Petition To Stop Further Cuts To SFPD Staffing
San Francisco Police cadets with Chief Bill Scott in 2019.
To the Board of Supervisors Budget Committee:
Please do not further reduce the number of police officers in San Francisco.
Crimes like burglaries and homicide are up while our police staffing is low due to a record number of retirements and resignations. Yet the movement to defund the police continues to call for even fewer police in San Francisco.
The New York Times recently featured SFPD as a model of reform. We can embrace more reforms. We can shift police calls away from situations best suited for social workers. We can value a diverse police force while ensuring they serve the community at the highest standard. This requires investment.
Arbitrarily cutting beat officers will not make SFPD better or residents safer. We still need police to protect the public and we can’t forget about victims of crime.
BACKGROUND INFO
San Francisco’s mayor and police chief both agreed to redirect $120 million from the police budget over the next two years to fund programs that will support and invest in the city’s underserved Black community.
Yet Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who serves on the Budget and Appropriations committee, announced that she wants to make much deeper cuts to SFPD and lay off officers. This will be discussed at budget committee meetings from August 20 to 24.
Further reducing our police force is a bad idea for the following reasons:
Burglaries, car thefts and homicides are up. Some crime categories have continued to rise during the pandemic when things were supposed to be quieter with social distancing. We still need police to protect the public and we can’t forget about victims.
SFPD is already stretched thin. City Hall commissioned a study on police staffing earlier this year. It said a city our size should have at least 200 more police officers than we currently have. The Chronicle recently reported that a record number of officers are retiring this year or leaving the force for jobs in other cities.
Laying off police officers will affect the newest and most diverse members of the force who come from the communities they serve — the kind of officers we need more of.
Fewer police officers will negatively impact neighborhoods that have been long-ignored, especially where immigrant communities are often vulnerable to crime. Residents are asking for more police officers who are bi-lingual and culturally sensitive, which requires investment not defunding.
The New York Times featured San Francisco as a city “where police reform has worked.” The Chronicle cited how SFPD recently went one year without an officer-involved shooting — the longest such span in nearly two decades. Today’s SFPD has strict police conduct policies that contributed to a 47 percent decline in use of force since 2016. San Francisco is also one of only a few cities to have embraced a swath of police reform policies that activists are pushing every city to adopt to reduce police violence. SFPD is still working on implementing critical reforms recommended by the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice. Why should SFPD face drastic defunding when it has been making progress on reforms in recent years?