What It’s Really Like to Work Undercover in San Francisco

The laws in San Francisco have gotten weak. The judges have become more forgiving. When I was at Narcotics in 1999, we were doing drug cases. A lot of the people we arrested stayed in jail and went to prison. They go sit in a room for a few days. I think a lot of them will get some clarity, come to their senses. And I have personally seen some of them tell, like, when they went in front of the judge after, that I want to go to a program. I'm tired of doing what I'm doing. Right now, for a person to go to prison, it's very uncommon. Today we're joined by Britt Elmore, a retired undercover narcotics officer with the San Francisco Police Department, who spent 27 years on the front lines of drug enforcement, working deep undercover. For most of his career, he built trust with dealers, infiltrated networks, and helped take down major operations across the city. His firsthand experience offers a rare look into how San Francisco's drug landscape has evolved. In this conversation, Britt shares the realities of undercover work, the challenges law enforcement faces today, and what he believes needs to change moving forward. This is Bay Area Innovators, and I'm your host, Steve Vispas. Britt, welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Well, great to have you here. Well, first of all, thank you for your service. You've been with the SFPD for 27 years. Yes. And that's a long time to serve with the city and help people out. You know, one of the goals with this interview is to understand the state of SFPD and, you know, kind of what's going on in the city. But first, I want to understand, like, how did you get started? How did you get into law enforcement? And obviously, it was a career that you had for a long time. Yeah, I didn't think about being a police officer when I was growing up at all. I dropped out in ninth grade school. A friend of mine, when I got in my 20s, I was married, and a friend of mine was working for the San Francisco Fire Department, and he told me, go back and get your GED and put in for fire and police. So I went back, got my GED, I think I was probably 22, 23 years old, and I started applying for police and fire. My first job, I got picked up with the San Mateo Sheriff's Office. I got picked up as a correctional officer, so I worked in the jail. I did that for three and a half to four years, and then I moved over to, I tested with the San Francisco Police. I got hired in 1997, and then I went to the academy in 1997. And then you were in narcotics, undercover narcotics. Yes, I got out of the academy, and I went and trained. It's called Southern Station, it's downtown. I trained there for six weeks, and then after that, I went through my probation station, which was Ingleside Station. It's like the upper mission area. And I was there, and I probably only worked a uniform for about four months, and then I got picked up in their plainclothes unit, so I started working for the plainclothes unit for that district station. In 1999, I got asked to go up for a six-week detail up to narcotics, to go up there and work undercover and buy narcotics on the street. I went there, and I ended up staying my whole career there. I stayed all the way till 2024 when I retired. Wow. So give us a bit of a sense of what your work consisted of. At narcotics? Yeah. When I was working at narcotics, a big portion of it would be called— it was right towards the end of the crack epidemic, so we were still out in the Tenderloin. Tenderloin's the area that's saturated with drug dealing and drug users. And so it is now, pretty much. As it still is now. It's an open-air drug area. And part of our job there, we used to do a thing called buy bust, where four of us would dress up, kind of homeless-looking, and we would go out and buy crack on the street, methamphetamine on the street, heroin on the street, and we'd have a cover officer watch us. Once they'd seen us do the hand-to-hand transaction, they would tell the arrest team to move in. So we could arrest 20 in one day out there. Twenty dealers? Twenty dealers. Wow. Yeah, and we'd go back the next day and do it again and do it again. If there were issues going on in the Haight-Ashbury area, they would send narcotics up there for a week, and we'd go up there and purchase, back then it was marijuana, LSD, like hallucinogenic drugs. We'd go up there and try to clean that area up for a week. And then if they were having problems in any certain housing areas, it was projects back then, but now it's called housing areas, they would send us down there for a few days, and we would work those areas and buy drugs and make arrests. So let me get this straight. So you can arrest even 20 people in one day? Oh, it was very easy back then. So you'd do one, he would get arrested, or you'd buy from all of them? No, we would buy from one person, the arrest team would come in and arrest him. But wouldn't the other ones notice or run away? They were too greedy. They were too greedy, they wouldn't leave. So then we would just move over to another area of the Tenderloin, and then we'd cross Market Street to the other side of the Tenderloin, then we'd come back over there, and as we just kept shifting around, they would still be out selling, they weren't going anywhere. So we would spend probably 4 to 6 hours and arrest like 20 bodies, it would be like 20 people. And sometimes when you arrest them, one's holding the money, one's holding the dope, and one's out there handing it to you. So you end up arresting three on a conspiracy at one time. So how long do they stay in jail? I guess it depends, but on the average? Well, back in the day, like back then when we were doing crack and stuff, they would stay in jail for a few days until they got a court date. If they had multiple charges from before, multiple cases, they'd stay in longer. And then the laws have changed, and like up currently, if you arrest somebody, they'll be out that day. Yeah, for sales to an officer. They're not afraid to do it again, basically, if they get out the same day? They're not. And then you would have, like it's currently, you can arrest somebody and they would probably have 4, 5, 6 open cases within the last couple months. They get arrested, they get back out, they do it again. One example is I had a court case for someone selling me fentanyl, and it was in San Francisco's court system. I went to court. That dealer went to court as well. It got continued. And then I was working, in 2015 I got, no, 2009. 