San Francisco needs to shave $400 million in spending to accommodate a budget deficit, and Mayor Daniel Lurie has instructed departments to start by cutting any services that duplicate one another.
But the Adult Probation Department last week submitted a budget proposal requesting $12.7 million for a new program that furnishes the same service a city-contracted nonprofit is already paid to provide.
The city currently gives over $8 million annually to the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project to work with people awaiting trial outside of jail. The nonprofit has for 50 years connected people suspected of crimes to housing, employment, and medical treatment — the same services the probation department is now proposing.
CEO David Mauroff said the Pretrial Diversion Project received no notification of the probation department’s proposal, which he described as “an exact duplication of our services at a much higher cost.” His nonprofit currently has a staff approaching 100 and a total budget of $12.8 million, part of which is covered by local and state grants.
Probation is asking for $11 million from the city’s general fund and $1.7 million in court funding. According to the proposal, which will be reviewed by the mayor’s office in the coming months, part of the money will go toward providing housing and mental health services to those awaiting trial. It would also fund 50 full-time employees, who are already being recruited. Last Thursday, a director position was posted.
“I’ve never heard of putting out job descriptions that haven’t even been approved in the budget,” said Sandra Lee Fewer, a former budget chair for San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a current board member of the Pretrial Diversion Program.
Alea Brown-Hoffmeister, the probation department’s director of policy and legislation, declined to comment.
For years, the partnership between the Pretrial Diversion Program and the sheriff’s department has been endorsed by San Francisco politicians, law enforcement leaders, and criminal justice advocates alike.
In 2023, the nonprofit reported that 93 percent of its clients were not charged with another crime while participating. At other pre-trial pilot programs throughout the state, on average only 65 percent of defendants avoided picking up another charge.
In 2021, California State Bill 129 allocated funding for pre-trial programs to be operated by probation departments. But the bill specifically created a carve-out for San Francisco’s court to contract with “the existing not-for-profit entity,” the Pretrial Diversion Project.
Still, the probation department now wants to make developing and implementing its own pre-trial services a “budget priority” in the coming years.
“The Court has advised that SFAPD will assume Pretrial Services effective July 1,” Chief Probation Officer Cristel Tullock wrote in a Feb. 23 letter to the mayor’s budget director and city controller. “SFAPD welcomes the opportunity to integrate Pretrial Services as a new division.”
Hiring, training, and implementing a new pretrial services division by July 1 is “fiscally irresponsible” and “unrealistic,” Mauroff said. Even if probation got its program running, he added, it would create “confusion and uncertainty” for attorneys, judges, deputies and defendants.
Unlike those whom the probation department traditionally works with, people in pre-trial services have not yet been convicted of a crime, so the probation department will design a unique program that relies on civilian staff rather than sworn officers, Tullock wrote.
The chief probation officer described this as “an opportunity to address duplicative efforts that currently overburden the courts, resources, and services for individuals involved in multiple systems,” though she did not specify what those were.
The proposal comes as Lurie is seeking hundreds of millions in cuts, including paring back on contracts with community-based organizations. The mayor’s office said yesterday it aimed to cut $100 million in staff across the city, equivalent to 500 jobs, among other reductions.
The mayor’s office did not comment on pre-trial services.
Probation has struggled to find places for cuts. The $76.8 million and $80 million total funding it has requested for the next two fiscal years exceeds its target. Existing constraints have left the department without resources for “basic law enforcement operational functions” like background investigations, Tullock wrote in the Feb. 23 letter.
This is not the first time the department has proposed its own pretrial services. In 2019, the California legislature set aside funding for pilot pretrial service programs at 10 probation departments statewide. San Francisco’s probation department was not selected.
“We already have a system that works so well,” said David Rizk, a member of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Task Force, at the time. “This is a solution in search of a problem.”