Crime

John Ross: To stop is to die

Zelda Bronstein
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John Ross: To stop is to die

Editors note: John Ross is finishing up a book tour across the United States, and sending us his impressions of Obamalandia. You can read some of his previous posts here, here and here.

  

I. Baltimore/Washington

 

The Amtrak rumbles into the back end of Baltimore past block after block of abandoned, boarded-up row houses ripe for burning. This city of such magnificent renegades as Edgar Allen Poe, John Wilkes Booth, and Billie Holliday is mapped by grimy pocket ghettoes that made Baltimore a perfect stage-set for “The Wire.” When contrasted against the gleaming, refurbished downtown, these crime-scene neighborhoods incubate urban uprising.  Red Emma’s is one of a skein of anarcho bookstores with names like Sedition, Monkeywrench, and Bluestockings that have welcomed me on this grueling odyssey across the underbelly of Obamalandia. I’m enlivened by the energies these oases exude. Contemporary anarchists seem to have little time for the crippling ideological jousting that drained the lifeblood of my generation. Those bad old days of Marxist Leninist Maoist Trotskyist Stalinesque backbiting seem an absurd nightmare on the barricades of change these days.  

Tiffany, a tenor saxophonist who day gigs at OSHA over in D.C. and puts in after hours at the bookstore-cafe, and I pitch in to unload a busload of Bread & Puppet props for a zany, Zen show at a cavernous performance space Red Emma’s maintains in a vacated church. I get to trundle in the head of Ben Franklin, the villain in B&P’s latest mini-extravaganza in which $100 bills are the most pertinent puppets. A half century after its founding even before Vietnam caught fire, the puppeteers are still serving bread and aoeli to grateful audiences.

In D.C., I speak at the Institute for Policy Studies, a perennial leftist sounding board four blocks north of the White House and a billion light years from power, about how Washington has hooked Mexico on drug war. It is my first visit to the nation’s capitol with a black president in residence in the house that slaves once built. The Capo de Tutti Capos of the most grotesque criminal conspiracy on earth is too overwhelmed by swelling catastrophe offshore in the Gulf that will make Katrina look like a summer squall, impending car bombs in Times Square, and an economy that continues in freefall, to take time out for a chitchat.

On the day I speak in Washington, Teabaggers and their ilk are massing across the Potomac in an open-carry anti-Obama rally — newspaper photos depict white American males with what look like rocket launchers slung over their shoulders. The threats of this nativist scum are not idle ones. The economic collapse has stoked the bumfires that burn fiercely in the dormant craters of the American volcano.

 

 

II. New York
My roots on the North American landmass snake under the lower east side of Manhattan. The Ross (nee Grossinsky) DNA is imprinted everywhere on these mean streets. My grandma Mamie Zief (Ellis Islandese for “Jew”) relocated from Poland to a Rivington Street tenement at the turn of the 20th Century. Although I grew up in the West Village, I went east at an early age; after fleeing the family nest I squatted in the Shastone Monument building on Essex and Houston before escaping to Mexico in the late 1950s. Two of my kids grew up on Second Street and Avenue A, and my son the hiphop mogul still lives 500 yards away from the old homestead (Dante and I are working on a book that bounces off our mutual addictions to black music.)  

My presentations in the Big Apple fit neatly into this geographical schema. I lecture at NYU’s King Juan Carlos Center, once the site of concrete basketball courts where I expanded oodles of adolescent energies. I talk to the Friends of Brad Will at the Sixth Street Community Center where the slain Indymedia journalist, a lower east side rabble-rouser during the darkest days of the Giuliani dictatorship, regularly practiced yoga. Justice for Brad Will remains undone.
And I am lured into Amy Goodman’s state-of-the-art lair for 20 minutes of fame. Democracy Now even sends a car to fetch me up to Chelsea and I induce the stern goddess of left radio to smile — but perhaps it was merely a grimace.  

New York is chockablock with “I Love/Hate New York” minutes. One morning I descend from Dante’s sixth story inferno for a double espresso and the Lowisaida is infested with cops. I approach one of New York’s Finest, an amiable Caucasian, and inquire about the blue plague: “it’s the Will Smith show,” he smiles mischievously. Just then a motorcade of 50 bullet-proofed black vehicles swings off Houston with their lights flashing and sirens screaming and heads down the Bowery to Cooper Union where our commander-in-chief is to make a major speech addressing financial “reform” (in Mexico, we call this “plugging up the hole after the baby has drowned.”)

Goldman Sachs vultures in dark suits and furrowed brows listen intently but go mum to the press when they deadhead downtown back to Wall Street to continue fleecing the public’s pocket.

I step around the corner onto Houston, where a large enigmatic Shepard Fairey montage that references climate change has just been tagged (Dante who is well-versed in such iconography, speculates that the culprit is a tagger named “Nah” who is dedicated to dissing the public art of the stars of this genre.) Gallery slaves have been bussed in to erase the offending stains.  I am wearing my Mexican Electricity Workers tee-shirt, whose black and red colors and clenched fist logo match Fairey’s throw-up, and I am suddenly surrounded by a bevy of documenterians, at least one of whom is just off the boat from Andalusia. They pose me against Fairey’s wall for a thousand-click fashion shoot. New York New York!

Ironically (a word that doesn’t have much scratch here in Gotham), the Banksy flick “Exit Through The Gift Shop” is playing at a grind house across Houston, a cheese ball mockumentary that destroys this world-famous outlaw’s once-pristine reputation for thumbing his nose at power. Indeed, the best thing about the movie is that it is playing right next door to the Yonah Schimmil knishery. I order a kasha knish and sign the guest book with Subcomandante Marcos’s rubric.  

Also a mandatory dining stop in the old neighborhood: the immortal Katz’s (“Send a salami to your boy in the Army”) where pushy New Yorkers of the Hebraic persuasion scuffle to be next in line at the counter of this now 100% Puerto Rican-run deli. The brisket is still to die for.

New York City and environs is now home to a half million Mexicans, mostly from Puebla state, whose slow country drawls are a foil for the tropical machine-gun accents of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. The Poblanos work in the kitchens of yupped-up food palaces (16 Oaxaquenos were burnt to a crisp walloping pots up in “Windows On The World” on the 108th floor of the Twin Towers on 9/11 day) or slave in 24-hour grocery stores run by Arabs and Hindus and Koreans.  

Mexican elites who have fled here from their imploding fatherland do not much rub elbows with their impoverished compatriots, except when they employ them as maids and babysitters One of the few upsides of the new Arizona Breathing While Brown law is that former pundit and Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda might be jailed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his storm troopers and forced to don pink underwear if he were to be stopped without papers in Maricopa County.

III. BOSTON

The new Boston Tea Party that catapulted Scott Brown into the suddenly Kennedy-less Senate is not an anomaly in a city where the name of Charles Stuart (Google him up) still rings a bell.  

I speak at the Harvard Coop to a handful of bedraggled Harvard Square denizens who have found sanctuary from a driving rainstorm in this hallowed readery. I am invited to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies to rant at the future leaders of Latin America — but none show up. I spend an engaging evening with Jack Womack, whose “Zapata & The Mexican Revolution” is still the definitive text on the struggle of the incorruptible revolutionary. Jack, now emeritus in Harvard Yard, recently rebuked the Mexican government by turning down a literary prize because of President Felipe Calderon’s role in the firing of 43,000 workers in an undisguised ploy to privatize electricity generation in Mexico, and is currently chipping away at his life work, a history of working class struggle in the state of Veracruz. Jack and I converse in an argot stippled with so many arcane references to social upheaval south of the border that FBI eavesdroppers could surmise we are planning a new Mexican revolution — which, 100 years to the date of the last one, is not such a bad idea.    

I warm up for May 1st rallies by urging attendees at community meetings at the UNITE building in Chinatown and a U-U church in Jamaica Plains to join the protests. There are two marches and rallies set for International Workers Day in Beantown, the bitter fruit of a split in the movement the seeds of which I could not divine.  

On the Boston Commons, I spiel about the first May 1st back in 1886 when 80,000 immigrant workers stomped through Chicago to demand the eight-hour day, a day of solidarity and struggle around the world everywhere except in the country where it was birthed. The Haymarket Martyrs join us for a stroll through the streets of downtown Boston, held aloft by the ubiquitous Bread & Puppet comrades.  

All across Amerikkka, immigrant workers, incensed by the enactment of a law that makes inhaling the air of Arizona a jailable crime if you are a person the color of the earth, were on the march, perhaps a half million (high end estimates) strong — as many as 200,000 in Los Angeles and another 100,000 in Chicago; 25,000 more in Dallas and significant turnouts in New York and Washington but only 6,000 or so in Boston to which Mexicans have migrated in smaller numbers.  

This year’s surge, which was dwarfed by the gargantuan outpourings of 2006, featured a marked absence of Mexican flags as undocumented workers chose to cloak themselves in the Stars and Stripes in response to the feeding frenzy of the Fox News lynch mob.  

Although the condemnation of Arizona Goddamn was vibrant, it must be noted that there have been as many ICE raids under the Obaminators as under Bush and the crackdown on employers is targeting union-organized janitors. David Bacon, whose reportage remains a light in this darkness, recently noted that 175 SEIU janitors are about to be fired in San Francisco, once a sanctuary city for labor.

The People the Color of the Earth rolled through the streets of east Boston with gusto. “No One Is Illegal!” Sandra, my displaced Chilanga guardian angel, and I yodeled in unison with the compas.  “Do I Look Illegal?” read the homemade banner draped around the shoulders of a skinny pre-teener. Many high schoolers wore caps and gowns to highlight the prohibitions on financial aid that doom their college educations to MacDonald’s Hamburger U.

Speaker after speaker in a park down by the harbor  — where, indeed a few hundred years back down the pike the original Boston Tea Party was staged — raged against a system that still consigns immigrant workers to the lowest step on the American food chain. “Justicia! Justicia!” they clamored and their cries were no less relevant than those uttered by the “Martires de Chicago,” as the Haymarket martyrs are known throughout Latin America. By the time I took the mic, all the words had already been spoken but I finished up with the chant of the pensioners’ movement in Mexico City in whose ranks I am enrolled: “Parar Es Morir!” — To Stop Is To Die!

Me and the Monstruo have come to the end of our three month 66 performance journey through Obamalandia but there’s one thing you can count on: “Parar Es Morir.”  I’m not planning on stopping (or dying) any time soon.
  
John Ross will be returning to Mexico in mid- May to begin work on a new book, “From Bebop To HipHop – Fathers & Sons.”  You can consult him on particulars at johnross@igc.org  
        

Knocking on fascism’s door

Mary Magee
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Knocking on fascism’s door

Like many folks in the United States, I’m an immigrant. But unlike many folks who crossed this nation’s borders, I was lucky to come here with a green card. I say “lucky” because getting a green card typically involves having the money and educational skills to make you “desirable” in the eyes of federal immigration authorities, things you are less likely to have if you are born into a dirt-poor country.

Getting my green card involved getting fingerprinted and biometrically assessed. So, I understand the national security argument for wanting every immigrant’s fingerprints. And I hear the feds saying that, thanks to limited resources, their prime objective is to deport undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

The question I have around the Secure Communities program is this: Where are the guarantees that this system won’t be used, now or in the future, to deport long-term or juvenile residents who haven’t actually committed serious crimes?

Imagine that your legal immigrant co-worker is charged with terrorist activity? You’d expect them to get their day in court before being stripped of their citizenship, right? You wouldn’t say “due process’ was never meant to protect criminal behavior, would you? But that’s exactly the slippery slope that folks start sliding down when they say that sanctuary city policies were never meant to protect criminal behavior, while refusing to stand up for the due process rights of immigrants who aren’t guilty as charged.

The point here is that there is a world of difference between being charged with and being guilty of a crime, (which explains why Arizona is trying to make it a crime to be here without paperwork.)  And without guarantees of due process, the potential for abuse of any law becomes immense.So, it’s kinda important that folks who want to be politcal leaders show us that they get that point. Otherwise, how can we trust them to stand up and do what’s right in the future?

Is ICE planning to destroy sanctuary city?

Mary Magee
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Virginia Kice, spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sounded hopping mad at the way that ICE’s Secure Communities initiative is being represented as undermining San Francisco’s sanctuary policy and possibly creating an even worse federal immigration system.

“It’s just an information sharing system,” Kice told the Guardian. “Any time someone is electronically booked by local or state law enforcement agencies, their fingerprints will be compared up against biometrics in U.S. Department of Justice, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases. “


If a match is found, then ICE will do the follow-up investigation, Kice said.

“Not everyone in the system has violated the law,” Kice explained. “They may have applied for an immigration benefit or they could already be naturalized [have become a U.S. citizen]. It just means that they have had an encounter with DHS.”

Alluding to the ongoing debate about immigration law and racial profiling, Kice stressed that this new system doesn’t selectively finger print.

“It finger prints everybody, and because this system uses biometrics, it’s going to be accurate in terms of i.d.ing people who have had prior encounters with D.H.S,” she said.
“Some people use multiple aliases and give misinformation about their history. We know people have escaped deportation this way in the past, but fingerprints don’t lie.”

Local law enforcement officials are concerned that though the new policy is supposed to target folks charged with serious crimes, including murder, rape, sex crimes, serious assault, and resisting arrest, it will also sweep up folks charged with minor infractions, such as being drunk in public, who could now fall into ICE’s hands for deportation, especially if they resist arrest at the time, which happens to be defined as a serious crime.

“Not everybody who is in the country illegally has ever been encountered by D.H.S. and because we don’t have their biometrics, the system would not detect a match,” Kice continued. “But that does not mean they won’t be referred for a follow-up investigation. And it ensures that we get their information shortly after an encounter occurs.”

But despite Kice’s rosy assessment of the federal government’s Secure Communities program which she says has already been set up in 15 other California communities, 20 states and about 160 municipalities nationwide, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office continued to express unease at how the new program will shift the local landscape.

 “The ground rules in the jails have changed, but not due to any decision on our part,” Eileen Hirst, spokesperson for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department told the Guardian.

The interlinking automated database will remove the firewall that used to protect folks booked with low-level crimes from being referred to federal immigration authorities.

“The firewall was the discretion of local law enforcement,” Hirst explained.

In San Francisco, the Sheriff’s Department developed laws that were consistent with federal laws, as well as San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance, which was enacted in 1989.

Under San Francisco’s current “City of Refuge” ordinance, local law enforcement officials refer individuals who are booked on felony charges, or have a history of felony charges, and are foreign born and have previous deportation orders or ICE holds.

But now everyone who gets arrested will be fingerprinted and referred to ICE, not through human intervention, but through a fingerprint database that connects to similar databases in Canada, Mexico and within Interpol.

“DHS, of which ICE is part, has interoperability agreements with California’s Department of Justice, which maintains a fingerprint database for state,” Hirst said.” ICE now has complete access to the DOJ databases and vice versa.”

This fundamental change in policy means that any time anyone is booked in San Francisco, they will be fingerprinted and automatically reported, including folks charged with misdemeanors, such as minor drug possession, low level financial crimes and misdemeanor battery.

“What happens next will depend on DOJ’s response,” Hirst said. “We are putting the word out because it was clear that the immediate community did not know about this.”

Local law enforcement officials say they were verbally informed of the new initiative at a recent meeting at ICE’ office at 630 Sansome Street in San Francisco. Asked if the system will go into effect June, Kice said the agency doesn’t typically inform communities when the program will be deployed, but promised to get back to us.

David Venturella, who has been involved with ICE for years and is currently the head of ICE’s Secure Communities initiative was not available for comment, but Kice sent a fact sheet, which claims the program “is leading ICE’s efforts to modernize and transform its criminal alien enforcement model, through technology, integration and information sharing.”

“This is the first time that the Federal government has used biometric identification technology to enforce immigration laws at the state and local law enforcement level,” the fact sheet states. “This enables ICE to accurately identify dangerous criminal aliens much more efficiently, and in significantly greater numbers. This also helps local law enforcement officials get dangerous criminals off their streets, at little or no additional cost. If an individual’s fingerprints match those of a person in DHS’s biometric system, the new automated process will notify ICE and the participating agency submitting the fingerprints. ICE will evaluate each case to determine the individual’s immigration status and take appropriate enforcement action. Top priority will be given to offenders who pose a threat to the public safety, such as aliens with prior convictions for major drug offenses, murder, rape, robbery, and kidnapping.”

