The Weekly Digest (June 16, 2024)
Happy Father’s Day, Briones!
Here’s what you need to know about San Francisco politics this week and beyond:
City Hall
Monday, June 17 at 10am: Regular meeting of the Rules Committee (agenda here):
The numbered agenda items for this meeting are a series of ho-hum nominations to various committees. The real action is on page five, which lists legislation under the 30-day rule. This rule provides that when a proposed ordinance or resolution would create or revise major city policy, it shall not be considered until at least thirty days after the date of introduction. These items include:
240495: A proposed ballot measure to establish a new elected position: Director of the Department of Police Accountability. Currently, this individual is nominated by the mayor and confirmed by the supervisors, but the proposal would create an elected position along the lines of city attorney, district attorney, etc. We note a curious job requirement for the position, which is responsible for investigating complaints against officers and would presumably require some knowledge of policing: “this individual shall have never been a uniformed member or employee of the Police Department.”
240546: A charter amendment to modify the redistricting process for Board of Supervisors districts by creating an independent redistricting task force responsible for adopting supervisorial district boundaries. Our pals at ConnectedSF are calling foul on this one.
Thursday, June 20 at 10am: Special meeting of the Budget and Appropriations Committee (agenda here):
Item 2 — Hearing to consider the Mayor's proposed budget for fiscal years 2024-2025 and 2025-2026.
Action item
Join Stop Crime Action in calling for much-needed reforms to Proposition 47.
Happenings around town
Ingleside, Tuesday, June 18, 6-7pm
Southern District, Tuesday, June 18, 6-7pm
Central District, Thursday, June 20, 5-6pm
What we’re reading
Remember the Dolores Hill Bomb of July 2023? Depending on who you ask, this was either a “spectacle of danger,” an “underground flash mob,” and “battle of stunts” in which “hundreds of individuals illegally blocked streets and sidewalks on Dolores Street to enable skateboarders to ‘bomb’ and perform tricks down the steep incline … creat[ing] a substantial risk of harm to participants, pedestrians, and residents” (City Attorney David Chiu) or it was “an informal event … typically organized by high school students … an expression of San Francisco’s youth skateboarding culture and values … a way of reclaiming the urban landscape,resisting attempts to regulate it and to mold it into a mainstream sport” (class action plaintiffs). This week, a federal judge ruled that civil lawsuits by three minors who were arrested that night can go forward, potentially exposing the city to big-money damages. While the events of that day are in dispute, we noted while watching this interactive play-by-play on Mission Local’s website that (1) police barricaded Dolores Street between 3-4pm (pro tip: police barricades = a hint that one should not cross); (2) the first arrest occurred at 7:10pm, at which time the crowd started to throw objects, including glass bottles and fireworks, at officers; (3) police issued the first order to disperse at 7:15pm; and (4) at 7:35pm there were reports of gunshots and a group swarmed a Muni light-rail train, causing $70,000 in graffiti damage. The fact that teens were arrested at 8:30pm, over an hour after the police ordered the crowd to disperse and a participant spat at an officer, seems … not unreasonable? Worth noting: the district attorney didn’t bring charges against these kids, and they would have remained anonymous had their parents not chosen to seek compensation.
Our favorite Nonprofit Truthteller Sanjana Friedman does it again with “Oakland Defund Movement is Starting to Look a Lot Like Fraud,” an investigation of Lateefah Simon, the Kamala Harris protege who is on track to win a House seat this November. This seems important: “Between 2016 and 2023, Simon leveraged her access to millions of funding dollars while president of the Akonadi Foundation, a Bay Area ‘racial justice grantmaking’ nonprofit … to funnel money to a small circle of activists, who seem to have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal kick-backs while working to defund the Oakland Police Department (OPD) of $18 million.”
Quick hits