Lime on Market Street near Castro was crowded with Mark Leno supporters when the candidate took the microphone just before midnight. He had already taken the concession calls from Carole Migden and Joe Nation and was primed to celebrate his victory over an incumbent senator, whom Leno supporter Bevan Dufty had just taken a couple subtle digs at as he introduced Leno, suggesting that Migden didn’t listen to her constituents or play by the rules.
Leno then gave a speech that demonstrated the unique package of issues, enemies and allies that he has turned into a winning coalition. “Tom Ammiano, it’s gonna be a helluva lot of fun serving with you,” Leno said of the man who will succeed him with his endorsement. “I just heard Prop. E passed,” Leno continued, referencing the measure that will submit the mayor’s SFPUC appointments to Board of Supervisors approval. “As an early supporter, I was happy to see that.” That stand was already a hopeful sign of his independence from Mayor Gavin Newsom and PG&E, but then he really went after the company, which had funded a hit piece mailer by a group calling itself Californians to Protect Children, trotting out some old sleaze about Leno being soft on pedophiles because he resisted right wing efforts to capitalize on crime fears.
“When you attack one gay man like this, you attack all gay men,” Leno said. “All gay men should be outraged with PG&E tonight.” He thanked Dennis Kelly of United Educators of San Francisco for giving his campaign early credibility. Then Leno returned to the LGBT community, promising to heal the rift his challenge of Migden opened by leading the fight against the fall ballot measure that would ban same sex marriage. “I invite you to join together to defeat the religious right,” Leno said.
He then thanked a long list of leaders who endorsed him, from Mayor Gavin Newsom and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to District Attorney Kamala Harris and former SFPUC director Susan Leal to members of the late night entertainment community, which rallied for Leno with signs on nightclubs all over town. And then he thanked his campaign consultants, the downtown darlings BMWL, affectionately naming a list of people from there and saying of the campaign they created: “It was clean, it was smart, it was effective.”
And Leno’s final name check was to the presidential candidate he supports, who also had a good night: “The winds of change are blowing tonight. Let me congratulate Barack Obama on his victory.”
District Attorney
Cop charged with theft appears in court
San Francisco police officer Michelle Alvis appeared briefly in court this morning to request from a judge more time for her attorneys to gather defense evidence in a case involving charges that she stole cash property from an evidence locker.
Dressed in a gray suit with shoulder-length blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, Alvis until now has mostly escaped press attention stemming from her involvement along with another officer in the shooting death of an unarmed man in 2006.
But the new charges, which appear unrelated to the shooting, have thrust her back into the spotlight even though it will continue to be difficult for the public to learn all that much about the rest of her intriguing career in law enforcement.
That’s because state law specially protects officers from having any details of their personnel files released publicly, including the results of four parallel investigations into the killing of 25-year-old Asa Sullivan, who was shot 16 times by Alvis and a second officer named John Keesor.
We’ve tried unsuccessfully for two years to learn the conclusions of four standard probes into the shootings done by the SFPD’s homicide unit, the internal affairs division, the District Attorney’s Office and the Office of Citizen Complaints.
The new zoo blues
› gwschulz@sfbg.com
Ten years ago, the San Francisco Zoo asked voters for $48 million in bonds to overhaul its decaying animal enclosures, rebuild its entrance, expand educational facilities for children, and make a host of other improvements.
Every major figure in San Francisco with even an ounce of political ambition made sure his or her name was attached to the voter information pamphlet that went out to residents in 1997 urging passage of the bonds.
The list included Willie Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi; members of the community college and school boards; the district attorney and city attorney then in office; Republican judges and local chambers of commerce; and countless grade school teachers.
The entire board of supervisors signed on, declaring that the improvements would "include new habitats where many of the animals will experience grass under their feet for the first time."
Prop. C passed, and the private San Francisco Zoological Society, which had taken control of the zoo from the city five years before, was on its way to introducing real live sod to exotic animal species. Just like a sanctuary, or even the wild itself.
But it hasn’t quite turned out like the pretty pictures suggested.
On March 18, the San Francisco Animal Control and Welfare Commission quietly released a report that made it clear many of the promises of that bond campaign were never kept. The private zoo didn’t spend the money the way all of those giddy city officials had told the voters it would.
The report was largely overlooked because on the same day the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which inspects San Francisco’s zoo for accreditation, released its own long-anticipated investigation of what happened at Christmastime when a hulking Siberian tiger named Tatiana mauled three people, killing one.
