SF politics

SF politics

If we can make the little things go away then all the larger projects and the more significant issues can all be dealt with by all the regulatory agencies,

San Francisco's public defenders say the district attorney's office is still withholding evidence months after they warned the state bar about an alleged "pattern and practice," and doing so in nearly half of their misdemeanor trials. Withholding evidence, the public defenders say, makes it much harder for them to represent their clients, and violates their clients' constitutional rights. The allegations come amidst a rise in misdemeanor cases filed by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins as the city has prioritized lower-level crimes for policing and prosecution.

Ellicott was charged in January 2024 for invoicing the city $14,000 for earthquake supplies. But according to his charging statement from the DA's office, The actual items purchased were three Oculus virtual reality headsets, four Rylo Action cameras, an HDTV projector, a Nikon DSLR camera worth nearly $2,000, four GoPro cameras, three mini instant cameras, six Microsoft tablets, and four OSMO pocket cameras with expansion kits. Moreover, Ellicott then went and just resold most of these items on eBay.

Lew has worked at the city's Ingleside, Bayview and Mission police stations and later became captain of the Ingleside station in 2022. He was later promoted to commander and ran the city's Drug Market Agency Coordinating Center, an effort started by former Mayor London Breed to bring together various city agencies to tackle outdoor drug dealing. Most recently, he led the city's Field Operations Bureau and served as deputy chief under Yep.

I was born and raised right here in the Sunset,

I swear I can remember standing right there on 8th and Clement thinking, 'This is where I'm going to live when I grow up,'

That data also reveals that ICE arrests across Northern California have more than tripled this year. A Mission Local analysis of data released from the Deportation Data Project, a group of researchers based at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that 48 percent of the people arrested by ICE across Northern California in September had no criminal background, while 39 percent had a criminal conviction. The remaining 14 percent had pending criminal charges.

Fiona Hinze can see it coming when she spins around the streets of San Francisco: An indicator showing that her wheelchair battery is running out of juice. Hinze is always with someone when she's out with her power chair. When the battery dies, she switches on the manual mode, takes the chair out of gear, and asks her companion to push her chair - which weighs a couple hundred pounds, plus her body weight - to her car.

Members of the Board of Supervisors are calling for action and accountability after Mission Local reported that women held in a San Francisco jail were allegedly forced to undress in front of each other while sheriff's deputies watched and filmed them with their body-worn cameras. Late Thursday afternoon, 17 women filed a claim with the city saying that deputies violated multiple laws and policies in May when they strip searched them en masse while male deputies were present.

What is a People Mover? People movers are neither moving walkways nor Tesla Tunnels. Instead, people movers refer to trains often used to shuttle passengers around airports. However, San Diego's APM would travel beyond the airport to connect to Trolley Lines at Santa Fe Depot and serve Civic Center (below) or the Convention Center. The APM would emulate Vancouver's Skytrain, whose 22.6-mile Expo Line serves urban neighborhoods far from any airport.

Ali Sutton, Tipping Point's chief program officer, warned that the situation could deteriorate further depending on federal policy changes after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, formally known as HR 1. "We are expecting some of the deepest cuts to our social safety net in our history," Sutton said. "Given those substantial cuts, we anticipate these numbers will only worsen over the next few years."

Delivery platform DoorDash bought a warehouse at 16th and Folsom to test delivery drones, but the Teamsters challenged their permit on zoning grounds. Now the drones will fly, after the SF Board of Appeals shot down the Teamsters' appeal. Delivery-based tech companies like Amazon have dreamt of using robots to deliver their goods for the better part of ten years.

Mayor Daniel Lurie's District 4 appointee, Beya Alcaraz, was the only San Francisco supervisor appointee in at least 30 years to enter the job with zero experience in either politics or government, a Mission Local analysis found. Alcaraz abruptly resigned from her post on Thursday night after controversy. Hours earlier, Mission Local published text messages in which Alcaraz said she paid her former pet store workers "under the table," skimped on taxes, and underreported income.

He recently wrote to SFMTA officials and Supervisor Myrna Melgar, arguing that they need to shift Vision Zero policy away from reacting to deadly crashes, and instead focus on streets and intersections where speeding and other forms of reckless driving are common. In other words, instead of depending on the high-injury network-a reactive system based on an accounting of deaths and serious injuries- take a proactive and systemic approach to making streets safe.

A vacant city-owned warehouse is going to become the drunk tank for people on drugs, as arresting people and trying to sober them up is Mayor Lurie's latest attempt to cut down on drug use on San Francisco streets. Now ten months in office, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie has tried a number of strategies to combat San Francisco's fentanyl scourge.

Breed confirmed to Politico Friday that she is discussing a possible run with allies, including mentor Willie Brown, thus answering the question of what could be next for the ambitious former mayor. "I called a couple of people just to see what their thoughts were," Breed tells the site. "My text messages and phone have been ringing off the hook from a lot of people in San Francisco. It's important that San Franciscans have options. I want to explore whether I could potentially be one of those options."

The San Francisco Ethics Commission has now formally accused former Human Rights Commission Executive Director Sheryl Davis of a range of ethics violations that may also amount to illegal acts involving improper gifts and conflicts of interest. Embattled former city commissioner Sheryl Davis, whom former Mayor London Breed also tapped to lead her Dream Keeper Initiative, has been slapped with a 31-page charging document from the city's Ethics Commission.

In an eight-to-five vote on Monday (3 November), the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) voted to disassemble Armand Vaillancourt's namesake fountain. Two days prior, the San Francisco Chronicle that San Francisco Recreation and Park Department (RPD) officials stated the fountain posed an "an immediate and serious hazard" and would propose dismantling the monumental fountain and storing it for up to three years, at a cost of $4.4m.

Imagine freeways along Lady Bird Lake in Austin, through Georgetown in Washington, along the beach in Santa Monica, through the French Quarter in New Orleans, or bisecting Cambridge between Harvard and MIT. Freeway builders had their sights set on all these places. They would've had their way, too, if not for the meddling protesters who foiled their schemes. The freeway revolt of the 1960s and '70s changed the course of American history, saving some of the nation's oldest and most-beautiful neighborhoods.

A man claimed to have a subpoena for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman after vaulting onto the stage at the beginning of Altman's highly-publicized conversation with Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr and Manny Yekutiel on Monday. Within moments of Kerr and Altman joining Yekutiel on stage at the Sydney Goldstein Theatre in downtown San Francisco, the man left his second-row seat and bolted onto the stage.