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After Mayor Daniel Lurie’s bodyguard ended up bloodied in a brawl at the edge of the Tenderloin Thursday night, the neighborhood again found itself in the national spotlight for street violence — and locals are wary of the response that could follow.
A member of Lurie’s security detail told Mission Local that he was attacked while guarding the mayor — and video showed the two men tussling, with the officer thrown to the ground. But subsequent video released Friday called that account into question.
Surveillance footage from the Lower Nob Hill alley where the altercation took place showed that the police officer shoved the man, Tony Phillips, before he was slammed to the ground. The first video of the attack, obtained by Mission Local, spread online widely Thursday and Friday, with conservative outlets like Fox News and the New York Post blasting San Francisco as a bastion of chaos.
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One of the men who fought with Mayor Daniel Lurie’s police security detail on March 5, 2026, being arrested in the Tenderloin. Photo by Eleni Balakrishnan.
Police officers appeared to crack down on the block the day after. Three people who frequent Cedar Street, the small alley where the scuffle occurred, told Mission Local on Friday morning that police arrived around 7 a.m. to urge people gathered there to move along.
Video posted to social media also shows at least two people being arrested and multiple police and Public Works vehicles lining the street.
While the incident technically took place in nearby Lower Nob Hill, it was quickly identified with the Tenderloin. Some residents and community leaders in the Tenderloin hoped the incident would bring more attention and resources to the neighborhood, but they also worried about police overreach in the aftermath.
“The immediate response tends to be an overreaction,” said Joe Wilson, the director of the homeless services nonprofit Hospitality House. There are, he said, “much deeper structural inequities” in the Tenderloin “that continue to put neighborhood residents collectively at risk.”
Del Seymour, the founder of another homeless service provider, Code Tenderloin, and a recovering addict who once lived on the nearby streets, said he was familiar with Phillips from the neighborhood. He said Lurie should have left interacting with someone like Phillips to professionals instead of his security detail.
People living in the streets often have a “bundle” of personal struggles, like “drug use, mental challenges, anger issues, alcoholism” that can create someone “that is very difficult to deal with.”
“You can’t be driving through the Tenderloin jumping out trying to be Mother Teresa,” Seymour said. “You think you’re a celebrity being the mayor and you think everyone loves you, and most of us do, but there are people that don’t know who you are and you mean nothing to them.”
Lurie, he said, “has learned that now.”
According to Lurie’s bodyguard, Lurie approached the men to ask them to move out of the way.
Violent crime rates in the Tenderloin are down 22 percent since 2019, according to San Francisco Police Department data. But approaching people on the street can still be tricky because of the issues Seymour described.
And while reported crime has improved more in the Tenderloin than other areas, its residents are still subject to higher rates of violent crime compared to the rest of the city.
“Things have improved a lot … we can acknowledge those accomplishments, but we still get measured by our failures,” a law enforcement source said. “This is an example of, we’re not there yet … we’re still failing.”
The source, who is familiar with the area, said clearing the alleys is the typical response but agreed with Wilson that more is needed in the long-term.
“We just don’t want to be in this cycle of moving folks around. We want to find a pathway to getting people healthy,” they said. “If you get people healthy, you just eliminate so many issues.”
Randy Shaw, the longtime executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, said the incident showed one thing clearly: “The Tenderloin needs a higher level of service than it is getting.”
“That seems kind of obvious,” he added, “but it hasn’t yet translated into a policy action.”
Shaw pointed to the online conservative spin-zone and said the incident ran the risk of being used to pillory the city. “There’s a lot of right wing fanatics, MAGA people who want to discredit San Francisco.”
Indeed, the New York Post ran a story today saying the mayor was “under fire” for his “apathetic-seeming response” to the scuffle that broke out — seemingly a reference to Lurie walking away as his security guard wrestles with Phillips. The X account Libs of TikTok claimed Lurie “casually” abandoned his bodyguard.
Subsequent footage shows Lurie apparently calling for support from another officer.
Phillips and Abraham Simon, 33, who was also involved in the brawl, were both arrested at the scene. In his statement to responding police on Thursday, the officer from Lurie’s security detail said he believed Phillips was mentally ill and described him as speaking “gibberish.”
The San Francisco Examiner reported that Phillips was arrested in 2019 on suspicion of stabbing a man to death, but was never charged by the district attorney for lack of evidence.
Seymour said he believes Lurie is sensitive to the Tenderloin and won’t retaliate in an “unbalanced” way.
Shaw, for his part, said he has pointed out drug activity and disoriented people on Cedar Street for “quite some time” and wanted more from the city.
“That’s probably the predominant feeling in the Tenderloin,” Shaw said. “People feel like, ‘We’ve been telling people how there’s problems here.’”
Additional reporting by Alice Finno.
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