Enough is enough

Outside a graffitied, abandoned hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, a girl with a shaved head and a dirt-caked face sits on the curb. She looks as young as 20. Her jeans sag and her body hovers over the foil she holds with both hands. She’s already so high she drops the lighter she used to light the fentanyl. Her head inches forward slowly toward the drug, trying to snort another hit.

It took her seven minutes to complete the process. Watching from his rented SUV, former San Francisco Police Department investigator Paul Lozada, who has been talkative up to this point, sits in silence. Lozada calls fentanyl “poison” and refers to this part of the city as “a graveyard.” One Wednesday in mid-February, he drove me around blocks, alleys, and parks riddled with homelessness and open-air drug markets. We saw stuporous drug users slouched over in extreme positions, called the “fentanyl fold,” a ubiquitous sign of San Francisco’s opioid crisis. On one block, a group huddled around a blanket spread with drug store items.

“You see that all laid out? Stolen goods,” Lozada said.

As one of the city’s highly decorated cops, none of this exactly surprises Lozada. But like many other San Franciscans, he’s never gotten used to seeing unmitigated lawlessness on his city’s streets.

Scenes like these have plagued the deep-blue city for several years. Long seen as a bastion of progressive politics, it’s now a glaring example of left-wing extremism and soft-on-crime ­policies pushed to their logical conclusion.

But five years after the apex of the “defund police” and Black Lives Matter movements, San Franciscans have had enough. In the past year, voters in this Democratic stronghold have approved new leadership and measures to restore law and order. The changes are coming in fast and furious, although some say they’re too little too late. For most, the changes are long overdue. Already, law enforcement is clamping down on crime with more incentive, manpower, and political backing.

They have a long way to go.

A record 810 people died from overdose in San Francisco in 2023, according to city records. Fentanyl caused the majority of those overdoses—with help from drug paraphernalia provided by city-funded nonprofits as part of its “harm reduction” policies, Lozada tells me. He retired from SFPD in 2008, and from police work in 2020. Now, he’s a private investigator and a chaplain for the city’s police and sheriff’s departments.

Days after our driving tour, police conducted a middle-of-the-night raid on a drug market in the nearby Jefferson Square Park, arresting nearly 90 drug dealers and users. The next day, San Francisco’s newly installed mayor, Daniel Lurie, praised the multidepartment raid, posting on X, “Hear this: If you are selling drugs in this city, we are coming after you.”

It was a far cry from former Mayor London Breed’s announcement five years ago that San Francisco would be among the first cities to answer the call from the Black Lives Matter movement to “defund the police.” Breed slashed police and sheriff’s department budgets by $120 million, diverting the money to addressing African American disparities, despite a warning from the city’s largest police officers union that the loss of funds would severely diminish their ability to respond to emergencies.

Photo by Paul Lozada

The city’s district attorney at the time, Chesa Boudin, openly expressed animosity toward police and announced he would not prosecute street-level drug dealers. He labeled open-air drug use and sales “victimless crimes.” He also ended cash bail, let out nearly half of the city’s prison population, and slashed charges for theft arrests by more than half.

BOUDIN’S SOFT-ON-CRIME APPROACH aligned with the city’s socialist ideals and with growing anti-police rhetoric nationwide. More than a decade ago, when 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer, “it spurred a narrative that there is something intrinsically racist within not just policing, but the entire criminal justice system, that you could reduce criminal consequences for lots of crimes … and still have the same degree of public safety,” said Hannah Meyers, a fellow and director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute.

In San Francisco, it had the opposite effect. The city quickly became a hotbed for drug activity and burglaries, including mob-driven smash-and-grab retail thefts that prompted businesses to take extreme security measures—or pack up and leave. Many chose the latter. The fallout didn’t shock criminal justice advocates. “It was no surprise that we began seeing these viral videos of people walking out with shopping carts full of stuff with only passive resistance by security and retail staff to stop them,” said James Dudley, a criminal justice lecturer at San Francisco State University, who retired from the SFPD after a 32-year career.

