Police

Bury the Geary

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OPINION Geary Boulevard transit riders deserve a real solution to the problems plaguing the busiest travel corridor west of the Mississippi River – not a short-term fix, such as bus rapid transit (BRT), that will waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money and create even more problems and congestion for the troubled street.

Transit experts have hailed BRT as cutting-edge technology and a cheaper alternative to light-rail and subways. They point to successes in countries such as Japan, France, and Brazil – and even some US cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Successful they may be.

But the streets these BRT programs operate on look nothing like Geary Boulevard.

More often than not, these streets have no parking – and eliminating parking is something we can’t do to the residents and merchants along the corridor.

These model corridors are extremely wide and remain so throughout the course of the BRT route. On Geary we face much more challenging lane widths throughout the Richmond and east of Van Ness Avenue, not to mention the daunting challenges of how to handle the Masonic and Fillmore interchanges.

The current study of BRT on Geary is in its final stages. After three years the transit authority staff has offered the Geary Citizens Advisory Committee "choices" to recommend to the full board.

These choices include different arrays of BRT and one non-BRT option that encompasses much cheaper repairs such as proof-of-payment boarding through all doors, transit signal priority, and other improvements.

None of these choices, however, contemplates the issues Geary and O’Farrell Street face east of Van Ness, and they all assume police and traffic control will step up their enforcement of the diamond lane.

But there’s one solution we have not considered. Yes, it is the most ambitious and the most expensive, but it also could be the most transformative and could spur more people to leave their cars behind and embrace public transit: bury the Geary and create a subway.

We owe Geary corridor residents and riders this solution. Why can someone in Berkeley or Hayward get to downtown San Francisco faster than some of our residents?

Big problems require big thinking, big solutions, and, most important, leadership. So far we’ve had none of that on Geary. It’s time for our city leaders to champion a solution that can grow along with the city and help solve the congestion issues that will only continue to get worse.

San Francisco holds itself out as one of the world’s finest cities. If that’s the case, we all should remember the world’s great cities move people underground – not in buses. *

David Schaefer

David Schaefer is vice chair of the Geary Citizens Advisory Committee.

Sunshine for Berkeley

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EDITORIAL At long last the city of Berkeley is talking seriously about adopting a sunshine ordinance. That’s the good news, and it’s overdue: Councilmember Kris Worthington asked city attorney Manuela Albuquerque to start working on this six years ago.

The bad news is that Albuquerque has drafted a law that’s full of holes.

The biggest problem with the proposed ordinance is its lack of effective enforcement. Although the law sets (some) standards for open records and open meetings, any complaints about secrecy would go to the city manager. That won’t work: if we’ve learned one thing in covering politics for more than 40 years, it’s that city officials can’t police themselves on sunshine issues. What happens if the city manager is the biggest offender? What happens if the city manager doesn’t want to take on the mayor or the council members? What if the city manager winds up protecting city employees (who may be vioutf8g the ordinance with impunity)?

The ordinance needs a few other things – for example, mandatory time for public comment at City Council meetings ought to be written into the law instead of being left as a council rule that can change any time. There ought to be clear language stating that all requests for information are to be treated as public records requests, even if they aren’t in writing and didn’t come through the City Manager’s Office.

But if this ordinance is going to make any difference, it needs real enforcement – and that means having an outside, independent panel or commission that can handle complaints. In San Francisco, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force does that job – and the city still lacks decent enforcement. If Berkeley wants to adopt a real landmark ordinance, it should follow what Connecticut has done and create an open records commission with the authority to order city departments, agencies, and officials to release documents and open up meetings.

Worthington is a strong supporter of an independent enforcement body and has been struggling to get Mayor Tom Bates and Albuquerque to go along.

At this point, Worthington and the sunshine advocates would be better off letting Terry Franke of Californians Aware and Mark Schlosberg of the American Civil Liberties Union – both of whom have offered their time and expertise – simply write another draft. It should include a new sunshine commission, with teeth. Worthington says that might require a charter amendment and thus a vote of the people, and he’s prepared to push the entire package onto the ballot if necessary.

That threat alone ought to get Bates and Albuquerque in line – and if it doesn’t, the voters of Berkeley should have the final say. *

Death of fun, the sequel

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> news@sfbg.com

Fun – in the form of fairs, festivals, bars, art in the parks, and the freedom to occasionally drink alcohol in public places – is under attack in San Francisco.

The multipronged assault is coming primarily from two sources: city agencies with budget shortfalls and NIMBYs who don’t like to hear people partying. The crackdown has only intensified since the Guardian sounded the alarm last year (see “The Death of Fun,” 5/24/06), but the fun seekers are now organizing, finding some allies, and starting to push back.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and other city hall leaders have been meeting with the Outdoor Events Coalition, which formed last year in response to the threat, about valuing the city’s beloved social gatherings and staving off steep fee hikes that have been sought by the Recreation and Park, Fire, Public Works, and Police departments.

Those conversations have already yielded at least a temporary reprieve from a substantial increase in use fees for all the city’s parks. It’s also led to a rollback of the How Weird Street Faire’s particularly outrageous police fees (its $7,700 sum last year jumped to $23,833 this year – despite the event being forced by the city to end two hours earlier – before pressure from the Guardian and city hall forced it back down to $4,734).

The San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee will also wade into the issue April 25 when it considers a resolution warning that “San Francisco has become noticeably less tolerant of nightlife and outdoor events.” It is sponsored by Scott Wiener, Robert Haaland, Michael Goldstein, and David Campos.

The measure expresses this premier political organization’s “strong disagreement with the City agencies and commissions that have undermined San Francisco’s nightlife and tradition of street festivals and encourages efforts to remove obstacles to the permitting of such venues and events up to and including structural reform of government permitting processes to accomplish that goal.”

The resolution specifically cites the restrictions and fee increases that have hit the How Weird Street Faire, the Haight Ashbury Street Fair (where alcohol is banned this year for the first time), and the North Beach Jazz Festival, but it also notes that a wide variety of events “provide major fundraising opportunities for community-serving nonprofits such as HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, and violence-prevention organizations that are dependent upon the revenue generated at these events.”

Yet the wet blanket crowd still seems ascendant. Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier now wants to ban alcohol in all city parks that contain playgrounds, which is most of them. Hole in the Wall has hit unexpected opposition to its relocation (see “Bar Wars,” 4/18/07), while Club Six is being threatened by its neighbors and the Entertainment Commission about noise issues. And one group is trying to kill a band shell made of recycled car hoods that is proposed for temporary summer placement on the Panhandle.

That project, as well as the proposal for drastically increased fees for using public spaces, is expected to be considered May 3 by the Rec and Park Commission, which is likely to be a prime battleground in the ongoing fight over fun.

 

FEE FIGHT

Rec and Park, like many other city departments, is facing a big budget shortfall and neglected facilities overdue for attention. A budget analyst audit last year also recommended that the department create a more coherent system for its 400 different permits and increase fees by 2 percent.

Yet the department responded by proposing to roughly double its special event fees, even though they make up just $560,000 of the $4.5 million that the department collects from all fees. Making things even worse was the proposal to charge events based on a park’s maximum capacity rather than the actual number of attendees.

The proposal caused an uproar when it was introduced last year, as promoters say it would kill many beloved events, so it was tabled. Then an almost identical proposal was quietly introduced this year, drawing the same concerns.

“These are just preliminary numbers, and they may change,” department spokesperson Rose Dennis told us, although she wouldn’t elaborate on why the same unpopular proposal was revived.

Event organizers, who were told last year that they would be consulted on the new fee schedule, were dumbfounded. They say the new policy forces them to come up with a lot of cash if attendance lags or the weather is bad.

Mitigating such a risk means charging admission, corralling corporate sponsorship, or pushing more commerce on attendees. This may not be a hindrance for some of the well-known and sponsored events such as Bay to Breakers and SF Pride, but consider how the low-budget Movie Night in Dolores Park might come up with $6,000 instead of $250, or how additional permit fees could strangle the potential of nascent groups such as Movement for Unconditional Amnesty.

The group is sponsoring a march in honor of the Great American Boycott of 2006. On May 1 it will walk from Dolores Park to the Civic Center in recognition of immigrants’ rights. The group wanted to offer concessions, because food vendors donate a percentage of their sales to the organization, but the permit fee for propane use from the Fire Department was too high.

“They couldn’t guarantee they’d make more than $1,200 in food to cover the costs of permits,” said Forrest Schmidt, of the ANSWER Coalition, who is assisting the organizers. “So they lost an opportunity to raise funds to support their work. It’s more than $1,000 taken off the top of the movement.”

ANSWER faced a similar problem after the antiwar rally in March, when the rule regarding propane permits was reinterpreted so that a base charge, once applied to an entire event, was now charged of each concessionaire – quadrupling the overall cost. ANSWER pleaded its case against this new reading of the law and was granted a one-time reprieve. But Schmidt says none of the SFFD’s paperwork backs up a need to charge so much money.

“They kept on saying over and over again, ‘You guys are making money on this,’ ” Schmidt said. “But it’s an administrative fee to make sure we’re not setting anything on fire. It’s essentially a tax. It’s a deceitful form of politics and part of what’s changing the demographic of the city.”

The Outdoor Events Coalition, which represents more than 25 events in the city, agrees and has been meeting with city officials to hash out another interim solution for this year, as well as a long-term plan for financial sustainability for all parties.

“We’re cautiously optimistic,” said Robbie Kowal, a coalition leader and organizer of the North Beach Jazz Festival. But he’s still concerned about what he and the coalition see as a continuing trend.

“The city is changing in some way. It’s becoming a culture of complaint. There’s this whole idea you can elect yourself into a neighborhood organization, you can invent your own constituency, and the bureaucracy has to take you seriously. Neighborhood power can be so effective in fighting against a Starbucks, but when it’s turned around and used to kill an indigenous part of that neighborhood, like its local street fair, that’s an abuse of that neighborhood power.”

 

NIMBY POWER

Black Rock Arts Foundation, the San Francisco public art nonprofit that grew out of Burning Man, has enjoyed a successful and symbiotic partnership with the Newsom administration, placing well-received temporary artwork in Hayes Green, Civic Center Plaza, and the Embarcadero.

So when BRAF, the Neighborhood Parks Council, the city’s Department of the Environment, and several community groups decided several months ago to collaborate on a trio of new temporary art pieces, most people involved thought they were headed for another kumbaya moment. Then one of the projects hit a small but vocal pocket of resistance.

