Mayor Daniel Lurie announced on Friday afternoon that the two BART plazas in the Mission District, at 16th and 24th streets, would get more police officers, a dedicated sergeant, and extra street ambassadors.
“We’re going to go all in,” Lurie said in a video filmed at 16th and Mission. Over the past year, the intersection and nearby alleys have been the focus of a “relentless” campaign by Lurie to clean up the area of drug dealing, illegal vending, and general grime. “This neighborhood, these children, these families deserve clean and safe streets,” he said.
The mayor promised increased police foot patrols on the eight-block Mission Street corridor between the 16th and 24th street BART plazas where illegal vending has continued to pop up. In recent months, open-air drug use has also increased on those blocks.
The mayor said a sergeant at the Mission Station a block away would “oversee these BART plazas,” and that the city would add street teams to “keep this corridor welcoming.” He said street cleaning would start occurring before school starts.
Police officers are already a near-constant sight at the plazas. They park SUVs with siren-lights on during the night, and stand on either the northeast or southwest plazas at 16th and Mission to ward off illegal street fencing, which grew prolific after the pandemic. Until September, an RV-sized van was parked on the BART plaza each and every day.
Lurie, the former police chief, and the current police chief have all acknowledged that the Mission District is seeing “displacement” of drug activity and crime from other areas of the city where police operations have ramped up. Last year, Lurie told Mission Local the city would not “arrest our way out of this problem” but that police would have to chase drug dealers around “for a little bit” until conditions improve.
The 16th and Mission operation has had mixed results: Street peddlers often simply go across the street from where officers are standing. At night, crowds gather selling everything from perfume to raw steaks to drugs.
For months, the city had succeeded in moving most of the illicit activity to the northeast plaza, and it mostly took place after 5 p.m. But increasingly, vending has also started to emerge again on the southwest plaza.
And, throughout the nearly year-long operation, vendors simply moved to the 24th Street plaza. So would officers. But once they left, the crowds would return.
Residents and merchants saw little improvement after the first few months of the operation that began on March 12 last year. But as it progressed they said the streets were cleaner, loitering was down, and the city’s street teams were highly responsive. The results can be uneven, however, and crowds often return when police or ambassadors aren’t present.
Police arrests are up. On Thursday, police officers made 16 arrests near 16th and Mission and 59 in the last week, according to Mission Local‘s dashboard tracking daily statistics from the intersection. Since Lurie announced his crackdown on the area, arrests and citations for dugs there have skyrocketed, reflecting a concerted police focus.
An alphabet soup of city agencies already patrol the area with dedicated street teams. They are bolstered by two nonprofit contractors.
The community ambassadors wear clearly marked uniforms and do a variety of tasks, like intervening in street fights, reversing overdoses, and walking children to and from Marshall Elementary near 16th and Mission. Students there see drug dealing, feces, public intoxication, and more nearly every day — one mother told Mission Local she “play that we jump poop on the street” on the way to class.
They carry
walkie-talkies
Workers wear one or more
layers of the uniforms, including
a black t-shirt, a black zip-up
hoodle, and a white vest
Workers wear one
or more layers of the
uniforms, including
a black t-shirt, a black zip-up
hoodle, and a white vest
They carry
walkie-talkies
Lurie acknowledged the lack of progress in his social media video.
“We have good days, and we have days that are not what we want to see here,” he said. He promised the city would continue to work “tirelessly” on the intersection.
Feng Han, an aide for District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder, said in a statement that Fielder “has been asking for more community policing and foot beats since she began her term last year as that was the number one request of constituents.”
“She hopes that this new sergeant assigned can deliver that.”