Sheriff

Sex crimes grandstanding

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EDITORIAL Sex offenders are an easy political target. Nobody wants to be portrayed as soft on child molesters; nobody wants to defend ex-cons who are required to register their whereabouts with the police. Jessica’s Law, the state bill that bars registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of any school or park, passed overwhelmingly in 2006, and only a few brave politicians, including San Francisco sheriff Mike Hennessey and Assemblymember Mark Leno, were willing to oppose the measure on the grounds that it’s counterproductive and unworkable.

Now Joe Alioto Veronese, a San Francisco police commissioner and candidate for State Senate, has launched an effort to force the local police to roust sex offender parolees who live in San Francisco. It’s good politics for someone who wants a high-profile campaign issue, but it’s bad law enforcement policy.

Proposition 83, which Veronese supported, imposes harsh penalties for anyone convicted of a sex crime. It also prevents all convicted offenders from living in San Francisco, since there’s not a single residential unit in the city that isn’t within 2,000 feet of a school or a park. That, of course, simply forces the problem onto other communities — and tends to send offenders to rural areas, where they lack access to services and ties to the community. By most accounts, isoutf8g ex-cons is a bad way to prevent future criminal conduct.

But there’s a loophole, and the state Bureau of Prisons has made no effort to hide it. If an ex-offender registers as transient — that is, homeless — the state can’t bust him or her for living too close to a school or a park. So some number of parolees — perhaps as many as 166 — released after committing sex crimes have returned to San Francisco and registered as transients. Some of them probably are, indeed, homeless. Some are no doubt trying to find a way to live in this city without vioutf8g Prop. 83 (and thus vioutf8g their parole, which means returning to prison).

Veronese wants the San Francisco Police Department to go out and find every one of these transients and, if they aren’t in fact homeless, arrest them for parole violation. That’s going to take a lot of police time — and is unlikely to be terribly effective.

For starters, it’s not the job of the SFPD to monitor parolees. The state’s Department of Corrections does that — and every transient parolee has to check in with his or her parole officer every single day anyway. Veronese told us he doesn’t expect the SFPD to send ex-offenders back to prison — but if they’re arrested, that’s exactly what will happen.

And for the record, as Sheriff Hennessey points out, only a very small percentage of paroled sex offenders are rearrested for sex crimes. The vast majority of child molesters — the category of criminals Prop. 83 was aimed at — are relatives of the child in question, not strangers on the street. And every one of these parolees already has to wear a GPS bracelet.

The whole effect of Veronese’s policy will be to drive further underground a population that shouldn’t be hiding in the shadows. It would encourage parolees to hide, to remove their locator bracelets, and to avoid service providers. It would divert police resources at a time when the murder rate is soaring.

It’s a bad idea that the rest of the commissioners should shoot down. And if Veronese wants to be a serious candidate for State Senate, he should start talking about real issues and leave the phony "tough-on-crime" stuff for the Republicans.

Extra! Rock Rapids 38 Carroll 0

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Well, it isn’t Rock Rapids High School any more and it isn’t the almost famous Rock Rapids Lions. It’s now a consolidated high school district and goes under the fancier nomenclature of Central Lyon. (The Central Lyon Lions just doesn’t have it, does it? For the regular Bruce blog readers, you will realize that I am talking about my almost famous hometown of Rock Rapids, Iowa, a little town in northwest Iowa known as the Gateway to the West.)

Jim Wells just flashed me the final score: Central Lyon 35 Carroll 0. A rout and a surprising one since our two quarterbacks have been banged up and it’s been questionable which one could play for how long and with what effectiveness.

Next game is on Saturday for the state championship, a big big thing back in Iowa, much bigger than the presidential primaries. Everybody in town (that’s about 2,800 people) will either be at the game or glued to the radio. I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. This is how things work back in Rock Rapids, by personal contact over the years and the generations. Jim Wells was the cpa for years for my parents at their drugstore, “Brugmann’s Drugs: Where Drugs and Gold are Fairly Sold, Since l902.” And he handled their personal taxes until they died in the early l990s. He is now reporting on Rock Rapids news for the Bruce blog. I am also getting reports from Dave Foltz and others. Dave is the grandson of Glen Foltz, who operated Foltz’s Construction for many years and then became the Lyon County sheriff. He reported earlier that Halloween in Rock Rapids was pretty tame this year and that my boxcar-across-Main Street generation had probably spoiled it for all the succeeding generations.

Working on the Foltz crew, during the summers, was a rite of passage for the young men in town just out of high school or in college. However, my crew was the crew for the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), FDR’s public power agency that brought electricity to the farms. But that is another story for another day.) B3

Dead town

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

Every reporter assigned to the Castro on Halloween knew right away that the story was, in fact, the nonstory.

There were no outlaws. No shootings or stabbings as in the past. There weren’t even many of the scumbag bridge-and-tunnelers police feared most. The mayor’s plan worked: two decades of fun in the Castro on Halloween died in 2007.

"People are leaving in droves," one man said into his cell phone around 10:30 p.m. "We can’t drink."

By that point the San Francisco Police Department could count the total arrests on one hand. A few people were cuffed for public intoxication. One man had outstanding warrants. Another jaywalked. Department spokesperson Sgt. Neville Gittens — not someone reporters know as typically cheerful — was in a startlingly good mood.

"There aren’t enough people out here to urinate or defecate anywhere," Gittens told the Guardian that night while standing near a cordoned command and control center the city had planted at 18th and Collingwood streets. "You can see the streets. They’re pretty empty. They’re pretty quiet, and we’re very thankful for that. What we set out to accomplish as far as discouraging this party, so far it seems like it’s working."

The Mayor’s Office, in fact, called the night "an incredible success." Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press spokesperson, added, "We are pleased with the way Halloween turned out this year. [Police] Chief [Heather] Fong did an excellent job of keeping the peace, and Sup. [Bevan] Dufty deserves praise for showing real leadership and representing the interests of his district."

But that success came at a cost — the Castro on Halloween night was under the tight control of a massive contingent of police. Barricades blocked the streets. Cops kept revelers (and anyone else who happened by) from setting so much as a toe off the sidewalk.

While the crowd totaled just a fraction of what has appeared in years past, Gittens said well over 500 law enforcement personnel were assigned to the area, including officers from the probation department, the BART Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, the California Highway Patrol, and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Even the San Francisco Chronicle, an institution that hardly embodies unbridled countercultural fun — deemed the law enforcement preparations "almost militaristic."

The tab for all of that police presence — and for the lost tax revenue from bars and restaurants and the hit to the tourist industry — will almost certainly run into millions of dollars.

At times members of the media even appeared to outnumber partygoers. When an ambulance and two vans from the Sheriff’s Department began backing into an alley between Market and Castro, a camera operator and a reporter rushed to the scene. It was nothing, it turned out. Just a woman splayed out drunk next to a Dumpster.

SMALL BUSINESSES UNHAPPY


The last-minute announcement of the shutdown of the BART station at 16th and Mission streets, Gittens said, probably did the trick more than anything else. But that decision enraged some business owners, who told us they were worried that fewer transit riders would threaten revenue during what is usually a profitable holiday.

"Small business is the heartbeat of San Francisco, and the Mission district itself endures enough difficulties on a regular basis," Jean Feilmoser, president of the Mission Merchants Association, wrote in a community e-mail Oct. 30. "To cut off the arm that feeds the economic engine on one of the busiest nights of the year is cruel and unusual punishment."

The dramatic transit shutdown earned harsh criticism from two local officials, BART board member Tom Radulovich and District 6’s Sup. Chris Daly.

"Transit riders have been unfairly singled out in the city’s War on Halloween, and BART’s proposed closure is an insult to the community [that]
relies on 16th Street Mission Station," the two wrote in an Oct. 30 letter condemning the move. "People and businesses that depend on BART and Muni will have their mobility compromised by this campaign to suppress the Halloween celebration in the Castro."

Alix Rosenthal, who lost a board challenge to Castro district Sup. Bevan Dufty in 2006, was appalled by how little the public knew about the Halloween plans in advance. Rosenthal helped found Citizens for Halloween, a group that argued revelers would show up despite city hall’s insistence that the event be cancelled this year.

"I think it was really great they were able to keep the Castro safe," Rosenthal said. "But at what cost? The cost of fun. The cost of Halloween. The cost of transit riders. The cost of merchants."

Several businesses — including sex shops, bars, and restaurants — relented to pressure from the city and closed early. Officers clad in riot helmets and zip cuffs filled the entryways, seeming to overshadow civilians and bored-looking TV reporters.

The Edge bar at 4149 18th St., Osaki Sushi around the corner, the Posh Bagel, Chinese Dim Sum, the Sausage Factory, and even Twin Peaks, a bar that stands at the northeast entryway of the Castro and normally serves as a sort of de facto welcoming committee for the neighborhood, were shuttered. The restaurant A Bon Port at 476 Castro stood dark with a chalkboard sign in the window: "Out cruising," it read hopefully.

San Francisco Badlands, one of many Castro bars owned by area entrepreneur Les Natali, closed at 10 p.m., and two perturbed-looking private security guards in orange vests informed loiterers that they weren’t allowed in any longer. Harvey’s (on the southwest corner of 18th and Castro streets) remained open, but there were few people inside.

THE EAST BAY CROWD


The folks who braved the police and the lack of transit tried to liven things up. Just south of the Castro Muni station, two friends protested with signs reading, "Don’t tell us what to do — we’ll come if we want to." One of them, Erik Proctor, splits his time between the East Bay and San Francisco and said residents who move to the neighborhood should expect rambunctious annual celebrations.

"Partly why I’m out here is because last year they said people from the East Bay were the problem," Proctor said. "I represent the East Bay also. I come over here to have a good time. I don’t come over here to cause problems."

With the crowd under control, the cops had plenty of time to chat about their paychecks. "Are you on OT?" one officer standing south of 18th Street casually asked another.

"I think so," he responded.

"Well, that’s good."

A handful of costumed celebrants graced filled the sidewalks, but there was still plenty of breathing room, and traffic moved swiftly and easily along Castro Street, which was lined with steel barricades. One step into the street would elicit a hand on the chest and a hasty warning from a police officer: "Back on the sidewalk."

A handful of men went near-commando in little more than elastic thongs, but few people were shocked, and most of the costumes were far from scandalous. One woman dressed as a bag of groceries from Trader Joe’s.

Among the people most directly impacted were foreign tourists — the very folks the city spends money to attract every year. Activists walking through the Castro and interviewing people found visitors from 19 countries who had come to see the legendary celebration. Most walked away disappointed; they won’t be back next year.

THE BACKLASH


At least one business that stayed open felt a bit of official pressure. Koch Salgut, who owns Ararat on 18th Street, didn’t close early, even though he was repeatedly asked to do so.

"I kept it open because I was against" the shutdown, he told us later. "All the merchants rely on the business."

To his surprise, he got a visit that night from the San Francisco Fire Department. The inspectors told him he didn’t have permits for the candles on his tables.

"This is the second business I’ve had. I never heard there was a regulation against candles," Salgut told us. "The Fire Department gave me a little hard time. It wasn’t threatening, but it was an ugly situation."

Salgut has no doubt what was going on: "They were trying to give me a hard time because I was open, I didn’t close."

Calls to the SFFD seeking comment were not returned by press time.

John Lewis, a bartender at Moby Dick on 18th Street, wasn’t working Halloween night, but he lives in the neighborhood — and when we talked to him Nov. 1, he told us he wasn’t at all happy about what went down. The city had promised to fix the problem, he told us — not shut down the entire event. He complained that local bars were asked to close early and then reminded that they could be cited for exceeding occupancy regulations, for public displays of drunkenness, and for open containers on the street. Halloween has traditionally been the one time of year when the city doesn’t strictly enforce those rules.

Dufty has taken credit for shutting down the party and keeping the city’s plans for security under seal, but he admitted Oct. 31 to the Chron‘s gossip hounds, Matier and Ross, that next year’s event could look different. It’ll be on a Friday.

Police Commission president Theresa Sparks said she’s been told the event cost the city half what it did last year, including overtime for law enforcement, but she still hadn’t received dollar figures when we reached her Nov. 1. She had been skeptical that the crowds could be contained, considering that the city’s scheme was simply to announce that there would be no party. "But I think it was extremely well coordinated…. It went off better than expected." But she still believes planning should have begun far sooner. Police Chief Fong will give the commission a report about Halloween on Nov. 7.

So is the answer to shut down the Castro every year? No, Sparks said, but Halloween has to be made into "a citywide celebration, not just a neighborhood celebration."

Steven T. Jones and Sara Knight contributed to this story.

Endorsements: Local offices

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Mayor

1. QUINTIN MECKE


2. AHIMSA PORTER SUMCHAI


3. CHICKEN JOHN RINALDI


Let us be perfectly clear: none of the people we are endorsing has any real chance of getting elected mayor of San Francisco. Gavin Newsom is going to win a second term; we know that, he knows that, and whatever they may say on the campaign trail, all of the candidates running against him know that.

