The group is a collection of property owners who have levied an extra tax<\/a> on property in their part of SoMa in order to pay for the kind of street-level security that neighborhood residents and business owners claim the city is failing to provide in one of the poorest areas of San Francisco.\u00a0<\/p>\n Molina\u2019s job is to keep sidewalks clear of people sitting or lying down on the pavement.\u00a0If he sees people using drugs in the open, he tells them to move along. He can do that work better than most, he said, because he has lived some version of their lives himself. <\/p>\n Molina was homeless, incarcerated, and then went back to living on the streets, with few options for work or shelter. That history helps him to relate to people in crisis, he said, and motivates him to draw on his deescalation skills instead of reacting with aggression or anger.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t allow people to harm us, or anyone else,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n West SoMa locals say the private patrols capture a broader truth about the neighborhood. <\/p>\n More than a dozen residents and business owners told Mission Local that the area has come to feel like a \u201ccontainment zone;\u201d\u00a0 a handful of blocks where the city\u2019s hardest street problems seem concentrated, and law enforcement feels absent.<\/p>\n The area seems increasingly abandoned by city officials, they say. It is left to deal with drug use, assaults and theft that, they feel, aren\u2019t tolerated in other neighborhoods.\u00a0<\/p>\n Police data shows one reason why. When it comes to lower-priority calls that shape daily life in the neighborhood, like\u00a0drug use, noise or situations that hold the potential for physical harm,\u00a0local police are slow to respond \u2014\u00a0much slower than they react to reports of similar crimes citywide.<\/p>\n Data from December 2025 to March 2026 shows that San Francisco police officers get to the most urgent emergencies in SoMa relatively quickly. The less-urgent calls, though, are a different story.<\/p>\n For Priority A calls, the most urgent incidents involving immediate danger to life or property, police responded to calls in SoMa about 8 percent faster than the citywide median, at a median of 7.51 minutes, compared with 8.08 minutes citywide.\u00a0<\/p>\n But for Priority B calls \u2014 situations involving potential harm, a suspect who may still be nearby or a recently committed crime \u2014 police responded to calls in SoMa about 55 percent slower than the citywide median, at a median of almost 40 minutes.<\/p>\n For Priority C calls, lower-urgency incidents with no present danger and no suspect in the area, police took around 53 percent longer to respond than the citywide median, at a median of an hour and 54 minutes.<\/p>\n When asked about this discrepancy, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey said SoMa residents are not wrong to wonder about the delays. When asked what he thought of residents\u2019 concerns that SoMa has become a \u201ccontainment zone,\u201d Dorsey responded, \u201cI think they\u2019re right.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The San Francisco Police Department, for its part, disagreed. <\/p>\n \u201cThe accusation that West SoMa is a \u2018containment zone\u2019 for crime and disorder is unequivocally false,\u201d department spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky wrote in an emailed statement. \u201cCrime is illegal everywhere in San Francisco, and our officers are working hard to ensure our streets are clean and safe.\u201d<\/p>\n Street conditions have been worsening for years in West SoMa and the Tenderloin, Dorsey continued. He said SoMa\u2019s police response-time numbers point to severe understaffing<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cPriority A calls will get 100 percent service,\u201d he said. \u201cBut what that means is, most of those cops are only doing Priority A calls.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The end result, he said, is that \u201cthe lower-level kinds of disorder that can be very disruptive to the neighborhood diminish people\u2019s confidence in their government.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The police department has been working to fill a staffing gap of more than 500 officers<\/a> citywide, Sernoffsky wrote. <\/p>\n \u201cWe are always working diligently to improve our response times to all calls while continuing to prioritize violent crimes in progress,\u201d Sernoffsky continued. \u201cAs SFPD increases staffing across the department, we expect to see shorter responses to A, B and C priority calls at all district stations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The biggest cluster of calls occurs in SoMa\u2019s western corridor, especially around Sixth and Natoma, Sixth and Stevenson, Sixth and Mission, Sixth and Minna, and the intersection at Sixth, Market, Golden Gate, and Taylor. Another high cluster of calls has come from around Seventh and Eighth Streets near Mission, Natoma and Stevenson.<\/p>\n The biggest cluster of calls occurs in West SoMa<\/p>\n Number of calls for service per intersection in SoMa, Dec. 28, 2025-Mar. 28, 2026<\/p>\n \t\t 22% of share of all SoMa calls <\/p>\n were from the 6th Street corridor<\/p>\n S H O W P L A C E <\/p>\n S Q U A R E<\/p>\n Number of calls <\/p>\n per intersection<\/p>\n \t\t 22% of share of all SoMa calls <\/p>\n were from the 6th Street corridor<\/p>\n S H O W P L A C E <\/p>\n S Q U A R E<\/p>\n Number of calls per intersection<\/p>\n Chart by Iryna Humenyuk. Source: Public Safety department via SF Open Data. Note: Data covers top 40 calls for service in the SoMa neighborhood.