Police in San Francisco responded to a city hotel after reports of a “strong chemical odor” emitting from one of the rooms and said they discovered a functioning meth lab inside, according to reports on Thursday.
Two people were arrested on Saturday at the Civic Center Motor Inn, KTVU reported.
One of the guests at the hotel told the website that she was shocked when police knocked on her door that afternoon to tell her that there is a “meth lab right above your room, so we need you to evacuate cause it could explode at any time.”
Eric Johnson, another witness, told KRON4, “It is what it is you know I wasn’t surprised that there was a drug lab.”
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A spokesman from the department said that this appears to be an isolated incident, but it will no doubt increase the scrutiny of the program that was put in place while the state continues its lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Erica Sandberg, a contributor for the City Journal, told Fox News in July that the program was not going well.
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“You are talking drug-fueled parties, overdoses, deaths, people are being assaulted. You have sexual assaults going on, it is pandemonium.”
KTVU spoke with the city’s sheriff who said that his deputies have been conducting wellness checks at the hotel since March, but that program ended in July due to some of the restrictions being lifted. He said his deputies “responded to domestic disputes, overdoses, and persons in crisis” during that time frame.
The Alternative Housing program in the city currently includes nearly 2,000 hotel rooms that are still in use, according to Fox News.
The city said it will update its guidelines on the shelter program after the drug bust, which will include new wellness checks by “program operators.”
Jennifer Friedenbach, from the Coalition for Homelessness, told NBC Bay Area told the station, “We’re talking about adults, mostly people of color, we don’t need to treat them like infants or toddlers.”