It’s a sad state of affairs: San Francisco has been, at best, wallowing helplessly in problems under Newsom, and in many cases things have gotten worse. The murder rate is soaring; young people, particularly African Americans, are getting shot down on the streets in alarming numbers. The mayor has opposed almost every credible effort to do something about it — he fought against putting cops on foot patrol in the most violent areas, he opposed the creation of a violence-prevention fund and blocked implementation of a community policing plan, and he’s allowed the thugs in the Police Officers Association to set policy for a police department that desperately lacks leadership. The public transportation system is in meltdown. The housing crisis is out of control; 90 percent of the people who work in San Francisco can’t afford to buy a house here, and many of them can’t afford to rent either. Meanwhile, the city is allowing developers and speculators to build thousands of new luxury condos, which are turning San Francisco into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Newsom only recently seems to have noticed that public housing is in shambles and that the commission he appoints to oversee it has been ignoring the problem.

The mayor is moving aggressively to privatize public services (including turning over the city’s broadband infrastructure to private companies), and he’s done little to promote public power. He’s cracking down on the homeless without offering adequate alternatives to long-term housing. Much of the time, he seems disconnected, out of touch with the city; he won’t show up and take questions from the Board of Supervisors and won’t even comply with the Sunshine Ordinance and release his daily calendar so the voters can see what he’s doing all day. He rarely appears in public, unless his handlers have complete control of the situation.

In fact, almost all of the significant policy discussions and initiatives that are happening in San Francisco today (including the universal health plan that Newsom likes to take credit for) have come from the Board of Supervisors.

There are good things to say about Newsom. We were among the huge number of San Franciscans who applauded when Newsom directed the city to start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He did more than make a political statement, more than allow hundreds of couples to get married; he put one of the leading civil rights issues of our time on the center stage of the political agenda. And he made all of us proud to be San Franciscans. We were happy to see him stand up against the big international hotel chains and support striking hotel workers. In some ways, he’s brought modern management to the city — the 311 system, which connects callers directly to the proper city services, actually works, and sometimes works well.

But San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, and it’s in serious trouble, and the person in charge isn’t offering much in the way of leadership — and he certainly isn’t offering the sort of progressive agenda that this city ought to be showing the nation. Newsom doesn’t deserve another term.

And yet the progressives in the city, who have come so very far since the return of district elections in 2000, were unable to field an electable candidate. We could spend pages dissecting why that happened. Matt Gonzalez should have made a decision much earlier in the process. Ross Mirkarimi should have run. The entire movement needs to be better about developing and promoting candidates for citywide office. But right now the issue on the table is this: who should the progressives, the independents, the neighborhood activists, the tenants, the people who have been dispossessed during the Newsom years, who don’t like the prospect of this mayor waltzing into another term atop a landslide majority, vote for Nov. 6?

We aren’t in the habit of endorsing for a big-league elective office people who haven’t put in their time in the minors. And Newsom’s challengers are not exactly a varsity squad. But many of them are raising important issues that Newsom has ignored, and we commend them all for taking on the difficult task of mounting a campaign against a mayor who most observers say is unbeatable. Our endorsements are, to be honest, protest votes — but we hope they’ll send a message to Newsom that there are issues, communities, and ideas he can’t just ignore after his coronation. The smaller the mayor’s margin of victory and the more votes the candidates who are pushing the progressive agenda collect, the less of a mandate Newsom will take into a second term that could be a truly frightening time.

Quintin Mecke has the strongest progressive credentials and by far the best overall approach to issues facing the city. He’s never held elective office (and had never run before), but he’s been involved in local politics for a decade. A volunteer with Tom Ammiano’s campaigns for supervisor and mayor and with Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign, Mecke went on to serve on the civil grand jury and the task force on redistricting, where he helped stave off attempts to chop up progressive supervisorial districts. He helped organize the South of Market Anti-Displacement Committee and now runs the Safety Network Partnership, a nonprofit that works to fight crime and violence in the city’s neighborhoods. He’s on the committee that monitors the city’s homeless shelters.

Mecke told the Guardian that "it’s hard to find an innovative, non-PR-type initiative out of the Mayor’s Office." He supports community policing, a progressive gross-receipts tax that would exempt small businesses, and a moratorium on market-rate housing until the city can determine how it will build enough affordable units. He complains that there’s no standard of care in Newsom’s homeless shelters. He opposes the privatization of public programs and resources.

Mecke tends a bit to bureaucratspeak; he talked about "horizontal conversations" instead of taking some issues head-on. And we’re concerned that he didn’t seem serious or organized enough to raise the modest amount of money it would have taken to qualify for public financing and mount a more visible campaign. But he’s a solid candidate, and we’re happy to give him the nod.

Ahimsa Porter Sumchai is a remarkable success story, an African American woman who grew up in the housing projects and wound up graduating from UC San Francisco’s medical school. She’s running primarily on the issue of environmental justice for southeast San Francisco — and for years has been one of the loudest voices against the flawed Lennar Corp. redevelopment project at and the reuse plan for the contaminated Hunters Point Shipyard. Sumchai says the shipyard can never be cleaned up to a level that would be safe for housing, and she suggests that much of it should be used for parks and open space and possibly maritime and green-industry uses. She’s highly critical of the low levels of affordable housing in market-rate projects all over the city, arguing that the developers should be forced to provide as many as 25 percent of their units at below-market rates. Sumchai is a physician, and she talks like one; her scientific language and approach sometimes confuse people. She suggested that one of the main causes of the homicide rate in the city is mental illness. "You can medically address people who are violent," she told us, saying the first step is to properly diagnose and treat depression in men. "Just as we looked at AIDS as an epidemic," she said, "we should look at violence as an epidemic." Which is, at the very least, an interesting approach.

Sumchai has some innovative ideas, including a universal child-care program for the city, paid for with a "fat tax" on unhealthy food. She’s a strong supporter of public power and a longtime critic of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

She can be abrasive and temperamental, but she’s talking about critical issues that almost everyone else is ignoring. She deserves support.

Chicken John Rinaldi is the political surprise of the season, an artist and showman who has managed a traveling circus, run a bar in the Mission, put on unusual performances of every kind — and somehow managed to be the only person running for mayor who could qualify for tens of thousands of dollars in public funding. On one level Rinaldi’s campaign is a joke — he told us repeatedly he has no idea what he’s doing, and that if by some wild chance he were elected, he would hire people like Mecke and Sumchai to run the city. He’s the Dada candidate, with his entire run something of a performance art piece.

But Rinaldi has a real constituency. He represents a dying breed in the city: the street artists, the writers, the poets, the unconventional thinkers with economically marginal lifestyles, who were once the heart and soul of San Francisco. It’s hard to pin him down on issues since he seems to disdain any policy talk, but in the end, the very fact that he’s running speaks to the pressure on artists and the lack of support the unconventional side of the art world gets in this increasingly expensive city.

Rinaldi is the protest candidate of all protest candidates, but he’s going to get a lot of votes from people who think San Francisco needs to stop driving some of its most valuable residents out of town — and if that leads to a more serious discussion about artist housing, affordable housing in general, arts funding, and the overall crackdown on fun under Newsom, then it’s worth giving Chicken John a place on the ticket.

There are several other candidates worthy of consideration. Josh Wolf, a video blogger, served 226 days in a federal prison rather than turn over to the authorities tape of a demonstration he was filming. It was a bold and courageous show of principle (anyone who’s ever done time knows that spending even a week, much less month after month, behind bars is no joke), and it speaks to his leadership and character. Wolf is talking about some key issues too: he’s a big supporter of municipal broadband and sees the Web as a place to promote more direct democracy in San Francisco.

Lonnie Holmes, a probation officer, has roots in the African American community and some credible ideas about violent crime. He favors extensive, direct intervention in at-risk communities and would fully fund recreation centers, after-school programs, and antiviolence education in elementary schools. He thinks a network of community resource centers in key neighborhoods could cut the crime rate in half. He’s a little conservative for our taste, but we like his energy, commitment, and ideas.

Harold Hoogasian, a third-generation florist, registered Republican, and small-business activist, is a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and law-and-order guy who complains that the city budget has skyrocketed while services don’t seem to have improved. Yet somewhat to our surprise, he told us he supports the idea of a moratorium on market-rate housing and a ballot measure that would force developers to build housing more in tune with San Francisco’s real needs (even if he wants to start with ownership housing for cops). He supports public power, wants more sunshine in government, and opposes privatization. He also brings a much-needed critique of the remaining vestiges of machine politics in this one-party town and speaks passionately about the need for outsiders and political independents to have a seat at the table. We’re glad to have him in the race.

In the end, though, our picks in this first ranked-choice vote for San Francisco mayor are Mecke, Sumchai, and Rinaldi — on the issues, as a political statement, and to remind Newsom that his poll numbers don’t reflect the deep sense of distrust and discontent that remains in this city.

District attorney

KAMALA HARRIS


We’re always nervous about unopposed incumbents. And since Kamala Harris unseated Terence Hallinan four years ago, running as an ally of then-mayor Willie Brown with the backing of a corrupt old machine, we’ve been nervous about her.

In some ways she’s been a pleasant surprise. Harris quickly showed that she has courage and integrity when she refused to seek the death penalty for a cop killer despite the fact that the police rank and file and much of the brass excoriated her for it. She remains one of the few district attorneys in the nation who oppose the death penalty in all situations. She’s created a public integrity unit and aggressively filed charges against Sup. Ed Jew. She’s made clear to the Police Department that she won’t accept sloppy police work. She talks constantly about making crime and criminal justice a progressive issue.

But there are plenty of areas in which we remain nervous. Harris hasn’t been anywhere near as aggressive as she could be in prosecuting political corruption. She doesn’t pursue ethics violations or Sunshine Ordinance violations. The San Francisco DA’s Office could be a national leader in rooting out and prosecuting environmental and political crime, but it isn’t.

Meanwhile, the murder rate continues to rise in San Francisco, and Harris and the police are pointing fingers back and forth without actually finding a workable solution.

And lately, Harris, to her tremendous discredit, has been stepping up the prosecution of so-called quality-of-life crimes — which translates into harassing the homeless. She’s made sure there’s a full-time prosecutor in traffic court, pressing charges for things like public urination, sleeping in the park, and holding an open container of beer. That’s a colossal waste of law enforcement resources.

We expect a lot more from Harris in the next four years. But we’ll back her for another term.

Sheriff

MIKE HENNESSEY


Mike Hennessey has been sheriff for so long that it’s hard to imagine anyone else holding the job. And that’s not a bad thing: Hennessey is one of the most progressive law enforcement officers in the country. He’s turned the county jail into a center for drug rehabilitation, counseling, and education (the first charter high school in America for county prisoners is in the SF jail). He’s hired a remarkably diverse group of deputies and has worked to find alternatives to incarceration. He’s openly critical of the rate at which the San Francisco police are arresting people for small-time drug offenses ("We’re arresting too many people for drugs in the city," he told us). He took a courageous stand last year in opposing a draconian and ineffective state ballot initiative that would have kicked convicted sex offenders out of San Francisco and forced them to live in rural counties without access to support, services, or monitoring.

We’ve had some issues with Hennessey. We wanted a smaller new jail than he ultimately decided to build. And we really wish he’d be more outspoken on local law enforcement issues. Hennessey told us he wants to stick to his own turf, but if he were more visible on police reform, criminal justice, and law enforcement, the city would benefit immensely.

Hennessey’s only opponent is David Wong, a deputy sheriff who was unable to make a case for replacing the incumbent. We’re happy to endorse Hennessey for another term — but since this might be his last before retirement, we urge him to take his progressive views and push them onto a larger stage.

The Clean Slate

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RACES


Mayor:

1. Quintin Mecke

2. Ahimsa Sumchai

3. Chicken John Rinaldi

Sheriff: Mike Hennessey

District Attorney: Kamala Harris

PROPOSITIONS


Proposition A: YES

Proposition B: YES

Proposition C: NO

Proposition D: YES

Proposition E: YES, YES, YES

Proposition F: YES

Proposition G: YES

Proposition H: NO, NO, NO

Proposition I: YES

Proposition J: NO

Proposition K: YES

Free speech in Phoenix

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I’ve had, to say the least, some fights with the company that publishes the SF Weekly. We’re suing the bastards for predatory pricing. I’ve made a few critical comments on the big chain in my time.

But I’m also the First Amendment chair of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, and we are strongly supporting the chain’s flagship paper, the Phoenix New Times, and its top executives, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, in their battle against a local sheriff and prosecutor in Arizona.

The crime of being homeless

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› amanda@sfbg.com

Sleeping in the park, urinating in public, blocking the sidewalk, trespassing, drinking in public — these and about 10 other infractions are commonly and collectively known as "quality of life" crimes because they affect the condition of the common spaces we all share in San Francisco.

For a homeless individual, they’re also called "status" crimes, committed in the commons because there is no private place to sleep, go to the bathroom, or crack a beer. For years the District Attorney’s Office hasn’t bothered to allocate time or resources to prosecute these petty crimes, and advocates for the rights of homeless people have contended that to do so results in unfair persecution of those who have no place to call home.

