An Insider's View of the SFPD

Officer X has served more than 15 years in the SFPD and currently serves as a patrol sergeant. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Briones Review: What do you like most about being a police officer? What do you dislike? 

Officer X: That’s a big question. One of the things that initially drew me to police work was the ability to be outside every day. I had different jobs in high school and college and by the time I graduated college, I had decided that I did not want to be in an office every day. You’re constantly out and about as a police officer. It’s an interesting job. You meet different people every day.

One of the things that I like about SFPD is that we have a good bit of autonomy. For the most part, you show up, do whatever you want for 10 hours, and then you go home. Basically, they toss you the keys to a police car and you get to go drive around the city for 10 hours and make a difference.

Sometimes you're told you have to go sit here on this assignment or you have to go deal with this protest or whatever else is going on. But for the most part, you have a partner, somebody whom you hopefully get along with, and you go out and fight crime with them. It’s almost like a marriage once you've been together with that person for five or ten years. 

Briones Review: Partnerships last that long?

Officer X: Yes, they often do. Another advantage of working for a big department is that there are a lot of different things you can do. You can do patrol. You can drive a motorcycle or ride horses. There's a bomb squad and a SWAT team, just to name a few.

Honestly, it’s fun. I think I'm probably one of the few people that I know at work who still enjoys it, which is kind of sad to say, but I still enjoy coming to work every day. It's an adrenaline rush. You get to go out and drive fast and chase bad guys and use the lights and siren. We have a computer in the car and you push a button and it comes up with a list of waiting calls. You never know when that next big call is going to come. It's like a constant adrenaline drip that keeps you going. It's addicting.

And of course, there's the satisfaction of actually being able to help people. That’s what drew me towards it in the beginning. How many people do you know who can say they help people all day?

As for what I dislike: The last three years or so have probably been the most difficult, since the George Floyd incident really kicked things off with defunding the police. And then, in California, we have to deal with a bunch of laws, including Prop 47, that have watered down or weakened our ability to do police work. 

Briones Review: Proposition 47 reduced penalties for property and drug crimes?

Officer X: Yeah, it watered down a lot of the felony thefts to be non-felony misdemeanors. It basically legalized narcotics in California because possession is just a misdemeanor now. It used to be a felony. You could pull a bag of cocaine out of your pocket right now and the most I could do would be to write you a ticket. 

Briones Review: Wow, I didn't realize that. 

Officer X: Yeah, that's the whole state, not just San Francisco. They didn't quite legalize it, but they essentially decriminalized it because the reality is: Why would I spend the four hours that it takes to write the police report and give you a ticket that's not going to go anywhere?  If I write you a misdemeanor citation for having fentanyl, that case is never going to see the inside of a courtroom. 

Meanwhile, it takes me off the street for four hours while I process the evidence, write the police report, and upload my body camera footage. And so it essentially decriminalizes hard drugs, which has, I think, played a large part in what you see downtown and in the Tenderloin where you have people lying on the sidewalks in all kinds of sad states of disrepair. The Tenderloin has had problems for a long time, but it wasn’t nearly as bad when I came into the department.

Briones Review: It wasn't the scale of devastation that it is today.  

Officer X: Correct, and I think a lot of it has to do with Prop 47. I think we need to go back to actually arresting drug users, not so that they get put in jail long-term, but so that they are then pushed into some kind of treatment program.

The common argument that we hear as police officers is that we’re trying to fill up the prisons. People shouldn't go to prison for having crack cocaine or having fentanyl. But the reality is that nobody did, at least not here. There were stories about people in other parts of the country who got life in prison for a marijuana violation or something like that. But here, nobody went to state prison over a crack rock or heroin or anything like that. You would go to county jail. Going to jail forced you back into the system, which in San Francisco means treatment, which is a good thing.

In the past, in classic San Francisco brilliance, the City would even pay somebody to come  fight the ticket for that person in court and the person doesn't even have to appear. We saw this with the infractions, too. We used to write tickets for what we call quality of life crimes: drinking in public, urinating in public. Now, if you’re unhoused, you can take your ticket to the DA and just have them dismiss it. 

Briones Review: The defendant doesn’t even have to show up in court?

Officer X: That’s right.

Briones Review: Anything else you dislike about the job?

Officer X: I would say one of the biggest things is the stress. There are studies that have examined police officers’ brains and found that a police officer after 20 years has the same brain damage as a prisoner of war from World War Two, because you just deal with this trauma everyday.

It's the flipside of the action, right? You go to all these hot A Priority calls and you end up seeing dead bodies and children who’ve been victims of sexual assault and people who’ve been beat up and all kinds of stuff. That trauma accumulates daily, weekly, and monthly, and it eventually just kind of chips away at you. 

And then in San Francisco, one of the biggest dislikes is just a general feeling of lack of support. The impression that we get – and I'm going out on a limb by speaking for my coworkers – is that many people here do not like us. I've gone to funerals for police officers who’ve been killed in the line of duty in places like Modesto or Fresno. People are lining the street with signs and flags and saluting and saying: “We love our police.” You would never see that here.

Luckily, we haven’t had too many funerals here recently. The last funeral we had here for a line-of-duty death I think was for Brian Tuvera, who was killed in December 2006. But there’s not the same support for law enforcement here. I've had people come up to me while I'm fighting with some violent felon at 16th and Mission on the BART steps and start yelling at me: “Let him go, he didn't do anything!” Meanwhile, the guy just robbed somebody.

People feel very entitled to just run up and physically assault us or intervene because they dislike the police so much. It’s common here. I’ve been in a foot pursuit down 16th near Valencia and had bystanders throw bottles at me. It’s a unique-to-San Francisco thing.

Briones Review: That makes me sad to hear.

Officer X: I think there is a silent majority that does want the police here. But the problem is there’s a small percentage that hates the police and they’re vocal. They're the ones who were out on the street smashing police cars and setting them on fire during the protests and riots. And I think the silent majority is kind of on the back burner and not really being vocal the way they need to be. 

Briones Review: Any more dislikes?

Officer X: One more thing. I think there's a lack of job satisfaction here because we will spend all this time and effort on a good arrest and the person gets immediately released. This isn’t just something that happened during the Boudin era, it’s been this way since I came here. It’s sort of like a hamster wheel syndrome where we feel like we’re just spinning our wheels. We put in all this work, and the person just gets released. 

We arrested a person for a burglary recently and the person has 47 felony arrests just in San Francisco. How do you have 47 felony arrests and you’re still walking the street? He was on probation for a burglary. He had been rearrested and was released again, out of custody while he was waiting for his next court appearance. It’s just over and over again, like the cliche revolving-door-of-justice.

Briones Review: That sounds crazy! Let's talk about the Police Commission and the broader set of policies that govern how you do your work. 

Officer X: Over the last five to seven years, there’s been a series of policies that have severely hampered police work and really cut back on what we call self-initiated activity or proactive policing. The first huge one was body cameras, which are kind of a double-edged sword. They have protected us a lot because we get a lot of frivolous complaints. I mean, I’ve been sued in the past over complete lies, just completely made up lawsuits because somebody knew that it’s cheaper for the City to give them $50 thousand to go away than to take it to a federal trial. 

So there are benefits of body cameras, but there’s a huge downside. We have a very strict body-worn camera policy. They have to be on and recording for every encounter we have with anybody. That makes it more difficult, for example, to pull somebody over really quick and say: “Hey, you need to slow down. Okay? Thank you. Slow down. Have a nice night. See you later.” 

That’s policing from the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. You have to use the letter of the law because now it’s all being recorded, so it's harder to give somebody a break. Let’s say we don't tow a car when we stop someone who’s driving with a suspended license. That's a violation of policy. But it’s a struggling single mom with three kids in the backseat. Are you going to take away her car?

Briones Review: It takes away discretion. 

Officer X: Exactly. 

Briones Review: What other new policies have impacted you?

Officer X: As of a few years ago, the California Department of Justice and the City require us to collect data on every detention, whether we initiate it or whether it’s initiated by a call for service. So when somebody calls 911 for domestic violence and we go into a house and detain somebody, we now have something like 42 questions that we have to answer on our department cell phone before we can go to the next call. I think the state requires about 16 or 20 questions and San Francisco added a bunch of  extra questions to the list. 

Briones Review: What does detention mean? 

Officer X: It means that a reasonable person feels that they’re not free to leave. Let’s say you’re driving down the street with your partner and you see somebody who's looking into trash cans or something. That’s not inherently a serious crime. They’re not breaking into a house or something, but it still may be a good idea to contact this person.

