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Delos Pierre Gallon on MUNI footage
Delos GallonSFPD Booking Photo Courtesy of Hoodline

Boudin Gives Puppy Killer Drug Diversion for Violent Robbery of Asian Visitor

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

Iwas a legacy at SFPD and when I went into the Department, my father advised me, “You never want to see a dead child, it will stay with you forever.”  As normal people, we can’t fathom why anyone would harm a child. Children are so innocent, vulnerable, and totally dependent on us.

I can neither watch coverage nor comprehend the cruel mind that caused the tragic school shooting in Texas. It’s heart wrenching. And while not for a second would I ever compare harming a child to killing a puppy, there is a parallel sickness possessed by the violent assailant of either. A puppy is also innocent, vulnerable, and totally dependent on humans.

Delos Pierre Gallon (27) is such a violent man.

Gallon’s pre-Boudin résumé

DelosPierreGallon
Gallon in Tenderloin footage just before killing puppy.

Gallon is a resident of Richmond, California. In 2014, he was convicted of robbery in San Francisco. In 2016, he was convicted of a burglary in San Francisco. In May 2018, in an extremely graphic (Warning: this will stay with you forever) video viewed by over 30,000, Gallon killed his girlfriend’s puppy Cocker Spaniel by hurling Prince onto the floor of a Tenderloin grocery store. For this domestic violence incident, Gallon was sent to prison for four years. Only a monster would kill a puppy.

Puppy killer Gallon’s résumé under DA Chesa Boudin

Released from prison early, in December 2020, Gallon was arrested in a burglary, while being in possession of a gun. Technically, a convicted felon with a gun. Gallon also gained dual probation status in both San Francisco and Contra Costa County.

On October 8, 2021, at 2:00 in the afternoon, MUNI video documents that Gallon and Sasha Maxwell-Johnson entered a 38 MUNI at O’Farrell and Taylor Streets. On the MUNI video, Gallon is heard using his cellphone coordinating a second accomplice to enter the back entrance of the MUNI bus (without paying of course). The second accomplice went directly up to a seated 24-year-old Asian female named Jung, who had her backpack firmly guarded between her legs, aware how dangerous San Francisco has become. The accomplice grabbed Jung’s secured backpack and started to flee through the back door—one of 85 reported nonviolent property larcenies that occur in SF daily.  Jung instinctively arose to give chase. Gallon stood up from his seat, and cowardly Sunday-punched Jung in the side of the face—elevating the property crime to a robbery. The force of Gallon’s closed fist sent Jung to the floor and bloodied her nose. Paramedics had to be called to attend to her.

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Boudin and the judge circumvented diversion eligibility rules because violent criminals are specifically not eligible for diversion programs. And why did Boudin send someone to drug diversion if they weren’t arrested for drugs?”

Gallon had performed an excellent profiling of Jung, an obvious unfamiliar international guest to our city. From Jung’s backpack, Gallon and his accomplice robbed her of her passport, visa, iPad, laptop, and $500 in cash.

SFPD immediately went to work, gathering videos and putting together a cohesive investigative case on Gallon. SFPD arrested Gallon.

Delos Pierre Gallon on MUNI footage
Gallon prepares to strike Jung as Sasha runs out door.

DA Boudin threw the synonym book at Gallon: he filed, charged, took action against Gallon, held Gallon accountable, and prosecuted Gallon. At the preliminary hearing on November 12, 2021, the judge determined that there was sufficient evidence to support that Gallon committed the robbery and assaulted Jung.

Then, when no one was looking, Boudin and the judge freed Gallon the puppy killer to the streets by enrolling him in an official sounding drug diversion program called Drug Court Track II. (Why not call it Drug Track XVIIb?) Of great concern is that Boudin and the judge circumvented diversion eligibility rules because violent criminals are specifically not eligible for diversion programs.  And why did Boudin send someone to drug diversion if they weren’t arrested for drugs?

It is obvious that Boudin recognized Jung would not be in San Francisco to protest the release of Gallon. Thus, it was easy for Boudin, still acting as a public defender, to sneak the puppy-killer out of the backdoor of county jail so that he would be available to continue driving up the crime rate in SF. (Through May 29th, larcenies are up 24% over last year.) 

Nor did Boudin have the courtesy to notify the SFPD officers that combed through hours of surveillance and MUNI video to arrest and make the public safe from the puppy killer. SFPD only gained knowledge of Gallon’s freedom when a few officers recognized the Richmond resident on the City’s streets. 

Almost laughable, sources are confirming that Gallon was seen last week vacationing in Las Vegas. We have to assume you can attend Drug Track II remotely, maybe even while you are working the corner of Eddy and Hyde Streets. 

Boudin lacks empathy has failed the public’s safety

You can’t make stories like this up. Unlike us normal folks,

  1. It is clear that Boudin’s lacks the empathy gene in his DNA, 
  2. Boudin recognizes no responsibility to uphold the basic prosecutorial function of his job, and
  3. Boudin feels no obligation to protect the citizens, visitors, tourists, or even puppies that make up the fabric of our struggling city.

Only a DA, with a sadistic mindset, would allow a puppy killer like this on San Francisco or Las Vegas streets.

Lou Barberini is a CPA and has been writing articles for the Westside Observer since February 2016.

June 2022

Market St. Market
Alleged shoplifters find an easy customer base on Market Street

Preposterous Chronicle & Examiner: Only 6 Shopliftings Occur Daily in SF

While “US property crimes declined 23%,” SF’s increased 42%

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

To promote the progressive narrative on decarceration and defunding of law enforcement, it is essential to mask surging crime rates in San Francisco. Despite numerous viral YouTube videos documenting San Francisco’s shoplifting incidents, in a June 25th Chronicle and a June 29th Examiner article, Susie Neilson and Michael Barba, respectively, wrote about falling shoplifting crimes rates. District Attorney Chesa Boudin immediately congratulated himself by retweeting Neilson’s article, “We work hard to protect local businesses.”  But has shoplifting really declined in San Francisco?

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…one of the security guards at a Walgreens on Market Street, told me he documents photographs of the shoplifters he catches on his cellphone. On the day of Neilson’s 6-per-day article, James caught 23 shoplifters by himself. He said he averages catching 15 shoplifts per day, but he knows he misses many of the shoplifters.”

Neilson correctly cited CA Department of Justice (DOJ) statistics, while Barba accurately referenced a May 13th SFPD report. Perhaps I am the only person who divided the 2019 (a non-Covid year) total shoplifting crimes of 2,362, by 365 days. According to the SFPD report, for the entire 49-square miles of our city, only six people shoplifted per day. Each law enforcement officer I spoke to describe the 6-per day figure as being comically inaccurate. I agree.

Newspapers report the quantity of SFPD incident reports, not shoplifting crimes

The SFPD report only references shoplifting offenses that required SFPD officers to prepare an incident report. That means either the shoplifter fought security, committed additional crimes, or stole more than $950 worth of items. It’s not that SFPD’s report is erroneous, it’s just not a representative statistic.

SFPD Shoplifting stats

In a parallel statistic, SFPD only completes incident reports for traffic accidents when there is an injury. Therefore, thousands of noninjury accidents are handled civilly without SFPD reports the same way thousands of shoplifting offenses are handled without reports. An insurance company would not determine premium rates based solely on SFPD incident reports, nor should readers interpret SFPD shoplifting reports as anywhere near the total picture of the shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco.

Do the Chronicle/Examiner conflict with the obvious?

  • In San Francisco, over the past 18-months, 17 San Francisco Walgreens have closed because of the financial losses due to excessive shoplifting. If we were to assume Walgreens was the exclusive victim of all of SF’s 6 daily shoplifts, that means Walgreens’ accountants made a major business decision to close those stores because they only suffered a twice-per-week shoplift. Doubtful.

 

  • James, one of the security guards at a Walgreens on Market Street, told me he documents photographs of the shoplifters he catches on his cellphone. On the day of Neilson’s 6-per-day article, James caught 23 shoplifters by himself. He said he averages catching 15 shoplifts per day, but he knows he misses many of the shoplifters.
  • Bloomingdales and Nordstrom employ security guards at every entrance of their stores. On the same floor as the Bloomingdales, Michael Kors, Panerai, Rolex, Tourneau, Rio Valentine, Burberry, Kate Spade, and Abercrombie all employee security guards at their doors, while the mall also provides an additional layer of security in yellow jackets. It is hard to conclude that all the stores’ professional analysts are spending millions on security payroll to defend against only 6-shoplifting crimes per day.

 

Decreasing shoplifting stats are inconsistent with San Francisco’s property crime surge

In her Chronicle article, Neilson supports the 6 shoplifters per day by conflating a national declining property theft rate as evidence that shoplifting also must be declining in San Francisco: 

Still, shoplifting has been declining in the city since 1985, according to data from the California Department of Justice. That’s in keeping with broader national trends:  Between 2009 and 2018, overall property crime in the U.S. declined by 23% according to the FBI.”

First, apparently the CA DOJ’s 1985 shoplifting base of 14 shoplifts per day, came from the same unrepresentative SFPD incident report statistic.

Second, and extremely shocking, while the ten-year national property crime rate dropped 23%, San Francisco experienced a 42.6% surge (34,509 to 49,214). For those of you turned off by numbers, let me reword that statistic:  Between 2009 and 2018, San Francisco negatively diverged from a national trend by 65 percentage points! Consistent with that statistic, which makes many view SF as lawless, we are supposed to believe shoplifting was simultaneously declining?

Proposition 47’s contribution to property crimes

On Twitter, Ms. Neilson defended Proposition 47’s perceived negative effect by claiming the initiative recategorized felonies into misdemeanors, but that it should not have suppressed lower property crime figures. That is theoretically true.

However, Prop 47 legally prevents police officers from arresting shoplifters of merchandise under $950. A civilian witness must make a citizen’s arrest, and then SFPD issues the thief a citation on a traffic ticket. The civilian potentially loses a day of work to go to court and is civilly exposed for a false arrest. James at Walgreens said, “Why should I make a citizen’s arrest if the DA is just going to kick the case anyway? We just return the stolen merchandise to the shelves.”

I spoke to several SFPD officers that echoed James’ sentiments, “Shoplifting crimes are dispatched as such a low priority call, by the time we get to the store, the clerk’s shift has ended and so no report can be made. Or the store clerk knows that the thief will not be prosecuted, so they just ask us to get their merchandise back. That saves us a 2-hour report that will go nowhere, and we instead are available for more violent crimes.”  In both James and SFPD’s situations, there is no incident report so no shoplifting statistic.

If James, SFPD, and the clerks all agree that there are no consequences to shoplifting, don’t you think the thieves know it too?

Integrity issues with Chronicle editors

Our fear should be the voting power of the many San Franciscans who can afford to live here because they are highly educated and book smart. And like Neilson and Barba, they have accepted a literal and convenient progressive interpretation of SFPD’s statistics without questioning, “Wait, does that make sense?”  And these literally smart, but street naïve people then vote in San Francisco elections based on our newspapers’misinformation.

And while I would like to acknowledge that Neilson was very helpful by sharing her links, nothing has changed in terms of the objectives of the editors of our City’s newspapers: agenda journalism is more important than objective information.

Another example of misinformation was published three days after Neilson’s piece, when Jill Tucker perpetuated another Chronicle myth about declining juvenile crime. For the basis of their so called “signature series,” the Chronicle cited declining arrests while ignoring that SPFD was reporting increased juvenile crimes. Juvenile arrests are as disconnected to crimes as SFPD incident reports are dissimilar to shoplifting crime totals. Via Twitter, I forwarded my article detailing the Chronicle error to then-editor Audrey Cooper. She then blocked me. How’s that for journalistic integrity? 

Lou Barberini is a CPA and has been writing articles for the Westside Observer since February 2016.

July 2021

Safeway ParkingLot incident
An Attempted carjacking in a Safeway parking lot—foiled by Good Samaritan Harry Mulholland—calls Boudin's pursuit of violent crime into question as well as his tactic of using surrogates to write op-eds
How Boudin’s Friends Bully His Critics

Ethical Issues Arise with Washington Post’s op-ed on Dion Lim

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

Apattern emerges when San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is criticized. Instead of directly presenting his beliefs to the public, he indirectly attacks the messenger through surrogates writing op-eds for various media sites. This may be indicative of a shallow depth to his talking points, or just a malicious regard for the first amendment.

In my March 15th Westside Observer article, I wrote about how, immediately after ABC’s Dion Lim challenged Boudin on his tendency to blame others for his policy failures, a fake and disparaging poser’s Twitter account “The Real Dion Lim” surfaced. Boudin not only used his official government account to follow the fake Twitter account, but he effectively validated the fake high school poser’s posts when he retweeted them. Even more curious, the first people that the high school poser chose to follow with her new Twitter account were Boudin’s closest associates, op-ed defenders, and campaign staff. And as soon as I went on the Twitter account and inquired whether the high school poser was Boudin, the account was immediately shut down. Busted?

Last week, Radley Balko of the Washington Post published a hit piece on ABC’s Dion Lim regarding her claim that charges against a juvenile Safeway parking lot carjacker were “dropped.” At issue is the splitting of hairs on what the word “dropped” means?

In a similar situation described in my recent article, “Armed Robbery at Stow Lake,” Boudin “dropped” the robbery-with-a-gun case. But technically, from a legal standpoint, Boudin really didn’t “drop” the Stow Lake case, he just let the robber walk with a noise complaint violation. But when we apply a layman’s general definition of “dropped,” it provides an accurate description of the Stow Lake incident, as does Dion Lim’s use of “dropped” when she described a violent juvenile felony that will not be pursued.

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Any reasonable person would infer that if the adult’s case was “dropped” through perpetual stalling due to evidence not meeting Boudin’s intentionally unachievable standards, then the juvenile’s case would be treated with even greater lenience. Sounds like Dion Lim was spot-on!”

Many of Boudin’s assistant district attorneys know that he already tabled the carjacking robbery on the juvenile’s adult accomplice. And Boudin would never put a harsher sentence on a juvenile because it is presumed that an adult codefendant is the corruptor. Any reasonable person would infer that if the adult’s case was “dropped” through perpetual stalling due to evidence not meeting Boudin’s intentionally unachievable standards, then the juvenile’s case would be treated with even greater lenience. Sounds like Dion Lim was spot-on!

Dion Lim
ABC-7's Dion Lim / Photo: Facebook

But it wasn’t Boudin’s semantics that caught my attention in the Balko article, it was the following paragraph:

“The problem is that Lim was wrong. The charges against the assailant were never dropped. In California, as in most states, juvenile cases are generally sealed, so state law prevents the DA’s office from discussing the case with the public. But in phone interviews, both the victim and Mulholland tell me they were informed by Boudin’s office that Lim’s story is inaccurate, that the juvenile not only still faces charges but that she also had a court date last week.”

Let’s dissect the contradictions in Balko’s opinion piece:

Only one of two things could have occurred for Balko to be able to write this column:

  1. The victim and Mulholland (involved in assisting the victim) just happened to get together one day and decided to contact a columnist 3-time zones away on a local matter (I think this is unlikely), or
  2. Boudin orchestrated the article to Balko by providing Mulholland’s and the victim’s phone numbers (How else would Balko obtain them?) as well as directly or indirectly leaking the confidential juvenile’s information.

Thus, if (a) is true and Balko received the juvenile’s confidential information from the victim and Mulholland, that means his story was based on secondhand knowledge—hearsay and an absence of direct evidence. This also means that Balko’s conclusion that “Dion is wrong” is unfounded and without substantiation. We can also conclude that Balko has hypocritically challenged Dion Lim about her evidence, but he is not able to refute her because he too is not in possession of the same direct evidence.

On the other hand, if (b) is true, that means Boudin provided prohibited confidential juvenile information to Balko—and in the process, per Balko’s own words, Boudin would have violated state law.

Perhaps Balko can answer whether it is (a) or (b) that is true, or Chesa Boudin can provide clarity and reveal what the charges on the juvenile actually are. Oh, but conveniently those charges are sealed to the public, meaning Balko’s op-ed is tantamount to contesting what matter exists on an undiscovered planet.

Beyond Boudin’s semantics, the public should be concerned about Boudin’s frequent use of surrogates to bully his accusers with op-eds. His supporters should question if Boudin’s incapability of personaly defending his lenient prosecution to the public debases his social justice leadership. Many of us are alarmed about Boudin’s apparent leak in this case, as well as his consistent selective use and abuse of laws. Those of us who are critical of Boudin believe his actions have amplified issues concerning his integrity and that this leak from his office demands a California State Bar investigation.

Note on Balko’s and Boudin’s claim of decreased SF crime. Per SFPD’ Dashboard, when making an apples-to-apples comparison of crime during the shutdown, property crimes +38%, overall crime +16.1%, and robberies +8% (periods March 17 to June 13 for 2020 and 2021).

Lou Barberini is a CPA and has been writing articles for the Westside Observer since February 2016.

June 21, 2021

Chesa Boudin
Boudin’s Corpses, More Than a Serial Killer

What “filing a case” in Boudin-speak Means

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

You see them when you go downtown. Union Square, the Financial District, Market Street. They make you feel uncomfortable. They keep the tourists away. Macheath literally chased the tourists away.

Saturday had barely turned to Sunday. It was still 61 degrees, and our September summer was a day away. One block west of the American Conservatory and the Geary Theater, Maurice was waiting for a friend to pick him up.

Macheath had only recently been released from state prison after serving a 4-year sentence for attempted murder on a Black man at 16th and Mission. Macheath, who is white, approached Maurice, who is Black. They had never met before.

Macheath randomly blurted to Maurice, “Come any closer and I’ll stab you!  Two steps! Do it!”  Maurice defensively backpedaled, then per numerous witnesses, Macheath closed the gap and stabbed Maurice in the chest.

Central Station police officers Lara and Serrano quickly found Macheath and arrested him. Other Central Station officers recognized Macheath from a previous day’s report. In that incident, citizens had reported that Macheath was running around Union Square brandishing a large kitchen knife approaching potential victims yelling, “Say it, say it.”   He was still wearing the same blue shirt when he stabbed Maurice.

This case serves as an example of exposing what District Attorney Chesa Boudin means when he frequently brags “I filed on over 4,500 cases.” Central Station officers booked Macheath into county jail on an “attempted murder” charge. Per Data.SFgov.org, Boudin “filed” the felony paperwork accepting SFPD’s arrest charges. In Boudin-speak, “my office filed the case” has the equivalent meaning of “my office read the SFPD police report” or “at least I didn’t let the arrestee immediately back to the streets.”

But then, after only 145-days in custody, Boudin took the “filed” attempted murder charge and downgraded it to a penal code section that can be treated as a misdemeanor. Boudin added a two-year probation sentence, required Macheath to wear an ankle monitor, and then let him back on the streets. Macheath immediately cut off the ankle monitor. Reducing a felony— an attempted murder charge— to a potential misdemeanor is what Boudin does in thousands of cases and then intentionally confuses the public by boasting that he “filed a felony.”

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In Boudin-speak, “my office filed the case” has the equivalent meaning of “my office read the SFPD police report” or “at least I didn’t let the arrestee immediately back to the streets.””

It is unfortunate that this story doesn’t end with complaints about Boudin’s specious jargon and his aversion to prosecution.

On the evening of February 25th, Devan was found dead on the sidewalk. Stabbed in the chest, only 100-yards from CPMC Hospital’s Van Ness Avenue campus. And guess who was Suspect #1?

Macheath, who is white, was now the primary suspect in the murder of a Black man via a knife. SFPD found blood on Macheath’s shirt, and he was in possession of a bloody knife. The blood was sent for DNA testing to confirm it was the victim’s blood on Macheath’s possessions.

The DNA will corroborate (or has already corroborated) that Macheath was the killer, which raises three questions:

  1. Had Boudin pursued felony charges against Macheath, might Devon be alive today?
  2. Shouldn’t a DA seek a stiffer sentence for an offender repeating the same crime?  The last DA achieved a 4-year sentence for attempted murder, while Boudin only sought 145-days?
  3. The odds of Macheath stabbing three Black men at random in San Francisco—in other words: not the hate crime of targeting Blacks— is one-in-ten thousand (.0001). But will Boudin proceed with a hate crime enhancement on Macheath?

Boudin’s new challenge will be how to spin why he is not prosecuting Macheath and to get him back to the streets.

In Boudin’s first homicide case as our new District Attorney, a drug dealer shot and killed Emma Hunt because she was swinging a crate. Emma was a mother and Black. Boudin filed the Emma Hunt murder case. (He files thousands of cases.)  Then, Boudin determined that a mother swinging a crate against two males—a two-on-one disadvantage—justified one of the males shooting the mother to death in “self-defense.”   In this filed felony case, Boudin rewarded the shooter with a misdemeanor charge.

Similar to the Emma Hunt case, Boudin could imagine that Devan just might have clenched his fist, which would have provoked Macheath to stab him in self-defense. If a gun-versus crate warrants self-defense, why wouldn’t it be reasonable to also use a knife-versus-fist scenario in the Devan murder?  Then, just like Boudin’s prosecution strategy returned Emma Hunt’s killers back to the streets to sell drugs, this strategy would make the public uncomfortable again when he gets old Macky’s back in town.

The common thread is, to Boudin Black lives do not matter as much as keeping habitual criminals out of custody.

Lou Barberini is a resident of West Portal and has been writing for the Westside Observer for the past six-years.

Lou Barberini has been writing for the Westside Observer for the past five years.

May 20, 2021

Chesa Boudin
Boudin Supporters’ Misinformation Campaign

An Absence of Context

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

My Fact: The San Francisco Giants completely defunded all law enforcement from its ballpark in 2020. Then, incidents requiring a police response dropped 100%. While my example is factually correct, it’s intellectually dishonest because it omits the important context that absolutely no fans attended Giants’ games in 2020.

Similarly, in preparation for the two petitions to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, his supporters have circulated “Four Facts” on social media that are equally as specious as my Giants’ example above.

So that readers are privy to the full story, I am sharing facts and adding context to the Boudin supporters’ four misrepresentations:

Boudin Supporters’ Fact #1:  “Overall Crime in San Francisco is Down by 23%.

Context “A”: Exactly like closing the Giants’ ballpark in 2020 because of COVID-19, the favorite stores of thieves — Lululemon, Apple, and Victoria Secret — were also closed for the majority of 2020.  Eighty-one percent of the 23% drop in “overall crime” came from just a decline in property crimes. An absence of tourism and store closures caused this drop in property crimes, not Boudin’s policies. And while Boudin and his supporters ride the COVID-caused apples-to-oranges crime comparisons, during the same period 10 Walgreen stores closed, abandoning San Francisco because of vast takeover larcenies. Mob thefts and shoplifting were so overwhelming that storeowners didn’t bother reporting the larcenies to SFPD to be included in property crime statistics. 

Context “B”: A 23% decline in overall crime” weighs the magnitude of all crimes equally. Boudin and his supporters are patting themselves on the back by rationalizing that a decrease of 8 auto burglaries offsets the human cost of 7 additional lives lost to homicides.

Context “C”: On March 16, 2020 Mayor London Breed ordered San Franciscans to stay-at-home. If we compare apples-to-apples “overall crime” trends over the same six-week period in both COVID 2020 and COVID 2021, overall crime is actually increasing. Specifically, overall crime is up 8% and property crimes have climbed 17% — all under Boudin’s watch.

Boudin Supporters’ Fact #2:DA’s Office Prosecutes Thousands of Cases.”

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the favorite stores of thieves — Lululemon, Apple, and Victoria Secret — were also closed for the majority of 2020. Eighty-one percent of the 23% drop in “overall crime” came from just a decline in property crimes. An absence of tourism and store closures caused this drop in property crimes, not Boudin’s policies.”

Context “A”: Boudin supporters claim, “In 2020, DA’s Office filed over 4,500 new criminal cases.”  “Filing a case” only means his office “starts a prosecution,” not that a case resulted in a completed prosecution. Subsequently, Boudin’s office pleads the accused out with a venial traffic ticket, or a social services program so that the same person ends up returning to the streets to repeat their criminal specialty.

Context “B”:  When Boudin is asked how many actual felony settlements (convictions) he has achieved on felony arrests, he conveniently blames the Superior Court’s record keeping as the problem. Apparently, his office doesn’t have the statistical competency to even track felony convictions by using tally marks.

Boudin Supporters’ Fact #3:The DA’s Office cannot prosecute cases when the police do not make an arrest.”

This misguided social media claim is based on Boudin’s favorite quoted statistic: “In 2020, 88% of residential burglaries reported to SFPD have not resulted in an arrest.”   

Context “A”: Burglars don’t commit just one burglary per year. Some burglars burglarize several homes in a single night. At a minimum, if we assume a burglar commits a burglary every second month, that translates to six burglaries per year. Thus, if SFPD makes an arrest in 12% of the burglaries the Department has actually arrested the burglars who account for 96% of the burglaries in San Francisco! That is a remarkable accomplishment, considering that SFPD is now working in an environment with a reduced investigative budget.

Context “B”: Using statistical science, statisticians distinguish the odds of something happening if a sample is replaced or not-replaced back into the pool. Accordingly, most readers mistakenly believe that a person that is arrested for burglarizing a home while the homeowner sleeps, has been taken off the streets. Statistically defined as “not replaced.” But Boudin issues these dangerous burglars ankle monitors and “replaces” them back into the statistical population— the streets. Scientists of statistics would determine that by Boudin “replacing” these arrested burglars back onto the streets, he has personally increased the odds that more events (burglaries) will reoccur. Boudin needs to listen to the scientists!

Context “C”: In statistical science, each “replaced” burglar is not “equal likely” to commit another burglary. Some burglars are more active. In a December 17, 2020 email to Police Chief William Scott, Boudin again scapegoated SFPD for burglar apprehension: “It is hard for us to focus on the people (burglars) you believe are responsible for so many crimes if you don’t share the list with us.” After SFPD arrests a burglar, SFPD prints out the accused’s criminal history, creates a “rebooking file,” and hands that rebooking file to an attorney in the DA’s office. Mr. Boudin, though you always seem to find it easier to blame someone else, it’s really pretty simple: The thicker the file on your desk, the more prolific the burglar.

Boudin Supporters’ Fact #4: “DA Boudin has instituted reforms that prioritize public safety.”

In their social media posts, Boudin’s supporters specifically define public safety as “expanding victim services for domestic violence victims and obtaining financial support for small businesses that have experienced break-ins.” Most people think that prioritizing public safety means taking preemptive measures to prevent a crime from occurring. Alternatively, Boudin’s supporters have cited post-crime remedies to victims as “prioritizing public safety.” This argument is tantamount to shutting off all the traffic lights in San Francisco, and then bragging about providing ambulances for all the carnage your policies have created.

In 2020, the City’s population decreased significantly — partly due the pandemic, and also partly perpetuated by the fear San Francisco has surrendered to lawlessness. Homicides were up 17% in 2020. Through the first 100-days of 2021, shootings are up 300% in San Francisco — all on Boudin’s watch. When informed, San Franciscans are astute enough to understand that Boudin and his supporters’ “Four Facts” are both misrepresentations and intellectually dishonest

It is pretty clear Boudin’s social experiments are failing. To hide those failures, he and his supporters are cherry picking statistics, attempting to censor SFPD’s public statements, and deliberately ignoring context. For San Francisco residents, it comes down to a simple question: Do you feel safer, or more vulnerable, since Boudin took office?

 

Lou Barberini has been writing for the Westside Observer for the past five years. 

May 12, 2021

Chesa Boudin
As D.A. Prosecutions Wane, Vigilantism Sprouts

Punting Another Case?

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

Playing golf on an unseasonably warm Sunday in February eased Aidan’s mind. It put the horrible week behind him. He was just thankful he still had his golf clubs. Little did he know that the rapidly deteriorating City had one more act of meanness to play on him.

When Aidan was ten, his family moved to San Francisco from County Kerry. He attended elementary school on Vicente Street. The City was larger than any town in his county, having buildings taller than any structure he had ever seen. “I didn’t know anybody, but I still fell immediately in love with the City.”

Aidan’s family eventually moved to the Peninsula. As a young adult, he heeded that magnetic call to return to The City. He rented a garden apartment in the Castro neighborhood, bordering Noe Valley. Aidan was content to be back home in the City but was acutely aware that over the past six months things had been changing quickly — just not in a good way.

In the first hours of February 13, two hot prowl burglars broke into the common area of Aidan’s building. The hot prowlers stole two bicycles and then returned for more.

The burglars tested Aidan’s front doorknob. Aidan grabbed his Irish hurling stick and tapped on the inside of his own door. He intended the sound to serve notice his apartment would not be breached uncontested. The tapping startled the hot prowlers, who clumsily grabbed a handful of Aidan’s tools and made for the street, fumbling the tools to the floor before clearing the building.

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Exactly one week and 20 minutes later as Aidan slept, a single hot prowl burglar was able to break into the same common area of his building. This time the hot prowler made off with $3,500 worth of his electrician’s tools.”

Exactly one week and 20 minutes later as Aidan slept, a single hot prowl burglar was able to break into the same common area of his building. This time the hot prowler made off with $3,500 worth of his electrician’s tools. But not — thank God — Aidan’s beloved golf clubs.

The next day, Aidan’s golf clubs were his salvation as he savored the 64-degree Sunday taking refuge at his favorite links. Advancing past each hole, the memory of the prior week’s misadventures faded further and further from Aidan’s memory.

For San Francisco, evenings during heat waves create their own magical electricity that draws everyone to the warm air. Aidan, still surfing from the tranquility of the fairway and the false spring weather, could feel the energy beckoning him. Around 8 pm, as he left his apartment to visit some friends, he noticed two strangers, Dan and Nic, sitting in the cab of his Dodge truck.

Aidan approached Dan and Nic, and demanded, “Get out of my truck, please!” The men challenged Aidan that it was not his truck. They flashed Ford keys at him and claimed the truck was theirs, then audaciously mandated Aidan recite his own license plate number to them.

Aidan pulled out his cellphone, started recording, and asked passersby to call 9–1–1. Dan and Nic exited the cab of his truck and ambushed Aidan from both sides. Dan executed a martial arts kick to Aidan’s face. One witness described it as a “two-on-one” attack as the pummeling continued with Aidan trapped on the ground. His nose was broken. He lost consciousness twice.

Within seconds, SFPD’s Mission Station units responded to the altercation and immediately started tending to Dan and Nic. Both were on the ground with “soft tissue” injuries to their faces, and both told SFPD they had lost consciousness. Dan and Nic were injured so severely SFPD officers summoned an ambulance for each to San Francisco General Hospital.

Wait!  How did Aidan go from losing consciousness to Dan and Nic going to the hospital? Well, that’s how it appears when you’re knocked unconscious.  

Let’s rewind: Enter two “unknown subjects.”

Per video, Unknown Subject #1 came to Aidan’s defense with a weapon in his hand. Dan attempted to demonstrate another martial arts jumping kick, but lost his footing and struck the back of his head on the sidewalk. While Dan was kicking, Nic reverted to a two-on-one blindside attack on Unknown Subject #1. Enter:  Unknown Subject #2, who clocked Nic.

Then, the two Unknowns disappeared into the night.

The Unknowns didn’t just rescue Aidan — they probably saved his life.

All this is eerily similar to scenes from the Death Wish vigilantism series about New York City, circa the '70s, which had descended into a state of lawlessness — like our City. I am in no way advocating for vigilantism. But historically, when a community fails to protect its most vulnerable, sadly street gangs frequently form to fill the void.

Dan and Nic were each arrested for felony assault. SFPD officers interviewed multiple corroborating witnesses, waited for Dan and Nic to be medically cleared, reviewed videos, booked evidence, and prepared an extensive report. Officers and inspectors were taken off the streets for approximately ten manhours. Within only a couple hours of this incident, with these officers working on Aidan’s case and consequently absent from the street, a fresh crew of hot prowlers were afforded the window to attempt a burglary on the garage of Aidan’s next-door neighbor.

Unfortunately, all this evidence wasn’t again enough for District Attorney’s office. The case was rejected “pending the need for (even) more evidence.” District Attorney Chesa Boudin frequently blames SFPD for not providing him with enough evidence. In this case, three videos and numerous witness statements were deemed insufficient. No one in the District Attorney’s office — including DA law enforcement investigators sitting on Boudin’s payroll — ever bothered calling Aidan to either update him on the status of his case or get his side of the story.

Five weeks have passed, and the DA’s office is still reviewing this case. Even if the DA’s office eventually “files this case as a felony,” meaning they might feign proceeding with felony charges on Dan and Nic, the overwhelming odds are the DA will let them slide out the courtroom backdoor with a misdemeanor slap on the wrist. And, Boudin will brag, “I took action on another felony case.”

Subsequent to these events, Aidan departed San Francisco saying, “I hate it some, I love it some. But I don’t want to live here until we have a DA who supports our police and the people of the City.” 

Lou Barberini has been writing for the Westside Observer for the past five years.

March 26, 2021

Chesa Boudin
Is DA Boudin Connected to a Fake Twitter Account?

His Official City Social Media Validates a Media-hit Account?

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

On the Twitter’s social media site, people can follow other people’s views (“tweets”) or post tweets themselves and hope that other people follow and read them. Everyone’s Twitter account publicly displays who they are following and who is following them.

So from that previous paragraph, here is an SAT question on Twitter:

Which of these social media account names does not belong?

  1. A) 13TikiGod13
  2. B) Wash your mouth with Sope7
  3. C) SweetdestruxionDolls7
  4. D) Chesa Boudin District Attorney of San Francisco
Twitter

On January 4, 2021, ABC Channel 7’s, Dion Lim interviewed San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. The end of the interview became contentious when Dion pressed Boudin for “less lip service and more solutions.”

A few days later, a person named Michaela Lim opened a Twitter account with the title “The Truth on Dion Lim.”  Michaela stated she lived in Atherton and her Twitter account was a “parody account showing dishonest reporting.”   

Michaela claimed that in high school her teachers taught her about social justice. She posted mature reasoning for social change on Twitter, followed by polar reversions to utterly nasty tweets about ABC’s Dion Lim being a racist. Michaela claimed her parents would not let her read all the strangers’ comments on Dion Lim’s Twitter account because bad words were used. Curiously, Michaela’s Twitter account showed she just recently started following Dion Lim’s Twitter account.

quotes

But there was something even more odd about Michaela’s account:  One of her followers was Chesa Boudin. Not a personal Twitter account where Boudin could post a funny video, but his official San Francisco District Attorney Twitter account.”

But there was something even more odd about Michaela’s account:  One of her followers was Chesa Boudin. Not a personal Twitter account where Boudin could post a funny video, but his official San Francisco District Attorney Twitter account.

Twitter

Think about it: over 100 zombie names (like the SAT question above) started following Michaela before our district attorney joined the high school girl’s social media account. No other elected politician was stalking this juvenile’s Twitter account, just Boudin.

Coincidently, Michaela was also following a lot of Chesa Boudin’s friends’ Twitter accounts:  Lara Bazelon who spoke on behalf of Boudin during a 2019 campaign video and who accused the media in a January 22nd Examiner piece for “fearmongering” over the New Year’s Eve’s deaths attributable to Boudin’s leniency. Mano Raju and Brandon Wood, San Francisco and Oakland’s public defenders. The high school girl was also following Judge Michelle Tong, a former coworker with Boudin in the Public Defenders’ office.

When you look at who a person on Twitter is following, the names are listed in chronological order from bottom to the top. Of the 570 people Michaela now follows, the aforementioned Boudin’s closest associates, were in the first people 50 Micheala elected to follow.

Down at her high school in Atherton, Michaela was following the reporting of Mission Local, but not the San Mateo Daily Journal.  And like Boudin, she followed all of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, but no San Mateo elected officials. The precocious Michaela was even following the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

But you know who the juvenile Micheala was not following? The 40-year-old San Francisco District Attorney that was following her. Think about it: a gifted San Mateo high school student is following numerous San Francisco politicians, but not the attention-seeking Chesa Boudin. And yet, he is the only politician following her.

The scenario is no different than Boudin professing to his classroom that they should all worship Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and then coincidently everyone in the class receiving a Valentine’s Day card from AOC, except Chesa. A rookie Twitter mistake, which instead of absolving Boudin from suspicion, makes him Suspect #1!

On March 6, 2021, I directly contacted Michaela regarding the statistical improbability that she was following the same people as Boudin:

“Micheala: This is a new Twitter account? U r following the same media as Chesa: H. Knight & M. Cassidy, + Mission Local?? Same BoS as Chesa? Same public defenders Raju & Woods? Former pd/judge Tong?? Lara Bazelon? Chesa follows u, but you don’t follow him? Sounds like u r Chesa”

I mean, what possible interest could a high school student have in Judge Michelle Tong?

Michaela immediately blocked me as a Twitter contact. She replaced ABC’s Dion Lim’s photo with a different person, and deleted all of the nasty tweets against Dion Lim. What a coincidence! Later in the evening, “Michaela” made her entire Twitter account private to the public.  

The next day, Michaela returned to using Dion Lim’s real photo and the juvenile added the legalese “non-affiliated account.” Michaela also stopped (deleted) following the accounts of: Lara Bazelon, Michelle Tong, Manu Raju, and the same Chronicle writers that I pointed out to Micheala that Boudin coincidently was also following.

One of Boudin’s traits as an elected official is that while he publishes articles to promote his social agenda, he never directly defends the tragic actions caused by his feeble prosecution. Instead Boudin offloads the excuse-making to ally-media sources like Lara Bazelon, 48 Hills, or Mission Local. Being involved in a fake Twitter account against a respected investigative reporter would be consistent with his use of ally-media sources to do his dirty work.

Even though Boudin will disassociate himself from involvement with this Twitter account that attacks a reputable journalist, his actions raise several ethical issues:

  1. By Boudin using his official government position to follow this account he is lending San Francisco’s credibility to this media-damning Twitter account,
  2. If it is a fake account, why is San Francisco’s highest law enforcement officer following a fake account? 
  3. If it is not a fake account, why is the 40-year-old top San Francisco law enforcement officer using his official government Twitter account to follow a juvenile girl?

Boudin is free to choose his rationalization for following this account; he has cast a dark shadow on San Francisco. This is beyond public critique on his handling of cases but goes to the core of ethics as a member of the California Bar and an officer of the court. At a minimum, it appears Boudin used his government Twitter account to voyeuristically satisfy his needs for vindication on an investigative reporter who challenged him.

 

Lou Barberini is a former police officer and a CPA who has written for the Westside Observer for the past five-years.

March 15, 2021

Judge Van Aken
Judge Christine Van Aken / Photo: Courtesy Ch. 2
SF Judge Questions Prosecutor’s Leniency

Four Months Later, Defendant Arrested for Attempted Murder (Again)

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

Norville Rogers either surrendered to his demons, or he was unable to conquer his anger issues. A 24-year-old father and third-generation San Franciscan, Norville leans towards skateboarding. Norville is used as an alias because this story is more about exposing feeble San Francisco prosecutorial efforts than embarrassing a young man spiraling out of control. 

An Ascent of Crimes

Two months after his 18th birthday, Norville was involved in a strong-arm robbery of a group of Asian males at Powell and Market Streets. Four-months later, he engaged in another strong-armed robbery captured on MUNI bus video. Norville was given the opportunity to plead to a softer assault charge instead of a robbery.

Norville disappeared off the radar for 18 months before he was arrested trying to burglarize a Safeway pharmacy — also captured on video. The case remained open as he was returned to the streets.

quotes

Only in San Francisco do you get a judge who looked at the entire trajectory of a young man’s criminal career that the District Attorney’s Office had neglected to do:  Two strong-arm robberies, followed by a burglary, then an auto burglary, a loaded firearm charge, a third armed robbery, and finally graduating to attempted murder.”

Another five months passed. Norville was with friends when he pulled another robbery. This time with a gun. Norville was caught with the victim’s property. The magnitude of his crimes kept becoming more violent. By then he had turned 20 and had racked up three robberies plus a burglary in just two years. Then he remained in county jail for almost two years while awaiting sentencing.

On January 11, 2019 Norville accepted reduced charges for the robbery and was given credit for the time he served while in county jail. He was released again to the streets and placed on parole without having to go to state prison. Just two weeks later, he was arrested for partaking in San Francisco’s pre-COVID signature crime while on parole: Auto burglary. He was bailed out and his auto burglary case remained open, too.

In May 2019, Norville was arrested with a loaded firearm. He was bailed out again while that case also remained open.

On August 1, 2019 Norville was arrested for six accounts of attempted murder for shooting at a group of individuals and an occupied car near Candlestick Park.

With the fall election coming, do you think Norville’s public defender might have been calculating that his radically liberal public defender coworker might be elected our next District Attorney?  Stall, baby, stall!

Are Victims Entitled to a Prosecutor?

Norville spent the next year building up soft time on the books in county jail in lieu of hard time in state prison. On August 4, 2020 Assistant District Attorney (ADA) Myles Campbell, representing District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office, negotiated a disposition with the public defender. Norville was back on the streets.

A month later Norville returned to Department (courtroom) 25 for sentencing on September 1. From court transcripts, presiding Judge Christine Van Aken, stated:

What I have heard from both parties was that I should accept the plea because Norville was ready to turn his life around, make changes. After hearing all that, I took the plea [on August 4].

Three things to consider: First, every public defender claims their clients are going to turn their lives around in 100% of their cases. Second, how did ADA Campbell fall for such a trite line? And third, how did Campbell gain direct knowledge that Norville was going to turn his life around? Do ADA’s now get one-on-one interviews with defendants who are in County Jail?

Judge Van Aken went on, saying “I am withdrawing my acceptance of the plea today. At the time I took the plea, I hadn’t recollected what Norville’s criminal history was. So, it [the sentence] does not acknowledge the increased severity of Norville’s crimes.

You have to balance encouraging people to rehabilitate, but also ensuring there are enough consequences if they do not rehabilitate themselves.”

Then Judge Van Aken directly spoke to ADA Campbell:

The proposed disposition doesn’t take into the account the severity of Norville’s prior criminal history, and does not take into account the severity of the incident, which was extremely dangerous, and so where I am now is that I am withdrawing acceptance of this plea.

Campbell responded:

The offer represented a plea to charges that we thought could be proven and that were serious, as you said a strike, and that did take into account conduct from previous charges, which would be the auto burglary, and the other open gun possession case.”

Only in San Francisco do you get a judge who looked at the entire trajectory of a young man’s criminal career that the District Attorney’s Office had neglected to do:  Two strong-arm robberies, followed by a burglary, then an auto burglary, a loaded firearm charge, a third armed robbery, and finally graduating to attempted murder. Meanwhile, the prosecutor myopically focused on just the two most-recent open cases and minimized those crimes because he interpreted a bored defendant’s attendance of classes while in county jail as a sign that Norville had turned his life around.

The final November 9 negotiated disposition for Norville was that he pleaded to four and two-thirds years in state prison, with credit for time served in county jail. Norville’s actual trip to state prison was suspended; he remained free and was returned to San Francisco streets.

2021 Aftermath

The night of January 4. 2021 was supposed to be a rainy evening, but the storm never arrived. The 11 o’clock nightly news screamed of two innocent victims killed on New Year’s Eve by a different career criminal. Boudin had first represented the killer when he was a public defender. Then, in an extremely unethical move, newly-elected Boudin rewarded his former client with a sweetheart deal to avoid a third strike after he robbed a grocery store at gunpoint and made all the cashiers empty their tills. Boudin’s M.O. appears to be avoiding handing out strikes on defendants’ records.

After the news, Jeremy went outside with his dog on Ellis Street, just two blocks from Northern Police Station. A blue Volkswagen, riding four-deep with associates, slowly crept by Jeremy. The driver rolled his window down slightly. “Who are you?”   To which Jeremy responded, “Who are you?” 

Gunfire pierced the night air.

Jeremy said, “I felt my whole body get hot,” as he realized he’d been shot. Bullets had fractured his pelvis and spine. He was lucky to be alive.

Other reckless stray shots shattered a neighbor’s window.

Seconds later, SFPD picked up the speeding Volkswagen on Geary Street. They trailed it south on Gough Street, east on Eddy, then south on Polk. The walls were closing in on Norville as the encircling howl of sirens grew louder. Around Hayes Street Norville, lost control of the Volkswagen and fishtailed before colliding into two vehicles traveling in the same direction.

Only a couple months after Myles Campbell had fallen for Norville “turning his life around,” and punted on prosecuting him for attempted murder charges, Norville was arrested for attempted murder—again!

Who Is Representing the Victims?
 
The San Francisco District Attorney’s office is supposed to prosecute crimes, protect the public, and share the victim’s trauma with the court. Instead, Assistant District Attorney Campbell treated Norville as the victim. Jeremy was almost killed as a result. If not the DA’s office, who is representing the victim’s pain and suffering?

Numerous attorneys from the San Francisco DA’s office have asserted that if a prosecutor wants to pursue a case but Boudin insists on the defendant not being assessed a strike, prosecutors have to back off — or face losing their job.

Perhaps that’s the situation Mr. Campbell found himself in.

 

Lou Barberini is a former police officer and a CPA who has written for the Westside Observer for the past five-years.

February20, 2021

...
Boudin “Takes Action” And Now a 3rd Person Is Murdered

Actions That Are Worse Than Serial Killing

San Francisco's District Attorney propagates that he “takes action“ on 80% of the cases he is presented. But when asked for details, Boudin immediately transitions into scapegoating the quality of SFPD’s arrests, algorithms, Superior Court’s archaic computer system, and incarceration doesn’t work. 

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

Boudin’s taking action is a vague term and allied interviewers rarely dig deeper. A teacher crumpling up a student’s term paper and tossing it into the waste bin is literally “taking action.”  It serves as a metaphor for Boudin's treatment of felony cases that are presented to him.

On December 20th, Ali Hudson was riding on a MUNI bus. Informed sources say that Hudson took the victim’s property and strong-armed him before he fled with the victim’s property.  Presumably, this incident was captured on the MUNI surveillance video. 

SFPD recovered the victim’s property on Hudson and arrested him for the strong-arm robbery (SFPD Case#: 200 765 420). 

When Hudson was booked for the felony robbery, it was discovered he also had an outstanding $5,000 warrant from Solano County. The warrant gave Boudin the out he needed. Boudin took action by prioritizing the small Solano County warrant, while taking no action on the violent San Francisco strong-arm robbery. It was not confirmed that Hudson received gift cards upon his release as the serial burglar in the Northern District did when he was set free.

In Sacramento, there were three law enforcement shootouts over a five-day period — one that left an officer dead. Rumors circulated that Ali Hudson was involved in the gun battle that took a law enforcement officer’s life.

quote marks

Internet computer records show that Ali Hudson was booked at 1:46am that night into Sacramento County Jail for both murder charges and for a still outstanding warrant.”

However, one of the shootouts involved a domestic dispute between a mother and her son. When deputies arrived, the mother dismissed the officers. They returned 20-minutes later and as they opened the door, they watched as the suspect shot his mother dead. The suspect then fired on deputies before he was taken into custody. No deputies were killed in this shootout.

Internet computer records show that Ali Hudson was booked at 1:46am that night into Sacramento County Jail for both murder charges and for a still outstanding warrant.

The “Ali Hudson” arrested for murder in Sacramento has the same October 2, 1978 birthdate as the “Ali Hudson” arrested in San Francisco on December 20th. It is unlikely, but it is possible there are two “Ali Hudsons.” However, the odds are one-in-a million that two “Ali Hudsons" were born on the same day and committed felonies within 100-miles of each other in a 30-day period. And, apologies in advance to the San Francisco robber Ali Hudson if he did not murder his mother.

Would Hudson’s mother be alive today if Boudin had really taken action and prosecuted SFPD’s robbery arrest of Ali Hudson? Worse, would Mrs. Hudson be alive if San Francisco didn’t have ranked-choice elections that allowed Boudin to obtain SF’s top law enforcement position without a majority vote?

Perhaps this story doesn’t have the sensationalism of career felon, Troy McAlister, killing two innocent people on New Years Eve. Or, Boudin’s egregious ethical violation by first representing McAlister as a public defender for the grocery store robbery, while gaining access to attorney/client privileged information, only to turnaround as DA and use the privileged information to sabotage a third-strike conviction on McAlister.

However, unlike the random innocents that lost their lives in a car accident on New Years Eve because of Boudin’s ineptness, here there is real intent when a son fires a gun at the women who labored to bring him into this world. 

This is the third death in less than three weeks attributable to Boudin even though he claims he took action.

It is time for the media to stop letting Boudin off the hook for the take action misdirects. He needs to release the records of the felony cases that come across his desk. The public needs to know how many of the felony cases that come across Boudin’s desk that he actually does initially “file” as a felony, but then he immediately offers misdemeanor sentences. In almost every one of these violent felonies, Boudin takes action by downgrading the felony charge to a misdemeanor, letting the violent felon walk away with a misdemeanor release.

Boudin will scapegoat the inferiority of the Superior Court’s computer system, but the City needs to hold him accountable if it requires Boudin to keep tally marks. For the safety of the City, Boudin’s dishonest accounting has to be brought to light.

Lou Barberini is a former police officer and a CPA who has written for the Westside Observer for the past five-years.

January 23, 2021

Here Comes Proposition 19!
...

How Governor Newsom Hoodwinked Homeowners

If you need to speak to an estate-planning attorney within the next month, good luck. Since Proposition 19 passed, estate-planning attorneys are scarcer than toilet paper during the pandemic. Thanks to Governor Newsom’s misleading Proposition 19, we are seeing panicked strategizing on the greatest intergenerational transfer of wealth in California’s history.

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

How to Mislead Voters

In 2014, San Francisco’s then-District Attorney, George Gascón, misled voters with Proposition 47 “the safe neighborhoods and schools act.” In reality, Prop 47 was about decriminalizing crime from cellphone robberies to traffic tickets, which resulted in elevating San Francisco to the per capita property crime capital of the world.

Following Prop 47’s deception, last November Governor Gavin Newsom and the real estate industry smelled the money they could capture with a misleading proposition called “Property Tax Transfers, Exemptions, and Revenue for Wildfire Agencies.” Newsom dangled the illusion to California homeowners that they could preserve their homes’ low property tax rate if they moved to, for instance, Lake Tahoe. But for Newsom, desperate for more tax revenue, Prop 19 was a way to weaken Proposition 13.

For the heads of the real estate industry (NOT the agents on the street), Prop 19 translated into stimulating more commissions through greater activity. They were not on your side. Prop 19 isn’t on your side, either.

quotes

...a homeowner of a Sunset home purchased in 1980 for $80,000 might be paying $2,000 in property taxes on their home, which now has a current fair market value of $1.2 million. Meanwhile, a young couple buying an identical house next door would be paying $14,000 in property tax — seven times their established neighbor’s bill.”

A History of Proposition 13

In June of 1978 — with local assessors thirsty for extracting more and more dollars through annual property tax increases — voters enacted Proposition 13, which placed a cap on property tax increases. Prop 13 especially protected older homeowners who were on fixed pensions and could not afford annual gigantic tax increases. With a few voter-initiated exceptions, Prop 13 allowed city tax assessors to regain market rate property taxes when a home was sold.

Over time as California homes appreciated, homeowners who remained in place started to reap greater and greater benefits through the Prop 13 cap on their property taxes. For example, a homeowner of a Sunset home purchased in 1980 for $80,000 might be paying $2,000 in property taxes on their home, which now has a current fair market value of $1.2 million. Meanwhile, a young couple buying an identical house next door would be paying $14,000 in property tax — seven times their established neighbor’s bill.

This created an environment where:

  1. The new neighbors were envious of their neighbor’s low property tax basis.
  2. Older homeowner couples were locked into their home because a move would trigger an increase in their “overall” taxes.
  3. Governor Newsom was frustrated he couldn’t maximize taxes to bail out the cities from their profligate spending.

The principles of Prop 13 parallel the theory of rent control. It protects established residents from violent fluctuations in the market. Yet in 2019 Newsom, passed California’s first statewide rent control law affecting intergenerational tenants, while in 2020 he eliminated a similar preservation of property tax for intergenerational homeowners.

Why the Mechanics of Prop 19 Don’t Work

Many voters interpreted that Prop 19 made their low property tax transferable to other California counties. But that was not the arithmetic before — and it still isn’t after — Prop 19.

To the same extent a person has low property taxes because they haven’t moved, to that same degree they have pent up appreciation in their home. That means even if their low property tax rate is now transferable through Prop 19 to a Lake Tahoe home, the homeowner still will have a gigantic capital gain tax hurdle to transplant.

If the Sunset couple in my previous example wants to take advantage of the veneer of Prop 19, they will still have to pay federal capital gains taxes on $620,000 of appreciation. A widower would incur $870,000 of federal capital gains.

And remember, while the IRS affords taxpayers a lower capital gains rate on long-term appreciated property, the term “capital gains” does not exist in California’s tax dictionary. California residents suffer the highest state tax rate in the country on sales of appreciated property and stock. Therefore, the widower with $870,000 in appreciation will be taxed by California as if she went out and earned that $870,000 as an employee. Subtract the tax on $870,000 of appreciation and the widower will have to take at least a $250,000 income tax haircut to preserve her property tax on a new Lake Tahoe home. Or she can save her heirs a quarter million dollars by just holding onto her home and saying, “Thanks for nothing Gavin!

How to Plan for the Post-Prop 19 World

All the nuances of Prop 19 are too complex to be condensed into a single article.

If you gift your house to a single child who is going to eventually live in your house, you have to weigh giving up current control of your house and the potential higher income taxes your child will have to pay when they sell the family home. Thus, the breakeven test is how long your child will occupy the home. A 15- to 20-year residency by your child may justify gifting the home now. If upon your passing, your child will immediately sell the home to move, it is better to retain the home and let your child inherit the property when you die. However, all of this really requires difficult projections on your children’s lifestyle dynamics pretty far into the future.

One exception:  If one of the married homeowners died recently, the family is in a unique Prop 19 situation. The home’s full income tax basis was increased (stepped-up) to the fair market value at the time of the spouse’s death. The surviving spouse can immediately gift or sell her home to a child with minimal to zero income tax consequences, while the child can retain the parent’s low property tax.

The important things to takeaway from this article are:

  1. Assess your options now.
  2. If you make a decision, do it by February 14, Valentine’s Day.
  3. Talk to your CPA.
  4. Governor Newsom badly hurt homeowners with this misleading proposition.

Consider also that Prop 19 could be weakened or clarified in the future.
 
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Kathleen Pender has published outstanding analyses of different scenarios through multiple articles. Google and read her articles.

 

Lou Barberini is a CPA who has written for the Westside Observer for the past five-years.

January 2021

San Francisco’s Department of Public Health Lacks Transparency

Listen to Scientists
(or to Statisticians?)
Mask Reequired Bus Sign
As San Franciscans hunker down for COVID — death counts are no longer news

On a per capita basis, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH) has performed an amazing accomplishment of minimizing the spread of COVID-19 and related deaths. COVID-19 is real and treacherous.

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

That being said, from a statistical vantage point, COVID-19 deaths reported on the DPH website appear anomalous. More concerning, when questioned both the DPH and the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) have not been transparent.

Five concerns follow that when examined independently might not cause alarm, but when viewed holistically are troubling. 

First, disappearing media coverage about COVID-19 deaths: Per the DPH website, through the first four months of the pandemic 52 people in San Francisco lost their lives to COVID-19. During the subsequent two-month period of July and August, there was a 76% increase in COVID-19 deaths! 

On April 10, early in the pandemic, an article appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle:  The Uncounted: San Francisco Neighbors Wonder if Coronavirus Killed Him.  Using 1,679 words, the author strained to assert that a taxi driver who had died with a cough was a COVID-19 death.

quote marks

Deaths surged 76% and the media went quiet. Why the lack of stories?”

Fast forward to the summer surge in deaths and I couldn’t find any additional Chronicle articles anecdotally detailing COVID-19 deaths. Deaths surged 76% and the media went quiet. Why the lack of stories?

Second, CARES Act’s economic reason:  Additional reimbursements incentivize reporting COVID-19 cases.  Section 3710(a) of the CARES Act states that a person diagnosed with COVID-19 entitles a hospital to recoup an additional 20% add-on for patients diagnosed as having COVID-19.  Hence, a hospital might want to go back and re-diagnose a previous death as COVID-related, which could contribute to untimely DPH death statistics. 

Third, DPH’s cumulative data masks recent trends:  When a person views DPH’s website, COVID-19 cases are presented on both a daily and cumulative basis; however, deaths are only presented in a cumulative format.  Cumulative “mountain” charts, while appearing more dramatic, dilute recent trends and weaken decision-making.

Consider:  If your life depended on a bet whether the Warriors are going to win their next game, would you prefer to know that a) Steph Curry has accumulated 2,496 three-point shots over his career, or b) Over the past two-weeks, Steph is averaging a white-hot 12 three-pointers per game?  So, is it curious why DPH uses a different scale for infections versus deaths?

Fourth, nonlinear trends:  I converted DPH’s cumulative deaths chart to a weekly trend graph (below).

COVID-19 Deaths Graphic.

One would expect the 76% summer surge in San Francisco COVID-19 deaths to have occurred in a more linear fashion. The seesaw nature of the deaths on DPH’s website conveys that either the deaths were posted in batches, or the deaths occurred in clusters. If deaths were occurring in groups, that information would be exceptionally valuable in tracing the source of outbreaks (depending on the accuracy of DPH’s recordkeeping).

Fifth, DPH’s opaque recordkeeping:  Trying to interpret the graph above, there are two possible reasons why data is posted in batches and that the date of a COVID-19 death might be different from the date DPH initially posted it.  First, there could be a lag time between when a patient dies in a hospital room and when the hospital administrator relays that information to an overworked DPH.  Or second, DPH could be obtaining the results of postmortem tests long after a patient had died.  Considering the magnitude of the pandemic, either way people would expect that DPH maintains detailed spreadsheets necessary to assist in contact tracing.

To ascertain the validity of DPH’s statistics, a public records request on August 13 asked for the specific dates of death of San Francisco COVID-19 victims. It did not ask for any information about the victims — just their dates of death. 

DPH immediately responded, saying it relays its data to the CDPH, with whom it has a “signed agreement that limits our ability to share data.”  That DPH publishes COVID-19 cumulative death dates on its public-facing website, but is prohibited from disclosing daily supporting data, seems implausible.  Doing so would not violate patient privacy protections under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), because HIPAA doesn't apply to dead people — particularly if their names are never released and only aggregate data is made public.

I immediately followed up by placing a public records request to CDPH asking for the specific dates of deaths in San Francisco that occurred in July and August, but not individual patient names.  The following were CDPH’s responses:

Day 1:  Were you interested in deaths only in San Francisco (or additional counties)? Also, deaths that occurred there or residents there?

Day 12:  We are exercising authority to extend time to reply.

Day 27:  We wanted to confirm you are requesting this data for only deaths in the City & County of San Francisco.

Day 43:  We want to confirm that you are seeking this information about deaths that were reported to CDPH between July 1 and August 15, (but might have occurred prior to July 1).

Day 71:  After an extensive search, CDPH is unable to locate a record responsive to this request. 

It doesn’t take a degree in science to understand that CDPH repeating the same clarifying question three times is stonewalling.  Either CDPH is negligent in its recordkeeping, or they are hiding something from the public.  The fact that on Day 43 they asked me if I wanted to know about deaths that occurred before July but were reported in July is an admission that the CDPH’s, and by extension the DPH’s, websites are not accurate as to the timing of deaths.

Slouching Towards Transparency:  Scientists and Statisticians

There is no denying that COVID-19 is a serious and deadly disease. Based on DPH’s interpretations of data, streets are closed to traffic, homeless are housed in hotels, and arrested persons are expedited to freedom.  Billions of dollars have evaporated from residents and the bankrupted businesses of our City. Residents have been isolated and families separated.

Over the past few years, the Department of Public Health has become an increasingly political organization. Its director, Dr. Grant Colfax, sits on District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s Sentencing Commission, where Colfax can weigh in on San Francisco’s skyrocketing crime, and to the extent the city distributes taxpayer-funded narcotics to prisoners and homeless.

Are we to believe scientific and statistical thought processes are mutually exclusive?

On October 27, prior to San Francisco moving into the purple tier, the Department of Health issued a 19-page directive on procedures for indoor gyms. (Yes, 19-pages!!!) DPH still would not let residents exercise in chlorinated water, forcing San Francisco residents to swim in San Mateo pools, despite San Mateo being in the same-colored tier.
Also, per the 19-page ordinance, people could now isolate themselves in an enclosed 800-square foot racquetball court and practice hitting a ball with a racquet. But, if that same person donned gloves and touched the ball, they are in violation of the ordinance. Huh? Has DPH determined that gloves are less safe than bare hands?  (And we’re to believe this?)  Yup!

DPH’s promulgation is essentially tantamount to splitting hairs over the potential respiratory damage caused by playing softball versus baseball. And, this detailed micromanaging comes from a City department that doesn’t maintain detailed death information or understand the basics of the sports it is disallowing.  I’m sorry; that’s not science. Its power grabbing.

If DPH can voice opinions on criminal sentencing, then perhaps economists, statisticians, and CPA’s should be allowed to assist DPH scientists in the areas they obviously have no knowledge of. 

After all, it doesn’t require a scientist to ensure zero deaths by flipping the lights off to a city.   

Lou Barberini, CPA is a resident of the West Portal neighborhood and has been contributing to the Westside Observer for the past five years.

December 2020

Boudin and Raju Throw Rocks From Their Glass Houses

Vote No on Proposition D — Sheriff's Oversight

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SF Sheriff's Department January 2020

In an October 7 San Francisco Examiner editorial, both District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Public Defender Manohar Raju aligned to promote San Francisco’s Proposition D.  It is unusual that a city’s public defender and its district attorney would be on the same side of a proposition.

If it passes, Proposition D would create a charter amendment that would fund an Inspector General position and a new department to provide oversight for complaints made against San Francisco sheriffs. Presumably these complaints would come from arrestees and their families. 

Currently, complaints made against San Francisco sheriffs are overseen and investigated by the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability, an independent department. Thus, Boudin and Raju are proposing a new Inspector General position that would not only duplicate bureaucratic oversight already in place, but it would also tack on an additional annual cost of $2.9 million —  taxed to a city that is already bleeding funds.

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In a city being federally investigated for corruption, it seems inconsistent for Boudin to only target law enforcement for increased oversight. Perhaps we should look at where oversight applied to the District Attorney’s office and the Public Defender might be more appropriate.”

San Francisco Sheriffs are different than SFPD. Chief Scott is in an appointed position. If voters are unhappy with Chief Scott’s performance, their only option is to voice complaint to Mayor Breed. That's a contrast to Sheriff Paul Miyamoto who is in an elected position. If he underperforms, residents can vote Miyamoto out

San Francisco Sheriff
Photo courtesy of Voice of America

D.A. Boudin is technically the City’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer. So not only is he insinuating that the Department of Police Accountability is inadequate, but that a new layer of bureaucracy is needed because he is too busy prosecuting criminals (and tweeting, producing a video on omelets, creating podcasts, and submitting editorials) to focus on overseeing San Francisco's sheriffs.  

In a city being federally investigated for corruption, it seems inconsistent for Boudin to only target law enforcement for increased oversight. Perhaps we should look at where oversight applied to the District Attorney’s office and the Public Defender might be more appropriate.

District Attorney’s Office:

A generic square placeholder image with rounded corners in a figure.
D.A. Chesa Boudin
Photo: Davis Vanguard

Since Boudin was sworn in, compared to last year, homicides are up 52%, burglaries up 45%, arsons up 41%, and stolen cars up 45%! That in itself spells failure as Boudin has made our city less safe.

Boudin has relentlessly disparaged law enforcement while applying over-sympathetic and nonexistent prosecution to violent criminals. To Boudin, it doesn’t matter what crime you have committed, it only matters where you rank on Boudin’s hierarchy of grievances.

Last month a letter was sent to Boudin requesting an investigation into Vilaska Nguyen’s Board of Supervisor registration at the Department of Elections whereby he claimed to live in District 7, while siimultaneously, informing the City Assessor’s Office that he lives in a District 11 home for which he receives reduced property taxes as a benefit. These two registrations are in conflict, meaning Vilaska, is lying to one of the City departments. Perhaps, Vilaska is using his city employee status to conspire this dishonesty with a fellow city employee.

Boudin, who made the maximum political campaign contribution to Vilaska, has a conflict of interest. Boudin has not responded to me to clarify Vilaska’s misrepresentations. To Boudin, these falsifications are excusable because Vilaska was a fellow coworker when Boudin was Deputy Public Defender.  Unequal justice under the law.

Public Defenders Office:

Public Defender Manohar Raju
Public Defender Manohar Raju
Photo: lawenforcementtoday

As a city employee, Vilaska Nguyen’s use of insider status to deceive District 7 is an embarrassment to the integrity of the Public Defender’s office.  You would think Public Defender Raju would ask Vilaska, his subordinate, to come clean about his Airbnb District 7 residency.

But Vilaska’s scheme did not fall far from the Raju tree. Raju didn’t sell his 4271 Norton Avenue home in Oakland until November 15th — 10-days after he was elected San Francisco’s Public Defender. Per Trulia, Raju didn’t even list his Oakland home until September 14, 2019 —  approximately 6-months after he registered to run for Public Defender. The City Charter requires all candidates to reside in San Francisco to be eligible to run for an at-large elected position. 

This raises several questions:

  • Where was Raju living when he filed his papers to run for San Francisco’s Public Defender?
  • Is Raju so wealthy that he was able to simultaneously afford two Bay Area homes?
  • Why did Raju wait until just 45-days before the election to list his Oakland home?
  • Did Raju train Vilaska on how to wait until you are elected before making a financial commitment to a supervisorial district?

Chesa Boudin’ and Manohar Raju’s ethics are questionable. They live in glass houses and are throwing expensive and duplicate service stones at law enforcement. This is all a distraction to the failing results of their Progressive agenda push.    

Do you want to be on the same side of a proposition as Boudin and Raju?  If you care about San Francisco, vote the opposite of Boudin and Raju. Vote NO ON Proposition D.

Lou Barberini resides in District 7. 

October 2020

photo of Otsego Ave.
It's lovely on Otsego Avenue, but it's not in District 7
Vilaska and Melgar: Are Outside Influencers Invading D7?
Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

Once upon a time, there was a very different west side of San Francisco. A place where there were more kids playing on the sidewalks than parked cars. It was a time when both Republican and Democratic candidates existed, which forced the Chronicle and Examiner to report more balanced perspectives.

In 1975, “ranked-choice” voting did not exist. In the fall election, then-mayoral candidate George Moscone did not achieve 50%+1 of the vote, which under the rules at that time forced a runoff with second-place finisher John Barbagelata. The runoff mechanism let many votes for third-place Diane Feinstein coalesce under Barbagelata, which narrowed Moscone’s victory margin to only 2% of the vote.

Fast forward to today. The ranked-choice voting system we now use resulted last year in 64.3% of San Francisco voters choosing a district attorney candidate other than outlier candidate Chesa Boudin, yet he is now our District Attorney.

After the 1975 mayoral election, Moscone and Barbagelata continued their philosophical feud on the issue of “district elections.”  Prior to Moscone’s term, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was elected based on a citywide at large vote.

Moscone and progressives believed San Francisco would be better served if the city were divided into 11 distinct supervisorial districts believing candidates from the immediate community would have a better understanding of their neighbors’ needs compared to a supervisor living across town. Barbagelata feared that the smaller vote total needed to win a district election was an invitation for outlier candidates and outlier positions.

District elections passed in November of 1977, but were repealed after voters blamed the poll structure for producing Supervisor Dan White and the murder of Mayor Moscone. District elections returned in 2000 and have been in effect since.

For District 7 (D7), the more the mechanics of district elections has changed, the more they have remained the same. Today, D7, centered on West Portal, is one of the more relatively conservative districts and acts as a swing vote for the balance of power among the Board of Supervisors.

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Two D7 candidates, Vilaska Nguyen and Myrna Melgar, may appear to represent the interests of the other ten districts, more than the interests of D7 voters. Both of them are running, not to represent west side neighborhoods, but with agendas they have spent their entire careers advancing for districts other than D7.”

Two D7 candidates, Vilaska Nguyen and Myrna Melgar, may appear to represent the interests of the other ten districts, more than the interests of D7 voters. Both of them are running, not to represent west side neighborhoods, but with agendas they have spent their entire careers advancing for districts other than D7.

__________________________

Vilaska Nguyen

There doesn’t seem to be much of an issue whether Vilaska Nguyen is a carpetbagger. He spent the last ten years living in the home he owns with his wife on District 11’s Otsego Avenue. After the November 2019 election, Vilaska rented a home and registered to vote in D7. After renting for only three months, he announced his candidacy for D7 supervisor — a position he had never previously been eligible to campaign for.