Elisa Della-Piana is an attorney with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and has spent much of the past three years in traffic court arguing against fines for homeless people who have received quality-of-life citations. As of this summer, Della-Piana said things have changed down at the Hall of Justice.

Now every time she stands up to represent a homeless person in traffic court, someone from the DA’s Office gets up too, fighting for the other side. Though there’s no way to tell from the traffic court calendar if the defendant is homeless, Della-Piana and Christina Brown, another attorney who represents through the Lawyer’s Committee, have witnessed prosecutors ignore quality-of-life citations that didn’t appear to have been collected by homeless people.

"When the person is homeless and the DA stands up and prosecutes, that’s selective prosecution. They’ve done that in the past with other populations in San Francisco," Jenny Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness said, citing historic crackdowns on queers and Asians.

Deputy district attorney Paul Henderson denied the DA’s Office is selectively prosecuting only quality-of-life citations received by homeless individuals. "We’re prosecuting all of them," he told the Guardian, confirming this is a new task for the office. "In the past the DA’s Office wasn’t staffed to have people in the courtroom. I think we’re there every day now." He said more staff has been hired, and a team he heads is now devoted to the issue.

When asked why this was a new priority for the DA’s Office, Henderson said, "We felt that people weren’t getting the help they needed. The public’s interest wasn’t being served. [These issues] were not getting addressed in the traffic court without the DA being there. Neighborhoods and communities have been complaining about the lack of responsiveness, and so we’re trying to address that."

Henderson called the day in court an open door for a homeless person to walk through and access services. "We want to handle them responsibly to make sure there’s some accountability for breaking the law, but try to do it in a way that’s an intervention."

But advocates for homeless rights say that’s not what happens.

"They’ll tell you we’re there to offer services to homeless individuals," Della-Piana said. "Which is a piece of paper. In fact, what they have is the same list of services the police pass out. They’re not actually doing anything to connect people to the services. They’re just offering the list. They could offer those services in the street. There’s no reason to go through the court system."

This list of homeless resources is updated every six months by the San Francisco Police Department’s Operation Outreach and is offered on the street, according to Lt. David Lazar, leader of the 20-officer branch of the SFPD that interfaces directly with the homeless population.

"The accountability is a problem, and the process they go through is not working," Lazar said. "There’s a large population we’re seeing that doesn’t want services." He listed three reasons: inadequacies in the shelter system, a desire to be left alone, and a mental health or substance abuse problem that impairs judgment. "If we could house absolutely everyone, what would they do during the daytime?" he asked. "You need intensive case management, job support, substance abuse support."

But homeless-rights advocates say the stability of housing is the first step toward improving the quality of life for the homeless. Della-Piana said, "Ninety-five percent of my clients come to me and say, ‘I’m getting social services.’ They point to something on the list and say, ‘I’m doing this.’ They’re doing everything they’re supposed to be doing, but they don’t have housing yet. That’s why people are still sleeping in the park."

Henderson said critics of the new tack "aren’t recognizing that laws are being broken. People’s qualities of life are being dragged down by these violations. If it’s your street, your door, and there’s feces on it every day, that affects your quality of life."

Ticketing the homeless is not a new thing. Two homeless-rights groups — Religious Witness with Homeless People and the Coalition on Homelessness — have a standing Freedom of Information Act request with San Francisco Superior Court that provides a monthly tally of the infractions likely committed primarily by homeless people. According to their data, for the past 15 years the SFPD has averaged about 13,000 quality-of-life citations per year. Last year Religious Witness released a study showing that more than 31,000 citations had been issued during Mayor Gavin Newsom’s administration.

"For the police, the sheriff, and the court cost, we estimated it cost almost $6 million for those 31,000 citations," said Sister Bernie Galvin, executive director of Religious Witness. Galvin said a new study, to be released at City Hall on Oct. 4, shows that citations and costs have skyrocketed in the past 14 months. "Now we’re putting in the dramatic new expense of the DA," she said, adding, "Everyone wants to prosecute a greater number. It’s like it makes it justifiable to issue these 31,000 tickets if we can prosecute them. Actually, it makes it crueler and more expensive."

Media reports have characterized the tickets as empty pieces of paper, issued and then metaphorically shredded when a homeless individual fails to pay the $50 to $500 fine. In a recent San Francisco Chronicle story, Heather Knight reported that "all quality of life citations are getting dismissed." Yet when they don’t — and violators either don’t show up in court or can’t pay the fine — infractions become misdemeanors or an arrest warrant is issued, both of which become problems for people trying to access services.

"It backfires," said Christina Brown, an associate at O’Melveny and Myers who volunteers time in traffic court representing homeless people through the Lawyer’s Committee. "When people are served with warrants, they’re precluded from services." Even if the person cuts a deal with the DA to access services in lieu of paying a fine, they still have to return to court to prove they’ve done that. If they can’t get the paperwork or can’t make it to the court in time, it becomes a misdemeanor.

"The criminal justice system is actually making it harder if they want to find somewhere else to sleep," said Della-Piana, who related an anecdote of a client who had a few open-container infractions. The client was afraid to go to court when she couldn’t pay the fines, so a warrant was issued. She’d spent the past seven years on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s waiting list for public housing and got kicked off because of the misdemeanor.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi expressed concern that a dragnet is being created for arresting homeless people committing status crimes they have no control over. "We have to be very careful we’re not trying to legislate services through the criminal justice system. We do too much of that already," he said. "This approach assumes that if a person is in trouble, they’re more likely to accept the services. I haven’t seen that is true."

Henderson doesn’t necessarily agree that the criminal justice system shouldn’t play a role in assisting homeless people: "I want this citation to serve as a wake-up call for you." He thinks people need to be held accountable and would like to see the city adopt the plan for a Community Justice Center, modeled after New York City’s, a vision that his boss, District Attorney Kamala Harris, and Newsom also share.

"We believe San Francisco has a unique infrastructure and need for the Community Justice Center. That’s why we are proposing to pilot this initiative in the Tenderloin and South of Market area, where more than a third of the city’s quality of life offenses occur," Harris and Newsom wrote in a May 13 editorial in the Chronicle. "The center promises to give relief to the neighborhoods most affected by quality of life crimes."

During an Oct. 1 endorsement interview with the Guardian, Newsom said he hoped to open the new center by December. Lazar, who sits on the committee that’s still hammering out the details for how exactly the center would work, agreed with Henderson that it’s the next step in more direct connection with services: "We’re trying to put the criminal justice system and the social justice system together."

Della-Piana said this still ignores the black marks that misdemeanors leave, which become good reasons for some service providers to save their limited resources for people with clean records. "The two ideologies don’t mesh," Della-Piana said. "My homeless clients want housing. There currently is not enough of it to go around. Arresting them instead of citing them for sleeping and other basic life activities will not change the availability of the most needed services."

The underground campaign

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Click here for the Guardian 2007 Election Center: interviews, profiles, commentary, and more

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Elections usually create an important public discussion on the direction of the city. Unfortunately, that debate isn’t really happening this year, largely because of the essentially uncontested races for sheriff and district attorney and the perception that Mayor Gavin Newsom is certain to be reelected, which has led him to ignore his opponents and the mainstream media to give scant coverage to the mayoral race and the issues being raised.

To the casual observer, it might seem as if everyone is content with the status quo.

But the situation looks quite different from the conference room here at the Guardian, where this season’s endorsement interviews with candidates, elected officials, and other political leaders have revealed a deeply divided city and real frustration with its leadership and direction.

In fact, we were struck by the fact that nobody we talked to had much of anything positive to say about Newsom. Granted, most of the interviews were with his challengers — but we’ve also talked to Sheriff Mike Hennessey and District Attorney Kamala Harris, both of whom have endorsed the mayor, and to supporters and opponents of various ballot measures. And from across the board, we got the sense that Newsom’s popularity in the polls isn’t reflected in the people who work with him on a regular basis.

Newsom will be in to talk to us Oct. 1, and we’ll be running his interview on the Web and allowing him ample opportunity to present his views and his responses.

Readers can listen to the interviews online at www.sfbg.com and check out our endorsements and explanations in next week’s issue. In the meantime, we offer this look at some of the interesting themes, revelations, and ideas that are emerging from the hours and hours of discussions, because some are quite noteworthy.

Like the fact that mayoral candidates Quintin Mecke and Harold Hoogasian — respectively the most progressive and the most conservative candidate in the race — largely agree on what’s wrong with the Newsom administration, as well as many solutions to the city’s most vexing problems. Does that signal the possibility of new political alliances forming in San Francisco, or at least new opportunities for a wider and more inclusive debate?

Might Lonnie Holmes and Ahimsa Porter Sumchai — two African American candidates with impressive credentials and deep ties to the community — have something to offer a city struggling with high crime rates, lingering racism, environmental and social injustice, and a culture of economic hopelessness? And if we’re a city open to new ideas, how about considering Josh Wolf’s intriguing plan for improving civic engagement, Grasshopper Alec Kaplan’s "green for peace" initiative, or Chicken John Rinaldi’s call to recognize and encourage San Francisco as a city of art and innovation?

There’s a lot going on in the political world that isn’t making the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. The interviews we’ve been conducting point to a street-level democracy San Francisco–style in all its messy and wonderful glory. And they paint a picture of possibilities that lie beyond the news releases.

THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT


As the owner of Hoogasian Flowers on Seventh Street and a vocal representative of the small-business community, mayoral candidate Hoogasian describes himself as a "sensitive Republican," "a law-and-order guy" who would embrace "zero-based budgeting" if elected. "The best kind of government is the least kind of government," Hoogasian told us.

Those are hardly your typical progressive sentiments.

Yet Hoogasian has also embraced the Guardian‘s call for limiting new construction of market-rate housing until the city develops a plan to encourage the building of more housing affordable to poor and working-class San Franciscans. He supports public power, greater transparency in government, a moratorium on the privatization of government services, and a more muscular environmentalism. And he thinks the mayor is out of touch.

"I’m a native of San Francisco, and I’m pissed off," said Hoogasian, whose father ran for mayor 40 years ago with a similar platform against Joe Alioto. "Newsom is an empty suit. When was the last time the mayor stood before a pool of reporters and held a press conference?"

Mecke, program director of the Safety Network, a citywide public safety program promoting community-driven responses to crime and violence, is equally acerbic when it comes to Newsom’s news-release style of governance.

"It’s great that he wants to focus on the rock star elements, but we have to demand public accountability," said Mecke, who as a member of the Shelter Monitoring Committee helps inspect the city’s homeless shelters to ensure that people are treated with dignity and respect. "Even Willie Brown had some modicum of engagement."

Mecke advocates for progressive solutions to the crime problem. "We need to get the police to change," he said. "At the moment we have 10 fiefdoms, and the often-touted idea of community policing doesn’t exist."

Hoogasian said he jumped into the mayor’s race after "this bozo took away 400 garbage cans and called it an antilitter program." Mecke leaped into the race the day after progressive heavyweight Sup. Chris Daly announced he wasn’t running, and he won the supervisor’s endorsement. Both Hoogasian and Mecke express disgust at Newsom’s ignoring the wishes of San Franciscans, who voted last fall in favor of the mayor attending Board of Supervisors meetings to have monthly policy discussions.

"Why is wi-fi on the ballot [Proposition J] if the mayor didn’t respect that process last year?" Mecke asked.

Hoogasian characterized Newsom’s ill-fated Google-EarthLink deal as "a pie-in-the-sky idea suited to getting young people thinking he’s the guns" while only giving access to "people sitting on the corner of Chestnut with laptops, drinking lattes."

In light of San Francisco’s housing crisis, Hoogasian said he favors a moratorium on market-rate housing until 25,000 affordable units are built, and Mecke supports placing a large affordable-housing bond on next year’s ballot, noting, "We haven’t had one in 10 years."

Hoogasian sees Newsom’s recent demand that all department heads give him their resignations as further proof that the mayor is "chickenshit." Mecke found it "embarrassing" that Sup. Ross Mirkarimi had to legislate police foot patrols twice in 2006, overcoming Newsom vetoes.

"San Francisco should give me a chance to make this city what it deserves to be, " Hoogasian said.

Mecke said, "I’m here to take a risk, take a chance, regardless of what I think the odds are."

ENDING THE VIOLENCE


Holmes and Sumchai have made the murder rate and the city’s treatment of African Americans the centerpieces of their campaigns. Both support increased foot patrols and more community policing, and they agree that the root of the problem is the need for more attention and resources.

"The plan is early intervention," Holmes said, likening violence prevention to health care. "We need to start looking at preventative measures."

In addition to mentoring, after-school programs, and education, Holmes specifically advocates comprehensive community resource centers — a kind of one-stop shopping for citizens in need of social services — "so individuals do not have to travel that far outside their neighborhoods. If we start putting city services out into the communities, then not only are we looking at a cost savings to city government, but we’re also looking at a reduction in crime."

Sumchai, a physician, has studied the cycles of violence that occur as victims become perpetrators and thinks more medical approaches should be applied to social problems. "I would like to see the medical community address violence as a public health problem," she said.

