Meet The New Mayor, But First, A Cautionary Tale

HONGISTO: Long-serving Sheriff, Short-serving Chief, force of nature.

As our Absentee Landlord runs for Governor, one of the burning questions on the minds of those interested is who will succeed him. There are a number of people who are actively posturing like they want the job right now, but the most likely successor is someone who hasn't made himself noticed much recently - and that is something that people should be talking about.

But first, we have a cautionary tale for George Gascon, who as of late July, will be our new police chief. As big city police manager with experience in the quantitative performance school of police management pioneered in New York, Gascon represents one of the few substantial campaign promises that the Absentee Landlord has followed thorough on. It certainly took long enough, too.

While Gascon's main selling point is his experience being part of the Bill Bratton management regime in Los Angeles, many are also capitalizing on his recent exposure to - and survival in - the often surreal world of Arizona politics, which occasionally comes up with some real pieces of work - like Evan Meacham, and more to the point, the ever-entertaining Joe Arpaio. But dealing with Arizona's right-wing buffoons may pale in comparison to the demagogues on both the extreme left and right that a police chief must deal with in San Francisco. And this is where our history lesson begins.

Not with Charles Gain, the hyperpoliticized troll who was appointed by George Moscone and mostly did himself in by listening to Joe Freitas a little too much. For some reason Gain keeps getting trotted out as the object lesson in SFPD political mismanagement. Unfortunately, there is a much more germane - and recent - example. The best object lesson in how the city's political establishment can eat a police chief alive - even when that chief comes from that very same establishment - is Richard Hongisto.

Dick Hongisto eventually became a sort of rennaissance man of San Francisco government, serving as police officer, elected Sheriff, member of the Board of Supervisors, and as Assessor, before becoming police Chief under Mayor Frank Jordan as part of political appointment shuffle. Appointing Hongisto as Chief allowed Jordan to move Doris Ward to the Assessor's office, and Annemarie Conroy to the Board of Supervisors. It also allowed Hongisto, who made his name as a progressive activist street cop and founder of Officers for Justice, and as an equally progressive and popular Sheriff, to realize his own vision for SFPD as a progressively-run force which still emphasized respect for the law.

But Hongisto soon found himself under attack by both the hidebound police union and his former Progressive allies. Earlier as Sheriff, Hongisto burned bridges with some Progressives by being compelled to enforce the law: after spending time in jail for refusing to carry out the court-ordered mass eviction of the International Hotel, which was home mainly to indigent Filipino retirees, he finally carried out the order. In 1978, Hongisto was appointed as police chief in Cleveland by progressive mayor Dennis Kucinich. He was soon sent packing once he proved to be more popular than his boss. Now at the helm of SFPD, he would soon find himself in a similar position again, along with the burden of conservative opposition within his own rank and file.

Soon after his appointment, Chief Hongisto faced a major challenge: in the wake of the Rodney King Trial, riots in Los Angeles were soon mirrored by civil unrest in San Francisco. Fears that the deaths and massive property damage in Los Angeles would also manifest in the City prompted Jordan and Hongisto to react strictly to demonstrations - any that resulted in property damage or injury, or which deviated from agreed routes would be shut down. Local progressives didn't care much for that - they went ahead and crossed the established line of conduct, and the result was mass arrests. Additionally, Hongisto took measures, such as declaring the local jails full and processing and releasing rioters at the Santa Rita Jail across the Bay, which effectively took the wind out of the sails of any further organized unrest. Progressives were incensed, and looked for any opportunity to get Hongisto fired. They, with help of the right-wing leadership of the Police Officer's Association, would soon find that opportunity.

In response to police action against the demonstrations, a local LGBT publication, The San Francisco Bay Times, ran a cover which featured a satiric, demeaning caricature of Hongisto. Faced with continuing dissension in police ranks due to public reaction to the mass arrests, Hongisto asked a narcotics detective based out of Mission Station, Gary Delagnes, who was also vice president of the police union, to get some copies of the Bay Times and distribute them to his membership "to show them what kind of heat he was taking." Delagnes apparently misinterpreted the request - perhaps deliberately - as an order to seize over 2,000 copies of the paper out of public newsracks. Soon afterwards a "little bird" complained about missing newspapers and investigators found the papers being stored in a basement at Mission station.

