Department of strange bedfellows

When you are up against the threat of fascism, you have to be willing to inhabit, always uncomfortably, a big tent. 

So these days, I find myself listening to and cheering on Never Trump folks at The Bulwark and elsewhere. They are stalwart at working to defeat Trump and MAGA and they have suffered for their determination. They have lost their tribe; that is a terrible human injury.

Yet they believe so many things I find appalling ... They think Ronald Reagan was a hero of human freedom; I think he was the butcher of Central American aspirations for justice and democracy. They think it's somehow morally wrong to forgive student debt; I think this policy is simply making whole people who've been victims of a con. They applaud Joe Biden's support for Israel's war on Palestinians; I think he's lost the moral thread.

And perhaps most counter-factually in my view, they think the racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd's murder-by-cop was mass violence unleashed. That's just hooey. According to the international Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), researchers concluded that these events, largely inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, were "overwhelmingly peaceful."

The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent. In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity. Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country. Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations — under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd’s killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.

Sure, there were a few places where there was considerable violence -- in addition to a few blocks of Portland, Kenosha comes to mind. 

And there were quite a few locations where polices forces, angry at seeing their free use of excessive force challenged, reacted to protesters with violence of their own. Remember Martin Gugino, the 76-year-old white protester who had his skull cracked by Buffalo police? After video of the incident went viral, two officers were suspended, but eventually returned to duties as if nothing had happened. 

Via El Tecolote

All this is preface for a bit of unfinished business that's become current business here in the Mission. 

A hilltop San Francisco intersection will soon bear the name of Sean Monterrosa to honor the legacy and contributions of the 22-year-old man killed in 2020 by a Vallejo police officer. 

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution to honor Monterrosa with a commemorative street name at Park Street and Holly Park Circle in the Bernal Heights neighborhood where he grew up. Several neighbors and residents wrote to the board to express their support. 

“Sean Monterrosa had a bright, beautiful, and limitless life ahead of him,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a co-sponsor of the resolution. “The passing of this item will help the community heal, serve as a positive beacon for Black and brown youth for whom Sean was a mentor, and remind our city of his great contributions.” 

Monterrosa was killed in a Walgreens parking lot in Vallejo on June 2, 2020, by Det. Jarrett Tonn, who fired five rounds from a Colt M4 Commando rifle from the backseat of an unmarked police truck, records show. A single bullet struck Monterrosa in the back of the head. Tonn told investigators that he mistook a hammer in Monterrosa’s sweatshirt for a gun.

The Vallejo police fired Tonn; he was later reinstated. No charges were filed against Tonn; evidence surrounding the killing did not survive handling by Vallejo Police Department.

That this killing happened in Vallejo should be little surprise according to KQED: 

Between 2010 and late 2020, Vallejo police officers killed 19 people, the second-highest rate among America’s 100 largest police forces.

Can I be excused for knowing with certainty that most of the violence of the summer of 2020 was not done by the supporters of Black Lives Matter? 

Can I work on the same team with people who've imbibed a completely different reality in which mobs trashed America? Faced with the danger to us all, I have to.

When it comes to policing, there are multiple stories

Radley Balko is an extremely unsentimental observer of US policing. His 2013 The Rise of the Warrior Cop is an essential history of the evolution of violent policing, even if, I believe, properly subject to criticism for not integrating an understanding of historic white supremacy into his narrative.

Though still libertarian in his instincts, he's no longer on that page -- thanks BLM. We live and learn, all of us.

This guy sticks with the beat. On his newsletter, he has recently published a complicated assessment of positive developments in policing since George Floyd's videoed murder. Some excerpts:

... Three years later, it seems safe to say that the 2020 demonstrations brought real, substantive change. Not enough, but more than in any of my 20 years on this beat. If you had told me in 2018 that within five years, dozens of cities and a few states would impose restrictions or outright bans on no-knock raids, I’d have rolled my eyes at you. We’ve also seen a wave of bans on chokeholds, and state restrictions on civil asset forfeiture (though many of those pre-date 2020). A few states have even stripped police of the qualified immunity that shields police officers from federal lawsuits when they’re sued in state court. 

We’ve seen reformist police executives take over many big city police agencies, where they’ve implemented policies like mandatory deescalation, prohibitions on shooting into moving cars, and barring high-speed chases for minor offenses. We’ve even seen some jurisdictions attempt to limit the role of police in traffic enforcement.

Many of these reforms were only possible because of the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. For all the criticism of “defund” and police abolitionists, the protests dramatically shifted public opinion in a way we haven’t seen since the civil rights era. There’d been some movement in polling after Ferguson, the death of Eric Garner, and other high-profile incidents of police violence, but within months public opinion tended to regress back to the mean.

That hasn’t been the case since the George Floyd protests. ...

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this shift. Prior to Ferguson, public support for all but the most cosmetic police reforms was pretty much nonexistent. Even after Ferguson, it remained pretty low. The 2020 protests not only spurred a massive swing in public opinion, support for reform has remained high even as crime has gone up, and even as one of the two major political parties has gone out of its way to demagogue police reform as a major contributor to violence and disorder. It’s notable that in that YouGov poll, a plurality of Republicans still favor every reform polled but two — banning no-knock raids and prohibiting military gear.

The country clearly wants change. The main barrier right now is politicians.

So why aren't we seeing more reform, more public safety, less occupying army in the 'hood? Balko thinks he knows:

The problem is that though a healthy majority of the country thinks policing is in need of change, there’s a loud, well-funded, and politically powerful constituency that feels otherwise — groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, older voters, and police and prison guard unions. (I suppose we can also now add “middle aged tech bros” to the mix.)

Successful reform means overcoming political inertia, and to do that you need to convince politicians of one of two things:

1) The support they’ll get from backing reform is greater than what the support they’ll lose for abandoning the status quo.

2) Reformers are capable of imposing a political cost for failing to support their policies.

For the moment, the political force for change is not there. But we know there will be more atrocities ...