<\/p>\n The western SoMa corridor where calls cluster has a combined poverty rate of 23 percent, compared with 11.3 percent countywide \u2014 roughly double the county\u2019s overall rate.\u00a0<\/p>\n Local residents and business owners repeatedly told Mission Local that the slow response times have discouraged them from seeking help from the police.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI hear from a lot of my neighbors that they\u2019ve stopped calling the police because the police don\u2019t come, or they come so late,\u201d said Shaun Aukland, a member of the West SoMa Neighborhood Association.<\/p>\n The group filed a formal complaint<\/a> to the state of California on April 3, alleging that San Francisco has violated state-housing law by concentrating poverty and disadvantage in SoMa, and by failing to provide basic city services on the same level as other neighborhoods.\u00a0<\/p>\n Residents who spoke with Mission Local wonder why police delays are so prolonged when SoMa\u2019s crime rates have far exceeded those in the rest of San Francisco \u2014 more than double the rate in every other neighborhood for all crime categories throughout 2025, according to police incident data<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re tired of being number one,\u201d said Reese Isbell, another neighborhood association member.\u00a0<\/p>\n Isbell gave a presentation to that effect to SFPD Chief Derrick Lew and other police staff on April 3 during a neighborhood meeting that turned tense, according to area residents.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI walked away feeling worse, not better,\u201d said Leah Edwards, who lives at Eighth and Folsom streets. \u201cThe response we got was, \u2018Well, all of San Francisco is understaffed, so you\u2019re not the only one.\u2019 We understand everyone\u2019s understaffed. But, relative to everyone being understaffed, we are worse than everybody else.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n According to department figures<\/a> from a 2025 report, SFPD\u2019s Southern Station, which serves SoMa and five other areas, handled 31,955 calls for service and spent 39,189 hours responding to those calls \u2014 a ratio that gives officers assigned to the Southern Station one of the heaviest workloads in San Francisco. <\/p>\n A staffing table<\/a> shows the Southern Station running about 66 sworn officers short of its recommended level.\u00a0<\/p>\n The largest gap is in Sector Patrol, the officers who are responsible for responding to calls for service from the public. The table lists no foot- or bike-beat officers at all, even though 20 are recommended.\u00a0In October, Mission Local reported that SFPD staffed less than a third<\/a> of its foot beats across the city.<\/p>\n The numbers make some residents wonder why one of the city\u2019s busiest districts is still missing a basic patrol presence. Available data suggests that some quieter police districts are better-staffed.<\/p>\n A 2025 SFPD staffing report shows that Southern Station was operating at about 78 percent of its recommended sector patrol officer staffing in 2024. Meanwhile, Park was at about 98 percent, the Tenderloin at 101 percent, and Bayview at 112 percent.<\/p>\n Dorsey said that Southern Station\u2019s understaffing appears disproportionate compared to other stations, and said that he wants the police department to explain the disparity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we should not expect to see is that some neighborhoods and some districts are repeatedly worse than others,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat that tells me is that we are failing to allocate resources where they\u2019re needed, and doing it again and again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In an emailed response, Sernoffsky wrote that, in the coming weeks, the police department \u201cwill be assigning an additional 11 officers to Southern Station, who will focus primarily on the SoMa Neighborhood,\u201d beginning their new roles in early May. <\/p>\n The department \u201cwill continue to add staff to the station in the following months,\u201d as it rolls out new station boundaries<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dr. Jack Sinow, an optometrist who has run his practice in West SoMa for 52 years, remembers when city police had a foot patrol in the neighborhood. It made a difference. <\/p>\n \u201cThey would come down to Sixth Street often and walk around, and come into the offices and say hello,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t see that anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n The police service delays, meanwhile, have led some neighborhood residents to invest in their own private patrols.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve had private security in place since October 2024,\u201d said Alex Ludlum, a former city commissioner<\/a> and executive director of the SoMa West Community Benefit District, an organization that took in $5.8 million<\/a> in revenue in 2025. \u201cIt\u2019s obvious the police don\u2019t care to enforce the law in our area.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a designated containment zone, plainly,\u201d Ludlum continued. \u201cThe city has a policy of containing its ills in the Tenderloin and SoMa. That\u2019s consistent across supervisors.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/soma-containment-2.jpg\"\/)
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