In addition to Vilaska moving into D7 just to achieve elected office, it appears Vilaska has little D7 support. Through the first half of the year, Vilaska received more donations than any other D7 candidate, but 52.3% of his donations came from outside of San Francisco. Worse, an astonishing 94.6% of his donors reside outside of D7. It is interesting that 49.4% of his campaign contributions were received from fellow attorneys; one donation even came from an alleged homicide suspect.

Vilaska’s donor rolls provide a window into his political cronies:  Chesa Boudin, Matt Haney, Dean Preston, Hillary Ronan, and John Avalos. Jakie Prager, a former project manager for Supervisor Dean Preston, runs Vilaska’s campaign.

Responding to a July 14 Green Party questionnaire, Vilaska answered that if he is elected, he would vote for either Matt Haney or Dean Preston, as the next Board of Supervisors president.

Despite his campaign slogan “putting families first,” it seems Vilaska is putting his own family second to carpetbagging District 7.

Voters were misled before in November of 2014 by Proposition 47, "the Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act," which really masked a decriminalization measure that catapulted San Francisco to the property crime capital of the U.S. D7 voters are justified to be weary of  similar intentions from “enlightened” leaders, and the unexpected consequences.

__________________________

2929 19th St.
Centro Social Obrero at 2929 19th Street is now the Jamestown Community Center

Myrna Melgar

There is no an issue about whether Myrna Melgar resides in District 7. The issue is whether her heart resides in the Mission District.

When Board of Supervisor President London Breed appointed Melgar to the Planning Commission, the Chronicle characterized Myrna has an “ally of progressives, anti-gentrification, and tenants” — issues that play well in the Mission where Melgar has spent the majority of her career, but not exactly issues of concern to residents of D7 neighborhoods.

Similarly, “Defunding SFPD” is popular in the Mission District, yet Melgar has positioned herself even further left. In the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club questionnaire, Melgar stated: “I furthermore support disbanding the SFPD and requiring officers to reapply to a newly constructed, less violent force.”  Disbanding SFPD?  Sandra Fewer, a maximum donor to Chesa Boudin, is supporting Melgar.

While serving on the über-political Planning Commission, simultaneously earned approximately $100,000 per year as the executive director of the Mission District’s Jamestown Community Center, per the non-profit’s IRS Form 990. In March 2019, the Jamestown nonprofit moved within the Mission to the Centro Social Obrero building at 19th and Alabama Streets (in District 6).  Within only seven months, Jamestown was able to purchase the building, as its website attributes:  Thanks to a generous contribution from Mayor London Breed’s Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative, Jamestown is officially a homeowner in The Mission!  Three months after Mayor Breed’s contribution, Melgar announced she was running to represent the voters of West Portal district (D7).

While Melgar has made a career out of blocking new housing in San Francisco while serving on the Planning Commission, she never raised objections when fellow commissioner Dennis Richards bought out Mission tenants in the heart of Melgar’s nonprofit’s territory. Jamestown employees actually testified against projects before the Planning Commission while she was acting as a commissioner, according to anonymous sources.

Selectively blocking housing projects and the acquisition of the Centro Social Obrero building are not technically ethical violations, but both elicit concern about the swampy intersection of connected politicians and the flow of funds through nonprofits that have eroded the public’s confidence in our Planning Commission, which is supposed to be a regulatory commission, but in reality, average citizens have to turn to permit expeditors (professionals who circumvent San Francisco’s red tape) to achieve project approvals.

Vote for Anyone Other Than Vilaska and Melgar in D7

Responding to a Westside Observer questionnaire, Vilaska and Melgar distinguished themselves by being the only two candidates supporting either the defunding or disbanding of SFPD, closing Juvenile Hall despite increasing juvenile crimes, and approving of Chesa Boudin’s lack of prosecutions. In the Green Party questionnaire, Vilaska bragged that he is the only candidate proposing a homeless shelter in D7, clearly ignoring the paucity of homeless people living within our district.

Vilaska and Melgar are the realization of the outliers John Barbagelta feared. Though we keep the form of district elections, we have reverted back to electing supervisors citywide judging by the campaign donations and carpetbagging.

If you think the allies of Vilaska and Melgar have improved the City, then disregard this column. If you think the City is in a death spiral, cast your three ranked-choice votes for any of the remaining candidates.

Lou Barberini CPA has been writing for the Westside Observer for the past four years. 

July 2020

DA Boudin Advocates Stats That Flatter SFPD

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

For the past two decades there has been great concern amongst companies hiring graduates that the American educational system has fallen short in training our youth in the S.T.E.M. subjects ¾ science, technology, engineering, and math. 

Chesa Boudin

On June 26, 2020 District Attorney Chesa Boudin forwarded on Twitter an excellent FiveThirtyEight piece that serves as an educational resource for understanding probability and statistics.

Here is how this plays out:  Last season, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo was tackled to the ground (sacked) 36-times.  The other half of the 49ers’ quarterbacks, Dante Pettis, was never tackled. 

On the surface, opposing defenses applying 100% of their tackling force to just 50% of the 49ers quarterbacks seems grossly inequitable.  And, the article Boudin promoted addressed this equation:  The data seems to overwhelmingly point to “a system riven by bias” against a particular specific variable (in this example:  quarterbacks). 

But then the Boudin-forwarded article provided more clarity to its readers: “We’re going to get mathy. There are two main ways that researchers approach this problem — by using a ‘population denominator’ and an ‘encounter denominator.’  Using population denominators might not lend itself to an apples-to-apples comparison.”

The San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury, and the local Mission website all continue to use the apples-to-oranges” population denominator because it produces more sensationalized results that fire up the confirmation-bias crowd. 

If we apply the Boudin-suggested encounter denominator to the same football example, while Garoppolo was sacked 36-times last season, he potentially encountered defenses during the 476 times he tried to pass the ball.  Contrastingly, Pettis, though representing half the 49ers’ quarterback population, only tried to pass the ball once all year.  Substituting the encounter denominator for the population denominator makes the 36-sacks of Garoppolo seem more reasonable. 

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...recent public records requests to 9–1–1 and SFPD that show no data exists to dispel that SFPD officers spend 99% of their day responding to where 9–1–1 customers direct them.  It is 9–1–1 callers themselves who determine the location and quantity of encounters.

Implementing Boudin’s favored encounter denominator helps explain the ratios for SFPD’s traffic stops, arrests, and use-of-force incidents, versus various demographic residents of the city, as well as how SFPD has intuitively deployed more personnel based on the frequency of encounter denominator-incidents occurring in various city neighborhoods.

I went back and checked staffing levels for January and February when SFPD scheduling wasn’t affected by COVID-19 or protests, and found that on those typical nights — at a minimum — SFPD staffed the Bayview District with 50% more police officers than the Richmond District.  For some shifts, the Bayview Station was staffed with 70% to 100% more officers than Richmond Station.  By doubling the staffing in one district, one has to expect the potential for a doubling of encounters.

Unfortunately, at the July Police Commission meeting, SFPD Chief Scott — who is guilty of stacking personnel in the Bayview, Mission, and Tenderloin districts — failed to defend his officers for incurring more encounters in those districts.  Scott wouldn’t assign the same personnel to guard Steve Kerr that he would to Kerr’s teammate, Michael Jordan.  Scott must choose to staff each police district equally, or concede that Michael Jordan creates more encounters and thus needs more defensive attention.  But just because Scott doesn’t understand population denominators versus encounter denominators, doesn’t give him the right to let his officers take the fall.

Listen to the statisticians!!

In fairness to the author of Boudin’s forwarded article, after establishing that encounter denominators are preferable to population denominators, she immediately veeredto essentially claiming that when a defensive player runs past ten opponents to tackle a ball-carrying quarterback, that the defensive player might harbor more bias against the quarterback than the other ten players without the ball.  In other words, subjective mindreading is still superior to encounter denominator statistics.

The FiveThirtyEight author’s biased-defensive-player assumption is further weakened by recent public records requests to 9–1–1 and SFPD that show no data exists to dispel that SFPD officers spend 99% of their day responding to where 9–1–1 customers direct them.  It is 9–1–1 callers themselves who determine the location and quantity of encounters.

For this public statement, Boudin should be commended on promoting the fairness of the encounter denominator, and perhaps unwittingly, defending SFPD’s practices.

 

Lou Barberini CPA has been writing for the Westside Observer for the past four years. 

July 2020

Boarded up windows

Photo courtesy of CBS

SFPD Claims Larcenies Declined 96% During Protests

Lou Barberini
Lou Barberini

For the first four months of 2020, compared to the same period in 2019, crimes in San Francisco pretty much increased across the board. This also represents the first four months of District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s term and his unique philosophy. Despite a period that included 45 days of shelter-in-place, homicides were up 25%, burglaries +12%, robberies +3%, arsons +52%, and stolen vehicles +15%.   With tourists blocked from visiting San Francisco and retail stores closed, larcenies dropped 16%.

Note that larceny involves property only. Robbery includes force or fear imposed on a victim, while burglary involves breaking into another's property. Up until a couple years ago, If someone went into a store and stole something, it was considered larceny and burglary. After Prop 47, they dropped the burglary component.

So — the first person breaking down a door is a burglar. But, everyone else going in is just stealing (larceny).

On May 8, 2020, District Attorney Chesa Boudin made a public statement: “We decreased the jail population by 40%. Meanwhile, crime rates plummeted by more than 40%.”

Recognizing that there was a disparity between Boudin’s assessment and SFPD Compstat numbers, I made a public records request into Mr. Boudin’s office. Rachel, the former public defender handling Mr. Boudin’s public records requests, stonewalled with the claim that the DA’s office did not have to respond  “as the informational items are not public records, and appeared to be a media request to gain further information about something DA Boudin said publically.”  Yeah??

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There are several problems with Boudin’s boasted success with reducing the jail population”

After I provided the statute that commands the DA to respond to the public records request, Rachel came up with a second excuse: “we are not required to create new records and sources you appear to be seeking come from an outside agency.”

After I finally explained to Rachel, an attorney, that anything Chesa Boudin says or writes publically is subject to a public records request, Rachel finally revealed that Boudin had gone to SFPD’s Crime Dashboard and picked a 35-day period immediately following the March 16, 2020 stay-in-place. 

There are several problems with Boudin’s boasted success with reducing the jail population:

1. He gave equal weight to all crimes. In other words Boudin believes a decline in two larcenies fairly offsets two murders.

2. With no one on the streets, total crimes exclusive of larcenies barely declined for Boudin’s cherry-picked 35-day period: 1,036 this year versus 1,082 last year.

3. When he cherry-picked the period that made his policies appear the least disruptive, he failed to consider how his policies would affect the city once the stay-in-place was lifted.

We are all aware of the public protests that started May 28, 2020 over the tragic murder and complete disregard for George Floyd’s life. Concurrent with the protests, larcenies and looting escalated.  (This story is about fudging of crime statistics, not who is responsible for the looting.) The explosion of larcenies have the potential to damage Chesa Boudin’s narrative that allowing hundreds of people out of jail does not affect the crime rate, especially larcenies stats which carry Boudin’s statistical thesis.  The recent larceny wave also affects how citizens will view Mayor Breed and Chief Will Scott’s performance. 

To see how Chief Scott and the two elected public officials will account for the surge in larcenies and looting, I went to Mr. Boudin’s source, the SFPD Crime Dashboard.  Last year, for the four-day period of May 28th through May 31st, larcenies totaled 458.  Through the same four-days of this year, SFPD is reporting only 64 larcenies- a 96% decline despite all the looting we have witnessed.

Burglaries for the same period increased 100% from 64 to 126.  

So from SFPD’s larceny and burglary statistics above, we can conclude that SFPD will claim that the hundreds of people that stormed businesses with snatch-and-grabs of millions of dollars worth of merchandise can be smoothed down into 126 burglaries.  And, after all this passes, Chief Scott, Mayor Breed, and DA Boudin will use this burglary blip to pat themselves on the back and claim how successful their policies were.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Lou Barberini is a former police officer with the San Francisco Police Department.  He has written for the Westside Observer for four years.

June 2020

police action

Prelude to a SFPD Shooting

We’ve all seen videos of people in the Tenderloin strewn out on the sidewalks, under the influence of drugs or seemingly “unable to take care of themselves.”  Frequently citizens ask, “What is SFPD doing about this?”  If SFPD observes someone consuming narcotics, the most they can do is interrupt the subject with a useless traffic ticket, because District Attorney Chesa Boudin has repeatedly articulated he will not prosecute these crimes.

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...Tommy, a resident who was refusing to social distance, fighting with other tenants, opening the door to allow non-tenants into the building, and acting “erratic.” Upon arrival, the two officers immediately observed Tommy was bleeding from his mouth.”

Then there are those who appear completely disconnected to this world:  Zombies talking to themselves who, if not a threat to passersby, remain a threat to themselves.

The Aranda Residence.
The Aranda Residence at 64 Turk St.

At 7:13 p.m. on the evening of April 20, 2020, two Tenderloin Station officers were dispatched to 64 Turk Street ¾ a residential hotel run by the nonprofit Conard House.  The website for the Conard House sermonizes it provides “supportive housing, counseling, community involvement and coordination of essential services, including health navigation…  More than 33% of (Conard’s residents) reflect two stark underlying realities:  A pervasive disengagement in self-care and a tragic failure to access health care that is available.”

The call from the Conrad’s front desk was regarding Tommy, a resident who was refusing to social distance, fighting with other tenants, opening the door to allow non-tenants into the building, and acting “erratic.”   Upon arrival, the two officers immediately observed Tommy was bleeding from his mouth.

Tommy attacks from the lobby

One Tenderloin officer asked Tommy if he needed medical assistance, but Tommy walked away saying, “You are going to have to kill me” — not your typical San Franciscan’s response.  When the officer attempted to have Tommy remain for an investigation, Tommy punched one officer and kicked the other officer.  Additional Tenderloin officers were required to assist in subduing Tommy.

With Tommy in handcuffs, the two SFPD officers had two options: 1) They could book Tommy for assaulting a police officer, or 2) They could recognize that Tommy was not of sound mind and that he needed a mental health evaluation.  Section 5150 of the California Welfare and Institutions Code provides law enforcement officers with the ability to restrict a citizen’s freedom for up to 72 hours, if the law enforcement officers can articulate that a subject is a danger to himself or others.  This is frequently referred to as a “5150.”  The two officers selected the second option and requested an ambulance take Tommy for a 72-hour mental health evaluation.  The ambulance took Tommy to St. Francis Hospital on Hyde Street.  

Tommy attacks

With all of the St. Francis personnel’s training, somehow Tommy was released less than ten hours after he arrived.  We know this because at approximately 5:26 a.m. the next morning, 60-year-old Jonathan was walking his dog at approximately 624 Post Street ¾ directly one block north of the theater district, two blocks west of tourist-centric Union Square, and 50 feet from the Bohemian Club ¾ when Tommy stepped out from a building alcove, said “You fu*ker,” and smashed a two-by-four across Jonathan’s face, causing several facial fractures.  Meanwhile, Tommy fled further into the homeless nonprofit ecosystem.

An hour later, the manager of the Pierre Hotel at 540 Jones Street called 9–1–1 to say that Tommy was threatening people at the hotel, was swinging a “bloody two-by-four,” and was reaching for a knife or a similar-looking object. 

A generic square placeholder image with rounded corners in a figure.
The Pierre Hotel

As the Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s website advertises, the Pierre Hotel is part of its portfolio with the purpose “that a homeless person’s first and primary need is for a roof over their head.”  The Tenderloin Housing Clinic is a nonprofit organization run by career homeless activist Randy Shaw, who lives in Berkeley.

SFPD was quick to link this connection to the same Tommy, still carrying on his rampage from Post Street.  When SFPD arrived at the Pierre Hotel, Tommy had hijacked and isolated himself in the lobby’s front desk, which is protected behind counter-to-ceiling transparent plastic partitions.   On video released by SFPD, two officers spent more than eight minutes trying to talk Tommy out, before he eventually started swinging the two-by-four around, stained with Jonathan’s blood, and destroying the Pierre Hotel’s front office.

When Tommy finally emerged from the office, he charged directly at a SFPD officer and apparently tried to strip a gun out of the officer’s hand as the officer tactically retreated.  One SFPD officer fired his gun at Tommy without striking him.

Glide Memorial
Glide Memorial Church

Next, Tommy fled to another nonprofit, Glide Memorial Church.  Per Glide’s website, they are the “radically inclusive, just and loving community mobilized to alleviate suffering and break the cycles of poverty and marginalization…with a mission to change public policy around poverty, discrimination, and civil human rights.”

For the next 15-hours, Tommy barricaded himself inside Glide, tying up platoons of SFPD officers, the tactical squad, and a negotiator, before he was arrested without being injured.

Tommy’s 24-hour-plus tour of Tenderloin nonprofit buildings raises several issues:

1. How are residents in the Tenderloin expected to live in safety if medical personnel only hold persons who are a danger to themselves or others for a fraction of 72-hour 5150 holds?

2. Should SFPD spend time directing desperate souls to hospitals for a 45-minute visit, or should SFPD triage citizens who are victims of crime?

3. How will District Attorney Boudin be able to claim that Tommy is incapable of recognizing what he was doing, if professional St. Francis medical personnel determined Tommy was lucid and taking care of himself?

How can the Board of Supervisors continue to campaign for spreading the homeless throughout the city via “navigation centers,” if, as in Tommy’s case, three nonprofits were unable to help him?

Sadly, I fear it’s only going to get worse.

 

Lou Barberini is a CPA and worked for the San Francisco Police Department for 21-years, which followed his father’s 30-year SFPD career.

May 2020

Chesa Boudin sworn in

DA Boudin’s Struggles with Math and the Dictionary

Lou Barberini

San Francisco politicians wasted no time in using the chaos of the coronavirus to push through their agendas: street closures to nonexistent traffic, spreading the homeless to hotels in districts they don’t frequent, and the release of “non violent” prisoners from jail.

On March 17, 2020, District Attorney Chesa Boudin, along with other progressive district attorneys, signed a declaration that “non violent” inmates be immediately released because of concerns about the coronavirus spreading throughout county jails.  On April 6, Boudin switched the blame for releasing prisoners with a tweet, “Healthcare professionals demanded we drastically reduce the jail population, so we listened.”  Over a two-month stretch, Boudin pared the SF jail population 38% and further boasted in an April 6th tweet, “Meanwhile, crime rates continue to decrease in SF.”  Two weeks later, Boudin tweeted again that the crime rate in SF was still falling.

Boudin’s Math Deficiency

Despite his education, Boudin’s math was either conveniently inaccurate, or perhaps he was just misleading the public to fuel his lineally inherited agenda. 

Total violent crimes through the first three months of Boudin’s term increased 6.4% fueled by a 17.8% increase in robberies. Robberies in just February 2020 increased 50% when compared to the previous February. One SFPD station reported that year-to-date robberies with weapons were up 100% over last year.  All since Chesa Boudin arrived, San Franciscans were 3,400% more likely to be robbed than to perish from the coronavirus.  

Boudin was also incorrect on property crimes. Sure, with tourism down auto break-in’s declined 9%, but thieves made up for it with a 10.7% increase in stolen vehicles. 

Extrapolating an approximate 40% decline in bridge, BART, and MUNI traffic, with streets anecdotally vacant of people, one has to question how robbers are even finding so much prey. If robbers are this successful with fewer people on the streets, that means the odds of getting robbed are more than double in the pre-Boudin era. Have the criminals just been taking advantage of an accommodating District Attorney to graduate up the scale of crime?

Boudin’s Definition of “Non-violent” Differs From The Dictionary

On a sunny day in San Francisco, two SFPD officers cruised on their bike beats at Market and Jones Streets. (Note: there would be no story here if these officers had been walking ineffective foot beats). As they approached TB (Tenderloin Businessman), wearing a black hoody on a 73-degree day, TB made eye contact with the officers and then from the sidewalk picked up a tool of the trade (an electronic scale) and inventory (marijuana). 

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 Sure, with tourism down auto break-in’s declined 9%, but thieves made up for it with a 10.7% increase in stolen vehicles.

With suspicion that TB was operating a business, the bike officers attempted to detain TB, but he became so irate and agitated that the officers had to call for backup. With backup present, TB gave the bike officers a fake name and lied that he was not on probation. Unaware who TB really was, the officers started to release TB with a mere citation addressed to the fake name.  However, TB screwed up and signed the SFPD property receipt with his real name: “TB.”  

The bike officers escalated their investigation and took TB back to Tenderloin Station, which caused TB to vehemently plead to handoff his car keys to his girlfriend.

At Tenderloin Station, the bike officers confirmed that because of prior arrests at Jones and Market Streets, the courts had already filed a worthless “stay away order” supposedly preventing TB from hanging around Jones and Market Streets.

While TB was in a holding cell, a different Tenderloin officer recognized that TB met the description of the person — captured on video — who, a couple hours earlier, had  “discharged a pistol towards two unknown victims.” The bike cops connected TB’s adamant earlier appeal to handoff his car keys, to the need to take a tour of the Tenderloin clicking TB’s keys until they triggered his vehicle’s indicator lights to come on. A SFPD Investigator then convinced a judge that probable cause existed; that TB was a shooter, that he controlled the vehicle in question, and the gun used in the violent crime was likely in the car the beat officers found. The judge authorized a search warrant. With the approved search warrant in hand, the officers found a Smith & Wesson 380 under the vehicle’s center counsel panel.

The officers booked TB only for assault with a deadly weapon — a conservative move even though attempted murder would have been appropriate.

Only 30-days later, Boudin’s office released TB with a GPS ankle bracelet “for good cause pursuant to National Emergency due to Covid-19 pandemic.”  If TB does not meet the definition of “violent criminal” in Boudin’s lineally inherited reality, then who does?

Boudin’s Alternative Reality

On March 26th, Boudin tweeted, “Like the majority of Americans, I have an immediate family member locked up behind bars.” There are three problems with Boudin’s perspective:

First (and again) Boudin’s math skills are atrocious. Like his falsehood of declining San Francisco crimes, a majority of Americans, 165 million, are not locked up.  Nor should a 35.7% share of a DA’s race be considered a majority either.

Second, Boudin tweet demonstrates no remorse and is disrespectful to the lives stolen by his parents’ planned robbery and resultant murders.

Third, Boudin’s tweet reeks of a self-absorbed selfishness and a misguided grievance that his real father was not freed to raise him. 

On October 20, 1981, Chesa Boudin’s mother, secured him with a babysitter while she went on to participate in a scheduled Brink’s robbery and consequential murders. Because the heinous crimes brought prison sentences to both his parents, alternative Weather Underground participants had to raise and mold Boudin. Granted, that was tough card to be dealt to an innocent 14-month Chesa.

However, lets put Boudin’s feeling of injustice into context: from that same October day forward, Edward O’Grady (6), Patricia O’Grady (2), Kimberly O’Grady (6 months), and Gregory Brown never saw, never spoke to, nor were ever held again by their fathers — thanks to the “violent crimes” and political views of Chesa Boudin’s parents.   

Yet now, Chesa Boudin pouts about his father, and disrespects the families of his parents’ victims, while perpetuating the impossibility that 165,000,000 Americans are currently incarcerated.   Some politicians should not tweet!

Lou Barberini is a CPA and worked for the San Francisco Police Department for 21-years, which followed his father’s 30-year SFPD career.

