Kyra Worthy, former director of SF SAFE, arrested and charged with 34 crimes

Kyra Worthy, the controversial former head of the police-affiliated nonprofit SF SAFE that disbanded this year after revelations of lavish spending and months of unpaid bills and salaries, was arrested today and charged with 34 counts of serious crimes.

The charges include embezzling public funds, submitting fraudulent invoices to a city agency, stealing items from her nonprofit organization SF SAFE, stealing wages from SF SAFE employees, failing to pay withheld employee taxes and writing checks with insufficient funds to defraud a bank.

Worthy is accused of illegally embezzling over $700,000 while working at SF SAFE. Worthy was fired by SF SAFE’s board of directors in January; she was hired at SF SAFE in late 2017.

Worthy’s firing came on the heels of an audit conducted in January that found SF SAFE had embezzled about $80,000 in San Francisco Police Department grants in 2022 and 2023. The organization’s board of directors subsequently determined that its “bank accounts were essentially empty,” according to an affidavit released today by the district attorney’s office.

Based on this revelation, the Police Department’s Operations Command requested that the District Attorney investigate the SF SAFE “missing money” case, which led to today’s arrest and indictment.

“Our investigation uncovered evidence that Worthy embezzled over $100,000 in SF SAFE funds, with the majority of the money taken during her early years at SF SAFE,” today’s affidavit states.

“Our investigation also revealed that over time, as Worthy continually spent SF SAFE’s money in lavish ways, she drove the organization into deep debt and eventually committed a series of crimes to delay the inevitable discovery that she had bankrupted SF SAFE.”

The prosecution lists these crimes as follows:

• Wage theft in excess of $80,000;

• Issuing over $500,000 of public funds to cover SF SAFE’s debts instead of the intended use of those funds;

• Submitting fraudulent bills to the city;

• Writing bad checks to top up the balance in the bank accounts and to enable an electronic transfer, SF SAFE did not actually have the money to

In September 2023, trouble began brewing for Worthy when a company called Applied Video Solutions notified the Special Prosecutor’s Office that $600,000 worth of security cameras that were supposed to be funded by SF SAFE were delayed. At that point, the prosecutor was informed that an “individual donor” – namely crypto billionaire Chris Larsen – was concerned because SF SAFE had been paid a grant to fund the camera installations.