The resulting hearings before the Police Commission were nothing if not a Soviet-style show trial par excellence. Hongisto was fired, and Delangnes and some other cops got off with suspensions and warnings. Indeed, after a public face-saving interregnum under moderate President Chris Cunnie, Delagnes now heads the police union.

As the new SFPD chief, George Gascon will likely have less emotional involvement and political baggage then Hongisto had. But unfortunately, the hazards faced are still the same.

Meanwhile, back to our next Mayor. An inordinate number of local politicos are acting as if Newsom is going to be the next Governor – despite the fact that his chances in that race are slim to none. Anyone with half a brain knows that either Jerry Brown or Tom Campbell will end up winning that one.

But let’s say he does win. Or, alternatively, he ends up having to leave office because one of his Caligulesque personality tics finally does him in with the public. Has anyone considered the fact that in such a scenario, our next Mayor will most likely be Aaron Peskin?

PESKIN: "So, how long do I have to wait for my closeup?"

Yep. You see, although the former Supervisor and Board President will have been out of the public eye for the better part of two years by the time he would be appointed, he is the most favored candidate for Mayor should Newsom leave office early.

Under the City Charter, the succession plan works like this: if the Mayor leaves before the due expiry of his office, then the President of the Board becomes Acting Mayor. But the Acting Mayor doesn’t get to keep the job for any specified time; unless the vacancy occurs within 120 days of a regularly scheduled election, the Board of Supervisors gets to nominate and then appoint, by majority vote, a new mayor. And they can appoint anyone.

Looking at who is on the Board now, and who will likely be elected to the Board by 2010 (Janet Reilly in District 2; Debra Walker in District 6; Carole Migden in District 10), a majority of them owe significant political favors to Peskin – including David Chiu, the current Board President and Peskin’s anointed successor on the Board.

Now before we start imagining horror scenarios of Aaron Peskin, emerging from the shadows like Pol Pot to forcibly migrate Downtown San Francisco to rural reeducation camps on Treasure Island, you may want to consider that of the last three mayors, the most effective and ultimately most true to a centrist agenda was Willie Brown – who initially ran from the Left with significant Progressive support. As Board President, Peskin ran the agenda like a Swiss watch, and has often shown a pragmatic side. But then again, that pragmatism may be put in abeyance when he is able to gain the power of incumbency as Mayor without a truly public vote.

It’s something to think about.

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Penalty Unfair

The current pressure on MUNI to “get tough” on fare evaders creates an even bigger sinkhole for public funds - and more tension on trains.

This week Supervisor Bevan Dufty became the latest in the long line of public officials around the country to address the issue of MUNI fare evasion, an offense whose level of outrage seems to correlate to a city’s economic health. Dufty “is pushing to increase evasion citations by 50 percent, which would bring the fine for first-time offenders up to $75 from the current $50. Dufty is also suggesting fines of up to $250 and $500 for second-time and third-time violators, respectively.”

MUNI fares are in the news this month as the City’s economic woes bring pressure to bear on any municipal revenue stream, and the MUNI fare box has always been the subject of political tug-of-war between transit advocates who endorse cheap, plentiful transit as an incentive for citizens to stop using their polluting and sprawl-inducing cars so much, and fiscal conservatives who tend to indict transit as an exemplar of everything that is wrong about social democracy – an overpaid driver and an underpaid fare box leading the way inside a mobile aquarium of the working poor and ungovernable urban youth covered in magic marker ink, crack pipes, spilled coffee and lickspittle. The end result is that nobody seems to want to look at the issue in terms of how to effectively ameliorate the problem.