• • •

Unhappily, San Francisco is not one of the places leading the way on police reform. In 2016, the Justice Department blasted our local cops for a catalogue of racist use-for-force practices culminating in five police killings of unarmed residents in a two year period. But this was unenforceable, not a binding consent decree. The incoming Trump DOJ dumped the process. Chief Scott assures our toothless Police Commission that reforms are underway, but without external enforcement and with a rabidly anti-reform police union, that's doubtful.

Mayor London Breed flanked by a smiling Chief Scott

Meanwhile, with a captive Mayor and District Attorney, the SFPD seems unwilling to simply do the job. 

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight has concluded we have "a police department asleep at the wheel." She interviewed an immigrant-led business that is giving up in the Tenderloin, the city's urban core.

Damian Morffet and Ron Haysbert, who work security at La Cocina, put the blame for its failure squarely on a shrugging City Hall and an inconsistent, lackluster police department. They said when they were growing up, drug dealers and people using drugs felt uncomfortable in public — but now they’re given free rein over public sidewalks while families, kids and people just trying to get lunch are made to feel uncomfortable.

“If the police were consistent with their patrols and efforts, people would come out here at night,” Morffet said.

“The cops drive by and look, and they don’t do anything,” Haysbert agreed.

Obviously we don't want trigger-happy enforcers, but if we have to pay for this police department, they could at least make it look as if they are working for their fancy salaries and pensions.

Beyond bad cops and bad neighborhoods

Sociologist Patrick Starkey wanted to explain, first why crimes against property and people soared in the 1970s and 1980s -- and then rapidly declined after 1993. In Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, he outlines, both meticulously as befits a quantitative scholar, and journalistically, as suits an author who wants to be read, what he found out.

It's all there, from theories of widespread lead poisoning in inner cities leading to more violence (he's skeptical) to figures on increased militarized policing (he attributes to this both some success and some exacerbation of racist violence) to an examination of what growing up amidst heightened violence does to children (not good, as you might expect.)

The most novel bit of his survey to me -- as someone who lived these years by choice in what is widely considered a violent, depressed urban neighborhood -- was his appreciation of successive nonprofit efforts at community building and rebuilding that characterized some to the worst locales.

Yet for all its virtues, I would describe this book as "stranded." Starkey wrote in the mid-2000 teens -- he identifies 2014 as the deepest year of the "great crime decline," knowing as early as 2017 that crime was again on the rise. Of course he couldn't predict the pandemic and its discontents which seemed to raise the murder rate, then has seen it drop, while reported burglaries and assaults have gone up and then gyrated. He saw trouble ahead. He concludes:

The calls for justice that have dominated recent debates about policing, poverty, and crime are well justified and crucially important to developing effective reforms of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. But the war on violence -- with all its tremendous physical, emotional, social, educational, and financial costs --starts with investment.

• • •

I'm suspicious of survey research on crime. Sure, there is hard evidence which enters into this -- there are bodies on the street. 

But not in most places in the country, most of the time. For most Americans, even in the bad old '70s and '80s, crime was something over there, among those people. But our media told us it was bad and out of control. And even when material evidence says it is bad, most of us don't encounter its violence in person everyday. 

I suspect it would take a long period of rising incomes and social peace before most of us would tell a researcher that crime is getting better. Our fears exceed our realities, even when the underlying trends are good. We're not smart about objective observation -- for the good reason that overconfidence might be dangerous.

San Francisco and its cops

A leisurely perusal of the collection of the San Francisco's Tenderloin Museum (398 Eddy Street at Leavenworth) proved there is nothing new about the city's ambivalent relationship with its police force. Before the area devolved into a residential neighborhood of last resort for new immigrant Asian-origin families and street dwellers, the Tenderloin was where artists, jazz musicians, and gay oddballs found a home. 

And the cops exploited and enjoyed this lawless realm. In the 19th century, the cops profited along with the dance halls.

In the early 20th century, campaigns against gambling houses created opportunities for extortion.

 

San Francisco was decidedly out of sync with Prohibition, no place more than the Tenderloin. Among these gents sharing the bottles, the county sheriff.

 

During World War II, the city was the jumping off point and recreational refuge for Pacific sailors. The Tenderloin welcomed both gays and a booming heterosexual porn industry. Our senior US Senator (and former mayor) began her political career crusading to "clean up" the Tenderloin. Local cartoonists, including R Crumb, were not amused. There are those cops on the take again ...

Click on any of these images to enlarge. And if you get a chance, visit this little local gem yourself.

There's no forgetting the death of Banko Brown

Our cop-endorsed D.A. Brooke Jenkins tried to shove the killing of the young unhoused trans man down the forgetery, but the ploy is not working.

Apparently there's still plenty of resistance in San Francisco to the notion that shoplifting should be a capital crime.

• Under questioning by the Police Commission, Chief Bill Scott affirmed that Banko Brown did not have any weapon when he was shot outside Walgreens on Market Street on April 27. 48 Hills

• According to a witness, the rent-a-cop killer had ejected Banko Brown from the store -- and only then followed the young man outside and shot him. The security guard was about 6'2"; Brown was 5'4" and weighed some 155 pounds.  Mission Local

• It emerged that Banko Brown had made off with $14 worth of candy when he was shot. SF Chronicle

• Banko Brown was not utterly alone living on the streets. The Young Women’s Freedom Center was his community. They did what we do in this city -- they organized to pressure the system.

• Banko Brown had blood family. They have hired John Burris, a Northern California attorney famous for winning judgements in wrongful death suits against cops. 

• The LGBTQ community is unusually unified in pursuing justice for Banko Brown -- and the D.A. is antsy enough about the case that she's giving defensive interviews to gay media. Bay Area Reporter

• Local pols are swinging into line seeking better for Banko Brown, despite having done so little for people like him in life. Supervisor Aaron Peskin is fronting a Board resolution demanding that the D.A. release the video record around his death. 48 Hills

This city feels becalmed in a sad post-pandemic doldrums, but we can still be aroused  to demand justice. 

Police protect and serve themselves and their institutions

The Los Angeles Times has produced a devastating report about how police are trained to interrogate family members of people they have killed, looking for derogatory information that will defend against, or lower payouts, in any wrongful death lawsuit.

