San Francisco police tout increase in traffic enforcement for 2024
Officials with the San Francisco Police Department on Thursday said they are moving in a positive direction when it comes to cracking down on lawless driving citywide.
"We've definitely made an upward trend, but we still have a lot of work to do," San Francisco Police Traffic Commander Nicole Jones told CBS News Bay Area.
Jones presented the latest numbers at a Traffic Enforcement and Street Safety meeting at City Hall on Thursday.
The agency issued nearly 13,000 tickets by the end of October this year, which is a big jump from just a little more than 5,000 citations in all of last year.
"I think we were very honest about what we're doing well. I think we were very open about what we need to improve upon, and I think there's absolutely a commitment from the department to make sure that traffic safety is a priority -- as well as enforcement -- moving forward," Jones said.
However, it's a far cry from the nearly 130,000 tickets San Francisco Police wrote 10 years ago. The citations have been declining since 2014, with a sharp drop in 2020 due to the pandemic.
"We are still far, far, far below the enforcement levels the department was at prior to the pandemic, much less 10 years ago. And my concern is that we don't really have a clear plan or notion for how we're going to get anywhere close to those levels of enforcement," Rafael Mandelman, San Francisco District 8 Supervisor, told CBS News Bay Area.
Mandelman asked police to report on their plans to make the streets safer. He said, however, while the numbers are encouraging, change won't happen unless staffing improves.
In 2014, the department had 77 traffic officers, compared to 43 officers this year.
"The other thing that we heard is that, because of changes in state law, it's actually much more time consuming to give out a ticket than it was in 2014. A citation, writing a ticket may have taken 5 minutes then. Because the data reporting that has to happen now might be more like 20 minutes. And so that does two things: it makes the officer less efficient who are doing traffic enforcement and kind of discourages officers from allocating scarce time to that particular activity," Mandelman said.
With the uptick in citations this year, SFPD says injury collisions are down compared to last year. However, the number of traffic fatalities are higher this year. Officials confirmed that there have been 31 collisions resulting in 34 deaths so far this year.
Joey Medeiros of pedestrian advocacy group Walk San Francisco said the progress with traffic citations is a step forward, but the city has a long way to go to meet its Vision Zero goal set 10 years ago.
"It's one of the pieces of the puzzle. So this is not just a silver bullet; enforcement doesn't do everything. We need our city streets to be designed for safety over speed. And also we need drivers to realize that they need to obey the law," Medeiros said.
Police said they are looking forward to the rollout of speed cameras in locations across the city. They also have the goal of purchasing radar for motorcycles.
Mandelman advised Jones to have the agency's police chief come to their next meeting scheduled in the spring of next year.
