It’s obvious to anyone who runs a business in San Francisco that break-ins and crime against our social venue businesses is rampant. Find me one physical business that has cash or valuable goods on site that hasn’t been broken into (or attempted) in the last four years. The problem needs to be better addressed, and being 500 officers short in our police department doesn’t help. Fully staffing the SFPD and gaining alignment on public safety policy between the SFPD, DA and Police Commission is the real answer to addressing this problem.

However, an interesting program was brought up in a July 2023 article in the SF Standard written by Jonah Owen Lamb. Read the article, but in short there is a program in the city for private police officers (not security guards) funded by residents and businesses that are trained, monitored and overseen by the city. For a small business, a “patrol special” working the beat the business is in, could hire that officer to take a special interest in their business for about $300 a month. That means doing drive-bys and responding quickly to issues. These officers go through city training and are on the SFPD dispatch system. There’s also exactly one patrol special left currently working in the city, so the program is basically defunct, but could be revived.

If we can’t hire officers or adequately fund the SFPD, this could be a stopgap program that could be very useful to San Francisco’s businesses. Implemented correctly, the patrol specials could be valuable community members stemming the crime epidemic against small businesses. Implemented poorly, this could look to be something akin to school vouchers or paying the mafia for “protection.”

We’ve talked to a handful of supervisors who say this is a program worth investigating, but the jury is still out. We’ve also talked to a handful of business owners who say they’d be interested in a service like this but would want to know more. All in all, this is an issue to watch and see how it develops and the upside could be significant for the city in these tough times.

Thank you Jonah Owen Lamb for this quality reporting.