By 2022, fed-up voters ousted Boudin in a contentious recall. His replacement, Brooke Jenkins, won reelection in November after carving out a reputation for being tough on crime, including calling out judges by name for being too lenient on dangerous criminals her office wants off the streets.

In the city’s mayoral race, Lurie, a Levi Strauss heir and philanthropist who had never run for public office, defeated Breed with a campaign pledge to restore public safety by shutting down the open-air drug markets and making the city less welcoming to street encampments.

Since taking office, Lurie has declared a fentanyl “state of emergency,” including plans for a new “stabilization center” for police to take users they pick up off the streets for immediate medical and psychiatric attention. He created a special police unit to patrol high-traffic areas in the city—and hopefully woo back retail businesses and tourists. Lurie has also promised to beef up the city’s historically low police staffing, down about 600 officers since its peak of more than 2,000.

Lurie’s office and the SFPD did not respond to my interview requests.

The shift away from progressive policies has been evident across the bay and throughout the state. A new recall effort could unseat soft-on-crime District Attorney Diana Becton in Contra Costa County. In November, voters recalled Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and rejected far-left district attorneys in Alameda and Los Angeles counties. California voters also overwhelmingly approved a measure that reinstated felony sentences and prison time for some repeat theft and drug crimes. It passed despite strong opposition from Democratic groups and politicians, including Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The measure reversed changes to the criminal justice system made in 2014, when voters approved Proposition 47. That measure reduced overcrowding in the state’s prison population by lowering criminal penalties.

That led to a surge in serious drug- and theft-related offenses, the Manhattan Institute’s Hannah Meyers found in an October 2024 report in which she compiled representative data from Riverside, one of the state’s largest counties. She also found increases in reoffending, detention times, failure to appear in court, warrants issued on offenders, and case dis­missals in conjunction with plea deals.

Former SFPD officer Britt Elmore recalled its immediate effect on policing in San Francisco: “We used to pick up all the users in the Tenderloin, take them to the station, and give them the option: jail or a [rehabilitation] program.” After Prop. 47 passed, when police made arrests, drug offenders would say, “Give me a ticket, I’m not going anywhere,” Elmore told me.

“They would reach in their pocket and pull out about 30 tickets. Nothing would happen. There was no leverage,” he added.

Under the new measures, law enforcement agencies across the state are making more arrests, even as lawmakers debate how to pay for the additional influx of prisoners. In San Francisco, Elmore said the immediate focus has been cracking down on retail theft: “They are pushing that hard right now.”

THE DAY I RODE AROUND with Lozada and Elmore, the city’s premier downtown shopping district, Union Square, teemed with police cars and clusters of uniformed officers, despite its numerous shuttered cafés, storefronts, and department stores. It’s a routine San Franciscans are getting used to: In touristy areas ahead of a high-profile event, in this case February’s NBA All-Star game, city workers power-wash the streets and police officers are more visible. The city puts its best foot forward.

Elmore retired from the SFPD in January 2024 after 25 years as a narcotics officer. Since then, San Francisco police have gained even more leverage: Voters approved a local measure that loosened restrictions on police surveillance technology, reduced paperwork, and allowed police to engage in more vehicle pursuits, something they previously could do only in cases of a violent felony or an immediate threat to public safety.

Lozada pointed out other neighborhoods where police are tackling problems, not just touristy spots. A group of deputies from the sheriff’s department stood along 6th Street, while a police car was stationed at 16th and Mission, two hubs for drug activity and selling stolen goods.

“These are all good signs,” Lozada said. But gangs selling drugs have become moving targets. “It’s like whack-a-mole, they just move to another area and do it,” Elmore adds. And in San Francisco, there’s still opposition. “The city always listens to the 1% that makes all the noise, but the 99% are the ones who want things to change and things to clean up.”

Please read Part 2 of this 360 feature: “Teen trouble”