Esther Stearns owns Stagecoach Greens, a miniature golf course in Mission Bay that highlights the famously fun and whimsical side of San Francisco. But on Sept. 12, while making a video for her business near McCovey Cove, she encountered the city’s increasingly notorious dark side.

A disheveled man who appeared to have just been released from a hospital because he was wearing only blue hospital bottoms with no shirt and no shoes began ranting incoherently near Stearns and her friends. Then, the man pulled out a small knife, got in the women’s faces and repeatedly yelled, “Who wants to get cut?”

Stearns, 59, showed me her call log from that day. She phoned 911 at 11:41 a.m., 11:48 a.m. and 11:53 a.m. It wasn’t until 11:55 a.m. — 14 minutes after the first call — that police responded. According to Stearns, they took the man’s knife, but said his words hadn’t constituted a criminal threat and did not arrest him. The man talked about his freedom of speech and just walked away.

Stearns said it’s heartbreaking to see fellow human beings left to deteriorate and scary to be a victim.

“I can’t outrun this guy,” she said. “This has become an inhospitable place for vulnerable populations like older women, like any older people.”

The frightening encounter and discouraging outcome was one of dozens of similar stories shared with me after last week’s column about a woman sexually assaulted by a man who appeared to be high or have untreated mental illness outside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It seems that just about every resident of the city has a story of walking in San Francisco and being yelled at, spit on, lunged at, punched or kicked by a stranger exhibiting deranged behavior. And many don’t feel confident the San Francisco Police Department will take their calls seriously or that City Hall has any sort of grasp on solving San Francisco’s severe twin crises of drug addiction and untreated mental illness.

“There’s an acceptance of incivility and threatening behavior that is not an acceptable way for people in a dense city to live with each other,” Stearns said.

Mayor London Breed said in an interview she hears these stories too — and they’re not OK.

“I understand that this is a problem,” she said. “What’s happening, unfortunately, is we see these people, we see that they’re in crisis, and we don’t have all the tools we need to address these issues until something happens.”

But the “something” that happens after a crime is committed isn’t very satisfying either. They’re taken to either jail or San Francisco General Hospital’s psychiatric emergency room. There aren’t nearly enough treatment beds available for longer-term care, so they’re often quickly released — sometimes still in their hospital garb.

“They’re right back on the streets in the same place, creating the same conditions they did before,” Breed said. “The problem is everyone wants a solution, but we have to be able to force people into treatment.”

The mayor said she’s glad the city has opted in to state Sen. Scott Wiener’s expanded conservatorship program to compel treatment of mentally ill people who are too sick to know they need help. But that will apply only to people who’ve been 5150’ed — taken to a psychiatric emergency room for a 72-hour hold — eight times in one year, which is a very high bar.

Think about it. That’s someone posing an imminent danger to themselves or somebody else at least once every six weeks, on average, for a year. Only then can the city require the person to receive long-term help.

Breed said she’d like to see more loosening of the state law to allow the city to compel more people into treatment. But in reality, neighboring counties bound by the same law are conserving far more people per capita than San Francisco, partly because of a looser interpretation of the term “gravely disabled.”

Under California law, people can be conserved if they pose an imminent danger to themselves or others or are gravely disabled and unable to provide for their own food, clothing and shelter.

Many people in San Francisco clearly fit that third definition, but the city rarely conserves them because it doesn’t have anywhere to treat them and due to concerns over violating their civil liberties. San Francisco lost treatment beds during the recession, and it hasn’t restored them despite its budget swelling to $12.3 billion a year. And it’s obviously struggling to cope with the repercussions.

Breed said she joined the city’s street medicine and homeless outreach teams Tuesday for a walk around the Civic Center. Outside the Main Library, they talked to an alcoholic homeless woman known for cursing out passersby. She had just been released from the hospital when the mayor encountered her on the sidewalk. The group couldn’t convince her to accept help — or even drink water on a brutally hot day.

“This is not something we should allow to continue,” Breed said. “This is a situation where we should have the ability to do more whether they agree to wanting help or not.”

That’s true — and Breed does have power to do more by pressing for every treatment bed in the city to be used every night, to continue to open more beds, to urge more gravely disabled people to be compelled to accept treatment, and to open more sobering centers, including a proposed center specifically for people addicted to meth. Of course, her continued push for more shelter beds and supportive housing units is essential, too.

There’s also clearly a need for Breed and Police Chief Bill Scott to have a conversation about the role for police officers to play in addressing this crisis. While countless city residents have told me over the years they feel dismissed by officers when reporting scary street behavior, Breed and the Police Department are adamant these stories are simply not the true.

“I know that’s not happening,” Breed said of officers discouraging people from pressing charges or not taking complaints seriously. She said she’s accompanied police on some of these calls and never sees them act dismissively; of course, police might be more careful when the mayor is standing right there. Breed added that the department is understaffed and having a hard time recruiting.

Several requests to interview Scott were not granted, but the department’s spokesman, David Stevenson, also flatly denied officers sometimes discourage people from filing reports or otherwise wave off citizens’ concerns.

“Our officers work hard to respond quickly to numerous calls for service,” he said. “They’re committed to treating victims with courtesy and respect and do their best to make arrests as quickly as possible.”

Stevenson invited me to police headquarters on Third Street to view an officer’s body camera footage from an April incident referenced in my last column in which a woman was punched by a stranger in the back of the head. She told me she opted not to press charges because “the officer told me, ‘You can press charges, but the judge will probably drop it. It’s not going to go anywhere.’”

The footage showed a more complicated interaction. An officer told her the punch would count only as a misdemeanor, which meant the officers could issue only a citation. Then, she’d have to fill out paperwork and “the judge would hash it out.” The officers also said the man could be mentally ill and offered to take him to the hospital, and the woman chose the latter option.

The officers appeared to have been very respectful toward the woman. It is not known what happened after the officers took the man to S.F. General.

“Our officers care deeply about our city,” Stevenson said. “It’s unfortunate that our many successful investigations and resolutions go unreported.”

On that note, I asked if there was any update in the case of the woman attacked outside SFMOMA, hoping for some good news. Stevenson said he is unaware of any developments. The woman who was attacked said she has heard no updates but has a meeting with a police investigator scheduled.

Stevenson confirmed that police responded to McCovey Cove on Sept. 12, removed the man’s knife and determined no crime had been committed. He said response time was nine minutes, not 14. He said some witnesses in the group reported fearing for their safety and others did not.

Stearns, the mini golf course owner, said she has seen the knife-wielding man around Mission Bay since the frightening encounter and just hopes he doesn’t remember that she called 911 on him. She said it’s a struggle between promoting the city she loves for her job and feeling frustrated by its inaction on the rampant street misery.

“I love this city. I hate saying bad things about it, so believe me, I don’t do this lightly,” she said of talking so publicly. “I would just like things to be better.”

Wouldn’t we all.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf