Issac Molina starts his shifts as an outreach worker in the South of Market knowing that, at any moment, someone might pull a knife, flash a gun or threaten him with assault.
Molina is not a police officer. He carries no civic authority. When an interaction on the street turns violent, or seems like it might be about to, all he can do is step back, try to talk people down, and call for help.
“This job is not for the weak,” he said.
For the last five months, Molina has patrolled the blocks around Russ, Minna and Natoma streets in SoMa’s western corridor as part of a private team hired by the SoMa West Community Benefit District. The group is a collection of property owners who have levied an extra tax on property in their part of SoMa in order to pay for the kind of street-level security that neighborhood residents and business owners claim the city is failing to provide in one of the poorest areas of San Francisco.
Molina’s job is to keep sidewalks clear of people sitting or lying down on the pavement. If he sees people using drugs in the open, he tells them to move along. He can do that work better than most, he said, because he has lived some version of their lives himself.
Molina was homeless, incarcerated, and then went back to living on the streets, with few options for work or shelter. That history helps him to relate to people in crisis, he said, and motivates him to draw on his deescalation skills instead of reacting with aggression or anger.
“We can’t allow people to harm us, or anyone else,” he said.
West SoMa locals say the private patrols capture a broader truth about the neighborhood. Over a dozen residents and business owners told Mission Local that the area has come to feel like a “containment zone” — a handful of blocks where the city’s hardest street problems seem concentrated, and law enforcement feels absent.
The area seems increasingly abandoned by city officials, they say. It is left to deal with drug use, assaults and theft that, they feel, aren’t tolerated in other neighborhoods.
Police data shows one reason why. When it comes to lower-priority calls that shape daily life in the neighborhood, like drug use, noise or situations that hold the potential for physical harm, local police are slow to respond — much slower than they react to reports of similar crimes citywide.
Data from December 2025 to March 2026 shows that San Francisco police officers get to the most urgent emergencies in SoMa relatively quickly. The less-urgent calls, though, are a different story.
- For Priority A calls, the most urgent incidents involving immediate danger to life or property, police responded to calls in SoMa about 8 percent faster than the citywide median, at a median of 7.51 minutes, compared with 8.08 minutes citywide.
- But for Priority B calls — situations involving potential harm, a suspect who may still be nearby or a recently committed crime — police responded to calls in SoMa about 55 percent slower than the citywide median, at a median of almost 40 minutes.
- For Priority C calls, lower-urgency incidents with no present danger and no suspect in the area, police took around 53 percent longer to respond than the citywide median, at a median of an hour and 54 minutes.
When asked about this discrepancy, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey said SoMa residents are not wrong to wonder about the delays. When asked what he thought of residents’ concerns that SoMa has become a “containment zone,” Dorsey responded, “I think they’re right.”
The San Francisco Police Department, for its part, disagreed.
“The accusation that West SoMa is a ‘containment zone’ for crime and disorder is unequivocally false,” department spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky wrote in an emailed statement. “Crime is illegal everywhere in San Francisco and our officers are working hard to ensure our streets are clean and safe.”
Street conditions have been worsening for years in West SoMa and the Tenderloin, Dorsey continued. He said SoMa’s police response-time numbers point to severe understaffing. “Priority A calls will get 100 percent service,” he said. “But what that means is most of those cops are only doing Priority A calls.”
The end result, he said, is that “the lower-level kinds of disorder that can be very disruptive to the neighborhood diminish people’s confidence in their government.”
The police department has been working to fill a staffing gap of over 500 officers citywide, Sernoffsky wrote. “We are always working diligently to improve our response times to all calls while continuing to prioritize violent crimes in progress,” Sernoffsky continued. “As SFPD increases staffing across the department, we expect to see shorter responses to A, B and C priority calls at all district stations.”
The biggest cluster of calls occurs in SoMa’s western corridor, especially around Sixth and Natoma, Sixth and Stevenson, Sixth and Mission, Sixth and Minna, and the intersection at Sixth, Market, Golden Gate, and Taylor. Another high cluster of calls has come from around Seventh and Eighth Streets near Mission, Natoma and Stevenson.
The biggest cluster of calls occurs in West SoMa
Number of calls for service per intersection in SoMa, Dec. 28, 2025-Mar. 28, 2026
22% of share of all SoMa calls
were from the 6th Street corridor
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S Q U A R E
Number of calls
per intersection
22% of share of all SoMa calls
were from the 6th Street corridor
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S H O W P L A C E
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Number of calls per intersection
Chart by Iryna Humenyuk. Source: Public Safety department via SF Open Data. Note: Data covers top 40 calls for service in the SoMa neighborhood.
The western SoMa corridor where calls cluster has a combined poverty rate of 23 percent, compared with 11.3 percent countywide — roughly double the county’s overall rate.