The ICE fact sheet notes that, “Deployment of this interoperable technology across the nation is now underway as is expected to be complete by 2012.”

“Congress has allocated $350 million for Secure Communities in FY 2008 and FY 2009,” the fact sheet continues.  “As of March 2009, Secure Communities has been deployed to 48 sites in seven states – Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia.”

And clearly, it’s already expanded beyond those boundaries and is about to kick in, right here in San Francisco and other Bay Area municipalities.

Secrecy and criminality in the SFPD

Sasha Cuttler
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Secrecy and criminality in the SFPD

Today’s Chronicle unveils more problems at the scandal-plagued San Francisco Police Department, as well as the District Attorney’s Office, raising new questions about their commitment to public accountability and protecting civil liberties at a time when the SFPD is seeking more authority and asking for the public’s trust.

At issue are police officers with criminal histories and disciplinary records serious enough to warrant disclosure to the criminal defendants that they testify against in court, which the story indicates is more than 80 officers. Such disclosures have been a standard requirement for almost 40 years, but neither police nor prosecutors in San Francisco have been making them, a revelation that could overturn hundreds of felony convictions because of this official misconduct, the Chron reports.

That bombshell comes in the wake the SFPD’s crime lab scandal, in which lab technician Deborah Madden – herself a court witness with a criminal history that should have been disclosed to defense attorneys – is suspected of regularly stealing from the seized narcotics that she tested.

The SFPD and its undercover party-busting cop Larry Bertrand are also accused of harassing nightclub owners and patrons, busting private parties using excessive force and warrantless raids, and illegally seizing computers and other personal items – all while publicly seeking to discredit the Entertainment Commission and seize its power to shut down nightlife in the city, as well as seeking greater authority to roust and threaten vagrants by proposing a law to ban sitting or lying on city sidewalks.

SFPD officials have repeatedly claimed the agency can be trusted not to abuse these new authorities, but the latest revelations about criminal cops highlights how difficult it is for the public or the press to keep tabs on the agency.

The Guardian today sent the SFPD a Sunshine Ordinance request for the names and violations of the officers in question, but if the past is a predicator, it’s likely to be denied with the claim that such records are exempt under the Peace Officers Bill of Rights, a state law with strict privacy protections for cops.

Even defense attorneys who have well-established rights to examine an arresting officer’s criminal and disciplinary histories through what’s known at Pitchess motions are routinely stonewalled by the SFPD, say defense attorneys. For example, attorneys for Arash Ghandan, an alleged victim of Bertrand’s brutality and retaliation, are now having a hard time getting information on the officer’s history. “We are in a battle for Bertrand’s personnel file,” Ghanadan’s attorney, Steve Sommers, told the Guardian. “The city of San Francisco just does not hand over documents without a fight.”

In 2006, former SDPD attorney Reno Rapagnani and his wife, former SFPD Sgt. Leanna Dawydiak, raised the issue of SFPD secrecy, its pattern of routinely shielding problem officers from discipline and public scrutiny, and retaliating against whistleblowers – and were then subjected to a witch hunt that forced them out of the department.

More recently, SFPD and its powerful Police Officers Association succeeded in watering down an early warning system for violence-prone officers, removing a number of triggers – such as resisting arrest and assault on a police officer charges that often accompany cases of abusive police conduct – that had been recommended by a police practices expert and which are currently used in San Jose and other cities. 

Meanwhile, District Attorney Kamala Harris, a candidate for California Attorney General, is also being criticized for the latest scandal. Under the Penal Code, she bears the responsibility for ensuring that her prosecutors are doing background checks on all witnesses and sharing that information with defense attorneys.

“Ultimately, the district attorney has to answer for this. It is the prosecution’s duty to check the criminal backgrounds of officers called to testify. That never happened, and as a result, people have been denied fair trials,” Public Defender Jeff Adachi said in a press conference on the issue this morning.

The tough-on-crime era of the 1990s — when politicians, police, and prosecutors did all they could to create new laws and enforcement powers – is over, and we have a severely overcrowded prison system to show for its short-sightedness. But that mentality continues to guide the SFPD.

Since the arrival of Police Chief George Gascon from Arizona last August, SFPD has undertaken a series of crackdowns, including hundreds of drug arrests in the Tenderloin, raids on marijuana-growing operations in the Sunset and parties in SoMa, citing Dolores Park-goers for drinking, and, on Friday, giving at least two Critical Mass bicyclists tickets for amplified music. He’s also said he wants more power to discipline problem officers, but he has yet to show that’s anything more than just talk.

Perhaps now it’s time for the pendulum to swing back in favor of restoring damaged civil rights and raising our expectations of the agencies that have such power over our daily lives and freedom. The SFPD should adequately police itself before it looks for new ways to police the rest of us.   

All the young Turks

David Talbot
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All the young Turks

arts@sfbg.com

HAIRY EYEBALL Welcome to Hairy Eyeball, a bimonthly rundown of visual art. We don’t aim to be comprehensive, just opinionated. First Thursday is tomorrow, so enough with the introductions. On with the shows.

CCA is unleashing a new batch of Fine Arts MFA students into the wild Thursday night. With 66 artists total, this year’s MFA show (which runs at the San Francisco campus through May 15) is one of the largest in recent memory. The cream from CCA tends to rise to the top pretty quickly, so here are some names worth looking out for in white cubes, near and far, in the future.

Llewelynn Fletcher’s interactive sculptures aren’t aiming to take a particular pulse, but will probably slow yours down. For Please Lie Down, she has created several enclosures of lead, ceramic, wood, and felt that completely cover the head, forcing you, per the piece’s title, to lie down on the floor (thankfully, she’s also constructed camping-style palettes for comfort). The mini-meditation huts, evocative of beehives as well as certain medieval torture implements, have the additional effect of transforming the wearer into something of a sculpture.

Maggie Haas’ mixed-media pieces could easily be mistaken for installations-in-progress. But her arrangements and treatment of construction site detritus — sawhorses, wooden slats — cannily gut minimalism, This Old House-style, by preferring to hang out in the workshop with Donald Judd et al., turning the means of production into the piece itself. Endless Escape in particular performs a neat rope trick that yokes Robert Smithson and Yayoi Kusama with the ease of an Eagle Scout.

Hilary Wiedemann’s installations, which frequently combine sculptures and projection, are far more elusive — and unsettling. In Untitled, a plaster cast of what looks to be a bullet hole-riddled surface (glass, perhaps?) leans against the wall; on the floor, laminated sheet glass has been contorted to resemble discarded tissue. Both components record the violence of the transformational processes that have brought them to their current states. It’s not comfortable viewing — as if you’ve stumbled on a crime scene before the police tape has gone up.

Someone put Doron Fishman in touch with a textiles manufacturer, stat. His gorgeous ink-on-paper works, all black tendrils of liquid smoke, let it bleed. They’re begging to be transferred to chiffon. The witchy Mulleavy sisters, of Rodarte fame, would be smart to look him up.

Well worth the trek to the other side of Potrero Hill is Ping Pong Gallery, which is currently showing Gwenael Rattke’s dark, hypnogogic collages (through May 14). The collection’s title, “Oktogon,” refers to a street intersection in Budapest and also to the Ottoman-style “Kiraly” baths built during the Turkish occupation in the 16th century. These layers of history, architecture, exposed flesh, and power are not wholly self-evident in the psychedelic grandeur of Rattke’s straight-razor wizardry — which recalls, among many associations, the graphic punch of Tadanori Yokoo and Keiichi Tanami’s 1960s poster designs, the homo-plagiarism of Jess’ massive Narkissos (1978/91), and the profondo rosso beloved by Dario Argento. Rather, they form the deep structures to these mandala-like works in which Op-Art geometrics collide with Art Nouveau scrollwork and leather daddies are refracted into Busby Berkeley chorines. The corner in which 14 of these pieces have been hung draws you in, like some black hole. Proceed with caution, and awe.

Also closing toward the end of the month (May 22 to be exact) is Beverly Rayner’s “Accretion” at Braunstein/Quay, an elongated housecoat covered in the day-to-day paper ephemera — greeting cards, bills, receipts, inspirational quotes, correspondences — that one accumulates over the course of a lifetime. “Go paperless” is one takeaway. That such a load is too much to bear — psychically as much as environmentally — is another. *

CCA GRADUATE THESIS EVENTS

Through May 14, free

California College of the Arts

1111 Eighth St., SF

(415) 703-9500

www,cca.edu

GWENAEL RATTKE: OKTOGON

Through May 14, free

Ping Pong Gallery

1240 22nd St., SF

(415) 550-7483

www.pingponggallery.com

BEVERLY RAYNER: ACCRETION

Through May 22, free

Braunstein/Quay Gallery

430 Clementina, SF

(415) 278-9850

www.bquayartgallery.com

Sounds and slides from May 1 immigration rally

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Thousands of people spilled out into the streets of San Francisco on Saturday, May 1, to march for federal immigration reform and to denounce Arizona’s SB 1070, an anti-immigration measure widely perceived as a racist, ill-advised approach to addressing illegal U.S. border crossings. The law makes it a state-level crime to be in the U.S. illegally, and criminalizes failure to carry immigration papers at all times.

Sup. David Campos, who introduced a resolution at last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting calling for a city boycott of Arizona-based businesses until the law is repealed, delivered remarks in Spanish to a crowd of rally participants, which can be heard in the slideshow below. (Those of you with delicate sensibilities may want a heads up that his remarks are interrupted a couple times by a guy screaming “Fuck Arizona!!!” right into the mic.) Campos’ resolution is on the agenda for the May 4 Board of Supervisors meeting.

Here’s a translation of the Supervisor’s remarks: “Power to immigrants! Power to the workers! Power to the Latino community! Power to America! This is our country, we’re Americans like anyone else. We’re sending a clear message to the president and the Democratic Congress. They’ve been elected by the Latino Community. They were elected to pass immigration reform. It makes me proud that San Francisco was the first to send a message to the whole country. We’re going to boycott Arizona. We’re going to send a message to Arizona that they’re not going to violate our rights, that they’re not going to violate this country’s constitution. Let’s send a message to our brothers and friends in Arizona that you are not alone. We’re with you. Power to the immigrants! Yes we can! Let’s keep fighting onto victory!”

Audio and photos by Rebecca Bowe

For a more detailed story about the day’s events and local responses to the Arizona legislation, pick up this week’s Guardian.

 

Editor’s Notes

David Talbot
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Editor’s Notes

Tredmond@sfbg.com

I’m glad to see Mayor Gavin Newsom finally opposing the anti-immigrant bill in Arizona, and maybe, kinda, sorta, being willing to support some sort of boycott. He’s right that the Arizona law practically mandates racial profiling; he’s also right that it’s an utterly inappropriate way to address immigration and crime issues.

The problem is that the Arizona policy is awfully close to what Newsom has implemented in his own city.

As Angela Chan, staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, points out in an opinion piece at sfbg.com, the mayor’s policy — which mandates that juvenile probation officers report young people to federal immigration authorities if they suspect the youth may not be in the country legally — also pretty much mandates racial profiling. It also tears apart families. And makes no sense.

It’s easy to criticize a state like Arizona, run by right-wing nuts who follow the lead of nativist bigots. And that’s fine; I’m on board. But let’s not forget what’s happening right here in San Francisco, where the Democratic mayor is taking the same essential policy approach as the Republican governor of the Grand Canyon State.

ENDORSEMENTS: Judicial races

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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2
ENDORSEMENTS: Judicial races

SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE, SEAT 6


LINDA COLFAX


It’s rare to see an open seat on the Superior Court; judges typically retire midterm and allow the governor to appoint their replacement. And with a Republican governor, the more progressive Democrats have had a hard time getting even close to judicial appointments. Four highly qualified candidates are seeking this seat, and all of them make good cases for election.


Since judicial candidates can’t take stands on most political issues or indicate how they might rule on cases, it’s hard to get a sense of where the candidates stand. But they can talk about their backgrounds and experience — and about how the local courts are run. For example, the Superior Court is managed on a day-to-day basis by a presiding judge, elected by the sitting judges on the San Francisco bench. But those elections are secret; nobody except the judges know who the candidates were; who voted for which one; or what the final tally was. Court administration is done in closed meetings. Most of what happens in the courts is public — but there’s no presumption of cameras in the courtrooms to give the public access to the justice system.


Our choices for judge reflect our interest in a diverse judiciary, judges who have both professional and personal experience that will shape fair decisions — and jurists who believe in open government, including open courts.


Our choice for Seat 6 is Linda Colfax, a deputy public defender with a background in community service (she’s been an ACLU board member) and progressive politics. Like all four candidates, she has impressive legal credentials and trial experience. She also strongly supports sunshine in the courts and told us she would allow the press and public into judges’ meetings when appropriate, supports cameras in the courtrooms (except for cases where a witness or crime victim has to be protected), and efforts to make the courts work more efficiently.


Robert Retana, who grew up in East Los Angeles, has worked in both civil and criminal law, as a prosecutor and a civil litigator. He also has extensive community service with La Raza Centro Legal and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights. He was awfully vague on cameras in the courtroom and didn’t seem well-informed on open-government issues, but he’s certainly qualified for the job.


Rod Mcleod, a former San Francisco School Board member, told us he won’t raise any money for this race since he thinks judges shouldn’t be captive to special interests. That’s noble, but it also makes it unlikely he’ll be a factor in the end.


Harry Dorfman, a career prosecutor with the District Attorney’s Office, has extensive trial experience but was the least willing of all the candidates we interviewed to expand public access to the courts.


Colfax has the endorsements of Assembly Member Tom Ammiano, Sen. Mark Leno, and Sups. David Campos, John Avalos, and Eric Mar, among others. She would also diversify the bench in a significant way, not just because she’s a lesbian but because she spent her career in the Public Defender’s Office. And since Democratic and Republican governors alike tend not to appoint public defenders to the bench, that background and perspective is rare. Vote for Colfax.


 


SUPERIOR COURT JUDGE, SEAT 15


MICHAEL NAVA


Another rarity here: a contested race where challengers are taking on a sitting judge. Richard Ulmer, the incumbent, was a Republican living in Hillsborough when Gov. Schwarzenegger appointed him to the bench last year; he quickly changed his registration to independent and took up residence in Park Merced. But two gay men, Michael Nava and Daniel Dean, saw him as potentially vulnerable and, noting the lack of LGBT appointments coming out of the current administration, filed to challenge Ulmer.


Ulmer’s a smart and appealing person with an impressive legal resume, and we see no scandal that would mandate his removal from office. But we also recognize that this is an elected office, and that it’s perfectly acceptable for candidates who think they would better serve the public and the bench to run against an incumbent. In this case, we’re endorsing Michael Nava.


Nava, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, makes the case that judicial appointments can be just as political as elections: out of some 500 judicial appointments, Schwarzenegger has named perhaps five openly LGBT candidates. Nava also would bring a different perspective to the courts. His career has been in the public sector and he currently works as a staff attorney drafting decisions for Superior Court Justice Carlos Moreno. More than anyone else running for judge this year, Nava is an advocate of openness in the judiciary. He told us the courts are the third branch of government and should be held to most of the same sunshine standards at the executive and legislature.


Daniel Dean also makes a compelling case and has extensive courtroom experience as a litigator and judge pro tem. His accessibility and sense of humor would serve him well on the bench, and we hope he continues to seek a judicial slot. But in this race, we’re endorsing Nava.

ENDORSEMENTS: National and state races

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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15
ENDORSEMENTS: National and state races

Editor’s note: the file below contains a correction, updated May 5 2010. 


National races


U.S. SENATE, DEMOCRAT


BARBARA BOXER


The Republican Party is targeting this race as one of its top national priorities, and if the GOP can dislodge a three-term senator from California, it will be a major blow for the party (and agenda) of President Obama. The pundits are happily talking about how much danger Barbara Boxer faces, how the country’s mood is swinging against big-government liberals.


But it’s always a mistake to count out Boxer. In 1982, as a Marin County supervisor with little name recognition in San Francisco, she trounced then-SF Sup. Louise Renne for an open Congressional seat. Ten years later, she beat the odds and won a hotly contested primary and tough general election to move into the Senate. She’s a fierce campaigner, and with no primary opposition, will have a united party behind her.