Concerns about fare evasion are rising in all major cities. That’s because we’re in a recession, and cities need money. The fact that fare evasion rises when everyone is under economic pressure makes it an even more convenient bugaboo that allows transit agencies to vent popular pressure while increasing fares. Enforcement schemes against fare evasion are indeed more often than not more expensive than the lost fare income itself, and in a culture where the public expectation of transit fares are still based upon the outdated notion that transit is primarily for the poor to lower middle class, you’ll never get away politically with bringing fares up to the level where they actually pay for service.

The stupidity of fare evasion enforcement becomes even clearer when you combine the subsidy-vectored pressures of cities like San Francisco (where the rule against back-door boarding is broken literally hundreds of thousands of times per day out of common sense) with the individualistic cultures of Left Coast cities generally. Such schemes become characterized by the public as the urban equivalent of the old Southern “Speed Trap” as any hope to legitimize the policy goes out the window. End result: more fare evasion.

So whatever happened to Penalty Fares? Is it really more expensive to just make scofflaws pay their fare on the spot rather than process all those citations?

Now there’s an idea.

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SFWeekly Looks at the JROTC Issue

http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-04-08/news/jrotc-under-fire-in-s-f-schools/

Interesting article. Some Observations:

1) As I've posted before, I was a JROTC cadet in two different school districts. JROTC kids get teased/bullied everywhere. Yet it's only here that the program has tried to conform to self-styled "community standards". Despite this, it's still used as an ideological hate idol. I wonder whether the decision of the local JROTC program to water down their curricula helped them at all.

2) Any attempts to create a "homegrown" leadership program within SFUSD is doomed to failure. Any realistic attempt at a syllabus for such a program would have to include instruction on the use of discipline and motivation, and any such work outside the aegis of a neutral subject venue such as national defense or public safety will inevitably be labeled as ideological. We've already seen the interim "Leadership Pathway" project exposed as a sham.

3) Some people are just nuts about this. Apparently, a certain anti-JROTC School Board Commissioner "unfriended" one of her facebook freinds because that person had the temerity to post supportive comments about Fiona Ma's pro-JROTC legislation, on Ma's facebook wall. If I unfriended people based on policy decisions I'd have shit can FB Friends left.

4) I wonder if Army TRADOC (the national command which oversees JROTC) wouldn't rather see JROTC die at SFUSD in favor of a charter school or private military academy, either here or in Daly City. Lots of military secondary schools use the JROTC program as their curricula base. This may suit the facile political goals of the anti-JROTC School Board Commissioners, and the Army, but leave both the majority of SFUSD JROTC students as well as the peace activists with a great deal of resentment.

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The Homeless, Again

Funny, I still see an overwhelming number of chronic homeless on Downtown's streets. I doubt any progress has been made at all.

It goes without saying that any social service case management regime requires a way to track the process of clients. We have similar programs with GA clients and other programs. There are safeguards in those programs. SFPD can't just demand the GA or SSI address records of a given client who may have warrants, for instance.

The Board will never contribute to solving the homelessness problem because they receive endorsements and campaign assistance from homeless-oriented NGOs who want to be able to keep their service contracts. Downtown wants to see the homeless "moved along" someplace else, which is impossible. The Mayor has turned the issue into a cruel Potemkin Village sideshow with a program that allows corporations and constituents to feel better about themselves on the issue by letting them donate free massages.

The only answer to chronic homelessness is intervention. Implementation of Laura's Law, increased cooperation between MAP and SFPD, and the opening of transitional shelters for cumpulsory committment cases. And the program needs to be run directly by DSS/DPH, not contracted out.

Of course, that would violate the sensibilities of our City's political class, who use the ethical fiction "people have a right to live without money" to defend the presence of the homeless, which they in turn use to propagandize their constituents about the continuing need for their brand of social change - which never seems to arrive despite the fact that they were supposedly elected to enact it.

Richard Ramirez once said "In the absence of government strategies of how to help the lunatic or the destitute, or the addicted, we pass out quarters. In return, the homeless give us the assurance that we live in San Francisco."

http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/03/homeless-policy-progress-made-more-accountability-needed-grand-jurors-say.php

A Board of Supervisors panel this afternoon took up a Civil Grand Jury report that found San Francisco is on the right track with its push to create more permanent housing for homeless people but that new tools are needed to make sure service dollars aren't being wasted.

