A month ago, I received a call from the manager of Shalimar, a Tenderloin restaurant I’ve been frequenting since I was 8 years old.
“We were broken into. Cash register. iPads. All stolen.”
I could hear the urgency in his voice. He said that police had not yet arrived, and it had been hours since he reported the incident.
I immediately called the Tenderloin station to inquire and learned there had been a shooting at Powell Station at the very same time — all available officers had to be deployed to the scene.
Why is this? For the same reason that 911 response times are at a record high of almost nine minutes, why sideshows feel rampant, and why the flood of fentanyl in our streets seems unending.
San Francisco is facing a public staffing crisis. With a shortage of 500 officers, our city’s police are facing an impossible decision — deciding which residents to help in their moments of greatest need. But this isn’t just a crisis for law enforcement; it’s a crisis for every one of us left waiting for help that may come too late.
Every day that goes by without addressing this staffing crisis, we are effectively broadcasting to criminals that our laws will not be enforced because we are rationing public safety in San Francisco.
We must act. This starts with fully staffing our police department and ensuring beat patrols in our neighborhoods.
The need for regular patrols is not just a one-off request from the manager of Shalimar — the evidence speaks to this as well. Directed patrols in high-risk crime areas have been shown to reduce crime at significant levels. In a 2020 study of 60 different crime hot spots across the U.S., the results showed a 16% reduction in crime counts when deploying beat patrols.
This highlights a key finding often lost in the public safety dialogue: it is not the severity of punishment but the certainty of arrest that deters criminals from committing a crime.
The impact of not addressing our staffing crisis is reflected in the data throughout the city. According to members of the SFPD I have interviewed, we had 30 beat officers walking patrols for the Tenderloin station five years ago, which covers both the Tenderloin and SOMA neighborhoods. Today, we have only four beat officers in the station — meaning as conditions have worsened in these areas, there often hasn’t been a single beat officer available in the Tenderloin due to scarcity of resources. Monthly incidents of burglaries are now up 19% year-over-year, and victims of gun violence are up 77% year-to-date in the Tenderloin.
According to police sources, five years ago, we had 60 investigators in the Special Victims Unit — servicemen and women tasked with handling cases of sexual assault, senior abuse, and more. Now we have only 24 SVU investigators. Monthly incidents of domestic violence have increased 6% year-over-year, while monthly incidents of assaults are up 3% year-over-year citywide.
The root cause of the police staffing crisis? We only need to look at the numbers. According to police staff, there were 3,000 individuals who applied to SFPD last year. Of those, roughly 1 in 10 have historically passed even a preliminary background check. The current incoming class of police cadets is now 50 officers. This is a marked improvement than prior years, but still harrowing in that we are losing 60 officers per year to retirement.
The problem contributing to this downward trend isn’t just the lack of a pipeline — it’s the quality of the pipeline. And therein lies the solution: We need to fix the recruiting process.
Currently at SFPD there are only four full-time recruiters, according to police staff. The majority of them are sworn officers. We need to change that. For a comparably budgeted organization of 2,000 staff in the private sector, you would have 20 recruiters.
So here’s what we need to do:
- Quadruple our recruiting staff in SFPD. Corporate recruiters don’t rely on inbound applications — they go outbound to identify quality candidates. They proactively source, cold call, and solicit candidates to apply. Further, these recruiters should be civil servants, not sworn officers. The job is more akin to sales than it is to frontline policing, and we need all the sworn officers we can get to ensure safety on our streets.
- Cut the red tape that is slowing down the hiring process. From 911 dispatchers to frontline officers, the average time from application to hire is 255 days in San Francisco government. Would you wait nearly nine months for a job? Likely not. The hiring issues range from outdated paperwork to tortuous interview protocols that can be streamlined to hasten the hiring process.
- Think bigger and offer educational incentive programs for our officers. We should consider reimbursing college education for SFPD officers, in the style of the federal ROTC program, in exchange for a set number of years of service. Amid a competitive national hiring dynamic for officers, this offers a path for San Francisco to lead on innovative civil service modalities.
In the near term, this November presents a choice on the future of police staffing in San Francisco. Voters have the option to support Proposition F, which will incentivize officers to defer retirement in exchange for serving five more years as a patrol officer or investigator. While not perfect, Prop. F is a consensus measure with support from Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Matt Dorsey and has the potential to help retain frontline officers in areas like the Tenderloin, where they’re needed most.
In the long term, we need to systemically rethink our hiring and protocols to get back to a fully staffed police department. Doing so would send a clear and strong message: San Francisco is not a lawless city, and we will not abandon those who need us most.
Bilal Mahmood is a former policy analyst in the Obama Administration and tech entrepreneur. He is currently an elected member of the Democratic County Central Committee and candidate for District 5 Supervisor.