San Francisco apparently has a big poop problem.
The city’s online 311 system tracks all complaints made by city residents. While many of them are related to clogged storm drains or graffiti, a whopping 16,000 have been lodged about feces found on city streets. Most of them are about poop around homeless encampments or found in dark corners of the city, and more than 14,000 have been “closed” by the city (which likely means some unlucky city employee likely had to clean up the poop).
One of the strangest — and largest — complaints came over the weekend. The Fresno Bee reported that someone left a bag filled with 20 pounds of poop at the curb of a sidewalk. Picture showed that the bag appeared to be unable to hold in all the poop, leading to a number of complaints to the city’s SF311 system.
A representative for the non-emergency complaint service told the San Francisco Chronicle that they often get complaints about small amounts of feces found on street corners, but said that the amount stuffed into the clear garbage bag was “not typical.”
A spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Public Works said they have no idea how the bag of poop ended up on the sidewalk or what kind of poop it contained.
“I don’t know the source,” Rachel Gordon told the San Francisco Chronicle . “It could be people. It could be dogs. It could have been picked up from the street. It could have been from someone’s house. I’m glad it was in one place and in a bag.”
As the Fresno Bee noted, a picture of the bag was shared on Reddit, where one user confirmed that it smelled just as bad as it looked.
“It was the most atrocious smell I’ve ever smelled in San Francisco,” user tusi2 said.
Others shared that it took the city several hours to finally show up and haul away the overflowing bag of feces.
It really is the perfect San Francisco story https://t.co/pLWYHHyqQg via @stephemcneal
— MAT HONAN (@mat) July 3, 2018
The city’s feces problem has gained considerable interest among right-wing news outlets, with some taking a bit of glee in the famously liberal city’s unusual and disgusting problem. A site called Newswars reported on the 16,000 feces-related complaints to San Francisco’s 311 system, noting that it was part of an ongoing series from the outlet “documenting the decay of California.” The report noted that the state is a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants, though did not note how that connected to the feces story.