Imagining America’s Safest City
Photo by Boortz47 (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Bill Jackson
The following is written in the voice of an outgoing San Francisco mayor in the year 2032. The ideas presented in this fictional look-back are based on conversations with SFPD officers, former drug addicts, leading criminologists, and others.
To: San Francisco Board of Supervisors
From: The Mayor of San Francisco
Date: October 15, 2032
Subject: How San Francisco Became America’s Safest City
As I enter into the final months of my administration, I’d like to share with you my perspective on the journey we’ve been on these past eight years and highlight several lessons going forward. It hasn’t been easy for us to become America’s safest city, but it would be easy to let our success slip away. For the sake of all of us in San Francisco, we must not let that happen!
Since I was elected in 2024, property crime is down by two thirds and violent crime, including homicides, is down by one third. Both of these achievements were enabled by a shift in political culture that began 10 years ago with the recall of then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin. San Franciscans had had enough. They wanted to end lawlessness, but do so in ways that were consistent with our values of compassion and inclusion.
They wanted this in the wake of shifts in culture that had put law enforcement on the defensive. You may recall that after George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by Minneapolis police officers in 2020, San Francisco saw large-scale protests against police violence. Thousands streamed through the streets yelling slogans like, “No cops, no KKK, no racist USA.” A smaller number rampaged through the city, looting stores and toppling statues.
The aftermath of “defund”
At that point, my predecessor proposed to “defund” the police and sheriff’s departments by $120 million over two years and reallocate those funds to housing, mental health, and other social services. This decision accelerated a trend that had been building for years: Fewer and fewer people wanted to join the SFPD. Hundreds of officers were lost to transfers and early retirement even as applications to the police academy dropped by more than two thirds.
Defunding came on the heels of two other shifts in our city’s criminal justice landscape. First, in 2019, the voters had elected Chesa Boudin as district attorney. Boudin, who was later recalled, further softened the already lax prosecution policies of his predecessor. Second, over the previous decade, the Police Commission (as well as the State of California) had instituted a series of policies that removed discretion from officers and required them to spend more time writing reports and less time on actual police work.
In addition to these new restrictions, SFPD officers were also dealing with the sense that they didn’t feel valued or sometimes even welcome in our city. As one officer said at the time, “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.”
When I launched my campaign for mayor in 2023, the city was still reeling economically from the impacts of COVID and crime. San Francisco needed to renew and sell itself in a way that hadn’t been necessary in more than a generation. Given all the other challenges they were facing, citizens, commuters, and tourists were no longer willing to tolerate the disorder and lawlessness that had been a feature of San Francisco for some time.
Listening to the concerns of a broad constituency of voters, I built my campaign around two key ideas. First, improved public safety was a precondition for the recovery of San Francisco; everything else we wanted to do depended on it. Second, a fully staffed, well-supported police force would improve life in the city for everyone, including and especially Black and Latino San Franciscans.
The first argument was not hard to make. People all over the city were tired of dealing with crime. They wanted to be able to get to work without being robbed and park their car on the street without their windows being smashed. They were done with stepping over discarded needles and threading their way through tent encampments filled with drug addicts.
The second argument took more work, but we had the benefit of truth on our side. In 2023, our Black and Latino communities were the ones that were suffering most from crime. The tech community was up in arms after a white tech entrepreneur named Bob Lee was murdered near Rincon Center, but the reality was that nearly two thirds of those murdered in San Francisco were Black and Latino men.
Enough is enough
I went out to the communities most impacted by violence – the Bayview, Mission, and Tenderloin – and I said to people: Let’s cut the homicide number by a third. Let’s save 10 lives per year, 10 lives that won’t be snuffed out and 10 families that won’t have to go through the grief and pain of that loss. And, instead of spouting what were at the time politically fashionable slogans, I told them the truth: We’re going to need to hire more police officers to make this possible.
Naturally, people wanted to talk about police violence against black and brown people. I acknowledged that the police had sometimes made bad decisions and some officers may have acted with ill intent. In the five-year period between 2017 and 2021, SFPD had killed five Black and Latino individuals; at least two of those cases involved questionable judgment. I said: Let’s cut that number, too. We can never have a perfect police department – police officers are human – but we can get better every year.
I also talked about drugs. Nearly everyone was impacted by the drug crisis on our streets and no group was suffering more than the addicts themselves. More than 600 people were dying from drug overdoses each year and Black San Franciscans were dying at a rate five times higher than the city average. Whole blocks of the city looked like a third world country as dealers fed the addiction of the homeless in tent encampments. Addicts needed money to keep the drugs flowing, which contributed to our high rates of property crime. Small businesses were struggling with petty theft while larger businesses were slower to return to in-person work because employees didn’t want to deal with the public safety fiasco downtown.
I went out to every corner of the city and said: We don’t have to put up with this! The law as it was in 2023 allowed us to arrest people for public drug consumption and offer them the option of going to rehab. Sure, many would decline and return to the streets with their habits, but nothing was stopping us from re-arresting them and again offering the opportunity to enter rehab. There was also nothing to stop us from arresting drug dealers – and if lenient judges released them, we could simply arrest them again and again until they got the message that selling drugs in San Francisco meant doing business for just a couple hours until all your money and product was confiscated, each time and without fail.
We had the legal basis for doing these things. Our elected officials simply lacked the political will. And, for many San Franciscans, these were the improvements that would have the biggest impact on their quality of life. Our homelessness crisis was a tragedy, a multifaceted challenge that could not easily be addressed with our then-existing resources and legal framework. But we didn’t have to solve everything at once; we could start with the sprawling, open-air tent cities and drug markets that bred crime, violence, filth, and intimidation.
Then there was the property crime. San Franciscans had been living with a high rate of burglary, larceny, smash-and-grab car break-ins, and auto thefts for years. Property crime was two-and-a-half times higher than in other large American cities. I said: We don’t have to put up with this, either! We can make the choice to fully staff our police department and give them the mandate, tools, and support they need to tackle this scourge.
Slowly but surely, we built consensus: We could and should do something about the twin epidemics of drug and property crime in our city, even as we continue to reduce homicides. We San Franciscans don’t need to play victim anymore. We can make choices not only about how many police we have, but also about training, technology, and procedure. As we all know, people were sufficiently receptive to this message that I won election in 2024 against an entrenched incumbent.
Of course, the real work began after the election. To follow through on our promises, we needed to expand SFPD rapidly, which we did through brand-building and recruitment programs. We also needed officers to be more effective, which we accomplished through process reform, training, and technology, And finally, we put in place supports and pathways that people needed to choose life directions other than crime and drug use.
Brand-building and recruiting
Applications to SFPD had been declining for years leading up to the George Floyd incident and the dropoff accelerated afterwards. In 2021, just 21 officers made it through the police academy to join the force, in contrast to 90 three years earlier. At the same time, more officers were calling it quits than ever before, with 413 departures, or 20 percent of the force, leaving in 2021 and 2022. The numbers rebounded somewhat in 2023, but were still far below what was needed to replenish the SFPD’s ranks.
After I took office, we tackled this problem with short- and long-term solutions. In the short term, we secured private money to augment SFPD’s recruiting capabilities with some of the best recruiting minds in the country. Under my predecessor, the department had unveiled a slick new website that invited potential recruits to “Be the Change” they wanted to see by becoming a San Francisco police officer. We built on this work by interviewing academy graduates to understand their pathways and motivations for joining the SFPD. Then we designed recruiting campaigns to grow the pipeline of folks on similar pathways and with similar motivations. We got more applications not only from the traditional sources such as the military, but also from former techies, attorneys, and service workers.
The lessons from this early work informed our long-term strategy to make policing a more attractive occupation in San Francisco. We recognized that while many young people were suspicious of the police as an institution, they were also hungry for meaning and purpose in their lives in the aftermath of the pandemic. They were also eager to prove themselves – to show the world that they were capable of making a contribution.
We further recognized that policing is a challenging occupation that requires people to develop themselves across a wide range of dimensions. As then-Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz said: “I need an officer that’s literally going to be the community outreach officer, but also can respond to that active shooter.” Here was a profession that could be marketed in fresh ways to appeal to a broad range of people looking for both purpose and personal development.
In San Francisco, the brand image of policing had suffered for many years, as it had elsewhere. But the truth was that we had already implemented broad and deep reforms designed to reduce bias and the need for our officers to use force. By 2024, SFPD had implemented nearly all of the 272 reform recommendations made by the US Department of Justice to San Francisco back in 2016. The department was diverse and its members were committed to treating everyone with respect and dignity.
As a first step to improve the SFPD’s brand, we gathered twenty leaders who were in a position to influence young San Franciscans and we pulled back the curtain on police work. Over the course of two days, we taught them about the department’s operations, culture, and results. We asked them to go back to their organizations and communities to share what they had learned. It mattered when leaders like the superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District and the head of the NAACP told their constituencies that policing is an important, noble profession and that SFPD is doing it right.
We built out our website and social media presence to show police academy cadets and novice officers developing a wide range of skills that are useful both personally and professionally, including building relationships in diverse communities, decision-making under pressure, physical defense and control, emergency first aid, firearms proficiency, and advanced driving skills. We developed short videos featuring officers explaining how their experience with SFPD had helped them learn how to solve problems and become who they are today. Everything we did humanized our police department and showed how it put service and community at the center of its work.
All this activity created the flow of interest we needed to launch our now-famous two-week Police Basics camp for adults exploring a career switch as well as our six-week summer camps for high school and college students. These camps were popular in part because they asked people to perform in challenging simulations: Can you diffuse a tense situation? Should you pursue that suspect? How? Do you have the physical fitness you’d need to be a police officer? Now, these programs are not only an important source of future officers, they’ve also helped transform the relationship between San Franciscans and their police, especially in Black and Latino communities.
We all know the results. The flow of young and middle-aged people wanting to be police officers grew dramatically. By 2027, we were graduating 200 new officers per year from the academy and attracting more transfers into the department than we were losing from departures and retirements. This success laid the groundwork for everything else we achieved.
