San Francisco has started publicly displaying an array of data related to the Mission District’s two BART plazas, which have become a priority for Mayor Daniel Lurie’s attempt to clean up city streets.
In a video shared on Instagram on Tuesday, District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder announced the release of the “16th and 24th Street BART Plazas Activation dashboard,” which shows statistics on illegal fencing, drug use, 911 calls, street-cleaning requests, and more at both plazas.
The dashboard will update every month with data from various city agencies.
The dashboard dataset starts in March of this year and marks the start of a 90-day push, announced by Lurie in June, to improve conditions around Mission BART stations. He indefinitely extended that effort in early September.
Mission Local has its own data dashboard tracking conditions at the 16th Street BART plaza that is updated daily with arrests, citations, and more.
Fielder, who said she advocated for the city to create a dashboard, called it a “good step in the right direction,” but said she is not satisfied by what it shows: little progress across most metrics.
“I am a little disappointed with how things are going,” Fielder said. “I’m disappointed BART ridership at the two Mission plazas went down slightly in July. Drug dealer arrests went down in the activation period. And 311 reports of human and animal waste is largely the same as June and up from March.”
Fielder, who regularly receives resident complaints about street conditions, said the data tracks with what she’s hearing.
The dashboard shows the following:
- 911 calls for drugs were 19 in March, went up to 35 in May and are down again to 17 in August.
- 311 tickets for trash have been steadily increasing, from 88 in March to 113 in August
- Street-cleaning requests within a one block radius from the BART Plazas have dropped from 420 requests in March to 316 in August
Fielder, for her part, said it is “probably not feasible to get to zero street-cleaning requests in the Mission. But, I would like to see us get much fewer 311 cleaning requests,” she said.
She said the Department of Public Works has done more proactive sidewalk cleaning, and hopes that will be reflected in the data.
She also cautioned that there are caveats about how to interpret certain numbers; 911 calls may not reliably measure drug activity, for instance, because some are false alarms and residents do not report every instance of drug use.
Tackling the Mission BART stations’ open-air drug use and illegal fencing has been a long-term project for Fielder, Mayor Lurie and the city.
In March of last year, after Lurie vowed to crack down on drug dealing and street fencing, the two BART stations saw more police and community pop-ups promoting the plazas as family-friendly gathering spots.
Mission Local reported on the first 100 days of the 2025 crackdown.
Fielder said she was also impressed by the community ambassador statistics: Since January, ambassadors — non-police street workers who respond to conflicts and emergencies — at the two plazas have responded to 1,538 hostile street situations, reversed 15 overdoses, and collected 1,390 needles off the street.
“This shouldn’t be a statistic that we’re proud of because of just how large it is,” Fielder said, “But they collected 1,390 needles off the street.”
In a letter addressed to Lurie in July, Fielder requested 24/7 ambassadors for the 16th and 24th street stations. Lurie’s office denied her request, citing costs.
In the same letter, Fielder requested data from multiple agencies to track the progress of Lurie’s 90-day push. The new dashboard appears to answer that request.
Fielder said she plans to write another letter to Lurie’s office to request more ambassadors, street cleaning, police foot patrols and data of visible drug use that doesn’t just rely on 911 calls.
“My long-term hope is that street conditions are acceptable to visitors and residents alike,” Fielder said. “We’ll know that we got there when people are not complaining about Mission Street conditions in my inbox.”
Not sure I see the value in this or that I believe mayor Laurie’s stated commitments to intervening in the state of the streets. You’d think someone in a severe state of fentanyl fold would be an obvious mark for city services & yet it’s a very common sight.
The dashboard is a city function dashboard not a community experience dashboard. Datapoints are only noted when there is contact with the city.
This means that residents have to double down on calling 415-553-0123 to report fentanyl nests in order to score those datapoints for the dashboard.
One good use for AI would be for there to be cameras that were only trained to recognize fentanyl nests and file automated reports with SFPD non-emergency while purging all potentially identifying imagery so that datapoints are collected when behavior happens, not when someone’s there to observe it.
Statistically, they should assume that a quantum superposition of statistically likely behaviors describes circumstances when there is no observer to collapse the wave function. Or maybe Bohm was correct and the addicts are carried forward in time on pilot waves.
Obvious point – We wouldn’t have to collect 1,390 needles off of the street if the city stopped funding so-called “Harm Reductionists” to provide packets of 30 needles per illegal drug user per day! I am all for “Needle Exchange” (one for one, give your dirty needle to the healthcare agency, receive one clean needle in exchange, along with a strongly-worded pro-treatment spiel, hopefully!) – but this is an unlimited free needle giveaway, and needs to stop ASAP! Fielder, are you listening to your actual constituents?
The supervisor is enabling the real problem: illegal, unsupervised food vendors who assault inspectors and residents and violate the ADA. This failure to act is making the Mission more dangerous.
Pretty amazing Fielder is “disappointed” given she does nothing but exasperate the system. Even for how horrible Ronan was, she never made sure the Mission became the Tenderloin. Fielder has done that in overdrive, with both BART stations becoming containment zones that have broken out.