After Mayor Daniel Lurie’s bodyguard ended up bloodied in a brawl at the edge of the Tenderloin Thursday night, the neighborhood again found itself in the national spotlight for street violence — and locals are wary of the response that could follow.
A member of Lurie’s security detail told Mission Local that he was attacked while guarding the mayor. Video showed the two men tussling, with the officer thrown to the ground. But subsequent video released Friday called that account into question.
Surveillance footage from the Lower Nob Hill alley where the altercation took place showed that the police officer shoved the man, Tony Phillips, before the officer was slammed to the ground.
The first video of the attack, obtained by Mission Local, spread online widely Thursday and Friday, with conservative outlets like Fox News and the New York Post blasting San Francisco as a bastion of chaos.
Police officers appeared to crack down on the block the day after. Three people who frequent Cedar Street, the small alley where the scuffle occurred, told Mission Local on Friday morning that police arrived around 7 a.m. to urge people gathered there to move along.
Video posted to social media also shows at least two people being arrested and multiple police and Public Works vehicles lining the street.
While the incident technically took place in nearby Lower Nob Hill, it was quickly identified with the Tenderloin. Some residents and community leaders in the Tenderloin hoped the incident would bring more attention and resources to the neighborhood, but they also worried about police overreach in the aftermath.
“The immediate response tends to be an overreaction,” said Joe Wilson, the director of the homeless services nonprofit Hospitality House.
There are, he said, “much deeper structural inequities” in the Tenderloin “that continue to put neighborhood residents collectively at risk.”
Del Seymour, the founder of another homeless service provider, Code Tenderloin, and a recovering addict who once lived on the nearby streets, said he was familiar with Phillips from the neighborhood. He said Lurie should have left interacting with someone like Phillips to professionals, instead of his security detail.
People living in the streets often have a “bundle” of personal struggles, like “drug use, mental challenges, anger issues, alcoholism” that can create someone “that is very difficult to deal with.”
“You can’t be driving through the Tenderloin, jumping out, trying to be Mother Teresa,” Seymour said. “You think you’re a celebrity being the mayor, and you think everyone loves you, and most of us do, but there are people that don’t know who you are, and you mean nothing to them.”
Lurie, he said, “has learned that now.”
According to Lurie’s bodyguard, Lurie approached the men to ask them to move out of the way.
Violent crime rates in the Tenderloin are down 22 percent since 2019, according to San Francisco Police Department data. But approaching people on the street can still be tricky because of the issues Seymour described.
And, while reported crime has improved more in the Tenderloin than other areas, its residents are still subject to higher rates of violent crime compared to the rest of the city.
“Things have improved a lot … we can acknowledge those accomplishments, but we still get measured by our failures,” a law enforcement source said. “This is an example of, we’re not there yet … we’re still failing.”
The source, who is familiar with the area, said clearing the alleys is the typical response but agreed with Wilson that more is needed in the long-term.
“We just don’t want to be in this cycle of moving folks around. We want to find a pathway to getting people healthy,” they said. “If you get people healthy, you just eliminate so many issues.”
Randy Shaw, the longtime executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said the incident showed one thing clearly: “The Tenderloin needs a higher level of service than it is getting.”
“That seems kind of obvious,” he added, “but it hasn’t yet translated into a policy action.”
Shaw pointed to the online conservative spin-zone and said the incident ran the risk of being used to pillory the city. “There’s a lot of right wing fanatics, MAGA people who want to discredit San Francisco.”
Indeed, the New York Post ran a story today saying the mayor was “under fire” for his “apathetic-seeming response” to the scuffle that broke out, seemingly a reference to Lurie walking away as his security guard wrestles with Phillips.
The X account Libs of TikTok claimed Lurie “casually” abandoned his bodyguard.
Subsequent footage shows Lurie apparently calling for support from another officer.
Phillips and Abraham Simon, 33, who was also involved in the brawl, were both arrested at the scene. In his statement to responding police on Thursday, the officer from Lurie’s security detail said he believed Phillips was mentally ill and described him as speaking “gibberish.”
The San Francisco Examiner reported that Phillips was arrested in 2019 on suspicion of stabbing a man to death, but was never charged by the district attorney, for lack of evidence.
Seymour said he believes Lurie is sensitive to the Tenderloin and won’t retaliate in an “unbalanced” way.
Shaw, for his part, said he has pointed out drug activity and disoriented people on Cedar Street for “quite some time,” and wants more from the city.
“That’s probably the predominant feeling in the Tenderloin,” Shaw said. “People feel like, ‘We’ve been telling people how there’s problems here.’”
Additional reporting by Alice Finno.
Good points by many quoted in the article. Perhaps the Mayor is leaning too heavily to personally reaching out to troubled people throughout SF, but I’d rather a mayor being too much of a Mother Theresa rather than too much of a Marie Antoinette.
No way this was a one-off. How often was Lurie hopping out and striking the man of power pose while he had his goons intimidate?
Now his goon got dumped on his head and Lurie comes off as a colossal wimp. They get what they get for engaging in such behavior.
I agree,
He’s chosen the dark path.
Replaced a reformer District Captain named Johanson (born in the Mission) here with a guy on the ‘Brady List’ which means unfit to appear in court because they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything.
So, this new guy brings in the old top boss in the district who thugged out on the Mission teens in the ‘Hill Bomb’ cop attack on skateboarders …
brings the guy in on 4th of July to attack Latino block parties celebrating the birth of our nation …
Bottom line is that you can go one of two ways when dealing with crime.