Boxer is one of the most progressive members of the not-terribly progressive U.S. Senate. She’s been one of the strongest, most consistent supporters of reproductive rights in Washington and a friend of labor (with 100 percent ratings from the AFL-CIO and National Education Association). We’ve had our disagreements: Boxer supported No Child Left Behind, wrote the law allowing airline pilots to carry guns in the cockpit, and was weak on same-sex marriage when San Francisco sought to legalize it (although she’s come around). But she was an early and stalwart foe of the war in Iraq, split with her own party to oppose a crackdown on illegal immigration, and is leading the way on accountability for Wall Street. She richly deserves reelection, and we’re happy to endorse her.


 


CONGRESS, 6TH DISTRICT, DEMOCRAT


LYNN WOOLSEY


It’s odd that the representative from Marin and Sonoma counties is more progressive by far than her colleague to the south, San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi. But over the years, Lynn Woolsey has been one of the strongest opponents of the war, a voice against bailouts for the big Wall Street banks, and a foe of cuts in the social safety net. We’re proud to endorse her for another term.


 


CONGRESS, 7TH DISTRICT, DEMOCRAT


GEORGE MILLER


George Miller has been representing this East Bay district since 1974, and is now the chair of the Education and Labor Committee and a powerhouse in Congress. He’s too prone to compromise (with George W. Bush on education policy) but is taking the right line on California water (while Sen. Dianne Feinstein is on the wrong side). We’ll endorse him for another term.


 


CONGRESS, 8TH DISTRICT, DEMOCRAT


NANCY PELOSI


We’ve never been terribly pleased with San Francisco’s most prominent Congressional representative. Nancy Pelosi was the author of the bill that created the first privatized national park at the Presidio, setting a horrible standard that parks ought to be about making money. She was weak on opposing the war, ducked same-sex marriage, and has used her clout locally for all the wrong candidates and issues. But we have to give her credit for resurrecting and pushing through the health care bill (bad as it was — and it’s pretty bad — it’s better than doing nothing). And, at a time when the Republicans are trying to derail the Obama presidency, she’s become a pretty effective partner for the president.


Her fate as speaker (and her future in this seat) probably depends on how the Democrats fare in the midterm Congressional elections this fall. But if she and the party survive in decent shape, she needs to take the opportunity to undo the damage she did at the Presidio.


 


CONGRESS, 9TH DISTRICT, DEMOCRAT


BARBARA LEE


Barbara Lee, who represents Berkeley and Oakland, is co-chair of the Progressive Caucus in the House, one of the most consistent liberal votes in Congress, and a hero to the antiwar movement. In 2001, she was the only member of either house to oppose the Bush administration’s Use of Force resolution following the 9/11 attacks, and she’s never let up on her opposition to foolish military entanglements. We’re glad she’s doing what Nancy Pelosi won’t — represent the progressive politics of her district in Washington.


 


CONGRESS, 13TH DISTRICT, DEMOCRAT


PETE STARK


Most politicians mellow and get more moderate as they age; Stark is the opposite. He announced a couple of years ago that he’s an atheist (the only one in Congress), opposed the Iraq war early, called one of his colleagues a whore for the insurance industry, and insulted President Bush and refused to apologize, saying: “I may have dishonored the commander-in-chief, but I think he’s done pretty well to dishonor himself without any help from me.” He served as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee for exactly one day — March 3 — before the Democratic membership overruled Speaker Pelosi and chucked him out on the grounds that he was too inflammatory. The 78-year-old may not be in office much longer, but he’s good on all the major issues. He’s also fearless. If he wants another term, he deserves one.


 


State races


GOVERNOR, DEMOCRAT


EDMUND G. BROWN


Jerry Brown? Which Jerry Brown? The small-is-beautiful environmentalist from the 1970s who opposed Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s Diablo Canyon nuke and created the California Conservation Corps, the Office of Appropriate Technology, and the Farm Labor Relations Board (all while running a huge budget surplus in Sacramento)? The angry populist who lashed out at corporate power on a KPFA radio talk show and ran against Bill Clinton for president? The pro-development mayor of Oakland who sided with the cops on crime issues and opened a military academy? Or the tough-on-crime attorney general who refuses to even talk about tax increases to solve the state’s gargantuan budget problems?


We don’t know. That’s the problem with Brown — you never know what he’ll do or say next. For now, he’s been a terribly disappointing candidate, running to the right, rambling on about preserving Proposition 13, making awful statements about immigration and sanctuary laws, and even sounding soft on environmental issues. He’s started to hit his stride lately, though, attacking likely GOP contender Meg Whitman over her ties to Wall Street and we’re seeing a few flashes of the populist Brown. But he’s got to step it up if he wants to win — and he’s got to get serious about taxes and show some budget leadership, if he wants to make a difference as governor.


 


LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, DEMOCRAT


JANICE HAHN


Not an easy choice, by any means.


Mayor Gavin Newsom jumped into this race only after it became clear that he wouldn’t get elected governor. He sees it as a temporary perch, someplace to park his political ambitions until a better office opens up. He’s got the money, the statewide name recognition, and the endorsement of some of the state’s major power players, including both U.S. Senators and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He’s also been a terrible mayor of San Francisco — and some progressives (like Sup. Chris Daly) argue, persuasively, that the best way to get a better person in Room 200 is to ship Newsom off to an office in Sacramento where he can’t do much harm and let the supervisors pick the next mayor.


But it’s hard to endorse Newsom for any higher office. He’s ducked on public power, allowing PG&E to come very close to blocking the city’s community choice aggregation program (See editorial, page 5). His policies have promoted deporting kids and breaking up families. He’s taken an approach to the city budget — no new revenue, just cuts — that’s similar to what the Republican governor has done. He didn’t even bother to come down and talk to us about this race. There’s really no good argument for supporting the advancement of his political career.


Then there’s Janice Hahn. She’s a Los Angeles City Council member, the daughter of a former county supervisor, and the sister of a former mayor. She got in this race way before Newsom, and her nightmare campaign consultant, Garry South, acts as if she has some divine right to be the only Democrat running.


Hahn in not overly impressive as a candidate. When we met her, she seemed confused about some issues and scrambled to duck others. She told us she’s not sure she’s in favor of legalizing pot, but she isn’t sure why she’s not sure since she has no arguments against it. She won’t take a position on a new peripheral canal, although she can’t defend building one and says that protecting San Francisco Bay has to be a priority. She won’t rule out offshore oil drilling, although she said she has yet to see a proposal she can support. Her main economic development proposal was to bring more film industry work to California, even if that means cutting taxes for the studios or locating the shoots on Indian land where there are fewer regulations.


On the other hand, she told us she wants to get rid of the two-thirds threshold in the state Legislature for passing a budget or raising taxes. She supports reinstating the car tax at pre-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger levels. She supports a split-roll measure to reform Prop. 13. She wants to see an oil-severance tax to fund education. She’s one of the few statewide candidates who openly advocates higher taxes on the wealthy as part of the solution to the budget crisis.


We are under no illusions that Hahn will be able to use the weak office of lieutenant governor to move on any of these issues, and we’re not at all sure she’s ready to take over the top spot. But on the issues, she’s clearly better than Newsom, so she gets our endorsements.


 


SECRETARY OF STATE, DEMOCRAT


DEBRA BOWEN


Debra Bowen is the only Democrat running, a sign that pretty much everyone in the party thinks she’s doing a fine job as Secretary of State. She’s run a clean office and we see no reason to replace her.


 


CONTROLLER, DEMOCRAT


JOHN CHIANG


Like Bowen, John Chiang has no opposition in the primary, and he’s been a perfectly adequate controller. In fact, when Gov. Schwarzenegger tried two years ago to cut the pay of thousands of state employees to the minimum wage level, Chiang defied him and refused to change the paychecks — a move that forced the governor to back down. We just wish he’d play a more visible role in talking about the need for more tax revenue to balance the state’s books.


 


TREASURER, DEMOCRAT


BILL LOCKYER


Bill Lockyer keeps bouncing around Sacramento, waiting, perhaps, for his chance to be governor. He was attorney general. Now he’s treasurer seeking a second term, which he will almost certainly win. He’s done some good things, including trying to use state bonds to promote alternative energy, and has spoken out forcefully about the governor’s efforts to defer deficit problems through dubious borrowing. He hasn’t, however, come out in favor of higher taxes for the rich or a change in Prop. 13.


 


ATTORNEY GENERAL, DEMOCRAT


KAMALA HARRIS


There are really only two serious candidates in this race, Kamala Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, and Rocky Delgadillo, the former Los Angeles city attorney. Harris has a comfortable lead, with Delgadillo in second and the others far behind.


Delgadillo is on his second try for this office. He ran against Jerry Brown four years ago and got nowhere. And in the meantime, he’s come under fire for, among other things, using city employees to run personal errands for him (picking up his dry-cleaning, babysitting his kids) and driving his car without insurance. On a more significant level, he made his reputation with gang injunctions that smacked of ethnic profiling and infuriated Latino and civil liberties groups. It’s amazing he’s still a factor in this race; he can’t possibly win the general election with all his baggage.


Harris has a lot going for her. She was among the first California elected officials to endorse Barack Obama for president, and remains close to the administration. She’s a smart, articulate prosecutor and could be one of the few women atop the Democratic ticket this year. We were never comfortable with her ties to Willie Brown, but he’s no longer a factor in state or local politics. These days, she’s more closely allied with the likes of State Sen. Mark Leno.


That said, we have some serious problems with Harris. She’s been up in Sacramento pushing Republican-style tough-on-crime bills (like a measure that would bar registered sex offenders from ever using social networking sites on the Internet) and forcing sane Democrats like Assembly Member and Public Safety Committee Chair Tom Ammiano to try to tone down or kill them (and then take the political heat). If she didn’t know about the problems in the SFPD crime lab, she should have, and should have made a bigger fuss, earlier.


But Harris has kept her principled position against the death penalty, even when it meant taking immense flak from the cops for refusing to seek capital punishment for the killer of a San Francisco police officer. She’s clearly the best choice for the Democrats.


 


INSURANCE COMMISSIONER, DEMOCRAT


DAVE JONES


Two credible progressives are vying to run for this powerful and important position regulating the massive — and massively corrupt — California insurance industry. Dave Jones and Hector De La Torre are both in the state Assembly, with Jones representing Sacramento and De La Torre hailing from Los Angeles. Both have a record opposing insurance industry initiatives; both are outspoken foes of Prop. 17; and either would do a fine job as insurance commissioner. But Jones has more experience on consumer issues and health care reform, and we prefer his background as a Legal Aid lawyer to De La Torre’s history as a Southern California Edison executive. So we’ll give Jones the nod.


 


BOARD OF EQUALIZATION, DISTRICT 1, DEMOCRAT


BETTY T. YEE


Betty Yee has taken over a job that’s been a stronghold of progressive tax policy since the days of the late Bill Bennett. She’s done well in the position, supporting progressive financial measures and even coming down, as a top tax official, in favor of legalizing (and taxing) marijuana. We’re happy to endorse her for another term.


 


SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION


TOM TORLAKSON


Two prominent Democratic legislators are running for this nonpartisan post, state Sen. Gloria Romero of Los Angeles and Assembly Member Tom Torlakson of Martinez. It’s a pretty clear choice: Romero is a big supporter of charter schools who thinks parents should be able to move their kids out of one school district and into another (allowing wealthier white parents, for example, to abandon Los Angeles or San Francisco for the suburban districts). She’s been supported in the past by Don and Doris Fisher, who put a chunk of their GAP Inc. fortune into school privatization efforts. Torlakson wants more accountability for charters, opposes the Romero district-option bill, and has the support of every major teachers union in the state. Vote for Torlakson.


 


STATE SENATE, DISTRICT 8, DEMOCRAT


LELAND YEE


Sen. Leland Yee can be infuriating. Two years ago, he was hell-bent on selling the Cow Palace as surplus state property and allowing private developers to take it over. In the recent budget crisis, he pissed off his Democratic colleagues by refusing to vote for cuts that everyone else knew were inevitable (while never making a strong stand in favor of, say, repealing Prop. 13 or raising other taxes). But he’s always been good on open-government issues and has made headlines lately for busting California State University, Stanislaus over a secret contract to bring Sarah Palin in for a fundraiser — and has raised the larger point that public universities shouldn’t hide their finances behind private foundations.


Yee will have no serious opposition for reelection, and his campaign for a second term in Sacramento is really the start of the Leland Yee for Mayor effort. With reservations over the Cow Palace deal and a few other issues, we’ll endorse him for reelection.


 Correction update: Yee’s office informs us that the senator suports an oil-severance tax and a tax on high-income earners and “believes that Prop. 13 should be reformed,” although he hasn’t taken a position on Assemblymember Tom Ammiano’s reform bill. 


STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 12, DEMOCRAT


FIONA MA


Fiona Ma’s a mixed bag (at best). She doesn’t like Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and supports public power, but comes up with strange bills that make no sense, like a 2009 measure to limit rent control in trailer parks. Why does Ma, who has no trailer parks in her district, care? Maybe because the landlords who control the mobile home facilities gave her some campaign cash. She faces no opposition, and we’re not thrilled with her record, but we’ll reluctantly back her for another term.


 


STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 13, DEMOCRAT


TOM AMMIANO


When the history of progressive politics in modern San Francisco is written, Tom Ammiano will be a central figure. His long-shot 1999 mayoral campaign against Willie Brown brought the left to life in town, and his leadership helped bring back district elections and put a progressive Board of Supervisors in place in 2000. As a supervisor, he authored the city’s landmark health care bill (which Newsom constantly tries to take credit for) and the rainy day fund (which saved the public schools from debilitating cuts). He uses his local influence to promote the right causes, issues, and candidates.


And he’s turned out to be an excellent member of the state Assembly. He forced BART to take seriously civilian oversight of the transit police force. He put the battle to reform Prop. 13 with a split-role measure back on the state agenda. And his efforts to legalize and tax marijuana are close to making California the first state to toss the insane pot laws. As chair of the Public Safety Committee, he routinely defies the police lobbies and the right-wing Republicans and defuses truly awful legislation. We’re glad Ammiano’s still fighting in the good fight, and we’re pleased to endorse him for another term.


 


STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 14, DEMOCRAT


NANCY SKINNER


Nancy Skinner has taken on one of the toughest, and for small businesses, most important, battles in Sacramento. She wants to make out-of-state companies that sell products to Californians collect and remit sales tax. If you buy a book at your local bookstore, you have to pay sales tax; if you buy it from Amazon, it’s tax-free. That not only hurts the state, which loses hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, it’s a competitive disadvantage to local shops. Skinner’s a good progressive vote and an ally for Ammiano on the Public Safety Committee. We’re happy to endorse her for another term.


 


STATE ASSEMBLY, DISTRICT 16, DEMOCRAT


SANDRE SWANSON


Sandre Swanson represents the district where BART police killed Oscar Grant, but he wasn’t the one out front pushing for more civilian accountability; that was left to SF’s Ammiano. And while Swanson was generally supportive of Ammiano’s bill, he was hardly a leader in the campaign to pass it. This is too bad, because Swanson’s almost always a progressive vote and has been good on issues like whistleblower protection (a Swanson bill that passed this year protects local government workers who want to report problems confidentially). We’ll endorse him for another term, but he needs to get tougher on the BART police.

Herrera to San Francisco: boycott Arizona

Mary Magee
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Herrera to San Francisco: boycott Arizona

I almost visited Arizona once.
I was in Nevada, visiting the Hoover Dam which crosses the border between Nevada and Arizona and took a photo next to the Arizona state sign.

But I didn’t cross the line. I already suspected that Arizona was groundzero for wingnuts, thanks to the decision of Arizona U.S. senator, Republican John McCain, to choose then Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election.


At least, Democrat Janet Napolitano was still governor of Arizona at the time, and so was able to veto similar attempts to pass racist immigration laws in the state of


But now Republican Jan Brewer, a former Maricopa County supervisor, is governor of Arizona and has signed Arizona’s SB  1070, I think I’ll follow San Francisco city Attorney Dennis Herrera’s advice and implement a sweeping boycott of all things Arizona.


Citing San Francisco’s “moral leadership against such past injustices as South African apartheid, the exploitation of migrant farm workers, the economic oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland, and discrimination against the LGBT community,” Herrera offered the services of his office’s contracts, government litigation and investigations teams to work closely with city departments and commissions to identify applicable contracts and to aggressively pursue termination wherever legally tenable.


