What SDPD Isn’t Showing You About Operation Last Call
SDPD measures success in arrests, but its own records show most bookings reflect police effort, not harm
SAN DIEGO (Gaslamp Quarter) Three weeks after launching Operation Last Call in the Gaslamp Quarter, San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl declared it a success. “Following our successful efforts with Operation Last Call in the Gaslamp, we are bringing that same zero tolerance approach to the Central Library with Operation Overdue,” Wahl said in a Sept. 18 announcement, promising to “take back Downtown and other areas of our City, block by block.”
The success SDPD cites is enforcement. By mid-September, the department said, officers had made 76 arrests, written 102 citations and seized five guns, KPBS reported. The city offered no figures showing that crime or complaints had actually risen. SD Slackers went to SDPD’s own records to check, looking at the offenses it booked, the calls its dispatchers handled and the calls it posted publicly, on Friday and Saturday nights from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. on the blocks where the operation is concentrated.
Violence was already falling
The operation came days after a closing-time fight on 5th Avenue outside Tacos El Gordo on Aug. 23. Police broke it up with pepper spray and arrested five people, and videos of the fight spread widely online. Five days later, SDPD announced Operation Last Call, saying that “increasingly, assaults, disorderly conduct, and other unlawful behavior are impacting the experience for everyone.”
At a press conference that morning, Wahl said he was authorizing “up to 25 additional police officers,” stationed at intersections starting with Fifth and F, plus an undercover vice team “focusing on over-service and underage drinking.” Times of San Diego reported the officers would work from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. on weekends.
The weekend of the fight was a bad one on these blocks, with nine violent offenses booked, tied for the most of any weekend this year. The year as a whole was going the other way. From January through August, violent offenses booked here on weekend nights were down 17% from the same months in both 2025 and 2024, with 125 this year against 150 and 152.
Violent offenses were down 17% from both prior years before Last Call began. Monthly counts are small, so the overall shape matters more than any single month.
SDPD’s announcement also cited the Gaslamp recording three times Pacific Beach’s disorderly conduct cases “last year.” On these blocks, 2025 was the peak of an earlier enforcement push, with disorderly conduct bookings running 60 to 94 a month from March through October, the highest in three years. Disorderly conduct is a charge officers write, usually for public drunkenness, so a high count says as much about enforcement as it does about disorder.
More enforcement, fewer fights
Most of what SDPD books on these blocks doesn’t start with a victim’s report. About three of every four weekend-night offenses booked here are arrest-driven charges like disorderly conduct, so when more officers work 5th Avenue, the “crime” count goes up with them. That’s what happened after Aug. 28. Bookings climbed back toward the year’s summer levels, and 38 disorderly conduct bookings in the first three weekends put the operation on pace to approach last year’s highs once late reports arrive.
The measures of harm moved the other way. Violent offenses in the three weekends after launch were 2, 8 and 3, an average of 4.3 against the roughly 6 per weekend the year’s trend projected. Calls for disturbing the peace with violence, which are mostly fights, fell by half, from 6.2 to 3.0 per weekend. SDPD deserves credit for that.
Violent offenses after the launch stayed at or below where the year was heading. The Aug. 21 weekend, which included the Tacos El Gordo brawl, tied for the year’s high.
“These have been very quiet weekends since the 8/28/26 start of Operation Last Call,” said Dale Porter, a video journalist whose series Bike Cops on his YouTube channel, NewsReelMedia, follows SDPD’s downtown bicycle team. Porter describes the operation’s main tactic as groups of officers lined up on 5th Avenue facing the sidewalk crowds. “They should have called it ‘operation stare-down,’” he said.
At the launch, Wahl had argued that presence wasn’t enough. Officers usually get people to stop, especially people who are sober, he said, but “what we’re seeing is the police officer presence isn’t working.”
The stops you can’t see
The biggest change in SDPD’s dispatch records after Aug. 28 wasn’t in crime. Pedestrian stops more than doubled, from 5.9 to 13.0 per weekend, and flag-downs and other contacts started by officers rose too. None of those stops appeared on SDPD’s public calls page, before or after the launch.
Stops doubled and fights fell by half, but the public page showed none of the stops.
