The San Francisco Police Department, by its own reckoning, does about one pedestrian sting per week. The formula is not complicated: It’s less pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and more pulling a rabbit out of a rabbit hutch.
Here’s how it works: A plainclothes cop, known as a “decoy,” ventures into the crosswalk. If a car fails to stop, the cop points at the “chase car” or motorbike, where another cop is watching the whole thing. That gesture indicates that not one, but two, officers have witnessed a violation of California Vehicle Code 21950(a), failure to yield to a pedestrian. The chase vehicle chases, and the driver is admonished or cited or embarrassed on television by Stanley Roberts.
It’s been this way for a long time. Some 15 years ago, a colleague at SF Weekly covered a pedestrian sting. She described the decoy striding into the crosswalk “arms akimbo,” which inspired a particularly ingenious web commenter to query if the choreography here was done by Bob Fosse.
On Sept. 16, cops staked out Alemany Boulevard at Rousseau Street, between the Excelsior and Glen Park. SFGate sent a reporter to document the sting, just as my colleague went out a decade and a half ago. There would be no jazz hands, but there would be an element that led to this pedestrian-sting-of-the-week going viral worldwide. To put it mildly, the plainclothes cop working as the decoy was not wearing plain clothes.
Rather, Lt. Jonathan Ozol attempted to cross the road while dressed in an inflatable chicken costume. Retired San Francisco cops who’d carried out pedestrian stings told me they wish they’d thought of this. “The chicken thing,” one said, “it’s so outlandish: No driver should miss that. And this is a real attention-getter. It got the publicity for people to think, ‘Hey, you’ve got to stop for pedestrians.’”
It did, but that’s not all the attention it got. As is the case with so many stories about San Francisco, even benign ones, this article was rage-clicked into the stratosphere by right-wing trolls.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To break fulminating Trumpists’ brains, apparently.
“They have a massive crime wave in SF, and the prosecutors won’t prosecute anything. So the police have given up on actually trying.”
That was a typical web comment from the legions of ignorant know-it-alls; we pored through them so you don’t have to. That San Francisco life is a daily re-enactment of “Assault on Precinct 13” or “Robocop” is a given among out-of-town Internet trolls. As Trump himself said about baseless claims of Ohio Haitians eating pets, “people on television” are saying so.
But not just people on television. And not just out-of-towners: The accepted truth that San Francisco is suffering through a worsening crimewave has permeated the bloodstream of the body politic like microplastics, even here in San Francisco. When District Attorney Chesa Boudin was on the hot seat, Mayor London Breed was happy to tubthump a narrative of chaos erupting in her own city, despite the fact that San Francisco’s violent crime rate was and is low, its property crime rate has long been problematically high, and the San Francisco Police Department’s clearance rate has also long been low, especially with regard to property crime.
Boudin has since been recalled and relegated to academia. And now, the mayor has charts for you: Charts showing that crime is low, low, low, and getting lower every day. Well, guess what? It’s true! But not only is it in grave doubt whether anybody gives a damn, the notion of introducing actual crime statistics into discussions of actual crime is now enough to induce actual hostility.
To wit, last week your humble narrator was moderating a District 7 debate at the Forest Hill Clubhouse, a gorgeous Bernard Maybeck structure in the most bucolic corner of the district — the Los Altos Hills of San Francisco. And yet, as if on cue, a pair of elderly pedestrians outside were grumbling about gangs of marauders pillaging the Walgreens.
Within, when asked the question “What is the state of public safety in District 7?” candidates told us that it’s bad, and getting worse.
Now, it would be a colossal failure to tell the victim of a crime that what happened to them rarely happens; crime stats don’t matter quite so much when you’re the victim of a crime. But they do matter when you’re assessing the overall state of public safety and aspire to be part of city government. And in serene District 7, like the rest of the city, crime isn’t just down: It’s way down. At the three police stations overseeing the district, reported property crimes are down 29 percent year over year. Reported violent crimes are down 23 percent. There have been no homicides in District 7. San Francisco is on pace for its lowest homicide total since 1960 — around one-third what it was even 15 years ago, when Bob Fosse was choreographing pedestrian stings.
