Members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors are proposing an election to elect the director of the city’s police oversight agency. Should the proposal make it to the November ballot, it would yet again add one of the city’s most divisive issues — how long a leash should be given to police in doing their jobs — to an already crowded election table.
District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton is the principal sponsor of the charter amendment, which would, per the legislation, “provide for the election of the Director of the Department of Police Accountability (DPA)” and would require the support of a majority of the board to send to voters. Supervisor and mayoral contender Ahsha Safaí and colleagues Hillary Ronen and Dean Preston are cosponsors.
“Currently, the director of the department is not an elected position, and it’s not completely independent of the politics that exist [at City Hall],” Walton told The Voice in a text. “Requiring the office to be an elected position will provide that independence, much like the DA’s Office and Public Defender’s Office.”
Another source close to the matter stressed a perceived need for the office to be more independent from the mayor’s office given the passage of Measure E, which was approved by voters in March and limits the oversight power of the city’s Police Commission.
DPA Director Paul Henderson told The Voice in an email that his office is “reviewing it like we do every other proposed charter amendment that may impact the agency and our work.”
Meanwhile, there is the internal politics of City Hall and the external politics of the ballot, and how they interact.
“This appears to be a solution in search of a problem,” Lance Bayer, a former director of the Office of Citizen Complaints, a predecessor of the DPA under Mayors Frank Jordan and Willie Brown, told The Voice in a phone call. “The position requires the technical capability of providing oversight and should not be beholden to a political process.”
The politics over police oversight are routinely divisive in San Francisco, where a progressive political establishment and its supporters favor significant controls over police use of force and other policies focused on abuses driven by bias or the desire to close cases quickly.
But in recent years, the “new normal” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has increased public sensitivity to crime issues, as it drove an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans and immigrants and highlighted the incidence of robbery, disorderly conduct, and other crimes. The result has intensified public opinion on the nexus of homelessness, drug addiction, gritty street conditions, and crime that has become San Francisco’s political bete noire.
That’s reflected in recent election results, where 55 percent of the city’s voters recalled progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022 and this year’s 60 percent victory for Measure E.
The politics over police oversight are routinely divisive in San Francisco.
Much of that public backlash has revolved around conflict at the Police Commission between commissioners appointed by Breed and the supervisors and the increasing perception that the body has come under more political and structural influence from progressives on the Board of Supervisors, who have also hindered efforts supported by Breed to hire more police officers.
The commission oversees both the Police Department and the DPA. Currently, the mayor nominates four of the seven members of the commission, which are approved by the Board of Supervisors. The supervisors appoint the remaining three members.
One cause of the shift on the commission can be attributed to the “defection” of Breed appointee Max Carter-Oberstone, who had led a call to ban pretextual traffic stops. In these stops, police use minor equipment violations, such as broken tail lights or expired tags, as a pretext to stop vehicles whose operators are suspected of more serious crimes.
Carter-Oberstone cited statistics showing that Black and Hispanic drivers were pulled over for such violations at significantly higher rates. The conflict between Breed and Carter-Oberstone also highlighted the practice of commissioners submitting conditional undated letters of resignation to take office.
The commission has been in political limbo recently. It has repeatedly canceled recent meetings, citing a lack of a quorum due to absences and empty seats. On June 3, the supervisors’ Rules Committee is set to consider the appointment of recently retired Alameda County Superior Court Judge C. Don Clay to the commission and the reappointment of Commissioner Debra Walker. The commission has scheduled its next meeting for June 5.
The city budget, hobbled by a post-Covid $800 million deficit, is yet another political ingredient poured into this acrimonious soup. Breed submitted a budget on May 31 that scales back spending significantly in several departments while increasing funding to police and other public safety departments. The proposed budget for DPA reflects an increase of 0.7 percent over the previous year, compared to the rise of 6 percent for SFPD.
Back in 2020, in the wake of national outrages over high-profile incidents of police abuse, such as the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breed cut $120 million from law enforcement funding to fund the Dream Keeper Initiative, a program to reinvest the funds into business development, affordable housing and other programs aimed at the city’s African-Americans. Breed has increased police funding in subsequent years.
The DPA is the successor agency to the Office of Citizen Complaints, which was created by a ballot initiative in 1982. In 2016, voters approved Measure G, which renamed the agency and, and removed the Police Commission’s authority over its budget.
Meanwhile, observers continue to speculate on the measure’s purpose, including whether it’s an attempt to spice up budget negotiations or boost progressive voter turnout in November.
One campaign manager we talked to said, “Do they really think there is an appetite for more politicians in San Francisco? I don’t.”
