best part of this job. >> i'm on a side of paramedic. >> i'm an athletic and i'm a professional football and now a firefighter. >> i'm a firefighter. >> are you ready to answer the call and combooshg on a call media friends and everybody welcome to the chinese chamber of commerce. my name is dixon and uh, i'm going to say i bilingual and try to translate so please be patient with me and we're here today we have all of our esteemed speakers here today to celebrate the success of the 2025 year the snake lunar new year activities.

it has been an incredible season to really bring the city back to life with all the activities that was kind of coincidently happening on the same weekend and so yeah, thank you so much for coming and thank you for all media friends for coming and without further ado let's get started. i'm going to hang up hang out johnson i can walk. >> you take that robotic arm. yeah . >> the forefront of supporting and uplifting our community.

our president donald lu of the chinese chamber of commerce he's played a crucial role in organizing this year's lunar new year activity celebrations and ensuring our traditions will continue to thrive. so please join me to welcome mr. donald lucy couple weeks and while they don't watch on time we get duterte glow and fong she's out that. good morning everyone thank you for coming. i'm happy to announce that this year new year parade and festivity was a resounding success anchored by me a lovely inauguration in chinatown. it created so much energy and and momentum that carry into the the flower fair where we saw so many people half the sweep or one weekend from not from 10 to 5. we this year we had we also increased our our vendor we also created a new cultural block we will showcase eight

pandas that are going to be displaying around the city and followed up on that. we also had the the lunar new year day celebration which also was a very festive and very the spirit in chinatown gary which has which was magical. and then we all come then everything culminated in the in the parade and the street fair. we had over 120 vendors and the parade as we all saw was one of the most successful parade that we have in a while in the partnership with abc we saw that was the number one show in the in that day it increased enormously by a by by 27%. it was broadcast not just on abc seven local but also in over ten other market across the country and hulu and also

disney plus. so this just let you know and we also have more than close to a thousand volunteers many of them are a high schoolers or some college student on the parade. it's it's a very significant for this coming year in chinatown because it's a place for us to is not only an economic economic driver for for chinatown and the surrounding neighborhood but it's also a training ground for many, many volunteers for us. so i am very happy that i am here today to to say thank you to the mayor for all the work that you've done to support the outreach and our festivities right. your continued investment in the parade will be very, very significant not just in the parade but also our infrastructure i like to put it this way i know that you are very behind in supporting us to make the promise later to plaza something that we can we can be proud of something that's going

to be iconic. so with all that i want to say thank you everyone for coming. we had a wonderful year this year and we look forward to another beautiful year of listening. thank you, president hu. our next speaker needs no introductions. since taking office he's been a steadfast advocate for our city and make sure our all our community stay very vibrant and his leadership and commitment to cultural heritage has been very strong in supporting events like our lunar new year all activities to please give a warm welcome to mayor jan thank you donald. thank you very much and to everybody up on this stage. thank you. we're here to celebrate the remarkable success of the new lunar new year parade and nba all-star weekend and the eyes of the world were on san francisco and we rose to the occasion like we always do just like any big trip made possible by teamwork. i want to thank all the department leaders and city workers who came together to make this happen over the lunar

new year weekend i witnessed collaboration firsthand on saturday, the day of the parade i visited the department of emergency management's emergency operations center. the coordination and focus were exactly what we expect and appreciate from our teams on sunday ahead of the nba all-star game i also spent time at speeds command center out in potrero. what struck me most at those meetings was how seamlessly the teams worked together to make sure the city was ready for any situation. let me tell you there's an incredible amount of hard work going on behind the scenes to keep our city safe. residents and visitors don't always see that work but they can feel it. they can feel it when they ride muni with their family to the parade without worrying they can feel it when they shop at the pop ups that were up and

down powell street and they can feel it when they enjoy the walk from their hotel to dinner. everything all the time they travel down a clean and welcoming street and feel safe. our city workers are making a difference and we are starting to see vast improvement on that front. the stats from the weekend also tell a story of success. the lunar new year parade and nba all-star festivities brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to our city and spurred hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity thanks to the increased law enforcement and strong collaboration across public safety agencies. we also saw a significant drop in crime that weekend. crime was down 30% compared to last year's lunar new year parade weekend. in fact this was the safest lunar new year weekend since 2007 ten muni metro sites

busiest weekend since the start of the pandemic. the department of public works had dozens of workers out until midnight cleaning the streets after the parade our firefighters were out all weekend responding to hundreds of calls every day and our nine one operators answered 84% of the calls in 15 seconds or less. even with hundreds of thousands of visitors in town, this success is a direct result of the surge in resources and our ongoing commitment to safe to making san francisco a safe and clean place for residents and visitors alike. over the weekend the team activated 100 staff from the city, state and federal agencies as well as the private sector and all of our partners all sfpd officers all of them were on duty making the

