San Francisco’s Crestwood Healing Center, the city’s largest locked mental health ward inside St. Mary’s Hospital, is under intense scrutiny after today’s investigation detailed repeated violence, staff warnings and a January 16, 2024 attack that left one patient with 30 stitches. Former employees told reporters they were spat on, groped and at times left alone to break up fights, and they say managers often failed to intervene. The facility is a key piece of the city’s conservatorship system, and the reporting is reviving hard questions about oversight and what San Francisco is paying private operators for locked beds.
What reporters found
According to The San Francisco Standard, reporters interviewed 10 former employees and reviewed state inspection records, internal documents and contemporaneous text messages that together describe a pattern of safety failures. The Standard reported that San Francisco pays Crestwood roughly $35 million a year to run the center. Staff accounts described what they saw as a permissive culture around sex and safety that, in their telling, sometimes allowed dangerous behavior…..