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Kyra Worthy, the former head of the police-adjacent nonprofit SF SAFE — which dissolved this year after revelations of lavish spending and unpaid bills and wages — was today arrested and charged with 34 felony counts.
Charges include: Misappropriation of public money; submitting fraudulent invoices to a city department, theft from her nonprofit, SF SAFE; wage theft of some $80,000 from employees and failing to pay their withheld employee taxes; and writing checks with insufficient funds to defraud a bank.
Worthy is accused of illegally misusing more than $700,000 during her tenure with SF SAFE. Worthy was fired in January by the SF SAFE board; she was hired on at the nonprofit in late 2017.
Worthy’s firing came on the heels of a January controller’s audit that found SF SAFE misspent some $80,000 in San Francisco Police Department grant funds in 2022 and 2023. The organization’s board subsequently discovered its “bank accounts were essentially empty,” as noted in an affidavit released today by the district attorney’s office.
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That revelation led to police department command staff requesting that the DA investigate the matter of “SF SAFE’s ‘missing money,’” which led to today’s arrest and charges.
“Our investigation revealed evidence showing that Worthy embezzled more than $100,000 of SF SAFE funds, with most of the money taken in her first few years at SF SAFE,” reads today’s affidavit.
“Our investigation also revealed that, over time, as Worthy continuously spent SF SAFE’s money in extravagant ways, she put the organization deeply in debt and she ultimately committed a series of crimes to try to postpone the inevitable discovery that she had run SF SAFE into the ground.”
The DA lists those crimes as:
Trouble began brewing for Worthy in September 2023, when a company called Applied Video Solutions told the DA’s Special Prosecutions Unit that some $600,000 in surveillance cameras that was supposed to be underwritten by the nonprofit was late in coming. The DA was informed at this time that an “individual donor” — in fact, crypto billionaire Chris Larsen — was concerned, as a grant had been paid to SF SAFE to cover the camera installations.
Then, in January, the dam broke with the controller’s report, which revealed some $80,000 in improper spending on items such as limo service and luxury gift boxes.
Today’s affidavit notes reporting by both the San Francisco Standard and Mission Local in which aggrieved contractors complained that they had not been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for work already completed, including $625,000 not paid to the Latino Task Force.
During subsequent inquiries by DA investigators, it was discovered that Worthy had bypassed SF SAFE policies requiring multiple signatures on any check exceeding $5,000. On one check for more than $112,000, Worthy is accused of forging other SF SAFE officials’ signatures; she allegedly had a stamp of her treasurer’s signature produced without his knowledge.
Employees told investigators, and the media, that they had begun receiving their wages via Venmo or CashApp payments from SF SAFE’s attorney.
With a warrant, the DA’s office determined that Worthy had drained SF SAFE’s bank accounts of some $250,000 in 2019 and $5,000 in the spring of 2023. Today’s affidavit states that many of these were “personal” charges for Worthy. Those would include hundreds of dollars in monthly Lyft rides, meal purchases, out-of-city parking, airline tickets and out-of-state charges. She spent more than $24,000 at Marshall’s.
Receipts reveal she took a Lyft from her home in Richmond to SF SAFE’s Mission District office and back every day.
While SF SAFE’s board president told investigators he was unaware of Worthy’s alleged financial misdeeds, the DA doubts this. Reports from three different outside accounting companies going back to 2019 urged that controls be placed on Worthy’s spending, that she should be subjected to greater oversight and that her purchases should be reviewed. Her expenses, the DA reports, were listed in SF SAFE’s general ledger, and Worthy kept “meticulous records” of her own activity.
These “thick binders” are now evidence for the DA. They reveal “more than $130,000” in bounced checks and nullified electronic payments due to insufficient funds in the latter half of 2023. Her gift box expenditures alone in 2022 and 2023 exceeded $350,000.
In addition to spending lavishly on SF SAFE-related items such as gift boxes, and allegedly spending heavily on herself — expenses today’s affidavit makes pains to note that SF SAFE’s board was aware of and neglected to do anything about — the DA also notes instances of falsified invoices. These have led to charges of theft and fraud.
Today’s affidavit meticulously notes instances of Worthy diverting hundreds or thousands of dollars from SF SAFE funds to her own. These include payments to her landlord she categorized in the nonprofit’s general ledger as covering “community meetings.”
As detailed in Mission Local, Worthy’s alleged crimes left Mission businesses jilted and pulled the rug out from beneath longtime employees. Florist Diosa Blooms told Mission Local in February that Worthy, a big spender with a taste for lavish arrangements, had stiffed their family business $17,000. The nonprofit’s landlord also alleged that SF SAFE owed about $445,000 in unpaid rent for a sprawling and luxuriant office at 22nd and Mission streets.
SF SAFE’s dozens of former workers have complained to the city; one, Furlishous Wyatt, had worked at the nonprofit since 1982.
The workers are out a collective $80,000. Today’s affidavit notes that, in October 2023, Worthy spent $98,000 on an event called “Candy Explosion.” That included $20,000 for desserts and $19,000 for a petting zoo.
Worthy was booked into San Francisco County Jail at 12:42 p.m. As DA Brooke Jenkins is familiar with one of the alleged victims, she has personally recused herself from this case.
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Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.