Local residents and business owners repeatedly told Mission Local that the slow response times have discouraged them from seeking help from the police.
“I hear from a lot of my neighbors that they’ve stopped calling the police because the police don’t come, or they come so late,” said Shaun Aukland, a member of the West SoMa Neighborhood Association.
The group filed a formal complaint to the state of California on April 3 alleging that San Francisco has violated state housing law by concentrating poverty and disadvantage in SoMa, and failing to provide basic city services on the same level as other neighborhoods.
Residents who spoke with Mission Local wonder why police delays are so prolonged when SoMa’s crime rates have far exceeded those in the rest of San Francisco — more than double the rate in every other neighborhood for all crime categories throughout 2025, according to police incident data.
“We’re tired of being number one,” said Reese Isbell, another neighborhood association member.
Isbell gave a presentation to that effect to SFPD Chief Derrick Lew and other police staff on April 3, during a neighborhood meeting that turned tense, according to area residents.
“I walked away feeling worse, not better,” said Leah Edwards, who lives at Eighth and Folsom. “The response we got was, ‘Well, all of San Francisco is understaffed, so you’re not the only one.’ We understand everyone’s understaffed. But relative to everyone being understaffed, we are worse than everybody else.”
According to department figures from a 2025 report, SFPD’s Southern Station, which serves SoMa and five other areas, handled 31,955 calls for service and spent 39,189 hours responding to those calls — a ratio that gives officers assigned to the Southern Station one of the heaviest workloads in San Francisco. A staffing table shows the Southern Station running about 66 sworn officers short of its recommended level.
The largest gap is in Sector Patrol, the officers who are responsible for responding to calls for service from the public. The table lists no foot- or bike-beat officers at all, even though 20 are recommended. In October, Mission Local reported that SFPD staffed less than a third of its foot beats across the city.
The numbers make some residents wonder why one of the city’s busiest districts is still missing a basic patrol presence. Available data suggests that some quieter police districts are better-staffed.
A 2025 SFPD staffing report shows that Southern Station was operating at about 78 percent of its recommended sector patrol officer staffing in 2024. Meanwhile, Park was at about 98 percent, the Tenderloin at 101 percent, and Bayview at 112 percent.
Dorsey said that Southern Station’s understaffing appears disproportionate compared to other stations, and said that he wants the police department to explain the disparity.
“What we should not expect to see is that some neighborhoods and some districts are repeatedly worse than others,” he said. “What that tells me is that we are failing to allocate resources where they’re needed, and doing it again and again.”
In an emailed response, Sernoffsky wrote that, in the coming weeks, the police department “will be assigning an additional 11 officers to Southern Station, who will focus primarily on the SoMa Neighborhood,” beginning their new roles in early May. The department “will continue to add staff to the station in the following months,” as it rolls out new station boundaries.
Dr. Jack Sinow, an optometrist who has run his practice in West SoMa for 52 years, remembers when city police had a foot patrol in the neighborhood. It made a difference. “They would come down to Sixth Street often and walk around, and come into the offices and say hello,” he said. “You don’t see that anymore.”
The police service delays, meanwhile, have led some neighborhood residents to invest in their own private patrols.
“We’ve had private security in place since October 2024,” said Alex Ludlum, a former city commissioner and executive director of the SoMa West Community Benefit District, an organization that took in $5.8 million in revenue in 2025. “It’s obvious the police don’t care to enforce the law in our area.”
“It’s a designated containment zone, plainly,” Ludlum continued. “The city has a policy of containing its ills in the Tenderloin and SoMa. That’s consistent across supervisors.”
Ludlum said that the community benefit district recruits security staff from United Playaz, a SoMa-based nonprofit that provides after-school programs for local youth and reentry services. Outreach workers, like Molina, must call the police if they see crime occurring in the neighborhood, or ask people to leave the neighborhood if they are caught using drugs on the street, Ludlum said. It’s a tough job, he acknowledged.
Molina agreed.
“People pull out guns and knives on us, or try to engage in physical combat, or approach us in a disrespectful manner,” he said. “People get shot, stabbed here every day over simple petty issues. It’s getting worse out here. It’s a must that groups like ours are out here trying to make a difference.”
Supervisor Dorsey’s office plans to hold a public hearing on police staffing in the Southern District in May.
The goal, said Dorsey, is to get “visibility on what is going on and why this problem has been persistent.” He said he wants the police department to provide a clearer plan for how Southern Station will be staffed, and how resources will be deployed.
Until something changes, Molina said, he and his colleagues will keep trying to maintain a sense of order on blocks where residents say the city has fallen short.
“I want people to give us an understanding that we’re trying to do the best we can with what we have,” he said.