Fifty years ago, SF Pretrial was founded on the principle that people presumed innocent belong in community — connected to housing, treatment, and care — not in jail cells. The result: a 93% public safety rate, a 96% court appearance rate, and a health and safety model for the nation. Over the objections of the country's leading safety and justice experts and the San Francisco Sheriff, Mayor Lurie and the Courts chose to divest from SF Pretrial in favor of a new Adult Probation division with no pretrial track record and no written plan to stand up its services.
* Fifty years of what worked. Thrown away by choice.
SF Pretrial worked.For 50 years, the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project (SF Pretrial) — an independent community-based nonprofit — handled the city's pretrial services. Supervising people released from jail before trial. Making sure they showed up for court. Connecting them with housing, treatment, and stability.
A fight to survive.Mayor Lurie and the courts moved to dismantle SF Pretrial. No hearing, no public comment. The response was overwhelming. The San Francisco Sheriff and every leading pretrial and civil-liberties organization in the country came out in support. National press, from The Washington Post to The SF Standard to Mission Local. The data held up. The evidence pointed one way.
A disaster for SF.The city ignored reason and sided with politics. In July 2026, it decided to dissolve SF Pretrial and transfer all of that work to the San Francisco Adult Probation Department — engineered to punish, not help. 50 years of success will end November 13.
San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto put his full-throated support on the record. So did the country's foremost civil-liberties organization. So did the leading pretrial research and policy organizations in the United States. So did the local legal community closest to this work. Eight voices. One conclusion. This is the record of who stood with SF Pretrial before the decision was made.
In a letter to city officials, the SF Sheriff publicly refuted the Superior Court's attempt to undermine SF Pretrial's data — noting the court's analysis "failed to use national standards." Reported by The SF Standard.
Read the SF Standard story →Transparency requires more than the publication of data. It requires a shared understanding of what is being measured, how it is being measured, and whether the metrics being compared are, in fact, measuring the same outcomes.
The country's foremost civil-liberties organization on the record in defense of SF Pretrial's foundational contract.
Read the letterA national leader in criminal-justice research and policy writes the Board of Supervisors to preserve SF Pretrial.
Read the letterThe 5,600-member legal community of San Francisco — the lawyers closest to this work — urges Mayor Lurie to preserve SF Pretrial.
Read the letterThe national authority on pretrial policy research backs SF Pretrial's model as a national standard worth preserving.
Read the letterCalifornia's civil-liberties organization sends public-safety policy recommendations to the Mayor's Office.
Read the letterCalifornia's statewide coalition for community-based public safety stands with SF Pretrial.
Read the letterThe accreditation body for pretrial-services programs nationally — the body that accredited SF Pretrial itself — on the record.
Read the letterThe agency that made San Franciscans safer — and at a fraction of the price — was the one the city chose to dissolve.
"[SF Pretrial is] the greatest thing no one's ever really heard of." — Toney Chaplin, Former Assistant Chief, SFPD (30 years)
Not opinions. Not anecdotes. Audited outcomes by multiple sources — the kind decision-makers should have been seeing for years, and somehow didn't.
The SF Sheriff publicly stood behind these numbers — and publicly refuted the Superior Court's attempt to undermine them, in a June 12 letter to city officials. The court's analysis "failed to use national standards." The 93% safety rate figure followed the field's accepted methodology.
The data on SF Pretrial was exceptional and acclaimed.
The decision to dissolve it was not about outcomes.
The city paid SF Pretrial $7.5M for pretrial services. SF Pretrial more than doubled that — into $15.5M of total programming, leveraged with grants and Medi-Cal revenue. Comparable probation services and supervision for the same population would have cost the city ~$58M when scaled up. None of the leverage transferred.
A program that more than doubled every city dollar — and produced better safety outcomes — was the kind of result governments are supposed to look for, not throw away.
The Probation Alternative:
The city chose to pay more, to hire fewer people, to deliver worse safety outcomes, on the same population SF Pretrial had been serving better than any probation department in California. After a year to get ready, Probation was still failing and unprepared to take this on. The city made the decision anyway.
SF Pretrial wasn't just exceptional in San Francisco — it was a consistently-studied pretrial model across the country, a Bay Area public safety innovation other counties reached out to adopt. Other cities were trying to catch up. The city that built it chose to dismantle it.
