A San Francisco billionaire is offering a $10 million gift to the city to create a state-of-the-art police technology hub as he pleads with officials to clean up the streets.
Chris Larsen, the co-founder of cryptocurrency platform Ripple, has requested San Francisco officials to approve his huge gift to enhance the city’s policing.
Larsen’s funds would relocate San Francisco’s Real-Time Investigations Center, the police’s hub for overseeing tech including license plate readers, surveillance cameras and drones, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.
The entrepreneur, who has a net worth over $8 billion, is hoping to move the center from the SoMa Hall of Justice to the Financial District, into a building that he owns.
The potential new HQ, located at his building 315 Montgomery Street, would be sub-leased to the police for free from Ripple, which owns a $2.3 million lease on the property through December 2026 but no longer uses it.
Larsen is known for his funding of public safety initiatives, and beyond the free lease he is offering $7.25 million from his policing charitable organization, the San Francisco Police Community Foundation.
In an interview with the Chronicle, Larsen said the crimewave that upended San Francisco in recent years has started slowing thanks to advancements in police tech that he hopes will continue.
‘I think we can clearly see what a force-multiplier this is,’ he said.
‘The number of tools that they have is quite small, and we know that (expanding them) will have an impact.’
The streets of San Francisco became synonymous with crime, homelessness and open-air drug taking in recent years, fueled by soft-on-crime policies from officials such as former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin.
Boudin was recalled in 2022 as residents fumed over a lack of safety in the city, however crime in San Francisco has steadily dropped in recent times as it rebounds from the pandemic.
Officials said investigative work done through the Real-Time Investigations Center helped assist over 500 arrests in 2024 and drove a 40 percent drop in auto thefts over a one-year period.
Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesperson for the police department, said cops in the city are hoping Larsen’s proposal is accepted, adding that his multi-million-dollar gift would ‘supercharge’ the unit.
Commissioners within the San Francisco Police Department are set to discuss Larsen’s funding proposal on Wednesday, and if it is accepted the proposal would move to the Board of Supervisors to finalize the deal.
‘We cobbled together our current (Real-Time Investigations Center) with everything we basically had lying around,’ Sernoffsky continued.
‘Little did we know how effective it would become with just the tools at our disposal.’
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, the heir to the Levi Strauss denim fortune, was elected last year on a platform aimed at cleaning up the drug-infested streets.
He defeated London Breed in the election as voters rebelled against her lenient policing policies, and Lurie said in a statement this week that the tech investigations center has become one of the most important assets to his police department.
Lurie said it supports a severely understaffed department, and ‘with this new facility, the SFPD will have the tools and the technology it needs to take this work to the next level.’
‘I want to thank Chris Larsen for his continued dedication to our police officers and the safety of all San Franciscans,’ the mayor said.
Supporters of the proposal also say that the change of venue is desperately needed, with an ordinance proposal cited by the Chronicle noting that ‘in its current location, the RTIC has experienced power and internet outages, and plumbing leaks from the ceiling.’
‘The RTIC is in a windowless room in a concrete structure, which limits cell phone and emergency radio transmission capabilities,’ the document stated.
Larsen has become known in the city for funding such public safety projects, including gifting $1 million to his police charity to help officer wellness and financing surveillance cameras across the city.