2009 I got detailed up to DEA, so I was working as a task force officer up there. So I get out of court that day, and when I'm driving to the Fed building, he got there before I did, and he was standing on the corner in front of the Fed building. Doing his job? Selling his drugs. Wow. Yeah, he made it back there before I got there, and he was out there selling. So it doesn't even faze him. Why is that? Is it just the law is so weak, or why would that even happen? It's the laws in San Francisco have gotten weak. The judges have become more forgiving. It just ended up kind of turning out where nobody goes to jail. It's nothing against the district attorney's office. They're trying hard to put people away. It's just that it makes it difficult with the current laws and the judges. Why do you think the judges or whoever cares more about the rights of these drug dealers who are damaging many other people's lives, and not the ones who buy the drugs and maybe end up dead? What I think it is, is I think a big part of it is education. I think a lot of the judges don't understand the severity of fentanyl. Fentanyl is different than any other drug that was out there when we were buying drugs before in an undercover capacity. People smoke fentanyl, and your best high on fentanyl is to get as close as you can to death. And that's your best high. So I consider it a poison more than I consider it a drug. And I think a lot of it is education. They round it up just like it's cocaine, like it's heroin, like it's methamphetamine. They don't think of it as the severity of it. Now you mentioned the DEA. Can you tell us, so a case usually starts as a city or state and then it can move to a federal case? How does it work? Yes, when I was up at DEA, I was a task force officer, so that meant I had dual powers, federal powers and state powers. So we would take some of our cases and we'd bring them up to the feds for adoptions if we had a threshold amount of narcotics or firearms or whatever. But like on one example, I get called to a county right next to us, San Mateo County. It was Sergeant Leachman at the time. He's now a captain. But he called up and said, I have a guy out here selling methamphetamine and doing fraud with the EBT cards. And he said, I have an informant that can introduce you to him. Can you come over and buy? So I went over there and I was buying from him. I clicked with him right away, was buying like two, four ounces of meth a couple times a week. And what happens is he ends up telling me that he can get me guns. So we say, OK, so I order up to get a gun from him. He's staying in a hotel in South City. He tells me, hey, I got the gun and I got the meth you need. He had warrants, so the arrest team went in and arrested him. He says, I want to cooperate. Because if he cooperates, he gets lesser time. Or they can't promise it to him, but they go to the DA's office saying, hey, he provided us information that took us up another level. He says he wants to cooperate. He says, I have a guy that sells, him and his brother sell a bunch of guns. They sell a bunch of rifles and firearms. I can introduce Britt, who I was, I was Carlos at the time, but I can introduce Carlos to him. So what happens is we reach out to the ATF and the ATF comes out and they said, yeah, we'll furnish you the money to purchase firearms from him. The guy who got arrested for the methamphetamine hooks me up with the gun seller and I click with him and I start buying multiple assault rifles. I start buying firearms from him. Now ATF has it. Now it's a federal case on the ATF. Which is more, the penalty is higher, right? Far higher, far higher. He's a felon. He's selling weapons. He thought I was a felon, so he's selling me weapons and selling me ammunition, which even makes it worse. So what happens is they start doing electronic surveillance on him and his brother and he starts going into Arizona every two weeks and he buys from gun shows. He buys firearms from gun shows and he also buys from firearm brokers. There's a thing called straw purchasing where what happens is a firearm broker sells guns to somebody who's not allowed to possess firearms. And there were brokers in Arizona that were selling him like 10 Glock pistols at a time. So what happens is ATF does the investigation down there. They find out who the brokers are. They find out what gun shows he's going to. And when they're down there, they're taking pictures of firearms and they're sending them to him. He's saying, hey, you want this rifle? You want this pistol? I got this hundred round drum that fits on a Glock. You want to purchase that? So I tell him, yes, yes, yes. And they're just building up the case federally. So what happens is they come back. I bought probably 20 firearms from them over probably a four month period. And it's ready to take them down. So when they took them down, I ordered a bunch more rifles and pistols and they brought them back from Arizona. They were being followed. And that morning they hit both brothers' houses in East Palo Alto. But they also went down and hit the purchasers, the brokers, firearm brokers in Arizona. And what they were doing, they were able to match up the Glock pistols that I purchased, the serial numbers