department effectively fully staffed despite our persistent officer shortages, it's clear when law enforcement is fully staffed and resourced we get results. so far this year crime is down overall and my administration is committed to sustaining that trend. we're going to build on this momentum and i want to announce also something that the chief will talk about in a moment that we had a multi-agency operation in jefferson square last night in jefferson square park last night targeting the drug market. dozens of arrests were made. more information is coming. but i have to tell you and this is a message that i want everybody in the city to hear if you are selling drugs in this city, we are coming after

you. we are committed to fully staffing our police department, our sheriff's department, our 901 dispatch office. we can keep our streets safe and clean not just for an incredible event like the lunar new year parade weekend or an nba all-star game but to make sure that our elders here in chinatown feel safe our kids getting on the bus at 16th and mission feel safe every morning . the conditions are not where we need them to be. but last weekend proved that we are capable of delivering for the people of san francisco and you are going to see more of that in the weeks and months ahead. after i had i want to also end with this lunar new year weekend we announce a permanent sfpd hospitality zone task force that is now keeping our downtown good economic core safe 365 days a year. we are leveraging every tool we have, including that fenton all

state of emergency ordinance to expedite the hiring process and get more public safety and behavioral health professionals on the streets more quickly. the results we saw last weekend over the lunar new year parade and all-star weekend are the proof that we know that we can achieve results. i want to thank police chief bill scott. i want to thank fire chief dean crisp. i want to thank team director mary ellen carroll dpt dpw director carla short, s.f. mta director julie kirschbaum and new brant thank you for being on call last weekend for executing a successful and coordinated strategy to keep san francisco prepared and safe . and finally i want to thank all of our police officers fighters, our sheriff's deputies, muni drivers, dpw staff, first responders and all of our city workers for their tireless work to make these

events a success. my administration is committed to building on this progress. san francisco's comeback is just getting started. thank you, mayor larry. thank you, dana. up next, we'll have our next speaker. the success of the lunar new year parade is really the heart work of all these individuals here and the dedication of the team behind it and leading the charge of the parade is a man who has worked tirelessly to bring to continue our traditions of the parade and all the light of a new year facilities. so if i can have you introduce our next speaker mr. tony lowry, the director of the lunar new year parade. let me go. thank you. thanks and good morning everyone. good morning, mayor larry. good morning president donald good morning everybody. i just want to say thank you for all the support that you guys giving us. this was a very successful event in terms of the chinese

new year celebration. we have our chinese new year parade. we have our festival chinese the history fair. we also have our basketball team growing and we are having our ymca ones coming over for this weekend. so we cannot do it without all the support from different city agency, different leadership, upper management from from our city. so i really appreciate it. couple of things i want to share with you guys is that for the parade itself this year we have actually precise we have more than 1250 volunteers. is that truly a community event? this is an event for our community and of course we have approximately 134 units. we have about 5000 participants all over the bay area. we have different marching band. we have a total of 21 float and of course with the help with the partnership with abc7 we won't live in san francisco,

l.a., fresno, chicago, houston ,philadelphia and new york. we actually have got a call from new york from one of the potential vendor that want to talk to us for 2026 already. so i really want to say thank you for everyone you guys support. that's why we have such a successful event. and i think this number may be a little bit more understandable for our sponsor. we have a total of 25 million total minutes watch nationwide around the whole nation. so that's a huge number. so i just want to say once again thank you everybody. i think this is the greatest event. just to let you guys know we are ready to start planning for 2026 already. we had we had our first meeting on monday with the team. we are already planning for 2026 so with everybody's support i think 2026 is going to be another wonderful year. appreciate it. thank you so much. up next i wanted to bring up

the next speaker because our local business is at the heart of our community and today i want to we will get to hear from incredible merchants who play a vital role in making this celebration successful. so i want to introduce chelsea hong who is the owner of rg lounge who is of course celebrating the 40th anniversary in march. so and also a long time legacy business in the city. so please welcome chow. >> good morning everyone. first i just want to extend my gratitude to mayor lori for your unwavering support for the chinese new year parade. chinese chamber of commerce and your dedication to the chinatown community. also thank you to the chinese chamber of commerce for hosting such incredible events during the month of january and february including all the multiple fairs in the chinatown parade. i'm going to try and town usa pageant and the chinese new year parade. these events are these events

are not just traditions. they're the heartbeat of this community. for many chinatown merchants including us at orange lounge, chinese new year is the busiest and most important time of the year for us. we rely heavily on these festivities. the parade and the surrounding festivities bring in numerous tourists, locals and visitors alike and creating an incredible energy throughout the neighborhood and a positive impact for the businesses. those past weeks we were fully booked and over the parade weekend we hosted numerous events for guests who came especially for the parade and these festivities. it was amazing to see the city alive and these businesses thrive again. this is one community looks like people coming together to celebrate culture and supporting small businesses. thank you to our city leaders, our city workers that are