In particular, it was interesting to watch members of the board's Government Audit & Oversight Committee and Newsom administration officials tip-toe around the Grand Jury's call for a computerized tracking system that confidentially assigns a number to each client of city-funded homeless services agencies to determine which programs are working best.

"The Jury believes that such a tracking system, properly designed and maintained, will be an invaluable tool for establishing the effectiveness and cost effectiveness" of city-funded service providers, according to a report, titled "The Homeless Have Homes, But They Are Still on the Street."

The tip-toeing was on display because supervisors and administration officials either don't want to take on or share the view of advocates for homeless people who see such a tracking system as a violation of privacy and potential obstacle to getting care to people who are distrustful of how the information would be used by authorities.

Dariush Kayhan, the mayor's chief homeless policy director, never addressed the call for the tracking system directly but contended the city is keeping a close enough eye on the dozens of nonprofit agencies under contract to deliver homeless services.

"We know what they are doing," Kayhan said, adding, "I am very comfortable with the nonprofit agencies and how they are performing."

Supervisor Eric Mar suggested more attention on monitoring how homeless services dollars are spent might detract from the services themselves.

"I want to see strong services to people on the street," Mar said.

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Chronicle: 1st & Folsom Project Needs More Scrutiny

Perhaps, but maybe this way we won't get stuck with another giant condom-sheathed penis in the midst of our downtown...


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/29/BAHC16NIED.DTL

Two years ago, the competition to win the rights to build San Francisco's tallest tower drew powerful developers, celebrity architects and fervent public interest in the proposed designs.

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Now there's another competition just two blocks away, the grand prize a site with room for a 60-story tower at a major entrance to the Financial District. But only three teams bothered to respond - and the way the rules are currently written, the public won't be allowed to glimpse any of the proposals until the city selects a winner.

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The New Plan To Bring Jobs Back Downtown

http://www.spur.org/documents/030109_article_01.shtm

The smart growth movement has long called attention to the problems with sprawl, but has often been focused on residential sprawl. Yet the dispersion of jobs into suburban and exurban office parks that can never be served by transit is just as much of a threat to the environment as residential sprawl, if not greater. To achieve a low-carbon future, Bay Area residents need to be able to commute to work without relying on a car.

SPUR argues that our best strategy to reduce job sprawl is to channel more employment growth toward existing centers, particularly the transit-rich downtown of San Francisco.

Other transit-served employment centers in the Bay Area, such as downtown Oakland and San Jose, as well as Concord and Walnut Creek, also should capture a growing share of regional employment. The success of the other transit-served job centers is key to a future Bay Area that uses less carbon. But most workers in these other locations, including downtown San Jose and Oakland, drive to work. Future SPUR reports will look at what can be done to improve the land use, urban design and transportation networks for the other employment hubs in the Bay Area.

But downtown San Francisco is the only employment node in the region where most people travel to work without bringing their own car. This paper focuses on downtown San Francisco as the node with by far the greatest near-term potential to accommodate regional employment growth with a low carbon footprint. In fact, if reducing emissions and the amount of driving was our only criterion, we would advocate a region that adds as much of its incremental growth as possible into San Francisco. Even if San Francisco retains its share of regional jobs (16 percent), the increase in driving and emissions in the suburbs will prevent the region from attaining climate change goals.

While done from an environmental perspective, this is an excellent plan all around. One question, though: with regard to the Market-Mission and Civic Center, is public safety the Chicken or the Egg?


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A Modest Proposal: Chris Magnus for SFPD Chief

Why not?

This is a person who has worked as a police manager in three very different but challenging jurisdictions: Lansing, Michigan; Fargo, ND; and now Richmond.

He's a "stereotypical white guy" who nevertheless understands and honors diversity - and at the same time won't back down in the face of racial cronyism.

He's got experience in successfully implementing community based patrol schemes, handling community concerns from entertainment issues, tackling hate crimes, and reaching out to classified constituencies.

