The crap job with a $278,000 salary

San Francisco launches 'poop patrol' to clean up human faeces. Photo / Supplied

It's a crap job, but someone's got to do it.

As San Francisco's poop crisis reaches boiling point, the city has been forced to take drastic action to clean up its human faeces-smeared pavements.

Enter the "poop patrol" — a six-person, "proactive" poop detection and removal squad. Members will be paid a base salary of US$71,760 ($108,111) which rises to US$184,678 ($278,217) including benefits, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"What we're doing is trying to be proactive," San Francisco public works director Mohammed Nuru told ABC.

"We're going to have a crew that's going to roam around and just try and look for these locations. We actually have data for neighbourhoods where we get frequent calls."

One resident told the news station the poop patrol was a "great idea" but asked, "Could we get rid of the poopers as well?"

With up to 7500 homeless people sleeping on the streets at any one time, the city has faced an unprecedented problem — since the start of the year, there have been nearly 15,000 complaints about human faeces.

In one headline-making incident, a see-through plastic bag containing 9kg of human waste was dumped on the pavement. Earlier this month, Adobe developer and Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer tweeted his own experience.

"Nothing makes your morning like walking out of your overpriced San Francisco apartment and quickly having to dodge human diarrhoea smeared all over the street and walls of your building," he wrote. "I need to leave this stupid city."

San Francisco mayor London Breed told ABC she had faced the poo problem herself in front of her home and "it is not a pleasant feeling". "I want to change San Francisco for the better, I want to clean up the city," she said.