In a city that doesn’t agree on much, it’s widely accepted that San Francisco cops are in the dumps. Sad. with disappointment. Suffering from low morale.
Whatever you call it — and many people would call it collecting pay for not doing a lot of work — it’s not good for crime victims or their communities. So how are you going to do about it?
Like many tech billionaires who see a problem that needs fixing, Chris Larsen thinks he has an answer. The co-founder and CEO of Ripple, which helps people send money online via blockchain technology, created the San Francisco Police Community Foundation and seeded it with $1 million.
Each of the city’s 10 county stations will receive $100,000, and police officers will devise ways to spend it to promote a better work experience for themselves or to better engage with their communities. The proposals will be reviewed by an all-civilian board of directors before the money is spent.
Ideas floated so far include new sports equipment, better technology at stations, festivities to celebrate special occasions, food for community events and donating money to important neighborhood causes on behalf of the police.
It’s unclear whether any of that would boost morale and in turn encourage officers to work harder to improve the department’s low clearance rates to solve crimes and make arrests. But Larsen at least draws attention and money to a big problem in the city: a malfunctioning criminal justice system that needs police, prosecutors, and judges to stop pointing fingers at each other and work hard together. Incidentally, city police officers are well paid compared to their Bay Area counterparts, starting at $92,000 per year.
Larsen settled on the idea of boosting police morale after he became increasingly concerned about audacious – and rarely solved – property crime in the city. The San Francisco native lives on Russian Hill near the top of the crooked part of Lombard Street. In this hub for tourists and their rental cars, watch several car break-ins by organized thieves, sometimes brandishing guns and smashing security cameras so they don’t get caught. His father-in-law pulled the contents of his car when he visited for a few minutes on his way to the airport. There are rarely any consequences.
“They’ve gotten a lot bolder over the years,” Larsen told me in an interview. “Something is basically broken there, for sure.”
But Larsen, a registered Democrat, sees little nuance in the city’s property crime crisis, and doesn’t blame it on any agency or politician. And he doesn’t quite fit in with the major San Francisco political camps—the liberal versus the more liberal—that have managed to turn their relatively small differences into huge and sinister battles.
He has paid for an extensive system of security cameras throughout the city, which some local political clubs and city leaders oppose over privacy concerns, and founded Avenue Greenlight last year to provide small grants to commercial lanes across the city for festivals, lighting, and even new rainbow flags in Castro.
He awarded $100,000 to efforts to keep District Attorney Chesa Bowden in office after the June 7 election, and the two men have struck up a friendship during regular walking tours of Marina Green to talk about criminal justice reform.
“I think we should give him a chance,” Larsen said. “He is a really smart person, very practical and a very hardworking worker. I think it is unfair to have our public safety issue communicated on his doorstep.”
But Larsen endorsed Susie Loftus, Bowden’s more moderate rival, in the 2019 race for the district attorney. (He told me, “It was the mayor’s choice, and I love the mayor.”) He’s donated to many political causes and candidates over the years, including some Republican. He calls the police abolition movement “madness,” believing that a strong police department is essential to San Francisco’s future as a safe and prosperous city.
He described himself as a staunch advocate of criminal justice reform, an end to mass incarceration and the exclusion of police brutality from the force. But he believes the pendulum has swung too much in the anti-police direction, prompting many officers to retire or join divisions elsewhere and leave those in San Francisco burned after working too much overtime and feeling disrespected.
“I don’t think these things are in conflict with each other,” he said. “There has to be this respect, support and care because they are part of our home.”
He said he hopes other San Franciscans will contribute to the foundation, which will be a show of support for police officers, many of whom feel the city has turned against them.
There is certainly good reason to be disappointed with the San Francisco Police Department these days — including some high-profile incidents of use of force and recurring stories from residents and business owners of policemen ignoring crime if they show up to crime scenes at all.
The number one reason residents filed complaints with the city’s Police Accountability Service last year was “negligence of duty,” which accounts for 44% of allegations of police wrongdoing.
There was a burglary at a cannabis store that the officers saw from their car. The Barclays sabotage incident in which officers appeared halfway through the crime and left the perpetrator there to continue the destruction. Squatters who demolished a home in Bernal Heights empty while the owners waited for their rebuilding permits, officers let them go away. and Miraloma Park’s father who solved his case of stolen bags on the road, but couldn’t get much attention from the police.
While many San Franciscans have speculated that police are on unofficial shutdowns to make Bowden look bad, Police Chief Bill Scott has vowed that’s not true. He said the weaknesses in police work highlighted in The Chronicle are being investigated, but they are anomalies.
“I don’t think there is any downtime at all,” he said. “We respond to hundreds of thousands of calls annually, and there’s a lot of good work being done there.”
He said the Larsen Foundation is a smart idea because officers need to know that there is support for them even though loud voices are vehemently against them.
Tracy McCray, acting president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, agreed that the institution is a welcome sign of appreciation. She also agreed with the president that officers were not off work or unauthorized strikes.
“I will not defend that,” she said. “That goes against the reason we took this job.”
She said that many complaints about officers mocking the crime come from the public for not understanding the amount of paperwork required to build good cases, the necessity of leaving a property crime scene in the event of a violent crime elsewhere, and the severe shortage of officers in the department, a point with which not all police experts agree. . McCray, a San Francisco native, said she would vote to subpoena Bowden.
As for Tyler Sterkel, the father who solved a case of his family’s roadside travel baggage theft, he got a call from the police department on the day he ran my column about his frustrating hardships. He said the call lasted about 10 seconds, and included a promise to appoint a sergeant in his case and he would call him shortly.
He hasn’t heard anything since.
Heather Knight is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: Tweet embed