on them, to the brokers down there that they had sold them. But they had written down that they were selling them to all these individual people that didn't exist. They were using false names because they couldn't sell them to him because he was a felon. So they start using these individual names, just anybody's name. And then they end up losing their licenses as well and they get arrested. So that's like how a case goes from state to federal. A lot of times they will. I can go into the tenderloin and I can buy fentanyl. And then I buy a little more fentanyl. Then I get his phone number and I buy larger amounts, let's say four ounces of fentanyl. And the Feds, DEA, will end up running those numbers and saying, Hey, he's got a good supplier. We're going to go up on a wire. So they would go up on a wire and they would be able to climb the ladder. As I'm purchasing from him, he's buying from his source. His source is buying from a bigger source. And what happens over a six to eight month period, we end up arresting 20 plus people and seize a lot of narcotics. So you got a good sense of the whole organization or how this is kind of broken down into departments or whatever, right? Yes. When you're doing an investigation, what will happen is you'll get your street dealer and then you'll get the person that sells to him. And then if you keep locking on and you move the wire over to the person selling to him, then you get his source and then there's called source of supply. And then you get, you jump on that source and you keep going. So what happens with the wire is you just keep writing for higher sources. And a lot of times we'll end up with phone numbers out of Mexico. There'll be cartel that's sending stuff across the border. When you say a wire, it's a physical wire that you put on him? No, it's a wire tap where we're able to tap into their cell phone. Okay. Got it. It's a federal wire tap. So it's called a T3 wire tap. So we're tapping into his cell phone. And then the next one. And then we tap into that person's cell phone above him and that person's cell phone above him and we just climb the ladder. Once we hit Mexico, we know we're about done with it. It's time to take it down. Wow. So the quantity makes a big difference. If someone buys one gun or ten guns, the penalty or the sentencing is a lot higher. It is. And what happens with firearms is if I purchase multiple times from them, the feds will think, okay, this is a prolific drug trafficker or firearm trafficker. So they're saying it's not a one-time thing. This is what he does for a business. So if I buy firearms over a six-month period or I buy drugs over a six-month period, they can't come back and say, oh, but that's not what I do. If I buy from a person one time, they can say, well, I found that gun or I wanted to get rid of it, so I sold it to Brit. If I buy that gun three, four, five, six times, they're like, no, this guy's a trafficker. So generally the penalty, the sentencing or whatever you want to call it, for selling a gun is more bigger than selling drugs? It just depends. It just depends. What they do is like with the narcotics, there's minimum mandatories. Like if you sell, if I buy two ounces of methamphetamine, that's a federal charge. If I go over two pounds of methamphetamine, then that becomes a bigger charge. So there's minimum mandatories for time sentences that they get. And it's another good thing, too, in the federal system is with minimum mandatories, the judge can't impose releasing someone or dropping the charges down lower. They're set where I have, their guidelines are I need to charge you this many years because you're within the minimum mandatories. So you said there's a state case that can get to a federal case. Is there a city? How is the city involved in this? What happens is the city ends up passing that case over to the feds and they take the whole case itself. But it starts as a city. Starts on the city. That's why they use us. That's like for me working at DEA, I was on a metro task force. The metro task force consists of like three of us from San Francisco police, DEA agents, ATF agents, HSI agents. We had agents from everywhere working under a metro task force. So us being the TFOs that work state, we're able to take the state cases and move them up to fed cases. Now, I got to ask you, how did you live through this? Were you afraid when you deal with these people and sometimes you build trust with them and then you have to arrest them? No, I enjoyed the thrill of getting someone to sell me things. I enjoyed the thrill of being able to click with someone and get them to trust me and do business with me. I felt a little weird after. I think the other guys were more ecstatic when they made the arrest than I did because I kind of gained that person's trust. I know it's wrong. I know what they were doing is wrong and they got to go to their room and serve their sentence. But I didn't get a huge rise out of it. My rise was being able to get them to come find me and sell to me. So what would you say was your biggest motivation for going to work every day and doing what you were doing? I enjoyed working undercover. I enjoyed being able to converse with these traffickers for drugs and narcotics and firearms. I enjoyed conversing with them and setting up deals. Working for San Francisco Police Department, to me, I realized later it was like a dream come true. I never thought I'd be a police officer. I never aspired to be a police officer. And once I got in, I was like, wow, I'm doing what I used to watch on TV. I think San Francisco Police is just a wonderful department. Now when they would get arrested, would they know that it's you who got them arrested? They did. Based off of just discovery alone, evidence, their lawyers, their defense gets to find out that he was selling to a police officer. And as discovery gets put