April-May 2020

Scapegoating SFPD Officers
Police Pinata Lou Barberini

Department of Emergency Management’s Failure to Track 9-1-1 Suspect Info

The Apple sales manager scolded his Apple rep on the floor:

You sold too many Apple Watches!

I’m only selling what the customers want.  As the sales manager, I was sure you were the one monitoring the sales volume of iWatches.

I have no idea what the customers are demanding.  It’s your fault for selling too many iWatches!

This unlikely scenario would never happen in the real world, but does it happen in the City and County of San Francisco?  

In accordance with reporting crimes to the FBI, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) segregates crimes into violent crimes vs. property crimes.  Violent crimes include homicides, rapes, robberies, human trafficking, and aggravated assaults. 

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Another misconception ... is that SFPD police officers drive up, see a robbery in progress, and arrest the suspect. Nothing could be rarer.

Robberies involve the taking of property through force or fear.  The public often misconstrues someone breaking into their home while they are away as a “robbery.”  Per the California Penal Code, this is defined as a “burglary.”

Robberies are unique amongst other violent crime statistics because, almost by definition, robbery suspects don’t want the victim to know who they are.  What robber is stupid enough to rob someone who could later identify them?  This also makes robbery reports more objective when compared to the frequent he-said–she-said disagreements between acquaintances that sometimes escalate into an aggravated assault, or worse.  The shock and violence committed by an unknown, complete stranger is one of the most traumatizing crimes, leaving the victim with a lifetime of emotional scaring.

Another misconception about the approximate 10 robberies that occur daily in San Francisco is that SFPD police officers drive up, see a robbery in progress, and arrest the suspect.  Nothing could be rarer.

I polled SFPD officers having an aggregate of 500+ years of experience about the total number of robberies where SFPD makes an arrest that does not require a victim’s description of the suspect.  The answer was less than 10 per year.  That means that in 99.8% of the robberies that occur annually in San Francisco, officers have to rely entirely on a) The victim’s description of the suspect when officers are either flagged down or respond to a 9-1-1 customer call, and b) 3,000+ unrelated victims’ promising to identify the suspects in court under penalty of perjury.

Unfortunately, and for similar reasons, the socioeconomic demographics of robbery arrests mirror the composition of professional athletic teams, rather than mirroring the general socioeconomic demographics of San Francisco.  Anti-police groups despise this lack of diversity and scapegoat SFPD officers to justify anti-police biased perspectives of law enforcement.

Because the impetus driving SFPD robbery arrests comes from descriptions provided by victims, not from proactive police actions, it is informative to ascertain: a) The aggregate robbery suspect descriptions called into 9-1-1, and b) Whether (or not) SFPD arrested robbery suspects in proportion to the ethnic descriptions obtained from victims’ 9-1-1 calls.

On March 2, 2020 I placed a public records request to the Department of Emergency Management (DEM) — the City department that dispatches 9-1-1 calls to police officers — to obtain aggregate data of the ethnic descriptions of the 3,000+ annual SF robbery suspects.  Like the Apple sales manager in my example, DEM responded saying it could not produce aggregate suspect descriptions, and that I should contact SFPD.  Per a March 6, 2020 public records request to SFPD, it too stated it doesn’t maintain a database of robbery suspect descriptions. 

It defies reason that SFPD officers have been disparaged by various media outlets for failing to make arrests ¾ for all crimes ¾ in proportion to the City’s ethnic populations, since both the DEM and the SFPD administrations have failed to track suspect descriptions reported by 9-1-1 customers.  Likewise, it was total ineptness by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) during its 2016 survey of SFPD that the DOJ didn’t even trip over the conspicuous fact that there is no database of 9-1-1 callers’ suspect descriptions and, therefore, no evidence could possibly exist that SFPD arrested suspects disproportionately to the ethnic demographic descriptions obtained during 9-1-1 customers’ calls.

Why are 9-1-1 callers’ suspect descriptions not collected and tabulated?  There are a myriad of complex social, cultural, educational, and economic issues that drive crime rates.  Despite this, it has become simpler for SFPD’s upper management — and Chief Scott in his quest to appease the DOJ — to let officers on the streets take the fall for racism than to initiate a discussion with the already statistically-challenged groups about potential solutions to social problems contributing to lopsided crime rates.

If the Apple sales manager doesn’t want his salesperson to sell too many iWatches, he should screen out the customers wanting to buy them before they enter the store.  Similarly, if the media, the District Attorney, and the upper levels of SFPD want diversity of arrests, then DEM should be commanded to restrict taking additional customer calls to 9-1-1 once each ethnic group’s quota has been filled.  But watch out San Francisco.  Under this plan, the statistically-challenged will shift their scapegoating to the customers calling 9-1-1 ¾ Any excuse to avoid a discussion of social solutions.

Lou Barberini is a CPA and worked for the San Francisco Police Department for 21-years, which followed his father’s 30-year SFPD career.

April-May 2020

Readers need to recognize newspaper’s confirmation bias

The Chronicle Needs to Experiment With Reality

Chronicle 1906
Lou Barberini

I have always found it more informative to sidestep reading Yelp and Amazon cheerleading, five-star reviews.  Instead, I read the negative comments.  What'’'s more constructively informative:  Reading “the backpack was lovely”?  Or reading:  “several reviews reported the zippers ripped out after one week of use”?  Sadly, too many smart people read the San Francisco Chronicle’s articles as five-star facts instead of as insight to the direction of forthcoming social experiments.

In a December 22, 2019 editorial the Chronicle advocated for spreading the homeless crisis and shelters throughout the far reaches of the City, and refuted obvious concerns about potentially increased larceny crimes by reporting: “Despite the fact that the evidence shows no link between the presence of Navigation Centers and neighborhood crime.” Have you ever tried to purchase something at a homeless-centric downtown Walgreens or CVS?  It’s all locked-up!

One week later (12/29/2019) Joaquin Palomino and Jill Tucker revisited the Chronicle’s signature series about falling juvenile crime rates, claiming: “But at a time when youth crime in California is plummeting to historic lows …”

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Not only do the words “arrests” and “crimes” have different definitions in all English dictionaries, there is also considerable evidence that the Chronicle never even contacted the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) to research the level of crimes committed by juveniles who were not arrested.”

Because I have written recent articles based on responses to public records requests for the Westside Observer about increased San Francisco juvenile crime trends as well as increased larcenies around Navigation Centers, I was perplexed at how the Chronicle arrived at such conflicting statistics.  On December 30, 2019 I emailed Chronicle editor Audrey Cooper, and publisher and CEO William Nagel, enclosing links to my two articles.  I accused Chronicle writers of using “completely inaccurate statistics.”  And, I specifically indicted the Chronicle for intentionally mischaracterizing fewer juvenile “arrests” as evidence of reduced juvenile “crimes.”  Not only do the words “arrests” and “crimes” have different definitions in all English dictionaries, there is also considerable evidence that the Chronicle never even contacted the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) to research the level of crimes committed by juveniles who were not arrested.

Ms. Cooper and Mr. Nagel elected not to defend the Chronicle’s integrity.  They ignored answering my email.

Subsequent to my email, I learned by following a hyperlink in the Chronicle’s digital version that the referenced quote on unaffected crime rates around new navigation centers was based entirely on a single study made by a lone graduate student, Miki Bairstow.  She only measured unchanged crime rates in homeless-centric neighborhoods, which is like measuring the effect of a new Starbucks in Manhattan while ignoring how a new Starbucks would impact a one-coffee shop town. 

More frightening, the Chronicle — which is often used as an analytical source for San Francisco Board of Supervisors policy-making decisions — relied on such an important editorial proclamation based on the unverified findings of a solo graduate student whose LinkedIn profile claims that while she was conducing her analysis, she was simultaneously was acting as a “policy consultant” to the San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH).  Whether Bairstow was a consultant or an unpaid intern does not detract from the fact she had a conflicting relationship with HSH, and it appears her study lacked independence from the conflicts of interest with, and pressures to please, HSH.

In her January 22, 2020 Fifth & Mission podcast, editor Cooper interviewed the Chronicle’s Phil Matier on the steep increase of juveniles robbing and stealing electronic devices at San Francisco BART stations.  At 4:51 into the podcast, Cooper asked Matier, “It’s really interesting, you said juveniles are committing these crimes, why is that?”   And yet, despite her most famous columnist detailing the growing San Francisco juvenile crime problem, a few days later (1/28/2020) Cooper allowed Chronicle staff writer Jill Tucker to reference the “vanishing juvenile crimes” in yet another article, while continuing to intentionally mislabel arrests as crimes.

If Ms. Cooper’s disregard of my accusations were an isolated case, it would be one thing.  However, it appears that rather than reporting factual news, the Chronicle has zealously cherry-picked crime trends that currently serve the Chronicle’s we-don’t-need-arrests agenda.

In July 2019, when juveniles shot up the Tanforan Mall, the Chronicle misquoted the San Bruno police chief’s identifying descriptive elements of the violent juveniles who had escaped into the public.  Because the censorship of the violent juveniles’ description might have delayed the public’s assistance, I questioned the Chronicle writer and was arrogantly blown off: “The [identification description censorship] decision was made by people above our pay scale.”

On January 3, 2020 the Chronicle presented homicide totals in 2019 for San Francisco and the Bay Area.  The Chronicle calculated that Orinda had zero homicides in 2019, despite the five Orinda Airbnb homicides last Halloween that made national news.  Additionally, the Chronicle painted an 11% San Francisco five-homicide decline as “fall(ing),” while an almost reciprocal 10% increase for the Bay Area was airbrushed as a “leveling-off.”  Talk about slanting your words!!  For consistency, perhaps the Chronicle should only tally homicides if someone is arrested, the same way they only count juvenile crimes if a juvenile is arrested.

As an avid reader, to me the greatest evidence of the Chronicle’s selective filtering was their dropping of the nationally bestselling books list from its Sunday Pink Section, and replacing it with only presenting what is selling in the Bay Area bubble.  Figuratively burning the nationally-popular books list illustrates the Chronicle’s efforts to ratchet up confirmation bias to shield its readers from considering competing viewpoints.  The Chronicle and Cooper are adept at presenting selective evidence to support what they already believe, while ignoring and rejecting evidence that might support a different conclusion, a fact our Board of Supervisors wantonly ignore.

In our confirmation-bias drenched world, it has become increasingly more important for us to stop nodding “Yes” to the daily political emails from our friends, and instead start listening to the opposition and challenging their message(s). Gravitate to the one-star reviews because they represent constructive criticism.   Conservatives should watch MSNBC and liberals should watch Fox.

And, as much as cable networks rely on skewed echo chambers to amplify their opinions, the Chronicle is equally guilty of perpetuating skewed groupthink ¾ a sad testament for a historic newspaper that refuses to defend its analyses.

Read the Chronicle for insights into the next foggy social experiments coming at us.  But subscribe to the Westside Observer as an antidote to the Chronicle’s flawed and unsubstantiated analyses.

Lou Barberini resides in the West Portal area.  He has been writing for the Westside Observer for four years.

February 2020

The Chronicle’s Vanishing Crime (Stats)

Fewer Arrests Don’t Represent Reduced Crime

June 1997: An off-duty police officer was riding on a MUNI bus when he saw two juveniles steal a tourist’s purse. The officer exited the bus and followed the juveniles until backup from Northern Station arrived to arrest the juveniles for “grand theft.”

August 2016: The same off-duty police officer was bicycling on Phelan Avenue when he saw a man dart from Ocean Avenue into the bushes of an empty City College campus. The man’s face nervously scanned right and left, as if he was at center court watching a Ping-Pong match. The off-duty cop continued biking. The next day the officer learned the man had stolen a woman’s purse.

Prop 47

Were these examples of how indifference gradually creeps into police officers’ attitudes over time? No, they are examples of how Proposition 47 changed the definition of what a felony is, and how it prohibits officers from arresting suspects for misdemeanor offenses. Same victim trauma; different statutory consequences.

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In its Vanishing Violence series, the Chronicle stated: “The youth crime decline would be easier to believe, experts said, if they understood why it happened,” and went on to speculate that crime might have declined because of less lead poisoning. Seriously? A friend of mine told me there are no fish in the ocean because he didn’t catch any fish yesterday. Hey Chronicle, now there’s a story!”

Prior to the passage of Prop 47 in November 2014, if a thief stole an iPhone or a purse, it was deemed a felony, regardless of the value of the item stolen. Prop 47 — falsely billed as the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” — redefined “grand theft” as a felony only if the victim’s property had a minimum value of $950, ignoring that victims suffer the same anguish, humiliation, and violation of personal safety as before.

Under the law, the 1997 incident above was indisputably felony grand theft, while the 2016 incident above — solely because of Prop 47 — was only a felony if there was a $950 minimum value in the purse. Less than $950 in the purse? A police officer can’t make the arrest; the victim must make a citizen’s arrest.

Thus, under the illogic of Prop 47, if Thief A and Thief B each steal purses with $500 inside, but if the purse Thief A snatched also happened to contain a valuable wedding ring, Thief A would be booked into county jail. But if the purse Thief B snatched lacked a valuable wedding ring the Thief would just receive a ticket on a traffic violator form. Neither thief has x-ray vision and their intents were the same. Steal from a rich person, go to jail. Steal from a poorer person, receive a misdemeanor citation on a traffic ticket.

snatching a purseProp 47 had the effect of suppressing the reporting of grand thefts and larceny crimes for three reasons: First, for the thieves, there was now no immediate threat of a trip to county jail unless they were both caught and the stolen property exceeded $950 in value. Second, when victims (or tourists) are told that they must make a citizen’s arrest, the victims recognize the futility of taking further action. Ms. Tourist do you mind flying back here from Vermont to testify in court? Third, there is no benefit for an officer to chase a thief if the victim must agree to make a citizen’s arrest first, and the outcome most likely will be a misdemeanor citation on a traffic ticket.

Predictability, more traumatized victims are not reporting crimes, resulting in San Francisco’s larceny crime wave ascending to national records, while arrests collapsed to historic lows. Declining arrest rates are a reflection of San Francisco politics, implicit demographic arrest quotas, and a disconnected police chief.

In this environment, in March 2019 the San Francisco Chronicle penned a “Vanishing Violence” series, stating specifically, “San Francisco recorded a particularly dramatic reduction in juvenile crime” and advocated for the closing of Juvenile Hall. A few days after publication, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to study closing Juvenile Hall, and then in June, voted 11-0 to close the juvenile facility by 2021.

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Steal from a rich person, go to jail. Steal from a poorer person, receive a misdemeanor citation on a traffic ticket.”

 

But how accurate was The Chronicle series? Factoring in how many San Franciscans and tourists have voiced complaints about the pervasive lawlessness and the record level of property crimes and auto break-ins, The Chronicle’s findings seem to have diverged from the public’s perception.

Consider:

1) There is a difference between arrest statistics and reported crime statistics. The Chronicle only tallied juvenile arrests and ignored the total crimes being committed by juveniles that were recorded by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).

2) The Chronicle cited that between 2017 and 2018, juvenile arrests dropped 11% nationwide. In response to my November public record requests, SFPD data shows that between 2017 and 2018, juvenile crimes increased 12%, confirming there is a distinction between arrests and levels of juvenile crime.

3) The delayed responses to multiple, successively reworded public records requests to pull SFPD’s total number of juvenile crimes in 2017 and 2018 made it apparent to me that The Chronicle never ventured down the same road of inquiry. It was easier for The Chronicle to arrive at its erroneous reduced-arrests, therefore reduced-crime conclusion.

4) Because what was considered an arrestable felony offense prior to Prop 47 is no longer a felony, The Chronicle’s yearly trend analysis is effectively an apples-to-oranges comparison.

5) The Chronicle uses different assumptions depending on which side of a cause they are advocating. When promoting zero San Francisco traffic deaths (Vision Zero), The Chronicle has disparaged SFPD for writing too few traffic citations, which means the writers assumed that SFPD does not catch all traffic violators. However, when it came to advocating closing Juvenile Hall, the assumptions were changed to conclude that SFPD catches all juvenile criminals and no juvenile crimes exist beyond the juveniles arrested.

6) The Chronicle also used different scales depending on what they were advocating. For traffic deaths and Vision Zero, The Chronicle just used recent year-to-year comparisons, ignoring that precipitous fall in traffic fatalities since the ‘70s. Yet, for its Vanishing Violence series, The Chronicle contrasted current arrests to the ‘80s, ignoring the Department of Justice recent survey that reported between 2014 and 2018 juvenile victims of violent crimes had increased 20%.

On a different project, Chronicle (10/24/19) writers published the results of their test of the fastest mode of transportation between Powell and Market Streets and the Warrior’s new arena. Defying physics, a Chronicle writer biking at an absurd 3.7 mph, arrived four minutes after a Chronicle writer who had walked. Another example of finger-on-the-scale agenda journalism — like using arrests instead of reported crimes to purport preposterous conclusions.

In its Vanishing Violence series, The Chronicle stated: “The youth crime decline would be easier to believe, experts said, if they understood why it happened,” and went on to speculate that crime might have declined because of less lead poisoning. Seriously?

A friend of mine told me there are no fish in the ocean because he didn’t catch any fish yesterday. Hey Chronicle, now there’s a story!

Lou Barberini spent 21 years with SFPD.

December 2019

Mass SFPD Officers Exodus?

And what does this mean for the safety of the public?

The scariest moments of my life—Zephyr Cove September 4, 2019

With a pack of friends, I was making an annual biking lap around Lake Tahoe. With only 4 miles to go, the skies dumped cloudbursts and hail.

I waited out the storm under an overhang. When the rain abated, I slogged on through the standing water and salt that still congregated on Highway 50. Trucks gleefully aimed at puddles, an opportunity to douse a hated bike rider.

Visibility was zero. Ensuring that vehicles would see me, I militantly took over the entire slow lane of the highway. I could hear the brakes of speeding cars as they swerved around at the last second.

Climbing Zephyr Hill was peak danger because the difference between the approaching cars and me was the greatest. A reddish SUV approached and sat on my tail refusing to pass, even when the waves of cars dissipated. I climbed and cursed him. Numerous opportunities to pass, yet halfway up the hill, the driver remained on my backside.

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… unlike other violent crimes (homicides, aggravated assaults, and rapes) that involve a relationship or association between the felon and the victim, robberies are committed on random and vulnerable victims. These independent victims are the ones that corroborate the arrestees’ descriptions—not SFPD.

I’m slow mentally, and it took me ¾’s up the hill for me to finally realize that this driver, matching my 12 miles per hour assent, was actually blocking the speeding cars now behind the both of us.

At the crest of the hill, I gave him the finger—the deliberate index finger pointed directly at him, with a slowly mouthed “thank you.”

As he drove off, I said to myself “he must have been a cop.”

police billboardOfficers with The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) are suffering. Multiple SFPD officers asked me to write about the 100 to 150 SF police officers that are in the various interview stages of transferring to surrounding suburban Bay Area police departments. That means 5 to 9% of the entire SFPD force is potentially on the move.

This mass unprecedented SFPD exodus, with serious safety consequences to the underserved citizens of San Francisco, is based on three forces: compensation that no longer exceeds the suburbs, and the twin working environment issues of a disparaging media, and an overzealous police oversight body that buys into the media’s agenda coverage.

Compensation:

The surrounding suburbs, absent the taxing police work of political interferences, have either caught up to SFPD’s compensation or now exceed it. When a SFPD officer transfers into a suburban police department, that department saves the $100,000 to $200,000 in training costs it takes to graduate a recruit through an academy. The other side of this equation is that 100 to 150 officers departing San Francisco translates to $15-million to $30-million of future costs SFPD will incur to replace the exiting veterans with fresh recruits through the SFPD Academy.

A Disparaging Media Narrative:

In the bay area’s current #1 selling book, Malcolm Gladwell, through the luxury of hindsight, authors a 33-page dissection of a Texas traffic stop. (I am so thankful that the reddish SUV, didn’t take 33-pages to size up that I needed immediate help.)

Gladwell bases his premises on numerous uninformed interpretations of the law. For instance:

1) A Texas state trooper is not allowed to pull over a vehicle running a stop sign exiting a college campus (Actually Gladwell, Texas law allows an officer to do this.)

2) A motorist is required to get out of the way of a police officer driving with neither his vehicle’s lights nor sirens on. (Think about this: per Gladwell, if you saw a SFPD police car just going to get gas, you would have to immediately pull over.)

3) A person that grabs an item without paying for it and shoves the storeowner at his throat while exiting, has only merely committed “shoplifting,” (No Gladwell, this meets 50 states’ definition of “robbery.”)

Gladwell’s preconceived anti-law enforcement views are pretty apparent. As are the predetermined police views of the last District Attorney (DA), who authored Prop 47; social justice advocates; and the police oversight bodies who all buy into the skewed political narrative of Gladwell’s World.

These are the same groups that propagate that certain undersized demographic segments of SF are over-targeted and represent a disproportionate amount of subjects arrested. Despite these cemented beliefs, in response to my recent public records request, SFPD shared that they reported to the FBI that of the 1,063 suspects arrested for robbery in 2018, 74.7% came from the 17% segment of the SF population that the Gladwell World-advocates claim are over-arrested.

Robberies are a unique statistical measure, because unlike other violent crimes (homicides, aggravated assaults, and rapes) that involve a relationship or association between the felon and the victim, robberies are committed on random and vulnerable victims. These independent victims are the ones that corroborate the arrestees’ descriptions—not SFPD.

Let’s be clear, serious socioeconomic environmental issues exist that drive crime, and everyone is aware of the horrible texting history by a small group of SFPD officers. But rather than discussing the causes of crime, the anti-law enforcement groups have scapegoated SFPD into the no-win citywide demographic arithmetic.

To not be deemed racist, SFPD officers are placed in the impossible situation that they must adhere to an implied arrest quota that is proportional to the city’s total population, instead of to the demographic percentages in the crime centric Tenderloin, 6th Street corridor, and Mission Street. This is a lose-lose position that drives SFPD officers to the suburbs where law enforcement is more appreciated.

Department of Police Accountability (DPA):

There may be a perception issue that within any municipalities’ Internal Affairs (IA) division that there is potential for IA officers to investigate fellow officers they might be acquainted with. However, that same argument cannot be made about the independence of DA investigators appointed by a city-elected District Attorney.

Over the past few years, the DPA has conflicted with the determinations of both SFPD’s IA and the DA.

In a court case involving an officer capturing a gun from a fleeing felon, Judge Stephen Murphy said, “I have concerns about the officers’ credibility.” Independent of IA and DA investigations, DPA alone rushed to rule the officer “lied.” There is a huge difference between “lying” and not being “credible.” I could write about the structural engineering mistakes made on the Millennium Tower and be honest, but I definitely would not be credible. And yet, before the IA or DA have completed their investigation, the DPA’s rushed findings embarrassed the officer in a various media outlets.

