What's worse than the incident itself is what's emerged since — a pattern of security lapses that anyone paying attention could have seen coming. We're talking about systemic failures in how the facility managed access, monitored threats, and protected both patients and staff. The kind of failures that don't happen overnight but accumulate through years of deferred accountability and institutional shrugging.

This is the part where city officials will tell you they take safety "very seriously." They always take things very seriously. They took fentanyl very seriously. They took retail theft very seriously. They take everything very seriously right up until it's time to actually fund, staff, and enforce the systems that keep people safe.

Hospitals are supposed to be sanctuaries. They're where you go at your most vulnerable — sick, injured, scared. The bare minimum expectation is that the building itself won't make things worse. When security protocols are so lax that a stabbing can occur inside a medical facility, we've crossed a line from "bureaucratic inefficiency" into genuine negligence.

As one SF resident put it, "If you can't even be safe in a hospital, what's the point of any of this?"

The question now isn't just what went wrong — it's who's accountable. Security lapses at a public facility aren't acts of God. They're the result of decisions: budgets that got cut, positions that went unfilled, protocols that went unenforced. Someone signed off on those choices, or more likely, no one signed off on anything at all, which is exactly the problem.

San Francisco spends more per capita than nearly any city in America. Taxpayers deserve to know why that money can't keep a knife out of a hospital ward.