San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Deadly streets but few citations
Police give just 10 tickets a day — a huge drop in past 3 years
Considering all of the extravagantly dangerous driving on the streets of San Francisco, issuing traffic citations should be a cinch for city cops. Tickets could rain down like confetti at a Warriors championship parade.
But as with so many of its responsibilities, the police force has nearly given up on traffic enforcement, letting speeders, red-light runners and illegal turners run roughshod, endangering pedestrians, bicyclists and other motorists.
A new analysis of every traffic citation issued by San Francisco police over the past 4½ years shows enforcement of the rules of the road has plummeted. Incredibly, the 45 officers working in the department’s traffic division have issued a combined 10
“People are picking up on the fact that police aren’t really doing their jobs.”
citations a day this year.
Yes, in a city with nearly half a million registered vehicles, a ticket is written every 2½ hours, on average. That’s a huge drop in just three years: In 2019, the department issued an average of 74 traffic citations per day — or about one every 20 minutes.
“That’s pretty interesting and scary, frankly,” said Stephen Braitsch, a safe streets advocate and data analyst who requested the information from the Police Department and shared it with me.
“What exactly are they doing?” he asked of the cops, a question many San Franciscans have asked in recent months after a spate of cases in which police didn’t seem to do much policing.
Officer Kathryn Winters, an SFPD spokesperson, said the traffic division is at its lowest staffing level in 30 years and that, in 2019, it had 69 officers. The current 45 officers have other duties besides issuing citations, including investigating collisions, helping with efforts to increase police presence in the Tenderloin, and managing crowds at parades and marches.
“The officers assigned to the traffic company continue to go out every day balancing all of these obligations all while continuing to carry out their core mission of enforcing traffic safety in San Francisco,” Winters said in a statement.
She said the traffic division conducted a speed enforcement operation on Wednesday — the day after I sent the department questions for this column — in the South of Market area, issuing three citations plus additional warnings. I could stand outside The Chronicle newsroom at Fifth and Mission streets in SoMa and spot three illegal driving maneuvers in five minutes.
Luke Bornheimer, another safe streets advocate who worked with Braitsch on the citation analysis, said, “People are picking up on the fact that police aren’t really doing their jobs. We know the streets are dangerous because people think, rightfully, that no one’s going to pull them over.”
Braitsch, who lives in the Haight, requested the data in May after becoming exasperated with cars speeding through his neighborhood with no repercussions. Most of the city’s streets have a speed limit of 25 mph, but too many drivers ignore it. Data for Braitsch’s analysis runs through May 23 of this year.
SFPD’s plunge in traffic enforcement comes amid a national reckoning over police abuses, and continuing evidence that many officers racially profile drivers. Some civil rights advocates want traffic enforcement removed from police officers’ duties and assigned to unarmed civilians instead.
But that hasn’t happened yet — and neither has the adoption of automated speed enforcement. For now, it’s police or nothing when it comes to citing dangerous drivers.
Neither Braitsch nor Bornheimer wants more police officers in San Francisco, but they argue the department could be doing more effective work with the officers, money and equipment it already has.
In 2014, the city adopted a Vision Zero pledge to eliminate traffic fatalities within a decade. The Police Department was a key part of that commitment, pledging that half its traffic citations would be for the five behaviors that are most likely to result in crashes: speeding, running red lights, blowing through stop signs, failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, and failing to yield while making a left turn or U-turn.
But just 35% of the paltry number of citations issued in San Francisco since 2018 were for those five violations, while the majority were for behaviors unlikely to injure anyone else — like expired tags, suspended licenses, tinted windows and broken tail lights, the analysis found.
In neighborhoods with lower incomes and more diversity — including the Tenderloin, Chinatown and Bayview-Hunters
Luke Bornheimer, safe streets advocate
Point — an even higher share of citations were for these relatively minor infractions. It seems people of color always bear the brunt of enforcement, even the thin gruel served by San Francisco.
Meanwhile, just 32% of citations citywide are issued on the “high injury network” — the 13% of city streets where 75% of fatalities and major injuries take place. These include busy thoroughfares such as Geary Boulevard, Van Ness Avenue and 19th Avenue, as well as almost every street in the Tenderloin.
Braitsch and Bornheimer argue that the department’s 45 traffic officers would be far more effective if they aimed their citations at the five bad driving behaviors taking place on the high injury network.
But that’s not happening, and the outcome is predictable. Already this year, 19 people have died in traffic collisions on San Francisco streets, a figure that puts the city on target to match the 31 deaths in 2014 that prompted the Vision Zero commitment in the first place. Hundreds more people are severely injured on San Francisco streets each year but survive.
The drop in traffic citations mirrors what many city residents say is a plunge in overall policing. There were the officers who arrived at a break-in at a cannabis dispensary in the Haight in November and watched as a person exited the building, hopped in a car and drove away. There were the squatters that parked a Mercedes and BMW in front of a Bernal Heights home early this year, created a drug den inside it, wrecked the property and were allowed by police to leave with no repercussions. There was the San Francisco Wine Society parklet that was trashed by a vandal in December — thanks in part to police officers who, according to camera footage, arrived midway through the destruction and left, allowing it to continue.
Then there was Tyler Sterkel, the dad who in March found an apparently stolen van full of his family’s pilfered luggage, reported it to police and had nothing come of it. After a column about his saga, police told him a sergeant had been assigned to his case, and he’d soon hear more. He never did.
“Nope,” he texted Thursday. “Crickets.”
Told that 45 police officers are issuing a measly 10 traffic citations a day, Sterkel said, “Are they on an unofficial strike? What the heck is going on?”
That’s a great question, but the answer from the police force is a flat no. Sgt. Adam Lobsinger, a department spokesperson, said there’s no work stoppage or wildcat strike.
“We’re 500 officers short,” he said, an oftrepeated statement that is questioned by some police staffing experts. “We’re out there doing the best job that we can.”
Tracy McCray, the president of the Police Officers Association, agreed, saying, “I wouldn’t stand for that. We’ve never lost our motivation.”
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said he plans to call a hearing on the Police Department’s lack of traffic enforcement when the board returns from summer recess.
“I hear a lot from constituents that it doesn’t seem like any traffic laws ever get enforced in San Francisco, and I hear a lot of frustration about that,” he said. “I think the department needs an opportunity to explain.” Mayor London Breed has ultimate control over the Police Department. She’s also the only elected official who signed on to Vision Zero back in 2014 and is still in office. I asked several times for an interview with her about police performance, sinking citation numbers and rising traffic deaths.
She declined, but her spokesperson, Jeff Cretan, said the city’s new budget will fund hiring 220 officers through eight academy classes over two years, higher starting salaries for police and retention bonuses to keep officers from retiring or taking jobs in other departments. Breed’s hope is that a fully staffed department will perform better — including in enforcing traffic laws, he said.
“Enforcement is not only about catching people who are speeding, which is extremely dangerous, but also setting an expectation that you will be held accountable,” Cretan said. Asked whether Breed remains confident in Police Chief Bill Scott and his top brass, Cretan said yes.
“That being said,” he added, “she wants to see results on the street.”