Over those past 15-odd years, I have moderated quite a few debates: At churches, schools, community centers, auditoriums, and even in a soup kitchen in the Tenderloin, largely attended by the clientele. But let the record show that it was only within the Forest Hill Clubhouse that audience members felt entitled to loudly shout down the proceedings.
When I introduced actual crime statistics into a discussion about actual crime, someone shouted, “That’s not real!” Another audience member yelled, “Stop trying to fact-check them. Just ask the question!” This gentleman continued to loudly object to the notion of “fact-checking.” Given the option of watching quietly or taking a walk, he apparently chose the latter.
Nobody thought to escort him to his car. We can only hope that he did not come to grief on the mean streets of Forest Hill.
But it’s not just hecklers sitting in folding chairs and eating the free pizza and drinking the free wine provided by the West of Twin Peaks Central Council, who recoil at documentary evidence. So do our aspirational leaders.
At a recent mayoral debate, Ahsha Safaí said that “to consistently tell people crime is down is gaslighting.” Mark Farrell added that “if you believe those stats, I got a bridge to sell you.”
That tracks: Farrell told me in a one-on-one March sit-down that, regardless of what crime statistics show, public safety conditions have never been worse, and that people feel unsafe. And yet, when justifying his push to put cars back on Market Street, he said that “Market Street hasn’t been safer, statistically, since we took cars off” of it.
So : Crime statistics don’t matter, but traffic statistics do? But what if taking cars off Market Street makes people feel safer? What then? Statistics, apparently, are a malleable thing: When you agree with them, they mean something, and when you don’t, they don’t.
Clearly, that’s untenable; if you refuse to interrogate the city’s actual problems, your proposed solutions will not work. As such, every mayoral candidate’s public-safety platform includes hiring hundreds of new police officers. The city needs more officers and there are plenty of reasons why this would be a good idea. But there has not, in recent years, been a neat correlation between better police staffing and lower rates of crime, or even better rates of police solving those crimes.
Crime rates, in the present moment, are at near historical lows, even while the city experiences a full-blown police-staffing crisis.
When it comes to public safety, the best data we have point to “the certainty of being caught” being the most effective deterrent there is. And that goes for “Assault on Precinct 13”-type criminals, or people driving like Steve McQueen on Alemany and blowing past a chicken man in the crosswalk.
This isn’t very far from my home. People drive with impunity here (and then they park on the sidewalk). My parents’ generation worried about sickos with Halloween candy driving vans and abducting children. I’m just worried about the vans, and a 1978 Ford Econoline is downright quaint, compared to the trucks and SUVs permeating the market these days. Nobody here stops at the stop signs, let alone the crosswalks — sometimes drivers don’t even slow down — and you can’t see a small child over the hood of a tank-like vehicle.
That worries me a lot more than dystopian “Robocop” bullshit stories, truth be told.
If people drove better, we’d feel safer, because we’d be safer. Veteran cops I spoke to thought it was sad that online trolls couldn’t realize that keeping neighborhoods safe is a core tenet of what police can and should do.
“I got trained by people who came out of Vietnam,” says a former longtime San Francisco officer. “They felt their job was to put people in jail. But newer generations feel our job is to improve public safety in communities by myriad strategies, the least of which is putting people in custody. Any time there is a traffic stop, the community benefits from the notion that police are invested in the well-being of that community, and that government cares about this.”
And if the government would care to fix the broken traffic signals at Alemany and Rousseau — well, that’d be grand, too.