A group of artists from the Finch Mob and Rebar collectives are now at work on the Panhandle band shell, a performance space for nonamplified acoustic music and other performances that is made from the hoods of 75 midsize sedans. The idea is to promote the recycling and reuse of materials while creating a community gathering spot for arts appreciation.

Most neighborhood groups in the area like the project, and 147 individuals have written letters of support, versus the 17 letters that have taken issue with the project’s potential to draw crowds and create noise, litter, graffiti, congestion, and a hangout for homeless people.

But the opposition has been amplified by members of the Panhandle Residents Organization Stanyan Fulton (PROSF), which runs one of the most active listservs in the city, championing causes ranging from government sunshine to neighborhood concerns. The group, with support from Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s staff, has delayed the project’s approval and thus placed its future in jeopardy (installation was scheduled to begin next month).

“My main concern would be that this is a very narrow strip of land that is bordered by homes on both sides,” said neighbor Maureen Murphy, who has complained about the project to the city and online through the PROSF. “My fear is that there is going to be amplification and more people and litter.”

The debate was scheduled to be heard by the Rec and Park Commission on April 19 but was postponed to May 3 because of the controversy. Nonetheless, Newsom showed up at the last hearing to offer his support.

“Rare do I come in front of committee, but I wanted to underscore … the partnership we’ve had with Black Rock Arts Foundation. It’s been a very successful one and one I want to encourage this commission to reinforce,” Newsom told the commission. “I think the opportunity exists for us … to take advantage of these partnerships and really bring to the forefront in people’s minds more temporary public art.”

Rachel Weidinger, who is handling the project for BRAF, said the organizers have been very sensitive to public input, neighborhood concerns, environmental issues, and the impacts of the project, at one point changing sites to one with better drainage. And she’s been actively telling opponents that the project won’t allow amplified music or large gatherings (those of 25 or more will require a special permit). But she said that there’s little they can do about those who simply don’t want people to gather in the park.

“We are trying to activate park space with temporary artwork,” she said. “Guilty as charged.”

Yet any activated public space – whether a street closed for a fair or a march, a park turned into a concert space, or a vacant storefront turned into a nightclub – is bound to generate a few critics. The question for San Francisco now is how to balance NIMBY desires and bureaucratic needs with a broader concern for facilitating fun in the big city.

“Some people have the idea that events and nightlife are an evil to be restricted,” Wiener said. But his resolution is intended as “a cultural statement about what kind of city we want to live in.” *

 

Up against the police secrecy lobby

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EDITORIAL On April 17 the full weight of the state’s secrecy lobby and police unions descended on Sacramento to prevent the public from having any access to the records of peace officers who have faced disciplinary charges. The tactics were brutal: Everett Bobbitt, a police lawyer, testified to the Assembly Public Safety Committee that allowing any sunshine whatsoever would instantly threaten the lives of hardworking cops and their families.

His argument was bizarre, reminiscent of some of the tortured claims that the Bush administration made in seeking support for the war in Iraq and the civil liberties fiasco called the USA PATRIOT Act. He suggested that criminal gangs might find out something that would allow them to threaten police officers (despite the fact that until a recent court decision these records had been open for more than 20 years in San Francisco and 30 in Berkeley, and not a single cop had been in any way physically harmed by the information). He claimed that peace officers have an extraordinary right to privacy (despite the fact that as public employees who are given guns and badges and extraordinary powers, they need at least some degree of public accountability).

And the committee, despite being dominated by Democrats, was utterly cowed. It was a disgrace, and public officials and law enforcement leaders in San Francisco and the East Bay need to make a point of joining the fight to ensure that police secrecy doesn’t continue to carry the day.

At issue was a bill by Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) that would overturn an odious 2006 court decision known as Copley. In that ruling, the California Supreme Court concluded that all files and hearings reutf8g to police discipline must be kept entirely secret. The ruling "has effectively shut down virtually every forum in which the public previously had access to the police discipline process," Tom Newton, general counsel to the California Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote in a letter supporting Leno’s bill, AB 1648.

Newton added, "Copley represents nothing less than complete and total victory for the secrecy lobby in this state. In the ultimate perversion of legislative intent, the most powerful forces in government and their exceptionally creative and effective lobbyists have achieved a perfect storm of official secrecy – making it illegal to inform the public about official corruption…. These aren’t just any public employees that have achieved the holy grail of KGB-like official secrecy – they are the only public officials given the right by the public to affect the personal liberty of citizens and even take life, if necessary to protect the public peace."

Leno’s bill – which would simply restore the law to what it was for decades – had the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and a long list of grassroots organizations, including the Asian Law Caucus, Chinese for Affirmative Action, La Raza Centro Legal, the NAACP, and the National Black Police Association.

And yet Leno didn’t have the votes in the committee to even move the bill to the floor. Not one of his four Democratic colleagues (Jose Solorio of Anaheim, Hector de la Torre of South Gate, Anthony J. Portantino of Pasadena, and San Francisco’s Fiona Ma) was willing to move the bill forward. Ma, apparently, was among those who bought the police line: she told the Guardian she was "not prepared to vote for Leno’s bill as it was" but would be willing to accept a compromise that "also protects the rights of family members." Remember, nothing in Leno’s bill in any way endangers or provides any information on any member of a police officer’s family.

The only good news is that a similar, slightly weaker bill, SB 1019, by state senator Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), has cleared the Senate’s Public Safety Committee and will go to the Senate floor – and if it passes, it will come before the Assembly. So there’s still a chance to pass some version of a police accountability and sunshine bill this year.

It’s crucial that public officials and particularly law enforcement leaders speak out in favor of this legislation. The city of Berkeley has formally endorsed the bill, but Mayor Gavin Newsom and Oakland mayor Ron Dellums have been silent and need to speak up. So should San Francisco sheriff Mike Hennessey (who told us he supports the idea in principle but thinks Leno’s proposal goes too far) and District Attorney Kamala Harris.

And Fiona Ma needs to hear, loudly, from her constituents: police accountability is a priority, and she can’t get away with ducking it. *

The power of press pressure

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By Steven T. Jones

The power of the press can be overstated. Over two decades in this business, I’ve written many good words about too many bad situations and watched nothing change. So it’s nice to know that a couple drums that I’ve beaten recently have been heard and heeded by the powers-that-be.

gonzo.jpg

We were the only media outlet actively shaming Mayor Gavin Newsom for not trying to broker a Healthy Saturdays compromise and calling out police Capt. Denis O’Leary for his punitive approach to setting fees for the How Weird Street Faire (issues I also hammered on my TV gig, City Desk NewsHour). And lo and behold, while I was off on vacation for almost a week, both men did the right thing. I’ll discuss the complicated Healthy Saturday’s compromise after the jump, but the latest news on How Weird is that O’Leary capitulated and brought the event fees back to last year’s levels. Event organizers say he got a call from City Hall and that during their last meeting, O’Leary was calling me out by name as a troublemaker and thorn in his side (he still hasn’t returned my call seeking comment). I’m so proud. Whoda thunk this Fourth Estate stuff actually works?

State Senate race geting crowded

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By Tim Redmond

The race for state Senate in San Francisco is getting more crowded: Joe Veronese, son of former Sup. Angela Alioto, appears to be ready to jump into the race. Fog City Journal had the scoop today:

Fog City has it on good authority (you can bet the farm!) Police Commissioner Joe Alioto-Veronese will, within two weeks, declare his candidacy for the 2008 California Senate District 3 race, taking on incumbent Senator Carole Migden and challenger Assemblymember Mark Leno.

I called Veronese, and he’s not by any means denying it. “We will be making an announcement very shortly,” he told me. I think that sounds like a go.

The politics of this are interesting: The polling data right now shows Migden well ahead in Marin County; Leno says his polls show him ahead in San Francisco. Adding more candidates to the mix in the city makes it all more confusing — and if Sup. Aaron Peskin jumps in, too (which he has threatened to do), that would take progressive votes from Leno and help Migden.

Egads. The election is still a year away.

BTW, I asked Veronese what case he would make for his election, and he told me: “My family has always been about public service.” He’ll need a little more in the way of issue than that.

FIREWORKS, TEENAGE GIRLS AND AN SFPD PATROL CAR: Former cop caught in alleged corruption snafu

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By G.W. Schulz

Chronicle gossip sluts Matier & Ross caught up with an interesting scoop today involving a guy who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. His name is Arkady Zlobinsky. That’s him below in a photo the Chron ran, which kinda looks more like a Glamour Shot stolen from a bargain-bin picture frame than a staff-produced image.

zlobinsky1.jpg
Former SFPD cop Arkady Zlobinsky from, uh,
a series of Glamour Shots the Chronicle lined up?

Anyway, a while back, we reminded you of a short-lived feature we’d launched last year called “Cops Behaving Badly,” which was supposed to be a regular summary of the more disturbing and/or hilarious police disciplinary cases arriving at the San Francisco Police Commission for review, details of which we could obtain as public records from the commission’s secretary, a nice guy named Sgt. Joe Reilly.

Well, the series started off as loads of fun. There was the cop who got busted with pot in Lake Tahoe. There was the domestic-violence investigator who drunkenly crashed into a parked SUV in Marin County while off the clock. There was the lieutenant who was allegedly pulled over at different spots throughout the city three times while off duty in a string of civilian automobiles, twice with a golf towel curiously wrapped over his license plate.

He claimed to sometimes play golf late at night in the park, and the towel must have miraculously got caught in his trunk. All a big misunderstanding, but after apparently letting him go a few times, officers finally reported the incidents and the chief was forced to charge him with being uncooperative by refusing to turn over his license and trying to intimidate the officers who’d pulled him over. That was the same lieutenant who was arrested in 1983 for soliciting an act of prostitution.

Writing the book on cinematic sound

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Where to start with the work of Ennio Morricone? The composer and musician has scored more than 400 films, so the task for the curious listener, let alone for the intrepid film curator, can be daunting. His most famous soundtracks have become a kind of enduring synecdoche, capable of summoning not just a particular title but an entire genre — think of the evocative power of the ocarina flourish in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Countless others, unearthed from the vaults every few years, are often the only artifacts we have of titles — mostly sexy thrillers and low-budget police procedurals — long since forgotten (see Dagored’s impressive reissue catalog of Morricone’s more obscure Italian scores). The Castro Theatre has assembled a decent pocket guide — Il Maestro for Dummies, if you will — which includes chestnuts such as 1986’s The Mission (his biggest Oscar snub and crossover success) and the more rarely screened and heard, such as Sam Fuller’s 1982 tale of a racist canine, White Dog.

Morricone first garnered international attention for his collaborations with Sergio Leone, in which he underscored the rugged beauty of the director’s lawless western mesas by adding ethereal choirs, noble strings, lilting harpsichord, and fuzz guitars that dart like rattlesnakes across the landscape. It’s an approach perhaps best encapsulated in his gorgeous theme for 1968’s Once upon a Time in the West, also included in the Castro’s lineup.

By that time Morricone had already proven himself to be a protean asset to directors regardless of genre, given his ear for unusual timbres and sensitivity to emotional coloring. He could sum up the tragic cost of liberation in a simple martial tattoo, as he did in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), or use his extensive compositional training to achieve twisted, discordant ends, as heard in his score for the 1968 psychological thriller A Quiet Day in the Country.

It is the darker, freakier side of Morricone, deliciously showcased on the 2005 Mike Patton–curated compilation Crime and Dissonance (Ipecac), that has most consistently entranced this listener and could provide enough entries for its own film festival. The Doors-esque theme for Dario Argento’s 1971 giallo Four Flies on Grey Velvet — kicked off with a chaotic drum roll worthy of the Muppets’ Animal — only hints at the bleating, echo-laden trumpet (often played by Morricone himself), cackling snippets of wah-wah guitar, frantic free jazz drumming, and creaking gongs that would later accompany the supernatural goings-on and criminal activities in films such as The Antichrist (1974) and The Cold Eyes of Fear (1971). The score for the latter was the only one Morricone ever performed with his avant-garde orchestral ensemble, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza.

His work on these pulpy flicks, like his celebrated spaghetti western scores, are only one facet of the embarrassment of riches constituting Morricone’s oeuvre. To call the honorary Oscar he received at this year’s Academy Awards long overdue is a gross understatement. Hollywood’s acknowledgement seemed almost too little too late for someone who has so profoundly shaped how we hear, and in turn how we see, movies. *

LEGENDARY COMPOSER: ENNIO MORRICONE

April 20–25

See Rep Clock for show info

$6–$10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120

www.castrotheatre.com

>

Bar wars

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› news@sfbg.com

For the owners of the Hole in the Wall Saloon, the plan was simple: move their popular South of Market gay bar out of its dingy and dilapidated quarters to a much better spot around the corner. With numerous bars and nightclubs already along the stretch once known as the gay miracle mile, they assumed their place would fit right in.

But SoMa is changing — and the bar’s new neighbors in the increasingly residential district are using every regulatory trick in the book to block the move. Another bar, they say, is one too many.

The Hole in the Wall’s current location on Eighth Street frequently lives up to the place’s modest-sounding name. The plumbing stops up. The patched floor sags in places. And the bar tilts at an unnatural angle. Co-owners Joe Banks and John Gardiner, who are life as well as business partners, spent years seeking a new space for their eclectic, art-filled taproom. Last year they thought they had found an ideal spot a block and a half away on Folsom, between Dore and 10th streets.

At today’s prices, the building was a bargain — only $1.2 million. After making sure that the space, a former dance studio, was zoned to allow for a bar, Banks and Gardiner hired a local design-build firm to renovate the building. They hoped to open the new location by April 15, the bar’s 13th anniversary.

Now they just hope to open.

In early December project manager Jeff Matt was working on the build-out of the new space when a man named Jim Meko stopped by and asked him to give a letter to the owners. The letter, obtained by the Guardian, is on letterhead for the Western SoMa Citizens Planning Task Force. The task force, which Meko chairs, is advising the Planning Department on a new zoning plan for South of Market.

The letter was a copy of a five-month-old missive Meko had addressed to the real estate agent representing the building’s sellers. It warns that if the property were sold to someone who wanted to open a bar, the buyers could face "obstacles" such as protests to the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and petitions to the Planning Commission.

Silvana Messing, the agent to whom the letter is addressed, told us she never received it. The agent representing Gardiner and Banks as buyers, who asked not to be identified by name, claims he didn’t see the letter either. But if he had gotten it before the sale, he said, "I probably would have advised [Gardiner and Banks] not to buy the place."

Meko, who lives around the corner from the Hole in the Wall’s new location, told us Banks and Gardiner "tend to live right on the edge of the law" as bar owners. He charged that the place used DJs without the proper entertainment permits and that there have been reports of drug dealing and nudity on the bar’s premises.

Gardiner admitted that he and Banks have employed DJs in the past but says they did not know that a DJ requires a special permit: "We thought an entertainment license was for places with live bands…. When we found out, we stopped it." Banks and Gardiner denied that drug dealing takes place at the bar. As for nudity, several Hole in the Wall regulars recalled a time in the mid-’90s when patrons occasionally drank in the buff, but they told us such behavior died down long ago.

Officer Rose Meyer, the San Francisco Police Department’s permit officer at Southern Station, gave the bar and its owners glowing reviews. Referring to Gardiner in particular, Meyer told us, "Southern Station would have no objection to him operating [at the new location]. I don’t foresee there being any problems."

"He has always been responsible" in the past, she said.

Meko claims the letter wasn’t meant to stir up opposition to the bar’s move. Instead, he said, he was simply trying to warn Gardiner and Banks about the simmering antinightlife attitude among SoMa residents. "It’s real precarious," Meko said. "Neighbors just rise up. They become real irrational…. They can go crazy."

When 10th Street resident Damien Ochoa received notice from the Planning Department about the new bar in early January, he didn’t rise up — at least at first. But given that his bedroom window is less than 50 feet from the bar’s back smoking area, he was concerned. As a result, he said by phone, he "started to do a little bit of research about the owners." In the course of his research, he got in touch with Meko.

Ochoa said Meko informed him that "they’re potentially not good neighbors." After a neighborhood meeting, Ochoa, Meko, and several other residents pitched in money to file a petition in Ochoa’s name asking the Planning Commission to look at the project under its power of discretionary review. Other neighbors lodged protests with the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Within weeks all of Meko’s warnings to the real estate agent had come true.

As a result, work on the new bar is at a standstill. It cannot begin again until the protests work their way through hearings and appeals. It could be many months until the outcome is decided. Banks and Gardiner say they have staked their financial future on the new bar, with tens of thousands of dollars in construction loans set to come due before the end of the year. Without any income from the new location, they might not be able to stay afloat.

Banks told us the opposition to the bar’s move came as a complete surprise. The Hole in the Wall, he said, is "a place where everybody’s welcome. It’s a gay bar, but everybody’s welcome." To try to resolve the dispute, Banks and Gardiner hired Jeremy Paul, an experienced permit expediter, to shepherd the project through the regulatory process and to negotiate with Meko and the neighbors. The two sides are currently in talks about enclosing the back smoking area, a change that could cost more than $100,000. Paul expressed guarded optimism that the project will eventually go forward, but he told us the rancor over the new saloon is an example of "the identity crisis" San Francisco is going through.

"The Hole in the Wall relocation is a case study in how dysfunctional this system is," Paul said. Zoning in the area allows for a bar, he said, "and if these people don’t want to live in a bar district, they should check the zoning where they’re buying a house or renting an apartment" before moving there.

Paul added that if the residents are dead set against any new bars on their block, they should work to change the zoning.

The task force Meko chairs is at work on a new zoning plan for the area, which it will eventually present to the Planning Department. Some nightlife supporters worry that the goal may be a more residential neighborhood with no room for more bars.

Meko and Ochoa strongly deny that Meko is behind the residents’ actions. "I’m a neighbor," Meko told us, claiming that he is simply working with other neighbors to prevent the noise, smoke, and litter that could accompany the bar. As for the task force’s work, Meko said he is actually trying to bring more nightlife into SoMa, but only in appropriate areas with adequate "buffers" for the residents.

"I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life trying to broker peace between" bar owners and neighbors, he asserted. He noted that the Entertainment Commission, on which he also sits, is working to clarify permit rules for clubs and bars.

John Wood, a member of the San Francisco Late Night Coalition, said the neighbors "have reasonable concerns" about the new bar but those concerns "are being overblown." Wood noted that the bar is only rated for 49 patrons at a time and that by agreeing to soundproof the building and possibly enclose the back patio, the owners have been very accommodating. "Even nightclubs don’t go through those kinds of measures," he said.

Banks told us he and Gardiner desperately want to resolve the situation. "We’re willing to do anything within our financial means," he said. "We want to save it. The Hole in the Wall is our baby." *

Shooting spree suspect named

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By G.W. Schulz

Virginia rampage shooter identified. Love kills. Gun opponents are pissed, while NRA supporters are keeping quiet.

shooter1.jpg

*Photo from Virginia State Police via SFGate

Stop the presses! Here come the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration from the nation’s biggest chains (Hearst, Singleton, Gannett, Stephens) Why people get mad at the media (l4)

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

As expected, Federal Judge Susan Illston ruled on Tuesday April l0 that Clint Reilly can go to trial in his antitrust suit opposing the Hearst/Singleton deal to monopolize the Bay Area newspaper market.

The San Francisco Daily, a free daily, played the story the way it ought to be played: on the front page, with a strong head, “Newspaper monopoly trial allowed, Bid to block it quashed,” and a good lead that said, “A federal judge yesterday cleared the way for an unprecedented jury trial to determine if the consolidation of newspapers in the Bay Area violated antitrust laws.”

The Chronicle and the Singleton papers continued to run the story as if it were a rummy little squabble between a lone angry reader and a big company out there somewhere, without any redeeming journalistic or public interest values.
But the Chronicle did move the story from its usual burial spot in the business section to a new burial spot: straddling the fold on page 4 of its Bay Area section with yet another Rip Van Winkle sleeper head, “Judge permits trial over newspaper deals.”

The story is even harder to find on the Chronicle’s website. When I checked about 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, It ranked 23rd on the list of Bay Area stories, behind Farley the cartoon strip, and behind such blazers as “Bay Bridge Labor Day closure may begin early” and “Rain, rain will go away–’til possibly Saturday” and “Out to pasture they go–3 police horses retire/Long in the tooth, these mounts head to Santa Rosa ranch” and “Muni breakdown creates delays.” However, it did rank ahead of “Miniature boats provide major fun.”

More: not only are the Galloping Conglomerati blacking out and mangling a major story involving their own papers,
but worse they are continuing to reverse their own historic free press and sunshine-in-the-courts positions. They are continuing to press the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration in federal court to cover their
moves to monopoly.