The same holds across the year. On a typical weekend, SDPD’s dispatchers handled about 60 calls on these blocks and its public page showed about 15. Stops, traffic stops and special details, the work officers start on their own, appear there at or near zero. The one category SDPD posts in full is prisoners in custody, meaning arrests, the same number it cites as proof of success.
SDPD handled about 60 calls a weekend on these blocks and showed the public about 15.
What would success look like?
SDPD said the operation will continue “until there is a notable reduction in violence and illegal behavior in the Gaslamp.” It hasn’t said what counts as notable, and three weekends of data can’t settle the question either way. The sample is small, and SDPD adds offenses to its public records days to weeks after they occur. At the launch, Wahl framed the goal in terms of behavior. Once people see “this is the new norm,” he said, “you’re going to see much more lawful behavior. And that’s the outcome we’re looking for.”
The department’s numbers also don’t show who did what. The Gaslamp had a dedicated bike team before Last Call, and patrol officers help with arrests and prisoner transports. “Ideally, I would like to see the stats separate actions taken by the existing team from the new operation team,” Porter said.
SD Slackers sent SDPD a chart of weekend offenses booked on these blocks through 2026. Ashley Nicholes, communications manager in the chief’s office, said the department’s teams found the results similar to what they were seeing. In a statement, she said most people in the Gaslamp are “having a safe and responsible time,” though “there are still some who are engaging in illegal activity.” Officers are “keeping a close watch and ready to take enforcement action if necessary,” she said, and patrons “have frequently shared their appreciation with the officers for their presence. We will continue to maintain this Operation as long as necessary to ensure a safe experience for all.”
Our take
Operation Last Call is being offered as a model for downtown, to be repeated “block by block,” but most of it happens where the public can’t see. The stops, the part of the operation that grew most, never reach the public calls page. Police radio has been closed to the public since June 2, 2025, when SDPD encrypted all of its radio communications, citing a state mandate to protect personal information. The state Justice Department’s 2020 bulletin gave agencies a choice, though, between encrypting and adopting a policy that keeps protected personal details off open channels. SDPD had used that second approach for years, sending sensitive inquiries to an encrypted channel, before it chose to encrypt everything.
What’s left is a public calls page that shows a shrinking slice. On these blocks, the share of calls SDPD posted fell from about a third in January to under a fifth by late summer. It jumped to 41% the first weekend after the launch, then slipped to 32% and 24% over the next two.
The share of calls SDPD shows the public fell through 2026. This is one year of data, and some of the winter high may be seasonal.
The public ends up with an arrest count, which measures police effort more than public safety. Fewer fights is a real result. If SDPD wants credit for a safer Gaslamp, it should publish the evidence, including stops, their outcomes, and what the new detail did compared with the bike team already working there. Until it does, residents are left to take the department’s word for it.
Our reporting depends on public dispatch data, and before June 2025 it depended on SDPD radio, so SD Slackers has a stake in public access.
How we did this
None of this appears on SDPD’s public calls page. We assembled it from raw records the city publishes on its open data portal, data.sandiego.gov, and compared them with what SDPD’s public page showed for the same nights. The records are public, but seeing the full picture takes downloading, mapping and matching tens of thousands of rows.
The study area is a rectangle along 5th Avenue, from 4th to 6th Avenue and from Broadway to L Street, about 700 by 2,800 feet. We counted Friday and Saturday nights from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., matching the operation’s announced hours, from Jan. 1 to Sept. 14, 2026, giving 34 weekends before the Aug. 28 announcement and three after. SDPD calls for service and booked offenses (NIBRS) both come from the city’s open data, alongside SDPD’s public online calls page. Violent offenses are homicide, kidnapping, sex offenses, robbery, and aggravated and simple assault. Booked offenses include arrest-driven charges such as disorderly conduct. SDPD publishes offenses with a delay, with about 70% appearing within 14 days and 96% within 60, so recent counts will rise. Only records with a location could be mapped, and the public page share was matched by call type. Year-to-year comparisons of total offenses are limited because SDPD’s categorization appears to change between 2024 and 2025.
This piece was researched and drafted with AI from an outline by our editor, who made the editorial calls, checked the sources and edited it. How we use AI, and where we draw the line: sdslackers.com/how-sd-slackers-uses-ai