The DPA recently overruled SFPD’s IA and the DA’s investigative findings and ruled that the firing of a less-than-lethal beanbag at a suspect brandishing a machete “aggravated” and “escalated” the situation. How is this different from our readers, on Monday morning, judging that a run would have been more effective than a pass that was intercepted? Just as it is unfair for us to question a quarterback’s decision under the threat of 250+ linemen trying to squash him, it is equally unrealistic for the DPA, in the calm of their carpeted offices, to use hindsight to render judgment on how an officer should defend his life in the microseconds of the street. This is no longer an issue for this officer, he departed to a neighboring jurisdiction.

These incidents are evidence of an overzealous Department of Police Accountability, and illustrate:

Surrounding jurisdictions are accepting SFPD officers who are still under investigation because they recognize that discipline is a consequence more of a political agenda than wrongdoing,

Unlike IA and DA investigators’ training curriculum, there is no publicized investigative training for criteria for DPA investigators,

There is no oversight of DPA. If an officer wants to dispute a DPA’s finding, SFPD General Order 2.04 fiats the only recourse is to file a complaint back to DPA.

SFPD Needs A Chief That Is A Leader:

Like my failure to recognize the good intentions of the red SUV driver, the public often misses the silent shield law enforcement protects us with. Street cops desire to be purposeful and productive. For 21-years I witnessed the daily selfless and altruistic acts of SF street cops, which was concealed by the specious arrest math and false narrative the local papers spouted. It’s not just SFPD officers fleeing that is a problem, it’s that SF has no farm team. SFPD could only get 20 students into the current Academy class (of which 6 are repeating), which is evidence of the nationwide recognition of SF’s harsh political environment. And it’s not the cost of homeownership.

To stem the downward spiral of effective police work, SFPD needs the chief to stop drinking the fake stats kool-aid and instead campaign to improve the impossible position in which the media and DPA have placed his troops..

To the other Will Scott-Sgt. Will Scott who once bought narcotics from a seller named Scott on Scott Street, I know you now are “in the wind.” 10-7, Sarge. Rest in peace.

Lou Barberini worked 21-years with SFPD following his father’s 30-year career. Sergeant

November 2019

SF Juvenile CenterSave Tourism: Move the Homeless to the Westside?

If you step back and connect the dots, the reason for the hurried campaign to convert Juvenile Hall to a navigation center (homeless shelter) becomes much clearer.

San Francisco’s growing and conspicuous homeless population frequently is the butt of national media ridicule, enough so that in July 2018 the American Medical Association pulled its $40 million, five-day convention from San Francisco because of safety concerns for its members. Our entire $40 billion tourist industry is currently threatened by the City’s years-long dysfunctional handling of its homeless situation.

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Closing Juvenile Hall would hurt kids in San Francisco that have committed serious crimes but need the support of their families and communities. These kids would be shipped off to other counties’ facilities and taken out of San Francisco when they need their support networks the most. The worst part is that we would be putting the burden of travelling to whatever far flung place on the families of these kids.

Here’s City Hall’s new plan: Why not hide the homeless, away from tourist’s view, on the Westside of the city?

Closing Juvenile Hall:

The first step to saving tourism was the Chronicle’s “Vanishing Juvenile Crime Rate” series, which argued that Juvenile Hall was both expensive and the demographic composition of arrested juveniles was not perfectly proportional to the demographics of the city. The Chronicle has never disputed the percentage of juveniles arrested by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) directly correlates to the descriptions made by victims and 9–1–1 callers. Instead, the Chronicle messaged that arrest ethnic inequities are more important than the safety of the public.

Just hours after the series was published by the Chronicle, without even questioning the newspaper’s propaganda, San Francisco Board of Supervisors Shamann Walton, Hillary Ronen, and Matt Haney launched a campaign to close Juvenile Hall, culminating in a 10-to-1 vote on June 4 to close it by 2021.

Ironically, within a month of the Supervisors’ vote, the vanishing juvenile crime rate resurfaced in international news reports that two people at the Tanforan Mall were shot by alleged San Francisco juveniles, followed by a very recent San Francisco Juvenile Hall graduate allegedly being involved in the July murder of an Italian police officer, followed by the brazen, indiscriminate August rush hour shooting on Market Street involving at least one alleged juvenile (captured on KTVU). Vanishing juvenile crime rate?

After Identifying Homeless Centric Zones, Ignore Reality

The second step to saving San Francisco’s tourism was to sell the conversion of Juvenile Hall into a homeless center. In the August 27, 2019 Chronicle, District Attorney (DA) candidate Leif Dautch stated his desire for repurposing Juvenile Hall into a 150-bed mental health treatment center.

Consider the illogic of Dautch’s hypocrisy of not rewarding a homeless shelter to his own Cow Hollow neighborhood, and instead gifting it to the Westside. In January 2018, the City recognized and mapped the five most homeless-centric population “zones” in the city and organized the Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC) to provide services to those concentrations of homeless. The HSOC maps cover just nine-square-miles of the 49-square mile city.

This initial City survey of the most concentrated homeless “zones” perfectly matches the nationally-famous “poop maps.”

Comparing the HSOC “zones” and “poop map” confirms few homeless folks are living on the streets anywhere near Juvenile Hall.

San Francisco’s current homeless “zones” share three necessary common requirements:

1. All the zones are proximate to commercial retail stores, where larceny and successful panhandling can, and does, occur.

2. With the slight exception of the Castro, all of the zones are in flat, low-lying areas conducive to moving one’s belongings.

3. The zones are close to either BART or MUNI lines, with direct connections to other homeless zones.

Although Juvenile Hall does have a commercial area ⅛ of a mile away, it misses the other two important requirements: 1) The facility is at 565 feet in altitude, and 2) There are no direct MUNI lines connecting to other homeless zones. By contrast, given the potential for extending the Central Subway to the Marina, Dautch’s Cow Hollow neighborhood is obviously a much superior site than Juvenile Hall for building a homeless shelter.

All of the above make the unexplainable rush to create a large homeless shelter where the homeless currently don’t congregate — and to completely contradict the entire 2018 HSOC surveys and the two-year HSOC manpower surge — rather curious. By connecting these dots, it points to a city trying to protect tourism by exporting the homeless through designating Juvenile Hall a magnet facility.

Typically-Amateurish SFPD Crime Statistics

A new homeless shelter on Woodside Avenue should be of concern to Westside residents because it will expose children attending St. Brendan’s Elementary School (three-tenths a mile away) and Ruth Asawa School of the Arts students directly across the street, to both the mentally unstable and substance abusers committing larcenies to support their habits.

To assuage the fears of residents inheriting the increased crime of the City’s homeless migration strategies, both Director Jeff Kositsky of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing (HSH) and Mayor London Breed recently issued identical public statements:

“In general, we know the data shows there is no link between the creation of a Navigation Center and an increase in crime in the surrounding area.”

Identical public record requests were submitted to both Kositsky and the Mayor requesting the crime data they had cited.

The Mayor’s office immediately provided the SFPD crime data and the email chain transmitting the data. HSH mysteriously contends it somehow received the SFPD crime data with absolutely no accompanying email communications. Evidently, the data just fell out of the sky onto Kositsky’s desk.

There were many glaring problems with the “in general” crime stats SFPD assembled:

1. SFPD’s stats compared crimes that occurred within ⅛ of a mile (660 feet) to ¼ of a mile (1,320 feet) for only four of existing homeless Navigation Centers. This ridiculously small distance assumes the homeless are mobile enough to arrive at the proposed Juvenile Hall facility via walking or several MUNI transfers, but are incapable of wandering more than 1,320 feet from the facility. The Juvenile Hall campus itself exceeds 660 feet in length!

2. SFPD double-counted crime stats that occurred within 660 feet of a Navigation Center with crimes that occurred between 660 feet and 1,320 feet. Thus, the crimes within the 1,320 feet radius are definitely an inaccurate number.

3. SFPD aggregated some Navigation Center data using 12-month periods with other Centers using 4-month periods of data. When grouped together, this means the 4-month periods were incorrectly given the same weight as 12-month periods, skewing data results.

4. The SFPD crime stats included all crime statistics, many of which aren’t germane to the homeless, because larcenies are, by far, the most frequent crime committed by the homeless.

5. Crime is seasonal, with increased crime occurring during the tourist season and Christmas. For the Bryant Street Navigation Center, SFPD compared the last two months of 2018 when San Francisco received two inches of rain to the first two months of 2019, when we experienced 8.8 inches (400% more) of rain that suppressed crime.

To account for seasonality, a real statistician would have compared January/February 2018 to January/February 2019. Applying this professional comparison to the Central Waterfront Navigation Center at 600 25th Street shows larcenies increased 78% after the shelter was opened, not the 33% decrease for all crimes within ⅛ of a mile reported to the Mayor and Kositsky.

6. Importantly, SFPD did not provide the Mayor or Kositsky crime data surrounding the fifth Navigation Center at the Civic Center, the City’s longest-operated Center in a known high-crime area.

A “Solution” That Solves Nothing:

Media reports show three DA candidates Chesa Boudin, Suzie Loftus, and Leif Dautch all support closure of Juvenile Hall.

The fourth DA candidate, Nancy Tung, does not support the conversion stating: “Creating a navigation center/mental health center at Juvenile Hall doesn’t solve the issues we have. Mental health beds are going unused at SFGH already and the City hasn’t done enough to use the laws we have on the books to get people into treatment. Moving the problem to the Westside doesn’t change anything, unless homeless people are accepting treatment for mental health or drug issues [because] they’re not mandated into treatment now.”

“Closing Juvenile Hall would hurt kids in San Francisco that have committed serious crimes but need the support of their families and communities. These kids would be shipped off to other counties’ facilities and taken out of San Francisco when they need their support networks the most. The worst part is that we would be putting the burden of travelling to whatever far flung place on the families of these kids.”

It is completely nonsensical to decentralize treatment, services, food, and staffing throughout our gridlocked, dense city. Yet when Mayor Breed is provided fake crime stats and homeless zone surveys that contradict themselves from one year to the next; how can we expect the mayor to see the absurdity of converting Juvenile Hall to a homeless shelter where there is no homeless problem?

Full Disclosure: The author has contributed to Ms. Tung’s campaign for D.A.

Lou Barberini spent 21 years with SFPD after working for a Big Four firm and as a financial advisor. He has an MBA in Taxation, the AICPA’s Financial Specialist designation, and currently provides fiduciary retirement planning and investment services through Nich Capital Partners.

October 2019

Chief Scott Raids Pension Fund

My father abandoned us. We didn’t see him for months. When he wasn’t working, he buried himself in the solitude of an isolated room — studying for the SFPD sergeant’s exam. During that period, he shared with me the subject matter, like the ridiculously important California Vehicle Code law, Section 23114(a), that only feathers from live birds and clear water are legally allowed to escape from a moving vehicle.

The San Francisco Civil Service Commission scored my father’s test and then the identity-centric groups protested that the test was discriminatory. Some of the complainants admitted that they neither bothered to acquire the study materials, nor bothered to study, because of the presumption the test was discriminatory.

Forty years later, nothing has changed.

Chief William Scott sworn in by Mayor Lee / Photo: Courtesy LA Sentinal

In prior articles, I have addressed how SFPD Chief Bill Scott has ignored the Civil Service Commission’s test rankings for the current SFPD sergeant, lieutenant, and captain candidates. Instead, the Chief has either bypassed higher scoring candidates on the promotional lists, or worse, temporarily promoted officers who never even took the promotional test.

Rewarding childhood friends and schoolmates, or the elected leaders of identity unions with leapfrogged promotions proliferated under the prior SFPD administration. Chief Scott has merely continued the practice of ignoring civil service rankings, while from a statistical perspective quite obviously kept his eye on meeting identity quotas.

Ironically, with no attorneys on the SFPD command staff, during the last two captain’s tests both of the past two Chiefs sidestepped promoting lieutenant/lawyers to captain. Bizarro World: Why promote a person having a postgraduate law degree to captain, when you can promote a person who never took the test and only has a high school diploma to temporary captain?

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Officers who are assigned to a temporary rank, but never tested for that rank, are beholden to superiors as “yes men,” or they risk forfeiting the unearned, but accompanying, pay raise.”

By ignoring the merits of the promotional tests, SFPD is demoralized in several ways:

How can we expect a sergeant to respect another sergeant who scored lower on the civil service test, but has now been promoted to be his/her lieutenant?

How can we expect a sergeant to respect a “temporary” lieutenant who never even tested for the lieutenant’s rank?

Officers who are assigned to a temporary rank, but never tested for that rank, are beholden to superiors as “yes men,” or they risk forfeiting the unearned, but accompanying, pay raise. By contrast, an officer who has been promoted in rank order is in a secure enough non-temporary position to act as a sounding board to their superiors, for example by voicing opposition to serving a search warrant on a journalist.

Lou Barberini, father of the author with Ike
Lou Barberini, father of the author, joins the line to welcome President Dwight Eisenhower (Lou is third from the right)

Deviating from the civil service test creates a two-tier us versus them suspicious mentality amongst SFPD. Are you connected? Were you in the chief’s high school class?

The two-tiered department creates a legacy of distrust, so that subsequent generations are reluctant to take a promotional test that ends up being contingent upon one’s identity or juice.

On July 8, 2019 the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association (POA) filed a grievance against Chief Scott for bypassing candidates on the Civil Service promotional lists by promoting lower-scoring candidates based on identity or juice, and for filling openings with officers who didn’t even take the test. The POA cited the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the POA and SFPD. MOU Paragraph 122 states:

“… when a vacancy occurs in a promotional rank, an eligible list exists for that rank, a position exists in the budget for the promotion and an appointment is made, the promotional appointment shall be made immediately and on a permanent basis.”

On July 15, 2019 Chief Scott responded to the POA’s grievance, stating Paragraph 122 is about “timing” and it means that: “… when promotional appointments are made, they must immediately be made.” In other words, Scott believes that he can reward whom he wants because the agreement doesn’t require him to make a decision; only when he actually gets around to making a decision then he must immediately appoint someone. Chief Scott’s Clintonesque word-parsing of the definition of “immediate” may have created a slippery slope, because officers can now apply his liberal interpretation to the protocol defined by the Department’s General Orders (DGO’s).

Consider DGO 5.05 I(c)(3), which fiats how supervisors should monitor vehicle pursuits: “When the risks appear too unreasonable, the supervisor shall immediately order the pursuit terminated.” Now a supervisor can say, “Per my chief’s definition of immediate, I too was processing the situation. Only after I completed my thought process was I required to make a decision to order the pursuit be immediately terminated.”

For city residents, the morale of SFPD officers, or whether the 172nd candidate on the sergeant’s list vaults over the 22nd candidate, may not appear important. However, there are gigantic economic costs not only to other city employees, but also to the taxpayers who have to backstop the underfunded San Francisco Employees Retirement System’s (SFERS) pension fund.

When Chief Scott promotes lieutenants who never took the captain’s test to “acting captain,” it equates to a $40,000 annual raise for the “acting captain” position. No big deal from an SFPD budget perspective. Chief Scott is just shifting the $40,000 from a more deserving candidate sidelined sitting on the bench to a less qualified person.

But what about the cost to the SFERS pension? Usually, “acting captains” are appointed close to retirement. The officer banks the extra $40,000 in their final year’s paychecks; and then for the next 30 years of life expectancy, receives 90% of that $40,000 in increased pension benefits. In other words, frequently for just one year of service, the Chief has granted over $1 million in additional retirement compensation. Wouldn’t a CEO in the private sector perform a cost/benefit analysis before paying an employee an extra $1 million over 30 years for a single year of “temporary” service?

Chief Scott recently rewarded a lieutenant who was the former president of an identity union, but who never took the captain’s test, with a temporary captain’s position. She responded to the gift of the $1 million pension spike by suing SFPD and the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association with a $2.5 million discrimination lawsuit.

Including the aforementioned victim of discrimination, SFPD officers recently tallied that Chief Scott has promoted 11 “acting captains,” which means that he has unnecessarily tapped the SFERS pension fund for over an additional $11 million. The same SFPD inside tabulation determined that Chief Scott promoted 18 “acting lieutenants” who will receive pensions of 90% of the $20,000 salary increase over the next 30 years of life expectancy, for a total cost of $9.7 million. For every year’s layer of temporary lieutenants and captains, the cost to the SFERS’ pension is over $20 million. And it is pretty clear that the actuaries for SFERS are out of the loop on budgeting for these off-the-books pension raids via spiked salaries.

In August, Chief Scott asked sergeant and lieutenant candidates to submit their resumes for another round of promotions off the current Civil Service lists. Candidates on the lists are holding their breaths that Chief Scott will not use their resumes (technically called “secondary criteria”) against them by promoting lower-scoring candidates.

Consistent with that fear, also in August, Chief Scott promoted an attorney from the District Attorney’s office to Director of SFPD operations. Like the college music major who became SFPD’s Chief Financial Officer, the attorney’s LinkedIn account displays she has absolutely no operations experience. Meanwhile, a CPA, with oodles of government-certified operations experience, waits on the SFPD sergeant’s promotional list, while making approximately $5,000 per month less than a person who shares none of his expertise.

Patronage and embezzling taxpayer funds are close sisters, and combined with the Chief’s directionless staffing choices, is demoralizing the department and expediting SFPD retirements. Historically unprecedented, in the past few months six young officers have turned in their SFPD guns and stars to work for neighboring agencies. Likewise, it is unprecedented for federal agencies to come into the Tenderloin to conduct street level narcotics enforcement because both SFPD and the District Attorney’s office have failed to address the problem.

Sadly, perhaps Chief Scott’s promotion policies are just reflective of a two-tiered city:

A tourist has their car broken into and SFPD says: We’re too busy to come out. Go home and figure out how to file a police report on-line from our website.

A former major league baseball player has his car broken into and SFPD says: We will be out immediately to dust your car for prints.

A SFPD officer studies for hours for a promotional test: Sorry, your postgraduate degree is not a competitive resume.

A SFPD officer doesn’t even take the same promotional test: You only graduated high school? Don’t worry, we’ll make you a captain!

Chief Bill, it is time to make supporting your cops on the streets your first priority!

Lou Barberini spent 21 years with SFPD, after working for a Big Four firm and as a financial advisor. He has an MBA in Taxation, and currently provides retirement planning and wealth management through Nich Captial Partners.

SEPTEMBER 2019

Do as I say, Not as I do

SFPD’s Internal Affairs Cowboys

SFPD Academy 1996: Defrauding an Innkeeper Simulation Test

SFPD officer role-playing maître d’: Officer, we served this woman dinner and she is refusing to pay.

SFPD role-playing patron: Officer, I eat at five-star restaurants like this all the time and my husband is an attorney. These are the worst potatoes I have ever been served. They are terrible and I won’t pay for them.

Recruit (Me): This is not a crime of refusing to pay; this is a dispute over the quality of the food — at a five-star restaurant!

Proctor: Failed! You should have offered the maître d’ the opportunity to make a citizen’s arrest on the diner. If you let this diner get away, they will be lined up around the block to eat here for free!

Recruit: Isn’t it wrong to infer this is a crime, and arrest a patron? Wouldn’t we be suggesting negative publicity and damage to the restaurant’s reputation?

For businesses, like five-star restaurants, there is significant intangible value to a business’s brand and reputation that are passionately defended through legal and/or public relations’ departments. Similarly, it is the Internal Affairs division of every police department, like the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), to serve and protect the reputation of the organization they represent to ensure that the public trusts police officers, making interactions more conducive. Ninety-nine percent of Internal Affairs officers possess morally-aligned internal compasses and protect the reputation of SFPD.

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... the proximate timing of these investigations points to retaliation against officers who blew the whistle on other matters.”

However, the recent search warrants served on journalist Bryan Carmody by SFPD Internal Affairs(IA) may have damaged the public’s trust of SFPD, while the incident had the unique effect of uniting SFPD street cops and the media to the same side. Many SFPD cops viewed the department as prioritizing nailing the report-leaking officer rather than addressing elevated crime rates, while the media viewed SFPD as trampling over their rights just to mitigate an embarrassing situation.

It is hard to ascertain which SFPD officer signed off on the aggressive stance that a journalist gathering information had committed a crime. While the only person on SFPD’s command staff with a legal foundation from a law degree also happens to supervise the IA unit that served the search warrants on Carmody, more investigation is needed.

The search warrants also raise serious mismanagement issues regarding a small segment of “cowboys,” who have developed a reputation for retaliatory investigations, receiving off-the-books departmental promotions above their earned rank, and possessing sketchy resumes — all while these same IA officers pursued members of SFPD for lesser offenses.

If the search warrants disenfranchised the media’s and public’s trust in SFPD’s Internal Affairs, cops on the streets had already decided the unit was balanced on a wobbly three-legged stool, where investigations are dictated more by whom you offended, rather than any transgression committed.

A History of Retaliation

The following are examples of recent bullying investigations against SFPD officers that were launched soon after an officer raised a whistleblower-type issue.

One officer audio-taped another officer’s comments he felt were racially offensive. Three months after SF Human Resource Director Micki Callahan ruled in favor of the complainant officer, IA coincidentally launched an investigation into the officer who had mistakenly crisscrossed putting his California vehicle registration tabs on the wrong cars he owned. If a civilian stole and displayed false registration tabs that did not belong to him, a SFPD officer would write a 200-word report. For the complainant officer, who confused his own registration tabs, IA prepared a one-inch thick investigative file. Evidence of overkill?

A police union representative believed a conflict of policies existed when an IA captain arrived unannounced at an officer’s home and demanded answers to interrogating questions. The police union rep addressed this issue with a post on Facebook to a private group composed exclusively of members of the SFPD Police Officers’ Association: Does an off-duty officer, at home, have the right to consult with his union rep before he submits to a series of interrogatories from a captain in SFPD’s chain of command? A couple months later, IA launched an investigation against the union rep attributable to an anonymous complaint out of the private Facebook group. Deeming this a retaliatory act by SFPD, the union rep initiated a public records request to IA to learn the identity of his accuser. IA refused to respond to the request.

An officer documented a pay-to-play scheme where the husband of an outside consultant to the city was receiving campaign contributions from suppliers to the city, whose contracts the consultant was subsequently recommending the city should purchase. Within 20 days of the complaint, an investigative detention of a suspect made by the officer 14 years earlier was re-opened to determine if the officer’s background check on the suspect was a SFPD violation of computer use.

There clearly might be another side to these incidents. But it is an irrefutable fact that the proximate timing of these investigations’ points to retaliation against officers who blew the whistle on other matters.

Compensation Creating Conflicts of Interests

Many officers in the department viewed the compensation packages IA rewarded the “cowboys” with as a buyout to secure their loyalty and adherence. One of the officers involved in various stages of the Carmody search warrant was a lieutenant who was rewarded with a captain’s salary and a captain’s pension, even though the lieutenant never qualified for the captains’ civil service promotional list. And a sergeant was compensated with a lieutenant’s salary and pension, even though the sergeant never qualified for the lieutenants’ civil service promotional list.

On June 6, 2019 a group of several SFPD officers launched a civil suit because they had studied, tested, and were placed on sergeants’, lieutenants’, and captains’ civil service promotional lists, but were never promoted. IA snagged these promotions for “cowboys,” despite their never having completed the promotional tests.