Here's just one example among many the report includes:

Julie and Rick Perez unwittingly offered up a golden statement when a detective from the Richmond Police Department and an investigator from the district attorney’s office knocked on their door at 4:20 one morning in 2014. A few hours earlier, an officer in the Bay Area city had fatally shot their son.

When Julie Perez asked if her son was in trouble, the investigator said, “I’m going to get to that in a second,” according to a recording of the encounter first published by KQED.

The investigator launched into a series of questions about their son. Did he use drugs? Did they have a good relationship? Did he have problems with the police? Did he have “demons to conquer?” Unknown to Julie and Rick Perez, the investigator and the detective were secretly recording their responses.

“We’re not trying to trick you or nothing,” the investigator told the increasingly agitated parents.

“I hope he’s not in big trouble, and I wish you guys would get to the punch line,” Rick Perez said 10 minutes into the interview.

“I don’t know how to say this,” the investigator said.

Rick Perez finished his sentence: “You guys shot him.” 

When the couple filed a lawsuit, it became clear that the city intended to defend itself by focusing heavily on what they and other family members had disclosed to investigators. The thought of having their family’s worst secrets and darkest moments spilled in open court was a factor in the family’s decision to settle with the city for $850,000. 

It turns out, cops-in-training are taught that their first job, after an officer kills someone, is to extract whatever they can from friends and relatives that would be derogatory about the dead person. There's a company, Lexipol, which many California departments contract with for training, that specializes in getting this message across. A former cop and lawyer named Bruce Praet teaches new officers how to avoid responsibility. 

In an online training seminar reviewed by The Times, Praet instructs detectives to approach a mom before she learns her son has just been killed by police: “You got about five, 10, 30 minutes to get out there before word gets back on the street — that bad guy is either in the hospital, dead, jail, whatever.”

... In one seminar highlighted by [Joanna Schwartz, a UCLA law professor], Praet recommended that officers who use force against people in mental health crises should describe them in their reports as appearing to be on drugs because “jurors don’t like druggies.”

In another seminar, Praet showed off a police photograph of a man who had just been mauled by a police dog. He noted with approval how the police photographer had posed the man with his arm draped over the police dog while smiling and flashing a gang sign. “That was Exhibit One in the lawsuit, guys.”

Ninety-five percent of California law enforcement agencies use Lexipol for training according to the Times.

Departments that choose to train officers this way make the case for "defund the police." This isn't about safety for the community; it's about safety for cops. Ban contracts with Lexipol.

He got away with murder. Or did he?

Kyle Rittenhouse. Oh yeah, the troubled teenager who grabbed up an AR-15 and drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin to play vigilante during protests in 2020 against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. He killed two young white men playing protester and severely injured another. A Kenosha jury called Rittenhouse's exploit self-defense. His surviving victim is trying to add him to a civil suit against the city and Ritttenhouse is apparently evading subpoenas.

Shortly after he got off on the murder charge, Rittenhouse showed some interest in getting out of the public view and perhaps making a life. But he hasn't gone that way. Instead, he's been performing on the rightwing grifter circuit -- and apparently not being much of an attraction.

His promoters are still using this childish photo, three years after his defining moment. Guess he plays to someone's notion of the innocent all-American white boy.

Mother Jones journalist Stephanie Mencimer has been following the young man's trajectory.  Her account is sad and sensitive.

Rather than slink off into anonymity after his acquittal, Rittenhouse has spent the past year trying to rebrand himself as a free speech and gun-rights activist. Following the siren song of the right-wing industrial complex, Rittenhouse, now 20, spends his time going on podcasts, attending conventions, and taking selfies with fans. ... after a year on the right-wing circuit, Rittenhouse has shaved off any introspection from his public commentary, opting instead for conservative buzzwords about gun rights and the left. 

In public appearances, he seems baffled by the rest of the world’s refusal to exonerate him and embrace the Kenosha jury’s conclusion that he’d acted in self-defense. The problem, of course, is that the verdict didn’t absolve him of taking an assault rifle into a violent protest in the first place. “The conscious choice to impose a risk—even permissible risk, as in the case of driving—opens a person up to moral liability,” the Oxford professor moral philosophy Jeff McMahan told the New Yorker in 2017.  “People who are not culpable can nevertheless be responsible.”

Former First Lady Laura Bush was also 17 when she ran a stop sign and killed another 17-year-old driver. In a memoir, she wrote of losing her faith afterwards, and being “wracked by guilt for years after the crash.” Bush suffered in silence for more than 40 years. “Most of how I ultimately coped with the crash was by trying not to talk about it, not to think about it, to put it aside,” she wrote. “Because there wasn’t anything I could do. Even if I tried.”

Killing those men in Kenosha is all Rittenhouse talks about. From the beginning, Rittenhouse has been preyed on by right-wing opportunists. Bad actors anointed him a hero and absolved him of culpability. They’ve pushed him in front of the klieg lights ...

Mencimer's story feels sad and vacant. And most likely to end badly. 

I'm reminded of another famous killer who seemed to escape appropriate punishment, though not the verdict of society. Ex-cop and ex-elected official Dan White convinced a jury he was high on a twinkie when he killed George Moscone, mayor of San Francisco, and Harvey Milk, our first gay member of the Board of Supes. He got off with a short prison sentence. 

White died by carbon monoxide suicide in his garage two years after his release.

A righteous rant from Radley Balko

Some twerp named Michael Knowles who writes for a rightist propaganda outfit called the The Daily Wire suggested recently that  it was time for the “eradication of transgenderism from public life.” Knowles got pissed when folks drew the logical conclusion that this is the language of genocide for trans peope. But quibbles aside, that is what it is.

Knowles' demagoguery, along with more from his partner in bullshit Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee, teed off that great civil libertarian and scourge of bad cops Radley Balko. (Here's more on Balko's masterful history of policing, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.) Balko is having none of Knowles' whining. 

It isn’t hyperbolic to send up the distress flares when prominent figures in your society first begin using the same sort of rhetoric previous aspiring authoritarians deployed to lay the groundwork for what later became atrocious crimes against humanity — even if you think the odds of similar crimes happening here on a similar scale are pretty low.

