San Francisco residents who report open-air drug use through the city's 311 app have discovered an unpleasant surprise: hundreds of those complaints get automatically canceled, with instructions to call the police themselves instead. Between April 22 and August 21, the third-party reporting app SolveSF recorded 425 canceled drug-use cases, each one closed out with case notes telling the user to call the police department directly rather than wait for the city to act.
The cancellations trace back to a quirk in how San Francisco's 311 system is built. As reported by The San Francisco Standard, the city's Department of Emergency Management says drug-use complaints need to be phoned in to 311 so the call can be live-transferred to police, since app-submitted reports simply cannot be routed that way. When a report comes in via SolveSF or the official 311 app instead of a phone call, it is canceled, and the case notes instruct the user to call the police department on their own. The City Administrator's Office, which runs San Francisco's 311 system, confirmed to the paper that app-filed complaints are not acted on once they're canceled.
That leaves residents facing a second obstacle: San Francisco Police Department response times. Non-emergency calls are logged as Priority C, the lowest tier, and Department of Emergency Management data from mid-2025 put the citywide median wait for Priority C calls at nearly 84 minutes, according to The Voice of San Francisco. In SoMa, the delays are even worse — Mission Local's April 2026 analysis found the median Priority C response time there reached 1 hour and 54 minutes, 53 percent slower than the citywide figure.
A Contradiction Baked Into the System
The mismatch is especially jarring given that city officials have actively pushed residents toward 311 as the preferred channel for reporting drug activity. Last Saturday, District 5 Supervisor Bilal Mahmood posted a video public service announcement urging residents to file 311 reports for public drug use, loitering, and debris so the city can build hotspot data for street crisis teams, while reserving 911 for active dealing or overdoses. Mahmood told the Standard that residents commonly report issues through 311 only to find their reports closed without explanation, adding that there needs to be a better user experience.
Mahmood said he is working with the Mayor's Office to prevent drug-use complaints from falling through the cracks, and the Mayor's Office is discussing potential fixes with the Department of Public Health, the Department of Emergency Management, the Department of Public Works, and the City Administrator's Office. The Mayor's Office did not provide details about what those changes might look like or when a fix could be implemented.
Patrick McCabe, who created the SolveSF app, said multiple users have told him they are unwilling to call police after their app-based drug-use complaints get canceled. He fears that unaddressed reports could let dangerous situations fester until they turn into emergencies such as overdoses, and he said people simply giving up on filing reports would not help resolve the underlying problems on the street.
Data Gaps Compound the Problem
Complicating matters further, San Francisco's public 311 dataset lacks a dedicated drugs category and contains only redacted complainant notes, which limits outside researchers' ability to track the scale of the issue independently. That data has still proven useful elsewhere — 311 reports have helped identify drug-use and littering hotspots, and a related 311 reporting project led to a drone pilot program aimed at finding illegal dumping hotspots in San Francisco and Oakland.
The stakes of getting hotspot data right are high. San Francisco recorded 624 accidental drug overdose deaths in 2025, according to Narcotics.com's review of Medical Examiner data, giving the city the second-highest fatal overdose rate among major U.S. jurisdictions at 70 deaths per 100,000 residents. Preliminary Medical Examiner figures showed 53 unintentional overdose deaths in January 2026 alone, up from 36 in December 2025. In October 2025, city health officials launched newly integrated neighborhood street teams under the Department of Public Health, consolidating outreach across previously siloed departments — teams that rely on hotspot data like what 311 is supposed to generate, per KQED.
App Reliance Keeps Growing
The scale of the reporting gap is significant because so many San Franciscans now file complaints through apps rather than phone calls. Citywide, 311 has received 2.4 million complaints over the past three years, and 62 percent of those were filed via the city's official app or a third-party app like SolveSF — a share that has grown as digital submissions have come to dominate the system. Hoodline previously reported that 311 handled nearly 800,000 complaints in a single recent year, with digital and mobile submissions representing the majority of all reported issues.
Shelby Weiss said residents need clear, effective, and easy-to-use ways to contact the city — a standard the current drug-complaint pipeline is failing to meet, since phone-submitted complaints get transferred directly to the police non-emergency line while app-submitted ones are simply closed. Non-emergency calls also capture far less incident detail than a written 311 complaint, meaning even residents who do follow up by phone may end up providing a thinner account of what they witnessed than they otherwise would have.
The friction between city policy and app functionality isn't new. San Francisco's plan to discontinue its Open311 API drew opposition last year from civic tech volunteers and community groups including Refuse Refuse, who argued that third-party apps like SolveSF offered faster, easier reporting than the city's native tools — a fight Hoodline covered in its report on SolveSF's API shutdown fight. For now, the underlying contradiction remains unresolved: city leaders keep pointing residents to 311, even as the system keeps quietly closing the door behind them.