supporting the fire department event organizers especially tony and the chinese chamber of commerce and everyone who showed up to support chinatown. thank you. thank you for next i want to introduce our next three speakers who as mayor lori has speakers his team their teams have worked tirelessly during those weekends and in fact every single day to keeping our city safe and organized and making our community feels like san francisco is a great place to live. so i wanted to introduce sbt of chief william scott, our fire chief fire chief president and also the chief of public safety paul yet all the thank you and good morning. >> first of all i like to say thanks to our mayor mayor lori, thank you for your support and for your energy. we have some momentum in this city and mayor lori has hit the

ground running. i also want to say thanks to our chief of public safety paul yet because the structure that mayor lori has put in place instantly has caused better coordination between the public safety departments in that's due to chief yes. and his expertise his ability to get things done and his ability to coordinate. so thank you for your help and your support. i just want to talk a little bit about also let me say back to donald lu and the chinese chamber of commerce donald who is all about community to take the commerce chamber of commerce is all about community and we have to work together to make things work in this city and we have done just that. public safety partners our mayor, our policy chief of public safety we're all working together and that is why we are getting the results that we are getting. i want to talk a little bit about in detail some of what near laurie said about crime. that is no small thing. we had the lowest crime that we've had since 2017.

we've gone almost two months under mayor luis administration and we had one homicide and that was before he actually was sworn in with 20 minutes after midnight. we've had one homicide for the entire year. we know that we have work to do. we know that we have challenges in a city that we believe that we will be able to tackle and keep that momentum going forward. but it starts with our officers and the commitment to police that this police department will make a difference. it will allow us to sustain this work. we have dismantled the drug market but we still have problems. last night's arrest at jefferson square park we arrested 84 people 84 people and there's been this trend that we see where we go into an area we clean it up, we stabilize it and then a lot of the people that are causing problems and havoc particularly as it relates to the drug market go into another neighborhood. that day is over and we know it's going to take time.

but you will see these types of operations when people displaced from an area that we go in and try to clean up and then go to another community. this is what you're going to see. you're going to see these types of operations. so we are committed to doing just that and it was a multi jurisdictional multi-agency collaboration. we had our cpd officers in numbers. we had our sheriff's department you know like think sir paul miyamoto for that. we had our rec and park rangers . we had a multitude of people out there all with the same single purpose and that is to make these communities safer to stop this whac-a-mole thing that we're seeing when drug dealers and users go from one community to the next when they get pressure this pressure will not stop. this pressure will not stop. so here that message loudly and clearly i like big my partner public safety chief chrisman who will hear from him in a second and i'd like to finish with this. we know that our city has the momentum. commissioner silver from the

nba during the nba all-star week said and i quote him and saying that he is seeing a resurgence in this city energy like he has not seen before. that is where we are. but it's only going to get better from here because we are committed to making the city the safest city in america. and with that, i'll turn it back over to you, chris. i think the. good morning, everybody. first and foremost, i would like to thank our public safety team starting with mayor lori and the other members. we have a new administration in the fire department and it was very welcoming, very amazing welcome that we received from the other members of the public safety team. and it was very clear to me from the first several meetings that we had that we were going to be successful over this week those weekend's events. and the reason was that nobody was putting their department ahead of another department as

far as importance. everybody only had one goal in mind and that was to keep the public safe. there were no egos involved. everybody worked really well together collaboratively. so thank you everybody for the welcome that you have given us and working with us on the outset of our administration. it's been very nice. i'd also like to thank the members of our department that stepped up during these events specifically fire marshal chad law. next to me this was a big ask for for prevention staff. we asked them to staff several different locations including chase including mosconi, including the chinese new year route. and they did an amazing job of stepping up and making sure that there were no significant incidents. they were able to prevent anything from happening. i'd also like to thank chief erica brown, our chief of homeland security who also did an amazing job of staffing up our important areas and making sure that we staffed all the important operating centers that were set up for all that all of these events.

i think i'd be remiss without thanking the public i think the public actually really stepped up to the plate and that speaks to the energy and positive vibes that we're having in this city. people did not come to our town during these events to cause any trouble. i feel like people came here to celebrate these events show their pride in the bay area and san francisco. and that was evident by the statistics. we only had five medical events on the parade route. that's significantly fewer than we've had in the past and i think that's a direct result of citizens buying in to the positive energy that we have in this city and understanding that they are part of the solution as well. we didn't have any major car accidents because people took public transportation. so all the messaging that we sent out to the public to say hey, participate with us and ensure that everybody's safe was received and i think that's a testament to the leadership of this group in front of you and specifically mayor lori. and thank you again to director. yep, you've been a great inspiration for all of us and moving forward. thank you very much.