That attack, as we all know now from the relentless headlines, is the sexier story. But the commission, in a document with much greater long-term implications, said that only two significant new exhibits were built using the bond money the African Savannah and the Lemur Forest, completed in 2004 and 2002 respectively.
A scheduled $13.4 million Great Ape Forest was deferred from the list of projects. The zoo promised that project would "remain a fundraising goal for the SF Zoological Society," according to an update on the bond expenditures presented to the public in 2005. Orangutan and chimpanzee exhibits scheduled for improvement with the bond money were cancelled, the commission said, and the lone hippo was moved to an "arguably worse exhibit."
NICE RESTAURANT
Besides a new exhibit for grizzlies, habitations for the other bears "have not undergone any meaningful renovation," according to the commission.
And while the zoo spent the last decade downgrading projects promised to voters from the construction of new exhibits to the mere renovation of existing ones, others targeting the feel-good sensibilities of patrons that had little to do with actually caring for animals were completed as swiftly as possible.
The zoo’s miniature train system, "Little Puffer," was fully restored with $700,000 worth of private funds in 1998. A $4 million education center, which doesn’t actively house animals, was completed in 2001 using the bond money. A new entryway, improved streetscapes, parking, and a restaurant costing $20 million, which came largely from the zoo bonds, were completed two years late and $10 million over budget in 2002.
The renovation of an amusement ride for kids the historic Dentzel Carousel was also finished that year at a cost of more than $1 million. (Restorers spent almost 1,000 hours on each fake animal, according to the zoo’s Web site.)
"It’s evident that capital improvements from the bond measure focused on visitor amenities, not improvements for the animals," the report states. "The Joint Zoo Committee and Recreation and Park Commission did not provide adequate oversight to ensure capital improvements made with bond money focused on animal enclosures and exhibits."
The report also points in part to a 1999 performance audit of the zoo conducted by San Francisco’s respected budget analyst, Harvey Rose. The audit at that time argued that improving animal exhibits should come before building new gift shops and dining facilities, but that this recommendation was "not heeded," according to the commission.
"It was clear that none of that had been addressed," Mara Weiss, an animal welfare commissioner and veterinarian in the city, said of the 1999 audit.
Zoo officials received repeated invitations to attend recent commission meetings on the zoo, but they were mostly ignored. Weiss, however, acknowledged that the zoo was distracted by the tiger attack and resulting media circus.
‘UTTERLY IMPOVERISHED’
Early this year, three zoo experts from abroad visited the San Francisco Zoo at the request of the group In Defense of Animals. Each sent a letter to the supervisors that decried the conditions in San Francisco. Robert Atkinson, a former Oxford University conservation, welfare researcher and one-time curator at the Woburn Safari Park in the United Kingdom, noted a failure "to adopt modern approaches to animal husbandry." Peter Stroud, a former zoo director from Australia, described the Black Rhinoceros exhibit as "utterly impoverished."
"It is in fact completely barren…. This exhibit conveys the general impression of a stock yard in which the interests of the animals are of no concern whatsoever," Stroud wrote.
The crown jewel of the zoo’s animal habitations constructed using bond money, the African Savanna, was completed in 2004. It features giraffes, zebras, kudus a species of antelope and a bird aviary. But even that exhibit, the welfare commission argues, has problems.
"The new African Savanna exhibit was located in the most weather-exposed part of the zoo, and constructed without shelter or windbreaks for the warm-weather animals displayed there," the report states. "In fact, the most sheltered part of the African Savanna exhibit was designed for the human visitors, leaving the animals who live there exposed to the cold wind and fog off the ocean just across the street."
We tried to reach the zoo for comment, but an administrative assistant told us that spokesperson Paul Garcia recently left his job there and a replacement wasn’t available for questions. Another spokesperson was out of town. We were told that Bob Jenkins, the zoo’s director of animal care, might return our call but he never did.
Jim Lazarus, a former zoo executive and current rec and park commissioner, said the zoo had to devote significant funds to its entrance to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. In addition, he said, the cost of construction materials globally has ballooned since 1997.
"None of this money goes as far as originally thought with the worldwide demand for steel and concrete…. We need a multiyear plan, both in terms of priority construction and a capital campaign funding strategy, to complete the half of the zoo that hasn’t been renovated and that should be our goal," Lazarus said. "It’s a wonderful facility."
