San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced significant changes to the city’s street crisis response teams, which are charged with responding to disruptive incidents in public spaces involving persons with mental health or related needs, at a press conference at the Department of Emergency Management Tuesday morning.
The primary mission of the teams is to vector persons involved in incidents to appropriate behavioral health or other stabilizing services while enforcing city laws and other regulations against blocking public sidewalks and similar areas. The changes to the program are among those Lurie included in a policy directive issued last week, along with new standards and metrics for performance outcomes and the scaling back of harm reduction programs.
“Until now San Francisco has had nine different teams responding to the crises on our streets — nine teams with different mandates, different chains of command, different approaches, and still, every San Franciscan, including myself, has walked by someone suffering and wished they could do more,” Lurie told reporters at the Tuesday press conference, where participating city department heads, including Police Chief Bill Scott, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, and Fire Chief Dean Crispen were also present.
The new structure consolidates personnel from seven city departments into ‘a unified street team model’ with five neighborhood teams operating with an additional citywide response team.
The new structure consolidates personnel from seven city departments into “a unified street team model” with five neighborhood teams operating with an additional citywide response team.
The neighborhood-based teams will respond to encampments and urgent incidents of unsafe behavior. In contrast, the citywide team will respond to a statement from the Mayor’s Office called “high-need areas, preventing displacement and public safety issues before they escalate.”
“We’re shifting from scattered responses to neighborhood-based teams,” Lurie continued at the briefing. “Each team will know the people they’re helping by name; each team will be responsible for helping these individuals on their journey from the street to treatment, housing, or back to loved ones. Our goal is to give people a better, more humane option than being on the street, whether that’s a shelter bed or a treatment center. And for those unwilling to accept help, we can no longer allow them to cause disorder on our sidewalks, Muni stops, or parks. . . . If you’re a business owner, a resident, or a visitor to our city, you will see the change, and if you’re someone who needs care on the street, you won’t be passed from one team to the next.”
Each team will be led by Department of Emergency Management (DEM) personnel.
DEM Director Mary Ellen Carroll told reporters that her agency was “deeply invested in this work and uniquely positioned to coordinate it across city agencies,” and said that the plan “incorporates many of the lessons that we have learned over the years.”
“The unified team will take an approach that identifies daily hotspots that need immediate attention,” she continued, describing “a client-based engagement strategy, which will help us focus on individuals who are the most disruptive and the most in need of support. This new structure is already facilitating closer coordination; we’ve been working on this for quite some time since the mayor came to office … we are seeing more effective operations across the city already.”
A release from the Mayor’s office featured statements of support for the plan from other officials and stakeholders, including Supervisors Matt Dorsey, Myrna Melgar, Danny Sauter, and Bilal Mahmood.
A performance audit of the city’s street crisis response teams by the Budget and Legislative Analyst at the request of former Supervisor Dean Preston in late 2023 found a lack of coordination among program assets as well as verifiable performance metrics.
Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, told The Voice, “Mayor Lurie’s action is long overdue. The city has spent millions of dollars on street teams that lack accountability and allow, and even promote, sidewalk drug use. The proof is in the outcomes, but the city is heading in the right direction.”