Had command rightfully selected an IA captain or lieutenant from respective civil service promotional lists, those officers would have been in a position to question serving multiple search warrants on a journalist without jeopardizing a cut in pay. By contrast, the IA officers acquired through that Faustian bargain could not confront the command without risking their unearned pay raises and pension spikes. Essentially, IA embezzled the promotions of more-deserving City-approved lieutenants and captains just to puppetize his “cowboys” as compromised pawns.

Sketchy Resumes of Internal Affairs Officers

In addition to some IA officers receiving compensation above their earned rank, there were plenty of department whispers about the resumes of some of IA recruits. Had they conducted a simple Google search on one of the recent additions, they would have learned that the new sergeant (receiving lieutenant’s pay) had been investigated by the FBI, though they were unable to conclusively prove that the sergeant knew that the million-dollar remodel of his Marin home was financed by the $768,000 in Danielle Steel’s assets his wife "purportedly embezzled".

Two years earlier, the same sergeant had zealously campaigned to investigate other cops, but his transfer to IA was rescinded because of a vociferous chorus of complaints from within SFPD. Nevertheless, the sergeant was drafted for a second time in late 2018.

IA seems to consistently wear blinders, whether overlooking Article 1, Section 2b of the California Constitution protecting journalists’ sources, or adhering to the SFPD memorandum of understanding that fiats officers’ promotions shall be taken from civil service promotional lists, or by failing to Google the incriminating history of a sergeant who was part of the initial Carmody investigation.

Reputational Risk

Perhaps there was a calculated gamble using the-ends-justify-the-means search warrants knowing they could outlast the Chronicle’s and other media outlets’ attention spans. Or perhaps — as many street cops have voiced — the get-the-cop search warrant was orchestrated to distract from an exposé of a guest roster at an illicit crash pad, or to distract from the disappearance of the paramour, or to distract from the curious reason why the Medical Examiner suddenly canceled his request for SFPD to respond to Jeff Adachi’s suspicious death scene at 46 Telegraph Place.

Over time, foodies might forget that a five-star restaurant had patrons arrested. Similarly, as the media’s interest in SFPD’s violation of their rights fades when Carmody banks a lucrative settlement from the City as he likely will, the cops on the street will continue to remember the hypocrisy of IA pursuing officers’ venial violations while simultaneously supervising “cowboys” who made the task of patrolling more difficult because the “cowboys” seriously broke the law and damaged SFPD’s reputation.

Lou Barberini spent 21 years with SFPD after working for a Big Four firm and as a financial advisor. He has an MBA in Taxation, the AICPA’s Financial Specialist designation, and currently provides retirement planning and wealth management through Nich Capital Partners.

JULY 2019

Police Chief ScottSFPD Chief Masks Promotional Quota System

Circa 1996 SF Police Department (SFPD) Field Training Evaluations first phase: Over our car radio, Seth, my field-training officer (“FTO”) committed us to transport Sergeant Del Torre’s detainee back to Ingleside Station. In the cells at Ingleside, I emptied pint-sized wads of currency that were stuffed into the detainee’s pants pockets. After one of his hands was handcuffed to the cell bench, I squashed his money into a SFPD Currency Envelope.

“Ok Lou, let’s go in the other room and count the money. Then we’ll come back and have him sign a receipt.”

“Seth why can’t we count the money in front of him?”

“We’re the police, were not going to steal his money.”

“I’m more concerned about my CPA license than SFPD policy. I could lose my license for doing it this way. This guy doesn’t like us. He could accuse me of taking a million dollars off of him. How am I going to justify why we had to go to another room to count his money? What’s the risk of counting it in front of him? He’s the only person in the cells, he’s handcuffed, we’ve searched him, and there are two of us. Don’t you think it would be better optics to count the money here?”

“You’re right.”

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Chief Scott promoted 100% of the female candidates. In the first round of sergeants’ promotions, Chief Scott found fault with 70% of the white male candidates, promoting women and officers of color with lower test scores, instead.”

Seth was not the most flexible character. Deeply entrenched in some of his beliefs, his sole desire to be an FTO evaluator was to ensure the craft of policing was passed to the next generation of cops. For a veteran cop to make an independent decision based on a rookie cop’s recommendation — a suggestion that conflicted with widely-accepted SFPD procedures — exemplified Seth’s passion and loyalty to the Department.

New officers’ prior skill sets, such as a CPA’s knowledge of internal control procedures, are invaluable resources to progressing SFPD into the digital age. And it makes sense that those measurable skills, such as having passed the California Bar or being licensed as a CPA, should be factored into department promotions.

The promotional process within SFPD is already an arbitrary process. The existing SFPD sergeants’ and lieutenants’ promotional lists were based on a multiple-choice written pass/fail test, which diluted the efforts of officers who had studied diligently to improve their knowledge above their peers.

The written exam was followed by a subjectively scored oral exam. I sat for the most recent sergeant’s exam, which was unfairly and inconsistently administered by civilian role players. That is not my opinion; that was the decision of the SF Department of Human Resources, which rescinded the test. Over 400 officers, who had spent approximately a quarter-million dollars of vacation time to take the first invalidated oral exam, were again required to waste a second vacation day to take a revised oral exam. (I did not retake the second oral test.) The scores of the second revamped oral test were scored and codified into a ranked list of sergeant-candidates.

Since his arrival, Chief William Scott has frequently boasted about blindly adhering to the hyper-political 2016 Department of Justice assessment of SFPD. There is absolutely no evidence that the Chief has applied any of the statistical education of his college accounting degree to form his own independent interpretations and question the DOJ survey.

For instance, the DOJ reported on page 187 that women comprise 15% of SFPD. Despite the 15% composition, the DOJ surveyed that the rank of sergeant was 19.9% females, lieutenant 18% females, commander 20% females, and deputy chief 16% females. However, despite an overrepresentation of women in every rank other than captain, the DOJ determined that SFPD was completely guilty of gender bias because female captains were three-quarters of a human being deficient, at 14.29% representation.

The San Francisco chief’s position is also 100% male. To comply with the DOJ fractional proportionality requirement, perhaps Chief Scott should step aside for a female chief 15% of the time — which is probably way short of the percentage of nights he sleeps in his Los Angeles home.

From the top 157 candidates on the current sergeants’ promotional list, Chief Scott promoted 100% of the female candidates. In the first round of sergeants’ promotions, Chief Scott found fault with 70% of the white male candidates, promoting women and officers of color with lower test scores, instead. In Scott’s second and last wave of promotions, he still found excuses to skip over 33% of the white males with higher test scores. Scott’s 33% rejection rate for whites exceeds the rejection rate for African Americans of 10%, Hispanics of 20%, and women of 0%.

In the face of the overwhelming statistical evidence that his sergeants’ promotions were discriminatory, on the ABC Channel 7 news, Chief Scott spun, “We look at different set of experiences, different sets of training, different backgrounds, different cultural competencies.” This raises the issue of whether giving Chief Scott vague criteria on the definition of “secondary skills” opened the door for him to play with cronyism, nepotism, and accommodating the various identity tribes who were already overrepresented within SFPD. One must also question: What secondary skills were present in 100% of the female candidates, but absent in so many men?

The evidence that the Chief is using “secondary criteria” to cloak a quota system is evidenced by the fact that of three current SFPD officers who have passed the CPA exam, one of them is idling on the current sergeants’ list. Yet while the first sergeants were being promoted from the current list, Chief Scott’s Chief Financial Officer’s (CFO’s) resume was composed of a music undergrad major along with a master’s degree in political science. Consider: The government has certified that a male candidate on the sergeants’ list is proficient in accounting, internal control, auditing, operations management, government accounting, technology, income taxes, business law, and statistics, while the Chief paid a civilian CFO — who had never taken a class in debits and credits — significantly more money: $192,924 as a Deputy Director III in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2018.

Promotions based on race and identity harm the City in four ways:

The department would progress and run more efficiently if the Chief assigned officers with quantifiable skills to the positions that require such skills.

By appeasing and reinforcing the identity tribes through promotions and decorating police vehicles, the Chief is reinforcing the fractionation of the department. Giving only one of your children a gift makes the others feel slighted and resentful.

Because the Chief has promoted out-of-rank order on this recent test, officers promoted from previous tests have told me they believe coworkers now view them as delegitimized and due less respect under the perception that they, too, received the Chief’s gender/race thumb on the scale.

SFPD has perpetually struggled horribly with the presentation of crime stats that seem to change with the same fluidity as water. Placing someone in charge of reporting the crime stats who has expertise in statistics and a CPA license in jeopardy, would add credibility to the Department.

Twenty years ago, Officer Seth was capable of making an independent decision on an internal control suggestion against moving uncounted money into an adjacent room, while an accounting major Chief still allows uncounted suspects’ money to be driven across the city by a single unsupervised officer. This is the result of weighing the cultural competency of a degree in music — and recently promoting her higher than CFO — more than financial skills certified by the state.

Perhaps Chief Scott’s lack of comfort with statistics might explain why he has not challenged the preconceived 2016 DOJ coloring book. But the cost of Chief Scott’s inability to think independently, to ignore testing achievements by window dressing the department in identity colors, and stomping over a journalist’s constitutional rights to chase a possible cop leak, all contribute to a brew of soaring crime rates masked with fake statistics, a demoralized department that makes fewer arrests because they believe the Los Angeles-residing chief cares more about the racial proportionality of arrests than the cops, and a justifiably frightened citizenry.

Lou Barberini spent 21 years with SFPD after working for a Big Four firm and as a financial advisor. He has an MBA in Taxation, the AICPA’s Financial Specialist designation, and currently provides fiduciary retirement planning and investment services through Nich Capital Partners on assets held at Charles Schwab & Co.

JUNE 2019

RV campers in the Sunset DistrictIs the Sunset Becoming an RV Park?

Lou BarbariniCirca 2003: As we departed Cha Cha Cha, Jennifer was there with her hand out. Not your typical angry, grunge Haight Street panhandler, but more of a Summer of Love flower child. Pretty, but tired. I creased a few singles and tried out a new line, “Can you hook me up with some chiba?” (San Francisco urban language for “heroin.”) Jennifer responded, “Lets go.” Since I was off-duty, I had to tap the brakes: “Here’s my number. Hit me up tomorrow. I’m going away and want to re-up first.”

For several days, Jennifer led me to her hookups. Nondescript cars that circled the Panhandle, dropped off balloons, and then were off to service other customers. And coincidently, for a few days, each deliverer picked up an unmarked car trailing them until an eventual traffic stop was made by a black and white.

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Recently, there has been an increasing flotilla of people residing in RV’s and vans on the west side of the city. Living in vehicles has become most prevalent on Sunset Boulevard near San Francisco State University. On one morning, 17 vans and motorhomes were parked consecutively …”

Jennifer confirmed my belief in the prevalence of heroin in the panhandling and homeless communities. For the next several years, many times my partner and I were able turn requests for money into heroin purchases and arrests.

In her April 7, 2019 San Francisco Chronicle column, Heather Knight wrote: “A reader emailed me a photo the other day of a homeless man slumped in a Muni bus shelter next to an ad for the San Francisco Giants’ home opener with the slogan ‘It doesn’t get more S.F.’ These days, it seems it doesn’t get more S.F. then stark displays of the rich and the very poor as the middle class gets squeezed out entirely.”

RV's in the Sunset DistrictHomelessness is a complex issue, yet Heather Knight’s column oversimplifies the problem while perpetuating a false conclusion that a person sleeping in a bus stop shelter is the result of income inequalities. Ms. Knight might as well have attributed the homeless person’s status to the Giants’ dismal record, fewer fans attending games, and the reduced need for food service employees.

Beginning in January 2018, San Francisco Police Commander David Lazar has been addressing homeless problems through the Healthy Streets Operation Center (HSOC). The HSOC strategy is to coordinate a comprehensive response to homeless encampments between 40 SFPD officers assigned to HSOC, the Department of Public Works, the Department of Emergency Management, the Recreation and Parks Department, the Sheriff’s Department, San Francisco Housing Services, and the Department of Public Health.

HSOC was designed as a single phone number (3–1–1) resource for the public and district station officers to call for specialized assistance to handle homeless encampments, with the intention that this will alleviate the station officer’s workload so they can focus on other problems and crimes.

RV campersI polled numerous SF police officers who unanimously agree that, at a maximum, only 5% of the San Francisco homeless populations are “victims” of economic issues. The remaining 95% are split somewhat evenly between people with alcohol/drug addiction problems and people with mental illness issues. The HSOC’s own April 5, 2019 study similarly found that 41% of the homeless have an alcohol and/or a drug problem, 39% have psychiatric conditions, and 31% have chronic health problems. The similar assessments coming from the streets refute Ms. Knight’s misplaced claim income inequality causes homelessness.

Amongst the SF homeless population that HSOC deals with, there are differing degrees of living conditions ranging from those sleeping in doorways, to tent encampments, to motorhomes.

Recently, there has been an increasing flotilla of people residing in RV’s and vans on the west side of the city. Living in vehicles has become most prevalent on Sunset Boulevard near San Francisco State University. On one morning, 17 vans and motorhomes were parked consecutively along a three-tenths-of-a-mile stretch. The motorhomes overflow onto Winston Drive and are actually parked within Lowell High School’s campus parking lot. Motorhomes and vans are even parked on Portola Drive adjacent to Saint Francis Woods.

Rvs  - Sunset DistrictPer my SFPD sources, there are three segments of people residing in vehicles:

Homeless (frequently with bicycles attached to their vehicles). From a law enforcement prospective, not far behind this homeless segment is the narcotics trade and peripheral crimes.

Workers, who earn more money in San Francisco, and then return to their homes in lower-cost-of-living communities on the weekends. This isn’t about income inequality; it’s about people arbitraging earning income in expensive areas and spending their earnings in less expensive communities.

In extreme cases, recreational vehicle owners are renting out their parked vehicles on Craigslist in an Airbnb fashion.

It is difficult for SFPD to engage with people living in vehicles because the occupants are not compelled to open their doors to police officers. Parking in San Francisco is already scarce. The solution for the problem of people living in vehicles cannot be piecemeal restrictive parking as some San Francisco districts, such as the Portola District, have achieved.

Uniform restrictive parking must be applied throughout the city, or the west side will continue to be the welcoming place of least resistance to the motorhomes and vans. A surge in property crimes looms on the horizon, portending that every time we shop at the West Portal Walgreens, we will need to get a clerk to unlock the homeless-proof tubes of toothpaste.

Lou Barberini spent 21 years with SFPD after working for a Big Four firm and as a financial advisor. He has an MBA in Taxation, the AICPA’s Financial Specialist designation, and currently provides fiduciary retirement and investment services.

MAY 2019

Birds of a Feather…

Pac Heights Denizen Wades Into SFERS’ Swamp

Lou Barbarini
Lou Barbarini
Scott R. Heldfond
Hon. Scott R. Heldfond

The bothersome thing about the scandal of upper-crust parents cheating to get their kids into prestigious colleges wasn’t the deceit alone; it was the sense of entitlement in wanting to take a tax deduction for the bribes. These were transactions absent any sense of altruism, like volunteering to serve on a nonprofit board just to channel more business to their own company.

Speaking of which, this past month Mayor London Breed and her Chief of Staff Sean Elsbernd relieved Wendy Paskin-Jordan of her position on the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System (SFERS) board of trustees and replaced her with Pacific Heights high society San Franciscan Scott Heldfond, who is a world apart from Breed’s famous rise from housing developments.

Heldfond married the granddaughter of billionaire Benjamin Swig, who acquired the Fairmont Hotel and St. Francis Hotel in the 1940’s. Heldfond is now father-in-law to Eddie DeBartolo’s daughter. He is a lawyer and an insurance executive employed with AON Insurance, and has simultaneously served on several SF commissions, including the San Francisco Health Service System (HSS) for city employees.

The first question city employees should ask is why would Heldfond, whose spouse is a billionaire’s descendent, and who has a history of mishandling conflicting interests, venture into SFERS’ swamp?

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If this is an example of how Heldfond invests his personal assets — based on conflict-laden networking and apparently absent due diligence — he will fit in perfectly in the SFERS’ swamp. Perhaps Heldfond can even direct City business to one of his enterprises so at least he gets compensated for his altruism. ”

A Track Record of Conflicts of Interest

While serving on the HSS board, Heldfond’s employer AON Insurance obtained a lucrative contract with the same HSS system. Under pressure from the City Attorney regarding a relationship that appeared to be a conflict-of-interest “perception problem,” on September 1, 2011 Heldfond resigned from serving as a commissioner on the HSS board.

In Heldfond’s resignation letter, he showed neither remorse nor comprehension of the ramifications of AON Insurance receiving an inside advantage over its competition. He stated: “The fact is I feel good about AON getting the business. HSS will save a whopping $1.4 million under the new contract.”

Heldfond’s quote of the $1.4 million in savings is specious. Yes, AON Insurance might have generated $1.4 million in cost savings to the City, but did it come as a tradeoff to sacrificing insurance coverage? Is it any different than my apples-to-oranges claim that I could save SFPD millions in fleet costs by substituting bicycles for vehicles? Without having an HSS board independent from AON Insurance’s interests, we will never know what an objective comparison would have determined.

Considering Heldfond’s misinterpretation of the City Attorney findings, it is incredibly suspicious that Mayor Breed and Sean Elsbernd intentionally bypassed contacting the City Attorney for a clearance on Heldfond by running a “conflicts check” before appointing him to SFERS’ board.

[Editor: For discussion of Heldfond’s previous service to the city, see Patrick Monette-Shaw's article in this issue of the Observer.]

Heldfond’s India Connection

In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle touted Vijay Mallya as the head of “a multinational conglomerate. He has homes around the world. The walls of his Sausalito mansion feature Picasso, Renoir, Chagall, and Turner. He’s got two yachts in California, a few in India, and owns the famed Kalizma — a 165-foot Edwardian yacht once owned by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. He owns a Boeing 727. He says he is ‘the king of good times.’”

At the age of 22, Vijay Mallya’s father was appointed to the board of directors of the Indian conglomerate United Breweries Group (UB Group). Inexperience inherited inexperience, when in 1983 at the age of 27, Vijay took over the company following his father’s passing.

In 1997, three years after Mendocino Brewery of Ukiah went public, Vijay Mallya, through United Breweries bought approximately 70% of the company with much of his stock registered in a Panamanian shell company: Inversiones Mirabel S.A. Per SEC filings, Scott Heldfond joined the Mendocino Brewery board of directors in 2005 and acquired 2% of the company stock.

In 2003, through United Breweries Vijay Mallya started Kingfisher Airlines. The airline was initially financed with massive debt and lost money every year.

In 2009, Mayor Gavin Newsom launched the nonprofit San Francisco–Bangalore Sister City Initiative, with Heldfond participating in the kickoff and serving as a board of director. Coincidently, United Breweries (UB) is headquartered in Bangalore. On the San Francisco–Bangalore Sister City web page, Heldfond boasts he is “an advisor to UB Group (India) and Kingfisher (India).”

During Heldfond’s 14-year relationship with Mallya’s Mendocino Brewery, UB Group, and Kingfisher Airlines companies, it is unclear what impact Heldfond’s advisory services had. Unsurprisingly, king of good times Mallya’s personal empire collapsed under the weight of the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines and Mallya’s $1+ billion in debt owed to Indian creditors. With Indian regulatory bodies issuing an arrest warrant for money laundering and “round tripping” (inflating invoices to overseas companies and then repatriating the money), Mallya fled India in March 2016 and has been hiding out in London as a fugitive fighting extradition.

Heldfond’s LinkedIn biography indicates he was a director of UBICS for 15 years, until 2015. UBICS is the information technology component of of Mallya’s UB Group. In 2010, Heldfond’s filed his Form 700 Statement of Economic Interests as HSS Commissioner showing he earned $100,000+ as a UBICS board director, the same year the company’s comptroller, John Tain, resigned for embezzling $913,230. Tain subsequently served 33-months in a federal prison.

In no way should Vijay Mallya’s financial situation be interpreted as a reflection on Scott Heldfond. However, it does raise questions as to both the effectiveness of Heldfond’s financial or legal guidance to Mallya, his motivation for the Bangalore Sister City project, and his association with the king of good times who allegedly committed gigantic financial crimes. It would be one thing if Heldfond just invested in and served as board member next to Mallya in an Ukiah brewery, while it is quite another to have followed Mallya 8,700 miles to provide him with consulting services. There appears to be indisputable evidence that Heldfond and Mallya have been more intertwined than appears on the surface.

Either Heldfond wasn’t savvy enough to recognize Mallya was financially spiraling — and, therefore, Heldfond is not qualified to sit on SFERS’ board as a fiduciary — or worse, perhaps Heldfond was complicit.

Heldfond’s situation is analogous to the FBI arresting and successfully prosecuting a San Francisco police officer’s wife for embezzling millions from a Pacific Heights author, and then SFPD promoting the police officer to an Internal Affairs position of investigating other SFPD officers (actually a true story). Either the cop, like Heldfond, is very poor at his craft and therefore unqualified for his new position, or both the cop and Heldfond are guilty of looking the other way when the financial crimes were committed in their presence. Red flags either way.

Conflict: Heldfond’s Insurance Business

Any CPA selected to consult SFERS on internal control measures to reduce potential conflicts of interest would draw an immediate distinction between an active fireman or a retired SFPD captain sitting on a board of directors versus an insurance company executive, especially one having a history of compromising conflicts of interest. Heldfond essentially will be a referee in the game AON Insurance plays in.

Heldfond — by voting or not voting for a competitor who is bidding to serve SFERS — affects AON Insurance’s business. This is not to say that Heldfond will do this, but from an internal control vantage he will definitely be in a position to reward business to competitors who can later shift reciprocating soft dollar business back to AON Insurance. Our concerns should be heightened because of Heldfond’s failure to recognize the gravity of his 2011 ethics violations, and his own sense of entitlement, that forced him to resign from the HSS.

A Page From Elsbernd’s Playbook: The No-huddle Offense

Breed and Elsbernd moved quickly to appoint Scott Heldfond to SFERS’ board by skipping the customary “conflicts check” with the City Attorney. This speaks volumes about their fear of delving into Heldfond’s existing conflicts. It’s also a reminder of Elsbernd’s 2012 no-huddle offensive to get Jay Huish, who has similar baggage, promoted to be SFERS’ CEO just before Elsbernd’s own appointment to Retirement Board expired. Rush the questionable candidate through, before the defense can ask questions.

In 2018, Mendocino Brewery and its flagship Red Tail Ale went out of business. If this is an example of how Heldfond invests his personal assets — based on conflict-laden networking and apparently absent due diligence — he will fit in perfectly in the SFERS’ swamp. Perhaps Heldfond can even direct City business to one of his enterprises so at least he gets compensated for his altruism.

Lou Barberini spent 21-years with SFPD after working for a Big Four firm and as a financial advisor.

April 2019

Doing the Opposite

Lou Barbarini

George Costanz-ing at SFPD

Circa June 1996: It was the second day for the 186th Academy Class of SFPD. As an icebreaker, our SFPD instructor asked each prospective officer to share with the class where they expected to be in the department 25-years in the future. I said that I wanted to be riding a bicycle — amazed I could actually get paid for something I would do for free. My classmate Drew (alias) followed with, “I want to be chief.” —That literally sounds and reads arrogant. However, the delivery was followed by Drew’s introduction of his trademark giggle, which caused the entire class to roar— more at his chuckle than at the wisecrack itself.

