A street brawler allegedly attacked a member of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s police security team Thursday evening near the edge of the Tenderloin District, the city’s notorious drug-plagued neighborhood with the mayor only feet away as the violence commenced.
Mission Local posted video of the street wresting match between the suspect and cop after the mayor’s chauffeured SUV was stopped by people blocking the street and they reportedly were asked to move by the mayor himself.
The San Francisco Police Department officer assigned to the detail was left “panting and bleeding after he slammed his head during a struggle with the suspect,” the California Post reported.
The mayor is seen looking on at the beginning of the conflict before walking away.
Backup arrived on the scene and arrested one Tony Phillips, 44, on “suspicion of threat to an executive officer, possessing drug paraphernalia, petty theft, battery and assault upon a police officer, and resisting or obstructing an officer,” according to the Post.
Phillips repeatedly shouted, “Fuck you!” as officers cuffed and detained him.
Mayor Lurie was not harmed.
The injured officer gave a statement to his responding fellow officers.
According to Mission Local:
The officer said that three people blocked the car shortly prior to the attack, and that Lurie “hopped out” to ask them to move. They began to “comply,” the officer told his fellow cops, but, at some point, one man began “talking gibberish.” The officer then intervened and asked the man to move out of the way. The man did at first, but then came at him, he told officers.
The mayor’s driver, also a police officer, dealt with another man off camera but that confrontation apparently did not result in violence or injury.
Phillips, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, was booked on suspicion of murder in 2019 but never faced formal charges. That arrest had to do with a fight and stabbing of a man in the Polk Gulch neighborhood, close by to where Thursday’s incident with the mayor’s detail occurred.
The Tenderloin District is known for crime, homelessness, and open-air drug markets. It is the center of the fentanyl crisis in San Francisco.
Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, denied former Mayor London Breed another term in 2024 and, as Breitbart News reported, represented a rejection of the city’s long held progressive policies. He had argued Breed’s flawed leadership devastated the downtown economic district and exacerbated the drug crisis, homelessness, and public fears about crime.
In February, he signed a new law mandating police arrest people openly using drugs or appearing intoxicated on the street and triage them into detox and rehabilitation as an alternative to jail.
Contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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