out, they eventually get my name and everything. But then the next time you go out there, wouldn't they recognize you or know who you are? I just move on to other people. And the funny thing about it is, like in the Tenderloin when I was doing street buys, I could buy from the same guy three times. And he doesn't know it. Because he would forget. He would recognize that I was out there, but he'd forget that I was a police officer and that he got arrested the last time he sold to me. And on top of it, he gets released right away. So he's probably not even that upset. Yeah, he's not even tripping on it. And it's just greed. It's greed. I mean, a lot of times I'm like, well, if you don't want to deal with me, I'll just go to somebody else. And they're like, oh, I don't want to lose a sale. No, I'll sell it to you. Tell us more like what's in these people's minds. Obviously, they're doing a very risky business, right? But they keep doing it. I guess they're making money. Why are they doing it? Is it just the money, the thrill? I think it's lazy money. It's really good money. And I think it's lazy money. It's like $1,000 a day. They can make up to $1,000 a day just selling fentanyl on the corner in the Tenderloin seven days a week. A lot of them are very smart. If they put their minds towards something successful that was legal, I think they would do very well. But I think a lot of it's laziness. Do you have a sense like if a kid would come to these guys to buy drugs, would they sell it to them? Oh, yeah. In the Tenderloin, especially since fentanyl has been out, I've witnessed kids in Catholic school uniforms purchasing. I've witnessed guys in three-piece suits go purchase. I've witnessed your FedEx UPS parcel drivers pulling up in trucks and purchasing during work. It's just become—I've seen everybody out there. And they're not discriminating. They'll just sell to whoever wants it. Correct. And when they get arrested for selling fentanyl, one of the questions is asked, you know this kills people. And they say yes. They're the ones that want to buy it, so I'm going to sell it. So again, kids cannot—you have to be like, what, 21 to buy alcohol and 18 to buy cigarettes? Yes, yes. But you can be 12 or whatever and go get— They'll sell to anybody. Yeah. Anybody that has money, they'll sell. How would you say San Francisco changed over the years? When I worked—when I was at Narcotics in 1999 and we were doing drug cases, a lot of the people we arrested stayed in jail and went to prison. Right now for a person to go to prison, it's very uncommon. Everybody goes to trial now because they know that they have a good chance of getting out. Before, a lot of people pled because they knew they wouldn't get away with it in trial. And a lot of people pled and took their time and went to jail for a while or went to prison for a little bit. It's not like that anymore. And it's because of the laws and because of the leniency from the judges. And also they get a city attorney, I guess, to help the case. A public defender will come in and represent them, yes. Tell me about some other operations you were involved with. I think Operation Cold Day was something that stood out. I want to hear about that. Yeah, Operation Cold Day was a fencing operation. To explain fencing is I would purchase stolen items that I was planning on reselling. Okay. So I was purchasing narcotics, guns, and stolen cars. So a warehouse was set up in Colma, just outside of San Francisco. And it was wired with cameras inside and outside. And they had some false walls built in the back of the warehouse where a GSOC center would work with all the cameras. And they would use joysticks to zoom in and out. And they had a tactical unit there in case things got bad for them to respond out inside the warehouse. And they also had a group of officers outside that would follow cars off, identify somebody if they couldn't. And it consisted of ATF was the lead on it, CHP, DEA, San Francisco Police, and Daly City Police. And it was a real quiet operation. We didn't talk about it. And ATF brought a bunch of, which I call mercenaries. They're a bunch of informants that they fly into the state. And they go out and they start hanging out at all the gambling shacks and bars and all the places and start telling them, Hey, I got this guy, Carlos, that's buying stolen firearms, drugs, and stolen cars at this warehouse. I should introduce you to him. So there was four of us that were undercover there. And what we would do is they would call our phone. We had these burner phones. They'd call the phone and they'd say, Hey, I got two rifles I want to sell. And I'd be like, well, come on through. So we'd roll the door up. They'd pull inside. They'd be getting filmed the whole time. We would purchase the rifles or the stolen cars or the drugs. And then they would drive out and we'd have another call come in. It got to where people were calling like crazy to where I would tell them, Hey, somebody's in here right now. You need to call me in a half hour because you don't want to see them and they don't want to see you. So it ended up just being this revolving door that was coming through these warehouse doors. Did you have any leads to begin with or you just started this operation? Just started it cold. Just started it cold and just had the informants go out there. Just clean up, basically. Yeah, they would just give our phone number out. They would give the location where we were at and they'd say, Hey, call these guys are buying all kinds of guns, drugs and stolen vehicles. We did it for about 18 months. We arrested, I think it was over 125 people. 75% went federal. 