thank you to both of you. thank you, director yang. last but not least, our next speaker will be joined by someone who is a strong advocate for our local neighborhood and businesses. i'd like to introduce district police officer danny sato. >> good morning everyone. i'm danny sartor. you're district three supervisor. that means i have the absolute honor and privilege of representing chinatown in city hall and also the other incredible neighborhood union square where this parade wound through a few weeks ago and i'm really glad that we're here this morning to reflect on the success of this incredible event this is one of those things that we should never take for granted. it is a truly an only in san francisco event. and you know, i got to i got to say i had family visit my eight year old niece was in the parade with me and her mind was blown and we delivered that same experience for hundreds of thousands of people. and tony, i'm looking at you because it's your first year as a director but no one would know that because you delivered

an incredible event i'm already looking forward to next year. i know you're going to do it bigger and better and it is our job all of us up here on stage in the city to make sure that the excitement, the vibrancy, the joy that we felt the other week that we continue to deliver that to the residents and visitors to san francisco and we're going to do that in small bits and pieces every single weekend throughout this year and i look forward to working with all of the city to to continue to do that. i thank everyone for being here this morning. i want to thank mayor lyric, mayor lori for your leadership. you've invested a lot into this community. you've invested a lot into chinatown and it's showing success already. thank you. thank you. supervisor we have that concludes our speakers for this morning is any of our press media friends have any questions i sidney johnson of kqed have a question for the chief for the operation last night can you give more details about you know what folks were arrested for? were these mostly drug users,

mostly drug dealers for users? are they potentially going to be released pretty soon? just any more context you can share about the operation specifically? yes. so of course with that many arrests and we're still processing reports and all that so i'll have more details later today. but principally what is happening is we'll go into a community because of the rapid drug use or drug sales and we will put pressure on those drug dealers. we'll arrest drug dealers and we'll begin arresting people. we we have service providers to give services and when that pressure becomes intense enough, what we oftentimes see is those groups will go to the next block or the next neighborhood and we you know, we call that this place a lot of we believe a lot of the people that have started to hang out and in jefferson square park where we're selling drugs and doing drugs were a result of pressure from other neighborhoods. tenderloin summer and it just

became untenable. so a lot of what we see and what we were there for was drug related crimes. i don't have all the time right now we'll have a more complete breakdown later today. i'm sure some people will be released but for some of the crimes and misdemeanors and some people will remain in custody. but the bottom line to this is we're going to take action and it's not like we haven't taken action but displacement is a huge problem. you know, we see it in news stories. we hear it all the time. and what we don't want to do is get people comfortable with hey, if we put pressure on this block, we'll just go to the next block and nobody's going to bother us. that's not going to happen. we are going to do our job. we're going to make sure that we don't take a problem from one neighborhood and plant it in another neighborhood. so i know that's a long answer to your question. we'll have more details about all the charges later today. but 84 people were arrested. some will remain in custody. some probably will be released per law and we'll just keep the pressure up to make sure we

clean up our city. just a quick follow up to that. there's been you know, talk as you're mentioning that some of the enforcement pressure around sixth street, you know, that that has led to some of that displacement. is that a part of the police department using that triage center for any processing yeah. or detainment you know some of those stated goals for that new trailer center it not as much processing as we hoped to one day have but what it has been able to accomplish is we have hundreds of people that go to that center every day. they get connected to services, those that want to get connected service some people just arrested off of the sidewalks and that is part of what this is. you know, we don't when you go down the street or any street in san francisco just like that and you see people on the sidewalks that are struggling from addiction and all that you're part of this is where can they be that's a safe place . that's not a sidewalk if they're committing a crime, of course we need to take

enforcement action but some people just need help and those services are there so you know, from the first day people were a little bit skeptical because they didn't know what it's about. you won't go there to get arrested now if officers use it as a process, you know those crimes are happening on the street and we go there for an efficiency perspective. but we also have an array of city services and service providers that are there and people are starting to figure that out. some people would just go to get a cup of coffee and you know, get out of the office. i other people going there like journey home to get a connection back to where their home support system is. so you know, we're going to we're going to make adjustments with this as we need to but it's something different is something new and we hope that it's going to help our community. but police are not so far using it for processing or it's been very limited. it's been very limited but that is a part of the goal. it's a process as we get staffed up. francis we need partnership from our sheriff's office. they are stepping up just like

we are. we've increased our deployment on security to mission at that corridor and the sheriffs have as well. so we anticipate that that will lead to processing just from a take off of efficiency so officers can take them there for transport. the bands can then take them if they have to go to county jail or county jail and officers go back to the field. so that's the efficiency that we want to realize but that's a work in progress. thank you so much, chief scott. that's all the time we have for everybody today. so thank you so much for coming. really appreciate all of you here the