“Arizona’s controversial new law makes it a state-level crime for someone to be in the country illegally, and even criminalizes the failure to carry immigration documents at all times by lawful foreign residents,” Herrera’s April 26 press release observed. “It additionally imposes a requirement for police officers to question those they suspect may be in the United States illegally. Civil libertarians have sharply criticized the law for being an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against all Latinos, regardless of their citizenship. It has also been rebuked by the nation’s law enforcement community, with the president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, San Jose Police Chief Robert Davis, reiterating his organization’s 2006 policy statement that requiring local police to enforce immigration laws “would likely negatively effect and undermine the level of trust and cooperation between local police and immigrant communities.”


“Arizona has charted an ominous legal course that puts extremist politics before public safety, and betrays our most deeply-held American values,” said Herrera, who is the son of an immigrant from Latin America. “Just as it did two decades ago when it refused to observe Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Arizona has again chosen to isolate itself from the rest of the nation. Our most appropriate response is to assure that their isolation is tangible rather than merely symbolic. San Francisco should lead the way in adopting and aggressively pursuing a sweeping boycott of Arizona and Arizona-based businesses until this unjust law is repealed or invalidated. My office is fully committed to work with San Francisco city departments and commissions to identify all applicable contracts, and to pursue termination wherever possible.  And my office stands ready to assist in any legal challenges in whatever way it can.”


Meanwhile, Napolitano, who is serving as Obama’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary, joined Obama in calling Arizona’s new immigration law “misguided.”


Appearing on ABC News, Napolitano said of the bill: “That one is a misguided law. It’s not a good law enforcement law. It’s not a good law in any number of reasons.”
She also warned that Arizona’s law could get other states trying to pass similar legislation, which could create a patchwork of immigration rules, instead of an an overall federal immigration system.


“This affects everybody, and I actually view it now as a security issue,” Napolitano said. “We need to know who’s in the country. And we need to know, for those who are in the country illegally, there needs to be a period under which they are given the opportunity to register so we get their biometrics, we get their criminal history and we know who they are. They pay a fine. They learn English. They get right with the law.”


Here on the streets of San Francisco, immigrant advocates are asking folks to march on May Day in solidarity with the immigrant communities of Arizona.


“In 2006, the immigrant community took to the streets in huge numbers,” a press release from the May 1st coalition stated. “Millions of undocumented working people and their families sought a pathway to legalization and to a life without fear of work-place raids or middle-of-the night deportations that tear families apart. In 2010, conditions have only worsened as hate crimes have increased exponentially; intolerance has been legitimized by the rhetoric of the Tea Party; and governments (like Arizona) have instituted harsh policing and employment practices that terrorize our communities. The federal government has failed to solve the crisis of undocumented workers in this country. In San Francisco, thousands of workers face losing their jobs because of a flawed employment verification process. Our children are deported without due process and now we must fear the codification of racial bigotry in Arizona.  State and federal governments have ineffectively solved the budget crisis on the backs of the lowest paid workers.  We march in solidarity with Arizona’s immigrants; immigrants everywhere; and the hard-working people of San Francisco who’ve unfairly endured the burden of this economic crisis.


The May 1st Coalition invites the community to join them for an April 28 poster-making party at 10 a.m, City College Mission Campus at 1125 Valencia Street in preparation for a May Day march at which Olga Miranda, President of SEIU Local 87, Jane Kim, SFUSD school board president, and Pablo Rodriguez, city college faculty, will speak.


My favorite comment on this unfunny situation comes from Daily Kos contributing editor and Las Vegas resident Jed Lewison.


“What do you call a bunch of people who not only don’t see anything wrong with Arizona’s new hate law, but blame federal inaction on immigration reform for “forcing” Arizona to enact the law while simultaneously trying to block federal immigration reform legislation?” Lewison asks. “You call them conservatives.”


 

The Daily Blurgh: Is that an Archie in your pants, Banksy?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0
The Daily Blurgh: Is that an Archie in your pants, Banksy?

Curiosities, quirks, oddites, and items from around the Bay and beyond

Gay! Archie gets a gay (as opposed to “Archie is a gay,” a fantasy you can live out through this NSFW-ish Choose-Your-Own Adventure wiki). Lesbian lawyers defend “not gay enough” softball players. Texas doesn’t want to let gays divorce. And Jet Blue goes pink.

******

He’s not here: Banksy tags SF.

*****

“People are terrified of drugs. Drugs are linked to inner cities and crime – not mystical states. But with diligent and serious science, we can learn about all the wonderful ways that these compounds can help a stressed and troubled species.” Dropping therapeutic acid in San Jose.

******

Have you parked your keester in one of the city’s “parklets” yet? It’s lovely outside right now. Go! Editor’s recommendation: Totally hot biker parklet action at Mojo.

*****

If that constant hacking cough wasn’t enough of a warning about air pollution, you can always rely on your phone to tell you.

*****

“It refers to the sex act conducted in front of the Eucharist involving myself, as the role of Adam, and a female follower, who plays the role of Eve by her own free will. The Lord does not wish for anybody else to engage in this ritual. I was inspired to perform this ritual because I believed that there was no other way to prove Mr. Little Pebble’s innocence and the wrongful convictions of sexual assault made against him. Just a few days ago, God sent me a message saying that the woman who sued Mr. Little Pebble will confess that it was all a lie.” And there’s a whole lot more WTF where that came from.

*******

SFFD disaster drill mannequins: now more “P.C.” thanks to pants.

*****

Heads up: Remembering Playland, the full length documentary that tells the history of San Francisco’s famous 10-acre seaside amusement park, Playland at the Beach, starts a week-long run at the Balboa Theater tomorrow night.

Green cards in hand, Washingtons want Newsom to discuss immigrant youth policy. In person.

Mary Magee
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0
Green cards in hand, Washingtons want Newsom to discuss immigrant youth policy. In person.

Tracey Washington and her 13-year old son heard today that their green card applications have been approved. This means that they will not be deported to Australia, and their personal immigration nightmare is over.
But even as the family rejoices, Tracey’s husband, Charles Washington, a Muni bus driver and long-term San Francisco resident, has written to Mayor Gavin Newsom, voicing disappointment over Newsom’s failure to reach out to his family during their time of need and over Newsom’s continuing refusal to implement the immigrant youth due process policy that a veto-proof majority of the Board approved, in November 2009.

“Our family’s luck n this case was unique, but Mr. Newsom, the pain we felt when our family was facing deportation as a result of your policy is not unique at all,” Washington wrote in his April 21 letter. “We share the pain felt by the many other families whose children were taken into ICE custody and ordered deported, as a result of your policy.” (The full text of the letter that Charles Washington sent to Newsom today is included at the end of this blog post.)
 
The Washingtons’ nightmare began in January, when their 13-year-old boy was reported by juvenile probation to ICE for a minor bullying incident, during which he took 46 cents from another youth, then gave it back and apologized. That’s when the family first discovered that, thanks to a new juvenile immigrant policy that Newsom implemented in July 2008, their teen was going to reported to ICE immediately after his arrest – and before his case was heard in juvenile court. 

And even though the family was eligible for green cards thanks to Tracey’s April 2009 marriage to U.S. citizen Charles Washington, ICE handed Tracey and her son their deportation orders on Feb. 5, 2010–the same day they picked the boy up from juvenile detention and used the boy as bait to get his mother to agree to wear an electronic monitoring anklet.

That anklet was finally taken off today, meaning that Tracey Washington was forced to wear this uncomfortable and humiliating device for two and a half months, even though she did not commit a crime–and even though her son was not found guilty as charged, when his case was finally adjudicated by a juvenile justice.

Following the bullying incident, local law enforcement officers charged the boy with three felony counts, triggering an immediate referral to ICE, under Newsom’s immigrant youth policy.  But a juvenile justice recently gave the boy informal probation, recognizing that the youth is a first-time offender who committed a low level offense and is a good candidate for rehabilitation.

But seven weeks ago (March 1), when Tracey and her son had exhausted their legal options and were facing imminent deportation, the five-member blended Washington family held a press conference as a last resort. Two days later, following a media firestorm, ICE granted the Washingtons a two-month reprive, so that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services could review and approve their green card applications.

“We really appreciate that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was willing to look at our individual circumstances and approve our residency application, so that our family can stay together,” Tracey Washington said today. “ At the same time, my heart goes out to the many other families who were harmed by the Mayor’s policy.” 

Angela Chan, the staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, who handled the family’s case, noted that while the Washington’s nightmare ended happily, many other families continue to be broken up by harsh immigration laws, lack of access to affordable legal services, and Mayor Newsom’s local policy towards immigrant youth.

“Newsom’s policy exacerbates the impact of a broken federal immigration system on San Francisco families,” Chan said. “We need humane reform at the federal level, but in the meantime, Mayor Newsom needs to take a stand today for due process and family unity by ending San Francisco’s draconian policy. If the Washingtons’ son had not been reported to ICE, as required by Newsom’s policy, he would not have been sent to ICE, and he and his family would not have had to endure this nightmare.”
 
Letter to Mayor Newsom from Washington Family–
 
April        21, 2010
 
Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall, Room 200
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
 
RE: Unjust Policy Regarding Undocumented Youth in San Francisco

Dear Mayor Newsom,

My name is Charles Washington. I was born and raised in San Francisco, and am a long-time resident of this great city. I also am a city employee. I love the city of San Francisco and my family has developed strong roots here. Unfortunately, last month, we went through a horrible ordeal when my wife and step-son were ordered deported as a result of your policy, which requires reporting of youth to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) right after arrest, before the youth even has a chance to have a hearing in juvenile court regarding the charges.

As you may have read in the news, my 13-year-old son was arrested and reported to ICE for deportation over 46 cents in a minor, first-time bullying case. In accordance with your policy, San Francisco juvenile probation officers reported my son to ICE before the allegations could even be adjudicated by a juvenile court judge. To my shock, my wife also was ordered deported by ICE as a result of the reporting of my son by juvenile probation in keeping with your policy.

With the imminent deportation hanging over my wife and son’s heads, we were utterly terrified that our family would be torn apart. Since we had no other legal remedies when our request for a stay of deportation was denied, we desperately reached out to the media to seek help in a last ditch effort. Fortunately, a reporter contacted the White House, which then resulted in an extension of the deadline for the deportation. However, I must tell you that during this time, we were really disappointed that we did not receive a single call or any type of outreach from your office to offer my family support, especially when my son’s referral to ICE was a direct consequence of your policy.

I also would like to express my deep disappointment in the statements your office issued after my family was granted the reprieve through no help from your office. Your office made statements to the press suggesting that our situation proves your policy leads to just outcomes. I completely disagree with this assertion and firmly believe that our being granted the reprieve has proven even more so that your policy hurts families and tears children away from their parents for minor, first-time offenses. The White House seems to understand the importance of keeping families together in granting the reprieve. Unfortunately, your office appears to have missed this completely. It is extremely hurtful to our family that you would try to claim credit for the positive turn in events that my family and the community supporting us worked hard to obtain in order to combat the injustice brought upon us by the policy you implemented in the first place.

Let me also say that my family was lucky, but there are many other families who have not been as fortunate.There was no handbook to tell us what to do to obtain a reprieve when we were in this crisis. It just so happened that we were able to obtain legal assistance, but what if we had been unable to find legal services or if the press had not covered our story? My wife and son would have been torn from me and there is nothing I could have done to stop it from happening. Families in San Francisco should not have to struggle or rely on luck to stay together. In fact, there have been over a hundred families in this city who have not been as fortunate as my family since your harsh and inhumane policy was implemented in 2008.  Our family’s luck in this case was unique, but Mr. Newsom, the pain we felt when our family was facing deportation as a result of your policy is not unique at all.We share the pain felt by the many other families whose children were taken into ICE custody and ordered deported as a result of your policy.

Mr. Newsom, I know that you are a new father yourself and will teach your own daughter many lessons in her lifetime. I respectfully ask you to reexamine your policy from the eyes of a father, the way that I am looking at my son today. While I must say that I am greatly disappointed in the actions you have taken to support a flawed policy that has endangered the children of this city, I do hope that you will take this opportunity to do the right thing and support implementation of Supervisor Campos’ due process amendment, which is now city law.  Families like mine, who are hard-working and rooted in San Francisco, are depending on you to do what is right and to follow the law the community passed in November 2009.

I respectfully request a meeting with you, in which my lawyer, Angela Chan from the Asian Law Caucus, and my family can speak with you about this policy and how it has affected us and continues to impact families in San Francisco.
Sincerely,

Charles Washington

Live on screen

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Live on screen

johnny@sfbg.com

SFIFF All those with curious minds, step right up, we have live cinema waiting for you in this dark room. The idea of “live” or performance-generated movies has taken on a new vitality recently via the light-projecting likes of Bruce McClure, whose ear-splitting and eye-blasting appearances in San Francisco usually sell out. On a smaller local level, Konrad Steiner’s neo-benshi programs have united local writers and a wide variety of filmic subject matter in creative and sometimes entertaining ways. At the San Francisco Film Festival, live music by bands for silent works has become a reliable main attraction. But Sam Green’s and Dave Cerf’s new meta-documentary Utopia in Four Movements adds a new facet to the phenomenon: instead of utilizing an over-familiar voice-over, it unites live narration by Green with a musical performance overseen by Cerf, allowing for degrees of spontaneity and change.

Utopian, isn’t it? At the Mission bar the Phone Booth on an early Monday evening, Green can’t help but tease out his thoughts on the very word. “To me, utopia is almost a metaphor for hope, or hope in the imagination,” he says, shortly after we’ve been flirted with (and flashed) by one fierce female patron. “It’s about trying to be hopeful these days, which is hard. Utopia is almost a way to make up hope. In some ways it’s so preposterous. The word even has negative connotations these days — people are told not to be utopian.” Half an hour later, he returns for another analogy or two: “Utopia is a thing that never really exists. It’s like a flower — it always wilts. Even if there’s a moment of great utopian energy, it can’t last.”

Utopia may not exist in fully realized forms, but the quartet of mutations in Utopia in Four Movements (five if you count the movie) fascinate as real-life fables. The first segment explores Esperanto, which was invented in the late 19th century with the aim of its becoming a universal, international language. As Green puts it, Esperanto is “a wonderful idea that can’t be,” an idea that he illustrates with short direct portraits of contemporary Esperanto speakers that, uncannily, takes on a colors-of-Benneton feel.

Esperanto has also yielded some memorable black-and-white cinema, namely a 1965 Esperanto horror film shot in Big Sur by Conrad Hall, which stars a pre-Star Trek William Shatner. San Francisco movie maniacs may recognize Incubus through the efforts of Will The Thrill and Other Cinema’s Craig Baldwin. “William Shatner wrote a memoir in which he talks about it,” Green says, before adding some information that reflects Utopia‘s ever-changing nature –and utopia’s pitfalls. “I’m trying to do an interview with him because he’s practically the most famous person to have spoken Esperanto. But the world’s most famous Esperanto person is probably [financier] George Soros.”

The idea of utopia isn’t new to Green, whose best-known feature The Weather Underground (2002) digs deep into the multi-faceted realm of ’60s radicalism, riding out its actions and repercussions. The second part of Utopia, set in Cuba, adds a new chapter to Green’s explorations of thorny political contradiction. Like Assata Shakur, the segment’s subject lives in Cuba as a fugitive. In the present, she’s engaged with Cuban hip-hop, but she remains tied to her past as a radical in America. “It’s about the last embers of revolution,” says Green.

One of Utopia‘s movements examines the potential of forensice science in a manner quite different from pro-law enforcement US true crime television, showing how the smallest reinforcement can be regained from sites of mass tragedy. But the movie’s sojourn in China is in some ways its most vivid. There, Green takes an extended trip to the world’s largest shopping mall, in China. The subject matter is akin to dramas such as Jem Cohen’s Chain and Jia Zhangke’s The World (both from 2004), but this is a case of reality trumping fiction. “Almost every article I read about China and capitalism talked about how the world’s largest mall was there now,” says Green. “But nobody described it as a total failure. We were at the mall for ten days, and it was soul-killing. There’s something about a gigantic failed mall that is profoundly depressing.” Luckily, an encounter with a Teletubby who eventually removed its mask added some life to the experience.

