In San Fran you can ride the Muni without paying. You can steal from the drug store or retailing without arrest. Drug dealers are watched, carefully, by the cops, but allowed to ply their trade. Police will not ticket those who drive unsafe—because that could be racial profiling. In the late 1890’s San Fran was known as the Barbary Coast, a place for criminal’s sex traffickers and drugs. Today it has gone back 130 years.
“In recent years, the average amount of time it takes an officer to show up to a critical situation has, on average, grown dramatically worse: From 6 minutes and 25 seconds at the start of 2016, to 8 minutes and 47 seconds by the end of 2022. Second- and third-tier calls have slowed too: From 17 and 53 minutes, respectively, in 2016, to 32 and 73 minutes last year.
The police department has consistently missed its goals for response times on all manner of calls, and is missing them by more every year. And that was the case even before money and personnel issues grew dire.
But it does not matter—San Fran cops are just report takers and data collection. Fighting crime is a No No in modern San Fran.
Yes, the SFPD has a staffing crisis — but that’s just the beginning
by JOE ESKENAZI, Mission Local, 3/14/23
It is, as Woody Allen said, showing up is 80 percent of life, the San Francisco Police Department is increasingly falling into the troublesome 20 percent. When you’re a cop answering a high-priority call, this is, like Woody Allen’s more recent films, nothing to laugh at.
Jarringly, police response times have grown markedly slower over the past four years, even though the cops are now fielding nearly 40 percent fewer calls.
In recent years, the average amount of time it takes an officer to show up to a critical situation has, on average, grown dramatically worse: From 6 minutes and 25 seconds at the start of 2016, to 8 minutes and 47 seconds by the end of 2022. Second- and third-tier calls have slowed too: From 17 and 53 minutes, respectively, in 2016, to 32 and 73 minutes last year.
The police department has consistently missed its goals for response times on all manner of calls, and is missing them by more every year. And that was the case even before money and personnel issues grew dire.
“The ability to deliver uniform services is the main job of a police department,” explains a former longtime SFPD higher-up. “People have a reasonable expectation that someone will be there relatively rapidly. These response times for A-priority calls are a crisis.”
They are. And the cornucopia of tales of cops taking days to show up to burglary calls if they deign to show up at all don’t help.
One proffered excuse why these response times have slowed to a molasses-in-January pace could be because the police department is rapidly losing officers. By the SFPD’s own reckoning, its tally of “full-duty” officers dropped from 1,872 in 2017 to just 1,514 at present.
Make no mistake: Staffing is a serious problem. But the department’s own data reveals it’s not the onlyproblem. There is a quantity issue. But there’s a quality issue, too. And that’s much harder to fix.
Mission Local’s Will Jarrett unearthed troves of data from local and state sources. The numbers are complicated and troubling and belie any easy solutions — via cheap populism or expensive budget supplementals.
The number of San Francisco’s full-duty sworn officers is at a decades-long low – 1,537 as of 2022, and 1,514 as of this week. A couple hundred additional officers on light duties or on leave are not included in these figures, but nonetheless, the department is facing a problem.
So, what is the impact? What has been the relationship between police staffing and crime outcomes? Let’s take a look at the numbers.
Data from the San Francisco Police Department.
San Francisco arrest rates are low; the lowest in California by a long shot. And, over the past couple of years, as the pandemic hit, the arrest rate dropped as the number of available officers decreased.
Data from the District Attorney’s office.
But the patterns here aren’t intuitive. Over the past decade, the arrest rate has not gone hand-in-hand with officer numbers. Case in point: The department’s arrest rate dropped to a low point in 2017, right when its head count was at a recent high.
Data from the District Attorney’s office.
The rate at which violent crimes are solved has dropped along with staffing since 2019. But, in prior years, it was erratic, and not easily correlated with headcount.
Data from the California Department of Justice. Figures for 2022 were estimated using the San Francisco Police Department clearance rates dashboard.
The rate at which property crimes are solved, which is low across the board, was at a recent high in 2014, when staffing was in a trough.
The general pattern over the past 10 years is a steady, gradual decline in property crime clearance rates, irrespective of police numbers.
Data from the California Department of Justice. Figures for 2022 were estimated using the San Francisco Police Department clearance rates dashboard.
Reports of violent crime are creeping up at present, but had dropped steadily since 2013 (and precipitously during the pandemic). For several years, officer numbers and reported violent crimes fell in tandem.
Data from the San Francisco Police Department.
Reported property crimes have been high in San Francisco for the past decade, the pandemic lull notwithstanding, and were at their peak in 2017, when officer numbers were highest.
Data from the San Francisco Police Department.
Also worthy of note: According to state staffing data, the decrease in full-duty sworn officers has coincided with an increase in civilian staff. From 2011 to 2021, civilian staff rose 65 percent, from 440 to 728.
The hope for civilianizing the police department was that it would free up sworn officers from administrative jobs, and allow the police to spend more of their time combating crime.
Data from the California Department of Justice. Data unavailable for 2022.
Of course, there may well be an event horizon below which low officer numbers have a strong negative impact on crime metrics. San Francisco may be headed that way. But, looking over the last decade, it is tough to argue that more officers unambiguously led to better outcomes.
