As tech employers seek to hire more people in San Francisco, they’re going beyond free lunch and game rooms. Self-defense classes, which are increasingly popular, address workers’ growing discomfort in getting to the office.

Employees at Salesforce learn how to fend off a physical attack in one of the company’s Transbay district skyscrapers. Splunk, which is expanding its headquarters in South Beach, offers similar instruction.

Customer service software maker Zendesk, housed in several buildings around Sixth and Market streets, generates a waiting list for every self-defense class it offers.

Airbnb and Pinterest, whose headquarters buildings occupy the same block on the western edge of South of Market, also offer company-paid classes on site.

“I don’t want people to feel like they’re in danger all the time, but I think it’s important to be prepared,” said Splunk senior software engineer Anna Woodall, who took a self-defense class at the data analytics company last spring. She plans to sign up for the next class as a refresher.

“These aren’t skills that are second nature to us, and ideally, in (a situation where you’re under attack), you want to be able to react quickly. That’s why you have to practice,” Woodall said.

Back to Gallery With workers on edge, SF tech companies offer... 3 1 of 3 Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle 2 of 3 Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle 3 of 3 Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle





Tech companies aren’t responding to a crime epidemic. Violent crime in the city is generally on the decline, but conditions vary by neighborhood, and even block by block. Workers who commute around the Tenderloin or the far reaches of the South of Market area see the blight, homelessness and drug use, get verbally accosted and often don’t feel safe. Spotify decamped from three floors of office space in Mid-Market in December, with former employees saying the move was motivated in part by an assault that unnerved some workers.

In a Blind survey of 412 employees at some of the biggest tech employers, 57 percent said they feel unsafe traveling to and from work on city streets. A smaller number answered a second question: Have they ever been accosted or witnessed a co-worker being accosted near their San Francisco office?

One in 3 said yes, and some offered details on what happened.

“I was attacked randomly a block from my office,” an Airbnb employee said.

A Pinterest worker said someone tried to push them into traffic near Fifth Street.

“I never walk outside the building alone at night,” an Uber employee said.

Blind, an app that lets workers talk about their companies anonymously, conducted the poll for The Chronicle this month, asking employees of Salesforce, Google, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, Splunk, Uber, Lyft, Yelp and Square whether they feel safe commuting in San Francisco. Blind asks users to create an account with their work email addresses to verify their employment. While not scientific — participants volunteer answers and are not randomly sampled — the results provide a glimpse into how some workers feel.

Airbnb, which has 2,300 employees in the city, has two offices separated by Interstate 80 in San Francisco — a three-minute walk under the freeway.

Two-thirds of Airbnb employees who took the Blind survey said they had been accosted or watched it happen to a co-worker.

A private security officer patrols this stretch, because workers have reported so many incidents, said Jimmy Choi, an emergency medicine physician who also teaches self-defense.

The vacation-rental company hires Choi’s business, Self Defense for the People, to teach twice a month. The classes, which began in 2017, draw an average of 10 employees.

Each session addresses a familiar scenario: how to get away from unwanted grabs; how to use everyday items in self-defense; how to escape a choke-hold from a sitting position, such as an attack at a bus stop. Most classes last about an hour and allow participants to practice their moves against an instructor.

Linda Leu, executive director of Impact Bay Area, an Oakland nonprofit that has taught self-defense since 1985, said she has seen interest in its workplace program explode in recent years, adding Google, Pinterest and Splunk as corporate clients.

Employees offer different reasons for coming to class. Leu recalls one who said they were scared to wait at the company’s shuttle bus stop in San Francisco. Not everyone shares why they want to learn self-defense, and she doesn’t press them.

Self-defense classes in Bay Area Impact Bay Area offers a free, one-hour introduction on street safety and awareness once a month at locations around the Bay Area. Since 1985, the nonprofit has taught more than 12,000 people how to fend off an attack. www.impactbayarea.org Self Defense for the People has teamed up with a city martial arts studio to offer Monday night classes for women, in addition to its workplace programs. www.selfdefenseforthepeople.com Krav Maga SF teaches the essentials of self-defense in its level one classes. Seminars offer a chance to learn skills for certain scenarios, like how to react in an active shooter situation. www.kravmaga-sf.com

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“A lot of people are drawn to it because something has happened to them,” Leu said. “But a lot of them are scared of it for that reason.”

Splunk, which has 730 employees at its headquarters, has been offering Impact’s self-defense classes four times a year since 2017. The program started in San Francisco and has spread to offices in San Jose and Vancouver.

Keith Kops, head of safety and security, said he hasn’t heard from Splunk employees who feel unsafe near the office, but his team can protect them only at work.

Security is a “finite resource,” said Joe Ordona, Pinterest’s head of physical security. “We can’t be everywhere all the time.”

Self-defense classes help “turn down the volume on being afraid,” Kops said.

Lisa Lund, a technical program manager at Google, knows this intimately.

“I was amazed at how empowered and confident I felt afterward — not just out in the world, but at work, too,” Lund said. “I felt like I could be more calmly assertive and better at setting boundaries.”

Now, she’s one of the employees who handles planning and finding space for classes at Google headquarters in Mountain View. The company plans to bring the program to its San Francisco offices this spring.

Whether tech workers have reason to fear their commute is subjective.

“It’s a common mantra that the public’s expressed fear of crime, and especially people’s fear of being personally victimized, bears very little if any relationship to the actual risks they face,” said Robert Weisberg, faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center.

Many tech workers are recent college graduates, and in everyday life, people tend to fear crime as they navigate their environment away from home. Researchers have studied how the physical features of a neighborhood, like graffiti, broken windows and trash, and social cues, such as homeless people, prostitutes and drug sellers, are often as powerful in creating fear as crime itself.

In San Francisco, the violent crime rate has declined slightly over the last decade. But many people go to work in police districts that have higher numbers of violent crimes compared with larger, more residential areas. Reports of violent crime in a police district that includes South of Market and parts of the Financial District rose 11 percent in 2018; the Tenderloin, its own police district, saw violent crime hold steady year over year.

Officer Adam Lobsinger, a police spokesman, said the department is “constantly evaluating” crime trends and ways to combat them. In the Tenderloin Police District, which includes the Mid-Market homes of Twitter, Uber, Square and Zendesk, among others, police increased foot patrols last year to help rid the area of drug dealers.

Self-defense classes are popular citywide, with many students signing up on their own. Some companies that don’t host classes at the office offer reimbursements for a variety of health and fitness activities, including self-defense.

But self-defense instructors want workers to know they should avoid getting physical if it can be helped. They spend as much time in class teaching how to spot potential threats and avoid them, as they do on physical techniques to defend against an attack.

“We don’t have silver bullets,” Impact Bay Area’s Leu said.

“If you can escape the situation, that is always a great choice. It’s just not always possible,” she added. “But there’s no point in me teaching a class on how to run away.”

Melia Russell is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: melia.russell@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meliarobin