Holmes said he thinks the people who work on violence prevention need to be homegrown. "We also need to talk about bringing individuals to the table who understand what’s really going on in the streets," he said. "The answer is not bringing in some professional or some doctor from Boston or New York because they had some elements of success there.

"When you take a plant that’s not native to the soil and try to plant it, it dies…. If there’s no way for those program elements or various modalities within those programs to take root somewhere, it’s going to fail, and that’s what we’ve seen in the Newsom administration."

Holmes spoke highly of former mayor Art Agnos’s deployment of community workers to walk the streets and mitigate violence by talking to kids and brokering gang truces.

The fate of the southeast sector of the city concerns both locals. Sumchai grew up in Sunnydale, and Holmes lived in the Western Addition and now lives in Bernal Heights. Neither is pleased with the city’s redevelopment plan for the Hunters Point Shipyard. "I have never felt that residential development at the shipyard would be safe," said Sumchai, who favors leaving the most toxic sites as much-needed open space.

Despite some relatively progressive ideas — Holmes suggested a luxury tax to finance housing and services for homeless individuals, and Sumchai would like to see San Francisco tax fatty foods to pay for public health programs — both were somewhat averse to aligning too closely with progressives.

Sumchai doesn’t like the current makeup of the Board of Supervisors, and Holmes favors cutting management in government and turning services over to community-based organizations.

But both made it clear that Newsom isn’t doing much for the African American community.

ORIGINAL IDEAS


The mayor’s race does have several colorful characters, from the oft-arrested Kaplan to nudist activist George Davis to ever-acerbic columnist and gadfly H. Brown. Yet two of the more unconventional candidates are also offering some of the more original and thought-provoking platforms in the race.

Activist-blogger Wolf made a name for himself by refusing to turn over to a federal grand jury his video footage from an anarchist rally at which a police officer was injured, defying a judge’s order and serving 226 days in federal prison, the longest term ever for someone asserting well-established First Amendment rights.

The Guardian and others have criticized the San Francisco Police Department’s conduct in the case and Newsom’s lack of support. But Wolf isn’t running on a police-reform platform so much as a call for "a new democracy plan" based loosely on the Community Congress models of the 1970s, updated using the modern technologies in which Wolf is fluent.

"The basic principle can be applied more effectively today with the advent of the Internet and Web 2.0 than was at all possible to do in the 1970s," Wolf said, calling for more direct democracy and an end to the facade of public comment in today’s system, which he said is "like talking to a wall."

"It’s not a dialogue, it’s not a conversation, and it’s certainly not a conversation with other people in the city," Wolf said. "No matter who’s mayor or who’s on the Board of Supervisors, the solutions that they are able to come up with are never going to be able to match the collective wisdom of the city of San Francisco. So building an online organism that allows people to engage in discussions about every single issue that comes across City Hall, as well as to vote in a sort of straw-poll manner around every single issue and to have conversations where the solutions can rise to the surface, seems to be a good step toward building a true democracy instead of a representative government."

Also calling for greater populism in government is Chicken John Rinaldi (see "Chicken and the Pot," 9/12/07), who shared his unique political strategy with us in a truly entertaining interview.

"I’m here to ask for the Guardian‘s second-place endorsement," Rinaldi said, aware that we intend to make three recommendations in this election, the first mayor’s race to use the ranked-choice voting system.

Asked if his running to illustrate a mechanism is akin to a hamster running on a wheel, Rinaldi elaborated on the twin issues that he holds dear to his heart — art and innovation — by talking about innovative ways to streamline the current complexities that artists, performers, and others must face when trying to get a permit to put on an event in San Francisco.

"I’m running for the idea of San Francisco," Rinaldi said. He claimed to be painting a campaign logo in the style of a mural on the side of his warehouse in the Mission District: "It’s going to say, ‘Chicken, it’s what’s for mayor,’ or ‘Chicken, the other white mayor.’"

He repeatedly said that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; when we asked him what he’d do if he won, he told us that he’ll hire Mecke, Holmes, Sumchai, and Wolf to run the city.

Yet his comedy has a serious underlying message: "I want to create an arts spark." And that’s something he’s undeniably good at.

THE LAW-ENFORCEMENT VIEW


Sheriff Hennessey and District Attorney Harris aren’t being seriously challenged for reelection, and both decided early (despite pleas from their supporters) not to take on Newsom for the top job. In fact, they’re both endorsing him.

But in interviews with us, they were far from universally laudatory toward the incumbent mayor, saying he needs to do much more to get a handle on crime and the social- and economic-justice issues that drive it.

Hennessey said San Francisco’s county jail system is beyond its capacity for inmates and half of them are behind bars on drug charges, even in a city supposedly opposed to the war on drugs.

"I had this conversation with the mayor probably a year ago," Hennessey said. "I took him down to the jail to show him there were people sleeping on the floor at that time. I needed additional staff to open up a new unit. He came down and looked at the jails and said, ‘Yeah, this is not right.’"

Asked how he would cut the jail population in half, Hennessey — in all seriousness — suggested firing the city’s narcotics officers. He readily acknowledged that the culture within the SFPD is a barrier to creating a real dialogue and partnership with the rest of the city. How would he fix it? Make the police chief an elected office.

"From about 1850 to 1895, the San Francisco police chief was elected," he said. "I think it’d be a very good idea for this city. It’s a small enough city that I think the elected politicians really try to be responsive to the public will."

Hennessey said that with $10 million or $15 million more, he could have an immediate impact on violence in the city by expanding a program he began last year called the No Violence Alliance, which combines into one community-based case-management system all of the types of services that perpetrators of violence are believed to be lacking: stable housing, education, decent jobs, and treatment for drug addiction.

Harris told us so-called quality-of-life crimes, including hand-to-hand drug sales no matter how small, deserve to be taken seriously. But it’s not a crime to be poor or homeless, she insisted and eagerly pointed to her own reentry program for offenders, Back on Track.

More than half of the felons paroled in San Francisco in 2003 returned to prison not long thereafter, reaffirming the continuing plague of recidivism in California. Harris said more than 90 percent of the people who participated in the pilot phase of Back on Track were holding down a job or attending school by the time they graduated from the program. "DAs around the country are listening to what we’re saying about how to achieve smart public safety," she said of the reentry philosophy.

But at the end of the day, Harris is a criminal prosecutor before she’s a nonprofit administrator. And her relationship with the SFPD at times has amounted to little more than a four-year stalemate. Harris and former district attorney Terrence Hallinan both endured accusations by cops that they were too easy on defendants and reluctant to prosecute.

To help us understand who’s right when it comes to the murder rate, Harris shared some telling statistics. She said the rate of police solving homicides in San Francisco is about 30 percent, compared with 60 percent nationwide. And she said she’s gotten convictions in 90 percent of the murder cases she’s filed. Nonetheless, cops consistently blame prosecutors for crimes going unpunished.

"I go to so many community meetings and hear the story," she said. "I cannot tell you how often I hear the story…. It’s a self-defeating thing to say, ‘I’m not going to work because the DA won’t prosecute.’ … If no report is taken, then you’re right: I’m not going to prosecute."

YES AND NO


In addition to the candidates, the Guardian also invites proponents and opponents of the most important ballot measures (which this year include the transportation reform Measure A and its procar rival, Measure H), as well as a range of elected officials and activists, including Sups. Aaron Peskin, Tom Ammiano, Jake McGoldrick, Mirkarimi, and Daly.

Although none of these people are running for office, the interviews have produced heated moments: Guardian editor and publisher Bruce B. Brugmann took Peskin and other supervisors to task for not supporting Proposition I, which would create a small-business support center. That, Brugmann said, would be an important gesture in a progressive city that has asked small businesses to provide health care, sick pay, and other benefits.

Taxi drivers have also raised concerns to us about a provision of Measure A — which Peskin wrote with input from labor and others and which enjoys widespread support, particularly among progressives — that could allow the Board of Supervisors to undermine the 29-year-old system that allows only active drivers to hold valuable city medallions. In response, Peskin told us that was not the intent and that he is already working with Newsom to address those concerns with a joint letter and possible legislation.

"If San Francisco is going to be a world-class city, it’s got to have a great transportation infrastructure," Peskin told us about the motivation behind Measure A. "This would make sure that San Francisco has a transit-first policy forever."

Measure A would place control of almost all aspects of the transportation system under the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and give that panel more money and administrative powers in the process, while letting the Board of Supervisors retain its power to reject the MTA’s budget, fare hikes, or route changes. He also inserted a provision in the measure that would negate approval of Measure H, the downtown-backed measure that would invalidate existing city parking policies.

Ironically, Peskin said his approach would help prevent the gridlock that would result if the city’s power brokers got their wish of being able to build 10,000 housing units downtown without restrictions on automobile use and a revitalization of public transit options. As he said, "I think we are in many ways aiding developers downtown because [current development plans are] predicated on having a New York–style transit system."

Asked about Newsom’s controversial decision to ask for the resignations of senior staff, Peskin was critical but said he had no intention of having the board intervene. McGoldrick was more animated, calling it a "gutless Gavin move," and said, "If you want to fire them, friggin’ fire them." But he said it was consistent with Newsom’s "conflict-averse and criticism-averse" style of governance.

McGoldrick also had lots to say about Newsom’s penchant for trying to privatize essential city services — "We need to say, ‘Folks, look at what’s happening to your public asset’" — and his own sponsorship of Proposition K, which seeks to restrict advertising in public spaces.

"Do we have to submit to the advertisers to get things done?" McGoldrick asked us in discussing Prop. K, which he authored to counter "the crass advertising blight that has spread across this city."*

Spooked

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› sarah@sfbg.com

Dressed to kill in a firehouse-red pantsuit and matching stilettos, drag queen Donna Sachet stood in the Eureka Valley Recreation Center on Sept. 22 and fondly recalled how four years ago she lauded Sup. Bevan Dufty when he announced that he wanted to make Halloween in the Castro a safer, more enjoyable event.

"Bevan said, ‘Come and celebrate, but no bad behavior,’" Sachet purred.

But things have changed — dramatically — and this year Sachet was helping moderate a heated meeting of a group called Citizens for Halloween, at which residents raised myriad concerns about Dufty and Mayor Gavin Newsom’s secretive plans for Halloween.

Dufty and Newsom’s plans have morphed from a failed and furtive attempt to move this fall’s event to the waterfront to an ongoing PR campaign that asks businesses to close early on what traditionally has been their busiest night of the year and implores the public to stay away from the famously flamboyant Castro on Halloween night.

There will be no city-sponsored porta-potties and no street closures.

But locals are haunted by a belief that it’s about as easy to kill Halloween in the Castro as it is to kill a bloodthirsty vampire on a rampage and a fear that the city’s current plan could leave the Castro less safe than ever.

Sachet, who has lived in the Castro for 13 years, recalled that since the city’s gay population migrated from Polk Street to the Castro, the numbers attending the annual Halloween in the Castro party have steadily swollen, to 100,000 in 2006.

"There have been many concerns over the size of it," Sachet said, recalling how, after four people were stabbed in 2002, increased community involvement and police presence and the creation of emergency lanes made Halloween 2005 one of the most peaceful in years.

"Then in 2006 we got word from the city to hem in the event and end it sooner," Sachet said, reminding the crowd that Newsom promised to convene a task force two days after nine people were shot and one woman was trampled on Halloween 2006 — an incident that was triggered by someone throwing a bottle into a crowd of young people, one of whom pulled out a gun and fired nine shots in retaliation.

The bottle incident occurred shortly after the city pulled the plug on the music and began chasing away the costumed crowds with water trucks in an effort to break up the party early.

But despite Newsom’s promise of a task force, no public presentation was ever made, and longtime Castro resident Gary Virginia, who applied to be on the panel, said he "never got any communication back."

Public records show that Newsom and Dufty held closed-door meetings with city department heads and members of the Entertainment Commission last winter in an effort to shift Halloween from the Castro into the backyard of Mission Bay residents. Those plans fell through, thanks to the objections of neighborhood associations that were left out of the planning loop and the financial concerns of event promoters who allegedly got spooked by all of the negative publicity that has been given to Halloween in the Castro.

Rich Dyer of the Sheriff’s Department confirmed to the audience at the meeting that city department heads have been holding secret sessions for months.

With Newsom recently admitting that the city can’t prevent people from showing up, Sachet said the members of Citizens for Halloween "aren’t placing blame but want accountability."

SF Party Party founder Ted Strawser said he’s worried that the only party happening on Halloween will take place at San Francisco General Hospital and the County Jails unless the city provides answers to the community’s questions about public safety and health, medical emergencies, and transportation.

CFH cofounder Alix Rosenthal, who challenged Dufty in last year’s District 8 supervisorial race, joined Virginia, Strawser, and LGBT community activist Hank Wilson in sending the city an extensive list of questions, which also includes concerns about the impact of the current plan on businesses, the lack of community partnership and involvement, and hopes for a post-Halloween evaluation.

"We think we deserve to know as stakeholders," Virginia said.

