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Residents press commission for coordinated action on cameras, foot patrols, pedestrian safety and services
Summary
Community groups and residents urged the Police Commission to coordinate city agencies, fund pedestrian-safety fixes, review surveillance camera monitoring and support the New Tenderloin (TNT) neighborhood initiative; speakers presented petitions and recommended a liaison and neighborhood rescue team model.
Dozens of Tenderloin residents and neighborhood groups used the commission’s public-comment period to press for coordinated city responses to quality-of-life and safety issues, from camera monitoring to pedestrian protections and services for people experiencing homelessness.
Dina Hilliard of the Safety Network introduced TNT (New Tenderloin), a community-led coalition focused on drugs, pedestrian safety and violence, and submitted a petition of about 5,000 signatures asking city officials for help. “We organized the neighborhood to organize around those three issues,” Hilliard said, and handed packets to commissioners.
Multiple speakers called for greater coordination among the police department, the mayor’s office and other agencies. Philip Nguyen of the Southeast Asian Community Center described confusion about police-district boundaries, saying some residents do not know whether they belong to Tenderloin or Northern Station and urging clearer outreach in Vietnamese and Spanish.
Several parents and neighborhood advocates called for more pedestrian protections near schools. Elizabeth Alexander of La Voz Latina said the Tenderloin is “the most dangerous place in San Francisco for pedestrians” and requested structural street changes, speed enforcement and more traffic controllers at school open and closing times.
Speakers also questioned the effectiveness of newly installed surveillance cameras. David Millevos of the Community Leadership Alliance said community-on-patrol volunteers saw little benefit from cameras during night patrols and urged that cameras be actively monitored if they are to be effective.
Others asked the commission to examine General Order 5.03 and its impact on officers’ ability to address quality-of-life problems, to consider stay-away orders or gang injunctions where appropriate, and to support a community-justice center and better land-use monitoring to reduce street-level impacts on businesses and residents.
What happens next: Commissioners asked attendees to contribute to the PERF study (www.sfpolicereview.org) that is gathering input on district boundaries and foot-patrol deployment and said the commission will consider TNT’s requests and the petition as part of ongoing policy discussions.
