A Castro community patrol group that depended on the nonprofit San Francisco SAFE to receive city dollars is the latest potential victim to come forward as questions of misspending surround the embattled charity.
Castro Community on Patrol, a volunteer organization that seeks to deter crime by walking beats around the historically LGBTQ neighborhood, said Wednesday that its longtime fiscal sponsor, SF SAFE, abruptly canceled their partnership in November after nearly two decades of working together.
The decision left the volunteer group, known as CCOP, with some $11,000 in bills that it had expected to pay using city grant funding passed through SF SAFE, according to Greg Carey, the group’s chief of patrol.
Carey said the debt included more than $6,300 owed to a small business for ballistics vests, as well as funds owed to himself for smaller purchases and money owed to a contractor for record-keeping and communications work.
“We have been keeping a low profile because we need to find a new fiscal sponsor before we can begin rebuilding bridges with some of our valuable vendors,” Carey wrote in an email to The Standard. “At the same time, we did not want to be one of those invisible victims that keeps the public from knowing the true impact of the events as they unfold.”
Carey said he first began to understand the problems at SF SAFE after seeing an article in The Standard about how a Controller’s Office report found that the nonprofit had improperly billed its major funder, the San Francisco Police Department, for at least $79,000 in expenses not covered by its contract.
