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The San Francisco Police Department’s tour-bus-sized “mobile command unit” has been parked on the 16th and Mission BART plaza, 24 hours a day, for more than a week now.
Since then, the plaza, which at times has been so packed with people selling and buying suspected stolen goods that pedestrians struggled to walk from BART to the bus stops, has been fairly clear.
“This is multiple agencies working together,” Mission Station Captain Liza Johansen said last Wednesday at the plaza. “We want to take the city back.”
How long will it last? Johansen, for her part, wants the armored police bus to stay “indefinitely.”
But, according to half a dozen experts — among them retired police captains, academics, researchers, and a veteran police officer who worked at a command center — the relief is probably temporary, unless longer-term strategies are used.
“It’s just human nature that if somebody sees a police van, they’re not going to sell drugs within 20 or 30 feet of it,” said James Dudley, a former police captain at San Francisco’s Park Station.
In his 32 years of experience with the SFPD, he’s found that saturating an area with police and police vehicles can certainly deter crime. But it won’t last without arrests and consequences for the people who are actually making the area dangerous; extorting protection money, or otherwise victimizing people in the area.
“The key is that you’re strategic and do something with the presence … that there’s some enforcement behind the presence,” said Dudley. “If there is surveillance, and arrests are made, then that message will get through the crowd pretty quickly … [but] unless you keep up the pressure in the surrounding area, you’re just going to move it along to another area.”
Indeed, some residents near the plaza said they have noticed increased activity on nearby Wiese Street, Capp Street and Julian Avenue.
Hotspot policing
By centralizing resources at the 16th Street BART plaza, local authorities are using a strategy called “hotspot policing:” Focusing resources at a particular location with high levels of crime.
Hotspot policing can be effective in the short term, said David Weisburd, a professor of criminology at George Mason University and an experienced researcher in hotspot policing. But for it to have lasting impact, police need to work with a community to stabilize a location even when police aren’t around.
Not everyone feels safe around police, Weisburd said, but an experiment in which researchers put police through five days of training in procedural justice (a charm-school-like program that works with officers on ways to speak respectfully) found that crime went down by 14 percent in hotspots in Houston, Texas; Tucson, Arizona; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s compared to other areas where officers had not received the same training.
Crime from those hot spots also did not spill over to other neighborhoods, the study found.
Dallas Augustine, an assistant professor of criminology at San Jose State University, is a fan of “problem-oriented policing,” a term for working with local organizations and community members to prevent trouble before it happens. An example, she said, is to work with vendors at the plazas who, in the past, have reported being victims of extortion, and craft possible solutions.
Augustine sees “three big buckets of concern” with hotspot policing: It’s not a long-lasting strategy to decrease criminal activity, it can negatively impact relationships between police and some community members, and it usually targets communities where people of color live.
“It’s really just a surface-level response, especially for something like drug use and sales,” said Augustine. “This is just going to continue the cycle of arrest, jail, release and people returning and engaging in the same behavior, and then pushing to other neighborhoods.”
While the southwestern plaza has seen less activity in the days after the mobile unit’s arrival, just across the street at the northeastern plaza, some unpermitted vending has continued.
On nearby Wiese Street, a regular gaggle of people along the street are folded over, often passed out on the sidewalk. Residents who live on the street say that drugs are still being used and sold, and that much of the drug activity has moved to their street, and further, toward 15th Street.
To prevent crime from simply moving next door, Dudley suggested increased surveillance: Police drones controlled from the mobile unit, automated license-plate readers, camera towers, and moving the mobile unit around the neighborhood.
“You use that as your eyes and ears, as opposed to sending live cops out to check every street corner,” said Dudley. “It’s pretty easy to spot a crowd of five or six people congregating, selling drugs, doing drugs.”
The current conditions at the plaza, however, are nothing new.
A retired San Francisco police officer who has experience working in mobile units said the block doesn’t look much different from what it did when he started, not quite 20 years ago. Conditions have just fluctuated.
Augustine and David Ball, a professor of law at Santa Clara University, said hotspot policing tends to work only in very specific scenarios. Mobile units can ensure a store is not hit by shoplifting, for instance, because the store is stationary.
Drug use and dealing is harder; people move as enforcement ramps up.
“One person goes to jail because they’ve been selling drugs; another person steps in,” said Ball. “Is every dollar that we’re spending on policing giving us a better return for our money than spending a dollar on early childhood education? I don’t think so.”
That does little to solve the immediate issue at places like 16th and Mission, however.
SFPD has used mobile units before
The police department has deployed mobile command centers to “hot spots” for at least 35 years, said former Mission Station Captain Ron Roth. In 2018 and 2023, one was parked at UN Plaza for a month and, in 2021, another was parked at Union Square to curb retail theft. It still remains parked across from the Apple store there.
“It’s been a great change,” said Nicholas Neville, a security guard at the Louis Vuitton nearby. “The tourists feel safer, and crime is down.”
The unit has made “such a difference,” added another guard at Sunglass Hut. “We haven’t seen the crime we did in the past.”
The Union Square mobile unit is there to discourage theft, which is different from trying to change the culture of a spot like 16th and Mission. The one at UN Plaza is more analogous to the unit now at the BART plaza, and may effect long-term change as at Civic Center, as long as it comes with “activation” of the plaza.
Javier Herrera, the owner of Taqueria El Castillito B2, which is located just across from UN Plaza, said things look much cleaner and less crowded now than they did in 2023, before the police saturated the area for a month. But that’s largely because of the installation of a skate park in November that year, he guessed.
“A lot of people feel safer seeing the police presence,” said Herrera. But, he added, “The park has created harmony and has given young people a space to hang out. That’s what they should do in the Mission.”
“We can’t leave it up to the cops,” he said. “We have to create distractions for people.”