We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to stop and get out of the car? We both have to turn our cameras on and we’re going to have to do this 42-question survey about why we stopped them. You have to list what law they violated in order to stop them, either a penal code, vehicle code, or welfare and institutions code. It just makes it so much more difficult to do police work. 

There’s also some ridiculousness to it when you enter the person’s age. You're not allowed to use the age on their driver’s license. You have to use the age that you thought they were when you first saw them. You have to say whether or not you believe the person was gay or not. There's a dropdown menu for a transgender man/boy, transgender woman/girl. It puts us in an awkward position. Why do you want me to guess whether or not I think this person is transgender or non-binary? It’s a time consuming part of the job that discourages proactivity. 

Then San Francisco decided that any detention now requires a police report unless it’s a traffic stop. So when you’re done with the contact, not only do you have to do all the things I’ve described already, you also have to issue them a receipt that says they were detained by the SFPD. Then you have to go back to the station and upload that receipt into a database, create an evidence label for it, and then write a police report explaining why you stopped this person. It is an incredible amount of busywork. 

Briones Review: How much effort does it take to write a police report? 

Officer X: It’s not hard, but it’s time-consuming. Doing the questionnaire, booking the evidence, and writing the report – that's at least an hour – for what might have been a two-minute contact with somebody. 

It used to be that we could jump out of the car and go, “Hey, what's up? Who are you? Are you on probation or parole?” And then, after checking the person to confirm they don’t have any active warrants, we could tell them: “Hey, you know what? Don't go through these people’s garbage cans. They've been complaining about it.” 

Today, doing that takes those officers off the street for at least an hour, if not longer. That goes through an officer’s decision-making process: Is it worth it? Is the juice worth the squeeze? Do we want to be tied up for an hour over what could be nothing?

Briones Review: I know use-of-force policies have been changing. How has that affected you?

Officer X: I think we’re on our fourth iteration of our use-of-force policy over the last five years. It keeps changing, which makes it challenging  to stay within the confines of it. The first big change was de-escalation in about 2016. That’s a big trend in police work now, de-escalation – you’re probably heard that buzzword. 

Then, about a year ago, the Police Commission wrote a use-of-force policy that was absolutely atrocious. The policy basically made it so everything was a reportable use of force, any physical resistance whatsoever. So if I go to grab your hand to handcuff you and you say, “Hey, wait,” and pull away, that’s a reportable use of force, which means that a supervisor has to come to the scene to interview both of us.

Then all the officers involved have to go back and dock their body-worn cameras and wait for the footage to upload, which can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 3 hours. The supervisor has to watch all the body-worn camera footage of every officer who was there to determine whether or not the force was justified – even if there was no injury or complaint of pain.

This policy was an immediate disaster because all these cops would be off the street and we'd have calls coming in, stabbings, shootings, and nobody could go because all the cops were docking their cameras at the station. 

Briones Review: So what happened?

Briones Review: They fixed part of it. Simple physical resistance is no longer a reportable use of force. Now the person either has to complain of pain or be injured. 

There are still problems, though. For example, you’re no longer permitted to sit people down on the sidewalk, unless you have a specific and articulable reason to believe they are a threat. Let’s say you have a large person who’s drunk and they've been trying to fight people. They're belligerent. That’s one of the first ways we de-escalate. We say: “Hey, you know what? Have a seat for me. Sit down, relax.” It puts them in a lower position, which makes it less likely that I need to use force against them, because they’re sitting and they’re less of a threat to me. Now, I have to keep that person standing where they can run or fight.

I understand the motivation for this policy. It can be seen as disrespectful to make people sit on the sidewalk. But from the standpoint of officer safety, it’s a horrible idea that is completely contrary to de-escalation. 

Most recently, the Police Commission wrote a draft policy that severely limits our ability to conduct traffic stops and I think this is going to be the final nail in the coffin. With a few exceptions, you are no longer going to see police officers doing anything proactive.

Briones Review: What do you mean by proactive? 

Officer X: Proactive policing is basically an officer going out on their own and observing some kind of crime or violation and taking action on it. Let’s say I'm driving around your neighborhood and I see somebody blow through a stop sign and I pull them over. That's proactive policing. Or somebody jaywalking. I can detain that person and it sometimes turns into something bigger. 

