San Francisco’s newest crime-fighting hub proved its purpose with a live case. As officials gathered downtown in December 2025 to introduce the city’s Real-Time Investigation Center, investigators there were already coordinating with law enforcement in the East Bay to make an arrest in an active homicide.
The center, known internally as the R-TIC, uses a platform developed by public safety software company Peregrine Technologies to give San Francisco Police Department investigators a single place to access and contextualize existing data in real time. Since it opened in August 2025, the department says the center’s work has contributed to at least 800 arrests.
How the Real-Time Investigation Center works
The center is built to accelerate accurate response while incidents are still unfolding. For instance, when a license plate reader flags a vehicle tied to criminal activity, the department can immediately dispatch a drone to the scene. Officers receive a live, precise location, allowing them to respond directly instead of searching for a suspect who already has a head start.
“Criminals, people that commit crimes. We’re catching them faster,” SFPD Commander Thomas Maguire said at the December event.
The department has been clear about the limits on how those tools operate. SFPD confirmed that drones are deployed only during active incidents, not flown over the city looking for something to happen, and license plate reader data is used to investigate specific crimes. Those guardrails reflect a broader expectation that public safety agencies can both reduce crime and respect individual privacy.
Peregrine Technologies
Cameras and drones are just two of the many systems continuously generating information. The challenge is no longer collecting data. It’s understanding how all of it fits together. The harder problem sits beneath the visible hardware, in the many separate systems where a department’s information tends to live.
“Law enforcement often has lots of different systems, lots of different places where information may sit. They need that information at their fingertips,” said Tim Shriver, Peregrine’s Head of State and Local Government. “Peregrine glues all those together, brings it into one place.”
Peregrine Technologies, a San Francisco company founded in 2018, does not gather, create, or sell data. Its platform takes the records an agency already holds, scattered across systems that were never designed to talk to each other, and brings them into one secure, searchable environment where authorized users can work. In a fast-moving case, the difference between an answer in minutes and an answer in days often comes down to whether an investigator can see everything at once.
The company has grown quickly on the strength of that idea. Peregrine now serves more than 400 organizations covering roughly 125 million people, and in June 2026 it raised $250 million in a Series D round that valued it at $6.8 billion.
One screen for multiple agencies
San Francisco’s R-TIC serves multiple public safety agencies. The police, sheriff’s department, and fire department all use the system, each through the lens of its own operational responsibilities.
“Having information coming from one source is key to coordinating responses. If we’re responding to a crime in progress, if we’re investigating something,” said San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto.
The value of these systems extends well beyond law enforcement. The same real-time operational picture that helps officers respond to crime can also help firefighters navigate a natural disaster. “Should we have an earthquake, we can send one of our members to this location, and they can view the videos with the use of the drones and identify whether our streets are passable,” said San Francisco Fire Chief Dean Crispen.
A downtown move funded by a private gift
The R-TIC reached its current form with help from outside City Hall. This year the Board of Supervisors accepted a $9.4 million donation from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen to relocate the operation from the Hall of Justice to an upgraded space in the heart of downtown.
Larsen framed the investment as a test of whether cities can adopt this kind of technology responsibly. “This could actually be a national role model for utilizing these technologies in the right way,” he said.
Mayor Daniel Lurie pointed to broader trends. “This center and the work of our officers is showing real results,” he said, adding that violent crime in the city had fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s. City officials credit the R-TIC as one part of a broader public safety strategy rather than the sole reason for the decline. Crime statistics were provided by the San Francisco Police Department and the mayor’s office.
Why the San Francisco model is drawing attention
San Francisco illustrates where Peregrine’s technology fits into modern public safety. The cameras, drones, and other sensors generate data; Peregrine is the connective layer between them, giving authorized personnel shared situational awareness by connecting and contextualizing information that would otherwise be disconnected by siloed systems.
For a company based a short distance from the center it now supports, the San Francisco deployment is close to home in more ways than one. It is a working example of the argument Peregrine Technologies makes to the governments it serves: better decisions come faster when the information an agency already has finally sits in one place.
*The San Francisco Weekly newsroom and editorial were not involved in the creation of this content.