The world’s largest shopping mall — at least for now: Green says it is slated to be bulldozed — may be grim, but it’s also richly symbolic when history is integrated to the picture. “Victor Gruen who essentially invented the [shopping] mall in the US in the 1950s was a socialist who came to America,” Green says, as “This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven” gives way to “I Feel Love” on the Phone Booth jukebox. “In turn the mall has gone to China, and the grounds of cultural revolution became the site of a government-funded bust of a mall. In a way, it’s the trajectory of the 20th century.“

Today, we tiptoe into the 21st century, with a new president and old-new ways of seeing and making movies. “A year ago, when I was looking at [Utopia], people were saying ‘Aren’t you going to change everything because of Obama?’,” Green remarks. “It felt like cotton candy hope. When [U.S. presidents] are the limits of your possibility, it’s pretty lame.” Truth: Green may have used utopia in his title, but perhaps it’s time to come up with some fresh formulations of hope as well. *

UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS

Sun/25, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki

Top pic picks

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Top pic picks

The White Meadows (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2009) This latest by the recently jailed Iranian director of Iron Island (2005) is a stark, visually striking allegory whose natural settings (the salt formations of Lake Urmia) could hardly be more surreal. Aging Rahmat (Hasan Pourshirazi) rows his little boat from one tiny island community to another, collecting tears from variably aggrieved locals so they can be absolved of their sins — just how, neither they or we know. During his latest travels he gains a teenaged stowaway, then a blind-struck painter as passengers; witnesses a couple of village rituals that prove fatal for their main participants; and experiences other curious events that scarcely prompt a raised eyebrow from him. As with so much modern Iranian cinema, Mohammad Rasoulof’s film carefully renders its political symbolism so abstract you can dig endlessly for hidden meanings, or simply lose yourself in the hypnotic black-and-white-in-color imagery of black-clad people on bleached landscapes. Fri/23, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sat/24, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/25, 8 p.m., PFA. (Dennis Harvey)

Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Thailand, 2009) Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl cheats on boy with boss. Boy falls in love with tree. So are the broad strokes of Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s jungle-horror, Nymph, a city-to-country romance that deftly weaves strands of urban anomie, sexual dysfunction, and rural mythos into a dreamy, arboreal fantasia. One might be tempted to reference Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) and fellow Thai helmer Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2004 breakout, Tropical Malady, as obvious points of reference, but that would derogate the potency and intensity of Ratanaruang’s singular, artistic design. The director of Last Life in the Universe (2003) and Ploy (2007) creates a tropical mise-en-scène that is less cinematic than immersive, developed largely by his use of tight, suspenseful close-ups, fluid camera work (including a 10-minute opening sequence that is practically gymnastic), and a transfixing ambient score. But unlike Tropical Malady, which leveraged much of its second-half’s novelty from overwrought, homoerotic tropes and a condescending nativism, Nymph‘s descent into the jungle is only the beginning of this powerful love story. Fri/23, 9 p.m., Kabuki; Sat/24, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki; April 28, 4:45 p.m., Kabuki. (Erik Morse)

Around a Small Mountain (Jacques Rivette, France/Italy, 2009) Around a Small Mountain (or 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup) is New Wave doyen Jacques Rivette’s return to the whimsy of 1984’s Love on the Ground, another exploration of theater staring eternal demoiselle Jane Birkin. In Mountain, Birkin plays Kate, a prodigal daughter who has returned to her deceased father’s circus after an unspecified trauma forced her into a 15 year absence. En route she encounters Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), a peripatetic who instantly discovers in Kate a fellow improviser for his acrobatic feats of conversation. In hopes of learning her secret past, Vittorio follows Kate and her shabby troupe from performance to performance through the tiny towns of the Cevennes. Along the way, Rivette treats his audience to a mish-mash of sideshow sketches, enchanting dialogues and haunting soliloquies, all beneath the magical totem of the big top. The film is spellbinding ode to the theatre of everyday life and the actors who prance in and out of its cirque. Fri/23, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sat/24, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 28, 6:30 p.m., PFA. (Morse)

Way of Nature (Nina Hedenius, Sweden, 2008) Save for when Werner Herzog is doing the talking, documentaries about the natural world often benefit from a lack of voiceover narration. Nature’s seasons, cycles, and rhythms provide their own narrative structure, and simply, silently observing what happens can make for fascinating viewing. Nina Hedenius understands this. Her engrossing year-in-the-life portrait of Lisselbäcka Farm in northern Sweden is cut around creatures great and small — horses, cows, goats, chickens, dogs — and their routines. Although humans are part of the bucolic scene Hedenius so meticulously orchestrates (the sound editing is such that the film would be no less immersive if you watched it blindfolded), they are merely supporting actors. After watching, for the fourth time, another gangly offspring leap to its feet, minutes after being born, you start to realize the ways in which our species is quite helpless. If their keepers suddenly passed away, the animals of Lisselbäcka — domesticated though they may be — would probably manage to carry on. The way of nature is instinct, not mastery. Sat/24, 2 p.m., PFA; Sun/25, 3:45 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/26, 1 p.m., Kabuki; April 28, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Matt Sussman)

Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara, Sri Lanka, 2009) Part vision quest, part historical allegory, Vimukthi Jayasundara’s lush and beguiling head-scratcher unfolds like the mutable folktale told between two fishermen in one of the film’s asides. A synopsis would go something like this: an unnamed South Asian man falls from the sky into an unspecified South Asian country (although the Sinhala the actors speak places us in Sri Lanka) under siege by revolutionaries intent on destroying all means of communication and killing any remaining young men. Fleeing a riot-ravaged city he winds up in the countryside where he reconnects with his sister-in-law, and undergoes several mysterious and mystical experiences at a nearby lake. “It’s possible that one can see today what has happened in the past,” cautions an old man to our protagonist, and Jayasundara — with an eye for arresting mise-en-scene, gorgeously photographed by Channa Deshapriya — attempts to offer a way to re-see the traumas of the civil war that ravaged Sri Lanka for over three decades. Like a freshly remembered dream, Between Two Worlds is as stubbornly oblique as it is hard to shake. Sat/24, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki; Sun/25, 9 p.m., Kabuki; Mon/26, 9:15, Kabuki. (Sussman)

Transcending Lynch (Marcos Andrade, Brazil, 2010) Picture it: everyone’s favorite psycho-thriller filmmaker and coffee retailer waxing beatific about peace, love, and “infinite bliss,” his American Spirit–stained teeth frozen in a perma-grin as he extols the virtues of the “unified field” of consciousness. At certain moments in Transcending Lynch, an exploration of infamous auteur David Lynch and his 35-year devotion to transcendental meditation, the director comes across as flakier than the celebrated piecrust at Twin Peaks‘ Double R diner. (At one point he even utters the phrase “Holy jumping George!”) For the irony-soaked, all the TM talk may be a little TMI, but for Lynch the practice is nothing short of the very source of his creative wellspring. Marcos Andrade’s documentary, which follows Lynch on a 2008 Brazilian book tour, won’t offer the mad-genius Eagle Scout’s more rabid followers much new insight. While the movie strives to be meditative, it’s more of an amalgam of trippy travelogue and pitch meeting. Even more frustrating, we get only teasing glimpses of how TM has directly informed and impacted the artist’s work. Lynch may be on the path to universal enlightenment, but when it comes to the man himself, the rest of us ignoramuses are still mostly in the dark. Sat/24, 6:30pm, Kabuki; Mon/26, 9pm, Kabuki; Tues/27, 12:30pm, Kabuki. (Michelle Devereaux)

14-18: The Noise and the Fury (Jean-Françoise Delassus, France/Belgium, 2009) Made for French TV, Jean-Françoise Delassus’ unclassifiable film would be arresting simply for cobbling together seldom-seen archival footage reflecting all aspects of the First World War, from its leaders to its trenches. But he and co-scenarist Isabelle Rabineau have shaped that footage into a narrative driven by the writings of a (fictional) French everyman soldier who somehow manages to survive and serve in most of its major conflicts. The result melds exquisite color tinting, first-person narration, clips from commercial films about the war (by D.W. Griffith and Chaplin as well as European directors), and ambient sound to create a brilliant kind of living history lesson that makes the events of nearly a century ago seem as immediate as yesterday’s. Mon/26, 4:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 1, 2 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 9 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Peddler (Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano, and Adriana Yurkovich, Argentina, 2009) Daniel Burmeister is a traveling filmmaker. He drives his infirm jalopy from one small Argentine town to the next, hoping to set up camp for a month and make a movie with the locals. He’ll need food, a place to stay, and a camera. Whatever camera they can find. Usually the mayors are easy to convince, because Burmeister is essentially a regional attraction, a one-man circus they know about from the neighboring towns. It’s this strange repurposing of the filmmaking experience that makes the documentary so distinctive and special. And just watching the old man hustle from shot to shot with his bashful actors, working efficiently from one of the handful of scripts he’s been cycling through for years, is an absolute pleasure. Directors Eduardo de la Serna, Lucas Marcheggiano, and Adriana Yurcovich capture the jury-rigged process with unobtrusive admiration and an absence of condescension. As I watched it I kept thinking it was like the soul that was missing from Michel Gondry’s 2008 warmed-over DIY manifesto Be Kind Rewind. Mon/26, 6:30 p.m., PFA; May 1, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Jason Shamai)

Russian Lessons (Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov, Russia/Norway/Georgia, 2010) I remember watching the news two summers ago and feeling confused by the details of the Russia-Georgia War, the culmination of a dispute over the territory of South Ossetia. There seemed to be a haziness about who started what. Russian Lessons offers Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov’s version of what happened that summer and indicts Russian and mainstream international news organizations for exactly that failure to present a satisfactory chronology. Konskaya, a theater director and documentary producer, filmed events as they unfolded on the Northern end of the conflict while Nekrasov, a veteran documentarian, filmed in the South. The result is a collection of interviews with residents of recently bombed Georgian towns, confrontations with Russian soldiers, and investigations of still-smoldering battle sites. The filmmakers spend an equal amount of time scrutinizing source footage from the war and its antecedents, exposing how it was used to mislead the international community. It’s a disturbing and persuasive rebuttal to the Putin administration’s official side of the story. April 28, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki; April 29, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 1, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Shamai)

Restrepo (Tim Hetherington and Sabastian Junger, USA, 2010) Starting mid-’07, journalists-filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger spent some 15 months off and on embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, a Taliban stronghold with steep, mountainous terrain that could hardly be more advantageous for snipers. Particularly once a second, even more isolated outpost is built, the soldiers’ days are fraught with tension, whether they’re ordered out into the open on a mission or staying put under frequent fire. Strictly vérité, with no political commentary overt or otherwise, the documentary could be (and has been) faulted for not having enough of a “narrative arc” — as if life often does, particularly under such extreme circumstances. But it’s harrowingly immediate (the filmmakers themselves often have to dive for cover) and revelatory as a glimpse not just of active warfare, but of the near-impossible challenges particular to foreign armed forces trying to make any kind of “progress” in Afghanistan. April 30, 3:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 2, 4:15 p.m., PFA; May 4, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

Animal Heart (Séverine Cornamusaz, France/Switzerland, 2009) This first feature by Séverine Cornamusaz has a story that would have fit just as well into the cinema of 1920 — or the literature of Thomas Hardy or George Eliot 50 years earlier. Paul (Olivier Rabourdin) is the gruff owner of family lands in the Swiss Alps, raising livestock whom he treats better than wife Rosine (Camille Japy). When he’s forced to hire a seasonal hired hand in the form of Eusebio (Antonio Bull), the easygoing Spaniard’s concern for ailing Rosine incites not Paul’s compassion but his brute jealousy. This elemental triangle set amid the severe elements of its spectacularly shot setting has a suitably blunt (but not crude) power; it leads not where you might expect but to a hard-won fadeout of audacious intimacy. April 30, 4 p.m., Clay; May 2, 9:15 p.m., Clay; May 3, 6 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, France, 2009) A painstaking craftsman who left nothing to chance, French suspense master Clouzot (1955’s Diabolique, 1953’s The Wages of Fear) decided to push his own envelope a little in 1964. He cast Serge Reggiani as a resort innkeeper who becomes pathologically, paranoically possessive of his gorgeous wife (Romy Schneider). Convincing himself she’s having an affair, he gradually snaps tether — and the film itself would reflect that downward spiral by increasingly illustrating his mental stage in distortive image and sound. Unfortunately, the project also drove Clouzot mad in a way, as his grapplings at a new filmic language ran counter to the kind of creative discipline that normally storyboarded everything within an inch of its life. Shooting endless footage, spending endless money, he finally admitted defeat and abandoned ship. Never completed, the film’s surviving pieces were restored for this absorbing unmaking-of documentary — even if the original clips, daring then but now looking like psychedelic kitsch, suggest Inferno would likely have been no masterpiece but a fascinating, instantly-dated failure. May 2, 1:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 6:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

Presumed Guilty (Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith, Mexico, 2009) A fan of true crime TV programming, I all but take for granted that little coda at the end of each episode reminding viewers that the suspects shown are innocent until proven guilty. I sometimes forget that such rights are not the case in all countries, such as in Mexico where the criminal justice system employs a reverse practice requiring the accused to prove themselves innocent. In Presumed Guilty, filmmakers, lawyers, and UC Berkeley students Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete use rarely-seen, up-close footage of the Mexican trial process in their effort to exonerate a young Mexico City street vendor who is falsely accused of murder in 2005. The proceedings, which require the defendant to stand for hours on end and are performed sans jury, is riveting stuff for fans of those A&E true crime shows and is sure to ruffle the feathers of a few sympathetic humanitarians. May 2, 3:30 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 6:30 p.m., PFA; May 6, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Peter Galvin)

Lebanon (Samuel Maoz, Israel, 2009) “Das Boot in a tank” has been the thumbnail summary of writer-director Samuel Maoz’s film in its festival travels to date, during which it’s picked up various prizes including a Venice Golden Lion. On the first day of Israel’s 1982 invasion (which Maoz fought in), an Israeli army tank with a crew of three fairly green 20-somethings — soon joined by a fourth with even less battle experience — crosses the border, enters a city already halfway reduced to rubble, and promptly gets its inhabitants in the worst possible fix, stranded without backup. Highly visceral and, needless to say, claustrophobic (there are almost no exterior shots), Lebanon may for some echo The Hurt Locker (2009) in its intense focus on physical peril. It also echoes that film’s lack of equally gripping character development. But taken on its own willfully narrow terms, this is a potent exercise in squirmy combat you-are-thereness. May 2, 9 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Harvey)

The Day God Walked Away (Philippe van Leeuw, France/Belgium, 2009) Director Philippe Van Leeuw states in the press materials that he made The Day God Walked Away in an attempt to understand how the assassins of the 1994 Rwandan genocide could do what they did and how others could stand by and watch. I walked away from Day with a better understanding of what might draw a person to choose defeatism over an unlikely survival. The film opens as a Tutsi housekeeper (Ruth Nirere) finds herself trapped in her Belgian employers’ house, fearing for her children and surrounded by gun-toting murderers. Light on scripted dialogue and featuring local actors, van Leeuw’s nonintrusive filming lends the film an authentic atmosphere that can be slow but is never boring. In lensing the film’s horrific scenes in a simple and matter-of-fact fashion, he eerily replicates the emotional separation that survivors of the massacre were forced to adopt in order to live. May 3, 6:45 p.m., Clay; May 4, 4 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 4:15 p.m., Kabuki. (Galvin)

The Practice of the Wild (John J. Healey, USA, 2009) “The way I want to use ‘nature’ is to refer to the whole of the physical universe,” explains the poet Gary Snyder in John J. Healy’s succinct but penetrating documentary on the octogenarian poet, essayist, and environmental activist. Snyder’s expansive definition conjoins the two areas to which he has devoted his life and creative practice to better being at peace with: the terrestrial and the existential. Healey provides the back story — covering Snyder’s farmstead childhood, his discovery of his love for the outdoors, his association with the Beats and later immersion in Zen Buddhism, and his two marriages — told in part through the obligatory scan-and-pan photography and contextual talking heads. The film’s highpoints, however, are the many lively conversations Snyder engages in with his friend and fellow writer Jim Harrison, whose grizzled countenance and chirpy demeanor make him a character in his own right. May 3, 6:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki. (Sussman)

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, USA, 2010) Whether you’re a fan of its subject or not, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s documentary is an absorbing look at the business of entertainment, a demanding treadmill that fame doesn’t really make any easier. At 75, comedian Rivers has four decades in the spotlight behind her. Yet despite a high Q rating she finds it difficult to get the top-ranked gigs, no matter that as a workaholic who’ll take anything she could scarcely be more available. Funny onstage (and a lot ruder than on TV), she’s very, very focused off-, dismissive of being called a “trailblazer” when she’s still actively competing with those whose women comics trail she blazed for today’s hot TV guest spot or whatever. Anyone seeking a thorough career overview will have to look elsewhere; this vérité year-in-the-life portrait is, like the lady herself, entertainingly and quite fiercely focused on the here-and-now. May 6, 7 p.m., Castro. (Harvey)

THE 53RD SAN FRANCISCO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL runs April 22–May 6 at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF; Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, SF; Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; and the Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, SF. Tickets (most shows $12.50) are available by calling (925) 866-9559 or by visiting www.sffs.org>.

