The SF Police Department is claiming a major victory against the street drug trade, saying they made 97 arrests Wednesday and insisting they caught a large number of “fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants.”

The SFPD, Mayor Daniel Lurie, and your “tough-on-crime” elected officials are all gloating over what the Chronicle says “appeared to be one of the department’s largest one-day enforcement operations in recent history.” That language is almost straight from the SFPD tweet below, as the department says in their own press release that they made 97 arrests on Wednesday, in what they call a “one-day operation focusing on fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants.”


There is not much detail on where these arrests occurred or why, but the SFPD release says that the actions involved the department’s Tenderloin Patrol, Tenderloin Violence Reduction Team, Tenderloin Plainclothes Team, and Mission Patrol (among many other teams). So it’s a fair bet these arrests occurred in the Tenderloin and Mission District.  


And the SFPD says that of the 97 arrested, 79 of these suspects had arrest warrants. So nabbing nearly 80 people with arrest warrants is surely a success. The department also says, “During the arrests, officers located and seized a total of 16.5g of suspected narcotics, including suspected fentanyl, cocaine base, and methamphetamine.”

That seems like a handful of small baggies of drugs. While 97 arrests sounds like an impressive number, this operation did not exactly yield kilos.

And we should note that the Chronicle’s report, as well as the SF Standard writeup of this operation, are both based entirely on what SFPD said in their press release. No media outlets have any additional detail on Wednesday’s arrests.


The law-and-order crowd, like Supervisor Matt Dorsey (see above), is making a big to-do of this, with finger-point emojis and all. But one characteristic of these highly touted SFPD raids in the Daniel Lurie era so far is that they come with big announcements, but middling long-term results.

A 40-arrest raid at Civic Center in late March produced big headlines, but ultimately, zero criminal charges. Earlier that month, a “swarm” raid at 16th and Mission streets produced just four arrests and one ounce of drugs. And the famed Jefferson Square raid in late February ended with jailing only two people, with everyone else getting released with a citation, if that.

Related: Another Spot Where the Drug Scene Moved, Jefferson Square Park, Gets Raided By SFPD Overnight [SFist]

Image via SFPD