Gallery owner in San Francisco sprays homeless woman with water hose

Gallery owner in San Francisco sprays homeless woman with water hose

#SanFrancisco

Footage of an art gallery owner in San Francisco spraying a homeless woman with a hose and demanding that she move has gone viral.

The woman has been identified as “Cora” and can be heard shouting for help as she is drenched in water.

Collier Gwin, owner of Foster Gwin Gallery in the upmarket Jackson Square neighbourhood, claimed the woman had turned over rubbish bins outside his gallery.

“I said, ‘You have to move. I cannot clean the street. Move down’,” Gwin told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“She starts screaming belligerent things, spitting, yelling at me . . . At that point she was so out of control . . . I spray her with the hose and say ‘Move, move. I will help you’.”

The confrontation late on Monday morning was documented by a chef from a local bakery who later posted the footage online.

The video has been viewed more than 14.9 million views on Twitter and shared nearly 10,000 times.

Barbarossa Lounge, a business identifiable in the video, released a statement denouncing the act and calling it “inhumane”.

The San Francisco Police Department is reportedly compiling a full police report and soliciting witness statements to ensure Gwin is charged.

#California has more than half (53 per cent) of all unsheltered homeless people in the US. In 2018, San Francisco had the eighth highest per capita rate of homelessness in the US with 261 people out of 100,000 unsheltered.

Since then, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced service providers to house more people, with unsheltered homelessness dropping 15 per cent between 2019 and 2022.