25% went state within San Mateo County. We ended up with a large amount of firearms. I don't even know how many. And a lot of drugs and stolen cars. Now, how often, I wonder how much of a dent does that make in the overall crime scene? Do you think if you keep doing this, you would get to the point that there's no more crime, but it doesn't seem to get there. Yes. I mean, it makes a dent for a minute and it makes everybody that's not been arrested out there selling, makes them think twice. So you see things calm down for a period of time and then you see it start coming back. But it's just like I always say, let's just take the Tenderloin, for example. You're not going to arrest your way out of the Tenderloin. You can't arrest enough people because as you arrest people, more just come and backfill. They talk about the users that are out there buying. They say, Oh, they're homeless. Well, I don't think it's homelessness. I think it's mental health issues and addiction. If you dealt with the mental health issues and the addiction, you would take a lot of them off the street. If the users aren't out on the street, then there's no reason for the drug traffickers to be out there because they're not going to make any money. So I think the thought of just arresting everybody, I don't think you can arrest your way out of it. Give us a sense from your working experience, how the drugs get into San Francisco. I haven't had a lot of knowledge of it because I used to work those T3 wire taps, those federal wire taps. So we would see the drugs coming up. It comes across the border, comes across the Mexican border. Across the Canadian border, you might get some ecstasy, MDMA and stuff like that coming through. But the majority of your drugs is coming across the border from Mexico. So whether it comes through with tractor trailers, whether it comes into the ports in big ship containers, whether it's being driven through just people loading up the cars and making it through, that's how it's breaking through. And there's just so many containers and so many trucks that come in that it's not feasible to check all of them, right? That's true. And you also have some agents like we would discover when we're on the wires. You'd have some, how would you say, you'd have some dirty agents that were letting cars through or letting trucks through. You'd hear it on the phone when you were listening. You also have, if they want to bring a car through, they're very smart. If you want to bring a car through, you'll bring some through with a little bit of drugs on it so that the dog alerts to it. And when they pull that car into secondary search, they let the rest of the cars behind it go. And those are the ones that are loaded up with the majority of the drugs. So they'll give up a driver and some drugs to get the lion's share through. The current administration, it looks like it's putting effort into stopping or at least slowing down the flow of drugs in the U.S. How much impact do you think that makes or you see it make? Well, I think it makes a large impact just because you'll hear that there's dry spells of narcotics that aren't coming through. You'll hear that they're waiting on shipment to come through. It's not readily available like it was before, but it's still coming through. You're still getting, you go down the tenderloin, there's a ton of people out there selling fentanyl, selling methamphetamine, selling heroin. You've pretty much seen the full pipeline of the operations of the drugs coming in and how they get distributed in the drug dealers. What would you say are some innovations that could be done within the city of San Francisco to stop this? What would be the main things that can prevent it? Well, if it comes to the drug sales, tighter laws, tougher laws. If it comes to the border, it's more border agents and heavier screening, what comes across the border. I think heavier screening would help, but there's only so many agents available out there. In San Francisco, to address the drug problems, the trafficking and stuff, I think it's stricter laws. I think it's more education and stricter laws. I mean, fentanyl is a synthetic drug. There's other synthetic drugs that are coming into play now. They're just going to continue to make more and more types of synthetic drugs, and those are the ones that are really, really bad. Speaking of tougher laws, let's talk about San Francisco being a sanctuary city. What impact do you think that has overall on crime or drugs or whatever? I think it's got a large impact on crime when it comes to the undocumented. They serve a sentence in jail just like anybody else, any other citizen, and the federal agencies aren't allowed to take control of them when they finish their sentence. I think it's what makes it hard right now for the federal agencies when that person gets released. In 2008, INS was able to go into the jails and put holds on people, undocumented workers, when they had domestic violences, rapes, child molestations, murders, robberies, victim crimes. They were able to put holds and detainers on them. In 2008, they got pushed out. But what happens now is if you fingerprint somebody in the jail, it goes through the state and federal system, so the feds know that person's in custody. Well, if that person's wanted by the feds, they'll call over to the jail and they'll say, we're sending over a detainer for this person. The detainer is tossed away. It's not put into effect. And they make sure they're able to release that person back out to the city when it's time without the feds grabbing them. And then what happens is now the feds will go search for that guy and they'll get him in Oakland. A lot of our drug dealers live in Oakland. They'll get him in Oakland in a house. Well, there's 10 people in that house. Now, everybody in there is undocumented. You can't leave a scene without identifying everybody that's there, even on state. If I do a search warrant and I hit a house, I need to document everybody that's there. I need to run everyone that's there. It's just part of what you do and you put them in the report. Well, when