But future projects planned for the zoo appear to continue the emphasis on visitors. A wish list of projects from the zoo’s 2007 master plan update includes adding new conference spaces and retail, improving areas for family activities, creating a 1,000-seat amphitheater, installing yet another new café, and possibly a full-service restaurant called Windows on the Pacific.
The commission, however, has proposed that the zoo become a haven for saving animals rather than simply exhibiting them for the enjoyment of people. A rescue zoo, as they describe it, would provide a new home for exotic animals once held by private owners in inhumane conditions. Zoo veterinarians and other staff already possessing experience treating sick animals would naturally fit into the new concept, and the zoo’s past conservation efforts, like programs for eagles and wild cats, could be grandfathered in.
Deniz Bolbol, a co-coordinator of the Bay Areabased Citizens for Cruelty-Free Entertainment and supporter of the rescue zoo idea, describes the joint committee that oversees the zoo as a rubber stamp and says, "everything the zoo proposes is approved; everything is unanimous."
"The Board of Supervisors really needs to reform the zoo at its base," Bolbol said.
Lazarus opposes the idea of a rescue concept because he believes it won’t generate enough revenue to keep the zoo self-sufficient. Sup. Sean Elsbernd, whose district includes the zoo, was also cool to the idea, saying no one has an idea of how much it might actually cost. Discussions at the board about how the $48 million in bond money was spent, in the meantime, would likely take a back seat to the lingering citywide $338 million budget deficit.
Besides, he said, the zoo’s new Grizzly Gulch, where two bears that were close to being euthanized by Montana wildlife officials live, represents what the commission is asking for.
"In concept, it’s a great idea," Elsbernd said. "In concept, I also support every street being repaved every year. But there’s reality. There was no realism in their report that showed us how to achieve [a rescue zoo] in the means that we have."
The operating agreement between the Zoological Society and the city comes up for renewal in June.
Chop from the top
OPINION San Francisco officials released two very different documents last week. The first was a list of the 596 city employees making $150,000 a year or more in base salary. The second was a letter to the 334 patients of the Chronic Care Public Health Nursing program informing them that as of April 15 they will no longer have a public-health nurse helping them manage their illnesses.
You might expect that when the mayor proposes an "across the board" budget cut from city departments because of a looming budget deficit, almost any position in city government would be on the table. You might expect that maintaining services to the most vulnerable city residents would be a priority. But according to these two documents, you’re safe if your salary is $150,000 or more, and you are abandoned if you are poor, frail, and chronically ill.
Last week, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin suggested that instead of just cutting from the bottom, the city also consider cuts at the top. "So let me understand," the Chronicle quotes District Attorney Kamala Harris (No. 55 on the top-earners list), "Aaron Peskin is basically saying we should eliminate all the doctors and lawyers who work for the city."
But Harris didn’t understand. Peskin isn’t proposing to cut all of those 596 positions. He is proposing that in a fiscal crisis, the agenda should include some cutting from the top, not just the bottom.
As a public health nurse in the program slated for closure, I’ve been working to treat and make plans for my patients during the day, while working at night to keep the program open. I’m not worried about my job: nurses are in high demand and there’s comparable pay in many private hospitals. But private health care rarely serves the people I’ve come to know doing this job for the past year: frail, uninsured elderly folks with no families; patients who face language and literacy barriers who can’t navigate the system and use emergency rooms when they feel sick; long-time residents of Laguna Honda Hospital coming back to the community not knowing how to use a cell phone, let alone monitor their diabetes.
As the number of chronically ill people skyrockets, along with the costs of caring for them, it would seem a no-brainer to fund a group of nurses who are experts in keeping those folks out of the hospital. But our health care system still operates on an acute-care model. While Medi-Cal will pay the city much of the expense of sending a nurse to do brief wound care for a diabetic, it pays much less for a nurse to keep that same person healthy enough to avoid the next wound. Calcuutf8g future savings from chronic care health services is hard. So on paper at least, it’s a money-saver, if not the moral choice, to close the program.
When I was in nursing school, my public health professors told me, "in Public Health, you have to be an advocate, because your patients can’t be." But I bet those 596 top earners can defend themselves and Peskin is right, some of them should be given the opportunity.
Stefan Lynch
Stefan Lynch, RN, is a public health nurse at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and a member of Service Employees International Union 1021.