Process reform, training, and technology
When I took office, SFPD did not lack for talent, but officers were not getting the support they needed to keep up with the shifting nature of the city’s challenges.
After a month of listening and learning, I established priorities. First, we would go after the open-air drug dealing and use – primarily in the Tenderloin and South of Market. Once we’d made good progress there, we’d focus on property crime. Shootings and homicides were our third priority because we were already relatively strong in that area.
We set the stage to go after drug dealing and use by reassigning 100 officers to the Tenderloin and Southern Stations as well as focusing Street Crisis Response Teams on the most impacted locations. This required us to quickly hire 50 experienced officers and to delay the retirement of 50 officers with generous financial incentives.
While we were busy hiring and retaining officers, we undertook another equally important initiative: reducing the administrative burden on officers by one third. SFPD was suffering from procedural sclerosis. Too much time was being spent filling out questionnaires, writing reports, and reviewing body camera footage. No one single requirement was obviously egregious, but collectively they were hobbling the ability of officers to do their job.
As you may recall, the Police Commission was a major obstacle to necessary reforms. Most of its members were more focused on promulgating rules to constrain officers than helping officers be more effective stewards of public safety. We had some ugly fights, but we got the public on our side. Critically, we passed a charter initiative that once again gave the mayor the power to appoint all members of the Commission.
With our new hires and streamlined procedures in place, we began to shut down the open-air markets in the fall of 2025. Our goal was to create space for law-abiding citizens to “take back” their neighborhoods. While we threw the book at dealers, we were compassionate with users. The first, second and third times we arrested them, we held people for one night only. Everyone was offered the opportunity to enter drug or alcohol rehab. Everyone was treated with respect. It was harder and took longer than we expected, but it worked.
By 2027, we were turning our attention to property crime. Our recruiting and retention efforts meant that we were up to 1,750 full-duty sworn officers in the city, so we had some more resources. With the Tenderloin and SOMA largely cleaned up, we could reassign officers to a set of new tactical units that began training early that year for the express purpose of disrupting property crime.
This effort also bore fruit. Our new teams responded quickly to the burglaries, vandalism, robberies, and car thefts that San Francisco was all too famous for. We leveraged technology to connect store alarms systems to local stations and cars. We used AI to analyze images from the growing number of private surveillance cameras around the city. We equipped cars with new devices that allowed officers to “shoot” GPS trackers onto escaping cars. As more officers joined the force each year and our tactics got better, we cut property crime by a third by the end of 2029 and by two thirds as of this year.
Homicide was our final focus. All during my first term, the Community Violence Reduction Team (CVRT) established by my predecessor continued to get better at their work. With a small number of individuals belonging to only about a dozen high-risk social networks responsible for the majority of gun violence in the city, this team was able to leverage a strategy of focused deterrence to further reduce homicides to the point where we’ve had fewer than 40 in each of the past two years.
Supports and Pathways
The focus of this memo is what we did with regards to law enforcement, but it’s important to recognize that everything we achieved depended on things we did in other realms. To tackle the drug problem, we needed way more rehab beds than we had in the city, so we raised private funds to send people to rehab in other cities and states. We also doubled the rate of housing production, which both enabled us to attract more cops to live in the city and helped mitigate our homelessness crisis.
Our schools and youth-serving organizations played an essential role. For example, when School Resource Officers returned to SFUSD schools in 2025, they didn’t just build relationships with students and help with school safely, some of them taught a Policing Basics course to students, introducing them to skills that officers develop. We expanded the Police Athletic League and built relationships with all kinds of youth-serving organizations including after-school programs, scouting troops, and churches. Hundreds of individuals and organizations volunteered time and money to help our city’s most vulnerable residents find paths to better life.
In conclusion, I’d like to share three overarching ideas that I hope you will keep in mind as you work with the new mayor to help San Francisco remain America's safest city.
1. Defend the behaviors and institutions that undergird civilization. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, many people demonized the police, and behaviors that had previously been condemned were increasingly tolerated. As leaders, your job is to do the exact opposite. Yes, racism is real and institutions have flaws, but your job is to make our institutions, including the police, work for the benefit of all San Franciscans. When in doubt, talk to our Asian community leaders about this. They understand deeply that you can’t save civilization by destroying it.
2. Invest people in making their community – and themselves – better. Recruiting really began to turn around when we reached people who had never considered policing with the message that joining the police force was a great way to help make their community better, while also developing skills that would serve them well for the rest of their lives. People needed to see that other people like them were police officers and they were making a positive difference. My challenge to you is to ask yourselves how you can leverage this insight for the benefit of our city and its citizens more broadly – in our schools, foster care system, housing programs, and beyond.
3. Give people the discretion they need to excel and innovate. When I took office, few people knew that we had taken so much discretion away from SFPD officers, the vast majority of whom were well-motivated and trained. We have a tendency in our society to try to address institutional problems with ever more rules and requirements, but I challenge you to buck this trend. Hire good people, train them well, and give them the discretion they need to excel and innovate – in our police department, fire department, public health department, schools, and beyond. The problems that come with greater discretion will be swamped by the progress it fosters.