No society goes from “not at all like genocide” to full blown genocide without passing through countless “not exactly like Hitler, but still unacceptably Hitler-like” phases along the way. You needn’t wait until the ovens are running or until you stumble onto a pile of spent Zyklon-B canisters to raise alarms. It’s perfectly okay to say, “It’s pretty fucked up that a guy with 400,000 followers who works for a network with an audience of millions thinks trans people don’t exist in an ‘acceptable state of being.’”

... The point here is that Knowles knows exactly what he was doing, and what he’s doing is as common among aspiring demagogue bigots as part lines and flop sweat. You craft a message that you know your nuttiest, most foaming-at-the-mouth supporters will hear as reassurance — but that also leaves you with plausible deniability should one of them resort to violence. “Stand down and stand by.” “Really fine people.”

Balko apparently is no longer an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, a gig he had for nine years. But truth telling like this and an ongoing diet of sophisticated commentary on police misbehavior can be found at his Substack, The Watch. Highly recommended. 

Shards from the embattled republic

Things to think about ...

• Democratic Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur started 2023 off right. Congress has not covered itself with glory since but ...

As we approach the new year with hope and optimism in our hearts, let’s heed the timeless words of Daniel Webster etched in the U.S. House of Representatives: “Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests and see whether we also in our day and generation may not perform something to be remembered."

• GOPer dysfunction as evidenced by the Speaker election has many pundits trying to figure out what's wrong with rightwing politicians. Here's David Lauter in the LA Times:

What the voters on the right and their representatives have demanded is a return to the 1950s, if not earlier — an era when government was smaller, the social safety net weaker and traditional gender and racial hierarchies far more solid. That’s not achievable by democratic means: A large majority of the country rejects that agenda. So they’ve turned to anti-democratic tactics to try to push toward their goal. McCarthy and other Republican figures — one can’t truly call them leaders — have tried to indulge that faction to maintain their hold on power.

But their flirtation with anti-democratic practices has clearly hurt the GOP, especially with the swing voters who decide close elections.

That has brought the GOP to its current dead end: Without the far right, they would forfeit their current majority. With it, they may lose their legitimacy with a generation of voters.

• Meanwhile GOPers continue to try to completely ban abortion despite a strong national majority that supports comprehensive reproductive health care. NPR created an useful quiz which you can use to test your own basic understanding of abortion; many of us haven't had to know all about it for many years. Now we do.

• We're finding there's a lot of history, and a lot of heroes, whose work we need to retrieve.

• Jill Filipovic asks: "What's the matter with (rightwing) Men?"

In the US, men commit roughly 90% of homicides, 85% of non-parental murders of children under five, 99% of rapes, 88% of robberies, 85% of burglaries, and 78% of aggravated assaults. Most men who are murdered are killed by other men; most women who are murdered are killed by men, too. ...

The men who enact mass violence do have particular afflictions that separate them out from the Republican voter who may also be xenophobic and misogynist, most notably their misfit-ness — their isolation. But of course many women and girls are misfits, too, and they are far less likely than men to hurt others because of it.

It’s the entitlement, the hewing to narrow gender roles, the sense that one isn’t being allowed to be a true man (and that’s someone else’s fault), and the desire to make other people listen and pay attention and bow down — that’s what seems to drive so much violence from this particular demographic.

And it’s those same dangerous sensibilities that the Republican Party is stoking.

• Jamelle Bouie reflects on what makes bad cops.

With great power should come greater responsibility and accountability. The more authority you hold in your hands, the tighter the restraints should be on your wrists. 

To give power and authority without responsibility or accountability — to give an institution and its agents the right and the ability to do violence without restraint or consequence — is to cultivate the worst qualities imaginable, among them arrogance, sadism and contempt for the lives of others. It is, in short, to cultivate the attitudes and beliefs and habits of mind that lead too many American police officers to beat and choke and shock and shoot at a moment’s notice, with no regard for either the citizens or the communities we’re told they’re here to serve and protect.

• A former Sheriff of King County, Seattle WA, Sue Rahr, describes what often motivates officers:

Though the vest, the gun, the training, and the equipment all lessen the physical danger of the job, nothing assuages the fear of rejection from one’s group.

• Esau McCaulley on Black history in this disunited country:

What makes America a wonder is that this is the land upon which my ancestors, despite the odds, fought for and often made a life for themselves. We are great because this land housed the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and Maya Angelou, the advocacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, the urgency of Nina Simone’s music, and the faith-inspired demand for change in Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons. This way of telling the story allows us to speak of American ideals even if the norm is failure rather than accomplishment. It allows our history to chronicle progress without diminishing the suffering necessary to bring it about.

• Ezra Klein waxes philosophical, even if many of us can't afford to: 

... many in politics have abandoned any real vision of the long future. Too often, the right sees only the imagined glories of the past, and the left sees only the injustices of the present. The future exists in our politics mainly to give voice to our fears or urgency to our agendas. We’ve lost sight of the world that abundant, clean energy could make possible. The remarkable burst of prosperity and possibility that has defined the past few hundred years has been a story of energy. ...

Meanwhile, innovators and entrepreneurs work toward a more climate friendly future.

• Chris Choo is a planning manager for Marin County, California. She tries to look ahead:

“People still tend to think of these things [wildfire and flood] as isolated terrible things, rather than as part of a collective shift … in what the future might hold,” she said. “We live in nature and too often think of ourselves as separate from it … but nature is still very much in charge.”

• The 2024 presidential election comes closer. And feels familiar. Josh Marshall notes:

If the GOP were ready to move on from Trump they would be having a campaign that wasn’t entirely about him. But that is just what they’re doing.

• Sarah Longwell conducts focus groups: 

While many Republican voters may be moving off Trump the man, the forces that he unleashed within the party—economic populism, isolationist foreign policy, election denialism, and above all, an unapologetic and vulgar focus on fighting culture war issues—remain incredibly popular with GOP voters.

• Katherine Stewart studies Christian nationalism:

The lessons to be drawn from the rise of DeSantis in the wake of his reelection in Florida are stark. The descent of the Republican Party into a uniquely American form of authoritarianism has not stopped. The second coming of the “anointed one” will not be any better for America than a return of the first. We may be spared Melania and Roger Stone, but we won’t be spared the politics of division, demonization, and domination. DeSantis is simply promising to do demagoguery better. No wonder Trump has started calling him names.