Most U.S. jurisdictions run pretrial services inside a law enforcement or government agency. SF Pretrial was one of a small handful of independent, community-based programs operating at this scale and breadth — alongside peers like NYC's Criminal Justice Agency, JusticePoint, Maine Pretrial Services, and Berks Connections in Pennsylvania. The model itself was the innovation. To enhance public safety, the pretrial field was moving in the direction of SF Pretrial.
SF Pretrial built the case-management platform the field needed — client-centric, outcomes-first, wraparound and supportive services-integrated. OpenJustice quantified and standardized dimensions of client engagement and intervention that other systems left unmeasured, producing a more nuanced framework for program evaluation and data transparency. Counties across California and other states reached out to learn more.
Nationally, county and local governments used models like SF Pretrial to modify their probation and government-administered models toward community-based, independent support and supervision. SF Pretrial operated it for 50 years — long enough to answer questions the field was only beginning to ask, and long enough to train professionals in jurisdictions across the U.S.
Not "an organization." Concrete things. Specific things. Things that took fifty years to build.
AB 102 carved San Francisco out by name. AB 102 was designed to build pretrial infrastructure in counties that didn't have it. It directed courts to contract with county probation departments to stand up new programs. San Francisco already had one — a nationally accredited, 50-year program exceeding every standard the law was written to establish. The Judicial Council carved San Francisco out by name, explicitly allowing the Superior Court to maintain a program run by a local nonprofit instead. The court used that same law to dismantle the program that made the carve-out necessary.
"The legislation made exceptions to the requirement to contract with county agencies for the Superior Courts of San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties. These jurisdictions were allowed to maintain pretrial programs that were administered by local nonprofit entities and already in place at the time the legislation was enacted."
— Report to the Legislature: Pretrial Services Program Year 4, 2026. Judicial Council of California, April 2026. Footnote 7, p. 8. courts.ca.gov/7466.htm
San Francisco built its own pretrial system. The court invoked a law written for counties that never had one.
A decision this consequential — affecting public safety, the city's budget, and a 50-year SF institution — was made without anyone responsible for the work in the room.
The decision was reiterated as final before any formal data request was ever made of SF Pretrial and without the courtesy of a response to the SF Board.
The proposal to dissolve SF Pretrial and transfer its work to Adult Probation was reached through informal channels — phone calls, side meetings — among the Superior Court, Adult Probation, and the Mayor's Office.
SF Pretrial — the organization being dissolved, providing the service for 50 years — was not invited into substantive discussions.
No public comment period preceded the decision.
The 1,800 presumed-innocent people whose cases were being transferred were not consulted.
The 105 SF Pretrial staff were not consulted. The 150+ community partner organizations in SF Pretrial's network were not consulted.
When pressed, the court published flawed metrics instead of answering SF Pretrial's outstanding requests. The SF Sheriff publicly called it out in a June 12 letter: the court's analysis "failed to use national standards" and produced different — and inaccurate — conclusions about SF Pretrial's performance.
The data on SF Pretrial was unchallenged. The legal basis for the transfer didn't apply. And the process that produced this decision could not have survived five minutes of public scrutiny.
On July 28, 2026, SF Pretrial's Board of Directors voted to wind down operations.*
*The board did not seek this outcome. Over months of negotiation, SF Pretrial proposed restructuring to address every concern raised and requested the multi-year contract this work required. The city offered one year. The board concluded an orderly wind-down served clients, staff, and city better than a slow, uncontrolled decline.
On June 12, the SF Sheriff publicly refuted the court's attempt to undermine SF Pretrial — in a letter to city officials, reported by The SF Standard. On July 23, The Washington Post took the story national. The record is preserved here.
Transparency requires more than the publication of data. It requires a shared understanding of what is being measured, how it is being measured, and whether the metrics being compared are, in fact, measuring the same outcomes.
— Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, in a June 12 letter to city officials, reported by The SF StandardDocuments, data, and named voices. While the Trump administration dismantles federal criminal-justice reform, the bluest city in the bluest state chose to dissolve one of the country's most uniquely effective community-based pretrial programs and hand its budget to an armed law enforcement agency. The story of how that decision was made — and what San Francisco is losing — is here for whoever wants to tell it. Reporters welcome.