The Sheriff’s Department, at least, was willing to talk a bit about what’s going on. "The plans have changed radically over the last three or four months, as have the roles of the departments, but the police have finally settled on a response kind of plan," Dyer said. "And as far as I know, there are no plans for checkpoints this year."

Asked by mayoral candidate Chicken John Rinaldi whether he thought that frisking members of the crowd, as was done last year, helped contain the situation, Dyer nodded.

"A tremendous amount of alcohol was intercepted, along with knives and other weapons," Dyer said.

But this time around there won’t be the normal safety precautions; for example, cars will be able to drive along Castro between 18th Street and Market. If the mayor’s polite requests fail and large crowds show up anyway, the place could be a mess — and without toilets available, people may simply use the street.

Two Castro businesses, Ritual Coffee Roasters and one that asked to remain anonymous, will provide porta-potties to any residence or business that requests help. But with the witching hour just five weeks away, the prospects for peace and harmony aren’t looking good.

For more information, visit www.halloweeninthecastro.com or www.citizensforhalloween.com.

Meet the candidates: Michael Hennessey

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The Bay Guardian is interviewing the candidates for the 2007 elections. We’ll be updating this entry as more information comes in. Post your thoughts or comments below.

San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey

michael_hennessey.jpg

www.sheriffhennessey.com

“From about 1850 to 1895, the San Francisco police chief was elected. I think it’d be a very good idea for this city. It’s a small enough city that I think the elected politicians really try to be responsive to the public will.”

Michael Hennessey interview


Visit the Guardian 2007 Election Center for updates, more interviews, and 2007 election news.

Northern Frights

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FESTIVAL REPORT Leave it to me to pack as much violence as possible into my first days at the Toronto International Film Festival. (And that’s with only having seen one entry in the horror-heavy Midnight Madness series.) In Spanish spookfest The Orphanage — featuring a Poltergeist shout-out for Zelda Rubenstein fans — fingers are slammed in doors, limbs are snapped, and a few unfortunate, uh, accidents occur. Jodie Foster goes aggro with a cause in The Brave One, poppin’ pricks with a pistol (and other handy tools). But the standout gross-outs so far are the Coen brothers’ Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men and Dario Argento’s long-awaited final entry in his Three Mothers trilogy, Mother of Tears.

"If this ain’t the mess," reckons No Country‘s Texas sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), "it’ll do till the mess gets here." The mess, later dubbed a "colossal goatfuck," is indeed a doozy of a rural crime scene, involving gun-shot bodies both fresh and long bloated, a dead dog, a truckload of drugs, much spent ammo, and a missing satchel containing $2 million. Clutching that dough is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a ne’er-do-well who soon realizes his windfall will also be his downfall — in the form of Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, exquisitely coiffed), a ruthless killer hired to hunt down the cash. No Country for Old Men is certainly the greatest Coen film in a good while — no Tom Hanks joking about waffles here. It’s beautifully shot and edited (aside from a maybe too-extended ending), and while there’s not much dialogue when Ed Tom’s not onscreen, every nugget’s worth waiting for. Bardem is particularly golden, but the whole cast is on point.

And yeah, since I know you wanna know, Mother of Tears is likewise certainly the greatest Argento film in a good while. I’m not saying it’s a perfect film, but it has all the gnarly stuff you expect from the director of Suspiria, Inferno, Phenomena, and Tenebre: over-the-top occult themes, shrill acting (Asia Argento’s the lead, and she turns it out), goth punk gangs of giggling witches, a plot that makes only sporadic sense, Udo Kier (as an exorcist!), a pounding electronic score, and, of course, eye gougings like they’re going out of style. Thank goodness they never will. (Cheryl Eddy)

For more reports from the Toronto International Film festival, go to Pixel Vision at www.sfbg.com/blogs/pixel_vision.

Addis on “American Dream” on acid

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Burning Man graphic by Rod Garrett

Like most reactions I’ve heard to next year’s Burning Man theme, “American Dream,” mine has been one of dismay and disgust. BM founder Larry Harvey may be trying to reclaim America from the red state yahoos, which is a fine goal, but to overtly make this countercultural event about American patriotism seems to me to be an unforgivable mistake and severe misreading of the sensibilities of his core audience. Personally, I tend toward Tolstoy’s view that patriotism is a vice that implies racism and causes warfare, and the sooner we can recognize it for the evil it is, the sooner we evolve.

But yesterday I discovered an unlikely supporter for Larry’s new theme: Paul Addis, the man accused of prematurely torching the Man on Aug. 27. We spoke by phone yesterday in a long and rambling conversation, in which he generally reinforced his disgust with the state of Burning Man and American society in general. But when I asked about the theme, he said that he thinks nationalism and patriotism are good things worth celebrating: “People have a right to be proud of where they’re from.”

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Addis mug shot by Pershing County Sheriff’s Department

Breaking a sweat

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

When San Francisco took the national lead in eschewing consumer products made by workers forced to endure unsavory working conditions, Mayor Gavin Newsom positioned himself front and center on the issue.

Along with Sup. Tom Ammiano, Newsom coauthored the nation’s toughest municipal ordinance on the matter, requiring that the city and county of San Francisco purchase garments for its firefighters, police officers, Muni drivers, and others from manufacturers that can prove they don’t subcontract with sweatshops or mistreat workers themselves.

Putting the widely touted plan into action was another matter. Two years later, some appointees to the city’s newly formed Sweatfree Procurement Advisory Group, including former state senator Tom Hayden, say San Francisco is already failing to recognize its own commitment to human rights.

Several contractors who are set to provide the city with everything from bulletproof vests to uniforms for the Sheriff’s Department have received exemptions from the law, and nearly all of them have contracts lasting from three to five years — meaning it could be the next decade before the law has much impact.

The contracts in question total $7.2 million in value, according to city records.

"The waivers have no conditions attached," Hayden wrote in a recent letter to the mayor. "They give permission to continue avoiding compliance for several years…. We know from the city’s own staff that one supplier, Galls, produces in Colombia, a human-rights violator where scores of union leaders have been assassinated."

Hayden added in a phone interview that members of the advisory group have offered solutions to the city’s slow pace, but officials haven’t reacted. He met with American Apparel CEO Marty Bailey last month, and Bailey expressed interest in bidding on the city contracts, Hayden said, but the city hasn’t followed up with a meeting or conference call. Nor has it explored the option of joining contracts with "sweat-free" companies doing business with Los Angeles, Hayden contended.

"I’ve wondered if the procurement officials in San Francisco were being creative enough in looking for suppliers," Hayden said, "or whether they were looking at the same old handful of suppliers as if those people would change their ways."

Dozens of cities have such laws in place, but few have serious enforcement mechanisms. San Francisco was supposed to distinguish its ordinance in part by activating an agreement with the nonprofit enforcement body Workers Rights Consortium, which should already be inspecting manufacturing plants independently to ensure fair wages, benefits, and safety standards.

But enforcement, it turns out, is exactly where San Francisco’s law has so far fallen flat on it face, critics from the advisory group say. The group’s chair, Valerie Orth, an organizer for Global Exchange, said city bureaucrats promised to grant only short-term contracts until the law’s complex requirements were logistically workable.

Companies doing business with the city are often merely part of a supply chain that is coordinated with manufacturers abroad, so inspectors must track the conduct of subcontractors too.

The city, however, still doesn’t know the locations of some of the manufacturing plants where uniforms for sheriff’s deputies, meter enforcers, and many others are produced, Orth said, and with so many suppliers potentially receiving waivers, there’s no way to tell if, for instance, workers are getting a minimum wage.

Some businesses did provide info to the city on what outfits they subcontract with, but in one case the subcontractor, Fechheimer Brothers Co., didn’t comply with the law’s wage requirements, city records show.

According to Fechheimer’s Web site, the company has "manufacturing partners" in Central and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia that "complement our three union plants in the United States." Fechheimer is participating in a three-year contract to provide uniforms to the city’s fire department.

"We’ve been trying to implement this law since 2005," Orth told the Guardian. "They’ve had time to try and figure out the kinks."

Orth said an executive from Fechheimer attended a recent advisory group meeting and complained that disclosing the location of manufacturing plants abroad would make the firm less competitive.

Newsom’s government affairs director, Wade Crowfoot, was unhappy when he discovered last week that Hayden and Orth had distributed a news release outlining their complaints. When we contacted the mayor’s media flak, Nathan Ballard, with questions, he responded only with an exasperated letter that Crowfoot had sent to the duo.

"Far from the doom-and-gloom portrait painted by the press release, the city remains committed to advancing the most aggressive anti-sweatshop law in the country," Crowfoot wrote. "While it may be frustrating to implement this incrementally, our experience with other groundbreaking legislation such as requiring domestic partner benefits suggests that remaining focused on removing the barriers to implementation — and working together to do so — is the only way to make this law fully operative."

Crowfoot added that the city wants to modify the law to reward contract bidders who are mostly compliant, but Orth and Hayden still worry that the city is simply prioritizing suppliers who are the least costly. According to Orth, "Once [contractors] figure out how they can get out of complying with the law in a city like San Francisco … they can easily get out of complying with laws in other cities."

Do Bad (Burning) Boyz have good cop karma?

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By Sarah Phelan
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If you can’t afford to go to Burning Man, how about an overnighter at the Pershing County jail?

The Reno GazetteJournal reports that 35-year-old San Francisco resident Paul Addis was booked into Pershing County Jail on suspicion of arson and possession of illegal fireworks after the 40-ft high Burning Man icon got torched in the wee hours of Tuesday, four days ahead of the scheduled burn.

But did “Burning Man burning” Addis foretell his 2007 self-immolation four years ago in an essay called “Good Cop Karma,“?
And if “Good Cop Karma” Addis is “Burning Man burning” Addis, then Pershing County sheriff better beware: because “Good Cop Karma” Addis describes taunting San Francisco police with,er, a giant black dildo before being let go, after being wrongfully accused–a happy ending he chalked up to “good cop karma,” natch.

It’s not yet clear what kind of karma “Burning Man burning” Addis has with sheriffs, but when we checked earlier today, visitors to the Pershing County sherrif’s department website were being greeted with a reggae riff of “Bad Boyz.”

The Gonzo burner

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Mugshot of Paul Addis from the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office


See the comments below to read Paul Addis’s exclusive statement to the Guardian

Well, according to Laughinsquid and a commenter on sfgate, the alleged arsonist, Paul Addis, recently performed a one-man play about Hunter Thompson called “Gonzo.” And apparently he’s not too thrilled with the people who run Burning Man.

If that’s true, then his fiery act would be a very Gonzo thing to do.

Steve Jones, calling by satellite phone, says there were weird signs at the Burning Man entrance saying “what if they burned him Tuesday?”

I have to say: Charging this guy with arson, which carries a hefty prison sentencce, for burning something that was going to be burned in a few days anyway is kind of harsh.

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Paul Addis as HS Thompson (photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Careers and Ed: A life of death

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› culture@sfbg.com

A kid gets killed in the cross fire of a shooting. Someone digs up a human skull while planting begonias. An elderly woman dies in her sleep in an apartment no one has visited in years.

In all these cases, somebody — or somebodies — has to examine the scene and, well, the bodies to find out what happened. And as any fan of hard-boiled detective stories, CSI, or Quincy, M.E. knows, those somebodies are the forensic team, perhaps most prominently the coroner.

It’s a mysterious job with macabre connotations, imbued with a mix of excitement and dread. A new show on Spike purports to show armchair detectives what it’s really like, with Grand Guignol bravado, but I always wonder, is that really how it is? So I decided to find out.

GOING DOWNTOWN


I start with our own fair city of night, only to discover that the subject of coroners is more complicated than I thought. What TV often portrays as one or two jobs is often many different jobs. And San Francisco County doesn’t have a coroner — a position defined as an elected or appointed government official who deals with deaths that raise questions. Instead, it has a medical examiner, whose office is headed by an MD or doctor of osteopathy. The difference may seem like semantics, but it’s an important distinction for people in the field.

I also learn that it will be next to impossible to meet San Francisco’s medical examiner, Dr. Amy Hart. Unlike her predecessor, Dr. Boyd Stephens — whose media accessibility and subsequent scrutiny led to controversies about the reuse of needles, improper ventilation against dangerous pathogens in autopsy rooms, misappropriation of funds, and sexual harassment — Hart is fairly shy when it comes to the media. Public controversy can be a downside to the job, whether it’s over the contested findings of Los Angeles’ fabled "coroner to the stars" or the unpopular study by Marin County’s coroner of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge.

So I get the basics about the job from Hart’s deputy administrative director, Stephen Gelman, at the ’50s-era Medical Examiner’s Office on the grounds of the Hall of Justice. Gelman, a middle-aged, white-haired former special agent with the Department of the Treasury, explains the makeup of the office: 32 people, including forensic pathologists and anthropologists, toxicologists, chemists, investigators, and administrative personnel.

And becoming part of Hart’s team isn’t easy, especially since forensic-themed TV shows and the office’s involvement with UC San Francisco managed to attract 160 applicants during a recent call for three positions. Preference is given to those with a background in medicine and, at the very least, the funeral industry.

