The San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project — the nonprofit that for half a century has kept defendants out of jail and returning to court — is shutting down. It is being brought down not by a scandal it survived but by a fight over how its success is counted.

Mayor Daniel Lurie's budget funded only a shortened, one-year contract for the program — a move the nonprofit's own interim CEO said all but sealed its fate — while the San Francisco Superior Court spent a year pushing to strip SF Pretrial of its city contract and hand its work to the Adult Probation Department. But the case for the switch rests on a disputed set of statistics, the replacement unit isn't staffed, and it will cost taxpayers millions more. The result, drawn from heavy reporting by The San Francisco Standard and The Washington Post: even the sheriff who defended the program and the court that helped kill it are now warning of the same thing — a service vacuum with nobody ready to fill it.

In three months, one of the country's oldest pretrial diversion programs will cease to exist. SF Pretrial's board voted to wind the nonprofit down by Nov. 13, according to The San Francisco Standard↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), which obtained the board's July 31 notice to criminal-justice agencies. The group has already halted its most intensive case management and stopped taking newly released defendants; it will refuse all new cases as of Sept. 30. A layoff notice filed with the state warns 83 employees will lose their jobs.

The organization managed roughly 1,800 defendants — making sure they showed up to court while connecting them to housing, medication, and other services meant to keep them from reoffending. What replaces it is, for now, nothing. The Adult Probation Department, tapped to absorb those duties, was supposed to have its new unit running this July. It missed that deadline and now aims for 2027, the Standard reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab).

The road to the closure runs through a bureaucratic feud, not a policy debate. Early last year, SF Pretrial mismanaged its retirement funds and landed on the city's watch list of troubled nonprofits. The Superior Court demanded to see its books; the nonprofit refused, saying it wasn't legally required to, and the court responded by moving to reassign the workload. SF Pretrial says it later cleaned up the finances — but by then the court's leadership had committed to a divorce.

At the center of the dispute is a statistical argument over what "works" means. In a June letter obtained by the Standard↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), Court CEO Brandon Riley said the court's own analysis found only about 80% of clients appeared for hearings and 69.5% avoided rearrest — far short of the figures SF Pretrial cites. The nonprofit and Sheriff Paul Miyamoto put the numbers at roughly 95% court appearance and 97% not rearrested and charged in 2025. The gap is mostly a matter of method: the court logs every arrest, whereas the nonprofit and sheriff tally only those arrests that end in charges — the national yardstick, they say, since an arrest is not proof of a crime. Interim CEO Matt Miller said the court's data system does not register when a client leaves SF Pretrial's caseload, so later arrests and missed dates still land on the nonprofit's ledger.

Miyamoto, a top cop publicly defending a diversion program, has argued the move was rushed. He said he sent his letter to keep the decision deliberate rather than driven by mood or a push for change, and told The Washington Post — which reported the closure↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) on Aug. 8 — that he had been satisfied with the program's performance.

The switch also costs more. SF Pretrial ran on about $8 million a year; the probation department's proposed pretrial unit is priced near $12.7 million, per the Standard's review of the budget — close to a $5 million premium to place supervision of people not convicted of any crime inside a law-enforcement agency. The nonprofit's board, which counts a onetime police chief and a former prosecutor among its members, has cautioned that such an arrangement carries its own risks.

Now even the court is sounding an alarm. In an Aug. 7 letter, Riley wrote that it is "deeply concerned about the immediate consequences" of the suspended services, noting that since Aug. 5 people who would once have been screened and referred are getting nothing. Retired state appeals judge Anthony Kline was blunter: "There's gonna be more homelessness, more recidivism, more mental health issues, more drugs."