they do that as well, now you've got an extra 10 people that are undocumented and they have to go as well. So whether they're drug dealers or hardworking undocumented people, they're going to get pulled into that vacuum. If they got them in jail to begin with, then it would just be one person. If you were able to pass them over in jail, then it would be a different story. They would put all their resources into removing the people in jail that do the heinous crimes and the stuff. They would be able to get a hold of them. They wouldn't have to go search for them and then catch everybody else up in the mix. Give us a bit of sense about who's in charge of organized crime-wise. Is it the Mexican cartels or in San Francisco? I mean, who's doing what? Well, you have the Mexican cartels that are bringing it up and you have predominantly the Hondurans that are selling it on the street. In San Francisco, we also have Asian gangs, Russian gangs. They're organized groups. Yeah, I mean, it's a melting pot out there. We have everybody. You gave an example earlier about a Honduran, Honduran person saying that his worst day in San Francisco is better than his best day in Honduras. Yes, we did a search warrant in Oakland and we hit the house and one of them started fighting and a police canine bit him in the leg. And I put him in the car with me and drove him up to have it checked. He got cleared by the fire department. The fire department came out. They said, yeah, he's fine. Just go ahead and take him up to Highland Hospital and bring him up to emergency up there so they can clean it out. So I put him in the car with me. I was driving up and I asked him, why do you do this? And he said, my best day in Honduras is my worst day in the United States. And it really, like, really drove it home to me. I was kind of like, wow. And I said, really? He goes, this is not, this is nothing. Getting bit by the dog and getting arrested is nothing compared to being in Honduras. So that kind of explains or makes you understand more why they do what they do. Oh, it absolutely does. And I have no ill will towards them. Everybody's got to survive. My job is to make sure that you don't do anything illegal and you got to go to jail if you do or you got to at least get arrested. But I do understand. I understand why people do what they do. What would you say gives you hope for San Francisco overall? We have a really good mayor right now. And he's really trying to bring things back, like, like a lot of the businesses and stuff, which is that's a good start. There were some laws that were cleared in San Francisco to be able to. They run a real time crime center now where they run drones and surveillance cameras, license plate readers. And that's really helped fight a lot of the crime. San Francisco was never into that. It was always the big brother thing. We're not letting them come here and do this. It got cleared a few years ago for them to do it. And it's been very successful. They're able to put drones out to follow cars so you don't have to. Police cars don't have to pursue the possibility of hurting somebody. They're able to get surveillance on a crime that's occurring immediately before the police officers can arrive to update them what's going on. I think that was that was a huge thing. And, yeah, I think I mean, I do think it's it's it's getting better in that sense. I got to ask you about ICE. Recently, there's been all kinds of protests against ICE. And sometimes there's students and teachers that take the day off and then they go to protest. And I kind of want to get your sense how you feel about that. Is it something that you think it's needed or what it's allowed? It's allowed, but my personal opinion is I think when kids are in school, they should be learning and not being directed towards anything political. I just think that they're there to learn. I don't think they're there to be, like I said, directed in any typical path of following something. What would you say to them? What would you say to the teachers and to the kids as far as ICE operations and whether they should go out or not? I was in my opinion, I would say you just I mean, you're showing they're showing right now that it's it's the schools aren't very effective right now. And in learning, reading, writing, arithmetic, concentrate on that. Let's not concentrate on political, political things. So I'm sure there's many reasons, but I would still want you to summarize why the United States is like the biggest military force in the world. You know, we have like the richest country in the world. Why can we not stop the drug problem that seems to be affecting so many young people and so much in the US? I think there's different types of legs to it. I think it coming through is a big problem. It being readily available. I think education regarding narcotics. I think we're I think we're going in the wrong path when they started pretty much like Proposition 47, when they they made personal use of misdemeanor. I think you're going in the wrong direction. I think you need to tighten it up. Back in the day when we arrested users for felonies, they would sit in jail for a few days. And I think at that time they got some clarity because you're not going to get someone off the street when they're getting high. They're not even going to think about it. But if they go sit in a room for for a few days, I think a lot of them will get some clarity come to their senses. And I have personally seen some of them tell like when they went in front of the judge after that, I want to go to a program. I'm tired of doing what I'm doing. So I think that's a huge part of it. I think the laws need to be tougher for drug traffickers. I think that's why we've kind of leaned on the federal side of it because they're getting they're getting real time and they don't get a ton of time in the beginning. You might