Alas, Illston allowed the publishers to keep their records sealed, and the Reilly responses sealed, in their latest filings on April 6, despite her earlier order to open the court records on the demand of the Guardian and the Media Alliance. (The Guardian is appealing her decision and will continue to press to open up the records and keep them open throughout the trial, which is scheduled to begin on April 30.)

Too bad. You can tell, just by glancing at the extensive list of Reilly declarations and records that the publishers want to keep under seal, that there is a lot of explosive stuff in the hopper. Meanwhile, the Riley case remains the only major impediment to the Hearst/Singleton deal. And I am getting the impression that Riley is building a strong case and that Hearst and Singleton are getting extremely nervous about the outcome. It’s going to be a helluva trial.

Check the publishers’ filings below for a preview of coming attractions and the lengths to which they will go behalf of court secrecy and stonewalling. Check also the move by the Guardian attorneys, the First Amendment Project in Oakland, to request Illston to review her sealing order. Most important, check Illston’s excellent, well-reasoned order denying summary judgment. She nails the Hearst/Singleton position on point after point. B3

1. Click here to view the declaration of Joseph J. Lodovic, president of MediaNews Group/Singleton

2. Click here to view the declaration of Daniel E. Ehrman J., vice president of planning and development of Gannett

3. Click here to view the proposed order to seal from the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst, MediaNews Group/Singleton, Stephens Group, Gannett, and California Newspapers partnership (B3: a business partnership of the papers)

4. Click here to view the proposed order to seal from the MediaNews Group/Singleton

5. Click here to view the letter from the Guardian and its First Amendment Project attorneys asking Judge Illston to review her decision allowing the publishers to seal documents

6. Click here to view the Illston order of April l0 denying the Hearst/Singleton motion for summary judgment and giving Clint Reilly standing to sue

Six ed

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Conventional wisdom — chew before swallowing, hang on to your nine-to-five, the safety of the passengers depends on keeping conversation with the driver to a minimum — usually suffices eight days a week. But along march catastrophic events, and the rules fly out the window. Luckily, agile industry vets such as Six Degrees founders Bob Duskis and Pat Berry know how to respond to fate’s highs and lows. For instance, the label was universally warned not to release its Arabian Travels comp post–Sept. 11.

"Everybody told us, ‘You are crazy if you put this record out. People are going to be angry. Retailers aren’t going to carry it,’ " Duskis recalls at Six Degrees’ sizable Mission District office. "And we thought, you know, this is the perfect time to put this record out! More than ever people need things that transcend stereotypes — a positive representation of what comes from the Middle East." That, on top of evidence that Americans were suddenly ravenous for any information about a world they had once largely ignored, convinced them to go ahead. Turns out "it’s one of our best-selling compilations!" Duskis delivers the kicker, chuckling. "And we got a lot of mail from people of Middle Eastern descent who live in this country saying, ‘Thank you very much!’ Obviously, we feel like music is a great connector."

On the cusp of Six Degrees’ 10th anniversary celebration, sitting in a conference room atop some 20,000 CDs in the company’s downstairs warehouse with his 14-year-old hound Scout by his side, Duskis, 47, is feeling ever more optimistic about the future. On April 18 the label head will be joining the imprint’s Bombay Dub Orchestra, Jef Stott, and r:sphere of Zaman 8 on the steelers’ wheels — as he often does online via the label’s monthly radio show and occasionally does at one of many nights sponsored by Six Degrees at Supperclub, Madrone Lounge, and elsewhere. Part of the party: Backspin: A Six Degrees 10 Year Anniversary Project, which finds roster artists covering their faves (Karsh Kale takes a tabla to the Police’s "Spirits in the Material World").

Six Degrees has plenty to toast, while providing a lesson in indie survival techniques. After hitting it big with licensed bossa nova royalty Bebel Gilberto’s Tanto Tempo (2000) and subsequently downsizing amid the industry’s early ’00s doldrums, the imprint has been busily undertaking new projects, expected for a company that has always looked forward: a digital-only Emerging Artists series including Bay Area artists Stout and Zaman 8 as a way of breaking new performers with lower overhead, and a new partnership with Starbucks Entertainment to play and promote the debut by the silky-voiced, groove-obsessed, and cute-as-a-bug Brazilian singer-songwriter CeU, the first non-English-language artist to break into the chain’s Hear Music Debut series and find exposure to java junkies everywhere. "Hitting that consumer that’s outside the traditional pathways, which have been closed to us or just aren’t working anymore, it’s the kind of thing we need to do," Duskis explains. "All signs are pointing for this to be a big breakout."

Breaks and smarts have gotten Duskis and Berry this far: the two met at Palo Alto new age independent Windham Hill. Duskis had worked his way up to become the head of A&R; Berry, VP of sales and marketing. Both were united in their belief that the label should explore more global sounds, and they eventually departed to create Six Degrees under the umbrella of then-Polygram-owned Island at the behest of their genre-crossing hero Chris Blackwell, who asked the two to market the "weird stuff, all the nonpop stuff."

After Blackwell left, Duskis and Berry got out of Island with their masters in the nick of time before being entangled in yet another monstrous merger. With an infusion of venture capital, they relaunched the label as a true independent in ’98 before hitting it massive with Tanto Tempo. "From the start we treated it not like this was going to be some weird, little world-electronica record but as something for a wide range of people, from young club audiences and electronica fans to older people who had hit the first bossa nova wave to pop and Sade fans. Sure enough, it became the coffee-table world music record of that year," Duskis says. (Gilberto’s latest, Momento, comes out April 24).

The success of that album pegged Six Degrees as a world fusion label, but the founders always saw the imprint as more than that, releasing artists as varied as Michael Franti, Cheb i Sabbah, and the Real Tuesday Weld — more a global content provider with a highly eclectic palate and fingers dipped in digital distribution; podcasts; music blogs; and licensing to film, TV, and commercials before anyone else. "One thing I’d say we’ve never tried, as a label," Dukais quips, "is to be so hip it hurts." *

CEU

Fri/13, 9 p.m., $15

Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

SIX DEGREES’ 10TH ANNIVERSARY

April 18, 10 p.m., $10

Supperclub

657 Harrison, SF

(415) 348-0900

www.sixdegreesrecords.com

NO STOPPING HIM NOW

Gone are the days when Jeff Chang churned out columns for the Guardian, but my Hawaii bud can be excused for burying himself in books such as his award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and his compelling new volume, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (Basic, $18.95). Total Chaos emerged from discussions on the future of demographics and aesthetics in the arts about three years ago and found Chang editing playwright Danny Hoch, artist Doze, and DJ Spooky, as well as essays on hip-hop and queerness. It’s a wide-angle take on hip-hop’s impact on the arts, triggering what Chang calls "crosscutting debates within the book." And without: "I’ve seen a review in the National Review complaining that there’s no center to this," Chang says on the road. "But hip-hop is about call-and-response. It’s not necessarily about people having a consensus." Expect a hot back-and-forth when Chang gathers Marcyliena Morgan of Stanford’s Hip-Hop Archive and contributors such as Adam Mansbach for a hip-hop aesthetics talk April 17 (and later on May 8).

TOTAL CHAOS HIP-HOP FORUM

Tues/17, 6:30 p.m., free

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

www.ybca.org

www.cantstopwontstop.com

>

Who blinked?

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf has been free for more than a week, but the debate over why the federal government released him after 226 days in jail is only getting murkier.

First a US Attorney’s Office press release April 3 claimed that Wolf "complied with the grand jury subpoena." Next a San Francisco Chronicle headline April 4 declared, "Blogger Freed after Giving Up Video." Then a Chronicle op-ed April 9 by the California First Amendment Coalition’s executive director, Peter Scheer, claimed Wolf’s case never should have become a constitutional cause célèbre "because he never had evidence."

"In retrospect," Scheer wrote, "Wolf’s jailing looks like a huge misunderstanding, in which prosecutors assumed, incorrectly, that Wolf possessed relevant evidence, while Wolf believed, erroneously, that he had a responsibility to go to jail even if he had no relevant evidence."

Wolf disagrees with all the above, beginning with the prosecutor’s claim that he complied with the subpoena.

"If I complied, then journalists will be happy to know that the meaning of ‘complied’ has changed," Wolf said, noting that he never capitulated to the feds’ demands that he testify under oath before a grand jury about a July 2005 Mission District protest that turned violent, parts of which he captured on video and excerpts of which were aired shortly thereafter on national television.

Wolf was more forgiving of the Chron‘s misleading headline because, as he put it, "headline writers don’t write the story, and the story itself was accurate." That said, the truth, according to Wolf, is that only after the feds gave up their demand that he testify did he agree to post his unedited video.

It’s a subtle distinction that was missing from some coverage of his release from federal prison, but it’s a significant omission that makes Wolf’s decision look like a coerced surrender. Wolf emphasized, "The subpoena demanded I give up my video and testify before a grand jury."

As for Scheer’s argument that Wolf shouldn’t have gone to prison for nothing, Wolfe said it misses the crucial point: complying with a federal subpoena hurts a journalist’s standing with sources.

"You can’t decide to only protect material if it’s of evidentiary value. And Scheer sidestepped the issue of testimony and the fact that the government agreed to not make me testify before a grand jury," Wolf told us.

The problem with grand juries, at least from a journalistic perspective, is that their inquisitional power is unlimited and their proceedings are secret. In other words, journalists can be suspected of snitching yet can’t prove they haven’t, all of which adds up to the kiss of death for reporters who cultivate the trust of confidential sources.

Wolf said he offered to give up his tape but did not offer to testify about it, as early as November 2006, but the feds rejected the latter part of his demand. Once they did agree in April that he wouldn’t have to testify about the tape’s contents, Wolf said there was no longer any point in refusing to release the tape itself.

Releasing the tape, Wolf said, helped put to rest the "suspicion that I had any relevant evidence."

"Sure, Josh had developed sources in the anarchist community, but that’s not what this was about," Wolf attorney James Wheaton told us. "It was about refusing to appear before the grand jury and testify or name names."

With a parallel debate raging about whether bloggers are journalists, Wolf said he hopes people will give him the benefit of the doubt and say he should have been protected.

"I believe my action served to be the strongest case for the need for a federal shield law," Wolf said. Local officials agree.

"What happened to Mr. Wolf is stark evidence that we need a federal shield law to make sure this does not happen again," District Attorney Kamala Harris said April 3.