Sunshine in the digital age
EDITORIAL The California Public Records Act needs an update. So does the state’s Brown Act, which mandates open meetings of government bodies, and the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. These are the landmark laws that keep government from operating in secret but all were written long before the explosion of information technology profoundly changed the way city, state, and local agencies compile, sort, process, present, and preserve information.
And now, with agencies at every level trying to use information technology to hide data from the public and courts struggling with laws that didn’t anticipate the modern era, open-government advocates need to be working on every level to protect and expand access.
As we point out in this issue, technology can be used to spy, to hide, and to obfuscate but it can also be used to make the operations and processes of the public sector far more open and accessible. Properly used, today’s information technology can vastly improve the way governments work and it’s neither difficult nor expensive to make that happen.
The state Legislature, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the Sunshine Task Force should be looking at ways to make sure that computers don’t increase secrecy and to take advantage of the opportunities modern technology offers.
The Brown Act, passed in 1954, forbids public agencies from meeting in secret, except in very limited circumstances. The San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance goes further. The laws have been interpreted to mean that the members of a board or commission can’t use e-mail to discuss pending business; that would amount to a closed-door meeting. That same interpretation ought to apply to members participating in discussions on, say, a Yahoo! news group. Deliberations on a policy matter would be taking place outside of public view.
But what if the public was invited? What if a virtual discussion took place before or between traditional meetings and any member of the public could log in from anywhere (work, home, the public library, terminals in City Hall) and watch? What if people who are now allowed only a minute or two to comment in public meetings were able to post longer, more detailed comments that policymakers would see during online discussions? What if the entire record of that meeting were instantly available on the Web, in a searchable form?
Would that be an increase in public access? What about the large number of people who still don’t have computers or Web access would they be left out?
That’s just one of the questions sunshine advocates are talking about. Legislators need to be addressing the issues, too.
As Kimo Crossman reports on page 14, increasing public access doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive in fact, there are ways to save the city money. One obvious idea: almost every document that’s produced by a city employee, including e-mail, is already considered a public record. Why not simply program the computers to make an instant copy of everything and post it to a public Web site? That way someone looking for memos from, say, the Public Utilities Commission addressing solar energy could simply search that site with those key words and come up with all of the records quickly.
That would save time for journalists and citizen watchdogs who now have to request those records from the agency and it would save money for the city. If the documents were all searchable for anyone, there would be no need to spend time and money responding to public-records requests.
It wouldn’t be hard at all to add a "possibly confidential" key to records, preventing documents that really should remain secret from going into the public file. And the computers could automatically generate a list of the documents being withheld, so the public could find out what records are remaining out of view.
Over time, old paper records could be scanned and put on the site, too. And with electronic storage so cheap these days, there’s no reason why all public records can’t be preserved in an accessible form and location.
The County of Santa Clara a few years back began putting together a valuable data trove that included all of the county’s real estate and property ownership records. That allowed for the creation of a geographic information system that could be used to track property sales, taxes, crime rates, building permit applications, and much more. A wonderful public service except that the county didn’t offer it to the public. The data was for sale, for more than $100,000 a license.
It took a lawsuit by the California First Amendment Coalition to force the county to back off and make the data public. But that’s just an example of a trend that’s cropping up all over the country: governments are developing ways to make more use of information and then are trying to copyright it, sell it, and make money.
The problem with that, as attorney Rachel Matteo-Boehm, who handled the CFAC case, points out, is that it segregates access to information by wealth. The rich get the tools of technology to understand and use public data; the poor don’t.
It’s a dangerous trend and the Legislature should address it right away. Information created by public agencies using public data should be public no excuses, no exceptions. And if the software that makes it easy to process that information is created by the public sector (or under contract to the public sector) the public needs free access to it.
The Legislature also needs to shoot down a series of attempts by the secrecy lobbyists to cut off access to new types of data. A bill now before the Assembly, AB 1978 by Assemblymember Jose Solorio (D-Anaheim), would exempt certain types of information from the Public Records Act. The bill appears to be aimed at overturning the Santa Clara decision but could also address an issue that has come up in San Francisco: that of so-called metadata in public documents.
Metadata is embedded information that may be in a file that doesn’t appear when the file is printed out. The City Attorney’s Office has been arguing that metadata isn’t public. That’s nonsense it’s part of a public document, created at public expense by public employees. The Legislature needs to reject this bill and instead pass a law that would specifically require agencies to release any internal data that’s created as part of a public record.
