San Francisco is arresting more people for drugs than it has in years — but here's the catch: the dealers aren't the ones getting booked. You're listening to The San Francisco Daily Fix — I'm Cassidy, with Devin. Today we're digging into Lurie's drug enforcement push, what his new RESET centers actually are, and a ballot measure that could punch a hole in the city budget. The arrests are up, but if we're sweeping users while the supply chain walks free, someone needs to explain the theory of change here. That's exactly the question — and the data has some uncomfortable answers for everybody. Let's get into it. First, from David Hernandez, Maggie Angst, and Danielle Echeverria:
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s crackdown on San Francisco’s open-air drug markets has delivered one clear result so far: a sharp rise in arrests and citations for low-level drug crimes. What remains far less clear is whether the enforcement is disrupting drug dealing and leading more people off the streets and into treatment.
A Chronicle investigation out yesterday from David Hernandez, Maggie Angst, and Danielle Echeverria finds that Mayor Lurie's drug crackdown is producing a big jump in arrests — but here's the twist: nearly 70% of those non-sale drug arrests this year involve marijuana possession, up from 40-50% in prior years. Dealers aren't the ones getting caught. So the headline says 'drug crackdown' but what we actually built is a weed citation machine. If you're serious about open-air drug markets, you go after fentanyl dealers — not somebody with a joint. This is the city protecting its stats while the real problem walks. To be fair, the RESET center — the new sheriff-led sobering facility — is at least a concrete intervention for misdemeanor cases. That's a real piece of infrastructure. But if the underlying arrest numbers are padded with marijuana possession, the progress looks a lot less meaningful. And I'll say this about the critics demanding free drug supplies — that's not a crackdown, that's a maintenance program. Lurie ran on actually fixing this. Busting people for weed while heroin and fentanyl flow freely is not what anyone voted for. KQED puts the RESET center this way:
San Francisco’s latest effort to tackle rampant outdoor drug use is a new sobering center where law enforcement will drop off people detained for public intoxication as part of a pilot program. Sheriff’s department and city officials say that the facility, called the Rapid Enforcement, Support, Evaluation and Triage, or RESET, Center, is not a detention center or an emergency room, but a place where people can connect with different service providers.
KQED has the details on Mayor Lurie's new RESET Center — that stands for Rapid Enforcement, Support, Evaluation and Triage. It's a sobering facility where cops drop off people detained for public intoxication, overseen by the Sheriff's Office. This is the gap we've been missing for thirty years — not jail, not the ER, something in between. The old playbook was arrest, release, repeat. If this actually connects people to services while they're sober enough to hear it, that's a real intervention. Worth noting it's a pilot, and the City Attorney's office has already flagged concerns, and there's apparently infighting at City Hall. So the politics here are not settled. Of course there is. Any time you attach law enforcement to anything addiction-related in this city, half of City Hall loses its mind. But the Sheriff running this isn't the same as throwing people in a cell — someone has to have authority to actually hold people long enough to get them help. And on Prop C, here’s Sylvie Sturm at San Francisco Public Press:
Proposition C pushes back on efforts to raise a city tax tied to high executive pay, while providing more tax cuts to a wider swath of the business community. The measure proposes an expanded exemption threshold for gross receipts taxes to companies earning up to $7.5 million in annual revenue — up from the current $5 million cap. This would allow more businesses to avoid the tax altogether.
Prop C is on the June ballot, and the San Francisco Public Press has a solid breakdown of what's actually in it — shoutout to Lila LaHood. The headline: it cuts taxes on businesses earning under $7.5 million in gross receipts, tweaks the executive pay surcharge, and costs the city between $30 and $40 million a year according to the city controller. The executive pay tax is the real fight here. It hits companies where the CEO makes 100 times more than the median SF worker — sounds righteous, but the way it's structured, it's basically a penalty for having a local workforce. You shrink your SF headcount, your median goes up, your tax bill goes down. It's accidentally an incentive to hire fewer people here. And the context is a $936 million two-year budget deficit. So the timing of a $30-to-$40 million annual revenue cut is, shall we say, spicy. Labor unions want to close the deficit on the backs of corporations, and business groups say more taxes accelerate the exits we've already seen. Both of those things can be true simultaneously — that's the actual tension, and voters deserve to hear it straight. We’ll drop links to every story we talked about in the show notes, so if one of these caught your ear, you can go read the full piece.
That’s The San Francisco Daily Fix for Saturday, May 2nd. This is a Lantern Podcast.