Harris’s support for Wolf also highlights questions about the role San Francisco police officials played in this mess.

As part of the settlement that secured his release, Wolf answered no to two questions: did he see anybody throw anything at the squad car that was part of an alleged arson, and did he see whom SFPD officer Peter Shields was chasing before his skull got fractured?

"Answering questions about which you know nothing is not a violation of journalistic ethics," Wheaton told the Guardian. "But those same questions prove that law enforcement misused the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which was set up to investigate terrorism but which they used to get around California’s shield laws."

Public records show that the SFPD requested the help of the JTTF and the FBI to investigate the assault on Shields. That assault should be under the jurisdiction of the DA’s Office. But by framing the case as an alleged arson to a car, for which the department received some funds courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security, law enforcement was able to federalize the investigation.

With Wolf’s unedited video showing one police officer wildly pointing his gun at protesters in apparent violation of the SFPD’s general orders, questions remain as to who will hold law enforcement accountable for what’s on this long-disputed tape. *

Another digital divide

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› annalee@techsploitation.com

TECHSPLOITATION A couple weeks ago I moderated a panel discussion about free wireless Internet access in San Francisco. The audience and panelists included people who work on tech projects for the city, activists from impoverished neighborhoods, and civil liberties wonks. We were there to talk about what to do now that EarthLink has submitted a contract to San Francisco, offering to blanket the region with free wi-fi under certain conditions.

One of those conditions is that anyone who wants high-speed access will have to pay roughly $25 per month for it. So the only free wi-fi will be slow and spotty. Another condition is that Google will provide the software side of this free wi-fi network, potentially serving up location-based ads and keeping track of where people are when they log on the network.

A few minutes after panelists started discussing the EarthLink deal, a debate emerged over whether San Francisco should accept the contract with EarthLink as is or try to change some of the terms. Nicole Ozer from the American Civil Liberties Union was lobbying for more privacy-friendly provisions such as the ones EarthLink included in its contract with Portland; technical experts Tim Pozar and Bruce Wolfe wanted terms that promised better technical infrastructure. While their requests seemed reasonable to the geeks in the room, local teacher George Lee and African American community activist Reverend Arnold Townsend disagreed.

"What you don’t seem to understand," Lee said, "is that there are people in this city right now who don’t have any access to computers at all. They don’t know how to use Google or where to buy a USB drive. They can’t do their homework or apply for jobs because they don’t have Internet access. These people don’t care about being ‘pure.’ They just need to get online." Townsend echoed Lee’s sentiments, arguing that changing EarthLink’s contract would only delay much-needed high-tech resources for people in low-income areas in San Francisco — areas that are also heavily populated by blacks and other people of color.

Townsend said the concerns of civil liberties activists sounded to him like ideological quibbling. He added that Pozar’s and Wolfe’s suggestions for different technological approaches would just take longer and keep members of his community offline. Addressing the techies on the panel, Lee’s former student Chris Green said, "It’s like somebody is bleeding to death, but instead of giving him a tourniquet you’re saying that you’ll drive him to the hospital where you have really great facilities."

Ozer and others pointed out that asking EarthLink for better contractual terms isn’t likely to slow the wi-fi rollout in the city. The Board of Supervisors still needs to deliberate on the contract, and it could be more than a year before the supervisors accept the contract even if they don’t ask for changes. Plus, EarthLink’s technology may not serve the low-income communities. Wi-fi signals have a hard time traveling through walls and may not reach above the second floor on most buildings. It’s possible that EarthLink is courting low-income groups with promises of free wi-fi that the company can’t actually deliver.

Just for the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that EarthLink does manage to deliver wi-fi to low-income communities and that members of those communities can afford to get wi-fi-ready computers. Given that there are so few privacy protections in the EarthLink contract, I worry that we may close one digital divide only to open another.

Already, it’s easy for a company like Google to track what users do online and sell that information to the highest bidder. What happens when companies link that capability with the ability to know where users are physically when they log onto the wi-fi network? We might see a new era in racial profiling, where Google or companies like it sell information to police about what people in black neighborhoods are searching for online. If anybody does a suspicious search for "drugs" or "the Nation of Islam," that person could easily become the object of a fishing expedition by police.

There are many software tools that people use to protect their privacy online, but will impoverished people on the free wi-fi network know about them or be able to use them over slow connections? The new digital divide won’t be between people who can get online and those who can’t; instead, it will be between people who can afford to create privacy for themselves on the Web and those who don’t have the resources to do it. *

Annalee Newitz is a surly media nerd who wants everybody to have equal access to both the Internet and digital privacy.

A hammer, a pizza guy, and $60

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

When Darius Simms walked into Department 25 at the Hall of Justice late last year, dressed in the orange cottons inmates wear at the county’s downtown jail, he received some good news. He was being released.

The bad news was that he was still going to be punished for something a judge said she was pretty sure he didn’t do.

Simms had been on probation when he was arrested for allegedly bashing in the head of a pizza delivery driver for $60. But the District Attorney’s Office couldn’t make a criminal case against him, and the charges of assault, attempted murder, and robbery were dropped.

Still, on the advice of his lawyer, Simms accepted a deal that extended his probation until 2009 just to escape the hoosegow — essentially on the grounds that the normal rules of the criminal justice system don’t count for those on probation, innocent or not.

The way California’s probation system works, it doesn’t matter if law enforcement proves an ex-con committed a crime. Just getting arrested can mean trouble.

It is, one defense lawyer told us, a "dirty little secret" of criminal prosecutions in the state.

The prosecutors may not have a case to take to a jury, in which a defendant is innocent until proved guilty and the evidence has to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But they can send people on probation, such as Simms, to jail anyway, and that requires only a hearing before a judge.

"It’s not 12 people agreeing. It’s one," Robert Dunlap, the defense attorney for Simms, told the Guardian. "And it’s not beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s by a preponderance of the evidence. It’s a lower standard of proof."

Deputy district attorney Jim Thompson insisted that Simms was guilty even though he lacked proof, and he wanted to railroad the 26-year-old Western Addition native into more jail time.

Sitting behind the prosecutor that day in the gallery of Department 25 was a man named Tony Portillo. If Simms’s defense attorney hadn’t negotiated an extended probation for his client, Portillo would likely have testified that Simms pounded the pizza driver with what Portillo says was a wood-handled, iron-head hammer — the same testimony Portillo gave during a preliminary hearing for Simms in September 2006.

Portillo was the people’s main witness, an auto mechanic who the DA’s Office had originally believed would help keep Simms behind bars for what Thompson described as a "heinous" crime.

But case number 194817 reveals just how quickly the roles can alternate in Superior Court and how the probation status of a defendant can make a mess of the legal system.

FOR THE PEOPLE


For several months Portillo had been restoring a 1973 Dodge Challenger for his pal Apollo Pacheco’s girlfriend. The car was kept in the garage of Pacheco’s home, on 47th Avenue in the Sunset.

The 28-year-old Portillo has an unassuming stature at two inches shy of six feet and boasts an "SF" tattoo on his right arm. On April 4, 2006, he was in Pacheco’s garage working on the Challenger’s floorboards, wheelhouse, and one of the quarter panels. Portillo says he had seen Simms around the neighborhood, and the day before, Simms stopped by to ask if Portillo was willing to sell his car, which was sitting in Pacheco’s driveway. "He seemed like a fine individual," Portillo would later testify.

Simms is heavyset at six-foot-one and at the time had a short moustache and beard. He’s no stranger to the Hall of Justice. In fact, the very law enforcement office that would later try to pin him for attempted murder had sent him to the Sunset in the first place. He was supposed to be living quietly with his mother by the beach in a witness protection program, poised to testify against a man who’d allegedly shot him five times.

When the Guardian reached Portillo in person, he declined to speak on the record, but he did tell police inspectors that Simms lied at the time of their meeting by telling him he was 22. Simms, who is now 27, was also on probation for a handful of robbery and battery cases stemming from 2001.

The sale of Portillo’s junker never happened, but Simms returned the next day, and Portillo asked for help removing the Challenger’s rear window. "He was there basically for company," Portillo told the court. Throughout that second day the two talked over cans of Olde English, at which point the story began to turn.

According to court records, at some time during the afternoon, Portillo slunk into the house and stole from the fridge a rum drink prepared by Pacheco’s roommate, Ted Langlais. Langlais discovered the theft later, and the two would clash over it.

After sharing the rum, Portillo realized he needed to run to the Kragen Auto Parts store on Taraval and buy a new piece for his welder. On his way out, he asked Langlais for money, who testified that he said no.

Two young women who were visiting stayed behind at Pacheco’s house, where Langlais was painting their nails. (One of the two girls is a witness in the case, but we are concealing her name because she’s a minor. Portillo testified he believed she was Simms’s girlfriend.)

Simms, Portillo, and the girl congregated back at the garage around 7 or 8 p.m. Simms and the girl wanted to order pizza. Portillo promised to pitch in five dollars. After a period during which Portillo stated he was gathering his tools and cleaning up, the pizza arrived.

"I was washing my hands to get ready to eat," Portillo later testified. "I heard a knock on the garage. The garage was slightly open. I looked up. I saw [Simms]. I heard a thump. I looked over. I saw him striking the pizza delivery person with the blunt object."

The pizza guy, Marco Maluf, was screaming, and Simms was telling him to shut up, Portillo told inspectors the night it happened. Maluf had $60 cash on him, which he would later testify was taken.

Simms and his friend left on foot down 47th Avenue. Portillo was in shock and didn’t know what to do. He reported that he collected his tools and threw them into his car.

"Ted came down, and he said, ‘Dude, why is this guy bleeding all over my floor?’ " Portillo told the inspectors. "And I go, ‘I don’t know, Ted. Ask, ask them,’ " pointing toward the couple walking away. He didn’t call 911 but drove back toward his home in the Portola District. He called a childhood friend, a firefighter at Station 42 on San Bruno Avenue named Michael Guajardo, to ask for help. Guajardo encouraged him to go to the Taraval police station, where inspectors recorded Portillo’s version of the story.

He told the inspectors Simms called him afterward to tell him about the $60. "Dude, don’t call me again, dude," Portillo said he told Simms. "We’re done. Don’t ever — we’re done. You fucked up."

Five days later Simms was arrested for the attack. He told police interrogators that he wasn’t in the garage when the pizza arrived. Portillo, he said then, had given him and the remaining girl a ride to his house up the street. But Simms eventually admitted to police he’d returned to the garage with the girl. The girl ultimately admitted the same thing during her interview with the inspectors.