The San Francisco Sunshine Task Force is in the process of updating and improving the city’s landmark law, and it should seek to incorporate some of the suggestions above.
The Task Force also needs to be sure that the amendments to the law give that oversight body the teeth it needs to enforce public-access requirements. Far too often, city officials simply ignore task force findings, and, as Sarah Phelan reports on page 17, the Ethics Commission and the district attorney rarely follow up with sanctions.
For starters, the task force should have the right to subpoena documents and witnesses (without first asking the supervisors for approval a cumbersome process). The panel should have its own full-time legal counsel. It should also have increased enforcement power: while giving the task force the right to levy fines and sanctions is politically tricky, a provision that allows the task force to order the release of documents backed up with the full support of the City Attorney’s Office ought to be part of the final package.
More funny money at City College
EDITORIAL The chancellor and the board of the San Francisco Community College District have tried hard to act as if the diversion of $30,000 in public funds for political purposes was just an isolated error, easily fixed. But as G.W. Schulz reports on page 14, an audit has found at least one other diversion, this time of at least $28,670 and it’s starting to look as if there’s a pattern here.
The college administration, possibly with the knowledge of some of the trustees, has been spending public money on political campaigns. Money earmarked for public education has gone to promote bond acts that bring in money for the district and that’s not only sleazy and unethical, it’s clearly a violation of law.
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris is reportedly looking at the second diversion but she needs to expand the probe immediately. If the administration of the outgoing Chancellor Philip Day shuttled public cash to bond campaigns twice, there’s a good chance it happened a few more times. And at a certain point, this rises to the level of serious criminal charges.
The first diversion, first reported in the Chronicle, involved a $30,000 payment from a motorcycle school that was using college parking lots for its classes. That rent money never made it into the public coffers; instead, it wound up helping to pay for the campaign for the latest round of City College bonds.
The latest revelation is just as smelly: the Foundation of the City College of San Francisco, a nonprofit that takes in donations for the school, gave $35,000 on November 6, 2006, to a political group that supports statewide college bond elections. A day later, on Nov. 7, the college itself handed $38,670 (the school’s $28,670 and another $10,000 in private money) to the foundation. That’s odd in and of itself the foundation usually gives money to the school, not the other way around. And the timing is highly suspect; given the history of questionable financial moves at City College, the idea that some administrator would use the foundation to launder a cash contribution to a political group is not at all beyond the imagination.
The college board needs to hire its own special counsel to check every contribution to local college bond acts to see if there’s any more evidence of improper diversion of public funds. But an internal audit isn’t enough; Harris needs to look into this and make public her findings.
City College is a valuable public institution, and for years, the people running it have undermined public confidence in its financial integrity. That’s a crime itself and if someone broke the law along the way, the district attorney has to make clear that it won’t be tolerated.
Newsom’s woman problem
OPINION Be nice, wait your turn, pay your dues, your time will come.
This is the “guidance” given to women in politics, and many of us have bided our time and paid our share of dues. But what happens when our time comes, and we speak out for what we believe in? We are called pushy, mean, controlling, or cold. And worse — we are stripped of our positions.
In the last month, four of the most respected women in city government have been removed from their posts:
•Susan Leal is considered one of city government’s best managers and was leading the city toward a future of sustainable energy usage. According to the Chronicle, she was fired from her position as director of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission because the Mayor did not consider her to be a “team player,” and because it appeared that Leal was readying herself for another run for Mayor in 2011.
•Leah Shahum is a fearless bike advocate and Executive Director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. She was removed from the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency for being an outspoken critic of the city’s inaction on promoting alternative forms of transportation.
•Roma Guy is a fierce advocate for women’s health, a former lecturer in San Francisco State University’s health education department and a longtime progressive activist. She was removed from the city’s Health Commission without explanation.
•Debra Walker is the only woman on the city’s powerful Building Inspection Commission, a longtime affordable housing activist, and a fighter for reform and transparency in the Department of Building Inspection (a male-dominated department in a male-dominated field). Walker lost her leadership position on the commission after she was targeted by the mayor’s office for openly disagreeing with his positions.
We can’t allow these affronts to go unnoticed and we can’t afford to lose more good women in power — or let the few that remain be silenced into inaction. It is time for women to stand behind our sisters who work hard every day to represent us in government, many on a volunteer basis, while also pursuing full time careers and caring for their families.