 

The crime-lab mess: Who knew?

Zelda Bronstein
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The crime-lab mess: Who knew?

It’s no secret that the San Francisco crime lab is a godawful mess; in fact, we first pointed out problems in the lab back in 2001. Nobody took it seriously, and things continued to deteriorate.


Now the Examiner is pointing fingers at District Attorney Kamala Harris, saying her office had word that things weren’t exactly hunkey-dorey at the testing facility long before the current mess emerged. And if, indeed, a senior deputy in the D.A.’s office knew that the crime lab was bungling cases, Harris should have been informed, and she should have gone to the police chief and demanded to know what was going on; after all, lots and lots of her cases are now going south because of screw-ups in the lab.


But let me add another element to this, one that the daily newspapers haven’t put much focus on:


Where the hell was the chief of police, the assistant chief in charge of the crime lab, the crime lab director — all the top SFPD brass — whose job it was to monitor the lab and ensure its quality — while a truly nasty, messy situation was developing? Now, much of this pre-dates Chief George Gascon, and the guy he brought in from L.A., Assistant Chief Jeff Godown, who’s now trying to patch things up. But if the D.A.’s office knew there were problems, and a deputy D.A. was able to point to one lab employee who was allegedly calling in sick just to screw up lab operations, it’s almost inconceivable that nobody at the Police Department had a clue what was going on.


Godown appeared April 19 at the Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee, and Sup. Ross Mirkarimi grilled him about how the situation was allowed to get so bad. Godown’s answer: “We’re still trying to piece together who knew what at the crime lab. Did the commanding officer know? Did the command staff at the Hall of Justice know?”


Good questions, because either somebody knew — and didn’t report it — or nobody knew anything, in which case you wonder why the SFPD is allowed to run a crime lab in the first place.

Crime Bomb

Zelda Bronstein
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Editors note: This story was originally published May 31,  2001.


They found Virginia Lowery lying in the garage of her Excelsior home, an electrical cord around her throat, an ice pick jammed through her skull — in one ear and out the other. For the next 11 years San Francisco homicide detectives made no progress on the case. Promising leads turned into dead ends. Theories collapsed. The cops assigned to the case retired. It looked like Lowery’s 1987 slaying would never be solved.


Then in April 1998, by pure chance, police found Robert C. Nawi. Or rather, they found his fingertips.


When Nawi, a 57-year-old carpenter, got in a shouting match in a North Beach watering hole, he was picked up by the cops on misdemeanor charges and shuttled to county jail, where he was fingerprinted and booked. The computer spat out some interesting news: Nawi’s digits, according to the database, resembled a fingerprint found at the scene of Lowery’s slaying.


Soon thereafter, police evidence analyst Wendy Chong made a positive print match, and the new suspect found himself facing murder charges and life in a cage.


Nawi’s fate, to be decided at trial next year, rests largely on police readings of his fingerprints, as well as some DNA gathered by the coroner. Which raises some questions: How, exactly, did the cops and their computers analyze the evidence? Did they get it right? Is anybody checking their work?


 


Making a match between the distinguishing ridges and whorls, often microscopic, of two fresh fingerprints is a relatively simple task for a print expert. However, cases like Nawi’s aren’t so clear-cut: the print collected in Lowery’s garage is faint, smudged, and missing in patches.


Michael Burt, the resident forensicscience guru at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, shows me an 8-by-10-inch enlargement of the print discovered at the murder scene; it’s blurry, grainy, and only about 60 percent complete. To my layperson’s eye, it bears little resemblance to the clear, fresh mark left by Nawi at his booking. “The one print is so washed out you can’t see anything,” says Burt, who is representing Nawi. “This is not science at all; it’s subjective and shouldn’t be allowed.”


Burt, a 22-year veteran defense lawyer known around the Hall of Justice for his trademark cart full of documents, has plenty of cause to doubt the cops’ evidence. Despite what you may have seen on Law and Order, fingerprint examiners can — and often do — get it wrong. Last year 141 of America’s top forensic labs were tested to see if they could accurately match two fingerprints: 39 percent failed; 11 labs made false IDs. San Francisco analysts are rarely, if ever, graded for accuracy.


Jim Norris, head of the San Francisco Police Department’s forensics division, argues that new computer imaging tools are making it possible to match even sketchy, partial prints. “When somebody shows a print that was originally collected at the crime scene, and it looks very difficult to deal with, what they’re not looking at is the image that has been [digitally] enhanced,” Norris explains. “It’s a lot easier to deal with.” Norris admits that the department has seldom tested its print examiners for accuracy, but he says their work is constantly checked by superiors.


According to Burt, in this particular instance analysts didn’t turn to computers but simply enlarged the prints before making the call. The district attorney’s DNA evidence against Nawi is equally flawed, he says. When coroner Boyd Stephens autopsied the corpse, he — per routine — snipped the woman’s fingernails with a household nail clipper and stuck them in an envelope. Unrefrigerated, the clippings slowly rotted for more than a decade, until, in the wake of Nawi’s arrest, prosecutor John Farrell had them tested for DNA.


When the crime lab got the evidence, in 1998, DNA analyst Alan Keel scraped all 10 nails with a single cotton swab, combined the scrapings into one tiny pile, and dropped them into a genetic-typing device. According to standard forensic procedure, each nail should’ve been swabbed and tested separately.


Now, Burt contends, the sample has deteriorated because of a lack of refrigeration and has been contaminated with the DNA of more than one person. “[Keel] says there are three, possibly four different individuals underneath her fingernails,” the lawyer says. “He’s trying to grab my client out of that mixture. There’s no scientific way to do that.”


Norris disagrees: “There are ways to deal with [DNA] mixtures; it’s not a common problem luckily, but it’s something that comes up — for example, in rape cases where there are multiple assailants. There are ways to deal with it.”


I run down the scenario for Dr. Simon Ford, a Ph.D. biochemist and DNA expert who heads up San Francisco–based Lexigen Science and Law Consultants. “That’s not good,” Ford tells me. “You should deal with each hand separately, at least, and probably each nail separately. I don’t think combining all the nails together is a good idea.”


 


The dispassionate examination of crime scene evidence — narcotics, fingerprints, hair and fibers, genetic material, firearms, and everything else — is a cornerstone of the American justice system. The work, which can mean the difference between life and death for a suspect, is carried out by more than 500 labs nationwide, most of them run by law enforcement agencies.


In the public imagination — as shaped by endless cops-and-lawyers TV shows — forensic science is a perfectly impartial arbiter of justice. Eyewitnesses get confused. Police may be corrupt. Lawyers can corkscrew facts. Juries, not always composed of the brightest lights, can be swayed by mob dynamics. But science doesn’t lie. If the analyst says the bullet came from the suspect’s gun, then it must have.


It’s a comforting thought.


There’s just one problem: All forensic science is performed by humans, and all people make blunders. They mislabel samples. They use malfunctioning equipment. They inadvertently drop a flake of skin in a vial of blood, thus adding their own DNA to the sample.


Subjectivity, too, plays a starring role in forensic science, much of which depends on human-made comparisons. In one case heard last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Robert Dondero, two DNA experts couldn’t agree on the meaning of a genetic sample.


In addition to honest mistakes born of incompetence and overwork, there are continuously uncovered examples of fraud: the lab analyst, believing that the verdict justifies the means, willing to lie on the stand or fake test results. While the scientific question of DNA accuracy has been hashed out extensively in court rooms and the media, the issue of police crime lab accuracy has gone ignored, both by press and government regulators.


Each year California cops make 1.5 million arrests. Each of the state’s 19 local crime labs — run by sheriffs, prosecutors, and cops — performs thousands of analyses annually. Each of those tests, if faulty, could put an innocent person behind bars, or set a guilty soul free.


And in the wild world of forensics there are precious few safeguards against human bias and error: Crime labs are almost entirely unregulated. There are virtually no federal laws governing their operation; no law that says, “Bullet comparisons must be done using the best, most accurate techniques”; no law that says, “DNA examiners must meet these basic educational criteria”; no requirement that crime labs be audited and inspected. In California only DUI-<\h>testing procedures are regulated by state law.


“There’s more regulation in whether some clinical lab can give a test for strep throat than there is on whether you can use a test to put somebody in the gas chamber,” public defender Burt says. “That to me seems backwards. The stakes are the highest in the criminal justice system. These people are deciding who lives or dies.”


The ramifications spread beyond individual cases. While billions of dollars have been poured into police departments and prisons over the past two decades, pols and badge wearers have shown little interest in adequately funding or regulating crime labs. California’s facilities need hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and equipment upgrades. The idea of public oversight is off the radar entirely.


The nonprofit American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD) is the closest thing forensics has to a regulatory agency. Created in the early 1970s to “improve the quality of laboratory services provided to the criminal justice system,” the group runs a voluntary accreditation program for forensic facilities. To get the society’s stamp of approval, a facility must pass a 149-point inspection. (Sample question: “Are the procedures used generally accepted in the field or supported by data gathered in a scientific manner?”) To maintain the certification, a lab must be tested annually and be reinspected every five years.


Of the approximately 500 labs in the United States, a mere 187 are accredited by the ASCLD. Only 11 of California’s 19 local crime labs have the group’s seal of approval. The San Francisco police facility isn’t one of them. Neither is the Contra Costa sheriff’s lab. Nor the San Mateo sheriff’s forensic unit.


 


“Got dope?” asks the white-coated woman who opens the locked door to the SFPD crime lab. She’s expecting cops bearing drug-filled baggies, to be weighed and tested and filed away until the courtroom beckons. Crime lab chief Martha “Marty” Blake steps out of her windowless office to greet me.


A few months back, Blake and her 18-person team traded overstuffed quarters in the city’s central cop shop at Eighth Street and Bryant for expansive new $1.5 million digs out in the asphalt wastes of the Hunters Point shipyard. “I’m getting ready to apply for accreditation, hopefully by next spring,” she says, pointing to a file cabinet emblazoned with the ASCLD seal. “We couldn’t get accredited in that facility when we were downtown at the Hall of Justice. It was too cramped. There was no way we could guarantee there would never be any chance for any contamination of the evidence when we had four people crammed into a little room trying to look at clothing, for example.”


Blake’s operation has taken its lumps over the years. In 1994 analyst Allison Lancaster was canned after she was videotaped faking drug tests. Last year Superior Court Judge Dondero slammed the lab’s lead DNA expert for “engaging in shortcuts,” “performing missteps,” and harboring a questionable “degree of bias” against defendants. Defense lawyers like Burt continue to hammer the lab for its lack of credentials.


With her eyeglasses and graying hair Blake looks more like a schoolteacher than a cop. She pulls a xeroxed sheet of paper out of a drawer and eagerly places it in front of me. “We just switched to a new case review process. This is the sort of thing we have to implement for accreditation. Every case we produce has to go through a review by a supervisor,” she explains. “This wasn’t happening before; a review happened before, but you’d just glance over [the work] and say, ‘Hmm, looks good to me,’ and initial it. It was sort of lightweight.” Bolstered by an increased budget and a growing staff, the lab’s procedures are improving across the board, according to Blake.


Why should forensic labs, which can land someone on death row, go without government oversight? “I’d like to think we can do this ourselves,” Blake replies, noting that the state’s management of the DUI testing program has been less than stellar. “I’m a little nervous about other agencies getting involved in regulation,” she says, because they don’t “really know the science.”


Nationally, the accountability vacuum is producing a steady stream of scandals, raising unsettling questions about the way we administer justice in this locked-down nation. A small sampling:
• Let’s start with the trial of the century, wherein O.J.’s defense team put the forensic bunglings of the Los Angeles Police Department on display for “unacceptable sloppiness,” pointing out a dozen major instances of possible evidence contamination. After losing the Simpson trial, the lab promptly began a thorough overhaul.
• In 1993 the West Virginia Supreme Court found a police blood expert guilty of fabricating or misrepresenting evidence in a staggering 134 cases. The man, one Fred Zain — employed by the state cops during the 1980s — was put on trial for perjury, while the state freed several unjustly imprisoned death row inmates and paid out millions to people who had been wrongfully convicted. Bexar County, Texas, where Zain worked in the early ’90s, also prosecuted him for perjury.
• A few years later, in 1997, the reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation crime lab — at the time widely regarded as the pinnacle of forensic science — was shredded by the allegations of a whistle-blowing scientist. The bureau’s lab practiced shoddy science and regularly presented inaccurate, pro-prosecution testimony, charged Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, one of the agency’s top explosives experts. The FBI denied the allegations and tried to discredit Whitehurst, but a scathing 517-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general corroborated many of the scientist’s major claims and recommended disciplinary action against five agents.


• An April 1997 front-page story in the Wall Street Journal brought more unflattering publicity to the FBI lab, scrutinizing the track record of agent Michael Malone, a hair and fiber analyst. The paper quoted three well-known forensic scientists who challenged Malone’s analyses (one labeled him a “fraud”), illustrated numerous cases where the agent seemed to be fudging the evidence — and noted that courts were busy overturning convictions obtained with his testimony. “The guy’s a total liar,” one defense lawyer told the Wall Street Journal.
• In 1998 San Diego jurors convicted a top county police DNA expert of embezzling $8,100 in cash seized as evidence in murder cases. That same year the San Diego Police Department embarked on a 10-month internal investigation into charges of sloppy work and missing evidence at its crime lab, and it admitted that it had lost crucial evidence in an unsolved homicide case.
• Last year a crime lab chemist in Prince George’s County, Md., claimed that the police department was using improperly calibrated drug analysis equipment. Defense lawyers promptly challenged some 100 pending drug cases.



California is one of the few states that has actually scoped the inner workings of its local crime labs. The results of that onetime review, performed in 1998 by the state auditor’s office, are disturbing. Quality control was lacking at most of the facilities. Many of the labs were using “outdated and improperly working equipment.” As in San Francisco, many didn’t make their scientists undergo regular proficiency testing.


Without quality assurance measures — minimal at 13 of the 19 labs — the potential for error shoots through the roof. California auditor Elaine Howel says the study raised serious questions. “There are several issues,” she says. “Is the evidence being handled appropriately so there’s no potential for contamination?” Labs, according to Howel, should “make sure they are consistently applying the methodology so one forensic examiner isn’t using one technique and someone is using a different technique to conduct the same type of testing. That ties back to the credibility of the results.”


Ten of the outfits were relying on “outmoded” technology that needed replacement. At the Huntington Beach Police Department lab, staffers worked up a Rube Goldberg–<\d>esque scheme to revive a broken arson analysis gadget. Sort of. “Because the laboratory does not have the funds to replace this equipment, staff found a creative way to cool the [machine] using hoses rigged to a faucet,” auditors found. But, they noted, “this method could negatively affect the analysis of the evidence processed by this instrument.”


Then there was the question of whether the analysts themselves were up to par. “We think forensic examiners need to be tested every year to make sure they’re maintaining competence in their ability to perform the forensic examinations they’re doing,” Howel tells me. Eight of the labs had no proficiency testing for their staffers.


“It helped us put our operation in perspective to the rest of the state,” says S.F. lab chief Blake, who thinks the audit was fair. “We did look like we were swamped. It helped us get our additional staff.”


Whitehurst, the former top explosives expert at the FBI, doesn’t like the term ‘whistle-blower.’ “We’re simply scientists, and we disagree with the type of science that’s being practiced — because it’s not science,” he told me. “Our forensic labs are dictating truth; they’re not discovering it.” Whitehurst says he constantly hears from irate crime lab scientists claiming their operations are riddled with improprieties.