This story is far from complete, however. While Simms waited in jail, defense attorney Robert Dunlap pursued a different narrative for what happened on April 4.

FOR THE DEFENSE


Simms says he never knew Portillo as much by his birth name as he did by a nickname Portillo had given himself: Capone. He says Portillo introduced him to Langlais as a "friend from high school."

"He called me his window man," Simms told the Guardian. Simms had never taken a window out in his life, he admitted, nor had he known Portillo extensively, but he played along. "I said, ‘Cool, it’s a place to hang and drink and everything.’ "

Portillo denied in court that he ever went by the name Capone. But his close friend, Guajardo, testified during a September 2006 preliminary hearing that in recent months Portillo had, in fact, been calling himself by that name. Simms was calling Portillo by that name to police interrogators five days after Maluf was beaten. So was the girl who remained at the home that night.

Simms never testified in court, because the primary charges against him were dropped. But if Simms had testified before a jury, he likely would have told them he and Portillo had dropped by the home of Portillo’s grandfather to get some money for crack during their trip to the Kragen Auto Parts store. That’s how Simms says he knew Portillo’s grandfather had a breathing problem.

Guajardo also told the court that Portillo’s grandfather relied on a breathing apparatus for oxygen. He noted that his fire station had made medical calls to the man’s Portola home to assist him. But when defense attorney Dunlap asked Portillo about it, he denied to the court that his grandfather had any breathing problem.

Portillo also couldn’t clearly recall for the court if he’d ever been convicted of a felony. But in 2000, records show, police did arrest Portillo for cocaine and marijuana possession, and at the time, he had a suspended driver’s license. The day before Maluf was attacked, Portillo had also received a ticket for running a stop sign while taking Simms for a spin in his car along the Sunset’s Great Highway. At that time, he had a 30-day restricted license, the result of a DUI case.

After returning from the trip to Kragen and drinking a couple more beers, Portillo took Simms and the girl to Simms’s house for a change of clothes, and Portillo left alone, Simms told us.

Langlais was livid by then, having realized Portillo took his rum from the fridge. On Portillo’s way back to the house, he and Langlais argued over the phone. When he arrived, Langlais was armed with a baseball bat, according to Portillo’s court statements.

"I called Tony," Langlais testified last September, "and basically was just yelling at him on the phone for a little while…. He apologized profusely, broke down, and started crying, and I just didn’t expect that."

"I go, ‘Hey, look,’ " Portillo told the court. "’I’m not here to fight with you over this rum.’ … And he was pretty mad, so I got a little emotional."

Much of April 4 seemed charged with anxiety. Portillo by then sounded drunk, according to the testimony of Pacheco, who also argued on the phone with Portillo about the stolen rum.

The rum fiasco was resolved delicately. Simms and the girl returned to the garage with more beers. They ordered pizza. Portillo promised to pitch in. Simms says that he stepped outside for fresh air, his head spinning from the drink. The pizza man arrived.

"As soon as I step outside, I hear, ‘Uh! Uh!’ He just cavin’ this guy’s head in," Simms says. "Kickin’ him. Hittin’ him with the hammer. Just blowin’ him out of the water with it. This guy is cryin’, sayin’ some shit in some other language [Portuguese]. And [Portillo’s] yellin’, kickin’ him, sayin’, ‘Shut up! Shut the fuck up now!’ Ted comes down. He looks. ‘What the fuck is goin’ on?’ [Portillo’s], like, ‘We gotta get up outta here. I’m goin’ to Mexico.’ "

Simms says it was the start of the month and he had just cashed a Supplemental Security Income check. He didn’t need to rob the pizza man. He says police arrested him because of his background and because he lied to them about being in the garage — "I just panicked. I know how it is. I got priors."

He didn’t bother with a coat of sugar.

"The guy was small. I’m a big boy. I don’t need no fuckin’ hammer to get him. I’m just sayin’. I’m 300 pounds. If I would have used that hammer on that man, he would have been dead."

The pizza driver survived after being transferred to San Francisco General Hospital but suffered a skull fracture and lacerations that took 30 staples in his head to repair. He still gets headaches and can’t remember anything about that night.

STANDARDS OF PROOF


Nearly two decades ago the California Supreme Court declared that a lower standard of proof was sufficient to put suspects behind bars for vioutf8g the terms of their probation.

A judge convicted Juan Carlos Rodriguez of vioutf8g his probation in 1988 after a convenience store employee in King City testified that Rodriguez had shoplifted several pairs of utility gloves. The judge relied on a diluted standard of proof known as "a preponderance of the evidence" to revoke his probation rather than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" required from juries at full-blown criminal trials.

Rodriguez appealed and won. But prosecutors took the case to the state’s highest court, and in 1990 the justices decided that state case law already permitted a lower standard of proof known as "clear and convincing evidence." In effect, the court ruled, the state could send a person on probation back to jail on as little proof as it wanted. Besides, the justices argued, a higher standard amounted to retrying a criminal who’d already been granted the court’s grace and would unnecessarily burden the system.

Coincidentally, former San Francisco DA Arlo Smith filed a friend of the court brief in People v. Rodriguez supporting the state’s position.

But at least one concurring judge worried ominously that with a lower threshold for alleged probation violations, "an unfortunate incentive might arise to use the revocation hearing as a substitute for a criminal prosecution."

Former supervisor Matt Gonzalez, who worked as a public defender prior to his time at City Hall, says that’s exactly what’s happened. He recalls a case that surfaced years after Rodriguez involving a woman named Mary Elizabeth Alcoser. Although she had a long history of trouble ranging from severe narcotics abuse to prostitution dating back to the 1970s, according to criminal records, after police charged her with assault in a 1997 case, she was fully acquitted by a jury, citing self-defense.

"Even though she was acquitted," Gonzalez said, "the judge sent her to prison on a probation violation, because he determined that by a lower standard of proof, she was guilty…. The real question is, who benefits when you don’t have the higher standard of proof employed?"

In another case, Gonzalez represented a Hispanic man facing robbery charges following an incident at a Mission bar. A witness described the assailant during testimony as African American. But the judge sent Gonzalez’s client to prison on a probation violation anyway, claiming that a piece of jewelry snatched during the encounter and later found on the suspect implicated him, even though he’d never even been charged with receiving stolen property.

Gonzalez calls it the "innuendo of a case unproven."

Speaking in general terms, longtime local defense attorney Don Bergerson said it’s far from uncommon for the DA’s Office to use an alleged probation violation as leverage for getting tough jail sentences when a case otherwise looks lifeless.

"To hide behind the fact that the standard of proof required to revoke probation is ostensibly less seems to me to be morally and practically dishonest," Bergerson said, "even if one can justify it semantically."

When we reached deputy district attorney Thompson, he refused to talk about the Simms case. But spokesperson Debbie Mesloh said outright that the DA’s Office was seeking to take advantage of the lower standard of proof and added that there was at least enough evidence to hold Simms for trial.

"The charges in this case were dismissed because we await crucial DNA evidence that was not available at the time that the defendant was scheduled to go to trial," Mesloh wrote in a January e-mail. "We currently await the findings of this evidence."

Her office confirmed in a follow-up e-mail, however, that the DNA analysis has so far gone nowhere. To this day, no reasonably good physical evidence from the case has been identified.

FOR THE RECORD


Somebody almost killed Maluf, and the two most likely suspects are Portillo and Simms. Neither is a Boy Scout, and both have an obvious incentive to finger the other.

That’s exactly why courts require strong evidence — enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt — before sending someone to prison. Using shortcuts such as probation revocations leads to slipshod prosecutions and wrongful convictions.

Strong evidence standards are particularly important for a case as muddled as this one.

Portillo told the court he doesn’t do drugs, let alone smoke crack.

While he’s "got no love for Tony" over the stolen rum, Langlais told us he’s certain he heard Simms yelling at Maluf, and he saw Simms standing over him when he entered the garage from upstairs. He’s "enraged" that San Francisco’s "revolving-door" criminal justice system put Simms back on the street.

But defense attorney Dunlap said Portillo’s testimony, which the lawyer described as "inconsistent," wasn’t nearly enough to prove the assault, robbery, and attempted murder charges.

"When Jim Thompson got the case assigned to him upstairs," Dunlap said, "I think he took an honest look at it and realized he was going to have a hard time convincing a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that [Simms] was guilty of the crime. Because [Simms] was on probation, [Thompson] opted to dismiss the trial and proceed on a motion to revoke instead…. It was more or less a practical way to try and salvage something from a sinking ship."

After reluctantly accepting the extended probation deal for Simms at the hearing Dec. 13, 2006, Thompson still complained that Simms deserved more jail time.

"Your honor, this disposition is over the people’s strenuous objection," he indignantly informed Judge Charlotte Woolard. "The defendant has a lengthy criminal history…. And I do believe there is sufficient evidence that the defendant was the culprit in this matter."

But Woolard had a different opinion, based on a reading of Portillo’s testimony from the preliminary hearing, a telling example of how difficult it will always be to turn a real-world criminal prosecution into a fictionalized television drama and why the resolution of this case might actually be the worst possible outcome.

"The people’s main witness," she said, "in this court’s opinion is quite likely the person that committed this offense." *

Tempest in an urban teapot

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OPINION Our local road-culture war has erupted again, this time thanks to some unsavory gossip columnists at the monopoly paper in town. Wildly distorted accounts of two confrontations at Critical Mass in March have been presented as evidence that bicyclists are antisocial, out of control, and generally immature scofflaws. Such accounts serve to frame a narrative that is in sharp contrast with the actual experience of tens of thousands of bicyclists, pedestrians, and motorists on the last Friday of every month, not just in San Francisco but in hundreds of cities worldwide where Critical Mass rides take place regularly.

Suddenly, normal life is suspended as thousands of bicyclists — talking, singing, playing instruments and boom boxes, smiling and laughing — take to the streets. Bells tinkle, people wave, traffic stops, encouragement is shouted, and uncounted conversations of unknowable depth and breadth happen by serendipity and choice. This is much more characteristic of the Critical Mass experience than the relatively rare confrontation between an overheated, impatient motorist and a self-righteous, antagonistic cyclist.

Cheap journalism of the type practiced by the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Matier and Ross just obscures the truth that our transportation system is designed to promote mayhem, anger, and alienation. Every day motorists crash and die, confront one another angrily, and are left cowering in isolation. The fact that such events can also happen during Critical Mass should come as no surprise.