The National Women’s Political Caucus and the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee are working to increase the number of women in positions of influence in city government. In September of last year, 47 elected officials and other community leaders from the San Francisco women’s community came together for a Women’s Policy Summit where the participants agreed that our top priority is to promote more women to positions of influence in government.
Even though women comprise 51 percent of the voting population, we hold only 16 percent of the seats in Congress, 23 percent of state legislative seats nationwide, and 27 percent of the seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Only one elected executive office in San Francisco — district attorney — is held by a woman.
San Francisco must do more to promote women to leadership positions. We must also call on the mayor to appoint women to positions of influence in city government and demand an explanation when he removes qualified women from their posts without good cause. The time for patience and waiting our turn has passed. *
Alix Rosenthal, Amy Moy and Micha Liberty
Alix Rosenthal is the founder of the San Francisco Women’s Policy Summit. Amy Moy is president of the San Francisco Women’s Political Committee. Micha Liberty is president of the National Women’s Political Caucus (SF chapter).
Public safety, back on track
OPINION About a year and a half ago, James was dealing drugs on a street corner in San Francisco. He wasn’t a hardened repeat offender, just a young man with little education and few prospects. He got arrested and soon faced adult felony drug charges for the first time.
California law sets the punishment for selling narcotics at up to three years in state prison. But we know that 7 out of every 10 people we send to California prisons will commit a new crime within three years of being released the worst recidivism rate in the nation. If James ended up in state prison, there was a 70 percent chance that he would go straight back in a few years after his release, and we would actually be less safe, not more, for our trouble.
So instead of business as usual, we decided to try something new. We sent him to Back on Track, a program established by a reentry initiative created by my office in partnership with Goodwill Industries, other community service providers, and the business sector. After a year and half, Back on Track had put this former offender into the workforce and gotten him off the street.
Since we launched the initiative, more than 100 former offenders have successfully completed Back on Track. In the process, we’ve learned a lot about public safety and how to change the broken policies of the past that have crowded our prisons and jails without making us safer.
For decades, beginning with the war on drugs, there were only two brands of law enforcement: tough and soft. For decades we’ve chosen to get tough, but it’s mostly been tough on us: we’ve filled our state prisons to the breaking point with low-level offenders mostly drug offenders.
Isn’t there a smarter way to keep us safe?
Through Back on Track we’re initiating a new brand of law enforcement. Low-level drug offenders are referred to Back on Track, where they face swift sanctions for making bad choices and clear incentives for making good ones. The participants receive the basic opportunities for living crime-free that most of us take for granted: concrete job training and employment; union-based preapprenticeships in the building trades; college enrollment and help navigating financial aid; tutoring, money management, and banking instruction; child care, anger management, and parenting support. That’s the carrot, but there’s a stick too. Drug sellers must plead guilty to enter the program, and if they are rearrested or terminated from the program, they go straight to jail no excuses.
Fewer than 10 percent of Back on Track graduates reoffend and the program costs only $5,000 per participant, compared to $35,000 per year to house them in jail.
In October we held a graduation ceremony for Back on Track, one of four we’ve hosted since we launched the initiative. James was among the 13 young men and women who graduated. Today all 13 have full-time jobs or are working while they go to school. None have reoffended. More than 100 people currently in the program are following in their footsteps. Every day they’re teaching us that even a modest investment in people, coupled with accountability and clear guidance, can keep our community safe.
Kamala D. Harris
Kamala D. Harris is San Francisco’s district attorney.
Stop the homeless sweeps
EDITORIAL Sister Bernie Galvin and Religious Witness with Homeless People held a press conference Oct. 4 to release some remarkable data: since Mayor Gavin Newsom took office, San Francisco has issued 46,684 citations to homeless people, mostly for what are known as quality-of-life crimes. That’s cost the taxpayers $7.8 million.
Unfortunately, almost no news media showed up the mayor, it turns out, somehow scheduled his press conference on homelessness at exactly the same time. As Amanda Witherell reports on page 15, Newsom’s staff say it’s all a coincidence but it reflects how this administration is increasingly treating homeless issues.
Newsom, with the assistance of District Attorney Kamala Harris, is shifting the city back to a model that treats homelessness and poverty as crimes. But years of evidence prove that approach doesn’t work.
