Hearings Worth Watching, and a Program Advisory
Supervisors scrutinize sex abuse enforcement and police staffing plans Thursday
PROGRAM ADVISORY: you’ve probably read the accounts of last week’s meeting by a special committee of the Democratic County Central Committee on issues dealing with sexual abuse in San Francisco’s political community in The Standard, Mission Local, and the Examiner; my take, which is as expected considerably more political, is now up at The Voice of San Francisco.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee is meeting Thursday morning, and the main events are two hearings on hot topics— one called by District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen on sex abuse enforcement by city agencies and another by District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani on current police staffing issues.
Dear readers will remember how efforts to restore the San Francisco Police Department to a staffing level citizens are accustomed to became a searing issue at City Hall at the beginning of this year, and how the resulting ballot measure failed miserably in the March primary election.
Measure B was probably one of the least straightforward items San Franciscans voted on in recent memory. It claimed to be a plan to hire more cops but, in reality, would have barred funding for more police until labor concerns from other public safety workers were satisfied.
Originally introduced as a relatively uncomplicated appropriation by the original sponsor, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, his District 11 colleague, Ahsha Safai, decided to get all Leucochloridium on it and turn the measure into something else.
Safai had the votes to do just that on the board. He did not have the popular vote, as Dorsey leveraged the support of business-backed PACs to label the zombie measure as a “cop tax.” Meanwhile, the labor issues that prompted the parasitic play were still being hashed out in City Hall labor negotiations.
Supervisor Stefani supported the measure. Evidently, the supervisor, who will most likely be elected as Assemblymember for District 19 this November, decided keeping the Labor Council on side was the safer bet to stave off the David Lee Juggernaut.
Dorsey looks to pilot another ballot measure, which could coax cops into not opting for early retirement and bring back a minimum staffing number to the city charter.
#MeTooSFPolitics Inquiries Grow and Continue
The police staffing hearing follows the sex abuse enforcement hearing, which was requested by District 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen and is co-sponsored by the rest of the whole board, though there’s no word yet on this becoming a committee of the whole affair.
It’s certainly a hot enough topic as a legislative and news item. Ronen has been watching SFPD's handling of rape cases and victims— which appears to be lacking— for a while now.
A victim’s advocacy group sued the city in 2019 after repeated calls for improvement and a hearing called by Ronen a year before where promises to improve were heard, and the city stood up a new Office of Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention to help victims. SHARP was also charged with drafting policy proposals to deal with the problem, which it apparently has yet to do.
Needless to say, more attention is being drawn to the problem by the long fermenting and credible allegations of rape laid against political operative Jon Jacobo, as well as allegations against other politicos now coming out of the grapevine, some in the interests of justice, others possibly in the interest of playing political pickleball in an election year.
It was enough to overshadow rape charges against a Sheriff’s Oversight Board commissioner being dropped for lack of evidence at the beginning of last month. Meanwhile, women and allies in the city's political sphere are calling for another kind of enough.