SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, known as a hotspot for open drug use, is seeing a decrease in crime.
Data from the San Francisco Police Department shows the curfew program in the Tenderloin is working. The curfew was adopted in July of last year, and it made it mandatory for corner stores and businesses to close from midnight to 5 a.m. If they don’t, they can get fined.
The goal was to see if, by implementing this curfew, crime would go down, and the initial data is promising.
It’s been nine months, and photos by SFPD are the first set of visual evidence of improvement since the Tenderloin curfew was implemented.
“My recommendation is to absolutely keep it going,” SFPD Commander Derrick Lew said.
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During the last Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee, Commander Lew said the improvement is also data-driven, pointing to the total number of calls for service in the Tenderloin decreasing by nearly 18% during the curfew and the total number of crimes decreasing by 13% in the same timeframe.
ABC7 went to the Tenderloin to speak to people there who said the change started four to five months into the curfew.
“You see less people, users, sellers, you don’t have many people lying on the sidewalk,” Gregg Johnson said.
Johnson has lived in the Tenderloin for eight years and says people can sleep now, but he has noticed a spillover effect.
“Right now, we are still pushing people around. Around the blocks,” Johnson said.
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SFPD acknowledges this.
“It is a little bit part of the strategy because we don’t have resources to blanket the entire city,” Commander Lew said.
Tenderloin Housing Clinic pushed for this curfew and said it’s slowly changing the district.
“It prevents other people from other neighborhoods to come and do drugs and buy alcohol late at night,” said Gloria del Mar Lemus, Program Manager at Tenderloin Housing Clinic & Voz Latina. “There are still some challenges, this is a work in progress, I think, but a lot of the streets are looking a lot cleaner.”
Most businesses, except for liquor stores, must close by midnight. Some see it as unfair.
“Impacting the ability to extend hours and have more flow of cash through the ability to work and have people working hours, and just loss of opportunity for more jobs for more people,” said Von Hope, worker at 415 Marker and Kitchen.
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Following this data, Supervisor Dorsey is looking into the possibility of extending this curfew, which could be expanded to other parts of the city.
He said residents in nearby SOMA want to see this curfew in their district. He is also considering adding some businesses to the exemption group.
“Because there are some restaurants that stay open because they serve the neighborhood but don’t create a public nuisance,” Supervisor Dorsey said. “This week I’m going to be going out overnight to look at it myself, and I want to have some conversations with some of the people who are out there, including some of the business owners. There are going to be some tradeoffs. Right now, we are facing a problem with public disorders related to drugs and drug dealing.”
This is a two-year pilot program. For every hour a store remains open during the curfew hours, the city can fine them up to $1,000. In the last nine months, there have been four repeat violations.
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