When someone robs a bank in San Francisco, police rush to the scene with sirens blaring. But when a nonprofit executive is accused of stealing taxpayer money — mostly from the Police Department itself — police can’t be bothered.
San Francisco SAFE Inc. was founded in 1976 as a project of the San Francisco Police Department to lead community-facing crime-prevention initiatives. (SAFE stands for Safety Awareness for Everyone.) But after last year’s release of a controller’s office report flagging misspending, SF SAFE crumpled, leaving its employees and subcontractors in the lurch and its executive director, Kyra Worthy, facing criminal charges.
Despite an earlier commitment to determine exactly how much of the $5.3 million SFPD paid SF Safe in the last five years was stolen, misspent or wasted, the department now says it has no plans to carry out the controller’s recommendation to figure out where every cent went.
After a presentation about efforts to take over the nonprofit’s responsibilities, Chief Bill Scott told the Police Commission on Wednesday that the department will not conduct an audit. Scott initially called for one in June 2023 after a meeting with an SF SAFE vendor alerted him to missing payments.
Scott said there is no way to force SF SAFE to hand over financial documents, since it has been dissolved.
“I don’t know what [SF SAFE] did with the documents, but we didn’t get them upon request. We didn’t get any documents. I can’t tell you what they did with them,” Scott said.
“We don’t have any way to compel the former SF SAFE to give up any documents,” he added later.
Scott’s fatalism drew a strong response from mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin.
“It is mind-boggling that the chief of police — the top law enforcement officer — would not be interested in aggressively investigating a crime that was committed against him and his police department,” said the Board of Supervisors president, who held an Oct. 11 hearing on SF SAFE.
In a testy back and forth at the police commission hearing, Max Carter-Oberstone, a commissioner, wondered why the SFPD seemed “reluctant” to track down the documents that would illuminate the extent of the fraud.
“You are saying there will never be an accounting of those $5.3 million?” asked Carter-Oberston, who pressed the chief about why he hadn’t taken SF SAFE to court to compel it as a contractor to hand over receipts.
Scott said he wasn’t sure if his department could do so.
“One of the many things that are so troubling [is that] in many ways, it looks like SFPD looked the other way,” Carter-Oberstone said. “That it set up and designed a system not to catch fraud.”
Since the scandal erupted, the short-staffed SFPD has filled empty positions in the unit responsible for contract monitoring and has hired a new chief financial officer. But how that will prevent future abuses remains an open question among police commissioners.
“We need to know you have put in safeguards to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” commission President Cindy Elias told Scott. “This happened, you know, under your watch.”
SF SAFE will return to City Hall for a hearing Nov. 7, when its former board president and CFO respond to subpoenas issued by the Board of Supervisors.
For Furlishous Wyatt, 73, a 42-year SF SAFE employee, resolution can’t come soon enough. The nonprofit’s employees, along with subcontractors, have been stiffed on back pay and benefits, Wyatt said. He is waiting for a judgment from the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement so he can move on.
“We haven’t received anything since the program ended itself back on Jan. 24 of this year,” Wyatt said. “Myself, as well as my ex-coworkers — we’re basically in limbo.”