I can still smell the rustic smell of the floorboards of my grandparents’ store on Potrero Hill. After school, while other kids played ball, I priced ramen packets and translated utility bills for neighbors who spoke the same Toisanese dialect as my grandparents. On weekends, I watched shoplifters case the candy aisle and prayed no one shoved my grandparents during the evening rush.
Those memories followed me into the San Francisco Police Academy, into every midnight tour in South of Market neighborhood, and into the cramped union hall where, last month, 689 officers — more than had ever voted in a leadership election — chose me to be the first Asian American president of the 79-year-old San Francisco Police Officers Association (POA) in July.
I know what some readers are thinking: Why should anyone outside the department care who runs the POA?
For decades, the POA fought reforms with a ferocity that matched its wage demands, and it paid a price in public trust. If my election means anything, it is a mandate to break that mold.
Louis Wong
Because representation is not a vanity metric; it is leverage. Asian Americans are the city’s single largest racial group, nearly 37 percent of the population, yet we make up barely one-fifth of sworn officers and, until now, precisely zero of the union’s presidents. That mismatch matters in a year when videos of elders being punched, shoved, and slashed have ricocheted across the internet and when reported anti-Asian hate crimes in the city jumped more than fivefold between 2020 and 2021.
When your community is on the receiving end of violence, power is safety. Power is the ability to ensure that patrol cars show up on Stockton Street as quickly as they do on Chestnut Street. Power is having someone in the backroom contract talks who knows why immigrant shopkeepers hesitate to call 911 until the blood is mopped up and the customers are gone.
I carry that urgency, but I also carry something else: a belief that San Francisco is tired of being told it must choose between safe streets and civil rights accountability. My grandparents certainly never saw it as a binary. They wanted the cops to walk past the store at closing time, and they wanted those cops to treat my uncles — men with thick accents and calloused hands — as full citizens. Most San Franciscans want the same, yet our debate keeps collapsing into a tedious shouting match: Back the Blue versus Defund.
The union I now lead helped engineer that stalemate. For decades, the POA fought reforms with a ferocity that matched its wage demands, and it paid a price in public trust. If my election means anything, it is a mandate to break that mold. Officers did not vote for me because I promised a softer contract; they voted for me because they know a department hemorrhaging experienced cops cannot afford to be estranged from the city it serves.
So, to my fellow officers: we will still bargain hard for pay that keeps your kids in the city and your mortgages paid. But we will also stop pretending that accountability is a side dish. Long, opaque discipline cases alienate good cops and enrage residents; they serve no one except the few who hope the system never reaches a verdict. Speed it up. Show your work. Move on.
To the activists who doubt any union leader’s reform credentials: hold me to my words, but don’t prewrite the obituary. When patrol staffing is driven by real-time data — not seniority or politics — we can reduce both overtime usage and response times in the Bayview, the Mission, and Chinatown simultaneously. When we speak Cantonese or Spanish at community meetings without reaching for a phone app, witnesses come forward. When we recruit cadets who grew up in public housing alongside cadets who played high school lacrosse, civilian complaints go down. These are not thought experiments; they are lessons that other departments have already learned. We can, too.
And to every kid on the 38-Geary deciphering a medical bill for their grandparents: Your bilingual tongue is an asset, not a burden. The badge on my chest bears my family’s name because someone like you once believed a civic table might have a chair for him. Pull up yours sooner than I did.
Will a single election fix everything? Of course not. But it opens a door that has been locked for nearly eight decades, and doors, once open, invite traffic. Black neighbors weary of gunfire in Sunnydale, Latino entrepreneurs guarding their cash boxes on 24th Street, tech workers dodging smash-and-grabs in SoMa — all of us share the same 49 square miles. The coalition we need is already standing in line at Philz Coffee together; it just hasn’t been introduced to itself.
My job is to make that introduction and to prove, by deed, not slogan, that a police union can champion both the people behind the badge and the people who call us when the worst happens. If we succeed, San Francisco will not just have its first Asian American POA president. It will have a template for how cities can escape the ruinous myth that public safety is a zero-sum fight.
I owe that much to the officers who trusted me with their ballots and to every elder who now walks in the streets of San Francisco. For us, the work starts now.