A parklet, but for community policing: Mobile ‘peacelet’ idea gains ground in SF

Decades after abandoning kobans—essentially kiosks with a cop, inspired by the ones then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein observed on a trip to Japan—San Francisco is exploring a similar idea.

It’s called a “peacelet.” And proponents hope some key differences will prevent it from going the way of the cops-in-a-box the city once stationed in Japantown and a handful of other neighborhoods.

Think of it as a koban, but mobile. Or as a parklet, but for community policing.

Pitched by a diverse group that includes a retired San Francisco police commander, a restorative justice advocate, a housing activist, merchant organizer and a civil engineer, the concept gained some momentum this week thanks to a receptive audience at the city Police Commission. 

Much like the kobans, the peacelets aim to prevent crime and cultivate trust in police by teaming up social workers with cops in hubs that can literally move from block to block and adapt to the needs of a given neighborhood. What those needs are would be determined by a so-called Peace Partner Collaborative consisting of nonprofit leaders, residents and merchants who’d meet on a regular basis.

When the cohort of five advocates began discussing the notion of peacelets last year for a conference hosted by the San Francisco Chronicle, they wanted to strike an elusive balance.

“One thing we all agreed on was that we really just swing the pendulum back and forth between police-heavy and services-heavy—and we go around in circles,” said Saoirse Riley McLaughlin, a policy analyst at 3rd Street Youth Center & Clinic who joined the peacelets cohort at a colleague’s urging last year. “That’s when we started to think about how we can bring these two together because they do serve so much of the same population.”

Kobans cropped up in San Francisco during the mid-1980s with similar aspirations. But they eventually faded away in the early 2000s after becoming magnets for graffiti and public urination. They also ran into some of the same challenges that peacelets would no doubt encounter—things like getting SFPD to staff them in the first place.

Fellow cohort member Derek Ouyang, a Stanford University researcher focused on architecture and urban design, said he believes peacelets are distinct enough from kobans to avoid the same pitfalls. 

“I think mobility is one of the two key differences,” Ouyang told The Standard in a phone call Friday. “Crime, when deterred, can easily just move one block over. When something is stationary, it can’t be as responsive to where the greatest need is at a given night. It also doesn’t meet the same psychological need for citizens. So it’s the perception, but also it’s an active aspect to the system to have it literally move to meet the collective sense of where the need is.”

The other key difference, he noted, may seem superficial at first blush but could actually be pretty profound. 

“With kobans or police command stations, they have windows, they have doors—you have to be inside or outside of it,” Ouyang said. “And that creates problems. … These kinds of designs failed because they blocked views, they created distance. Even if the people inside are just a door-knock away, they’re not as accessible.”

Take a koban and open it up into something much like a parklet, however, and the dynamic shifts.

“You could take the same structure and create complete openness—one that doesn’t block views in either direction,” Ouyang said, “and you could dramatically change a person’s sense of safety.”

When Ouyang, McLaughlin and the rest of the group—retired SFPD Capt. Richard Correia, Cow Hollow Association President Lori Brooke and Delta Chinatown President Lily Ho—first unveiled their plan at the Chronicle’s SFNext conference last year, they hardly expected it to go anywhere. 

“At face value, there are some pretty obvious things that are good about this project,” Ouyang said, “but of course, the devil’s in the details and how to overcome these major barriers like staffing and personnel. So for peacelets, after that conference, we honestly assumed there would be no next step.”

But Kevin Benedicto and Debra Walker, both members of the Police Commission, happened to be in the audience at SFNext last fall and invited the group to pitch the idea again.

More than half a year later, that led to this week’s presentation before the commission, where SFPD Chief Bill Scott expressed cautious optimism about the idea. And in about that much time in the future, the hope is to come back with a more concrete plan for a pilot project in the Tenderloin, perhaps, or Chinatown. 

“This is an excellent idea,” Commissioner Larry Yee, who represents Chinatown, exclaimed after the Wednesday night overview. “This wouldn’t, I say, solve our problems in San Francisco, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

Benedicto echoed the sentiment, saying he wants to hear an update in six months with details about transforming the idea into reality.

“I think it’s an innovative and interesting proposal,” he said, “I think it, in some ways, is more timely now that we’ve seen some momentum … as well as now that we’ve seen some restaurants not use these [parklets] in the same way.” 

Al Casciato, a retired SFPD Mission Station captain-turned-security consultant, agreed that the peacelets sound promising.

“My take on the koban is that I think it was a great idea,” Casciato told The Standard. “But the koban itself had a lot of problems that the peacelet seems to solve. The magic words to me right now is that you have something that’s a mobile thing. If it’s mobile, it’s not going to be abused. It’s always going to be staffed. So that, to me, I think that’s the biggest thing here. If I was the captain or chief of police, I would say, ‘That’s an interesting idea. Let’s flesh it out a little bit.’”

The success of a peacelet, he said, will likely depend in no small part on the cops who staff it. It might also require SFPD to rethink the way it measures success in the first place.

“The police department’s measure of productivity is by tickets, arrests and reports,” Casciato said. “They don’t measure productivity by what doesn’t happen. When you have an officer on patrol who knows everybody, who’s engaged with the community and who does a lot of that prevention work, then crime doesn’t happen.”

McLaughlin stressed that SFPD buy-in is key, however that shakes out. If sworn officers don’t have time to be a consistent presence at a peacelet, she added, it could still work in practice with civilian staff.

Proponents say the next step is to figure out funding sources—like, say, San Francisco’s opioid settlement payouts—to help SFPD staff the converted parklets. Another is to recruit contractors interested in teaming up on the social services side.

“I’d like to learn more about it,” Scott said after hearing the presentation on Wednesday. “Definitely the concept is good. Cost, deployment needs—those types of things—are issues that we’d have to work through.”

But he committed to follow up with the group. And Correia assured the chief that proponents are ready and willing to “do the heavy lifting” to put peacelets on the ground.