Most importantly, in Richmond he's learned how to survive vicious political infighting.

He even looks a little like Hennessey. Plus he's single and collects art, so certain gatekeepers in the LGBT community could just assume he's... well, no, that probably wouldn't fly.

Oh well, just a thought. Still, who in the SFPD has this kind of experience, is still young enough to care about using it right, and isn't inured to the department's archaic culture?

Just A Thought.

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Is San Francisco Calcutta, or East St. Louis? And is it The Chronicle's Fault?

Yesterday, in their endorsement of Mayor Newsom for re-election, the Chronicle chided him for failing to have the fortitude to combat institutional resistance to implementing reform of homelessness policy, such as enforcing Laura's Law. However, after reading today's incomprehensible opinion piece by Callie Millner, I have come to the following conclusion: that all of the hand-wringing about homelessness in the Chronicle, whether it be the meretricious sensationalism by Sports Guy, the presumably reasoned unsigned editorials, or today's hysterical hallucination, is essentially crocodile tears.

In her editorial, Millner deliberately confabulates homelessness with gun violence, conjuring terrible images of armed homeless people just itching to shoot at overentitled white-acculturated yuppies such as herself. She compounds the injury further by contrasting these images with her tourist trip to Calcutta, stating essentially that while the homeless of Calcutta may be worse off, they at least make her feel safer because they are less likely to blow her away.

Quite frankly, if Ms. Millner was less likely to be blown away by a homeless person in Calcutta than by one in San Francisco, it would have more to do with the acceptance of homelessness in India's culture than anything else; gun ownership is legal in India, albeit tightly controlled, and let us not forget that Calcutta is a mere hop, skip and a jump down the Grand Trunk Road from Peshawar, Pakistan, where you can buy almost any sort of small arm which can be made or resold.

It's also hardly likely that the average homeless person in San Francisco, or any other US city, carries a gun. After all, they're too busy spending what money they get on drugs and booze in order to afford to buy a gun, whether at retail price or street. Most homeless people in San Francisco, however, do carry knives. They tend to use them on each other, however. Any streetwise San Franciscan knows that while they are very likely to be accosted and annoyed by a homeless person, the likelihood of being actually physically attacked by one is about the same as being eaten by a bear at Yosemite.

The bizarre hysteria exemplified by Millner and her article insults the intelligence of the public. So much so, that it becomes easier for ordinary citizens to accept the equally disengenous rhetoric of NGOs like the Coalition on Homelessness and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, whose primary business is using shrill elitists like Millner as straw men in support of public policy designed to keep people on the streets and in slums - and keep thus these very entities in business.

Homelessness does indeed present a threat to public safety. However the threat is an environmental one, not a direct one. Where homeless people are allowed to congregate, the streets become dirty, property values fall, businesses leave, and real criminals come in to take the easy pickings. The same homeless people are just as likely to be victimised by those criminals as they are to commit any crimes themselves. We've seen it again and again, just as we've seen the Chronicle fail to adequately cover the corruption of homeless-oriented NGOs.

Maybe the Chronicle editorial board thinks that coverage of that process, and why it should be stopped, is simply too complicated for its readership to comprehend, and so they've come up with this bogeyman of the machinegun-toting homeless person ready to incite an Urban Armageddon. If that's the case, they are underestimating their readers. This imagery is far more likely to drive the average person into the arms of the opposition, and as such we will be stuck with the same problems.

Which leads us tio thinking the unthinkable: maybe the Chronicle actually has no interest in helping the public frame the homelessness issue with the goal of solving or ameliorating it; instead, they simply wish to provoke a more organized backlash against homeless policy reform by San Francisco's Progressives and corrupt, self serving NGOs. This, in turn will destroy reform politically forever and keep San Francisco's urban blight and street crime intact as a source for further sensationalist coverage which the Chronicle can continue selling to its newer, disinterested suburban readership.

Of course, that does nothing for San Franciscans who continue to put up with homelessness and dirty streets, and the resultant increase in street crime.

Then again, most San Franciscans don't read the Chronicle anymore, either.