According to the SFPD dash board there have been 7 murders in the Mission this year, including that Lowell grad minding his own business on a bench in Dolores Park, versus 3 last year. I perceive there are more murders in my neighborhood, because there have been more murders. That’s great that the murder rate is down in the city over all, but locally it doesn’t feel good that there have been more murders here. And it sucks to go into a Walgreens and have everything locked up because, yes there has been a huge shoplifting problem in the city. The store wouldn’t bother installing the hardware, if they weren’t trying to combat a real problem.
Traffic enforcement is good! However, I encourage you to read the recent book out called “Killed by a Traffic Engineer”, which argues that enforcement doesn’t come close to solving the carnage on American roads. It all comes back to street design. People drive fast (and fail to yield) on Alemany, because the road is designed for cars to go fast and not for other road users like cyclists and pedestrians. Two pedestrians have been killed on Lombard this month. I support enforcement of traffic laws, but SF’s Vision zero is a joke, if all we do is lean into enforcement.
Thank you Mo! Yes, exactly: The infrastructure itself should be designed to push safety, even at the cost of — god forbid — speed. Alemany with its multiple wide lanes, separate turning lanes and center divide is designed as a speedway. Simply painting a crosswalk as an afterthought – and wasting police time and effort to admonish drivers for driving the way the road is designed – is the cause. Does SFMTA lock their office doors at night, or paint a sign saying “Do not enter: Closed” and expect the police to sit out there and catch anyone going in?
No, bicyclist covert dork, the street design is not responsible for the SFPD not ticketing 3% of the speeders that they used to 10 years ago. Your bicyclist cover lobby is obvious when you use unrelated traffic incidents to make your BS “climate friendly” “greenwashing” BS through Weiner and the rest of the liars. We are onto you, “walk sf” trolls. You don’t promote public safety, you promote a liar’s agenda using public incidents as if you would. Breed backers all.
With respect to the increasing, unchecked gunfire at 16th/Mission, had this been happening in any other neighborhood, “community leaders,” supervisors and the police would be up in arms. There would be community meetings. There would be the wailing and the gnashing of the teeth demanding that something be done. The patrons of “the most vulnerable” would be laying guilt trips on everyone for their privilege.
Instead, we are see the SFPD saying their hands are tied, the district supervisor has long since checked out and is barely phoning it in, and once the City purchased 1979 Mission for affordable housing, the city funded nonprofits are not paid to attend to such minor issues as life and death. Even Mission Local has failed to cover the shooting spree with the comprehensive analysis that it is known for.
I’m expecting for Kevin Ortiz to start representing the interests of whatever nexus of vendors, drug dealers and “guests” at Mission Cabins might be involved in this outbreak of violence.
MISSION DISTRICT OUT OF CONTROL
SF, CA — Some say crime is down in San Francisco, but in the Mission District – where the murder rate has doubled – residents call BS.
‘I suspect a nexus of illegals, druggies, and homeless,” said one local.
“At Walgreens, shit I need is locked up,” groused another. “This is a real problem.”
Comment Section had reached out to scandal plagued non-profiteers and barely-phoning-it-in D9 politicos, but so far no word back.
“We can only hope that he did not come to grief on the mean streets of Forest Hill.” Savage and hilarious …
People not reporting crimes + crime statistics = crime is down.
Stand outside that Walgreens on precious West Portal. It gets hit multiple times a day. Same as Safeway on Taraval and Noriega, Walgreens on Taraval and 22 and 40.
I too am a native from the Parkside and I have never seen so much crime, trash, and have never felt unsafe there until now.
So please stop with your stats and really stop with your “right wing trolls”. Just because people don’t believe the lies and skewed stats does not mean they are right wing. It means they can see through the BS and have a mind of their own.
@Rebecca Lee – I’ve been hearing the “people not reporting” whuddaboutism for over a decade at this point. You do realize that there are ways to measure how many crimes go unreported, don’t you? I don’t suppose those facts matter either, if the goal is confirmation bias for feelings and heckling.
Ah yes, the ever-convincing ‘crime isn’t down, people just don’t report it’ rebuttal. Never with anything resembling evidence.
