By: J.D. Morris
This article was originally published in The San Francisco Chronicle.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed sought to defend her record on public safety, homelessness, the drug crisis and other key issues Monday as some of her leading opponents argued during a lively mayoral debate that she’s failed to adequately respond to the city’s most pressing problems.
Breed faced off against three of her four top challengers in the third mayoral debate of the election season, co-hosted by the public safety advocacy groups Stop Crime SF and Stop Crime Action as well as the civic engagement group Connected SF. Aside from Breed, the candidates who participated were former Mayor and Supervisor Mark Farrell, nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie and Supervisor Ahsha Safaí.
The fifth major mayoral candidate, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, declined to appear at the debate, saying he wouldn’t get a fair shake from the event’s organizers, who he described in a letter as being “highly-partisan” — a charge they denied.
While the debate touched on a range of subjects — including transit and the city budget — the candidates’ emphasis on drug dealing and crime underscored the degree to which public safety will remain one of the defining issues in the city’s November election.
Here are a few takeaways from the latest debate:
Breed spars with Farrell and Safaí
Some of the most animated moments came when Breed, who polls have shown is in danger of losing her reelection bid, accused her opponents of inflating their accomplishments to undermine hers.
She pushed back on a claim Farrell has often made about clearing the city’s largest homeless encampments during the half year he was mayor in 2018. While Farrell did build off work from the late Mayor Ed Lee to remove large tent camps, Breed said San Francisco had more tents on its streets when Farrell left office than today. The city counted 568 homeless tents and dwelling structures in July 2018, the month Farrell’s mayorship ended, compared with 361 in April this year, the most recent month for which data is available.
Breed also had harsh words for Safaí, who had accused her of not fully funding the city’s plan to overhaul its mental health system. She said Safaí had “not even been at the table” while she worked with other city supervisors to set aside more money for mental health treatment.
In a later exchange, Breed said crime data was worse under Farrell’s leadership. She said her work had helped lead to a “significant decline” in reported crimes as the city sought to crack down on drug markets, in partnership with state and federal law enforcement, and combat retail theft. As of Monday, crime reports were down about 32% from last year, police data shows.
Breed said she didn’t know of any other mayor who had been as aggressive in arresting drug dealers as well as people using drugs on the streets when they pose a danger to themselves or others.
“I take full credit for all of this work, but it is not enough and I know more needs to be done,” Breed said.
Farrell redoubled his public safety critique of Breed in response, saying she had “defunded the Police Department two years ago to the tune of $120 million” — a reference to the Dream Keeper Initiative that Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton established to direct some funding away from law enforcement and into the city’s Black community. He also blamed Breed for the city now being hundreds of police officers below the level recommended in an independent staffing analysis.
“It is no wonder that public safety is the number one issue across the city of San Francisco,” Farrell said.
Safaí didn’t get a chance to respond directly to Breed’s comment about him, but he did get in a separate dig at her, after she had implied that he and Peskin backed her downtown-related proposals after they decided to run for mayor.
“Thank goodness we have a mayor who is running for reelection, because she loves to copy my ideas,” Safaí said after talking about his work to revive downtown. The comment was met with boos from the audience.
For Lurie and Farrell, all roads lead back to street conditions and safety
Lurie and Farrell both indicated that they thought San Francisco’s poor reputation for public safety and the misery on its streets was directly linked to some of its other challenges, such as downtown’s slow recovery from the pandemic.
Lurie said the city needs to have “clean and safe streets downtown, and it can’t just be when we have a conference in town or a world leader coming to town” — an apparent critique of the city’s lauded work to clean up public spaces during the high-profile Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last year.
“We need to be real about what the issue is downtown: It is the public safety,” Farrell said before discussing how the city needed a new mayor who would be “very strong” about growing police staffing and making sure the homeless and fentanyl crises were not “growing out of control and affecting downtown again.”
While Breed has been trying to respond to those crises by increasing support for police and searching for ways to add more students and residents downtown, her opponents say she’s not making progress fast enough.
“San Francisco, we are coming back, but the outcome of this election will determine how fast we come back and what that comeback looks like,” Lurie said.
SFMTA chief could be out of a job after the election
Safaí and Farrell both said at the debate that they would seek to fire Jeffrey Tumlin, the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority, which runs Muni and oversees street safety and design. Safaí said SFMTA is “the worst” department at doing outreach to residents and small businesses affected by its big projects, including yearslong construction on Taraval Street that merchants blame for keeping customers away. Farrell concurred that the agency was too “focused on ideology and not common sense on the streets of San Francisco.”
The SFMTA director serves at the pleasure of the agency’s Board of Directors, whose members are appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the Board of Supervisors.
Lurie didn’t say he would fire Tumlin but he did lambaste the “nightmare on Taraval” and said he would “be a mayor that listens, that communicates, that talks before making bold declarations and promises.”
Breed defended SFMTA’s reputation, saying that surveys had shown high customer satisfaction with Muni. But she also said she took responsibility for the agency’s “challenging communication process,” particularly around the continuing work on Taraval Street.
“I know it’s been very frustrating for the people who live there, but my commitment is to continue to listen and to do everything we can to move forward,” Breed said.
D.A. Jenkins gets an award, prompting outcry from opponent
Before the mayoral candidates took the stage to debate each other, Stop Crime SF used the event as an opportunity to bestow an inaugural “Crimefighter of the Year” award on District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.
In a speech to the standing-room-only crowd, Jenkins said she and Stop Crime SF shared the “same mission” of trying to reduce crime in the city. Like Breed, Jenkins pointed to the decline in reported crimes in the city but said it’s also important to be mindful of “how people feel” when measuring San Francisco’s progress.
“Unless and until they feel the way that I believe they are entitled to feel, which is safe, then our work is not done,” Jenkins said.
The award’s presentation did not go over well with Ryan Khojasteh, an Alameda County prosecutor who is now running to unseat Jenkins. In a letter to Stop Crime SF leaders ahead of the debate, Khojasteh said the award and its timing constituted “biased political activity” that ran afoul of federal restrictions on tax-exempt nonprofits. He also revealed that he had filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service.
In response, Stop Crime SF President Karina Velásquez told Khojasteh that the award to Jenkins and her subsequent speech were “within the bounds of lawful activity for a 501(c) (3) organization.” Velásquez noted in her letter that Jenkins was being honored for her work as the city’s incumbent top prosecutor and was “not appearing at this event as a candidate.”
