More money for the district attorney—but what about the public defender?

I gave a presentation this weekend to the Society of Professional Journalists Northern California Chapter, and I talked about why local government is so broke, why schools are in disarray, why we can’t have affordable housing, why everyone is facing austerity. It’s not just the COVID hangover: It’s because the very rich have taken all the money that the economy has produced over the past 40 years.

This ought to be the context for all the budget discussions the supes will be having this spring. San Francisco doesn’t have the legal authority to impose an income or wealth tax—but if, say, State Sen. Scott Wiener wanted, he could push legislation that would allow that to happen. Then the city could start bringing in revenue from the very, very rich who are getting even richer under the Trump tax cuts.

Wiener doesn’t seem to care.

So instead, we are fighting over scraps—and all the scraps are going to law enforcement, while social services are starved.

Sup. Matt Dorsey is holding a hearing at the Budget and Appropriations Committee on how much money the District Attorney’s Office needs to fund a massive new crackdown and minor crimes:

to assess staffing levels and needs within the District Attorney’s Office, including an evaluation of the department’s capacity to expand in coordination with other public safety agencies, the resources necessary for full implementation of Proposition 36 as well any other resource gaps, challenges related to recruitment and retention, recommending any legislative or budgetary actions to support these efforts.

The DA’s Office prosecutes crimes. Most of the people who will be targeted under this new crackdown will need public defenders. There is no hearing on “staffing needs” in the Public Defender’s Office, which is not on the list of agencies exempt from budget cuts. Which seems a bit unbalanced. Perhaps the chair, Sup. Connie Chan, could call a hearing on how much it will cost the city to defend people charged under these new laws and crackdowns, how much it will cost to incarcerate them, and how much it will cost in the long term to have so many more San Franciscans forced into the criminal justice system.

That meeting takes place Wednesday/7 at 1:30pm.

The cops, of course, want a lot more money for overtime, again, as has been happening every year. But this time around, the Budget and Appropriations Committee, including some conservative supes, is pushing back, at least a little. The panel listened to a lot of testimony on why police overtime is so out of control—the voted to send a proposal for more money to the full board without recommendation. The full board will consider that Tuesday/8.

The full board will also consider Dorsey’s bill that would shift city policy away from harm reduction and promote “abstinence only” approaches. The measure has no legal authority, but would mark a dramatic step backward for a city that has long followed the science and the advice of professionals in the substance use field and sought to keep users alive first—and work on recovery next.

Among other things, implementing Dorsey’s approach could undermine the city’s Housing First policy, which seeks to get everyone, even addicts, under a roof without mandating treatment. (Mandating treatment, the experts overwhelmingly agree, doesn’t work.)

Dorsey has six co-sponsors, so the measure is going to pass. But at least the supes should debate it; years from now, people may look back at this as a huge, huge mistake.

I’m really glad the San Francisco Planning Department has a Racial and Social Equity Action Plan. It started five years ago, with a mostly internal-facing review that looked at hiring, promotions, community outreach, and other things the department could be doing. Now there’s a Phase Two, which looks at the department’s role in planning the future of the city.

It sounds so good:

Despite delays related to the pandemic in formally adopting Phase 2, implementation of external facing initiatives began early on with key milestones achieved over the past several years, including initiating an Equity Audit of the Planning Code, establishing a pilot Neighborhood Data Hub tool, applying an equity lens to our budget, centering equity in the Housing Element, approving an Environmental Justice Framework in the General Plan, and expanding Community Liaison roles to support historically underserved communities, to name a few.

And I know the planners who worked on this had a profound vision that ought to drive the department into the future.

The problem is reality.

The demands of the Yimby movement, the economic inequality that has devastated local government, and legislation from Wiener and others, have made any serious attempt at equity all but impossible.

Let’s just look at one element from the department’s Equity Vision for Downtown, another excellent document. The plan specifically calls for

[The] # of affordable housing units in High Opportunity Areas to meet a minimum 25% Housing Element target.

But wait: The supes, under pressure from developers and Yimbys, have lowered  the affordable housing requirement, by almost half, to about 12-16 percent. That’s supposed to make more market-rate housing “pencil out.” But more market rate housing not only fails to solve the equity problem, it makes the situation worse.

I’m not blaming the planning staff; there are a lot of hard-working folks who are doing the best they can. But they are getting totally screwed by Yimby, Wiener & Co., who have set standards the city can never meet without massive new resources that can only exist if the state and the city are able to raise taxes on the very rich. Nobody at any level of local or state government is even talking about this.

Susan Fainstein, the Harvard planning professor, notes in her book The Just City that “equity is by definition redistributive.” Equity means taking wealth and power from the rich and powerful and giving it to others.

There is nothing in Part Two of the department’s equity plan that addresses redistribution of income, wealth, and power. The Planning Department staff has no authority or ability to take that kind of action.

But the members of the Planning Commission could talk about it. And the supes could do something about it.

The proposal comes up for a hearing at the commission meeting Thursday/8.

I have not been a practicing Catholic since the day I left home at 18 and went off to college, but I went to Catholic school so I know a little about how the Church operates. Donald Trump’s bizarre attempt to say he should be the next Pope has offended a lot of Catholics, for good reason: People take their faith seriously.

But for the record, Trump, despite his refusal for follow most rules or social norms, can’t get away with this one. You don’t have to be a cardinal or a bishop or even a priest to be the Pope—but you do have to be a man who was baptized in the Catholic faith.

Sorry, Donald: You missed that cut a long, long time ago. Pope Francis wasn’t a bit intimidated by you, and with any luck, his successor won’t be either. Let the conclave do its business in peace.