get five years on a federal case. You got to do 80 percent of it. But if you do it again, you're looking at 10 years. Now that sits in the back of their head. If you get somebody on a state case and which they don't get any time, but let's say they do 30 days, they might do 15 on the second one. They might do none on the third. It's it's I think that's the carrot and stick. I think you need to know that in the back of your head that this is going to be more severe if I continue to do what I'm doing. So we had someone on this program a couple of years ago who told us exactly that story, that he was he was homeless, he was addicted and he was buying drugs. And, you know, every day and he got arrested. And then first, second, third, fourth, fifth time. And then he would be released right away. The last time they kept him longer. Was it a week or two weeks? I don't remember. But he told us at that time because he was in prison longer. That's when he got sober. And then when he came out, he said, I don't want to do this anymore. So. So I remember that story when you mentioned. Yeah, I've had that happen a lot. I've had that happen a lot. I've had people tell me how I was. I was doing real bad. I didn't know how long I was going to last. And I'm real glad you guys gave me a time out and put me put me in jail for a little bit. I don't even look at it as I mean, you are being incarcerated, but I look at it. You're being incarcerated for another reason. You're being incarcerated for you to clean up for a little bit, kind of make a decision that this is what you want to do. So we had someone on this program a couple of years ago. Tom Wolfe is his name. Yes, I know him. Who told me the story that he was homeless. He was addicted. He was buying drugs every day. And then he was being arrested once, twice, three times, four times, released right away. Now, the sixth or whatever time they held him longer because, you know, he reached the threshold where he stayed longer. And he told me because I was kept longer in jail, that's why I got sober. And that's why I didn't want to go out there. I want to change my lifestyle. I want to improve and do better. Yes. So there was a pretty amazing story. And then just. I know of Tom Wolfe. I've seen him at events and stuff, and I see him at City Hall and places like that. But he turned his life around completely. He's absolutely right. I mean, we used to go through. We loved doing that. We loved arresting the drug traffickers, the sellers. But then sometimes the captain would go in and go, you got to grab all the users today. So we would drive through and arrest them all. And we would load up 20, 30 of them, and they'd spend a couple of days in jail. But that's when they had a chance to decide, do I want to go back out there and do it again? Or do I want to make a change and request a program? Because in so many ways, I think that they're not really in control. Their minds, they're not really controlling. There's just something else that controls them. When they're high, they're not thinking straight. So if you get them out of that state, it's a different world. They have some officers that do 11-5-50 now. It's under the influence. And they walk up to them, and they cite them tickets, misdemeanors for being high and using drugs. But they ask them if they want a program or anything. Well, you're not going to get them to say yes when they're in the middle of getting high. They need to step back. They need to be able to sleep for a while. They need to be able to get some food in their stomach. And then they need to kind of think, like, do I want to go sit out there in the cold again with no shoes on and live in a cardboard box? I mean, you'll get the ones that say they don't. And even if you could save one of them, it's huge. It's huge. Could be the next Tom Wolf. Yeah, they could be the next Tom Wolf. That's exactly right. There's not a lot of resources. Like in San Francisco, there's a lot of nonprofit money that's not going where it should be. As an example, there was an officer in the Tenderloin, Officer Katz, I think it was, in October. He finds a mother and two children sleeping in a doorway. And he says, it's cold out here. You can't be out here. And he calls for a crisis unit to come out. And they start calling shelters. All the shelters are saying, we're full. We can't take them. We can't take them. And he takes his credit card and rents a hotel room and puts them in it. Because he was like, they can't be out here. And all this nonprofit money, where's it going? I mean, you should be able to take a mother and kids off the street at night and put them somewhere. So they were good for the night, but what happens the next night? I heard a lot of stories that the shelters are actually not full because people don't want to stay in them. They don't want to stay in them because they have to abide by rules. But, I mean, on an incident like that, you should be able to call somebody and accommodate them. Yes, you should. And for an officer to have to put his credit card out, which I think is noble as hell, for him to be able to do that, I think that's awesome, but it shouldn't have to be that way. There should be a place to be able to put them. And all this nonprofit money, where's it going? It's billions of dollars. Billions of dollars. So speaking of the police officer who used his credit card to get a hotel room for the mom and the two kids, can you tell us, in your experience, were there moments, you know, police officers, many times, they sacrifice so much. Was there any moment that you say, you know, I can't do it anymore, I've had it, it's too hard, you know, I give up? And how did you come out of it? I myself didn't because I was lucky enough to be moved into the federal system. So it was very positive for me still because I knew that the arrests that I was making, they would serve