"IT’S CHINATOWN …"


But those are just the facts. My experience at the Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau, an art deco, cream-colored building on the outskirts of Chinatown, is much more visceral.

Inside I meet the genial Lt. Jason Arone, who explains that the bureau has been under the jurisdiction of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office since 1989. That gives Sheriff Gregory Ahern the title of chief coroner, but on a day-to-day basis, Arone is the guy in charge. I also meet Mike Yost, a former detective who is now a public administrator, which means he handles the belongings of decedents, from pets to hidden stashes of money.

Downstairs, the morgue is pretty much what movies would have you expect: cold metal and antiseptic green tile. Arone pauses at the sound of a saw — we can’t go inside if there’s an autopsy under way. But it’s just carpenters fixing a door. Inside, I’m struck by the lack of sliding-drawer coolers — bodies are identified by photograph these days and are kept in less-obvious storage rooms.

Then I meet autopsy technician Smiley Anderson — sometimes referred to as "the bullet finder" by resident pathologists. The 25-year veteran started working in his family’s mortuary as young man in the South — much the way many in coroner’s offices got their start. But Anderson says the field is changing now. Crossover careers are rarer, and he says the best way to get in is through an education in medicine.

As I sit at his desk outside the autopsy room, I notice what Arone calls "the meat-locker smell." It’s neither the smell of embalming fluid that I associate with funerals nor that of decay — just a stale, permeating reminder of what’s inside.

OUT IN THE FIELD


It’s midafternoon when I meet Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau detective Eric Larson, who’s agreed to show me the other side of the job: going out on calls. I wait with the jocular thirtysomething until two calls come in.

One is a follow-up from the night before. A young girl and her brother were at the house of a family friend, which also serves as a rehabilitation facility; soon after dinner both fell ill. The brother recovered, but the young girl died. Larson decides to ask some questions, though the toxicology report is still pending.

The other call is a notification about a suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge. (Sometimes Alameda County representatives will handle calls for Marin County if the next of kin is in the East Bay.)

Larson puts on his flak jacket as part of his routine, and we get into one of the department’s cars. Since it’s not a pickup, he says, we won’t need one of the vans.

The first stop is at a sagging west Oakland house. The man who answers the door is barely coherent but sends us to Children’s Hospital. When we get there, I’m amazed to see the little boy we got the call about bouncing up and down, chewing on a french fry. When he sees Larson, he starts singing, "Bad boys, bad boys …" Larson laughs and says, "That’s my favorite song, buddy." The child’s hale liveliness is heartbreaking with the knowledge I have of his sister.

Larson asks the family friend, who’s at the hospital, for any information on the night before. It’s unclear whether he’ll get answers, and he tells me that sometimes he never does. In fact, that’s one of the hardest parts of the job. "It doesn’t matter how much science you throw at it," he says. "Sometimes it comes out undetermined."

It’s getting late as we head to the home of the suicide victim’s sister in Castro Valley. No one answers the door. Larson checks with the Marin County Coroner’s Office for another address, then stops by a dispatch office to get directions. Notification is important to Larson, as people may otherwise never hear about the fates of their loved ones.

We arrive in a quiet, ’70s-era housing tract in San Leandro, at the house of the victim’s mother. Again, no one is home, but a neighbor with emergency keys checks the house, determining that the victim’s mother has gone for a walk with her dogs. We wait at the house.

When she arrives, she knows what Larson’s going to say before he opens his mouth — but the news is no less brutal. When we leave, her neighbors are sitting beside her on the couch, friends from happier, simpler times.

It’s late when we return to the office, and Larson is supposed to work another swing shift tomorrow. But he gets a message from home. The son of a friend died in an accident. The funeral is tomorrow.*

Crazy

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› news@sfbg.com

Shortly before midnight on April 21, 2001, Jason Grant Garza walked into the psychiatric wing of San Francisco General’s emergency room and said he was having a mental health crisis. A staffer there refused to admit him. When Garza insisted on seeing a doctor, he wound up strip-searched and thrown into jail. Now, after six years of legal wrangling and bureaucratic buck-passing, SF General has officially conceded that Garza was denied proper service. But Garza says he is still waiting for the help he needs and the justice he demands.

As I sat across from Garza on a recent afternoon, it wasn’t hard to imagine a busy hospital worker or government official blowing him off rather than dealing with his frenetic energy. Diagnosed with a so-called "adjustment disorder," Garza was intense, to say the least. Running his hands through his wiry, gray-streaked hair and leaning over the table as he spoke, the 47-year-old Panhandle-area resident railed against "the system" for well over an hour. At one point, he likened his suffering to that of "a starving kid in Africa … [except] the starving kid in Africa still has hope. I have none of that."

Garza’s ire and his penchant for hyperbole might be exasperating at times, but his behavior also seems to bolster his main contention — that he needs help with his mental health, help that he claims a flawed public health care apparatus has failed to provide. He says his attempts to receive care and support have only exacerbated his condition, increasing his isolation and his sense of persecution. "I’m dead right," he said repeatedly. "And yet I’ve gotten nothing for it."

Garza declined to recount specific details of his story or be photographed. Instead, he referred the Guardian to a 2003 deposition he gave to deputy city attorney Scott Burrell. According to the deposition, his ordeal began shortly after his lover and "soulmate" killed himself in January 2001. That April, Garza became despondent over his loss and called a suicide hotline. The phone counselor directed him to visit SF General’s Psychiatric Emergency Services.

Garza took a cab to SF General and told PES charge nurse Paul Lewis that he was "wigging out" and badly needed to see a doctor. According to Garza’s deposition and other court documents obtained by the Guardian, Lewis asked him if he was suicidal. Garza is quoted in his deposition as responding, "If I was crossing the street and fell, I don’t know if I’d get up." Lewis determined that this answer meant Garza was not suicidal and thus not in need of emergency care. He asked Garza to leave. When Garza refused, the hospital’s institutional police escorted him out.

Garza did eventually get into the hospital that night, but not in the way he was hoping. After he was ejected from the premises, he stole back into the main lobby and called city police to help him receive treatment. But hospital cops returned instead and stuck him in a holding room. Sheriff’s deputies arrived four hours later, early in the morning of April 22. They arrested Garza for trespassing and possession of marijuana, even though he had a prescription for medical cannabis in his wallet.

At the city jail, Garza finally got someone to acknowledge that he was experiencing a psychiatric emergency. He says he told jail staffers that he "didn’t care if he lived or if he died," and as a result, he was stripped of his clothes and placed naked in a cell for his own safety. "That nurse [at the jail] classified me as an emergency," Garza told us. "So one says I’m in an emergency, and the other [at SF General] says I’m not…. At what point am I going to get any help?"

To recap: When Garza voluntarily tried to find care, he was told he was not sufficiently distressed. Only when he was arrested and thrown into jail for demanding help was he declared a danger to himself. His "treatment" consisted of a strip search and a jail cell.

But that’s only the beginning of the insanity.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act was passed in 1986 to prevent hospitals from triaging out, or dumping, difficult or impoverished emergency room patients like Garza, a former business owner, cabdriver, and bookkeeper who has been on Social Security disability since 1995. EMTALA mandates that any patient who goes to an ER must be given an "appropriate medical screening examination." After he got out of jail, Garza sued the city, SF General, Lewis, and other city employees, contending they violated his rights under the act. He could not afford a lawyer, so he represented himself.

In one of the strangest twists of this twisted tale, Garza finally made it into the inner sanctum of SF General’s PES as a result of his suit against the city. But as with his night in jail, the circumstances of his psychiatric care were not what he was expecting.

While Garza was giving a deposition at the City Attorney’s Office in March 2003, his behavior prompted staffers to call in the authorities. According to an official report of the incident, Garza made suicidal remarks like "I have no desire to live." He also allegedly said that he "needed/wanted bullets and a gun." These statements are not present in the 168-page deposition. Garza did acknowledge to the Guardian that he became upset that day, especially when questioned about his experiences at SF General and the suicide of his lover, but he claimed that deputy city attorney Burrell "set him up" and that the calls to the mobile crisis unit and police were part of "an attempt at witness intimidation." Whatever the reason for the calls, Garza was detained for a 5150, a procedure under which subjects are involuntarily committed for up to 72 hours. The City Attorney’s Office had no comment on the issue.

Amazingly, police took Garza to the same PES department at SF General where the saga began. This time, though, he made it past the lobby and received a medical screening exam, marked by a report and other SF General paperwork. The mere fact of this report’s existence, Garza claims, proves that he did not receive proper care when he went to the hospital voluntarily in 2001. Deputy city attorney Burrell informed Garza by letter that the only record the hospital could produce from his 2001 visit was a triage report filled out by Lewis, the nurse. EMTALA does not permit triage of a patient without a subsequent medical screening examination.

However, in pretrial motions, the city argued that Lewis treated Garza like any other would-be patient and thus complied with the law: "EMTALA requires hospitals to provide a screening examination that is comparable to that offered to other patients with similar symptoms." In other words, Garza’s treatment may have been poor, but so was everyone else’s, so he had no case, the city contended. Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton agreed and tossed out the suit.

Perhaps the strongest proof of Garza’s "adjustment disorder" and need for psychiatric care, ironically, is the fact that he continued to press his case even after his lawsuit was tossed out, taking on a health care system that could make anyone feel unhinged. For the past six years, he says, he has badgered "10 to 15" local, state, and federal agencies, as well as government officials like Sup. Bevan Dufty and aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco). In the process, he has compiled an encyclopedic collection of letters, petitions, records, and even audiotapes of phone conversations.

"There isn’t a single agency that’s in charge of anything," Garza said of his dealings with the health care bureaucracy. "You’re parsed. You’re sliced and diced and parsed as a medical patient … and it’s designed to fail."

Not surprisingly, Garza’s efforts to find accountability have irked some officials and members of the bureaucratic corps. When he requested a copy of his arrest report from the Sheriff’s Department, he received a mocking denial letter signed "R.N. Ratched," a reference to the asylum nurse in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As the Guardian reported in 2002, Sheriff’s Department legal counsel Jim Harrigan eventually confessed to penning the letter, but only after Garza raised a fuss before the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force.

At Garza’s urging, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) asked the California Department of Health Services to investigate his treatment at SF General. In a letter dated Nov. 13, 2006, CMS official Steven Chickering informed Garza that the DHS "found no violation of statue [sic] or regulations." Chickering concluded his letter to Garza by warning him to back off. "Your frequent communications have become disruptive, distracting, and nonproductive. Therefore I have instructed CMS Regional Office staff not to accept telephone calls from you in this matter."

Despite his setbacks with the CMS and other agencies, Garza pressed on. He contacted the Office of Inspector General at the federal Department of Health and Human Services and asked it for help. OIG spokesperson Donald White declined to discuss specific details of Garza’s case, but he did tell the Guardian that "Mr. Garza came to [the OIG] directly, and we contacted CMS, and they conducted another investigation."

That second investigation found an EMTALA violation after all.

On April 19, Garza’s relentless — some might say quixotic or even crazy — pursuit of what he calls the truth finally produced some results. Nearly six years to the day after his 2001 visit to SF General’s PES, hospital officials inked a settlement agreement with the OIG in which SF General conceded that Garza had not been examined properly, a violation of section 1867(e)(1) of EMTALA. Section 6 of the settlement states plainly that the hospital "did not provide [Garza] with an appropriate medical screening examination on April 22, 2001."

The hospital agreed to pay a fine of $5,000. But Garza, as White told us, "is not a party to the settlement." In other words, he got nothing.

"That’s the way EMTALA works," White said, meaning that hospitals found in violation of the law pay restitution to the government, not to the victim. "We took the steps required under the law."

Reached by phone, Iman Nazeeri-Simmons, SF General’s director of administrative operations, acknowledged that hospital officials signed the settlement agreement but noted that in the course of the investigation leading up to it, "the state did give us a very thorough EMTALA survey and came out with no problems."

"It has been made clear to Mr. Garza that he is more than welcome to come back and access services here," she added.

Garza denied that he had received any follow-up calls from SF General offering services, and he balked at the idea of returning there: "That’s like sending someone back to the priest that molested them." He told us he would like to pursue further legal action against the hospital and the city but still has not found a lawyer. After the settlement was signed, he claimed, he asked officials at the OIG "where I could go now for legal and medical help, and they told me, ‘That’s not our jurisdiction.’ "

"So even though I’m dead right, I’m still without help because everybody’s pointing fingers … as opposed to getting me the help I need, because they don’t care, they’re unaccountable," Garza said. "Ten different agencies told me I was wrong, and now [with the settlement] I’m right?"

He threw up his hands. "Does that make sense to you?" *

Jailhouse justice

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› gwschulz@sfbg.com

San Francisco’s popular Mike Hennessey — the longest-serving sheriff in the state after winning seven elections — likely won’t be facing a major challenger during his reelection bid this year. But a group of his deputies are being targeted for allegedly employing abusive tactics.