The sheer exuberant pleasure of a rolling mass occupation of city streets month after month is hard to understand unless you’ve been a part of it. For the dozens of online flamers who have ferociously denounced Critical Mass, it’s inconceivable that an event that doesn’t behave according to the staid norms of a placid democratic society can have any justification: "Critical Mass doesn’t make demands! No one is in charge! The participants don’t all behave like obedient schoolchildren! They are destroying the cause of bicycling for the law-abiding cyclists!" And so on.

In February and March, Critical Mass bicyclists rode for two to three hours through San Francisco streets, enjoying the city in ways unplanned by traffic engineers, police, and city bureaucrats. It’s a remarkable reinvention of urban life in an organized coincidence that is mostly spontaneous in spite of its predictability — surprising every time and inspiring most of the time.

Critical Massers are engaged in that most rare of activities: an act of collective imagination and invention that is considerably greater than the sum of its parts.

For those motorists or bicyclists who think Critical Mass is about a fight between cars and bikes, think again! We are all in this together, and a monthly demonstration of how much better life could be is an invitation to everyone to try something different. There is a well-defined etiquette among Critical Mass riders that encourages riders to thank stuck drivers for their patience, promotes an atmosphere of friendly camaraderie on all sides, and invites the curious to join us next month at the foot of Market Street (April 27, 6 p.m.) on a bicycle for an experience that just might change your life. *

The Committee for Full Enjoyment

The Committee for Full Enjoyment (www.fullenjoyment.com) is an ad hoc group of San Franciscans dedicated to a richer life.

The real Josh Wolf story

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EDITORIAL The level of misunderstanding and utter inaccuracy in the reporting on the release of videographer and blogger Josh Wolf has been astonishing. Since Wolf was released from federal custody April 3, it seems as if everyone is taking a swipe at the 24-year-old, who set a record as the longest imprisoned journalist in American history.

The way much of the press covered the story, it would seem that Wolf gave up, abandoned his principles, and handed the government what it wanted; or he wasn’t really a journalist; or what he had wasn’t worth protecting.

But as Sarah Phelan reports ("Who Blinked?," page 15), those critics are all completely missing the point.

The facts: Wolf filmed an anarchist demonstration during which a San Francisco police car was slightly damaged and a cop was hit over the head. The San Francisco Police Department contacted the feds, who decided that since the city gets federal funding for police equipment, the damage to a taillight worth maybe $20 was enough to make this a federal case.

Wolf posted some clips from his footage on his Web site. Then a federal grand jury subpoenaed Wolf and demanded that he turn over all of the video — and that he come and testify about it under oath.

Wolf said from the start the video showed nothing that would be useful to the assault and vandalism investigations. He begged federal Judge William Alsup to look at the outtakes himself so that he could see the material was irrelevant. Alsup refused.

But the video was never the central issue. Wolf was in jail because he wouldn’t appear in a secret proceding before a grand jury without a lawyer and answer any questions under oath that the prosecution might have about the demonstration. He might have been asked to identify participants, to talk about any private information they had given him — in effect, to become a government agent in the investigation.

As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in a brief supporting Wolf, the FBI has been investigating activists all over the country. Once the grand jury started asking Wolf questions, he could have been forced to aid those investigations.

After almost eight months, a mediator was able to come up with a compromise. Wolf posted the rest of the video on the Web and gave it to the feds; as he had said all along, it showed nothing relevant. More important, though, he was able to avoid becoming a witness for the prosecution. All he had to do was say under oath that he didn’t know who hit the cop or damaged the car. Which he has been saying all along.

So this was in no way a capitulation to the authorities — and was by no means a moot issue. Wolf was standing firmly behind the journalistic principle that no reporter should become an agent of law enforcement. None of this was Wolf’s fault — it was the fault of the local cops, the federal prosecutors, and the judge. Wolf’s release after seven and a half months was a victory for free press and the First Amendment — and his incarceration ought to be strong grounds for Congress to pass a federal shield law. *

How Weird gets walloped…again

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By Steven T. Jones
When the How Weird Street Fair last month barely survived the city permit process to get the OK for one final gathering on Howard Street on May 6, I warned that they were likely to have a hard time with the cops. After all, Southern Station Capt. Denis O’Leary, the guy charged with setting their police fees, had come right out and sided with the handful of neighbors who were trying to kill the popular event. O’Leary promised to be fair. But now, How Weird organizer Brad Olsen tells the Guardian that the cops have more than doubled his fees, demanding $17,700 for beefed up patrols. That’s despite the fact that this year’s event ends two hours earlier than last year (another city demand), has never had significant law enforcement problems, and it’s fee last year was $7,700. O’Leary hasn’t yet returned my telephone call asking what this is about, but it doesn’t sound like he’s living up to his comment to me, “I’m very fair.” Meanwhile, the newly formed Outdoor Events Coalition is pushing City Hall to ease the administrative crackdown on street fairs. Stay tuned.
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‘WHEN WE WERE YOUNG’: Gen Xers don’t wanna be cops ‘cause they’re fat and lazy, says Gary Delagnes — PLUS! Police commissioner David Campos responds to the POA’s call for his resignation

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By G.W. Schulz

There’s never a shortage of bitching over at the San Francisco Police Officers Association. And the best place to find it lying exposed, unshaven and clad in patent-leather stirrups without so much as a single blush is in the cop union’s monthly newsletter, the POA Journal.

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As attorney Mark Schlosberg at the ACLU of Northern California will tell you, there’s no better place than the POA Journal for an honest assessment of what the SFPD’s rank and file is really thinking. And leading each edition of the Journal is a scribe from outspoken union president Gary Delagnes that’s sometimes funny but mostly unsettling.

Without further ado, ladies and gentleman, welcome to another edition of “What’s the city’s cop union bitching about now?”

This past year actually treated the POA quite well, what with the state Supreme Court’s Copley decision sealing off police disciplinary records from public scrutiny, Berkeley losing a subsequent legal challenge to the ruling and the SFPD’s general success in slowing down the implementation of a program designed to track and flag lunatic cops.

The Martin Luther King you don’t see on TV

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It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.” The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole. What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968). An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV. Why? It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years. In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter. But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation’s fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights” – including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow. Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power. “True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” By 1967, King had also become the country’s most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 –– a year to the day before he was murdered –– King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” (Full text/audio here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm) From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them. In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.” You haven’t heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 – and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People’s Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble “a multiracial army of the poor” that would descend on Washington – engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be – until Congress enacted a poor people’s bill of rights. Reader’s Digest warned of an “insurrection.” King’s economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America’s cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its “hostility to the poor” – appropriating “military funds with alacrity and generosity,” but providing “poverty funds with miserliness.” How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King’s efforts on behalf of the poor people’s mobilization were cut short by an assassin’s bullet. In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with “alacrity and generosity,” while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup. And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King’s life. ___________________________________________ Jeff Cohen is the author of “Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.” Norman Solomon’s book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is out in paperback.

Seattle’s finest

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The Crime Watch column was far and away the most entertaining part of my hometown’s local paper. Police Beat, a week-in-the-life account of a Seattle-by-way-of-Senegal bike cop named Z (played by nonprofessional actor Pape S. Niang), is structured around these strangely revealing public records, culled from the real Seattle blotter by writer Charles Mudede. Reenacted and filtered through Z’s layered immigrant experience, the episodic busts and false alarms are woven with off-key comedy and vague apprehension: a formulation that makes the film the rare work to merit the overused "Kafkaesque" tag.

The various crime scenes Z happens on are only connected in their general weirdness. Director Robinson Devor (previously celebrated for his 2000 debut, The Woman Chaser) drops us into these digressions midstream, denying us context or even clarity of tone. A man ravages raw meat in a supermarket; a woman with a gash on her head has been hit by an errant tree branch; a pimp has two chubby prostitutes doing sit-ups at gunpoint: these scenes hover uneasily between humor and menace. Their oddness reverberates against Z’s unwieldy English; he mediates with the strange lyricism that comes from being lost in translation (shades of Jim Jarmusch), instructing the tree-battered woman, for example, that "your tree is dead, and if it’s not chopped down, it will continue to harm and disturb the living."

If the audience is peculiarly disassociated from the nominal action in Police Beat, it’s only to match Z’s dreamy remove. We get his strange little koans in English, but the voice-over, in which he ponders his immigrant status (Police Beat articulates the notion of being a stranger in a strange land to an extreme degree) and worries over his spectral girlfriend’s faithfulness, is rendered in his native Wolof. Z’s musings aren’t readily locatable in either time or space, and while thoughts and action frequently seem to overlap, the echoes between the two only thicken the obscure narration.

And yet, if Police Beat ‘s montage is something of a hazy daydream, it’s hardly a formless one. The glue holding the picture together is Devor’s responsive mise-en-scène. Seattle — with its forested city streets, overgrown industrial sites, and ubiquitous water passageways (and bridges) — is a landscape of in-betweens, everywhere suggestive of Z’s placeless condition. In framing too, Devor frequently denies us a fully contextualized picture, casting Z against abstracted dark blues and greens. When Z rides his bicycle, the director allows the background to blur out of focus, creating an effect reminiscent of those deliriously dreamlike rear-projection shots once preferred in Hollywood productions.

Police Beat is marked by indirection on all levels, a risky modus operandi rarely found in mainstream or independent cinema. The prioritization of situation over characterization recalls Robert Bresson’s classics (as do the detached voice-over and the use of a quotidian occupation to frame the "action" of a film), and while Police Beat isn’t Pickpocket, sometimes a film’s ambition seems validating in its own right, regardless of whether it ties together as a neat package (Police Beat doesn’t).

Or maybe I’m just more willing than usual to forgive loose ends because of my sense that Devor and Mudede had fun making this movie — in compiling the crime reports and scouting Seattle, yes, but also in playing with the police procedural. They pay heed to the genre’s standard emphasis on temporality (a title occasionally breaks in, specifying the day of the week; every night ends with Z composing his police report), but instead of orienting these narrative ploys toward some guiding goal or payoff, Devor and Mudede allow them to overripen and underscore Z’s elusive existence: their film is more Eternal Sunshine of the Punch-Drunk Mind than Zodiac. This shift in emphasis makes Z the rare cop character I can actually relate to. His profile may seem unusual — I did, after all, have to look up the spelling of "Wolof" — but his experience is intensely familiar to those of us who regularly lose ourselves in the city. "I was in my own world," we say, though Z would surely have a more interesting way of putting it. *

POLICE BEAT

Opens Fri/6

Roxie Cinema

3117 16th St., SF

(415) 863-1087

www.roxie.com

www.policebeatmovie.com

Stand up for immigrants, Mr. Newsom

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OPINION President George W. Bush’s war on immigration is wreaking havoc on San Francisco’s immigrant community. Across the Bay Area and in San Francisco, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have been carrying out raids at homes and workplaces, near schools, and, in broad daylight, on the streets. Hundreds of immigrants have been deported, devastating families, separating parents from United States–born children, and leaving entire neighborhoods in a state of fear.