• Former Federal prosecutor Joyce Vance isn't giving up.

I hear a lot of people who say, often apologetically, that they just can’t take it anymore. That they have to unplug from the news for the sake of their sanity. I understand that. Truly, I do. But bad things happen when good people look away. We are still in too fragile of a position to be able to afford that luxury. It is often said that every generation has to secure democracy for itself. Our fight is not over yet.

Lessons from a wise woman

Sherrilyn Ifill led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, serving from 2013-2022. Because we have not found a way to provide safety to all without empowering killer cops, wise women like Ifill have to explain it all again, over and over, amidst trauma and grief. It's hard to say anything remotely helpful after something like the murder of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. But Ifill tries:

What has been most successful is the building of a movement of people who work every day to reimagine a new kind of public safety. Most people who are not afraid to imagine that our lives could really matter, now agree that the current system cannot be reformed and must be made over. Indeed it seems inevitable. The under-staffing and recruiting failures of police departments around the country demonstrate that no matter how much money is thrown at policing, the work itself has lost its appeal to a significant number of young people and is unlikely to reconstitute itself in the same form.

That is the moment that we are in. The outrage is perhaps even more intense, albeit less inclined to express itself in mass protest. It is combined now with the growing sense that the current system is simply not sustainable. The failure of the police response in Uvalde, and the lack of support shown by the most rabid pro-police political factions towards the Capitol Police officers assaulted on January 6th, 2021 has been a huge blow to law enforcement that will have repercussions for years to come, as will the revelations of infiltration by openly white supremacists groups into law enforcement agencies. Unraveling mythologies is a long process. But once it starts, the end is inevitable.

... Where should we assign blame for continued police violence? On the failure of the movements created by racial minorities to resist police brutality? On crime within our own communities, and some suggest? Yes, violent crime is real, and felt most profoundly in minority communities. We want solutions more than anyone, but refuse to believe that we must surrender our dignity and the lives of our sons and brothers to police violence, in exchange for protection from violent crime.

... Black Lives Matter continues to be a rallying cry for the very reason that the phrase became so popular. Every new police killing or beating of innocent Black people reinforces that in this country our lives are afforded little respect - especially when what is at stake is the myth of white supremacy that lionizes armed white men and distressed white women, and protects at all costs white masculinity and property and power structures. ... there is one thing about which I’m sure: the way forward to ending the white supremacy that fuels systemic police violence at this moment, begins with white people.

San Franciscans: note that the SFPD claims it cannot fill its vacancies, despite all the money we throw at the force. Meanwhile, Chief Scott and the POA fight even minimal reforms. And yet residents feel fearful of crime. This isn't working. Unraveling mythologies, perhaps?

"The Drug War is back on in San Francisco."

In the midst of the Trump presidency, Adam Server summed that regime up: "The cruelty is the point." 

San Francisco may have hated Trump, but the yawning gap between our rich high flyers and our increasingly hard-pressed poor and working class residents has made us ripe for our own adoption of urban cruelty. In this post-pandemic time (is the pandemic really over?), we're suckers for apparent "solutions" to squalor on the streets -- "solutions" that aim to sweep away people and pain we don't want to see. This is what we are getting in our angry frustration.

A lightly edited thread from Peter Calloway (@petercalloway), a San Francisco public defender, reports what he is seeing.

The Drug War is officially back on in San Francisco. For the first time in years, people are being prosecuted for simply using drugs or possessing paraphernalia. It’s hard to fully comprehend the harm this will cause. I’ll try to lay it out below. 

First, a bit of background. For a long time, San Francisco has generally declined to use armed government agents to enforce restrictions on what ppl can put in their bodies or hold in their hands. 

That’s because prosecuting drug users (and dealers, for that matter) goes against all available science and evidence on how to reduce drug use. You cannot arrest and imprison your way out of it. That’s been tried before—repeatedly, across the country, for decades. Does not work. 

As a nation, we’ve spend hundreds of billions of $$ over decades trying this approach. What do we have to show for it? More people in prison and jail than any other country in the history of the world. Entire communities devastated. Generational trauma. Incalculable suffering. 

The new DA, Brooke Jenkins, posed as a progressive while she was jockeying to be appointed to the office once the former DA, Chesa Boudin, was recalled with her help. It didn’t take long for her to show her true colors. 

In the first week, she essentially disbanded units in the office responsible for things like undoing wrongful convictions, prosecuting cops for murder and excessive force, and sharing with the public all the data on who the office prosecutes, for what, and what outcome. 

Now, she’s started charging people for possessing substances the government says it’s a crime to have, and for having paraphernalia. This will dramatically increase the number of arrests in San Francisco and likely cause the jail population to explode. 

Many people will remain in jail while they await trial because they can’t afford to pay money bail to be released (Jenkins announced she would again use money bail in this way). 

When the Drug War is on, even the best-intentioned wellness check can lead to violence.

People will be beaten by the police. Some may be killed. These outcomes are inevitable when increasing # of police contacts. 

Families will be separated. Undocumented immigrants will be deported, where they may face violence in their home country after prolonged detention in horrific immigration facilities. Many, many more people will experience the trauma of being shackled and caged. 

And consistent with SFPD’s well-documented track record, this will happen disproportionately to people of color, and exclusively to poor people. 

But never fear, Jenkins has hired an all-female management team. Supporters will point to this, and to the fact that she is a Black and Latina woman, to justify, excuse, or ignore the harm she will directly cause to Black and Latinx and poor people. That’s like saying we should support Clarence Thomas because he is Black, or Amy Coney Barrett because she’s a woman. ... 

... And watch, Jenkins and her office will couch their cruel and failed Drug War offensive in the language of compassion. They’ll say they want drug users to get help. That is false. What they are doing is utterly inconsistent with helping anyone. 

Are they going to house people? Address trauma and poverty? Of course not. Remember, this is about wanting to hide from public view the consequences of enforcing their extractive utopia. Mayor Breed made that clear in what should have been a scandal here. ... 

