Dirty Boulevard

A Love Letter from San Francisco to Its Police Department: The Breakup That Won’t End

Dear San Francisco Police Department,

This is hard to write. Not because we don’t know what to say, but because we know it won’t matter. We’ve been here before. We’ve tried to tell you how much we care for you, how much we respect what you’ve done for us. We’ve drafted the letters, packed our bags, signed the divorce papers, and waited for the right moment to walk out the door. But deep down, we know the truth: you won’t let us leave.

You can’t let us leave. And maybe we can’t either.

For decades, we’ve lived this strange, dependent love story. You were our heroes—the ones who ran toward danger when the rest of us stepped back. You stood guard when the city was shaken by violence or disorder, wearing the weight of a badge that we handed you with all our faith and expectations. We told ourselves you could handle it, that you were strong enough to carry it all.

But we’ve been asking you to do too much for too long.

We’ve asked you to clean up the streets—not just from crime, but from the consequences of poverty, addiction, and untreated mental illness. We’ve made you the frontline responders to everything broken in our city, from homelessness to overdoses to violence. And when the sweeps didn’t work, when the arrests didn’t stop the chaos, we didn’t ask why. We just asked you to do more.

We’ve put you in an impossible position, one where success is measured in the absence of things you can never truly control. Addiction, homelessness, organized crime—these aren’t problems you can solve with patrols or handcuffs. And yet, every time the city falters, we turn to you.

We love you for trying. We know the hours you spend in the alleyways, in Jessie Street and the Tenderloin, sweeping up the debris of our systemic failures. We know the exhaustion you carry home after a double shift, the frustration of knowing the problems you’re fighting will be back tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.

But we also know this isn’t working.

For every tent you clear, another goes up. For every arrest you make, the same syndicates keep thriving, adapting faster than you can catch up. The organized crime networks that flood our streets with fentanyl and meth are laughing—not at you, but at the system that gives them space to thrive. (And, actually that's just me trying to be nice because they are laughing at you and sometimes when I get mad at you I go fuck them in a cheap motel behind your back).

And what about us? We keep asking you to sweep the streets, not because we believe it will work, but because we don’t know what else to do. We’re scared. We’re tired. And it’s easier to lean on you than to confront the deeper truths about how our city and country have failed.

This letter was supposed to be our goodbye.

We wanted to tell you that we’re leaving, that it’s time for something different. We wanted to say that addiction is a public health crisis, not a criminal issue, and that we need armies of social workers, nurses, and psychiatrists—not more officers in holding facilities. We wanted to imagine a system where housing is treated as a basic right, where organized crime is undermined through regulation and harm reduction, not perpetual arrests.

But we know you won’t let us leave.

Even as we pack our bags and talk about new solutions, you’ll still be there, insisting we stay. Not because you want to control us, but because you believe, truly and deeply, that without you, everything will fall apart. And maybe we believe that too.

We wanted to believe you could do it all—protect us, heal us, restore order to the chaos. You’ve been our Eliot Ness, our imagined knight on horseback, but here’s the thing about those stories: they’re myths. Ness didn’t beat Al Capone. Prohibition didn’t end crime; it reshaped it, institutionalized it, and made organized crime stronger, richer, and more untouchable than ever before.

We’ve trapped you in that same myth. We’ve asked you to sweep the alleys and clear the tents as if addiction, poverty, and mental illness could be tidied up like litter. We’ve told ourselves that “police-friendly holding facilities” and kinder, gentler sweeps could fix what decades of disinvestment and neglect created. But deep down, you know as well as we do: this isn’t working.

The truth is, the world you’re policing has outgrown you. Drugs flow into this city like water through a sieve, feeding a shadow economy that thrives on scarcity and suffering. Organized crime doesn’t fear you; it profits from you. Every sweep you conduct, every arrest you make, feeds a system that thrives on chaos. Prisons, far from being places of reform, are recruiting centers, factories for organized crime’s next generation.

The black market isn’t a fringe economy; it’s a colossus. The global illicit drug trade alone generates hundreds of billions annually, rivaling the economies of nations. Layer on top the underground economies of trafficking, counterfeit goods, and stolen property, and you’re looking at an empire. They’re playing a different game, one you were never equipped to win.

And let’s talk about us, the city that keeps asking you to do the impossible. We’re complicit in this failure. We’ve asked you to manage crises that aren’t yours to solve. Addiction is a public health issue. Homelessness is a housing issue. Mental illness is a societal failure. And yet, we’ve handed you the baton and said, “Fix it.”

So, we’re staying—but not faithfully. We can’t leave you, but we’re turning elsewhere for what you can’t provide. We’re slipping into an affair with the broken capitalist machine and the cold, efficient embrace of organized crime. In their brutal pragmatism, they lay bare the fractures in our civic narrative. They thrive where we stumble, profiting from the very failures we refuse to confront. And, they are better looking and have more riz. If we can’t fix the system, we might as well use its shadows to survive.

Imagine Jessie Street, cleaned up. The tents are gone, the glass swept away. For a moment, the alley feels hopeful, like a victory. But where are the people who once lived there? They’re not gone. They’re orbiting just outside the city’s glow, pushed further into the shadows but never truly out of sight.

You’ll be there again tomorrow, patrolling the next alley, clearing the next tent. And the cycle will continue, because the city hasn’t given you the tools to do anything else. And because we, the city, haven’t yet figured out how to let you go.

We love you, but this love is unsustainable. You are not the problem, but you can’t be the solution. And yet, we know this isn’t goodbye. Because even if we try to walk away, we’ll find ourselves back at Jessie Street, holding on to the hope that maybe, just maybe, next time will be different.

Love,

Jessie Street

P.S. Thomas Piketty argues that without dismantling the structures of systemic inequality, any attempts at meaningful reform are destined to falter. As long as wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a select few and the frameworks that safeguard that concentration persist, the cycles of poverty and despair visible on our streets will only deepen. Organized crime thrives in the vacuum created by scarcity and exclusion, while policing is left to manage the surface symptoms of much deeper issues.

Even if San Francisco's streets are cleared, their scars will endure—etched into the lives of those displaced, the neighborhoods hollowed out, and the systems stretched to their breaking point. Just as Prohibition fortified organized crime and left behind legends like Eliot Ness, our current approach leaves a wake of fractured lives and a thriving black market that feeds on our unwillingness to confront foundational flaws.

We can sweep Jessie Street. We can whitewash its walls and erase its visible marks. But unless we confront the truths that Piketty lays bare—about the consolidation of wealth, the persistence of power, and the refusal to address systemic rot—the cycle will inevitably return, orbiting just out of sight, dragging us back into its gravitational pull.

Lou Reed once painted a haunting picture of urban life with Dirty Boulevard, a song about poverty, homelessness, and the systems that fail the most vulnerable among us. It’s a song that feels uncomfortably familiar today, decades later, as cities like San Francisco still grapple with the same issues.

Reed’s raw honesty inspired my latest essay—a love letter of sorts to the San Francisco Police Department, though maybe not the kind they’d expect. I recommend listening to Dirty Boulevard. Let it sit with you. Reed’s words remind us of what’s at stake and how far we still have to go.