitute major challenges. In San Francisco, at one end of the equation, owners of hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists are upset because the tourists are upset: aghast at witnessing incoherent wraiths, or repulsed by filth and open drug use, or frightened by angry and seemingly insane behavior, perhaps all of the above. The tourists go home, vowing not to return.
In neighborhoods where tourists less frequently venture, homelessness may take on a more intimate character. The same raggedy-looking man slumps over a coffee shop table evening after evening, until closing time. A woman in apparent distress squats by a shop door, her bundles nearby. A specter of a man lost to himself wanders the middle of a street, yelling. In the Tenderloin, multiply such scenes, add drug dealing, not necessarily by people who are homeless but by people who prey on those who are.
To cope, some small businesses joined forces. One example, the Tenderloin’s Larkin Street Association in May 2017 invited Del to address its members about his expertise. Del, of course, planned to promote Code Tenderloin.
While ten or so people, mostly middle-aged white men, sat at a long table in a Larkin Street restaurant, while employees in the background prepped lunch, Del introduced himself and Tenderloin dilemmas with almost brutal candor. He started with his familiar riffs: of arriving in San Francisco on a highway one day, soon living under it, of his addiction and homelessness. He went on almost in a cadence. “I’ve laid on every sidewalk in the Tenderloin. I’ve been arrested fourteen times by the San Francisco police for drug sales. So I know a little bit about what I’m talking about.”
