Cops, Taxes, and Crab Mentality
Reflecting San Francisco's ambivalence toward policing, Prop B’s tortured road to the ballot offers insight into whether the measure would make any difference if passed.
Voting in San Francisco’s March 5 primary election has been open for ten days now, and so far, about 20,000 ballots have been mailed in, according to the Department of Elections. Of six local measures on the ballot, half address San Francisco’s political bete noire - the nexus of drug addiction, homelessness, and petty crime that claimed over 800 deaths last year and has poisoned downtown’s street life.
Proposition B promises a “fiscally responsible” road to restore the San Francisco Police Department to a staffing level the city is accustomed to. The process by which Prop B got on the ballot was remarkably contentious and demonstrates why it likely won’t be able to fulfill that promise.
How Many Cops for a Progressive City?
San Francisco’s history of progressive politics has brought an ambivalence toward policing. In the 1970s, progressive mayor George Moscone oversaw attempts at reform at SFPD, which were both profound (like pushing to integrate the force) and performative (like repainting police cars “baby blue” and christening them “police service vehicles”).
That historical ambivalence has also led to regular arguments over how many cops San Francisco should keep on hand. Still, they always seem to lead to a consensus on a number that places the city above the national average and in the middle of the pack of major cities. In 1994, voters passed a mandate to keep 1,971 sworn officers based on a policy commitment made over a decade previously.
In 2020, a more progressive Board of Supervisors, led by Norman Yee, asked voters to replace that mandate with a more data-driven approach. It passed with over 71% of the vote. The resulting study recommended a staffing level of 2176 sworn officers and 492 civilian positions.
Overtaken by Events
By this time, San Francisco's recurring questions over police staffing were colliding with national events. In 2014, unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, over multiple abuses of power and a killing by police renewed attention on racial bias and the traditionally uneven level of professionalism in policing. In 2016, Donald Trump rode a wave of crypto-racist, revanchist politics, and further unrest, including reaction to the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.
San Francisco and California embraced “decarceral” policies, with unintended consequences that, together with the knock-on effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased both the incidence and awareness of crime along with general public and business unease.
At the same time, cities across the country have been experiencing a wave of police retirement and attrition; San Francisco is no exception. By 2022, sworn officer levels were already at a record low. It’s a situation some say will keep the department behind the curve in responding to crime for years. It’s also increased overtime costs, meaning the public is paying more for less work. Last July, the staffing situation was cited in a last-minute budget dispute between the department and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin over police manager positions that ended in a compromise.
A “Legislative Mugging” Over Table Scraps
Economic effects of COVID-19 have brought other political stumbling blocks for restoring police staffing in the form of zero-sum complaints from other first responder unions. Nurses at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, the city’s only trauma center, are severely overworked. 911 dispatchers, currently not classified as public safety workers for pay and benefits purposes, have been subject to similar mandatory overtime and other work demands. They’re legitimate beefs, but they’ve also led to what can only be described as the “legislative mugging” that produced Proposition B.
Last April, District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey proposed a ballot measure that would appropriate funds for hiring more police and restoring a staffing mandate, this time in line with the 2020 study. It was projected to cost $3 million over five years; that cost, the grievances from other first responder unions, and the usual police-averse sentiment from progressives set the stage for a particularly bitter hearing between Dorsey and other members of the Rules Committee, which he chaired at the time.
District 11 Supervisor and mayoral candidate Ahsha Safaí, along with District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton, nerfed the legislation with amendments to require new tax revenue, likely from a new tax, for funding. It barely cleared the board to land on the March ballot, with objections coming from both sides of the aisle. Dorsey, along with Mayor London Breed, now oppose the measure.
“In game theory, there’s a concept called crab mentality,” Dorsey said in a phone call. “Crabs see one of their own crawling out of the bucket, and they will affirmatively stop them, keep everyone from succeeding so that we all fail together. And that's what I think is playing out with labor, and it's disappointing.”
The way by which Prop B has made its way to the ballot presents a real dilemma for voters. It’s now championed by Safaí, progressive supervisors and labor as “a better way to shore up police and adjacent public safety services”. But if it passes, nothing will happen without another special tax measure, which has yet to appear and would likely fail in the current political climate.
But Rudy Gonzalez, Secretary-Treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, has a more optimistic view.
“I think there's plenty of room to figure out how we actually pay for it,” he said in a phone call.
Gonzalez suggested that much of that room could be drawn up in the current combined negotiations now going on at City Hall between the city’s unions and Breed’s office.
“We are having discussions about business tax reform and tax apportionment, and about what the Chronicle reported as a $5.8 billion price tag on city contracting,” he added. “I think that there is fat that we can identify and surgically deal with in the existing city budget. I think most people would agree that [police] is a baseline service and that we have the resources to deal with it.”
Which brings up yet another nettlesome issue - the various voter-approved special business taxes that some city programs have become dependent upon, despite being subject to litigation and multiple refund settlements. The refunds impacted the city budget to the point that Breed highlighted the issue in an Oct.11 letter ordering department heads to cut their budgets by at least a further 3%.
A city report found that the increase in voter-approved special business taxes meant that San Francisco’s tax revenue “increasingly comes from a smaller handful of large taxpayers, mainly in the technology sector” and “increased the volatility of the overall tax base.”
The taxes are mainly a result of recent legal decisions allowing them to be passed with a simple majority of the vote, instead of a supermajority, so long as they are placed on the ballot by petition and not by local government. The California Business Roundtable has responded with a statewide ballot initiative to reverse those decisions, to be voted on this November, unless the California Supreme Court decides to strike it from the ballot.
Meanwhile here at home Breed and some supervisors have been working on a plan to restructure business taxes, which has become yet another issue in union negotiations.
All of this means that, in the end, the question of whether Proposition B can implemented at all, even if it’s approved by voters, is ultimately out of the voters’ hands.