The humor never subsided. Throughout the academy, Eric, the Eddies, Drew, and I frequently bonded over a Tower Lodge beer on our way home, finalized with a final post-graduation toast at the Twin Peaks scenic overlook, as we contemplated the future effects of patrolling the streets below. The next morning we all went our separate ways, to different stations for daily evaluations in the field training program, followed by a year’s rotation in a probation station before being assigned to a permanent station.

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3C71 was not exactly loved by some segments of the Potrero Hill housing developments. Our drive up the 900 block of Connecticut would be greeted daily by the choreograph of youngsters turning their heads to spit in unison. It wasn’t us specifically, it was our blue uniforms.”

After a year at my permanent station, I transferred to Bayview— a vast district composed of middleclass neighborhoods, industry, Potrero Hill view homes, and housing developments. Bayview is one of the busiest stations with an organized chaos of citizen calls for service. We joked that time in the Bayview should be measured in dog years — because the amount of critical incidents in the Bayview compressed into a single year was the equivalent of seven years at a sleepy Westside district station.

At Bayview, I joined my academy classmates Eric and Drew in a three-man sector car, 3Charlie71 (3C71) — a “housing car” assigned to the Potrero Hill public housing development. Like the contrast of three small town Deer Hunter friends converging in a volatile Vietnam prisoner camp, there was surrealism to the reunion of three Academy friends from the theories and solitude of a classroom to the split-second commotion of the Bayview.

To Drew and I, the gravity of Bayview housing patrol was eye-opening. But I always wondered how comparatively insignificant our daily events were to someone like Eric, who joined SFPD via combat action as a marine in the Gulf War.

Drew was a dual citizen, the result of his San Francisco mother marrying and following his father back to County Offaly, Ireland. In, as I pronounced it: “County Awfully,” Drew grew up aspiring to return to San Francisco and to become a policeman. He was … living his dream.

3C71 was not exactly loved by some segments of the Potrero Hill housing developments. Our drive up the 900 block of Connecticut would be greeted daily by the choreograph of youngsters turning their heads to spit in unison. It wasn’t us specifically, it was our blue uniforms.

In this unappreciated environment, Drew’s self-deprecation, sarcasm, and trademark giggle kept the mood in our car light. I would repeatedly utter, “It was a bad day if we went more than six minutes without Drew making us laugh.”

The “Thank you Challenge”

At the end of a watch, Lieutenant Mike Stasko called the 3C71 into his office and informed us our job description was expanding. Bayview residents had been complaining about the depreciation of driving skills on Third Street and, the higher-ups had determined that traffic enforcement was the most viable remedy.

Sacrilegious! What type of officer could actually enjoy ruining someone’s day with a citation? (I was of the school that warnings were just as effective as issuing a citation.)

Stasko was not without his own sense of humor and had the ability to raise sarcasm to epic levels. Our rebuttal delivered with the sincerity of selling the substitute teacher that your regular teacher had actually canceled today’s test, was forthcoming.

“There are felonies being committed by the minute, and you are using us for vehicle code violations?”

“The bad guys will go wild if they know we aren’t around.”

“The housing developments will go to sh*t.”

“With us doing traffic, you will single-handedly be driving up the city’s crime rate.”

Stasko didn’t budge, but the hyperbolic cycle was feeding on itself, and bled out of the L.T.’s office and into the report writing room.

“You are just afraid to write tickets because you have a lousy personality and it will trigger citizen complaints.”

“Personality? You couldn’t sell pizza to starving eye-talians.”

“Ha, I could sell ice to Eskimos. I am so smooth that when I write tickets the drivers thank me!”

Thus we inadvertently started the “thank you challenge.” During every traffic stop, the approaching officer had to elicit a “thank you, officer” from the driver, while the competing officer stood on the opposite side of the vehicle as a verifying witness.

“Ma’am, you don’t know how hard this is for me to write this ticket. The neighbors are complaining and I am only doing this to service this community. Please don’t let this ruin your day, nor do I want you to think you are a bad person for this. Think of this just as a reminder to be careful, like how you probably drive more cautiously after a close call with another car. This ticket is like that close call. Just a reminder, because we don’t ever want you to get hurt.”

“Thank you, Officer. I know you are just doing your job.”

The “thank you’s” came much easier than expected, which raised the stakes to how many consecutive “thank-you’s” each of us could acquire. Our goal was still the bare minimum of citations, but the “thank you’s” definitely removed the sting of being the mean cop.

Doing the Opposite

In The Opposite episode of the Seinfeld television series, George Costanza discussed with Jerry Seinfeld that every decision he had made in life turned out to be wrong. Thus, doing the opposite of what he normally would have done must be the right thing to do. George approaches a pretty woman at the coffee counter with the unlikely line: “Hi. My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents,” and for the rest of the episode, George achieved great success.1

With our shift ending at 10 pm, it’s unlikely any of us actually saw “The Opposite” episode of Seinfeld. But on a slow day in the 3C71 car, Drew lamented the neighborhood’s unfriendliness towards us. Drew instigated, “Today, we are going to be the ‘happy cops.’ We are going to mess with everyone’s heads and do the exact opposite of what they expect us to do. We are going to kill the hostility with kindness.”

It started slow, engaging every person walking on the street, “Great weather today sir. How are you?” And as usual, one officer pushed the envelope a little further open. To a person running to catch a MUNI bus that had just pulled away, “Jump in. We’ll give you a ride to catch up to that bus.”

We were fighting to outdo each other.

Flashing the who-has-the-biggest-personality contest struck a crescendo when we saw Busby — a.k.a., the Lieutenant — the owner of an impressive arrest resume struggling to transport groceries from his car to his housing unit.

“Here, let us help you.”

“Uhhhh?”

“We want to help you.”

“Ooookay… but you can’t come into my house. You can only bring them to the front door. I’m not consenting to you entering or searching my home or my car.”

“No problem. We’re the friendly cops, we are just here to help the neighborhood.”

Twenty years later, I remember the friendly cop experiment clearly, and yet have no recollection of the run we had to race to that returned us to reality.

This article is not about us being better cops than others. The reality is that the “thank you” challenge and friendly cop experiment were born from the merger of curiosity, boredom, and clowning around. For me personally, learning the limitless power boundaries of playing the good cop or doing-the-opposite of what is expected, de-escalated a lot of tough situations in the future. Those lessons only came to me and others because we always fed on that stupid giggle-cackle that was first heard in the SFPD Academy many years back.

Éire go Brách, God Bless America!

Lou Barberini spent nine years undercover and four years as a bike beat officer with SFPD. He has an MBA in Taxation and currently provides fiduciary retirement planning and investment services for assets held at Charles Schwab & Co.

March 2019

1 youtube.com/watch?v=RerJWv5vwxc

Fabricated Stats Used to Justify …

SFPD Scarecrows Replacing Clark Kents

SFPD Circa 2012

Midday during my Noe Valley bike beat, a text came in. An informant with a history of providing credible information conveyed someone was trying to sell an assault rifle in the Tenderloin. His veracity increased with the next text: A photo of the assault rifle, followed by a third text providing the seller’s cell number.

I called Tenderloin Station to relay the information to Tenderloin undercover officers, but like present day staffing, the Tenderloin Station had no plainclothes officers working in 2012. I initiated a call into the seller, agreeing to meet him at Eddy and Hyde Streets. Next, I called Mike, the senior plainclothes officer at Mission Station, to posse-up undercovers for a trip to the Tenderloin, but first we had to inform our bosses (I am being intentionally vague) we were going to leave our district.

Unfortunately, bosses told us they were too understaffed due to a tentative naked protest at 17th and Castro Streets. Despite both robberies and burglaries increasing at a 33% rate, and property crimes at a 50% rate, during a two-year period nudity took precedence over a gun designed for mass killings. The seller melted into the chaotic fabric of the Tenderloin.

SFPD was changing!

San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego share similar economic backdrops and enforce a single California Penal Code. Yet, according to the per capita larceny graph (above), derived by dividing the larcenies disclosed in the annual FBI Uniform Crime Reports, by the 2010 U.S. census figures, only SF experienced a seismic spike in crimes starting in 2011.

The 2011 inflection point is attributable to four events: 1) Public Defender Jeff Adachi unveiled videos of undercover officers performing in a less-than-virtuous manner, 2) Mayor Gavin Newsom moved George Gascón from being SFPD’s Chief of Police to being San Francisco’s District Attorney, 3) A new SFPD chief replaced Gascón, and 4) Governor Brown signed AB 109 which transferred “nonviolent” felons from state to local jails and effectively reduced parole violations.

This column is not an attempt to resolve the chicken-and-egg argument of whether crime is up because of the District Attorney’s tepid response to SFPD arrests, or whether SFPD is not making quality enough arrests for the District Attorney’s office to prosecute. The graph (above) clearly illustrates the decline in larcenies attributable to the iPhone kill-switch in late 2013, and the 2015 resurgence of larcenies coinciding with the implementation of the Prop 47 decriminalization measure. For the ten-year period of the graph, the surge in larcenies appears to have affected SF more than the other three large California cities. This article is about the increase in crime rates correlated to SFPD’s reducing or eliminating undercover operations and the current SFPD administration’s continued use of fabricated statistics to justify cops walking beats. This article doesn’t address the greater effectiveness of bike beats versus foot beat.

Although Adachi’s videos in 2011 led to only one direct firing, SFPD’s reaction to the videos was to completely trim citywide plainclothes units of Narcotics and the Gang Task Force to skeleton staffs, while completely wiping out undercover operations at district stations. Over 100 potential Clark Kents surfacing to rescue citizens or startle criminals were replaced with police scarecrows fixed to 100-square-foot crime hotspots.

Immediate consequences to the phase-out of SFPD plainclothes were twofold. First, before someone commits a crime they generally swivel around looking for law enforcement. When plainclothes officers are working, potential criminals have to peer into every civilian car to rule out whether undercover officers will jump out. Undercovers not only are a hindrance to the criminals’ trade, but they keep perp’s guessing. It didn’t take long for the street to realize SFPD had retreated from proactive police work and undercover operations — as the chart shows, from 2011 on criminals were able to relax their own counter-surveillance.

Second, the internal hierarchy of respect for the art of police work was expelled. For close to a century, if an SFPD officer did well in patrol, they were moved to a district station plainclothes position. If they did well as an undercover within their district, they graduated to a citywide specialized undercover unit. This meritocracy of talent served as a carrot for uniform patrol officers to be proactive and stop crimes before they happened.

SFPD Circa 2012: A boss (me being intentionally vague again) at Mission Station informed me that Noe Valley residents were complaining about how many packages Andy was stealing off doorsteps. I suggested we use the “narcotics-buying tactic,” such that when Andy was seen on his bicycle, we put marked city currency into a package, have FedEx set the package on a stairway, and then have a second police officer arrest Andy after the officer recovered the marked city money in Andy’s pockets.

The boss’ response was for me to remain conspicuously in uniform.

Two weeks later on November 27, 2012 in a story that made news worldwide, Sonya — exasperated with the epidemic of package thefts — went vigilante. A stone’s throw from Mark Zuckerberg’s house, Sonya waited for Andy to steal her FedEx delivery, then doused him with bear spray.

In 2015, with auto break-ins surging, SFPD created an 18-person, citywide Patrol Bureau Task Force (PBTF) and some stations started fielding undercover teams. In 2016 larcenies dropped 9.5% and robberies declined by 12%. The street took note: The Clark Kents were back.

SFPD Circa June 2016 Central Station (North Beach) plainclothes officers were on an undercover operation looking for auto break-in burglars when a crew of men robbed three female tourists. On a steep street no foot beat officer had ever travailed, one officer sprinted straight up the hill, while the rest of his Clark Kent team converged on the robbers (see video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yszXyaLoUc). A by-product robbery arrest resulted from this undercover auto break-in operation!

Larcenies and robberies declined in 2016. For the first eight months of 2017, Police Chief Will Scott claimed auto break-ins increased. (For the majority of this period, auto break-ins weren’t disclosed on the SFPD website: SanFranciscoPolice.org.) In September 2017, despite PBTF’s 228 auto burglary arrests in just 23 months, Chief Scott disbanded the PBTF team, moving them with narcotics officers to foot beats.

For the first 12-months of Scott’s new foot beat experiment, the SFPD website documented larcenies increased 10.5%, from 37,445 to 41,368. To spin the disastrous results, on December 5, 2018 SFPD touted a reduction in property crimes in a San Francisco Chronicle article:

“The report by UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy found that daily incidents in San Francisco of larceny theft — which include vehicle break-ins — dropped nearly 17 percent, and assaults dropped 19 percent in the months after Chief Bill Scott reassigned 69 officers to foot patrols on Sept. 1, 2017.”

There are five major problems with the Goldman School study:

First, the dinky four-month sampling is too small of a timeframe to extrapolate any trends.

Second, a two-month base of larcenies in the prime summer tourist season should not be compared to two months of the less-touristy fall.

Third, concurrent with the elimination of undercovers, then-Mayor Lee simultaneously rerouted car victims’ larceny calls from SFPD dispatch lines to the 311-call center, where to this day victims are still instructed to file their reports online. The mayor’s message was, “Your loss is so common, we don’t care,” which surely discouraged victims from reporting crimes, resulting in understated post-September 1, 2017 larceny stats.

Fourth, while the Goldman School study claimed a 17% decline in larcenies for the period, SFPD’s website reported a 10.6% increase in larcenies — a 27-percentage point disparity:

During this two-month period of foot beat patrols, SFPD’s website reported burglaries, auto break-ins, and robberies increased 22%, 13.6%, and 4% respectively. In spite of these surging crime rates and larcenies increasing 10.6% from 6,660 to 7,368, the Goldman School somehow calculated 7,368 was a 17% smaller number than 6,660. Is this some sort of Berkeley “new math”? How did Chief Scott not understand larcenies increased under foot beats?

Fifth, page nine of the Goldman School study disclosed that they visited ten SFPD district stations and determined 16,248 larcenies cases occurred during the four-month period. Yet when SFPD headquarters accumulated the total larcenies for this period, SFPD HQ reported only 14,028 larcenies. Somehow, 13.6% — 2,220 — of the larcenies calculated by the district stations vanished between the stations’ books and SFPD headquarters’ consolidation of the stats.

Retired SFPD December 16, 2018: In the Central District, as we were scurrying out of the rain a guy lollygagged up the street before conspicuously settling into a seat on the front staircase — in the rain — as if he was soaking up an Indian summer evening. I noticed an adjacent garage door had never closed, revealing several bicycles hanging from the ceiling. I jogged up the stairs past him, and banged on all three front doors, Fred Flintstone-style. The suspect dawdled off to his next opportunity.

This thwarted burglary occurred on a steep city street surveilled by undercover officers, but which was never visited by foot beats. This is the Prop 47-decriminalization crowd peddling foot beats under the theory it’s better to arrest nobody, than to have arrest rolls deviate one iota from a tacit demographic quota system. While Chief Scott shops for his next Southern California chief’s job, citizens and tourists will have to endure his foot beat experiment, unreliable statistics, and the embarrassment the City has become.

Lou Barberini spent nine years undercover and four years as a bike beat officer with SFPD. He has an MBA in Taxation and currently provides fiduciary retirement planning and investment services through Nich Capital Partners on assets held at Charles Schwab & Co.

February 2019

Lou Barbarini

Other People's Money

SFERS' Limousine and Vacation Fund

The consistent theme in my recent Westside Observer columns has been that the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System (SFERS), its Trustees' Board, and its administrators to the $20+ billion pension fund and the voluntary $3+ billion deferred comp savings plan, have:

quotes

Limo Bill" claimed there were no taxis available in Manhattan, so he was "forced" to take a limousine to the airport. Really? No taxis were available in all of Manhattan, but "Limo Bill" was able to flag down a limousine in the middle of the street? Has Coaker not heard of Uber?"

1. Consistently sought the most expensive and opaque products;

2. Allowed politics to influence and compromise their fiduciary responsibilities;

3. Directed the $20+ billion pension to subpar returns during a soaring bull market, which lowered the pension's fully-funded level over 20 percentage points;

4. Remained oblivious to what or where the deferred comp pension assets are invested in; and

5. Prepared financial statements without supporting documentation.

If there was any doubt SFERS' administrators and its Retirement Board are ignorant to the nuances of the pension assets they steward, David Sirota, writing for the U.S. edition of The Guardian, exposed how SFERS was apparently illiterate to the fact that a Blackstone hedge fund investment had siphoned off city employees' pension money to contribute to a 2018 California ballot proposition.1

More concerning than unaccounted-for pension assets is, it appears that both SFERS' top administrators and its Retirement Board seem not to care. An example of the prevailing condescending attitude is a public employee's $150 limousine ride to a New York City airport — where New York airport taxi runs are capped at $66 per trip.

SFERS' Chief Investment Officer Bill "Limousine" Coaker is the highest-paid San Francisco city employee, while steering the city employees' pension to below average profits.

Bill "Limousine" Coaker is SFERS' Chief Investment Officer who was hired to enable hedge funds entry into the city employees' pension investments. He is the highest-paid San Francisco city employee, while steering the city employees' pension to below average profits. In his October 2016 reimbursement request, "Limo Bill" claimed there were no taxis available in Manhattan, so he was "forced" to take a limousine to the airport. Really? No taxis were available in all of Manhattan, but "Limo Bill" was able to flag down a limousine in the middle of the street? Has Coaker not heard of Uber? Or, is this just a fabricated cover-up to mask the typical pre-scheduling required for limousine service?

On this particular trip to New York to attend Blackstone hedge fund presentations, "Limo Bill" arrived on the scene late on Monday, October 17, 2016 and took the limo to the airport on Friday around 1:30 p.m. Presumably, Blackstone executives leave work at 1:30 p.m. Then, after spending only Saturday in the Bay Area, "Limo Bill" was back at SFO on Sunday to return to New York, charging the pension $99 fund for extra leg room. "Limo Bill" spent all day Monday meeting again with Blackstone, then flew business class back to San Francisco the next day, in effect having returned to New York for a single calendar day.

San Francisco city employees should question why anyone would check in and out of a hotel twice, spend 11 round-trip hours in the air, fight traffic in his 60+ mile commute to and from his home to the airport, go through TSA twice, just to turnaround and fly out of SFO for a Blackstone visit yet again, a mere 39 hours after landing. A second trip presumably necessitated because everyone from Blackstone immediately disappeared on Friday at 1:30 p.m. after the Blackstone conference concluded. Any pragmatic business owner would have crammed the extra meetings into the first visit or relied on video conferencing. "Limo Bill" commutes to visit Blackstone the way city employees hop on Muni. Only a month earlier, "Limo Bill" had flown Virgin Premium Economy ($2,700!) to spend three days with Blackstone, perhaps oblivious that Blackstone had peeled off city employees' money for political purposes. But then again, "Limo Bill" is spending other people's money — from the city employees' pension fund.

Consider, CIO Coaker is hardly the only SFERS fiduciary to bleed the pension fund for travel costs. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 2018:

In March 2018, Retirement Board Commissioner Leona Bridges hit SFERS' pension fund for the "Second Annual Delegation to Africa," which included stops in Dakar, Senegal; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Cape Town, South Africa. Two months ago, Ms. Bridges requested the pension fund pay for her travel and attendance at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference in September in Washington, D.C. — a worthy cause — but how was that conference applicable to finance or our city employees' pension fund? Other people's money.

Retirement Board Commissioner Wendy Paskin-Jordan parlayed her SFERS' pension fund travel perks to gain her United Airlines' highest frequent-flyer status: "Premier 1K." In the aforementioned fiscal year, Wendy went to New York twice, attended a seminar in Chicago, and incurred an $8,000 flight to attend a conference in Berlin, Germany. City employees paid a total of $16,000 for that three-day seminar within Ms. Paskin's eight-day vacation to Germany. In October 2018, she tapped the city employees' pension fund again for $16,000 to attend seminars in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia.

Perhaps it's because Paskin-Jordan's private financial advisory business and her ability to deduct the costs of international seminars from her firm's taxes that she is uniquely the only SFERS-related person who always pays for her for own flights, produces tax receipts, and then seeks reimbursement from the city employees' pension fund.

With all the worldly financial knowledge Wendy has gained at the city employees' expense, it is clearly ironic that her firm's registration with the SEC documents that her firm's clients are too good for insurance annuities investments, while she has never once objected to churning through insurance annuities for the 28,000 city employees in SFERS' deferred comp plan. Other people's money.

By no means are these the only SFERS staff and Retirement Board members using the SFERS $20+ billion pension for globetrotting vacations. During the aforementioned 12-month period, while badly underperforming simple stock index funds SFERS indulged on international trips to: London, Helsinki, Florence, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Singapore, China, Okinawa, Japan, Taiwan, Paris, and San Paulo. And, because SFERS and the Retirement Board is spending other people's money, they deem themselves above the city departments' and mayor's requirement of flying coach.

And, it's not just the glamorous nature of places SFERS deems they must visit; it's the vanity seminars they attend.

For instance, in July 2017, SFERS' board president attended a three-day seminar at Harvard University designed for "board members of large publically-held companies." The city employees' pension fund, which is obviously not a public company, paid a whopping $9,250 tuition for the president's three days to schmooze at Harvard.

After attending the Harvard seminar, at the May 2018 Retirement Board meeting the president mocked this column's use of the words "virtual" and "synthetic" to describe the unaccounted for deferred comp savings plan. If I may paraphrase Matt Damon's Good Will Hunting take on Harvard: "This is certain! Fifty years from now, you will wake up and realize you wasted $9,000 of your co-workers' money on a three-day seminar you coulda got for $1.50 in computer charges at the public library." Had the board president simply searched Google for Investopedia, the online financial encyclopedia, he would have learned that annuity components are described as "virtual, (if not exact) clones of their counterparts." Surely, the board president's fellow SFPD officers would have benefited more from him researching insurance annuities at the library or on-line, rather than taking an inapplicable $9,250 course at Harvard. Other people's money.

This is clearly transactional. SFERS' administrators and the Retirement Board enable both of SFERS' two funds to accommodate the political winds, while being handsomely repaid, fêted with ostentatious travel to exotic places. It isn't just the air miles, seminar tuitions, hotels, and limousines; it's SFERS' and the Retirement Board's lower-tier pension performance peddled to city employees' and taxpayers as stellar investment performances. During the 2017/2018 fiscal year, despite my deferred comp performance beating the pension fund by 3.9 percentage points — a 34% greater return than the pension fund "Limo Bill" oversees — the city paid "Limo Bill" a $223,000 bonus for his underperformance (or his enabling), for a total income of $550,000! This is certain: If "Limo Bill" replaced his jet set lifestyle with $1.50 in computer charges at the public library, taxpayers and city employees would be a hell of a lot wealthier.

Do these enablers care about their co-workers? Pass the Grey Poupon, please?

Lou Barberini's family lives in the West Portal area. He has an MBA in Taxation and currently provides fiduciary retirement planning and investment services through Nich Capital Partners on assets held at Charles Schwab & Co.

December 2018


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