You can choose Revenge as a path which has been proven to create more criminals (no better place to learn about crime for a young kid than in jail) ..
Or, you can choose Reform which works.
That’s why things are worse in the Mission now than before he was elected.
Hopefully, he’ll change.
go Niners !!
h.
Hope he keeps going to tenderloin and somehow does something to help make it better. That area is pure filth smack in the center of one of the richest cities in the world. What other cities in America have an open air drug den in the center of everything? Most cities put these areas in the corner. S.F. puts it front and center.
I hope everyone saw the BEGINNING of that video that Lurie’s PR firm did not release. It’s all over Reddit now. It shows his ex-cop security guard getting in the guys face, then shoving him about 10 feet onto the street, then when he got up, he ran at him and shoved him down again. Only then did the guy come at him, and totally justifiably at that point. Meanwhile, Lurie didn’t even take his hands out of his pockets. Just casually watched and then when his guard finally got taken down, he went and got his other privately paid ex-cops to help the guy who literally started the entire thing, then arrested the black guy and sent the press clips of his guy getting slammed. And the press just ran with it, making zero attempt to confirm anything.
My understanding from other recent ML articles is that the mayor’s security guards are currently SFPD officers, although I think the coverage could stand to be clearer on this point.
Mr Lurie, lying is the playbook of this administration, from morning to night a litany of lies so there are no reason for you/your team to join in..the dude your security pushed to the ground was probably a problematic individual but if he is smart, he will hire a lawyer and get money from the city..unfortunately..Thanks Mayor!
SF cops are a complete failure,
Because no one knows them.
There are 8,000 homeless of which 3,200 are addicts.
They are herded into what their department has conceded are designated ‘containment zones’ where they can use and sell their drugs.
Of the 3,200 addicts (faces change yearly) around 30% or 1,000 of them dies yearly from overdoses.
But, I digress.
What I meant to point out is that the major problem in San Francisco is that the Police Force has lost community with the citizenship.
Because there are no longer single officer Foot Patrols.
Which we had from 1880 to 1960.
We had 900 officers walking beats or, 300 per shift.
The only way we’ll begin getting back to that is if we have an Elected Police Chief with total power to hire and fire and suspend without pay.
All in the Charter and beginning as soon as Mayor Lurie desires it and puts it on the ballot which he seriously considered in conversation with me several times as Candidate Lurie and his main question always was, “Is Peskin going to promise it?”.
go Niners !!
h.
Campers,
Newsom went through a phase when he stopped his limo to get out and pick up trash which he put in his trunk.
He also once went to Homeless Connect and washed the feet of a really filthy homeless person.
Mayors do the strangest things.
Go Niners !!
h.
“Fox News and the New York Post blasting San Francisco as a bastion of chaos”
Fox News and the New York Post supported Trump who gave us the worst chaos we’ve been in since the Civil War 166 years ago.
Run Away! Run Away!
Second week in a row Lurie has been caught lying and helping right-wing media smear our city in the process. Last week he falsely stated the protesters at his presser announcing a tax break for the rich were chanting antisemitic slogans, but it turned out that was just one mentally unwell person known to neighbors and unaffiliated with the protest. Now, with this, the mayor falsely claims Mr. Phillips was blocking the street, and implies Mr. Phillips assaulted the mayor’s security detail first, when it was the opposite. And we’re supposed to take this guy at his word when he says he wasn’t besties with Kristi Noem? And that he has no records of his call with Trump? I don’t buy it.
lol do you even read the articles or just clickb8 headlines?
There were no protestors at the event last week. It was one mentally ill lady shouting from outside the event. Why u defending people who don’t even exist?
When was the last time you had to walk around the TL and dodge the street people? It’s not pretty or fun, but you should try it… it might decrease what IMO is an inappropriate level of empathy, your positive energy should be directed to those more deserving
Wesh,
You can read the article about the protesters at the event last week here. https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-mayor-daniel-lurie-antisemitism-chants-dsa/
Best,
Scott
This guy is definitely NOT Mamdani. There’s a coldness with this mayor, never looks people in the eyes. He’s a billionaire, this trend we’re on as a country of voting for people with more money than empathy has got to end. Btw, I still see RVs in SF after he promised to get rid of them in November.
Wait, so you want him to be more empathetic but you also are calling out how there are RVs still in San Francisco?
The real question is why is this area still a containment zone for homeless addicts And crime?
The citizens and taxpayers here are confronting the unsafe and unfair street conditions here everyday .
Clear the sidewalks and remove these people from the sidewalks
The babysitting and enabling here is not ok.
Really getting tired of this crap here .
Sidewalks need to be open and passable for all 24/7.
That persons are selling and using drugs here and choose to live on the streets here is wrong.
This block cedar between polk and polk is one big drug den everyday
Way wrong Get it addressed now
Not so much Mother Theres as noblesse oblige
Someone who thinks that it’s ok to say “you can’t leave your car in the Tenderloin” should not be receiving city money for his nonprofit.
Why are people trying so hard to defend this guy Phillips, who probably murdered someone, and seems like the type of person who makes the Tenderloin/Knob an awful neighborhood and a blight on SF… obv he was standing in the middle of the street screaming at the sky and being a nuisance. Not surprising the officer shoved him, which is neither unwarranted nor “overreach”… he’s allowed to use force to a man standing in traffic. Wish they had officers doing this all the time and not just when the mayor visits