... San Francisco was far from perfect. Like anywhere, people suffer every day here because they are poor. The racial disparities in our criminal legal system are among the worst. But we have regressed immensely in just a matter of days. Things will almost certainly get worse.

Is this the city we San Franciscans want? I know we're tired and angry. But the city of St. Francis can do better.

San Francisco doldrums

The ejection by recall of San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin only spotlights our broader season of discontent. I decided several months ago that my adjective for the public mood was "pissy" and I'm sticking with it.

Consider what the Examiner found in a late May poll: Mayor London Breed is no favorite either.

Only 16% of The City’s voters plan to vote for Breed in the next election, according to The Examiner poll. Twenty-nine percent of voters said they would “definitely vote for someone else,” 40% said they would “consider voting for someone else” and 15% were not sure. These terrible figures seem even more grim when you consider that even the beleaguered Boudin won 40% of the vote. 

Of course, under The City’s convoluted ranked-choice voting system, Breed could still manage to pull off a win. But such dismal voter ratings are hardly an argument in favor of her re-election, much less a vote of confidence in San Francisco’s future.

I wouldn't bet on Breed being overthrown in the next election; you need a potent candidate to oust even an unpopular incumbent. But we're not happy with the Mayor.

We are just not happy. We experienced a deadly pandemic and nobody fixed it. And it lingers on. 

Although the official count says less people are living on the streets, an awful lot visibly are. And they are dying of drug overdoses all too often. And nobody seems to have fixed anything about this visible misery. 

The powers-that-be haven't fixed crime either. It's hard to tell whether crime is up or down. We pretty much always tell pollsters that crime is rising -- though objectively our individual danger of experiencing a crime has fallen for decades. The pandemic seems to have unleashed threats to Asian-origin people. Somebody must be to blame. We hear almost daily about yet another shooter somewhere in the country ... We're pissy.

Meanwhile, less publicly than the problems in the prosecutor's office, the San Francisco Police Department seems to be a futile bunch:

The head of the police union, Tony Montoya, has been forced to step down amid accusations of theft and/or embezzlement. 

Though Chief Scott complains he doesn't have enough officers and wants more spiffy facilities, SFPD simply doesn't do a very good job (vis Mission Local.)

The SFPD’s arrest rate is typically low — 8.1 percent in 2021 — and clearances (rates of charging suspects) dropped further in many categories this year. Seven percent of rapes, six percent of motor vehicle thefts, and fewer than 10 percent of burglaries have been cleared in 2022. 

And the department’s track record in arresting and using force against people of color still points to extreme racial bias: Black people are 12 times as likely to have force used on them, and 10 times as likely to be searched as whites.

Those stats makes me pissy. Why should we spend yet more money on these stiffs? Yet that's the Mayor's plan, endorsed by most of the Board of Supervisors. 

San Francisco doldrums indeed.

To be continued ...

Being a San Francisco progressive is always about living to fight another day. (At least, usually -- didn't work out that way for George Moscone and Harvey Milk.)

So on the morning after moderate Democrats succeeded in throwing out Chesa Boudin, I find myself contemplating again the map of yesterday's recall and the new 2022 supervisor districts.

Here's the Boudin recall map:

Click to enlarge.

Here are the districts:

Click to enlarge.

As I noted when these districts were enacted, the major implications were that the Boudin-supporting Inner Sunset and Cole Valley areas are now moved to Districts 7 and 8.

Meanwhile we await the next time the SFPD kills someone and people have to take to the streets to demand action from whoever London Breed installs ...

The Office of San Francisco's Chief Medical Examiner called it "homicide"

William Jenkins from Mission Local summarized the account given by the San Francisco Police Department in a public meeting about how officers came to kill two apparently unhoused men. According to the cops, a woman called in to say one guy was beating on another. Twelve minutes later, some nine to eleven officers arrived at the scene.

To make the story short, both guys were on the ground; the reported scene: "Michael MacFiohnghain, age 57, is laying on his side holding a knife over 49-year-old Rafael Mendoza." 

Somehow all these heavily armed cops, hanging about for some nine minutes, bristling with "less lethal" armament and guns galore, were unable to end the altercation without shooting. Here's Jenkins" report of what the police department had to offer:

Footage from 11 different body cameras show officers aiming less-lethal weapons at the men, while one of the officers negotiated with MacFiohnghain, trying to convince him that all would be settled if he drops the knife.  

“I need you to drop the knife so we can sort this out okay? We’re not gonna shoot you.” 

Another officer responded with, “Drop the knife or we will shoot.” 

More than nine officers surround both men with weapons drawn, shields posted and pepper spray equipped. Officers repeatedly told MacFiohnghain to drop the knife, following up with a shot from a foam baton weapon.  

MacFiohnghain and Mendoza continued laying on the ground in the same position, while another officer sprayed MacFiohnghain with pepper spray.

 Also in the footage, an officer recognized Mendoza and mentioned he doesn’t speak English.

“We just booked him two weeks ago. He’s Cuban.” 

Officers initially believed Mendoza had a knife, but later they said MacFiohnghain had two knives. “Left side has two of them, hit him again,” said one of the officers. Three knives were found at the scene.  

“This is why we show all the videos because it shows perspectives of different officers,” said [Police Chief Bill] Scott. He also said that the California Department of Justice is still investigating which knives were used and how. [Were knives "used" at all? Not clear.]

Minutes before officers opened fire, one officer yelled “drop the knife” yet again while another said to the officers surrounding the men “there are too many guns, there’s too many.” He asked the officers to step back. 

The officers, however, stayed put with their weapons drawn, watching both men struggle on the ground. 

At approximately 8:10 p.m. after a roughly nine-minute struggle, MacFiohnghain suddenly climbed over the top of Mendoza and brought “the knife point downward towards Mr. Mendoza’s upper body,” Yep said. 

Shouts from the officers overlapped and began to mix as officers fired two more less-lethal rounds. “Within seconds, MacFiohnghain again brought the knife point up and then downward towards Mr. Mendoza in a stabbing motion at least two times while officers continued to give commands to drop the knife.” 

As MacFiohnghain apparently appeared ready to act, four officers opened fire. Three officers discharged their department issued handguns. A fourth fired a rifle.  