Six former jail inmates are charging in a civil lawsuit that they were beaten severely, left without medical attention, and forced to remain in administrative segregation for days, weeks, and even months. They originally filed suit in 2005, alleging that while in pretrial custody at various jail facilities in the city, including the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, they were punched, kicked, or slammed by deputies from the Sheriff’s Department, which oversees the jails.

A judge, after dismissing an attempt by the deputies to have the suits tossed, ruled in December that at least four of the former inmates could take their allegations of excessive force to a jury trial. Some of the plaintiffs claim they were denied proper medical treatment for the resulting injuries, while others say they’ve endured chronic pain or injuries since the alleged attacks took place.

"The only reason these cases have come to light is because two of the inmates ended up in San Francisco General Hospital," Scot Candell, an attorney for the inmates, told the Guardian. "They were knocked unconscious."

Candell has been a criminal defense attorney in the city for 10 years, working most recently out of an aging Victorian with mismatched carpets on Webster Street. He’d never handled a civil suit before but said he took the cases, along with cocounsel Mark Marin, an attorney based in Sacramento, because the allegations represented a disturbing pattern of inmate mistreatment by the accused deputies.

He was aware of such complaints made by inmates in the past but says they were often unfounded or he chose not to take them seriously. Candell says he still believes most of the department’s deputies handle inmates appropriately. But he argues that these cases went too far and the inmates had no legitimate venue for complaining about them afterward.

"In general with people in custody, there are a lot of problems representing them both criminally and civilly," Candell told us. "They don’t have a lot of credibility. But when I saw Mr. Henderson, there was no denying that there was a problem. You don’t just get a broken back from falling out of your bed."

Earnest Henderson claims that in December 2003, following a verbal dispute with deputies involving an extension cord, three of them trapped him in a utility room, slammed him to the ground, and punched him repeatedly in the head until he slipped in and out of consciousness and was left naked in a padded cell.

He later fell to the floor twice in his cell because of a pain in his back, jail medical records show, and finally had to be transported to San Francisco General Hospital after the second fall knocked him out. There, doctors discovered a broken lower vertebra, which attorneys for the city later characterized as "minor." The city attorneys insist Henderson was inciting inmates by yelling and kicking his cell door and the deputies were merely working to contain him using only constitutionally permitted "nonlethal force."

Inmates in county custody have basically one avenue outside civil litigation for pursuing grievances against deputies alleged to have used excessive force. But the inmates complain that the Internal Affairs Division of the Sheriff’s Department didn’t thoroughly investigate their grievances, while the deputies continued working in the jail.

Voters created the Office of Citizen Complaints in 1983 to serve as an independent watchdog over the San Francisco Police Department and a place where civilians can go to protest law-enforcement misconduct. But no such equivalent exists for the Sheriff’s Department, which, in addition to managing jails, also provides security for City Hall and San Francisco’s criminal and civil courts.

Candell argues that something similar should be created for the Sheriff’s Department. Even though allegations of institutional shortcomings (such as flawed training and oversight) have been removed from the case, Candell hopes a large monetary award paid by the city’s taxpayers would prompt local lawmakers to demand greater oversight.

The suit originally charged the city and Hennessey with medical negligence and wider-ranging inmate abuse resulting from a lack of proper training for deputies. But those allegations were dismissed by Judge Vaughn Walker, who held in part that the city and Hennessey were not deliberately indifferent toward inmate grievances.

"We already know there are a bunch of allegations in this case that did not rise to a legal standing," Hennessey told the Guardian. "I believe that’s how the case will resolve itself ultimately as well."

Nonetheless, allegations by four of the six original plaintiffs, all targeting a deputy named Miguel Prado, appear likely to go to trial after brief settlement negotiations between the City Attorney’s Office and Candell deteriorated. Two other deputies, Glenn Young and Larry Napata, are also defendants in excessive-force claims made by Henderson.

Mack Woodfox alleges that in October 2005, he had an argument with Prado over a breakfast tray he was trying to give to another inmate. The two exchanged words, and Woodfox alleges the deputy removed him from the cell, took him down the hall to a different area, and punched his head and banged it into the floor.

Two days later Woodfox lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital, where doctors found he had a broken nose and broken blood vessels in his eye. Candell said the District Attorney’s Office is investigating the alleged attack on Woodfox and could bring assault charges against Prado, but a representative in the office contacted by the Guardian would neither confirm nor deny that such an investigation was taking place.

Several inmates filed declarations stating they had either seen or heard Prado attack other inmates, and two claimed Prado and other deputies beat them last year. One testified he was told by Prado to clean the cell in which Henderson’s alleged attack occurred. "There were pools of blood on the floor and a smeared bloody handprint on the wall," the inmate stated.

Michael Perez claims that in July 2004, Prado punched and kicked him after they argued over whether Perez could stay behind in a gym at the end of an exercise period to look for a screw missing from his eyeglasses. Arturo Pleitez alleges that in November 2004, Prado punched him several times, stripped off his clothes, and dunked his head in a toilet. In both instances, the city argues that the inmates assaulted Prado first, and Perez was even charged with battery and resisting arrest, but those allegations were eventually dismissed.

Messages left for deputies Napata, Young, and Prado seeking comment were not returned.

Hennessey told the Guardian that force is sometimes needed to subdue defiant inmates who threaten or attack other inmates and deputies. He told the court in a declaration that "rare" instances of excessive force do occur at the jails, and when they happen, he doesn’t hesitate to discipline or fire the deputies involved if necessary.

"It’s a difficult environment to work in…. Two-thirds or more of the people in that jail have been to state prison before," Hennessey said, referring to San Francisco’s Bryant Street jail. "Most of them are going to state prison when their time in San Francisco is done. It’s a very tense environment with very sophisticated prisoners, and the deputies have to be very sophisticated as well."

Hennessey has a reputation as a progressive who shows more compassion toward inmates than most sheriffs, but he arguably can’t oversee all of the 850 sworn employees under his supervision. Hennessey told the Guardian that he’d directed investigations into complaints about Prado’s conduct in the past, but he insisted they had not resulted in discipline, and he remains confident of all three deputies.

"Mike Hennessey is probably as good a sheriff as you’re ever going to get," said Dan Macallair, a criminal-justice expert at San Francisco State University who specializes in corrections policy. "But Mike Hennessey is one person. The Sheriff’s Department is a big bureaucracy. Law-enforcement bureaucracies tend to be very closed, and there’s a code of silence…. They don’t do well at policing themselves."

In response to the allegations, the City Attorney’s Office was sure to remind Judge Walker exactly what the court was dealing with: hardened criminals. Perez, a purported member of the Norteños gang, is now in San Quentin doing 25 years to life for murder. Henderson was awaiting trial on charges of attempted murder and eventually pled guilty to robbery.

But not everyone in jail is prison bound. All of Candell’s clients were in pretrial custody at the time of their alleged abuses and simply too poor to afford bail before they had their day in court. Woodfox was eventually released after attempted murder and carjacking charges against him were dismissed.

"The bad guards are the ones that control the culture within the institution typically," Macallair told us, noting that he supports the establishment of outside oversight bodies. "The good people don’t speak up…. There’s always going to be problems in correctional institutions. It’s just their nature. But you can at least help promote a humane, better-managed environment when there’s accountability and monitoring."<\!s>

Police-records legislation on its way to state Assembly just as SFPD officer is charged with lewd act

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By G.W. Schulz

UPDATE! Here’s an SB 1019 alert from the Northern California ACLU.

Have you caught up with this week’s lurid law-enforcement story involving an SFPD officer facing criminal charges in the East Bay for sleeping with a 14-year-old prostitute? Scaaaaaaandalous.

If formal criminal charges had never been brought against the 37-year department veteran and he merely faced internal disciplinary proceedings for having sex with an underage girl in his car, there’s a chance you never would have learned about it. The state Supreme Court in a now-infamous decision handed down last year blocked the public from being able to access police disciplinary records.

If police hadn’t discovered the two in Sgt. Donald Forte’s civilian car at the dead end of an East Oakland street and the lewd act had simply been reported by a colleague internally, how else could the public have ever learned that a police officer had allegedly committed statutory rape?

Outside of a possible leak, the public may never have known a thing.

Two stories we published this week were also affected by that Supreme Court decision. Our story on three sheriff’s deputies in San Francisco accused in federal court by former county-jail inmates of assaulting them was limited in part because some personnel records generated in the case were designated confidential by a judge, so we couldn’t look at them.

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Mack Woodfox alleges he was beat while in custody

A chance to end police secrecy

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EDITORIAL There’s still a chance to restore sunshine to police disciplinary records, but it’s going to take strong and visible support from public officials around the Bay Area.

A bill authored by Sen. Gloria Romero (D–Los Angeles), SB 1019, would allow the public limited access to hearings and reports on police misconduct. That’s nothing new; the San Francisco Police Commission has held disciplinary hearings in public for years. But a 2006 state Supreme Court decision, Copley v. Superior Court, barred that practice, giving peace officers a stunning and unprecedented level of protection from public oversight.

All the Romero bill would do is restore the law to where it was pre-Copley. It makes perfect sense: cops have immense authority and power, and when they abuse it, the public loses faith in the law enforcement process. As San Francisco sheriff Mike Hennessey points out in a letter supporting SB 1019, shedding some light on the system and ensuring that officers who are suspended or terminated for misconduct can’t avoid public scrutiny "will help law enforcement by allowing it to inform the public that internal discipline within public safety agencies is a serious matter and that steps are being taken to maintain that discipline."

Assemblymember Mark Leno (D–San Francisco) tried earlier this year to overturn the Copley decision, but his bill was bottled up in the Assembly Committee on Public Safety. Even his San Francisco colleague, Fiona Ma, wouldn’t vote in favor of the bill. Romero, the Senate majority leader, has done a bit better: SB 1019 squeaked through the Public Safety Committee on a 3–2 vote and is now headed for the Senate floor.

The vote there will be close too: the police secrecy lobby has pulled out all the stops to fight this, and even Democrats in Sacramento are afraid of offending police organizations. That’s why it’s important that community leaders around the Bay stand up and make clear that this is a bill with broad-based support.

The San Francisco Police Commission has endorsed it, as have the San Francisco supervisors. The city councils of Oakland and Berkeley are on record as supporting it. But we haven’t heard from Mayor Gavin Newsom or Oakland mayor Ron Dellums; both need to speak out in favor of the bill and let Romero know that she has their support.

Sen. Leland Yee told us he fully supports the bill; so does Sen. Carole Migden. So far, though, Don Perata, the State Senate president pro tem who represents Berkeley and Oakland — cities that have long-established police oversight agencies — hasn’t take a position. He needs to not only endorse the bill but use the considerable power of his office to push for its passage. Every vote will count on this one, and Perata’s constituents should let him know that they’re watching. *

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. *

A half-century of lies

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View pictures of Leola King’s legendary Blue Mirror club here.

Leola King has lived your life, the lives of three friends and then some.

She’s traveled to Africa with the legendary entertainer, Josephine Baker. She’s featured jazz great Louis Armstrong at a popular Fillmore nightclub she helmed in the 1950s called the Blue Mirror, where she also once convinced a roomful of patrons to drink sweet champagne from the heel of her shoe.

She’s played host to the crusading television journalist Edward R. Murrow.

She’s even had a fling with championship boxer Joe Louis. From the ring at Madison Square Garden, he glanced toward her front-row seat, which she’d secured by chance during her first trip to New York, and had his lackeys retrieve her for a date afterward. Their rendezvous appeared as a gossip item in an Ohio paper and remains in its archives today.

Most of all, Leola King has come as close as anyone possibly can to experiencing bureaucratic hell on earth. For half a century, she’s been fighting with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which has taken four pieces of her property, wiped out a restaurant and two nightclubs she owned, and left her with a string of broken promises.

Her story is evidence that the ugly local chapter of Western Addition redevelopment history still isn’t over – and it’s a demonstration of why so many African Americans in this town will never trust the Redevelopment Agency.

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Beginning in the 1940s, King successfully operated a series of restaurants and nightclubs in the city, remarkable enough in an era that imposed a double-paned glass ceiling on black, female entrepreneurs.

“Back when I first moved onto Fillmore, it was very popular,” King told the Guardian. “Market Street didn’t have shit. They didn’t have traffic. They didn’t have nothing on Market Street.”

During the height of King’s accomplishments, the Redevelopment Agency infamously launched an ambitious project to clear out “blight” in the neighborhood. It was part of a nationwide urban-renewal trend, and while the project here still won’t be finished until 2009, it’s widely regarded as one of America’s worst urban-planning disasters.

In theory, Western Addition residents who were forced to give up their homes or businesses were given a “certificate of preference,” a promise that when the sometimes decaying buildings were turned to kindling and new ones built, the former occupants could return.

In practice, it didn’t work out that way. An estimated 5,500 certificates were issued to families and business owners shortly before the second phase of Western Addition redevelopment began in 1964. Some 5,000 families were dislodged and many of them fled to other sectors of the city (including Bayview-Hunter’s Point, which is today slated for its own redevelopment), or outside of the Bay Area completely.

Only a fraction of the certificates have benefited anyone. The agency has lost contact information for more than half of the holders, and redevelopment commissioners now openly admit the program is a joke.