It's kind of like fishing: You throw a line out, reel it in, and see what you get. Sometimes it’s nothing. Sometimes it is. I did a traffic stop maybe six months ago on a person who had expired registration. He turned out to be a convicted felon. He had two firearms in the car, so he went to jail. He’s now back on the street, of course. But the stop was for expired registration, which will soon be prohibited with the new traffic stop policy.

Practically speaking, if you live in San Francisco, you won’t have to have license plates on your car anymore. You can run through red light cameras without consequences. Do you want to live in a city where we don’t require license plates on cars, and don’t allow the police to conduct enforcement stops? It's going to deteriorate into even more lawlessness. San Francisco deserves more traffic safety and enforcement, not less.

Briones Review: We’ve talked a lot about how policing has changed in the years you've been on the force. Any more thoughts about that?

Officer X: We lost our School Resource Officers (SROs) after the George Floyd incident. The San Francisco Unified School District issued a statement saying that the public schools are a “safe space” from law enforcement and we are prohibited from being on campus. I mean, do you really not want us there if there’s a violent crime like a stabbing or shooting? I know that’s not the intent, but it seems like the Police Commission should clarify. 

Beyond that, SROs are one of the best tools we have to build rapport with kids before they become entangled in the criminal justice system. I was talking to a former SRO and he was telling me how this policy is so out of touch with what’s actually going on. The SRO unit was disbanded under the guise of being racially biased against students, particularly those of color, but the officer in charge of the program was African-American and  almost all of the officers were officers of color. SROs build rapport with kids at a sensitive time. It’s how they get to know us. By removing that, you're just doing so much more harm. 

Briones Review: Let’s talk about property crime and auto burglaries. What should we do to reduce them?

Officer X: I mean, it’s tough because all these things we’ve talked about have led up to this current situation. Criminals know that San Francisco is a safe place to come commit crime, although that might be changing somewhat now that we have a district attorney who is actually prosecuting people. 

On the policing side, if we want to make a dent in property crime, we’d probably need a specific unit to chase these criminals. Regular patrol officers cannot use their cars to chase criminals who commit property crimes – it’s been that way for a long time. But if the chief wanted to, I think he could set up an operation for a month or two with our SWAT team where they conducted heavy enforcement and they were allowed to chase and block the suspects in.

If we did that for a few months, the message would get out that this is not the place to come to commit crime. It would take a temporary policy change, which I think the chief could do if he wanted to. The problem is that it would also take staffing, which is a problem. Our department, including our SWAT team, is incredibly short staffed.

Briones Review: Final topic: technology. Tell me about the technology you use and what works and what doesn’t.

Officer X: We have smartphones issued to us, which is nice, but in general our technology is not good. Our computers in the cars run super old software. Most departments have mapping interfaces. Our computers look like 1990s DOS. It’s just a black-and-white  screen with text. There are no images, so when you run someone’s driver’s license, their photo doesn’t even come up. It’s incredibly outdated.

And then there’s the cars. When our chief came here, I think he was appalled at the condition of our fleet. From the beginning he has been working on getting us cars, but it comes back to money. He asks for 100 cars and the city says, well, you can have 20 this year. And then there’s the maintenance problem. Somebody T-boned a car last week in our station. The vehicle maintenance officer says it’s going to be two months before it gets looked at because there’s a big backlog. And so it’s just not a well-run system. We have cars with 200 thousand miles on them. It’s embarrassing to show up at someone’s house to help them in a vehicle that’s falling apart. 

Briones Review: What do you think needs to change in order to solve some of these problems that the Department is facing?

Officer X:  Ideally, the Police Commission would roll back some of the policies that discourage police work, but that is unlikely to happen. More realistically, the Department needs to hire more and better recruits. Police departments everywhere are struggling to recruit and retain cops these days. It comes down partially to money, but money isn’t everything. The mayor has secured funding for academy classes, but we can’t fill them because we aren’t getting the number or quality of applicants that we need. We could follow the lead of other departments and increase hiring bonuses for new officers and lateral transfers. We haven’t tried bonuses for new officers and our bonus for lateral transfers is too small to make much of a difference. 

I think, more importantly, we need to make San Francisco an attractive place to be a police officer, and that means making the officers here feel valued for the work they do. The new DA is making a huge difference with that, but it’s time for the Board of Supervisors and the citizens of San Francisco to step up as well.