Preserve SF Pretrial: Preserve the Presumption of Innocence.
To send your own letter, visit dontdismantlesf.org
6/12/26
Office of the Mayor
City and County of San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94102
Re: Preserve the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project & Deny the Adult Probation Pretrial Budget Request
To: San Francisco Mayor Lurie, Members of the Board of Supervisors, and San Francisco Superior Court
On behalf of the Care First California (CFC) coalition — a statewide coalition of community organizations, directly impacted people, state and national advocacy groups, civil rights advocates, and public defenders — we urge you to preserve the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project (SF Pretrial) by honoring its contract and denying the Adult Probation Department’s budget request to absorb its functions. Our stake in this decision is statewide: SF Pretrial is a floor, not an outlier. It is the standard the rest of California should be rising to meet, not a program dismantled to match jurisdictions that haven’t built it yet.
For fifty years, SF Pretrial has produced outcomes among the strongest in the country: a 93% rate of no new charges while enrolled, a 96% court appearance rate across more than 19,000 court dates, and 630,394 jail bed days saved in 2023 alone. The proposed replacement costs more and delivers less. Adult Probation is requesting $12.7 million for 27 staff to perform work SF Pretrial handles with roughly 100 staff serving approximately 1,800 people, with no legal mandate requiring the transfer. There is no public safety justification either: 2025 brought San Francisco its lowest homicide count since 1960, a 44% drop in robberies, and a 25% decline in total crime. Historic lows achieved while SF Pretrial was operating. The city would be paying more, caging more legally innocent people, and dismantling a fifty-year institution at the precise moment the data vindicates it.
SF Pretrial is also the model other California counties are actively trying to build toward. Under SB 129, all 58 counties operate pretrial programs, and by statute all but two run them through probation. San Francisco and Santa Clara were the only jurisdictions preserved as nonprofit-administered models. As an example, Los Angeles County established JCOD, an independent Care First department, specifically to build the kind of community-based pretrial infrastructure SF Pretrial has demonstrated is possible, most recently expanding to additional courthouses as of January 2026. SF Pretrial has directly supported that effort, providing advisory assistance to counties across California — five decades of institutional knowledge that cannot be transferred to a probation department on July 1 and will simply disappear. Dismantling SF Pretrial to bring San Francisco in line with the rest of the state is backwards logic. It removes the sample model counties like Los Angeles are still working to reach.
Nationally, the evidence is also equally clear. FBI data released August 5, 2025 confirmed that the United States recorded its lowest property crime rate and lowest violent crime rate since at least 1969 in 2024. Organizations like The Bail Project have demonstrated that community-based pretrial support works, supporting roughly 40,000 people across 37 jurisdictions with a return-to-court rate near 92%. Nonetheless, H.R. 5214, the D.C. Cash Bail Reform Act, reflects an active federal effort to override community-based pretrial services and reinstate cash bail in jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., which has operated a community-supported pretrial model since 1992. However, data suggests more detention does not produce more safety. It produces more cages at greater cost. SF Pretrial is not a program that is failing. It is a program at risk of being eliminated despite the evidence. Every county that is still fighting to build what San Francisco already has is watching.
San Francisco built the model. Other counties across the state are still working to reach it. Preserve the floor. Preserve SF Pretrial.
Anthony Robles and Marcella Rosen
Statewide Legislative Organizer and Communications Manager
Care First California Coalition