A new facility meant to allow San Francisco officials to arrest more drug users has a wrinkle that’s surprising some of its main advocates: Those detained can walk out soon after arriving.

On Monday, the city will open the RESET Center at 444 Sixth St. as an alternative to hospital or jail for drug users. The new center — RESET is short for Rapid Enforcement, Support, Evaluation, and Triage — allows police to trim the time they spend on each drug arrest by forgoing jail intake paperwork. At the 24/7 facility, drug users will have access to showers, transportation to drug treatment, and comfy leather recliner chairs. The initiative has been touted as part of the city’s new “tough love (opens in new tab)” approach to the fentanyl epidemic. 

“It’s another option for people,” Mayor Daniel Lurie said at a press conference Wednesday at the site. “We are going to try everything at our disposal to help people get off the street and stop people from dying.”

At the press conference, officials danced around questions about how long alleged users can be detained, at times offering contradictory answers.

“This is not a voluntary situation by any means,” Sheriff Paul Miyamoto said. “It’s intended to keep people out of jail. But it’s not a ‘get out of jail free’ card, because there are consequences to being publicly intoxicated and being taken in.”

As reporters continued pressing for details, Lurie spokesperson Charles Lutvak ended the press conference. But Rani Singh, chief legal counsel at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office, offered a slightly different explanation afterward. 

“Technically, they can walk out,” Singh said. “There are no locked doors.” 

Clients can stay for up to 23 hours, but officials expect the average stay to last between four and eight hours. “No one will be holding them,” Singh said. “But you can create an environment where, hopefully, they don’t want to leave.” 

Police will bring clients through the back door of the facility, a blue one-story building in the shadow of the Bryant Street courthouse, and they can leave through the front door on Sixth Street, just a few blocks from where many fentanyl dealers operate. But Singh emphasized that anyone still under the influence of drugs when leaving the center could be rearrested for public intoxication.

“While the facility is not physically locked, individuals are detained until they are able to care for themselves and appropriate for release,” the Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. “If someone chooses to leave, they may be subject to rearrest and booked at the county jail.”

A spokesperson for the mayor deferred comment to the sheriff’s department.

Supporters hope the RESET Center will provide a valuable alternative that lands somewhere between a hospital and jail. But some say the program isn’t what they were originally sold.

Drug rehab director Cedric Akbar, who stood behind Lurie in February as he signed the legislation (opens in new tab) inside City Hall, said he felt he had been misled. 

“We were told they were going to be held for 72 hours,” Akbar said. “It does give police more time to be out on the street, but I guess everything else was hot air.”

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a sponsor of the legislation, told The Standard he was under the impression that clients of the center would be under the sheriff’s custody. 

He later called back to say the sheriff assured him people can be detained at the center. When asked about the discrepancy between what he heard from the sheriff and their legal counsel, Dorsey again hung up to call the mayor’s homelessness chief, Kunal Modi. 

Between May 2023 and May 2025, San Francisco police made more than 3,400 arrests for crimes related to using drugs in public. While some say the crackdown has led to an improvement in street conditions, the approach has been criticized for overcrowding jails and failing to transition drug users to treatment. 

Neighbors of the center are wary. A manager of a nearby business, who asked not to be named, said she is worried the center may lead to more drug-related activities around her storefront. 

“They’re intoxicated when they come in,” she said. “What’s to say the moment they’re cognizant again, they’re not going to be like, ‘I’m out of here’?”

Homeless people who were near the RESET Center on Thursday had not heard of the new facility but said they would take advantage of its showers and comfortable chairs if they found themselves there. Emma Carrillo, who was reclining on a mattress near Victoria Manolo Draves Park, said people would stay in the facility if they were too intoxicated to leave.

“If they’re passed out, yeah,” Carrillo said. 

Donald Kempf, 40, was curious about how much help the center could provide.

“Do they feed you?” he asked. “Would it clear your warrants?”

Individuals with warrants will not be admitted, according to the contract signed with operator Connections Health Solutions.

The city has tapped Connections Health Solutions to run the RESET Center. The for-profit company runs similar programs in six other states. However, San Francisco is the only city in which all patients will be referred to the program by police. In Seattle, for example, roughly 50% are brought in by police, 35% are referred from hospital settings, and 15% admit themselves, according to Connections CEO Colin LeClair.

“In an ideal world, you would have a fleet of mobile social workers out the street, responding to calls from the community and picking up patients,” LeClair said. “We’re not there yet. No city in the country is there yet.”

San Francisco deploys a Street Crisis Response Team to many mental health emergencies, responding to 64,263 calls since November 2020. However, the team struggles to connect clients to services. According to the most recent data available, the team in January transported 46% of clients to a hospital or rehab, while 44% remained at the scene of the incident. 

In 2018, the city piloted the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, which allowed police to refer repeat drug offenders to social services. However, the initiative was undone two years later, despite continuing to operate in other U.S. cities, because the San Francisco Police Department and social workers failed to align on the initiative. 

“For us not to do this, and to try this model, would be a dereliction of duty for us as a city,” Lurie said of the RESET Center.