S.F. police take twice as long to respond to calls in these neighborhoods

San Francisco police response times are improving, but residents in some parts of the city still wait disproportionately long for an officer, a Chronicle analysis found.

After hitting a high point in 2023, the amount of time police take to respond to calls for service has ticked back down. But callers' experience depends on where they are: For medium- and low-priority calls, residents of the Tenderloin, SoMa, Western Addition and Mission Bay have to wait more than twice as long as other neighborhoods, an analysis of city data shows - and response times have improved faster elsewhere.

Even so, the police district that covers Mission Bay and SoMa, the Southern station, is set to expand under proposed new boundaries - which the department found would mean even more calls. That has frustrated residents who have long raised concerns that the area is a "containment zone."

"It is unacceptable that Southern District residents wait much longer for basic city service than other parts of the city," Supervisor Matt Dorsey, whose district includes the neighborhoods, said in a hearing on police staffing Wednesday. "Its challenges will only be exacerbated later this year, potentially, when the district expands to take on even more territory."

Calls to 911 are categorized by urgency: Priority A calls are for immediate danger or major crimes, such as live gunshots or active burglaries. Priority B calls include cases where a suspect may still be nearby, or there is potential property damage, like the scene of a recent burglary or a verbal fight. Finally, Priority C calls are those where there is no immediate danger, like reports of street disorder.

The most urgent calls have little variation among neighborhoods. From May 2025 to April 2026, the citywide median response time for Priority A calls was 8.3 minutes, with neighborhood-level medians ranging from 6.7 (Chinatown) to 11.6 minutes (Twin Peaks and Visitacion Valley).

But response times vary a lot more for lower-priority calls. Haight-Ashbury residents waited an average of 16.4 minutes for police to arrive for Priority B calls, while SoMa and Tenderloin residents waited 42 and 43 minutes, respectively.

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For the lowest priority calls, C, the difference widens even more. Mission Bay residents waited a median of 138 minutes for police to arrive - more than two hours. SoMa residents waited 115 minutes. But in the Inner Sunset, officers arrived on the scene much more quickly, taking just 48 minutes to get there.

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At the same hearing where Dorsey spoke, Bettina Cohen, the president of the Mission Bay Neighborhood Association, described waiting for two days for police to respond to a call about a break-in and vandalism at her building on a day when events were occurring at both Chase Center and Oracle Park, only to learn her call was one of several to go unanswered that day.

"Please take us seriously when we request adequate staffing," she said. "Our staffing levels need to match the Southern Station's workload."

SoMa and the Tenderloin see more calls than most of the city, which means higher workloads per officer. But even compared with other high-volume neighborhoods, their response times are slow. In the Mission, which also had among the highest number of B and C calls, police took 23 minutes to arrive on the scene for B calls and 57 for C calls.

Even though response times are getting better everywhere, the disparity between the rest of the city and the Southern District has widened. In 2023, SoMa residents waited about a third longer than the citywide median for priority B and C calls, on average. Now, they're waiting roughly 50% longer.

In the hearing, Jason Cunningham, a program manager from SFPD's crime strategies division, said response times are affected by a persistent staffing shortage, call volume and competing citywide demands.

But police expressed hope that the situation in SoMa and Mission Bay would improve. Cunningham said the Southern District has added 20 officers in the past few months and hopes to add more, will pilot using drones for low-level calls and will have more staff from the city's Drug Market Agency Coordination Center handle street-level disorder.

Those promises, however, were of little comfort to those who live in the impacted neighborhoods.

"A lot has been said about the citywide staffing crisis. It is fully irrelevant to this conversation. This is about how we deploy the resources we have," said Shaun Aukland, a director of the SoMa West Neighborhood Association. He noted that SoMa's long response times have been ongoing for years and that expanding the district's area and workload will only make it worse.

"We do not need to keep shifting the problems back and forth between SoMa and the Tenderloin," he said. "We want to heal both neighborhoods."

Several speakers at the hearing also argued that social services, not police officers, should handle some street issues. That would free police up to respond to crimes, not clear encampments.

"The police aren't able to address some of these socioeconomic issues," said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness. "When they're spread too thin, this is the result."

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This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 10:38 AM.