The Ph.D. chemist spent eight years at the bureau combing the rubble of bomb blasts for clues. And complaining. During his tenure with the bureau, he made 237 written complaints concerning what he saw as a pattern of bunk science and bogus testimony on the part of his colleagues. The charges spurred an 18-month probe by the Justice Department, the phone-book-size results of which were made public in 1997, undoubtedly marking one of the FBI’s worst public embarrassments.


The special-inspection team, an international panel of renowned forensic scientists, had few kind words for the lab, finding “significant instances of testimonial errors, substandard analytical work, and deficient practices” in numerous investigations, including the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, and World Trade Center bombings. Among the skeletons in the bureau’s closet: “scientifically flawed reports”; examiners devoid of the “requisite scientific qualifications”; and five agents who couldn’t be trusted.


Whitehurst’s experiences have led him to believe that crime labs should be overseen by federal or state authorities, rather than by ASCLD and its voluntary certification program. “It’s a foregone conclusion; there’s no question in my mind in five years forensic labs will be regulated, and they will be audited,” said Whitehurst, who now lives in Bethel, N.C., and acts as an expert witness in criminal trials. “There’s too much discovery happening.”


Lab directors argue that their work is constantly reviewed by the courts — juries don’t have to believe a forensic expert; judges can overturn verdicts based on forensic evidence — making their profession among the most scrutinized.
Whitehurst disagrees, saying juries, defense lawyers, and judges are often baffled by the science presented to them. “Listen to this phrase: pyrolisis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry,” he says. “Do you know what that is? Let’s try this one: fourier transform infrared spectrometry. I’ve got a doctorate in chemistry and a jurisdoctorate also. What I’m saying to you are completely foreign concepts. When I try to explain how a ultraviolet spectraphatometer works, or how a micro spectraphatometer works, just saying the words begins the glass-over of the eyes.”


The Alameda County Sheriff’s crime lab is housed in a two-story building in the foothills just off 150th Avenue in San Leandro. On the second floor, in a series of linoleum-tiled rooms connected by a cluttered hallway, the lab’s technicians scope the physical remnants of crime, putting bullets beneath microscopes, lifting latent fingerprints from knife handles, culling DNA strands from splattered blood.


Each year the operation, which analyzes evidence for most of the county’s police forces, handles some 200 “major” investigations, most of them murders and rapes. But drug cases (1,800 to 2,000) and DUIs (more than 4,700) make up the bulk of the work. There are only eight lab technicians to handle the massive load.


“Every analytical report has to be right on the mark,” said lab director Tony Sprague, who has worked at the facility for 30 years. “We have a huge responsibility to make sure all the results are accurate.”


Sprague guides me through the building, showing me a single lead particle, as magnified 10,000 times by a monstrous, $270,000 scanning electron microscope. Next door a white-<\h>coated technician sits glued to a conventional microscope, studying a handgun cartridge. Across the hall are the analysts’ personal workstations: on one of the wide-topped tables sit the innards of an auto; on another lie sheets of paper covered with boot prints.


Sprague is an amiable gearhead and explains in detail how each of the machines works. The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, an ovenlike slab of a machine, can detect the presence of gasoline or kerosene in air samples collected at the scene of a suspected arson fire. Another device uses infrared light to determine the chemical composition of a given substance — a bag of white powder for instance.


The lab’s ASCLD accreditation in June 1999 was a huge undertaking, according to Sprague. “It took us about two years [to get certified],” he says. “It was costly from the standpoint that you have to take dedicated staff time away from analytical work to get the paperwork done for the accreditation process. In our case we really didn’t change our ways of doing forensic science to meet accreditation standards. There was really no issue about doing things differently — the thing we had to do, we had to document all the policies, the procedures, all of our quality assurance records had to be brought up to a little bit higher level.”


Voluntary reviews by the nonprofit ASCLD are enough regulation for Sprague, who views government oversight as a losing proposition. “Some mandated federal program? I don’t know that that’s really the answer,” he says. “That would involve a huge bureaucracy. It would be a very difficult situation.”


Ralph Keaton, executive director of ASCLD’s accrediting board, agrees. “I think crime laboratories should have some kind of program to review the quality of the work being produced by the laboratory — and that’s the reason we came into existence,” he tells me via telephone from the organization’s headquarters in Garner, N.C. “It’s my opinion that no one can evaluate the type of work being done better than the actual practitioners of that discipline. Just like the oversight of the medical profession is best done by the doctors themselves.”


Speaking to me in his office library, Sprague tells me he is proud of the work his team does, proud to be acknowledged by his peers. But he admits to a certain frustration, saying that his lab is seriously short-staffed: “We’re about one-third the strength we should be at for what we’re doing.”

Crime Bomb

Zelda Bronstein
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Editors note: This story was originally published in 2001.


 


They found Virginia Lowery lying in the garage of her Excelsior home, an electrical cord around her throat, an ice pick jammed through her skull — in one ear and out the other. For the next 11 years San Francisco homicide detectives made no progress on the case. Promising leads turned into dead ends. Theories collapsed. The cops assigned to the case retired. It looked like Lowery’s 1987 slaying would never be solved.
Then in April 1998, by pure chance, police found Robert C. Nawi. Or rather, they found his fingertips.
When Nawi, a 57-year-old carpenter, got in a shouting match in a North Beach watering hole, he was picked up by the cops on misdemeanor charges and shuttled to county jail, where he was fingerprinted and booked. The computer spat out some interesting news: Nawi’s digits, according to the database, resembled a fingerprint found at the scene of Lowery’s slaying.
Soon thereafter, police evidence analyst Wendy Chong made a positive print match, and the new suspect found himself facing murder charges and life in a cage.
Nawi’s fate, to be decided at trial next year, rests largely on police readings of his fingerprints, as well as some DNA gathered by the coroner. Which raises some questions: How, exactly, did the cops and their computers analyze the evidence? Did they get it right? Is anybody checking their work?


Making a match between the distinguishing ridges and whorls, often microscopic, of two fresh fingerprints is a relatively simple task for a print expert. However, cases like Nawi’s aren’t so clear-cut: the print collected in Lowery’s garage is faint, smudged, and missing in patches.
Michael Burt, the resident forensic-<\h>science guru at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, shows me an 8-by-10-inch enlargement of the print discovered at the murder scene; it’s blurry, grainy, and only about 60 percent complete. To my layperson’s eye, it bears little resemblance to the clear, fresh mark left by Nawi at his booking. “The one print is so washed out you can’t see anything,” says Burt, who is representing Nawi. “This is not science at all; it’s subjective and shouldn’t be allowed.”
Burt, a 22-year veteran defense lawyer known around the Hall of Justice for his trademark cart full of documents, has plenty of cause to doubt the cops’ evidence. Despite what you may have seen on Law and Order, fingerprint examiners can — and often do — get it wrong. Last year 141 of America’s top forensic labs were tested to see if they could accurately match two fingerprints: 39 percent failed; 11 labs made false IDs. San Francisco analysts are rarely, if ever, graded for accuracy.
Jim Norris, head of the San Francisco Police Department’s forensics division, argues that new computer imaging tools are making it possible to match even sketchy, partial prints. “When somebody shows a print that was originally collected at the crime scene, and it looks very difficult to deal with, what they’re not looking at is the image that has been [digitally] enhanced,” Norris explains. “It’s a lot easier to deal with.” Norris admits that the department has seldom tested its print examiners for accuracy, but he says their work is constantly checked by superiors.
According to Burt, in this particular instance analysts didn’t turn to computers but simply enlarged the prints before making the call. The district attorney’s DNA evidence against Nawi is equally flawed, he says. When coroner Boyd Stephens autopsied the corpse, he — per routine — snipped the woman’s fingernails with a household nail clipper and stuck them in an envelope. Unrefrigerated, the clippings slowly rotted for more than a decade, until, in the wake of Nawi’s arrest, prosecutor John Farrell had them tested for DNA.
When the crime lab got the evidence, in 1998, DNA analyst Alan Keel scraped all 10 nails with a single cotton swab, combined the scrapings into one tiny pile, and dropped them into a genetic-<\h>typing device. According to standard forensic procedure, each nail should’ve been swabbed and tested separately.
Now, Burt contends, the sample has deteriorated because of a lack of refrigeration and has been contaminated with the DNA of more than one person. “[Keel] says there are three, possibly four different individuals underneath her fingernails,” the lawyer says. “He’s trying to grab my client out of that mixture. There’s no scientific way to do that.”
Norris disagrees: “There are ways to deal with [DNA] mixtures; it’s not a common problem luckily, but it’s something that comes up — for example, in rape cases where there are multiple assailants. There are ways to deal with it.”
I run down the scenario for Dr. Simon Ford, a Ph.D. biochemist and DNA expert who heads up San Francisco–<\d>based Lexigen Science and Law Consultants. “That’s not good,” Ford tells me. “You should deal with each hand separately, at least, and probably each nail separately. I don’t think combining all the nails together is a good idea.”
Blinding them with science
The dispassionate examination of crime scene evidence — narcotics, fingerprints, hair and fibers, genetic material, firearms, and everything else — is a cornerstone of the American justice system. The work, which can mean the difference between life and death for a suspect, is carried out by more than 500 labs nationwide, most of them run by law enforcement agencies.
In the public imagination — as shaped by endless cops-and-<\h>lawyers TV shows — forensic science is a perfectly impartial arbiter of justice. Eyewitnesses get confused. Police may be corrupt. Lawyers can corkscrew facts. Juries, not always composed of the brightest lights, can be swayed by mob dynamics. But science doesn’t lie. If the analyst says the bullet came from the suspect’s gun, then it must have.
It’s a comforting thought.
There’s just one problem: All forensic science is performed by humans, and all people make blunders. They mislabel samples. They use malfunctioning equipment. They inadvertently drop a flake of skin in a vial of blood, thus adding their own DNA to the sample.
Subjectivity, too, plays a starring role in forensic science, much of which depends on human-<\h>made comparisons. In one case heard last year by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Robert Dondero, two DNA experts couldn’t agree on the meaning of a genetic sample.
In addition to honest mistakes born of incompetence and overwork, there are continuously uncovered examples of fraud: the lab analyst, believing that the verdict justifies the means, willing to lie on the stand or fake test results.
While the scientific question of DNA accuracy has been hashed out extensively in court rooms and the media, the issue of police crime lab accuracy has gone ignored, both by press and government regulators.
Each year California cops make 1.5 million arrests. Each of the state’s 19 local crime labs — run by sheriffs, prosecutors, and cops — performs thousands of analyses annually. Each of those tests, if faulty, could put an innocent person behind bars, or set a guilty soul free.
And in the wild world of forensics there are precious few safeguards against human bias and error: Crime labs are almost entirely unregulated. There are virtually no federal laws governing their operation; no law that says, “Bullet comparisons must be done using the best, most accurate techniques”; no law that says, “DNA examiners must meet these basic educational criteria”; no requirement that crime labs be audited and inspected. In California only DUI-<\h>testing procedures are regulated by state law.
“There’s more regulation in whether some clinical lab can give a test for strep throat than there is on whether you can use a test to put somebody in the gas chamber,” public defender Burt says. “That to me seems backwards. The stakes are the highest in the criminal justice system. These people are deciding who lives or dies.”
The ramifications spread beyond individual cases. While billions of dollars have been poured into police departments and prisons over the past two decades, pols and badge wearers have shown little interest in adequately funding or regulating crime labs. California’s facilities need hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and equipment upgrades. The idea of public oversight is off the radar entirely.
The nonprofit American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD) is the closest thing forensics has to a regulatory agency. Created in the early 1970s to “improve the quality of laboratory services provided to the criminal justice system,” the group runs a voluntary accreditation program for forensic facilities. To get the society’s stamp of approval, a facility must pass a 149-point inspection. (Sample question: “Are the procedures used generally accepted in the field or supported by data gathered in a scientific manner?”) To maintain the certification, a lab must be tested annually and be reinspected every five years.
Of the approximately 500 labs in the United States, a mere 187 are accredited by the ASCLD. Only 11 of California’s 19 local crime labs have the group’s seal of approval. The San Francisco police facility isn’t one of them. Neither is the Contra Costa sheriff’s lab. Nor the San Mateo sheriff’s forensic unit.
Renewing the review process
“Got dope?” asks the white-<\h>coated woman who opens the locked door to the SFPD crime lab. She’s expecting cops bearing drug-filled baggies, to be weighed and tested and filed away until the courtroom beckons. Crime lab chief Martha “Marty” Blake steps out of her windowless office to greet me.
A few months back, Blake and her 18-person team traded overstuffed quarters in the city’s central cop shop at Eighth Street and Bryant for expansive new $1.5 million digs out in the asphalt wastes of the Hunters Point shipyard. “I’m getting ready to apply for accreditation, hopefully by next spring,” she says, pointing to a file cabinet emblazoned with the ASCLD seal. “We couldn’t get accredited in that facility when we were downtown at the Hall of Justice. It was too cramped. There was no way we could guarantee there would never be any chance for any contamination of the evidence when we had four people crammed into a little room trying to look at clothing, for example.”
Blake’s operation has taken its lumps over the years. In 1994 analyst Allison Lancaster was canned after she was videotaped faking drug tests. Last year Superior Court Judge Dondero slammed the lab’s lead DNA expert for “engaging in shortcuts,” “performing missteps,” and harboring a questionable “degree of bias” against defendants. Defense lawyers like Burt continue to hammer the lab for its lack of credentials.
With her eyeglasses and graying hair Blake looks more like a schoolteacher than a cop. She pulls a xeroxed sheet of paper out of a drawer and eagerly places it in front of me. “We just switched to a new case review process. This is the sort of thing we have to implement for accreditation. Every case we produce has to go through a review by a supervisor,” she explains. “This wasn’t happening before; a review happened before, but you’d just glance over [the work] and say, ‘Hmm, looks good to me,’ and initial it. It was sort of lightweight.” Bolstered by an increased budget and a growing staff, the lab’s procedures are improving across the board, according to Blake.
Why should forensic labs, which can land someone on death row, go without government oversight? “I’d like to think we can do this ourselves,” Blake replies, noting that the state’s management of the DUI testing program has been less than stellar. “I’m a little nervous about other agencies getting involved in regulation,” she says, because they don’t “really know the science.”
Beyond O.J.
Nationally, the accountability vacuum is producing a steady stream of scandals, raising unsettling questions about the way we administer justice in this locked-down nation. A small sampling:
• Let’s start with the trial of the century, wherein O.J.’s defense team put the forensic bunglings of the Los Angeles Police Department on display for “unacceptable sloppiness,” pointing out a dozen major instances of possible evidence contamination. After losing the Simpson trial, the lab promptly began a thorough overhaul.
• In 1993 the West Virginia Supreme Court found a police blood expert guilty of fabricating or misrepresenting evidence in a staggering 134 cases. The man, one Fred Zain — employed by the state cops during the 1980s — was put on trial for perjury, while the state freed several unjustly imprisoned death row inmates and paid out millions to people who had been wrongfully convicted. Bexar County, Texas, where Zain worked in the early ’90s, also prosecuted him for perjury.
• A few years later, in 1997, the reputation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation crime lab — at the time widely regarded as the pinnacle of forensic science — was shredded by the allegations of a whistle-<\h>blowing scientist. The bureau’s lab practiced shoddy science and regularly presented inaccurate, pro-<\h>prosecution testimony, charged Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, one of the agency’s top explosives experts. The FBI denied the allegations and tried to discredit Whitehurst, but a scathing 517-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general corroborated many of the scientist’s major claims and recommended disciplinary action against five agents.
• An April 1997 front-page story in the Wall Street Journal brought more unflattering publicity to the FBI lab, scrutinizing the track record of agent Michael Malone, a hair and fiber analyst. The paper quoted three well-known forensic scientists who challenged Malone’s analyses (one labeled him a “fraud”), illustrated numerous cases where the agent seemed to be fudging the evidence — and noted that courts were busy overturning convictions obtained with his testimony. “The guy’s a total liar,” one defense lawyer told the Wall Street Journal.
• In 1998 San Diego jurors convicted a top county police DNA expert of embezzling $8,100 in cash seized as evidence in murder cases. That same year the San Diego Police Department embarked on a 10-month internal investigation into charges of sloppy work and missing evidence at its crime lab, and it admitted that it had lost crucial evidence in an unsolved homicide case.
• Last year a crime lab chemist in Prince George’s County, Md., claimed that the police department was using improperly calibrated drug analysis equipment. Defense lawyers promptly challenged some 100 pending drug cases.
Under the microscope
California is one of the few states that has actually scoped the inner workings of its local crime labs. The results of that onetime review, performed in 1998 by the state auditor’s office, are disturbing. Quality control was lacking at most of the facilities. Many of the labs were using “outdated and improperly working equipment.” As in San Francisco, many didn’t make their scientists undergo regular proficiency testing.
Without quality assurance measures — minimal at 13 of the 19 labs — the potential for error shoots through the roof. California auditor Elaine Howel says the study raised serious questions. “There are several issues,” she says. “Is the evidence being handled appropriately so there’s no potential for contamination?” Labs, according to Howel, should “make sure they are consistently applying the methodology so one forensic examiner isn’t using one technique and someone is using a different technique to conduct the same type of testing. That ties back to the credibility of the results.”
Ten of the outfits were relying on “outmoded” technology that needed replacement. At the Huntington Beach Police Department lab, staffers worked up a Rube Goldberg–<\d>esque scheme to revive a broken arson analysis gadget. Sort of. “Because the laboratory does not have the funds to replace this equipment, staff found a creative way to cool the [machine] using hoses rigged to a faucet,” auditors found. But, they noted, “this method could negatively affect the analysis of the evidence processed by this instrument.”
Then there was the question of whether the analysts themselves were up to par. “We think forensic examiners need to be tested every year to make sure they’re maintaining competence in their ability to perform the forensic examinations they’re doing,” Howel tells me. Eight of the labs had no proficiency testing for their staffers.
“It helped us put our operation in perspective to the rest of the state,” says S.F. lab chief Blake, who thinks the audit was fair. “We did look like we were swamped. It helped us get our additional staff.”
Busting the FBI
Whitehurst, the former top explosives expert at the FBI, doesn’t like the term ‘whistle-blower.’ “We’re simply scientists, and we disagree with the type of science that’s being practiced — because it’s not science,” he told me. “Our forensic labs are dictating truth; they’re not discovering it.” Whitehurst says he constantly hears from irate crime lab scientists claiming their operations are riddled with improprieties.
The Ph.D. chemist spent eight years at the bureau combing the rubble of bomb blasts for clues. And complaining. During his tenure with the bureau, he made 237 written complaints concerning what he saw as a pattern of bunk science and bogus testimony on the part of his colleagues. The charges spurred an 18-month probe by the Justice Department, the phone-book-<\h>size results of which were made public in 1997, undoubtedly marking one of the FBI’s worst public embarrassments.
The special-inspection team, an international panel of renowned forensic scientists, had few kind words for the lab, finding “significant instances of testimonial errors, substandard analytical work, and deficient practices” in numerous investigations, including the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, and World Trade Center bombings. Among the skeletons in the bureau’s closet: “scientifically flawed reports”; examiners devoid of the “requisite scientific qualifications”; and five agents who couldn’t be trusted.
Whitehurst’s experiences have led him to believe that crime labs should be overseen by federal or state authorities, rather than by ASCLD and its voluntary certification program. “It’s a foregone conclusion; there’s no question in my mind in five years forensic labs will be regulated, and they will be audited,” said Whitehurst, who now lives in Bethel, N.C., and acts as an expert witness in criminal trials. “There’s too much discovery happening.”
Lab directors argue that their work is constantly reviewed by the courts — juries don’t have to believe a forensic expert; judges can overturn verdicts based on forensic evidence — making their profession among the most scrutinized.
Whitehurst disagrees, saying juries, defense lawyers, and judges are often baffled by the science presented to them. “Listen to this phrase: pyrolisis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry,” he says. “Do you know what that is? Let’s try this one: fourier transform infrared spectrometry. I’ve got a doctorate in chemistry and a jurisdoctorate also. What I’m saying to you are completely foreign concepts. When I try to explain how a ultraviolet spectraphatometer works, or how a micro spectraphatometer works, just saying the words begins the glass-over of the eyes.”
Understaffed in Alameda
The Alameda County Sheriff’s crime lab is housed in a two-<\h>story building in the foothills just off 150th Avenue in San Leandro. On the second floor, in a series of linoleum-<\h>tiled rooms connected by a cluttered hallway, the lab’s technicians scope the physical remnants of crime, putting bullets beneath microscopes, lifting latent fingerprints from knife handles, culling DNA strands from splattered blood.
Each year the operation, which analyzes evidence for most of the county’s police forces, handles some 200 “major” investigations, most of them murders and rapes. But drug cases (1,800 to 2,000) and DUIs (more than 4,700) make up the bulk of the work. There are only eight lab technicians to handle the massive load.
“Every analytical report has to be right on the mark,” said lab director Tony Sprague, who has worked at the facility for 30 years. “We have a huge responsibility to make sure all the results are accurate.”
Sprague guides me through the building, showing me a single lead particle, as magnified 10,000 times by a monstrous, $270,000 scanning electron microscope. Next door a white-<\h>coated technician sits glued to a conventional microscope, studying a handgun cartridge. Across the hall are the analysts’ personal workstations: on one of the wide-<\h>topped tables sit the innards of an auto; on another lie sheets of paper covered with boot prints.
Sprague is an amiable gearhead and explains in detail how each of the machines works. The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, an ovenlike slab of a machine, can detect the presence of gasoline or kerosene in air samples collected at the scene of a suspected arson fire. Another device uses infrared light to determine the chemical composition of a given substance — a bag of white powder for instance.
The lab’s ASCLD accreditation in June 1999 was a huge undertaking, according to Sprague. “It took us about two years [to get certified],” he says. “It was costly from the standpoint that you have to take dedicated staff time away from analytical work to get the paperwork done for the accreditation process. In our case we really didn’t change our ways of doing forensic science to meet accreditation standards. There was really no issue about doing things differently — the thing we had to do, we had to document all the policies, the procedures, all of our quality assurance records had to be brought up to a little bit higher level.”
Voluntary reviews by the nonprofit ASCLD are enough regulation for Sprague, who views government oversight as a losing proposition. “Some mandated federal program? I don’t know that that’s really the answer,” he says. “That would involve a huge bureaucracy. It would be a very difficult situation.”
Ralph Keaton, executive director of ASCLD’s accrediting board, agrees. “I think crime laboratories should have some kind of program to review the quality of the work being produced by the laboratory — and that’s the reason we came into existence,” he tells me via telephone from the organization’s headquarters in Garner, N.C. “It’s my opinion that no one can evaluate the type of work being done better than the actual practitioners of that discipline. Just like the oversight of the medical profession is best done by the doctors themselves.”
Speaking to me in his office library, Sprague tells me he is proud of the work his team does, proud to be acknowledged by his peers. But he admits to a certain frustration, saying that his lab is seriously short-staffed: “We’re about one-third the strength we should be at for what we’re doing.”<\!s>v

