On paper, the police response looks fine — even good. When a Priority A call goes out in SoMa, officers show up fast. Shootings, stabbings, someone actively in danger? SFPD gets there. But that's not really where the story is, is it?

The real story is in the Priority B and C calls — the ones that shape what it actually feels like to live in a neighborhood. The car break-ins. The open-air drug dealing. The guy screaming threats outside your apartment at 2 AM who isn't technically wielding a weapon. The encampment blocking your building's fire exit. These are the calls where response times lag, where residents are functionally told to just deal with it.

And over time, that creates something insidious: a de facto containment zone. The city doesn't have to formally declare that certain blocks are acceptable losses. It just has to systematically deprioritize the calls that define quality of life, and the market — and the misery — takes care of the rest. Residents leave or stop calling. Businesses close or never open. The feedback loop tightens.

This isn't a resource problem. San Francisco spends more per capita on homeless services and public safety than nearly any city in America. This is a priorities problem. When you pour billions into programs with no measurable accountability and then tell West SoMa residents that their daily reality just isn't urgent enough, you've made a choice. You've decided some neighborhoods matter less.

The most frustrating part? Nobody voted for this. There was no public hearing where the Board of Supervisors said, "We're going to let West SoMa absorb the city's dysfunction so the tourist corridors stay clean." It just happened — through bureaucratic inertia, political cowardice, and a refusal to hold anyone accountable for outcomes.

West SoMa residents deserve the same basic public safety as anyone in Pacific Heights or the Marina. That shouldn't be a controversial statement. And yet, here we are.