There are few other neighborhoods that feel the ICE war more than the Mission District, the Latino heart and soul of San Francisco. So it was especially painful to sit through a two-hour town hall meeting orchestrated by Mayor Gavin Newsom on March 26 at César Chávez Elementary School in the Mission. Never once did he acknowledge vocal community members’ concerns over ICE sweeps and civil rights abuses. Instead, as predicted, he kept to the script, selecting two dozen questions out of 70 that were submitted by more than 250 attendees. Despite the loud chants, luchadores dressed in capes and masks, and bold visuals that called for a stop to the ICE raids, the mayor continued to talk and talk and talk some more about the health care access initiative.

Health care access is an important issue — residents and workers throughout the city appreciate the mayor’s efforts and welcome any relief for the thousands of uninsured, low-income, and undocumented residents of San Francisco. But right now the streets of the city are hot, and immigrant families are scared to leave their homes, send their kids to school, go to work, or even seek medical care at General Hospital for fear of being swept up, displaced, and deported.

Fortunately, there are some protections in the city. In 1989 the immigrant-rights movement, with the support of elected officials, established the sanctuary ordinance, which bars city officials, the Police Department, and other city agencies from cooperating with federal immigration officials. But in light of the most recent aggression, the time has come for our mayor and our elected officials to do more.

In 2004, in a rightful act of civil disobedience, a defiant Newsom stood up for justice by marrying same-sex couples, a landmark event in US civil rights history. It’s time for the mayor to once again stand up for justice by supporting the immigrants who make great contributions to this city and the nation.

Mayor Newsom, show us that your stance on civil rights has no limits and is inclusive of immigrant workers and families. Show us that you were not just currying favor or seeking votes but are truly committed to all civil rights issues.

Join with us:

• March with the immigrant community to protest the ICE raids.

• Convene a meeting with ICE officials, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, and community members.

• Increase city resources for legal and educational services that help immigrants get on the pathway to legalization.

• Support the current day-laborer center and use day laborers’ input in the future expansion and creation of worker centers.

• Support the immigrant-led planning process in the Mission District, which calls for more affordable housing and jobs. *

Oscar M. Grande

Oscar M. Grande is a community organizer with PODER, People Organized to Demand Employment Rights.

Balazo KO?

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kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Once upon a time in the Mission, there was a gallery named Balazo. Not quite old enough to know better and a ways from 18, or 18th Street, the little walk-up art space that could blasted into many a local indie fan’s existence in the early ’00s with wall-rattling, hot ‘n’ clammy punk jammies overlooking the 24th Street and Mission BART station. From the beginning, this space was anything but Snow White pristine: noise kids littered the pavement outside with butts, and upstairs the humidity was high and the audience shank-to-elbow deep, packed into a onetime living room for bands like the Mae-Shi and the Lowdown who made it way loud for the crowd. Trailing into adjacent rooms were beer drinkers and art lovers, gazing at massive blowups depicting disappearing SF industrial buildings or paintings praising pubic pouches. Peddling metal too raw for larger stages, punk en español, and local ear bleed avant-gardians, Balazo proved the prince of the underground, Latino-run and Mission-bred, sweeping in on its black charger after Epicenter and Mission Records packed it in and keeping it all relatively under the radar, even as it hauled its bad self down the street to a space at Mission and 18th streets still greasily redolent of the past Chinese chop suey tenant. Rechristened Balazo 18 Art Gallery, the joint has hosted bands ranging from Beijing punkers Brain Failure to SF indie rockers Caesura, and artists including Michael Arcega and Liz Cohen — opening its doors to parties of all flavors.

But every fairy tale has an ending — whether Balazo 18’s is happy or not remains up in the air.

Guardian ears pricked up when we heard the gallery was forced to cancel an event planned for the relaunch of GavinWatch.com. Further, Guardian reporter G.W. Schultz obtained a letter sent to acting director Amy Lee of San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection from a resident living on Dolores Street who complained of "drug sellers and prostitutes hanging around all day and night" in the area. Though the author seemed to be attributing the activity to the general vibe of the hood, she did bemoan a "torn canopy" and "boarded up windows" at Balazo’s current 2183 Mission location.

Records show the city opened a file in mid-March, but an inspector noted the building’s "sign appears safe," and no apparent building violations were found. But we continued to scratch our collective heads, since Balazo’s online events calendar only lists dates through February. Was San Francisco about to lose one of the remaining all-ages venues for emerging hardcore, metal, and rock acts?

We finally got a hold of Juan Villanueva, who runs Balazo along with founder Txutxu Pxupxo, for a lowdown on the laid-low gallery. On his way to the first in a series of benefits for Balazo at Dolores Park on April 1, Villanueva explained that a neighbor had been complaining about the murals and denizens on the street, claiming the space was "bringing property valuation down," but it’s unclear whether that brought building inspectors to the gallery to check on the renovations that had been going on to make Balazo’s entrance and restrooms wheelchair accessible.

Unfortunately, at the same time the police began visiting Balazo, asking for an entertainment license, which Pxupxo and Villanueva don’t possess but have subsequently applied for. The $1,500 permit cost, the more than $2,000 needed for the construction, and the required month needed to post the permit application sign have caused the venue to cease shows for fear of incurring thousands in fines.

It sounds like a case of when it rains, all hell breaks loose. "Yeah, it’s a hassle," Villanueva agreed. "We pay rent from shows that come in. But right now we’re desperately in need of funds." Contrary to popular belief, Balazo is not a nonprofit, regardless of its work establishing a DIY community space in the area. Villanueva hopes that favorable letters will be sent to the Entertainment Commission by April 25 supporting Balazo’s application and that the community turns out for the May 1 entertainment-license hearing. But the gallery also has to find a way to pay its monthly $8,200 rent.

Perhaps the villagers will step up to rescue the hero this time around: Villanueva says bands such as La Plebe and Peligro Social have already volunteered to play benefits and the 924 Gilman Street Project has offered to host a throwdown. But we in the peanut gallery are all hoping other, more stealthy forces don’t snatch this independent space away. "Time influences our capability of whether we can make it," Villaneuva warns. "If it takes three months and we can’t get three months’ worth of rent, that would really affect us." *

www.myspace.com/balazo18gallery

Additional reporting by G.W. Schulz.

DON’T BOTHER KNOCKIN’

THREE LEAFS, ASCENDED MASTER, AND MODULAR SET


Something ecstatic this way comes from the synth eccentrics of Modular Set, the electric bongo beaters of Ascended Master, and the free-psych natureniks of Three Leafs. Thurs/5, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

CASS MCCOMBS, ARBOURETUM, AND DAVID KARSTEN DANIELS


Making music that can be startling sublime, Scorpio McCombs plays tag with the golden, Will Oldham–esque Arbouretum and Fat Cat experimental roots wrecker Karsten Daniels. Fri/6, 9:30 p.m., $10. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

LIGHTNING BOLT


Mind-frying volume, a frenzied punk psych attack, much spilled sweat, and a whirlpool of quasi moshing made up the scene at the last Lightning Bolt show at Verdi Club a few years back. The Brians have been busy since then, generating a split import CD, Ultra Cross V. 1 (Sony), with Guitar Wolf. Brian Chippendale pulls out percussion on the next Björk disc, kept up his Black Pus side project, and whipped up a book of eye-blisteringly bright Ninja comics for Picturebox. And Brian Gibson recently birthed Barkley’s Barnyard Critters: Mystery Tail, an animation DVD. But résumé builders aside, you really must sink your teeth into LB’s ass live. Mon/9, 9 p.m., $7. LoBot Gallery, 1800 Campbell, Oakl. www.lobotgallery.com. Also Tues/10, 9 p.m., $8. 12 Galaxies, 2565 Mission, SF. (415) 970-9777 *

Wolf freed!

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After spending more than seven months in prison for refusing to give a federal grand jury video outtakes of a 2005 anarchist protest, freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf’s is today being released. According to one of Wolf’s lawyers, David Greene of the Oakland-based First Amendment Project, Wolf won’t have to testify to the grand jury or identify protesters shown in his video, which has now been posted at his Web site, www.joshwolf.net/blog.

The deal was announced the day after a second three-hour mediation session before a federal magistrate in San Francisco. The 24-year-old Wolf has been held in contempt of court by a federal judge since August 2006 and has been imprisoned longer than any other journalist in U.S. history for withholding information. He is reportedly being picked up from the federal correctional facility in Dublin this afternoon and will appear on the steps of San Francisco City Hall at 5 p.m.

Greene said that the April 3 breakthrough occurred when federal prosecutors dropped their insistence that Wolf testify to the grand jury about people he interviewed for his video. Greene said Wolf was prepared to turn over the outtakes last November if he’d been excused from testifying but prosecutors refused.

In an April 3 press release, Greene wrote, “For the last several months, this (dispute) has been principally about the testimony and not about the video. The only reason he decided to publish (the video) now was their assurances that they would not require his testimony.”

Greene said prosecutors required only that Wolf answer two questions under oath, in writing: whether he ever saw anyone throw or shoot any object at a police car or learned about anyone who did so, and whether he knew who Officer Peter Shields was trying to arrest when he was hit from behind and suffered a fractured skull. Wolf answered no to both questions in a court filing today.

In a separate filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffery Finigan said Wolf has complied with the grand jury subpoena and should be released from prison. Finigan also noted the government has reserved the right to issue a new subpoena to Wolf in the future.

“I think his sacrifice of his personal liberty for 226 days for the sake of a principle that was for something much larger than him personally was really commendable,” Greene said.

Rick Knee of the National Writers Union say his group believes that, “Josh’s persecution at the hands of the San Francisco Police Department, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco, federal prosecutor Jeffrey Finigan, the federal grand jury and U.S. District Judge William Alsup was morally and ethically reprehensible, and an egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars.”

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