City officials said they've heard the message from voters and are cracking down on criminal activity while trying to improve street conditions and help the unhoused. That was the consensus at a public safety town hall in the South of Market neighborhood.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said during the District 6 public safety town hall February 3 that she approves of the help she's getting from Mayor Daniel Lurie – and hopes that the new Trump administration continues the cooperative relationship her office has built with federal officials.
"Any time you have a completely new administration, you have to sit down at the table and inform people of what you've already been doing and tell them what you think still needs to be done," Jenkins said, adding she had a couple of meetings with Lurie during the transition and now meets with him every other week. "He is trying to build a great team who are now trying to divide and conquer some of the work that under Mayor Breed's staff was more condensed, so each day we're all learning what each other thinks is best focused on coming up with a new strategy together."
Jenkins said her office shares many of Lurie's priorities.
"I discussed a lot with him: my thoughts on us needing a more robust public health strategy, because again, you can't put all of this on the shoulders of law enforcement to solve the addiction issue we have on our streets," Jenkins said. "We need to have a stabilization center. We need to have more data as we shift [law enforcement resources] to Sixth Street – are these people who are unhoused? Or are these people who are housed, who chose to use out on the street? That tells us something different about how we need to interact with them."
Lurie's promise to address the city's fentanyl crisis helped propel him to the mayoralty in last year's election. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors granted him broad emergency powers to address it. According to a news release the fentanyl state of emergency ordinance "will unlock funding and expedite hiring and contracting – allowing for expanded treatment and shelter capacity, new behavioral and mental health initiatives, and accelerated hiring of key public safety and behavioral health staff."
Lurie is a supporter of a 24/7 drop-off center as an alternative to jail for people experiencing a mental health or drug-driven crisis episode, as he reiterated in his inaugural address.
The mayor's office didn't immediately return a request for comment February 6.
San Francisco's national reputation has taken a hit in recent years for the intertwined crises of street homelessness, fentanyl use, and petty crime. Jenkins claimed that, "We do have some reason to think" that other jurisdictions are "even getting people bus tickets to come here, saying that's where all the treatment is and all the great things that we can go get."
Her message to them, "We will fight you through the courts."
Jenkins has asked the city attorney's office "to the extent that we can prove there is any jurisdiction in the Bay Area or beyond that is systematically sending people here, that we seek court injunctions, that we gather evidence to prove it and seek injunctions against these other counties."
Sam Dodge, the city's director of street response coordination, agreed that Lurie has been "very hands on from the beginning, prepared to go, and a breath of fresh air."
"Honestly, a lot of the government working since COVID was worn down, so it's been great to have fresh eyes and energy in there," he continued. "A more, I don't know, corporate approach. There's a seriousness – 'You don't want to do this? You need to do this. This is really important, and that's been also refreshing."
Future of DOJ efforts unclear
The public safety forum was held at the Ikea at 945 Market Street and featured Jenkins, Dodge, and San Francisco Police Department Chief William Scott. Questions submitted in advance were read by gay District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey. There were several dozen attendees in the Ikea food hall.
Jenkins came to power after the June 2022 ouster of her former boss Chesa Boudin, who was recalled amid voter concerns about his handling of crime and public safety, particularly during and after the COVID pandemic lockdowns. First appointed by former mayor London Breed, Jenkins won election in November 2022 and was reelected to a full four-year term last November.
Dorsey was also appointed by Breed in 2022 and went on to win election to a full term that November.
Dorsey – a longtime veteran of the City Attorney's office who later worked as the SFPD's communications director – said he's "never seen a level of cooperation between local, state, and federal authorities like we're seeing right now."
Jenkins said she built relationships within the Biden administration to deliver for San Francisco, and indeed, reported crime in 2024 fell to the lowest overall crime rate since 2001.
"When I got appointed, maybe a few months later we got a newly appointed U.S. attorney, a federal prosecutor, who due to urging from Speaker Emerita [Nancy] Pelosi came to the table with the chief and I and said, 'Do you want us to help you?' and we said, 'Absolutely, we do,'" Jenkins said. "The problem of drug dealing was so out of control we knew we needed all hands on deck. ... The [Drug Enforcement Administration], the FBI, and the federal prosecutors came together, again at the table with us, and said how can we work this out? What can this look like?"
Part of that agreement led to United States Attorney Ismail Ramsey taking on more street-level drug dealing cases, she said.
"Normally, the feds were more used to higher up in the drug trade," Jenkins said, adding an anecdote that the reality of federal prosecution has deterred drug dealing.
"The federal courthouse has judges who take crime really seriously and they have stiffer penalties, so it's a risk-benefit analysis" Jenkins said.
But with President Donald Trump back in office, Jenkins cautioned, "We don't know what's going to happen, everyone."
