SF's Crime Data Reckoning: How the City Stacks Up Against London, Tokyo, and Toronto

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors is demanding a comprehensive audit of the city's crime-reduction programs by September 1, after a Controller's Office analysis released this week found that per-capita property crime rates in the Tenderloin and SoMa remain roughly three times higher than in comparable dense urban cores — including central London and downtown Toronto. The audit request, filed Tuesday by Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, would require the Department of Police Accountability and SFPD to align their metrics with internationally standardized reporting frameworks for the first time in the department's history.

The timing matters. San Francisco is entering budget season with Mayor Daniel Lurie's administration already under pressure to justify $70 million in public safety spending approved in the June omnibus budget. Globally, cities are grappling with post-pandemic crime rebounds amid economic dislocation — France just recorded more than 2,000 excess deaths during a heatwave, straining European municipal resources, and instability from the war in Ukraine is generating security ripple effects as far as Monaco. Locally, the political calculus is sharper: the fentanyl crisis on Sixth Street and in the UN Plaza corridor has made the question of what actually works an urgent one, not an academic one.

What Other Cities Are Actually Doing

Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department publishes street-level incident data monthly, broken down by ward, offense type, and time of day, a practice that researchers at UC Hastings — now UC College of the Law San Francisco — have cited in at least two reports since 2023 as a model San Francisco should adopt. Toronto's Community Safety and Well-Being Plan, now in its third annual iteration, pairs beat officers with embedded social workers in the city's most distressed neighborhoods, a model that has contributed to a 14 percent drop in violent incidents in the downtown east side since 2023, according to Toronto Police Service figures. London's Metropolitan Police uses a tiered hot-spot enforcement approach in boroughs like Hackney and Southwark, with weekly public dashboards that feed directly into council budget decisions.

San Francisco, by contrast, publishes crime data through DataSF with a lag of up to 72 hours and without the neighborhood-level granularity that would allow the kind of real-time resource allocation those cities practice. The city's Street Crisis Response Team, which dispatches mental health workers rather than police to certain 911 calls in the Mission District and the Haight, handled 12,400 calls in fiscal year 2025 — a 22 percent increase from the prior year — but an independent evaluation by the Budget and Legislative Analyst's Office found the program still lacks outcome metrics that would let policymakers know whether those interventions reduced repeat calls or arrests.

The Pressure Building on Lurie's Team

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to the Mayor's Office of Economic and Workforce Development on June 27 urging the city to adopt a formal benchmarking protocol comparing SFPD outcomes against eight peer cities, including Amsterdam, Vancouver, and Singapore. The Chamber specifically flagged Union Square retail vacancy rates — still hovering near 28 percent according to the latest CBRE market report — as evidence that crime perception, even where it diverges from reported crime statistics, is driving economic damage that data transparency alone could begin to counter.

SFPD Chief Bill Scott's office did not respond to a request for comment by press time, but the department's publicly filed budget justification documents for fiscal year 2026-27 include a line item of $1.2 million for a new data analytics platform, a modest sum compared to the £45 million London invested in its crime intelligence infrastructure between 2022 and 2025.

The Board is expected to take up the audit motion at its July 14 session. If approved, the Controller's Office would have until the fall to produce a comparative scorecard — one that, for the first time, would measure San Francisco not just against its own prior-year numbers but against cities that have made measurable headway on the same problems. Whether city leaders act on what that scorecard shows is the question hanging over every conversation at City Hall right now.