The San Francisco Police Department’s brass could scarcely have been more emphatic about the seriousness of our city’s unprecedented police understaffing crisis when they presented to the Board of Supervisors committee I chair last month.
“The loss of close to 300 additional sworn members will be catastrophic for the department if we cannot balance the attrition,” SFPD Commander Nicole Jones warned the Rules Committee late last month, referring to the demographic cliff San Francisco is going over due to near-term police officer retirements. “We have not been able to balance that attrition at all in the last five years. We are losing members at a far faster rate than we are hiring, and this pattern will continue, and that gap will continue to widen for the next few years — unless we are able to do something drastic.”
Drastic help was on the way, until a few weeks ago.
A comprehensive five-year plan I authored in partnership with Mayor London Breed and my co-sponsors, Supervisors Joel Engardio and Rafael Mandelman, would have enabled San Francisco voters to prioritize their existing tax dollars to recruit new officers more competitively against neighboring jurisdictions, and to start delivering on the promise of a fully staffed police department.
It was a solutions-oriented approach that would have begun making a difference promptly — within a few months of adoption by voters in the “Super Tuesday” primary next March, in fact.
And it would have enabled us to start making real progress on the myriad public safety challenges facing our city, which right now rob too many San Franciscans of the safe enjoyment of their own neighborhoods and hamstring our city’s economic recovery.
Entitled the “San Francisco Police Full Staffing Act,” my proposed Charter Amendment reflected months of work with stakeholders and experts who included current and former SFPD command staff members, Mayor Breed’s budget and policy teams, the City Controller, the City Attorney and community leaders.
As originally written, it earned support from dozens of business and neighborhood leaders — from SF Travel and the San Francisco Hotel Council to the Council of District Merchants and community benefit district boards spanning most of our city’s downtown — together with thousands of residents who wrote emails and showed up in person to express their support.
Then, at the 11th hour, it was hijacked by an aspiring mayoral candidate.
A hostile amendment authored by Supervisor Ahsha Safaí — adopted with the support of Supervisor Shamann Walton, as part of a two-member majority of the Board’s Rules Committee — added a poison-pill to my proposal that wholly guts its solutions-focused approach. Instead, the hijacked measure (now solely sponsored by Supervisor Safaí) blocks any portion of the five-year plan from taking effect until and unless “a future tax measure passed by the voters” is determined to “generate sufficient additional revenue” to recruit and hire more police.
In other words, it’s now a “Cop Tax” scheme.
While disappointing, it’s hardly unusual for a Board of Supervisors that has distinguished itself in recent years for stalling solutions and frustrating progress — on everything from housing production and open-air drug markets, to public safety and, now, police staffing. But for Supervisor Safaí in particular, this poison pill is also politically self-serving in key respects.
First, the Cop Tax scheme cravenly sacrifices our civic public safety imperatives for mayoral politics. By obstructing progress on San Francisco’s police understaffing crisis until late 2025 at the earliest, mayoral candidate Safaí gets to keep blaming the mayor he is challenging for a politically salient problem.
And if anyone doubted whether the ploy was politically useful to Supervisor Safaí, he implicitly confirmed it in a recent social media post, lamenting “if only London Breed had shown some leadership.”
Second, it cynically aims to manipulate voters’ legitimate fears about public safety — which most pollsters agree represents the top voting issue this election cycle — into political support for new taxes next year.
Indeed, the so-called “Safer Smarter SF Coalition,” comprising public sector unions that compete with police for limited general fund dollars in The City’s budget, has been unequivocal in their championship of Sup. Safaí’s Cop Tax scheme, hailing his approach for tapping “new funding streams,” and “raising taxes on the largest businesses in The City.”
To me and many others — Mayor Breed included — the political tone-deafness of hijacking a police staffing measure to incentivize new taxes is breathtaking. Most of the voters I’ve heard from find the Cop Tax ploy outrageous, believing that minimum police staffing levels should be a baseline expectation for the existing tax dollars they already pay.
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The notion that San Franciscans can only expect a fully staffed police department if they’re willing to pay extra for it is a marketing gimmick worthy of Spirit Airlines — not a responsibly led municipal government.
Third, at least as galling as the “future tax” requirement for additional revenue is the significant delay Supervisor Safaí’s Cop Tax scheme has now irrevocably caused. In the context of an urgent crisis SFPD brass itself deems potentially “catastrophic,” denying voters a meaningful role to prioritize their own tax dollars to offset police retirements and more competitively recruit police is profoundly unwise, if not unforgivable.
Even if San Francisco voters were to swallow their outrage and agree to a tax hike or tax modification in the November 2024 General Election, Supervisor Safaí’s hijacked proposal will still postpone voter-mandated progress on police staffing for at least 18 months — until August of 2025 at the earliest — when SFPD’s understaffing levels could potentially be approaching 50 percent.
In only one respect am I grateful for Supervisor Safaí’s Cop Tax scheme. I’ve made countless presentations about my charter amendment to community organizations citywide, and I’m often asked, “Why do voters need to fix police staffing? Can’t supervisors just do this themselves?”
Supervisor Safaí’s poison-pill Cop Tax ploy provides a compelling answer to those questions. The Cop Tax scheme is yet another example of how an actionable public policy — intended to solve a gravely serious problem, in a reasonable manner, over a workable time period — can be rendered into a politically self-serving, do-nothing measure to curry favor with special interests and help no one else.
It perfectly demonstrates why this Board of Supervisors cannot be trusted to address the myriad problems for which San Franciscans are demanding solutions. And I have every confidence that San Francisco voters won’t be fooled by it.
I’m enormously grateful to my policy-making partners and community-based supporters for continuing to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me in our ongoing fight for a fully staffed SFPD.
That includes Mayor Breed, whose letter to me earlier this month expressed strong agreement that, “Providing a well-staffed police department is a basic responsibility of city government and tying the safety of our neighborhoods to tax increases is irresponsible, tone deaf, and disrespectful to our constituents.”
Likewise, another letter from more than 20 organizational supporters of my original San Francisco Police Full Staffing Act also expressed their strong opposition to Supervisor Safaí’s Cop Tax version.
“Although we understand the concerns in regard to the City’s projected budget shortfall, we also urge you to consider the consequences of severe police department understaffing in potential lost revenue to the City,” the organizations wrote. “Public safety perceptions are influencing decisions about whether companies want to locate here or host conferences, whether workers want to return downtown, and whether tourists will visit. Small businesses and their employees are victims of crime and greatly impacted by public disorder. These challenges have real impacts to The City’s tax revenue and overall vibrancy. We must get public safety right. Then tax revenue will follow.”
The decisive Board of Supervisors vote on Supervisor Safaí’s Cop Tax Charter Amendment is expected to take place on Tuesday. I’ll be voting “no,” and I’m certainly hoping to convince a majority of my colleagues to join me. We shall see.
Regardless of that outcome, however, I’m not backing down. I remain fully committed to solving our police staffing crisis before it reaches catastrophic levels. I’m already meeting with city leaders, stakeholders and supporters, and exploring options that could include moving forward with a voter-initiated version of a police full staffing Charter Amendment — much like
my original proposal — for the November 2024 General Election. Stay tuned.
We must continue taking every step necessary to make San Francisco safer, cleaner and more welcoming to all — not solely for our residents and neighborhoods, but also for the commuters, shoppers, tourists and conventioneers we’re depending on to power our post-COVID economic recovery.
Stated simply, police understaffing is a crisis San Francisco can’t afford
not to solve. And if our current Board of Supervisors won’t, I’m confident voters will.
