On a warm Monday afternoon, I found Alexander Bell III at the BART plaza at 16th and Mission streets, perched on a concrete bench and chatting with a friend. Looming next to us was the San Francisco Police Department’s massive Mobile Command van, blocking about a third of the entire plaza.
The vehicle, which sits on the corner day and night, has coincided with a reduction in unpermitted vendors selling random wares, visible drug use, and drug dealing on that corner, Bell told me. But like everyone else I talked to near the command van, Bell wasn’t sure why such a large vehicle was necessary to effect change.
“I guess it’s just to make a point,” he mused.
It’s been just over a month since the SFPD deployed the six-wheeled van at the BART plaza, and it’s still hard to parse exactly what the result is. There’s been a flurry of police enforcement in the area this spring, including regular sweeps of Wiese Alley across the street. However, drug dealing and unpermitted vending has migrated to other areas north, east and south of 16th and Mission, as I witnessed on Monday, and it seems like a big van parked in a single place will not change that anytime soon.
Meanwhile, SFPD was unable to answer Gazetteer SF’s questions about the costs of operating the command van for 24 hours a day at the plaza, with spokesperson Robert Rueca only stating that the vehicle is a part of the SFPD fleet and officers who staff it are “part of on-duty personnel.”
“At this time we do not have the ability to parse out costs or have any responsive [public] records,” Rueca told Gazetteer.
(The department also did not mention potential overtime costs, as reported by Mission Local; Gazetteer has asked for clarification.)
Other people who frequently recreate near 16th and Mission told me that they haven’t seen any particular usage of the command van other than an officer or two entering and exiting once in a while.
“It don’t do anything, really. They just stand there like always,” one man (who asked to remain anonymous) said while pointing at officers in front of the van.
The SFPD officers patrolling the area also remained vague about the exact purpose of the van. I had assumed that the command van was being used as a hub for non-patrol duties like surveillance or other intelligence gathering, but one officer, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the media, told me no such work was happening there.
“It might sound like a cop-out answer, but the truth is just that our higher-ups told us that they were putting the van there and that officers were going to be assigned to this spot,” the officer said.
Back at the plaza, Bell told me that he felt the command van would make a bigger impact roaming the Tenderloin, which has more residents and vulnerable people on the street.
“That’s where people get introduced into the drug shit,” he surmised.
The mobile command unit has popped up in recent years around the city’s most controversial hotspots of drug and property crime, including at UN Plaza in 2023 and in Union Square starting in 2021. A city audit of police overtime usage, however, found little evidence that the money and staff resources spent for projects like the Union Square Safe Shopper Initiative caused improvements in public safety and police response times.