Yep said that the investigations team found 11 pistol casings and one rifle casing at the scene. 

While the smoke was still clearing, one officer mumbled “this is bullshit” while another calmed one of the officers who fired shots. 

... MacFhionghain died at the scene. Mendoza was taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where he later died. 

A report from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner sent to Mission Local on Wednesday reported that both men died from gunshot wounds and the report characterized both deaths as homicides.

How on earth could that many cops be fail to disarm two middle-aged men with knives without using bullets? I am tempted to conclude the problem was something like the Uvalde police contingent: they feared they might get hurt. 

If you are a better person than I, you can watch the complete video of the meeting from which this official police story of the killings derives, including edited and blurred body camera video. I admit, I skimmed. But given the long record of the SFPD of defending the indefensible, I won't be surprised if yet more incriminating details emerge with further investigation.

 

UPDATE: The Chron interviewed police practices experts who had viewed the body camera footage:

David Klinger, a former police officer and a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said there are important distinctions between the legal standard and successful policing.

“When something like this happens, it’s a failure,” he said. “It’s something that shouldn’t have happened, so we need to understand why.”

Neither Klinger nor other experts think the shooting cops will face legal charges in these two deaths.

No on Prop. H in the June 7 election

Our progressive District Attorney has many supporters who understand he's doing the work to make all of us safer. Meet a few here.

The times they are changin' ... changing but not without pain

A lengthy article in the sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle has haunted me for the last couple of weeks. Three young male University of San Francisco baseball players, recruited athletes all, have filed a class action lawsuit accusing longtime head coach Nino Giarratano and former associate head coach Troy Nakamura of creating an “intolerable sexualized environment.”

The coaches' behavior seems to have been quite unapologetically piggish.

They [the students] described an atmosphere in which [associate head coach Troy] Nakamura routinely used sexually graphic language in front of the team; flipped one player into a handstand and pretended to eat spaghetti out of his crotch area during a pre-practice skit; and once crawled onto the field naked, swinging his penis in plain view. Head coach Nino] Giarratano witnessed these incidents, according to John Doe 1, and kissed his cross and looked skyward when Nakamura crawled onto the field naked. 

... Nakamura identified a dinner style — barbecue, luau, fast-food — and then went around the circle asking players what they would bring to this pretend meal. He always found a way to make the exercise sexual, according to the lawsuit, and encouraged players to do the same. For instance, the lawsuit said, Nakamura referred to women’s body parts he wanted to eat and bodily fluids he wanted to drink ... “Coach Naks would make those comments and he would see us roll our eyes,” John Doe 1 said. “He would see us isolate ourselves from the group or walk away. He could see we were visibly uncomfortable, and then things started to pick up.” 

 ... “It was kind of crazy,” he said. “Did I just see Coach Naks naked on the field? What prompted that? I didn’t know. Most of these situations, he came out of nowhere being sexual and I didn’t understand why.”

The players bringing the lawsuit described being shocked and confused by what they felt was completely improper behavior by persons with authority over them. They were afraid of losing their scholarships, though eventually found the situation so unbearable that they looked to transfer to other baseball schools.

The description of these events in the Chron doesn't go into the question of what the other members of the team may have felt. Did they like this toxic masculine atmosphere or were they just going along to get along? Were they convinced that this sort of thing was what it took to build a cohesive, tough team?

 The athletes bringing the suit clearly had been raised -- by parents? in high school? in organized sports? -- to expect respect in dealings with coaches and others. They seem to have had supportive parents with whom they could share their pain. Let's hope they land somewhere that will work better for them.

• • •

A recent Washington Post article explored at length the efforts of a Bellevue, Nebraska police official, Chief Ken Clary, to reduce use of force incidents by his officers.

[While attending] the National Institute of Justice LEADS Scholars Program in Washington, ... he was introduced to a wealth of academic research indicating female officers excel at de-escalation and use force less frequently than male officers." 

... Between classes, Clary struck up friendships with Ivonne Roman, a Newark police officer who would go on to be a finalist for New York City police chief earlier this year, and Maureen McGough, an attorney who is chief of staff for the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law. Roman shared with Clary many of the obstacles she faced rising through the ranks in Newark. In a later conversation over lunch, Clary shared with McGough a dawning realization. 

“He looked at me and, out of nowhere, he said, ‘Mo', we have got to figure out how to get the toxic masculinity out of policing,’ ” she recalled. ...

So far, Cleary's two-year experiment with hiring women officers, especially women officers of color, has reduced use-of-force incidents.

And he's run into exactly the sort of resistance that might be expected. "You are lowering standards," he is told. Time will tell whether the culture of toxic masculinity can be tamped down by fiat from authority in a police context ...

• • •

Feminist writer Jill Filipovic examined the underlying context in which these two seemingly so different events are playing out,

The whole Democratic Party message is “we’re all in this together, and we will make life better for everyone.” What happens, though, when a significant chunk of the electorate doesn’t want to be in it together, and doesn’t want life to become better for everyone? ... The complaint that America has grown “too soft,” coupled with what we know about conservative voters’ desires for inequality and hierarchy, is at heart a complaint that life in America is too easy for too many people. [Nuts!]

... If a subset of conservative voters want less equality and less equal opportunity, and more inequity and hardship, then what? If those voters who say that America is too soft want life in America to be harder and more hierarchical and less forgiving, there is no rhetoric or message discipline Democrats can employ to win their votes. And what’s scary is that it seems that as more Americans who have traditionally been cut out of power and privilege do ascend to higher levels — many white women, some men of color — many of them respond with greater hostility to their fellow citizens. Some of them also seem to believe that identity-based hierarchies are justified, that a fairer playing field is not actually the goal, that life in America should be tougher and more brutal for more people.

She concludes:

 ... I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re in a period of broad social cruelty following four years of an intentionally cruel presidency and the rising power of a party that seems to believe strength is defined by dominance and abuse. 

If the public can move in a more callous direction, though, it can also move in a more compassionate one. I believe that’s a harder task to accomplish — it’s always easier to appeal to one’s devils than one’s better angels. But progressives can try. We do it by not backing away from our core values — the belief that all human beings have basic rights; a desire for a more fair, compassionate, and equal society — both in the policies we put forward and in how we behave toward others. ... we should be playing the long game here.

