In 2011, just over 5,500 reports were logged by the San Francisco Department of Public Works; in 2018, the number increased to more than 28,000.

San Francisco has struggled with a feces problem for years. The city even employs a “Poop Patrol” that attempts to keep the streets clean and focuses on the Tenderloin neighborhood.

“I will say there is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed told NBC in a 2018 interview . “That is a huge problem, and we are not just talking about from dogs — we’re talking about from humans.”

Notably, this is a chart of only documented reports — the actual amount of feces on San Francisco’s streets is likely even higher than these statistics suggest.

The government watchdog Open the Books documented the sharp increase over time in a stunning chart , first spotted by the BuzzFeed editor John Paczkowski .

A 2017 report estimates there are 7,500 homeless people in San Francisco. Now, two years later, that number is likely higher.

In fact, San Francisco has more drug addicts than high school students, thanks, in part, to the city’s needle exchange program, which openly encourages drug use. The SF Chronicle reports:

San Francisco has more drug addicts than it has students enrolled in its public high schools, the city Health Department’s latest estimates conclude.

There are about 24,500 injection drug users in San Francisco — that’s about 8,500 more people than the nearly 16,000 students enrolled in San Francisco Unified School District’s 15 high schools and illustrates the scope of the problem on the city’s streets.

It’s also an increase of about 2,000 serious drug users since 2012, the last time a study was done.

“There is an opioid epidemic in this country, and San Francisco is no exception,” Deputy Director of Health Dr. Naveena Bobba said.

The problem is particularly visible in the Tenderloin, where police reported more than 600 arrests for drug dealing last year. And where 27 suspects were booked into County Jail for dealing drugs in the first 20 days of the new year.

The out-in-the-open use of drugs on city sidewalks and at the Civic Center BART Station was a huge embarrassment for the city and triggered more police patrols and crackdowns in the past year. The BART station has been cleaned up, but the problem continues in the Tenderloin.

And in an effort to reduce infections and disease transmission among injection drug users, the city also handed out a record 5.8 million free syringes last year — about 500,000 more than in 2017.

“The drugs of choice among the homeless appear to be heroin during the day, and methamphetamine at night — to stay up,” said Eileen Loughran, who heads the city’s syringe access and recovery program. Loughran said on average an addict shoots up three times a day, “but some people do more.”

While City Hall solidly supports the free syringe program, the proliferation of needles on city sidewalks and parks was a major issue in Mayor London Breed’s mayoral election last year — one she promised to clean up.

The first step was spending an extra $1.8 million last year to retrieve needles. That resulted in 500,000 more syringes being dropped off in new kiosks or picked up by special cleanup crews compared to 2017.

But even with the 300 percent increase in the needles returned to kiosks and a 100 percent increase in the needles picked up by cleanup efforts, the department handed out about 2 million more syringes than it got back.

Meanwhile, needles are still making their way into the city’s parks and onto the sidewalks.

For example, attendants cleaning the restrooms at Victoria Manalo Draves Park near Folsom and Sixth streets found 123 needles in 2018. The good news is that needle count was down 27 from 150 in 2017.

Going in the other direction, the city’s 311 call center received 9,659 calls complaining about needles citywide in 2018 — up about a third from 2017.