No one cares if you’re an SF native. You still aren’t correct. Just because you hear about shoplifting incidents more often and see trash wherever you go does not mean your neighborhood is less safe. It just means that you spend a lot more time on the internet (and by ‘internet’ I mean Nextdoor, which is Twitter for old people) getting spun into a frenzy.
You’re almost as ridiculous as the earlier commenter who is Chicken Little about the Mission. Jesus lord, does no one remember how bad it was back when the Norteños and Sureños controlled that neighborhood??
“People not reporting crimes” – So prove it. Making this kind of claim is gaslighting. Prove what you’re saying.
I’m totally happy that violent crime is way down in San Francisco as in most of the rest of the country.
However, most people know it’s a total waste of time to report property crimes to the police unless you are going to make an insurance claim. I know the crime on that front is way worse than the police reports. How many times have you seen broken glass from car break ins on the curb? How many bicycles have been stolen (me, 3 in one year)? How many garages have been broken into (half of my friends that have garages that have been broken into now spend $3000 on surveillance systems to protect a few thousand dollars of storage goods)? How many merchants have seen their Inventory shrinkage from shoplifting double or more?
Spend a whole day and $500 to replace a car window where the thief only got a $100 laptop.
No, petty theft is a big problem and headache and rightly pisses people off.
Through my own personal tragedy I know that a pedestrians’ chance of survival after being struck by a speeding vehicle is very low. Erratic behavior aside most drivers are driving much too fast for the environment they in. And with the desire to have larger vehicles (SUV’s) faster vehicles (tesla’s) other users of this public space ( pedestrians and cyclists) have never been in more danger. Please Please Please just slow down, phone down and look around.
Peace
Also, on the topic of traffic safety, with shorter days approaching:
*** Turn up those dimmy street lights and install new ones at crosswalks where needed. /r
In 2014, SFPD wrote about 2,500-3,000 tickets a month for the top five Vision Zero/traffic safety violations (failure to stop crosswalk etc.)
Today, SFPD writes about 300 similar tickets a month…with only 100 fewer officers than 2014. So what does SFPD do all day?
Comply with State law?
“In 2015, the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 953, the Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA), which among other things required state and local law enforcement agencies to collect data regarding stops of individuals and to report this data to the California Department of Justice (DOJ).”
Let’s throw a little shade on SFMTA. Besides SFPD, their managers and engineers are some of the best-paid in town. And what do they do for all that $? They fail to cooperate with other stakeholders like the Bike Coalition (ew, beneath us) and yet they won’t engage with other bicyclist and ped cities in the US and worldwide. And what’ve we got? A lousy patchwork of bike lanes and bulb outs and no real plan for now or the future, just a slogan “Vision Zero.” The bike lanes aren’t that safe, pedestrians keep walking out into traffic facedown in their phones, bikers keep running stoplights and cars keep hitting everybody. MTA is going to have to come up with a better idea for everybody. Take a look at other cities and other nations. Just get it done.
Well, I think it’s brilliant. Nothing teaches drivers to stop for normal pedestrians like sitting them the cops put on elaborate costumes when there’s a chance of actually getting a ticket.
What. could. possibly. go. wrong.
“When you agree with them, they mean something, and when you don’t, they don’t.” So true.
Crime being down does not mean crime is not happening. It just means that it’s down but people don’t care about that (for one reason or another). Crime has always been and is happening in every big city, especially in certain neighborhoods. Now that crime is citywide, there is a collective urgency to “clean up our streets”. I find it interesting.
This is a great observation. Improving traffic safety makes our children safer, but it also helps further lower other crimes. After all, most criminals drive away from the scene of their crimes in speeding cars. That’s why we need to blanket our city with cameras, with a goal of catching every single traffic infraction. We can do this without increasing our police budget.
Bullshit futurism from a simpleton who doesn’t understand bycatch.
I would love more camera enforcement for speeding infractions. Speeding kills.
If I saw some crazy person loitering around a crosswalk just waiting to stop me … especially in that neighborhood near an underpass … I would be leery about a car jacking attempt or a mentally ill person. Certainly it’s suspicious and there may be good reason not to stop given that crazy situation. How about a more standard old man with a walker … not threatening and not weird.
The usual sting decoy is a cop in civilian clothes. The cops writing the tickets are always busy with people getting pulled over. Your judgement is lacking.
Please stop demonizing people who have mental illnesses.
All chickens are bad.
Bicyclists are mostly fine, but bicycle agenda trolls on the Mayor’s illegal payroll?
Paid liars spending taxpayer money for an elitist yuppie agenda, not safety.
Joe, the plain fact is that most of us don’t like crime and are against it. Progressives, including yourself, are tolerant of crime and like criminals more than cops.
It’s like we’re speaking two different languages. Normal people look at a Walgreen’s being looted by people tossing stuff into garbage bags and think, “Why can’t that be stopped and the thieves arrested?” Progressives look at the same video and say, “Crime in District 7 is down 12.7% over the last six months.”
You can’t reach us if you don’t speak our language. I’m not sure you can. You would actually have to agree that crime is bad and criminals should be arrested — even if the criminals are not cops. It seems like this chasm cannot be bridged.
Stopped reading at “Progressives, including yourself, are tolerant of crime and like criminals more than cops.”
BTW, do you like criminal cops?
“This isn’t very far from my home. People drive with impunity here (and then they park on the sidewalk).”
Parking on the sidewalk may not matter, depending on the situation and location. Particularly in further-out parts of the city like yours, sidewalks are much wider. Some I know in the Richmond district are 20 feet wide. You could double park two Hummers on those, and a wheelchair or stoller could still get past.
And all bets are off during weekly street cleaning hours. You cannot remove 50% of the on-street parking for 2 hours and expect all those vehicles to just vanish. A cop told me that tickets for sidewalk parking are not issued during street cleaning hours. That would be a scam too far even for DPT.
You generally have to call the city if you want them to ticket sidewalk parking. For me, I only do it if a wheelchair can’t get past. Only so many battles I feel like fighting.
As for outer parts of the city, you see a whole lot of sidewalk parking in the Excelsior. To the point where you can’t use a lot of the sidewalks. That’s really bad, but they just don’t seem to enforce out there, or more likely even call it in.
Wow, it sounds like the Forest Hill guy is just one of many San Franciscans who prefer to believe that The City has turned into a place trashed by the aliens from “A Quiet Place” rather than deal with its uncomfortable realities.
Surprised the pedestrian didn’t slip on the feces!
“No driver should miss that”. Yeah, except, many drivers will be startled by the costume just for a moment. By the time they put things together and react, they’re at risk of passing the crosswalk, so they pull through.
Note to our dear local government: You won’t get towards zero traffic deaths if you turn driving in the city into a (crazy) obstacle course.
If your response to being “startled” is to plow through a crosswalk with a pedestrian in it, you absolutely deserve a ticket and probably shouldn’t be driving.
You got to be new here. It’s not that simple: Anyone who’s lived here for a while has grown accustomed to ignoring rando methheads yelling on the corner, or some self-absorbed rando who’s been putting on a chicken costume to make some point.
Daniel, you might review the traffic laws and drive slower. Your judgement about danger to yourself from a person in a chicken costume in the cross walk while you are in a two ton motor vehicle is severely lacking.
Learn how to live in the real world, bicycle agenda propagandists.
Someone on the streets of San Francisco is wearing an outlandish costume? How startling!
You may find this one hard to believe, but there are some people in this town who walk around in public without wearing anything at all.
Naw, it’s a good tweak. If it ends up in front of a judge there’s no “I didn’t see them” defense. That’s BS anyway, but drivers will say and do anything to justify their behavior.