SAN FRANCISCO, CA- After former San Francisco mayor London Breed made a career out of cutting the police budget, her successor, Daniel Lurie, is taking the opposite approach, increasing funding for the city’s police department and sheriff’s office by $22 million each, the San Francisco Public Press reports.
Not everyone is happy about that prospect, however.
Several nonprofit organizations were expected to rally on the steps of City Hall this week to draw attention to so-called “unconscionable” budget cuts proposed by Lurie.
“My overall reaction is extreme disappointment,” said Adrian Tirtanadi, founder and executive director of Open Door Legal, a legal aid nonprofit, according to NBC Bay Area.
“The budget will make homelessness worse, not better.”
The city has been budgeting $2.2 million for Open Door Legal, which provides free legal representation to city residents, covering matters such as family law, discrimination, and poor living conditions.
“The city’s own data shows that for every one person they help exit homelessness, three to four people enter it,” Tirtanadi alleged.
“That means we’ll never get a handle on the problem unless we go upstream and prevent people, as many people as possible, from entering homelessness.”
Lurie is not entirely eliminating the homeless issue.
Under his proposed budget, he is directing $90 million in previously unallocated funds to provide homeless services, including expanded shelter capacity.
Tirtanadi disagrees with that approach.
“If you prevent people from becoming homeless, they don’t develop that trauma and then they don’t need all of the supportive services that people who are homeless need,” he said.
Lurie taking a hatchet to certain city programs shouldn’t come as a surprise because he’s been repeatedly warning that deep budget cuts were coming in light of the city’s struggling economy.
Tourism is down, undoubtedly in response to the city’s skyrocketing crime problems, and following the pandemic, a significant portion of the city’s office space remains vacant.
In May, Lurie told reporters that he was “hopeful and optimistic” about the city’s economic future “because we are prioritizing clean and safe streets.”
Another cause for concern among some is Lurie’s proposal to eliminate several roles from within the city’s Department of Police Accountability (DPA), which is tasked with investigating civilian complaints against police officers and sheriff's deputies.
The city’s Office of the Inspector General will also see cuts.
The increase in the police budget and the cuts in other departments and services have been criticized by several city leaders, including Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a former spokesperson for the Police Department, and Supervisor Shamann Walton, a strong proponent of police reform.
Walton, in particular, has been outspoken in opposition to Lurie’s budget, pushing back against Budget Director Sophia Kittler’s claim that the city must cut “less essential core services” in response to the city’s $800 million budget deficit.
Walton noted that a recent audit of police staffing in the city revealed that officers frequently received sick pay while working security shifts for private companies.
“I mean, look–we have inflated budgets for imaginary overtime,” Walton contended. “There are things that are non-essential that are receiving resources in this budget.”
He also argues that eliminating funding from the accountability board sets the department up for failure.
“It’s disrespectful to the voters who expect oversight from these departments,” he said. “Is it legal to completely gut a department, particularly a charter department, to where it can’t function?”
The city established a civilian police oversight board in 1982, called the Office of Citizen Complaints.
In 2016, through the passing of Proposition G, that office was replaced by the DPA, which added greater independence and increased authority to audit and evaluate police policies and training.
In 2020, amid the George Floyd riots, voters approved the establishment of the Office of Inspector General, which is responsible for examining systemic issues, such as use of force patterns, racial disparities, and disciplinary failures.
Paul Henderson, executive director of the DPAy, worries about the impact of additional budget cuts on that department.
He says further staff cuts will result in delayed resolutions and administrative bottlenecks that could compromise the integrity of investigations and impact the department’s ability to meet legally mandated deadlines, the Press reported.
Henderson also said the size of cuts affecting the agency appears disparate, “given the size of DPA and the rest of the cuts that are being proposed in other city departments.”
The Budget and Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to push Lurie’s proposed budget forward with amendments. The changes resulted in a reduction of job cuts from 103 to 56.
It isn’t known what the reduction will be in the DPA, but it is believed the department will lose an investigator, a part-time clerk, and two attorneys.
Yel Haile, director of the criminal law and immigration project at the ACLU of Northern California, said he believes Lurie’s cuts “serve a political agenda that deprioritizes oversight.”
“This is deeply, deeply troubling,” Haile said.
“The mayor, by increasing spending on arrests and incarceration, is enacting a budget that harms the most vulnerable San Franciscans, while eliminating many of the mechanisms through which SFPD can be held accountable for its litany of misconduct over the years.”
When asked to comment on opposition to the mayor’s budget, his office directed the Public Press to a statement Lurie issued on June 26 after supervisors voted to advance an amended budget.
“This budget takes major strides to lay the foundation for our long-term growth–bringing spending closer in line with revenues so we don’t spend money we don’t have, while focusing our resources on providing safe and clean streets, addressing the fentanyl crisis, and advancing our economic recovery,” Lurie said.
“Passing this budget also required painful decisions that were, unfortunately, necessary to set up our entire city for success. Leadership means making those tough decisions, and this group of city leaders did that.”
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