Rep Clock

David Talbot
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0

Schedules are for Wed/21–Tues/27 except where noted. Director and year are given when available. Double features are marked with a •. All times are p.m. unless otherwise specified.

ARTISTS’ TELEVISION ACCESS 992 Valencia, SF; www.atasite.org. $6-8. Crime Wave (Paisz, 1986), Fri, 8. Films by Kerry Laitala with music by Eats Tapes, Sat, 8:30.

CAFÉ OF THE DEAD 3208 Grand, Oakl; (510) 931-7945. Free. "Independent Filmmakers Screening Nite," Wed, 6:30.

CASTRO 429 Castro, SF; (415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com. $7.50-10. The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1948), Wed, 7:30. Presented by Turner Classic Movies with Peter Bogdanovich and Jan Wahl introducing the film; sign up for free tickets at www.tcm.com/roadtohollywood. San Francisco International Film Festival, Thurs. See film listings. "Kubrick:" •Full Metal Jacket (1987), Fri, 7, and The Shining (1980), Fri, 9:15; •A Clockwork Orange (1971), Sat, 2:15, 8:30, and Barry Lyndon (1975), Sat, 5; •Spartacus (1960), Sun, 1:15, 7, and Paths of Glory (1957), Sun, 5:10; •The Killing (1956), Tues, 1:30, 5:10, 8:55, and Dr. Strangelove (1964), Tues, 3:15, 7.

CHRISTOPHER B. SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER 1118 Fourth St, San Rafael; (415) 454-1222, www.cafilm.org. $6.50-10. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010), call for dates and times. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Oplev, 2009), call for dates and times. The Greatest (Feste, 2009), call for dates and times. Vincere (Bellocchio, 2009), call for dates and times. May I Be Frank, Thurs, 6:30. Benefit for Beyond Hunger; tickets are $20-40. "Red Riding Trilogy:" Red Riding 1974 (Jarrold, 2009), Fri and Tues, 6:30; Sat, 2; Red Riding 1980 (Marsh, 2009), Sat and April 28, 6:30; Sun, 2; Red Riding 1983 (Tucker, 2009), Sun-Mon and April 29, 6:30.

FOUR STAR 2200 Clement, SF; www.lntsf.com. $7-9. Sleeping and Waking, Fri-Tues, check website for times.

HUMANIST HALL 390 27th St, Oakl; www.humanisthall.org. $5. A Sea Change (Ettinger, 2009), Wed, 7:30.

JACK LONDON SQUARE PAVILION THEATER 98 Broadway, Oakl; www.oakuff.org. Free. "Oakland Underground Film Festival: Leading Local Talent:" Everyday Black Man (Madden, 2009), Fri, 7:30; A Life Taken (Banville, 2009) with "A Day Late in Oakland" (Stauffer, 2008), Fri, 9:30.

MECHANICS’ INSTITUTE 57 Post, SF; (415) 393-0100, rsvp@milibrary.org. $10. "CinemaLit Film Series: Day and Noir:" Side Street (Mann, 1950), Fri, 6.

MUSEUM OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA 685 Mission, SF; (415) 358-7200, www.moadsf.org. $5-10. Sabar: Life is a Dance (Nwoffiah, 2009), Fri, 5 and 7:30; Sat, 4 and 7.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE 2575 Bancroft, Berk; (510) 642-5249, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu. $5.50-9.50. "Film 50: The History of Cinema:" The Beaches of Agnès (Varda, 2009), Wed, 3. "Dotted Lines: Women Filmmakers Connect the Past and the Present:" DDR/DDR (Siegel, 2008), Wed, 7:30. San Francisco International Film Festival, April 23-May 6. See film listings.

PIEDMONT 4186 Piedmont, Oakl; (510) 464-5980. $5-8. "Cult Classics Attack 5:" Coffy (Hill, 1973), Fri-Sat, midnight.

RED VIC 1727 Haight, SF; (415) 668-3994. $6-10. "Invisible Children Film Festival," films about Uganda, Wed, 7. "Celestial Navigations: The Short Films of Al Jarnow," Thurs, 7:15, 9:30. Labyrinth (Henson, 1986), Fri-Sun, 7:15, 9:25 (also Sat-Sun, 2, 4:15). Youth in Revolt (Arteta, 2009), Mon-Tues, 7:15, 9:15.

ROXIE 3117 and 3125 16th St, SF; (415) 863-1087, www.roxie.com. $5-9.75. Breath Made Visible (Gerber, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 8:30. It Came from Kuchar (Kroot, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 7, 9. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Ehrlich and Goldsmith, 2009), Wed-Thurs, 6:30. Call for Fri-Tues shows and times.

SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY Koret Auditorium, 100 Larkin, SF; www.sfpl.org. Free. "Canines on Camera:" Year of the Dog (White, 2007), Thurs, noon.

STONESTOWN TWIN 501 Buckingham, SF; (415) 221-8182. $7.50-10.25. The Harimaya Bridge (Woolfolk, 2009), April 23-29, call for times.

VIZ CINEMA New People, 1746 Post, SF; www.newpeopleworld.com/films. $8-10. Gravity’s Clowns (Mori, 2009), Wed-Thurs, call for times.

YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS 701 Mission, SF; (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org. $6-8. "The Word and the Image: Films by Marguerite Duras:" Nathalie Granger (1972), Thurs, 7:30. "Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams:" The Last Angel of History (Akomfrah), Sat, 2.

Sit/lie debate takes a strange new turn

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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67

Emails are rocketing around San Francisco political circles in anticipation of an April 21 meeting of the Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC), the policy-making body for the Democratic Party in San Francisco. Committee members are slated to discuss the city’s proposed sit/lie ordinance, a controversial measure backed by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief George Gascon meant to afford police more powers for dealing with hostile youth occupying sidewalk space.

Labor activist Gabriel Haaland, a DCCC committee member, touched off a small firestorm early this week when he submitted a resolution against the sit/lie ordinance. Haaland, who has lived in the Haight for around 15 years, said wayward youth have been flocking to that neighborhood and hurling occasional barbs at passersby (including himself) since he can remember, and recent interest in the issue does not make it a new problem. “What would actually solve the problem?” Haaland asked, and offered that sit/lie is not the answer. According to a post on Fog City Journal, his resolution for the Democratic Party to oppose sit/lie was co-sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, Supervisor David Campos, Supervisor Chris Daly, Supervisor Eric Mar, Aaron Peskin, Hene Kelly, Rafael Mandelman, Michael Goldstein, Joe Julian, Jane Morrison, Jake McGoldrick, Michael Bornstein, and Debra Walker.

While some might look at a grungy street kid and see a menace to smooth business functioning or an unruly vagrant not being properly dealt with because the laws are too weak, Haaland said he perceives a kid from a broken home who already feels alienated from society. Incarceration for a nonviolent crime such as lying on the sidewalk would only further alienate these youths, he argued, possibly nudging them toward criminal behavior instead.

“This legislation will not solve longstanding, complex problems,” Haaland’s resolution reads. “City Hall has openly and repeatedly admitted in the press that the criminal justice system is failing to deal with similar issues in the Tenderloin, and has created an alternative known as the Community Justice Court (CJC) that is founded on principles of Restorative Justice.”

Restorative Justice is an alternative approach to dealing with crime that involves bringing together those who are directly affected to understand and address the harm that has been done, with emphasis on personal accountability and transformation. Some models also seek to change the conditions in which harmful actions occurred.

Haaland’s resolution urges the Board of Supervisors and the Mayor to oppose sit/lie, and to explore successful alternatives to incarceration.

The proposal sparked a second resolution, this one from committee member Scott Wiener, who is a candidate for the District 8 seat on the Board of Supervisors. Wiener submitted that the Democratic Party should officially get behind the CJC, and should acknowledge its error in opposing the court, a Newsom pet project, in 2008. “When I saw Gabriel’s resolution … I noticed it contained a positive reference to the [CJC],” Wiener told the Guardian. “I was pleasantly surprised.”

Furthermore, his resolution “encourages the Mayor and Board of Supervisors, budget permitting and based on careful analysis, to consider future expansion of the CJC’s geographic boundaries to include the Haight-Ashbury.”

Wiener is fully behind the sit/lie ordinance. “Right now, the police do not have enough enforcement tools to deal with some of the behavior on the streets,” he said. The measure has been an issue in the District 8 race, since progressive candidate Rafael Mandelman opposes the ordinance.

The resolution contest wasn’t over yet. In response to resolution No. 2, Haaland submitted yet another resolution — along with a personal note that appeared to extend an olive branch — revising Wiener’s proposal by urging support for “the restorative justice model as an alternative to incarceration.” (Haaland wrote an in-depth piece about restorative justice in a recent Guardian editorial.)

“I appreciated him doing that,” Wiener said when asked what he thought about resolution No. 3. “But I’m not convinced that that’s the way to go. That’s why I did not agree to it.”

Perhaps there won’t be any kum-ba-ya moments after all.

Along other email-blast circuits, Haaland’s initial proposal prompted David Villa-Lobos, a strong sit/lie advocate and District-6 contender, to sound his own alarm by urging SFPD officers to attend the April 21 meeting and defend the sit/lie ordinance.

The city Planning Commission recently voted 6-1 against the measure, and a grassroots group that brought opponents of the rule onto city sidewalks last month will hold another Stand Against Sit Lie citywide protest on April 24. The measure is expected to go before the Board of Supervisors near the end of the month.

The DCCC meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 21, at 6 p.m. in the basement auditorium of the California State Building, 455 Golden Gate Ave.

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