Newsom’s plan, outlined in a memo that Sup. Chris Daly made public last week, involves sending a team of social service and outreach workers through the Tenderloin with police officers. Now the cops and the social workers are saying they won’t patrol together, but the message and the impact are the same: people who commit the sorts of offenses that are almost inevitable when you don’t have a place to live like sleeping on the streets and panhandling will increasingly be dragged into the criminal justice system.
Frank Jordan, a former police chief, tried that when he was mayor in the early 1990s; he called the program Matrix, and it was an utter failure. The reason is obvious: most homeless people can’t pay the fines for these violations. So either the citation process is a waste of everyone’s time or, if the city pursues the nonpayment and piles on more and more citations, it winds up creating a criminal record for someone who already is going to have trouble finding work. The promise of services implied by the social workers’ involvement in Newsom’s plan means nothing if services aren’t there and the city still can’t offer, say, substance-abuse treatment on demand or enough housing for all of the people who need it.
Yet despite all the evidence, Harris has now assigned a full-time staffer to do nothing but prosecute these low-level offenses. She and Newsom both say they want to help people use services but the only service the DA’s Office offers to homeless people who wind up in court is a handout, a single-page list of referrals.
San Francisco has been down this road so many times before that it’s infuriating. Criminalizing homeless people is not only wrong; it’s expensive, inefficient, foolish, and morally offensive. It also clogs the courts and takes the cops even further away from working on serious crimes.
Daly says he’s going to reintroduce his measure allocating an additional $5 million for housing for homeless people. That’s a good move, of course. But the supervisors ought to think about something else: if Harris, Newsom, and the cops want to persist in counterproductive and cruel homeless sweeps, perhaps the supervisors should move to cut funding to those departments by a total of, say, $7.8 million. 2
Editor’s Notes
› tredmond@sfbg.com
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi likes to say that murder and Muni are Mayor Gavin Newsom’s most obvious weaknesses, and there are all kinds of ideas about fixing Muni. Murder, that’s a little tougher.
The mayoral candidates we’ve been talking to all decry the city’s rise in violent crime, and they all say something has to be done. The district attorney says so, and so does the Police Officers Association. But there’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, and a lot of rhetoric and circling around and dodging. I realize it’s a tough, complicated issue; I realize that one city can’t utterly transform the socioeconomic impacts of more than a quarter century of federal neglect of inner cities. I know that poverty and desperation drive crime and violence, and what we’re experiencing in San Francisco won’t be solved by any one simple program.
But I have to say, I’ve heard an idea from one of the candidates that just makes a lot of common sense.
Lonnie Holmes, who almost certainly won’t be elected, told us in an endorsement interview that the mentor he relied on when he was a kid growing up in a tough neighborhood in San Francisco was the guy who ran the local recreation center. It was open all the time; Holmes would just drop in after school, hang out, play some basketball…. There was a place to go, with a caring adult who was a supervisor, coach, teacher, and role model. No pressure, no special classes to sign up for, no fee, no cost at the door. Just a local rec center. There are dozens of them, all over the city.
But these days a lot of them aren’t open as much. Budget cuts to the Recreation and Park Department have forced the rec centers to limit their hours. The center in Bernal Heights, where I live, used to be open on weekends; now the doors are mostly locked.
There’s not a lot in the way of quality public after-school programs either.
So kids who don’t have a stable home life, or whose parents or guardians are working two jobs and are rarely around, or who have any of a long list of factors that put them at risk for violence don’t have anywhere to go. Bad idea.
So why not a budget plan to fully fund all the rec centers and fund comprehensive after-school care as a means of violence prevention? It’s a lot cheaper than hiring a few hundred more cops.
Onward: there’s a fascinating comment at the very end of the seven-page city attorney’s opinion on Newsom’s call for mass resignations by department heads and other top city officials. It’s just two sentences, and the relevant part goes like this: "The resignations … may present other legal issues…. For example, there could be questions about whether to make public disclosures under certain city bonds or municipal debt issuances."
Here’s what that means: the city could be required to tell bond holders and underwriters that all of the department heads, the entire senior staff of the Mayor’s Office, and all commissioners the combined pool of talent and experience at City Hall have been asked to resign. If anything on this scale happened in a private business, the company’s stock would fall precipitously; one might assume that bond-rating agencies could consider San Francisco to be facing real leadership troubles and reduce our bond rating.
That, in turn, would cost the city a sizable amount of money.
I wonder, Mr. Mayor did that ever occur to you?