Program Advisory: Police Commiseration
As we detailed at The Voice this past week, San Francisco’s micromanaging Police Commission is getting belated pushback over new restrictions on foot pursuits. What was first trialed as doctrinal advice may well have been frogmarched by an oppositional police oversight regime into hard-and-fast rules that leave officers apprehensive about apprehending criminals.
Deputy Mayors, Transparency and the Politics of Blame
This year’s election season has brought San Francisco closer to a rational conversation about fixing the structure of local government. However, it’s also clear that neither Proposition D, the commission reform package fronted by TogetherSF, nor Prop E, the responsive poison pill fronted by Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, goes beyond a beginning. More lasting and needed changes won’t happen until a consensus is confident that enough of the “proper” people occupy both sides of the atrium at City Hall.
Dear readers who have been following the November ballot measure process know that TogetherSF had planned on offering another charter amendment to remove current restrictions on the mayor’s office in managing commissions and departments and hiring staff, which was pulled once Peskin jumped into the race for mayor. Supervisor Rafael Mandelman had also floated another ballot measure along similar lines, which also fell by the wayside.
The Mandelman measure, as well as the newly released study from the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Organization [SPUR], also reintroduced a subject of contention from the city’s political past: deputy mayors. That past also shows how what seems like a reasonable idea for effective delegation of mayoral authority can become a focal point for San Francisco’s traditional politics of blame.
When progressive Mayor Art Agnos, a former assemblymember, assumed office in 1988, he assembled a cabinet of deputy mayors, headed up by his former chief of staff in Sacramento, Claude Everhart. Budget squabbling between the mayor's office and supervisors during the first Bush Recession made the highly-paid deputies easy scapegoats, including via a Civil Grand Jury report and scathing review by the Supervisors, led by Tom Hsieh. Agnos then reorganized and renamed the positions, and by the time of the 1991 mayor’s race, the outrage-driven [and appropriately lettered] Proposition H appeared on a ballot that rivals this coming November’s for sheer volume. Proposition H passed with 67% of the vote.
The fight against deputy mayors in the 1990s was waged by moderates and fiscal conservatives against a progressive administration, so it’s rather ironic that moderates are now the ones wishing to resurrect the position. And there are some who were there who regard it as a meaningless, semantic battle. Positions with similar authority have been established by subsequent administrations, such as within Mayor Willie Brown’s regime of “Special Assistants” of differing grades of authority and pay, and even the current administration has “directors” of specific, sensitive portfolios.
It goes without saying that an effective structure of direct reports should exist in the mayor's office, and the SPUR report offers the most concrete structure of silos for policy domains under those direct reports, which is more important in the long run.
That said, we may want to dispose of the shiny title of Deputy Mayor, given its susceptibility to Tall Poppy Syndrome. Perhaps Satrap or Chachmool would be more appropriate titles.
More to the point, changing the seating order will not make a difference unless you have the right people in place to implement it. San Francisco has undergone multiple structural government and political changes in the last thirty years, from omnibus charter reform to district elections to ranked-choice voting to any number of changes made by ballot measures, all sponsored by alternating generations of opposed political factions. That was one of the points of frustration expressed by some who attended a talk held by the Bay Area Council last week featuring Emily Hoeven, the Chronicle’s new columnist, who was first out the door with a review of SPUR’s ideas.
Friendship Troopers
Meanwhile, the road to the National Question over whether America will choose liberalism or allow an electoral college-enabled minority to plunge it back into illiberalism inexorably continues. As Vice-President Kamala Harris takes up the banner of hope, it’s still worth remembering that if we aren’t careful, things can still go wrong, and we may find ourselves at the mercy of a revanchist regime hell-bent on strip-mining the republic, with the Orange Fool as figurehead over a coven of permanent-mascara-wearing Dario Argento movie bit parts.
Soldier of Orange [dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1979] provides a look into the wages of political resistance with style. Think of it as Anthropoid meets The Great Gatsby.
Based on the memoir of Dutch resistance fighter Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, the film follows a circle of six students at the University of Leiden and how they navigate the war. Erik [Rutger Hauer] and a number of others join the resistance; others become collaborators, and others let circumstance guide their fate. A reunion at war’s end reveals only two survivors.
Premiering in 1979, the film introduced American audiences to both Hauer and director Paul Verhoeven. The two talents became staples of the more outré products of Hollywood pop through the 1980s and 90s, including offerings from the latter as diverse but similarly edgy as Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers, and Showgirls.
Indeed, Soldier of Orange might well be the best of Verhoeven’s films, and its story continues to be celebrated in Holland.
2010 saw the premiere of a long-running musical based on the book and film, featuring a groundbreaking stage presentation where the theater is a circle of stages with the seating rotating in the middle. The show, held at a special venue inside a former military base, played to consistently full houses and was set to expand to the United Kingdom only to be postponed seemingly in perpetuity by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2011, when the populist-tinged Mark Rutte government decided to have arts and culture funding bear most of the burden of meeting EU-mandated deficit reductions, the outcry prompted over 100 orchestras all over the world, from Berlin to Tasmania, to play the opening theme from Soldier of Orange, used in both the film and stage show, together as a protest.
Talk about resisting in style.
Soldier of Orange is available to stream for free via the Internet Archive.