Streetsblog San Francisco

Until a year ago, there was no written agreement between Muni and the city's police department specifying what services Muni was paying for and how much, despite the fact that the police department was sending the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency an $83 million annual bill.

Now, one year after a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the departments was finally released, the City Controller's office has released a report that looks at the patrolling services SFPD is providing in a district that is both the location of a dramatic spike in Muni-related crime and also a potential model for how SFPD can reduce such crime.

The report, entitled "Addressing Crime and Disorder on the Municipal Railway: A Case Study on Data-Driven Policing in the Ingleside District," focuses on the efforts of Ingleside Captain David Lazar to overhaul and strategically target how police are assigned to Muni during their shifts.

The SFPD's Bus Inspection Program, or BIP, which was formally outlined in the 2009 MOU but has been around much longer, requires each sergeant in a patrol division and each officer "assigned to a radio car" to make two transit inspections per shift. Officers on foot patrol are required to make at least four inspections per shift.

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San Francisco Police Chief George Gascón is considering forming a task force to deal with bicycle and pedestrian issues, and "is very much in favor" of appointing a liaison to the bicycling community, as he begins to weigh a pressing number of livable streets concerns in the city.

"I think that some of the things that I would like to see here is perhaps the development of a task force or a group of people that are bicyclists as well as people that are not, and police, and try to start looking at some of these issues and trying to come up with a balanced approach that works for San Francisco dealing with traffic concerns, dealing with pedestrian concerns, dealing with bicycles."

In a short interview with Streetsblog San Francisco last Friday, Gascón, who was recently sworn in as police chief after serving as the top cop in Mesa, Arizona, said he is committed to making sure Muni is safe for all riders (our interview was conducted shortly before word got out about the vicious stabbing of an 11-year-old rider), and is still studying a memorandum of understanding that gave the MTA a greater role in managing the traffic division.

"I think that we definitely have an obligation and are certainly committed to ensuring that our public transportation is safe. And that requires presence and that requires attention. The other part is that we have to be smart," said Gascón. "Not every line and not every time of the day is going to require the same level of public safety concerns. So we have to be intelligent enough to be able to put our resources in the right places at the right time. And yet we have to continuously send the message that we could be anywhere anytime, so it's a balancing act."

Gascón committed to going on a bike ride with Streetsblog and bicycle activists to get a first-hand look at the conditions cyclists face on a daily basis, but balked at the idea of requiring all officers to occasionally ride a bicycle so they can understand the issues more thoroughly.

Gascón's willingness to meet with us, and discuss livable streets issues, is a sharp turnaround from the policies of his predecessor, Heather Fong, who often steered clear of reporters, and ignored efforts to establish closer working relationships with transit advocates. An SFPD public affairs spokesperson, Sgt. Lyn Tomioka, promised more time with the chief in the future. We tried to cram in as many questions as we could in our allotted fifteen minutes, and consulted with a number of transit advocates beforehand.

You can hear the entire interview below, and read highlights below the break:

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At a press conference today immediately after Mayor Gavin Newsom swore in SFPD's new police Chief George Gascón, the city's top cop, responding to a question from Streetsblog, addressed a number of issues central to his command, including, notably, how driver behavior can endanger certain neighborhoods as much or more than violent crime.

Many times we're concentrating on homicides, and we should, but many communities will lose more people, and more property, and there's more damage and injuries through bad driving behavior, than of course through crime. If you look at my record when I was in Mesa, [Arizona] and at the LAPD, we put a lot of emphasis on driver behavior. It's important to do so because that's a part of public safety.

When asked whether he would segregate traffic statistics from Compstat, as some cities have done with their data collection, Gascón said he felt that traffic statistics would be part of Compstat, on similar footing with other crime statistics.

To me Compstat is all-encompassing. We're going to deal with traffic, we're going to deal with crime, we're going to deal with overtime usage, we're going to deal with sick time, all of that. It's an accountability process--we look at a command and we start analyzing, what are the pieces within the command that need to be fixed. Can we do it all at once, obviously not. There's no such thing as Trafficstat and Overtimestat. It's Compstat.