A marathon hearing on the scourge of open-air drug dealing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, South of Market and Mid-Market neighborhoods Thursday raised more questions than it answered about the city’s fragmented, sputtering response to the problem.

What role should police and prosecutors play? How much should the city invest in diversion programs that keep people out of jail? How many drug-treatment beds does the city need? And how can the city address what’s widely considered a root cause of the nation’s drug epidemic — systemic poverty?

The hearing before the Board of Supervisors’ Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee featured presentations from nearly a dozen city departments and community organizations, reflecting the breadth and depth of a pernicious drug problem hobbling San Francisco’s poorest communities. Perhaps the only clear answer that emerged was that none of those questions will be easy to answer.

Supervisor Matt Haney, who represents the neighborhoods in question, called the hearing to draw attention to what he described as the “widespread and endemic” issue of open-air drug dealing in his district. To date, the city’s strategy has been one of “containment,” he said — confining open-air drug dealing primarily to poor neighborhoods.

“There are dozens of people selling drugs at any given hour, including around our parks and schools in the neighborhood,” Haney said. “I think each of the departments recognize that what we’re doing right now is not working.

“For each of them to be operating in their own silo is a failed strategy,” he continued. “We don’t currently have a comprehensive citywide strategy, where everyone is working together.”

The city can beef up its police force and bolster its patchwork of social welfare programs, but without an agreed-upon plan, Haney believes the city can’t get traction on the issue.

That’s why he plans to put together a task force from multiple city agencies that can work toward clearly defined goals.

“I don’t want us to kick this issue around for two years and then come up with a report. This is so urgent,” Haney said.

San Francisco police booked or cited 883 people citywide for selling drugs in the 2017-2018 fiscal year, according to a report from the city’s Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office prepared at Haney’s request. Of those, 56% were booked or cited by the San Francisco Police Department’s Tenderloin Station.

Confronting open-air drug dealing in the Tenderloin, South of Market and Mid-Market neighborhoods alone cost San Francisco more than $12.5 million during that time, the report said.

And that figure doesn’t include all administrative expenses, the cost of running behavioral health and drug courts or the long-term costs of incarcerating people for drug sales.

About 76% of all drugs seized during bookings or arrests were either crack cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine, the BLA reported.

SFPD Captain Carl Fabbri of the Tenderloin Station told the committee that 111 people accounted for 248 separate arrests for drug sales last year.

“It goes without saying that we’re using a lot of resources on the same people over and over again,” Fabbri said.

The district attorney’s office filed charges against 601 people for drug sales in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. Of those, nearly 46% of the cases are pending, nearly 29% resulted in convictions and just over 11% were dismissed.

Some cases were dismissed in lieu of convictions in other cases and some were replaced by state or federal grand jury indictments. But only 4.7% of cases resulted in a successful “diversion,” where a person is offered treatment and services instead of facing charges.

To date, the district attorney’s outcomes around drug sales have been “minimal and don’t lead to the large-scale system reforms we’re hoping for,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, District Attorney George Gascón’s chief of staff.

Deputy Public Defender Hadi Razzaq urged the committee to “embrace a paradigm shift” and move away from an emphasis on putting people in jail.

Razzaq suggested expanding pretrial diversion programs and investing in anti-poverty solutions to grow jobs, expanding housing opportunities and drug treatment programs.

Janet Ector, assistant manager for harm reduction programs at the Glide Foundation, recounted success stories in Portugal, which beat back an opioid crisis by decriminalizing the possession and consumption of drugs and emphasizing treatment.

“The conventional way of thinking is that we need more police to deal with these issues, to incarcerate people and remove them from the street. But we’re here today because we know those approaches have failed for a long time,” Razzaq said.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa