IMO what SF needs is beat cops. What I want is a city where it feels like your actions might have consequences. Like there are actually police who are there to help citizens and intercept criminals – fast, and non-apathetically. That's what SF doesn't have.
Everything between broadway and townsend on the Y axis and the embarcadero and van ness on the X axis should have, at minimum, a beat cop per 4x4 block area. Doing laps all day, meeting and integrating with the community, and enforcing the law – lowering the time and variance between violation and consequence, instead of promoting the perception that you can mess around and 9 out of 10 times the cops are going to be too distracted to care.
Ditto for the mission.
When I lived in SOMA, just under the loin, the liquor store guys knew who all the baddies were. They knew their faces, their MOs, where they hung out... nobody cared. The police presence in SF is so ethereal and abstract. It was so disappointing. The people on the street have the answers, and they're not exactly a sophisticated group. But it seems like the system just doesn't want to interface with the population at that level.
I want old fashioned preventative community policing, not high-tech post-crime people monitoring.
There's a court system component, as well. My understanding is that the courts just don't have the bandwidth to enforce the law in all cases, so they have to let the small stuff slide, which just creates a system with no consequences for petty crime. SF's situation is very unsurprising when viewed through that lens.