With the new administration comes changes at the justice department, an offer to buy-out federal employees (which some 20,000 have already taken, Axios reported, and promises to block federal dollars and resources to sanctuary cities like San Francisco, which prohibits local enforcement from cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.
"Our current U.S. attorney, Izzy Ramsey, who has been great, expects to be let go any day now because, of course, he is a Biden appointee, and we expect Trump to come in and overhaul every single U.S. attorney appointment," Jenkins said. "Until that happens, we're full speed ahead. We have to wait and see whether or not whoever replaces him is going to respect my office's need to abide by sanctuary city and that the role that we play has to be limited in our collaboration with them.
"We have to see whether or not the Trump administration's threats of sanctions against cities like San Francisco because of sanctuary city means he tells them 'don't work with us,' or anything crazy. We just don't know," Jenkins added.
Asked for comment in response to Jenkins' statements, a spokesperson for U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California stated that the federal government is looking forward to continued cooperation on combatting open-air drug scenes.
"The All Hands on Deck initiative, involving an array of local, state, and federal law enforcement, has driven the positive change that has taken place in the Tenderloin over the past year, including tackling open-air drug markets and reducing overdose deaths," the spokesperson stated via email February 7. "The San Francisco District Attorney's Office and San Francisco Police Department have been indispensable in this coordinated law enforcement effort. The U.S. Attorney's Office looks forward to continuing to work with them."
Scott said he feels confident federal officials won't seek to obstruct the city's progress.
"Federal and local law enforcement effectiveness is built on relationships at that level, at the local level," Scott said. "They have their marching orders from headquarters just like we do from our mayor and our executive administration. However, at the local level those relationships need a lot because they need us and we need them to do what we respectively do.
"I say that, to say this – they're going to have their orders, they know what our rules are in the city, what our laws are, immigration and other things, sanctuary city, and they've been doing that since the law has been on the books," Scott said. "The people I work with here, and before I got here in the city, have always respected that."
On February 7, San Francisco joined a number of jurisdictions in suing the Trump administration over two memos the city alleges "instructed USDOJ personnel to investigate and civilly and criminally prosecute state and local officials in sanctuary jurisdictions who do not actively assist in immigration enforcement," as well as Executive Order 14159, which the city says orders federal agencies to cut off funding to sanctuary cities, according to a news release from the office of City Attorney David Chiu.
The justice department brought a civil action challenging the city of Chicago and state of Illinois' sanctuary laws the previous day.
"The Trump administration's actions have nothing to do with public safety because we know that sanctuary laws improve public safety," Chiu stated in the release. "This is the federal government illegally asserting a right it does not have, telling cities how to use their resources, and commandeering local law enforcement. This is the federal government coercing local officials to bend to their will or face defunding or prosecution. That is illegal and authoritarian. As local officials, we have a right to do our jobs without threats and interference from the federal government."
SFPD makes hundreds of arrests on Sixth Street
Scott's department has been ramping up law enforcement in the past several months; for example, there were 218 arrests from December 28 to January 27 on Sixth Street alone, the SFPD announced.
These included 124 arrested for drug-related offences, 36 on outstanding warrants, 18 individuals on assault charges, and 40 additional individuals who were charged with other crimes.
Scott said during the forum that one past challenge with enforcement operations has been keeping an area crime free after focus has moved on to another area.
"You tackle the problem here and the problem moves there," he said, referring to how drug dealing activity moved from United Nations Plaza to Sixth Street, which he said is "much worse than it used to be."
"Now we're going to ramp it up at Sixth Street, but while we do that we're not going to give up at United Nations Plaza to where it goes back to where it used to be," Scott said.
Asked by the B.A.R. after the meeting what the plan is to fix that, Scott said, "We work with some of our nonprofits, like Urban Alchemy, and they do a great job. They're not police officers, but we try as much as we can when we have to go to the next spot is have them do the things that they do – to hold the ground as much as they can do that – while we support them, like if we start seeing issues pop up again, we're out there to support them. That has worked really well for us.
"It's been an effective model because we don't have enough officers to hold those corners," Scott said.
The San Francisco Standard reported, citing anonymous sources, that Lurie has considered firing Scott, and speculated that this had led Lurie seeking to remove Police Commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone, a Breed appointee to the oversight panel who proved to be a thorn in her side.
Dorsey wrote on X February 4, "I believe @SFPDChief Bill Scott is an extraordinary leader who has delivered on the ambitious and nation-leading police reforms we hired him to accomplish.
"Unfortunately, he has never been given the chance to lead a fully-staffed police department. That failure is 100% on City Hall; not on him. And City Hall is finally poised to fix it." As for speculation a potential shakeup for Scott is related to the row over Carter-Oberstone, Dorsey stated he disagrees.
Updated, 2/7/25: This article has been updated with information on a lawsuit San Francisco filed against the Trump administration, and comments from the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco.
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