Can San Francisco Arrest Its Way Out of Tenderloin’s Drug Crisis?

One year into San Francisco’s push to dismantle open-air drug markets, authorities are touting thousands of arrests by the law enforcement campaign; last week alone, police announced they had arrested 10 people in a single-day operation in the Tenderloin, as well as the arrests days earlier of two brothers suspected of trafficking drugs in the area and carrying 6 kilograms of fentanyl, among other substances.

Still, with people dying of overdoses near a record pace and neighbors’ complaints of a pervasive drug trade, some policy experts have questioned whether San Francisco is taking the right approach to the crisis.

Mayor London Breed launched the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center, a centralized hub for local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to disrupt drug dealing and public drug use in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods, in May 2023. Last week, on its first anniversary, Breed’s office released a public data dashboard showing that in the first year of the crackdown, law enforcement officials made more than 3,000 arrests and seized nearly 200 kilos of narcotics.

Of those arrests, 1,008 people were suspected of dealing drugs, 1,284 were suspected of using drugs, and 858 people had outstanding warrants. The top two drugs seized by weight were fentanyl, at more than 89 kilos, and methamphetamine, at 48 kilos. In a statement announcing the first-year data, city officials called those “significant results.”

“The partnerships we put in place are getting fentanyl out of our neighborhoods, and with new technology being deployed and more officers joining our ranks, our efforts will only grow stronger over the coming year,” Breed said in a statement.

Some residents and policy experts, however, said the coordination center has had little effect on the neighborhoods’ struggle to curtail drug dealing.

Randy Shaw, co-founder of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said that while arrests and seizures have been centralized around United Nations Plaza, the area’s drug market is still pervasive.

“At a place like 7th and Market, which I’ve written about a lot and which has gotten a lot of attention on social media, there’s still 50 drug dealers and drug users out there every night,” Shaw said. “Why is that still happening?”

In the two and a half years since Breed declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin related to the fentanyl crisis, San Francisco has recorded its highest number of overdose deaths in one year, totaling 810 in 2023. This year, the city is on track to surpass 770 overdose deaths.

Despite the city’s efforts, the crisis on the streets of the Tenderloin remains, Shaw said.

“We created an emergency coordination center, and a year later, the activities that exist there remain higher than any other neighborhood would tolerate and would be allowed to continue,” he said.

Keith Humphreys, a drug policy expert and professor of psychology at Stanford University, said he believes this is because San Francisco’s efforts are too focused on arresting drug dealers and users, which isn’t necessarily aligned with residents’ goals.

“You can arrest individual dealers forever, but your goal, I think, is to suppress the open-air market, and that is not done by individual arrests,” Humphreys told KQED.

According to Humphreys, data shows that closing drug markets takes collaboration not only among law enforcement agencies but with social service providers and prosecutors as well.

The coordination center works with city agencies, including the Department of Public Health and the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, to connect people with treatment and shelter options, city officials said in a statement. However, in contrast to the arrests dashboard, no data was available on the number of people who used those resources, and the mayor’s office did not respond to a request for the information at the time of publication.

Another point that could work against the city’s efforts is the discrepancy between the numbers of arrests and convictions in the data, Humphreys said.

“If you don’t have [convictions], the arrests are counterproductive because if they don’t result in convictions, it teaches people being arrested is no big deal,” he said.

As of May 25, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office said it had been presented with 394 felony narcotics cases this year and filed 344 of them. Officers with the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center have made 1,159 narcotics arrests since January, according to SFPD data.

As officials tout the number of arrests and the amount of drugs confiscated, Humphreys said the city should track other metrics instead.

“What I would like to see on their dashboard is, ‘How many sidewalks can you walk down without seeing a dealer or users?’ You can assess that very easily,” Humphreys said. “I think if they looked at that, my suspicion would be that while the arrests went up, that number stayed the same. When you gather that data, you think, ‘We need to think of a different strategy.’”