The dire shortage of cops on the street was one of the recurring themes last week when the mayor and many of her political allies appeared at a Tenderloin press conference and accused members of the Board of Supervisors of standing in the way of public safety. Their offense: simply asking remedial questions regarding the mayor’s proposed $27.6 million police overtime budget supplemental. These are questions along the lines of, What are you going to do with the money? and What did you do with all the money we gave you before?
Since mid-2020, the police department’s declining head count and its slowing response times have shown as mirror images on a graph — a near-perfect correlation. But beware simple solutions to complex problems: Over a longer period of time,response times were creeping up as the tally of sworn officers fluctuated, or even grew.
None of this is to say that city leaders can simply conclude that the SFPD was failing with adequate staffing and can fail with inadequate staffing. Clearly, it’s in the city’s best interests for the police department to succeed. But that will take far, far more than simply adding money and bodies.
San Francisco is a special place, but it’s not sui generis. The profession of American law enforcement is in a node right now, and the paltry recruiting numbers in this and other cities show it.
Recruitment and retention in this department look like charts of the 1929 stock market crash: In 2013, the list of candidates who’d taken the SFPD entry exam was 68 pages long with dozens of names on each page. By February of this year, the list was six pages long.
Veteran cops bristled at the notion that San Francisco is uniquely hostile to police, and this is what’s driving away recruits. Rather, they tell me they had a clear understanding of what was expected of them as cops when they joined up in San Francisco years ago. But that’s no longer the case.
“Forty years ago, when I became a cop, the job had a better rep, cops had more autonomy and less accountability,” sums up one retired SFPD veteran. “That’s not a good thing, but there was an attraction there. When I was a rookie cop, we knew we could get away with whatever we wanted. And we did.”
Well, you can’t do that anymore. The role of modern police is ambiguous and ever-changing and ill-defined even for those who’ve spent a lifetime in the profession — so what would you tell a potential 22-year-old recruit?
“The problem with San Francisco,” sums up a veteran active cop, “is that the city tells us what they don’t want, but we do not have a concrete answer on what is our job?”
When this officer joined up, a decade and change ago, “We were told explicitly to aggressively pursue crime. You were expected to make an arrest on a firearm once a week, write a citation per shift, pull over everybody. You were supposed to go and lock people up. That is how it was measured.”
The city and its police department have made it clear that this is now what it doesn’t want its officers to do. Cops are now told by their sergeants to “handle your sectors and handle your calls. But don’t put yourselves out there anymore.”
“We’re being told to pursue crime, but not aggressively. It’s a weird limbo we’re in, where the city wants us to handle crime, but they don’t know what that looks like yet,” the cop continues. “We don’t, either.”
So far, it looks reactive: In 2019, 49 percent of SFPD calls were self-initiated. By 2022, only 35 percent were. The raw tally of self-initiated calls dropped by 56 percent, from 339,000 to 150,000.
When asked if cops now approach their job like firefighters — staying in their stations and in their vehicles and waiting for a call — the veteran officer laughed: “100 percent.”
And it’s not as if nobody saw this coming. Take this passage from an article about the SFPD in San Francisco Magazine:
Insiders understand the nature of the paralysis gripping the department and, by extension, the city itself. Imagine a scenario where poor morale and a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t attitude among cops leads to a passive kind of policing — “depolicing,” to use the wonky term — where many crimes that could be stopped are allowed to happen. That is the road many believe San Francisco is on, with no clear plan for changing course.
This article noted that even the ostensibly good news of plummeting grievances filed against officers was likely due to decreased interaction with the public, rather than culture change.
Sounds relevant today, but this story ran in 2007. A lot has happened since then, but this was foreseeable. And foreseen.
That’s why, as much as the department needs more officers and new officers, it needs so much more.
“To say police staffing is the reason you don’t see a cop anymore or response times are so slow? That is not entirely true,” sums up a former department higher-up.
“You have an entire generation of cops who are disengaged. They have not been trained properly, or are accustomed to doing as little as possible.”
Adds a thirtysomething cop: “Some of the older cops are jaded for practical reasons, and the younger ones are jaded because they’re surrounded by older guys who are jaded. I don’t know how to fix that.”
Nobody does. If you want an unconventional marker of how jaded and checked out our cops have grown, take a look at how generously they gave to San Francisco’s “Heart of the City” city employee charity drive. In 2018, 957 individual officers, some 38 percent of the department, gave $246,000.
Last year, 62 officers, 2.5 percent of the department, donated $39,000. Overall giving was down across the board, but the SFPD’s plunge was dramatic.
At some point, the leadership of this city and its police department brass need plans to address the SFPD’s deep-seated problems. Plans more detailed than tossing a bunch of money into an overtime kitty after legions of cops were stationed outside the Macy’s at Union Square by mayoral edict.
“Hey, Joe,” one veteran cop asks me, “if Mission Local suffered a 50-percent reduction in subscribers, wouldn’t you think that people would want to talk to you?But that’s not what’s going on here.”
No, it’s not. The department may yet get its budget supplemental. And it may yet one day hire or repurpose enough officers. And then it will be able to fix the “showing up” problem.
What’s next? Fixing everything else.