The struggles within the University of San Francisco baseball team and in the Bellevue, Nebraska police department seem to me evidence of new cultural constructs of empathy and equality having a difficult birth. The sooner, the better ...

A short life cut short

It's been seven years since San Francisco police officers shot Amilcar Perez Lopez six times in the back. The young Guatemalan laborer may never have known who the men in street clothes were who ran up yelling at him in English. His wounds showed that he was running away when they fired at short range.

His remittances were the main support of his extended family back home. More of his story here.

No charges were brought against his killers. They stood secure outside the law.

A small stalwart group of activists gathered on Folsom Street where he was killed Saturday night to remember Amilcar and his family.

Damn lies and statistics

Washington Post politics and data writer Philip Bump has done a terrific job of showing how politicians exaggerate crime statistics when goosing anxiety suits their purposes. In a newsletter that came with my Wapo subscription (sorry, no direct link available), he writes:

[New York Mayor Eric Adams] was presenting his administration's anticipated budget and, as part of that, made the case that the city needed to make investments necessary to combat rising crime.

So Bump shows Adams' chart:

Click to enlarge

Now that looks scary!

But note how relatively small the increments in the left axis are, running from 92,000 to 104,000 offenses.

Bump offers another way to visualize the same data that he thinks is more realistic -- or at least far less alarmist.

Click to enlarge

When the left axis starts from zero -- wouldn't we love zero felony offenses? -- rising to 120,000, the increase looks much less dire, only 7.5 percent over previous year.

Being aware of what's really going on in charts about increasing felonies is going to be politically important in the coming year. Republicans are bound and determined to scream "RISING CRIME" whether statistics support that conclusion, or do not, or show something more nuanced.

Wariness about inflammatory howls claiming rising crime are going to be especially important in San Francisco where much of the moneyed establishment and supporters of the police union are out to recall our elected District Attorney, Chesa Boudin. Beware.

Is this worth $10K or $100K?

It seems likely the city will be paying out some such sum to Sergio Lugo for an encounter with three out-of-uniform San Francisco cops, if he finds a good lawyer. The plain clothes officers (no body cameras for them) decided Lugo was out of place at 21st and Castro; perhaps he was planning a burglary?

According to press accounts, the cops asked to search him. He protested they had no probable cause. As they moved to cuff him, they knocked him to the ground. With the cops on top of him, he scratched the hand of one of the officers with an X-acto knife. Officer Glennon Griffin admitted in court transcripts that he punched Lugo in the face "15 or 20 times." Griffin came away needing an ice bag for his hand. Lugo suffered a fractured cheek bone.

Nearby neighbors, seeing the violence on their block, called 911 to report a "beat down" -- three men beating up on one.

Naturally, the cops charged Lugo with assault on police officers. He was held in jail for four months. 

The District Attorney's office investigated the charges, deciding after uncovering "a fuller picture" that there was no reason to continue the prosecution. 

Lugo had the services of the city's excellent Public Defender office. It's hard to imagine a San Francisco jury convicting on the facts as they've emerged. 

The Police Officers Association (the cop union) is howling for District Attorney Chesa Boudin's head. How dare he drop the charges? Police Chief Bill Scott stuck up for his officers.

This San Franciscan is glad we have a District Attorney with common sense -- and the courage to stand up to the cops.

Chesa Boudin answers his detractors

The pandemic has made many of us anxious and pissy and insecure. How else would we feel after two years of this and a still uncertain future course? 

All this has made it easy for the foes of our progressive District Attorney to incite a panic about crime -- and potentially drown out Chesa Boudin's take on our civic woes and what his office is doing about them. Let's listen to the guy:

Though Fox News might have you think otherwise, the truth is that as District Attorney of San Francisco, I am holding those who have been arrested in connection with the crimes in Union Square accountable. My office filed felony charges against every person San Francisco police have arrested for these crimes. We presented evidence at a preliminary hearing, where a judge agreed there was probable cause to proceed on all felony charges aside from looting — a reminder that aggressive charges do not necessarily translate to convictions. Accountability is important, and my office is vigorously pursuing it, just as we have in 86% of the commercial burglary cases police presented to us this year. For context, police have made arrests in just 8.8% of commercial burglary cases this year. 

Organized retail theft is not a problem that can be addressed solely by law enforcement solutions — which come after a crime has been committed. Public safety is a shared responsibility between police, city officials, prosecutors and the courts — and also requires the help of retailers, community groups, public health providers and community members.  State and city officials make laws; police investigate and arrest; district attorneys file charges and prosecute; and the courts release or detain and sentence. Prosecutors don’t receive cases until after a crime has occurred and police have made an arrest. Combating crime can only come through a sense of shared responsibility. 

... Preventing these crimes before they happen and ensuring long-term public safety requires that, instead of unilateral focus on law enforcement responses or rolling back reforms, we must shift our focus to supporting victims and addressing root causes of crime. Supporting victims means meeting the needs of all victims, not just the powerful or wealthy. The focus on providing increased policing to support high-end retailers has meant that victims of thefts targeting smaller businesses — including numerous stores in Chinatown — have been largely overlooked. Those incidents have not received attention in the mainstream media and the city has not invested the same resources devoted to protecting those businesses as the larger businesses in Union Square.  

... We are at a tipping point in San Francisco; we are in danger of making decisions driven by fear. We should not return to the days of locking up every person who commits any offense, no matter how small — a practice which not only failed to stop crime but also disproportionately impacted over-policed communities of color. Returning to those criminal justice policies offers no solution. We can have both safety and justice. 

My emphasis. I certainly hope he's right.

No prosecutor can fix what's been broken for decades, nor counteract the consequences of a divided city where too much much money chases too little living space. This is a hard town in which to be poor and a hard place to raise kids. Thousands of our citizens do it, but it's not easy and the stresses and strains of hard-pressed poverty adjacent to extravagant wealth leave scars.

A cabal of our near and far money bags don't like Boudin's focus on the root causes of crime. They will be trying to recall him in the June election. Because money talks, you'll hear more about him than you ever wanted. I urge us all to listen to the man himself.