For the uninitiated, RESET allows officers to arrest people for public drug use and bring them to a sobering facility in SoMa. Once there, individuals are expected — but crucially, not required — to stay until they've sobered up, at which point they'll have access to services. On paper, it's a step toward the kind of enforcement this city has desperately needed. In practice? Twenty-five beds.

Twenty-five.

As one local put it bluntly: "Seems 25 beds isn't going to do it. Who would've thought."

Meanwhile, residents of the Mission District are watching in real time as the problem migrates into their neighborhood. People who walk the same streets every day report that conditions have noticeably deteriorated in just the past few weeks. As one SF resident noted, "Mission St is getting out of control. It's the new containment zone."

Here's what drives us crazy about how San Francisco does policy: the city announces an initiative with the right language — accountability, enforcement, services — then funds it at a scale that's almost comically inadequate. It's governance as press release. You can't address a crisis affecting thousands of people with a 25-bed facility and call it a serious effort.

But the deeper problem is one of equity, and not the kind City Hall loves to talk about. When enforcement pushes open drug use out of high-profile corridors, it doesn't disappear — it lands in working-class neighborhoods like the Mission. The people who bear that burden aren't the affluent progressives opining about "thoughtful approaches" from the safety of the Marina. They're families, small business owners, and everyday commuters who didn't sign up to be collateral damage in a policy experiment.

Another local captured the absurdity of the discourse perfectly: "What kind of country has this become where arresting people for public drug use is controversial?"

Look, we're not against the RESET concept. Enforcing public drug laws and connecting people to services is exactly the kind of common-sense approach San Francisco has avoided for years. But doing it at this scale is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound and congratulating yourself for practicing medicine. If the city is serious, it needs to fund this proportionally — more beds, more facilities, distributed across the city — rather than concentrating displacement in the neighborhoods least equipped to absorb it.

Otherwise, RESET is just another acronym in San Francisco's long history of half-measures dressed up as solutions.