time for them. But the hardest job is the officer in uniform. The officer in uniform's got the hardest job. They're dealing with hundreds of people every day. They're wearing a uniform so they have like a target on their back. But you see a lot of them feel like they're chasing their tail because, you know, before you would arrest a person that was using, now I go give him a ticket when he's ingesting fentanyl and he reaches in his pocket and pulls out ten other ones and shoves it in there and says, yeah, have a good day. You know, and it's kind of like... Demoralizing. It is because you're thinking like, wow, I mean, I'm sitting here giving this guy tickets. He's got ten of them in his pocket and nothing's going to change. And if you look at it like in the tenderloin, we're still losing two a day to overdose in fentanyl. It's like an eight by eight block radius. You're losing two people a day. It was three. Now it's down to two. But still, that's two in an eight block radius. Those are the people... Per day, per day. And those are the ones that they say, you know, oh, they have a right to be out there and do what they want to do. I don't think they're... I think they're endangering themselves and they don't even know it. Maybe talk more about the biggest... That's something I haven't even thought about, the biggest challenge for a police officer. Many went into law enforcement because they want to get the bad guys. So when you're getting them but you're not getting them, is that the biggest challenge? Like you got them but they get away. Yes, it's hard. It's a hard period of time right now for the uniformed officer because after the Floyd incident, there's not a lot of respect for officers. So they're not only trying to do their job, they're also putting up with disgruntled people who say bad things to them and disrespectful things to them. And they're the first they call when there's a problem. But when there's not a problem, they're, you know, spitting at them. So I think it's a terrible situation right now. And I think a lot of the officers are disgruntled about it. They want to go out and help people. They want to. I mean, that example that I've given you, that's not a one-timer. That's stuff that happens all the time. And people don't see it. People don't get a chance to see it. I'm lucky that I'm here able to talk because when I was in the police department, you're not allowed to talk to any press. You're not allowed to talk to anything regarding any incidents. You're not allowed to talk about any of the stories that I've been able to talk about. And I think you're programmed for that. So a lot of officers, when they retire, they're still programmed like that. They don't want to talk about anything that's going on. I have the luxury of being able to talk about it and open up and kind of not just talk about myself but also talk about what these officers do on the street. And you're not going to see a lot of them talking about it. And they go above and beyond. I mean, they're problem solvers. They're not there to just grab people and throw them in jail. They're constantly solving problems. They're constantly looking for resources. Their job is hard. That uniform job is hard. What difference did Prop 47 make overall in San Francisco? My opinion, I think Prop 47 destroyed... Maybe clarify what it is. Is it $950? It's less than $950. It's treated as a misdemeanor. It's a misdemeanor. Possession of drugs for personal use is a misdemeanor. I think it destroyed California, not just San Francisco. I think it was very shady that George Gascón named it safe parks, safe streets. It has nothing to do with safe parks or safe streets. How can it be safe parks, safe streets when you just gave them the green light to be able to do drugs and shoot dope and leave needles in parks and on the sidewalk? And I don't think... I think that was a bad move. I think when people were voting, they didn't even have any knowledge of it. And they look, and it says safe parks, safe streets. They're like, oh, that's... Yeah, I'm good for that. That's not what it was about. And I think it really destroyed California when that happened. We're declining with legalizing things and making things low-lying criminal acts when we should be tightening up things and getting things back to how they were. Well, Ray, thank you so much for your time. What are you doing now? You're retired from your SFPD work. And what are your plans? What are your future ventures? I work part-time as an investigator in San Francisco, in another branch of San Francisco. I work executive protection for a great family that I'm doing right now. And I'm also working on a book. I'm working with... It's a retired DEA agent, Mike Murphy, out of the East Coast. And we've created an outline and have the stories written and everything. And we're just shopping it out to publishers right now to see if somebody wants to do it with us. What's the book about? What's the outline? The outline of the book is undercover stories, true undercover stories, operations that took place. And also the rise of narcotics from the crack era to the methamphetamine era to the fentanyl. It just explains in detail about it. What do you hope to accomplish with the book? Do you feel that the reader out there is not educated enough as far as how the drugs happen? Yes, that was a big thing on us was we wanted someone to read it and get educated on the narcotics, the type of narcotics. And we wanted them to see what the narcotics, the problems it caused. And as you're getting all the way up to fentanyl, we wanted to explain the severity of fentanyl. As the other synthetic drugs that are starting to come through right now. Britt, thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you for the stories. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay.epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.