“If we’re going to boast about being this diverse community in San Francisco, and we’re going to allow our African American population to become extinct, then how can we show our faces in government if we’re not really doing anything about it?” asked London Breed, a redevelopment commissioner appointed by Gavin Newsom in 2005. “And not just putting black people in low-income housing. There [are] a lot of middle-class African Americans all across America, specifically in the East Bay and in other places. Why do they choose to live in the East Bay over San Francisco?”

A renewed interest in the certificates by City Hall led to hearings this month, and District 5 Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has planned another for April.

King obtained two certificates, and attempts to later redeem them both devolved into costly legal wrangling with the agency that lasted more than two decades. She has never regained what she lost.

Leola King’s story is about more than certificates of preference. It’s a story about the troubling legacy of urban renewal.

King welcomes guests into her home on Eddy Street near Fillmore with ease. The living room in what is little more than a two-bedroom converted garage apartment swells unimaginably with antiques – three stuffed chairs with vinyl slips, crystal chandeliers, an ornate dining-room table, lamps, a fur throw.

She insists that she’s just 39 years old, but public records put her closer to 84.

When the Guardian first visited with her in person, she was dressed in black cotton leisure attire. Two chestnut braids cascaded from a gray Kangol-style cap, which she smoothed with her hands as they hugged a pair of light-skinned cherub cheeks.

King made her way west after spending her earliest years behind the barbed wire of a Cherokee reservation in Haskell, Ok. Her mother died when King was young, and her restless father had meandered off to Los Angeles. Her grandparents oversaw her adolescence before she trailed after her father to California, where he was establishing a chain of barbecue restaurants. She married a man at just 14, and a year later, she was a mother. Tony Tyler, her son, is a San Francisco tour guide today and remains a close confidant and business partner.

It was 1946 when she first landed in San Francisco and eventually started her own barbecue pit at 1601 Geary St., near Buchanan, historic building inspection records show. She called it Oklahoma King’s, and hungry San Franciscans were lured to the smell of exotic buffalo, deer and quail meats.

“That end of Fillmore was very popular all the way down until you got almost to Pacific [Avenue],” she said. “Heavily populated. There was at one time in that area of Fillmore over 100 bars alone. Lots of hamburger places. That’s where I had the barbecue pit.”

By 1949, however, Congress had made urban renewal federal law with the goal of leveling slums and deleting general “blight,” still the most popular and awkwardly defined threshold for determining where the government can clear homes and businesses using eminent domain.

The first redevelopment zone in the Western Addition, known as A-1, included Oklahoma King’s. She was paid approximately $25,000 for the property, but offered no relocation assistance or other compensation for the revenue she lost as a result of ceasing her day-to-day business.

Forging ahead, she opened in 1953 what became a hub of jazz and blues entertainment in the Fillmore, the Blue Mirror, at 935 Fillmore Street. The place was decorated with brass Greek figurines on the walls, a circular bar and velvet festoons. King spent a year hopping onto buses full of tourists and begging the driver to drop them by her nightclub for a drink. Before long, her brassy personality had attracted world-class performers, each of them adding electricity to the club’s reputation.

“She was the type of woman who knew how to handle people,” a Blue Mirror regular later said in the 2006 collection of Fillmore jazz-era photography, Harlem of the West. “She could talk to the pimps and hustlers. She didn’t play around, and they knew how to conduct themselves in her club.”

A musician who formerly worked there told the Guardian the Blue Mirror was one of the few places on Fillmore that actually provided live entertainment at that time. Bobbie Webb backed up B.B. King, Little Willie John, T-Bone Walker and others as a young saxophonist at the Blue Mirror with his band the Rhythm Rockers. He said the other establishments nearby on Fillmore were mostly bars except for headlining auditoriums where mainstream acts like James Brown and the Temptations performed. Smaller venues abounded up the street on Divisadero, he said, save mostly for King’s Blue Mirror and the Booker T. Washington Hotel.

“[King] didn’t only have a personality” said Webb, who now airs a show Tuesdays on 89.5 KPOO, “she was a beautiful lady. Personality just spoke for itself. All she had to do was stand there.”

But like virtually everyone in the neighborhood at that time, King rented the place where the Blue Mirror operated. Redevelopment again reached her business in the early 1960s. State booze enforcers, she says, claimed to have witnessed a bartender serving alcohol to a minor and her liquor license was taken away. When the Redevelopment Agency showed up shortly thereafter to sweep the block away, she was ejected without compensation because she wasn’t at that time technically in business.

Two more commercial and residential properties she owned on Post and Webster streets respectively were also eventually taken under redevelopment.

She pressed on, encouraged by Jewish business owners in the area she’d befriended, including liquor wholesaler Max Sobel and Fairmont Hotel operator Benjamin Swig.

“Whenever I’d lose something, they’d say, ‘Keep on moving. Don’t stop, because you’ll lose your customers. When you open back up, they won’t know who you are.’ They’re the ones who told me, ‘Go get another spot.'”

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By the time King began work on her third business in the Fillmore, urban renewal projects had wreaked havoc on minority communities across the nation, including neighborhoods in west-side Boston, downtown Atlanta, the celebrated 18th & Vine District of Kansas City and elsewhere.

King opened the Bird Cage Tavern at 1505 Fillmore St. in 1964 near O’Farrell complete with a jukebox, 30-foot mahogany bar, a piano and a gilded birdcage. Then-police chief Thomas J. Cahill tried to block her liquor-license renewal by complaining to the state about “winos” and “prostitutes” in the neighborhood, records show, but regulators dismissed the claims.

“We had viable businesses all around us,” King said. “I had one fellow I worked with a lot named Willie Jones. He was a blues singer. The interesting thing was, I had music in the daytime at the Bird Cage. I specialized in afternoon jazz.”

Despite a triumphant resettlement, nonetheless, the redevelopment agency arrived yet again and bought her building during the expansion of it’s A-2 redevelopment phase and served as landlord for the Bird Cage, a barber shop and a liquor store as it waited for another two years deciding what to do with the building.

On the agency’s watch, a fire broke out next door to the Bird Cage that led to water damage in her space. Federal Housing and Urban Development records show that no insurance claim was ever filed by the Redevelopment Agency. King says the agency removed some of the bar’s contents, mostly kitchen supplies, and made only stopgap repairs to the building anticipating that she would later be ousted anyway. The items they took, she says, were never returned.

The agency then evicted all of the building’s tenants in 1974. This time, King stood fast and had to be forced out by the sheriff. The agency promised relocation assistance, but those empty assurances became her biggest headache yet. In fact, she would spend the next 25 years quarreling with the agency over relocation terms.

King and the agency searched fruitlessly until 1977 for a suitable replacement building before King purchased her own out of desperation at 1081 Post St. She was then forced to begin another endurance test of working to actually extract money from the agency owed to her for properly outfitting the new building.

Meanwhile, the Bird Cage’s leftover furnishings – from oil paintings, rugs and curtains to an ice maker, wood shelving and an antique porcelain lamp – were destroyed when the agency amazingly chose to store them on an outdoor lot off Third Street during her move, a fact later confirmed by an agency employee in an affidavit.

“They moved it all out,” King said, “all these antiques and stuff, into this field where the weather ate it up.”

The agency’s initial response was to determine how it could best avoid legal liability. Redevelopment officials finally offered her about $100,000, which she needed desperately to keep things moving with the Bird Cage’s new location, but King insists today the materials were worth closer to $1 million.

As she was fighting to reopen her bar business, she attempted to redeem an earlier certificate of preference given to her when she’d lost a residential property on Webster Street to redevelopment. In 1983, she bought a condemned, 12-unit apartment building on Eddy Street hoping to rehabilitate it using a federally backed loan.

The deal only led to more trouble. The agency paid for its own roving security to patrol Western Addition properties it had purchased, and before 1431 Eddy St. was ever officially conveyed to King (as well as two other neighboring developers), thieves gutted the building of windows, doors, plumbing, light fixtures and other hardware. (Two buildings belonging to neighboring developers were also hit, and the agency addressed their losses the same way.)

Almost immediately, the agency told her she’d purchased the building “as is” and that they weren’t responsible for the break-in. But according to an internal 1983 memo marked “confidential,” later unearthed when friends of King submitted a records request to the agency, staffers clearly were concerned about the legal implications of offering one building for sale “as is” and actually providing another one on the date of delivery that had been thoroughly burglarized.

The memo shows that the possibility of a lawsuit was of greater concern to the agency than any obligation to compensate King for the lost hardware, regardless of whether proper security was the agency’s responsibility. Records show they did discuss a settlement of little more than $2,000, but King considered the stolen goods to be worth thousands of dollars more.

She managed to eventually finish the rehabilitation of her Eddy Street property after several years of work, and while she lives there today, time and angst took their toll. Each step of the transition to what she hoped would someday become her new bar, Goldie’s on Post Street, involved a seemingly endless round of yet more negotiations, letters, legal threats and bureaucratic backbiting before the agency would lift a finger and allocate money for contractors, necessary seismic upgrades, architects and equipment.

In 1997, then-Rep. Ron Dellums (now Oakland mayor) wrote a letter to top local HUD official Art Agnos (later a San Francisco mayor) on King’s behalf.

“On August 26, Ms. King met with a member of my staff and detailed issues surrounding a 25-year dispute she has attempted to resolve with HUD and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency,” Dellums wrote. “Your expeditious attention to this matter is [a] request, as Ms. King is elderly and experiencing health problems. The resolution to this issue would allow her to live the remainder of her life with some piece of mind.”

It was too late. The federally backed loans she’d received from HUD to rehab her Eddy Street property, from which the Redevelopment Agency strictly enforced repayment, fell into default. Loans leveraged against her other remaining properties began to slip, too, all while she fought with the forces of redevelopment to recreate what she had once proudly possessed.

King’s story may seem like an unfathomable streak of bad luck, but there’s a paper trail for all of it. And her battle, laid out in hundreds of pages of documents saved by King over several decades and reviewed by the Guardian, was ultimately unsuccessful..

By 1997, King was submerged in bankruptcy proceedings and would lose pretty much everything that she owned, including an Edwardian landmark home on Scott Street near Alamo Square where she’d lived for years (partially burned in a 1986 fire, believe it or not) and a residential building on Sutter Street.

Goldie’s was to be her final resting place, a roost from which she hoped to feature cabaret dancing, fresh crab at happy hour, a refined art deco aesthetic and live music performances. She lost that, too. Today, it’s Diva’s just off Polk Street.

Urban renewal won.

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Hopeful press accounts lately foretell a jazz revival in the Fillmore District fueled by enterprising developers deft at financing lucrative redevelopment projects through tax incentives and low-interest loans half a century after the promise of “renewal,” now described euphemistically as “historic preservation.”

But with such a sordid history behind them, it’s no wonder residents of Bayview-Hunter’s Point, many of whom escaped Western Addition “renewal” in the first place, are leery of a pending years-long plan to redevelop nearly 1,500 acres in the southeast neighborhoods.

Bayview newspaper publisher Willie Ratcliff led a petition drive last year in an effort to put the plan before voters. Over 20,000 petition signatures were certified by elections officials, but City Attorney Dennis Herrera ruled the petitions were technically invalid because circulators hadn’t presented the full text of the redevelopment plan to signers. Redevelopment foes have since sued to have Herrera’s decision tossed.

“The misuse by these people is just unbelievable,” King said. “They were fighting me every inch.”

Thanks to Susan Bryan for joining the Guardian in reviewing hundreds of pages of public and personal records preserved in Leola King’s estate. Bryan is currently working with Monkey Paw Productions on a documentary about King’s life

Public power football

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By Tim Redmond

The City of Santa Clara has a lot that the San Francisco 49ers find attractive: A nice site for a stadium, a local fan base — and, it turns out, $200 million in cash. That money, which the team has its eyes on, is sitting in the bank — it’s the surplus from the city’s municipal electric utility.

Isn’t it funny: San Francisco may lose a football team in part because our competing city did what we should have done many years ago, and created a public-power agency. Now it’s got some money to spare.

This all came up at Mayor Gavin Newsom’s weekly department heads meeting March 18. when a mayoral staffer gave a briefing on the Santa Clara 49ers situation, including an explanation of how the Niners want that $200 mill (which the Santa Clara power agency is reluctant to part with). In the middle of the briefing, Sheriff Mike Hennessey dared to interrupt with the obvious question:

“Are you saying,” he asked, “that a city can make a profit from public power?”

The staffer’s response: “No comment.”

What’s up, Carole?

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By Tim Redmond

I’m still waiting to hear something from Carole Migden about this truly offensive blog post by her former aide, Michael Colbruno.

For the record, this attack on Mark Leno started when right-wingers went after him for opposing Proposition 83. We opposed Prop. 83, too. So did San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey. So, I’m told by Migden’s office, did Migden.

I left word for Migden two days ago. She ought ot come out and say that this is bullshit and that she won’t have her supporters pulling this stuff. (And if any of Leno’s people try to do the same kind os smear-stuff, I hope he smacks them down as well.)