Lee Heidhues 7.15.2022

High and middle level attorneys and staff who worked with  Progressive DA Chesa Boudin were summarily fired in The Friday Morning Massacre.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed’s Puppet District Attorney Brooke Jenkins campaigned eight months as a leader in the political coup d’état  which ousted the democratically elected Progressive DA.

The Puppet DA was handsomely rewarded for her political treachery and dirty work. Jenkins sits in Chesa Boudin’s office without having to face the voters and earn the job.

The Puppet DA purged the office today.

The Puppet DA is bragging about the fact her top four deputies are women.  This is small consolation to the people who labored tirelessly with Chesa Boudin for 30 months to bring Progressive and fair Justice to the DA’s office.

It’s all being swept away in the aftermath of the 7.2MM MAGA funded Coup d’état which overthrew Chesa Boudin on June 7, 2022.

Kudos to SF Gate reporter Eric Ting who is the one scribe telling the World what is REALLY going on in The Puppet DA’s office.

Excerpted from SF Gate – Eric Ting – 7.15.2022

New San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins fired 15 people in her office on Friday, with one in particular prompting an outcry. It comes in the first week after Jenkins was appointed to her role by Mayor London Breed following the recall of Chesa Boudin.

“I want to commend @BrookeJenkinsSF for firing me today,” wrote Dylan Yep, who was previously in the data department. “I had every intention to continue working to fight the obscene racial disparities that permeate the San Francisco criminal legal system — a goal she only has interest in paying lip service to. She was wise to hang up before I could get a single word in — otherwise she would’ve been forced to answer for her racist, carceral, and data-free policy plans. Or explain why I was fired.”

 

Managing Attorney Arcelia Hurtado was the first member of the office to lose her job. She had served as the DA Office’s representative on the city’s Innocence Commission, which investigates potential wrongful convictions in the city. The commission was established by Boudin in 2020, and Jenkins signaled support for allowing it to continue in a KQED interview on Thursday.

“The decision by Brooke Jenkins to fire Arcelia Hurtado is deeply concerning, especially given the promise she made just yesterday to allow the Innocence Commission to continue to function,” said University of San Francisco law professor Lara Bazelon, the chair of the commission. “Arcelia was critical to the commission’s function. It is also concerning because Arcelia was the head of the DA’s post-conviction review unit, which, among other things, is currently considering the petition by Mayor London Breed’s brother Napoleon Brown to be granted leniency and released from prison following his conviction for carjacking and manslaughter. I can see no legitimate reason for firing an attorney as rigorous, competent and ethical as Arcelia.”

Other notable staffers fired included Kate Chatfield, Boudin’s chief of staff; Tal Klement, assistant chief of general crimes; Rachel Marshall, Boudin’s communications director and policy advisor; Mikaela Rabinowitz, director of data, analytics and research; and Lateef Gray, managing attorney of the independent investigations bureau, the department that oversees investigations into police officers.

“I came to DA Boudin’s office to fight for criminal justice reform; that battle has never felt more urgent,” Marshall said in a statement. “There is no question that DA Jenkins’ approach differs dramatically from my values. My passion for the mission to reform our legal system is stronger than ever and I am eager for the next opportunity to effect change.”

“San Francisco has taken 10 giant steps backwards,” Rachel Marshall said. “Jenkins was dangled in front of us because she’s a Black woman, which was supposed to make us feel better, but the firings are terrifying. I hope this raises the ire of the left, and makes us realize we must fight or we will lose. We always say a shift to the right can’t happen in California, but it is happening right here in San Francisco.”

On Twitter, Kate Chatfield  blasted the firings.

“The resentencing/innocence commission unit: gone. Police accountability: gone. Data and transparency: gone. Political corruption investigation: gone. Champion for victims and children: demoted,” she wrote.

Kate Chatfield also sharply criticized framing from news outlets that Jenkins’ first wave of senior staff hires were all women. “We’re seeing Girl Bosses for mass incarceration,” she wrote.

Several fired staffers other than Chatfield also left Jenkins pithy notes on Twitter on their way out.

“While en route to Santa Barbara for a wedding with fam, new SF DA Brooke Jenkins called and fired me on spot,” wrote Ryan Khojasteh, a felony prosecutor who worked on juvenile reforms. “Odd choice to fire a non-management felony prosecutor in the courtrooms every day that never lost a case.”

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Brooke-Jenkins-makes-wave-of-firings-17308456.php

Top photo:  Puppet master Mayor London Breed and her Puppet DA announce her appointment at San Francisco City Hall – 7.7.2022

 

Lee Heidhues 7.15.2022

Today will go down in San Francisco history as The Friday Morning Massacre.

Mayor London Breed, who led the political Coup d’etat against Progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, is now seeing her vengeful law ‘n order political agenda carried out.

Puppet District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, ex-Assistant District Attorney working for Chesa Boudin, quit last October and spent eight months as the Recall spokeswoman.

Breed  handsomely rewarded her for performing these dirty political chores.

After just a week  being sworn in as Puppet DA she is carrying out her benefactor’s wishes. This is the stuff of corrupt dictatorships.

Chesa Boudin’s top staff was summarily sacked.  Replaced by hard core law ‘n order prosecutors whose Mission will be to undo all the reforms put in place in the past 30 months. 

Most disturbing is the selection of Nancy Tung as the new boss of Special Investigations. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that one of Tung’s responsibilities will be to investigate “police misconduct”. This is reprehensible.

Nancy Tung ran against Boudin in 2019.  She finished third in the four person race. During the campaign Tung was the only candidate who said she would not prosecute  SFPD cops who murdered Mario Woods in 2015.

Tung is on the Board of Directors of the virulent law ‘ order NGO StopCrimeSF. Tung, like her new boss the Puppet DA, spent the last several months campaigning to Recall the Man who beat her in a democratic election.

Now, without having to face the voters, Tung has been rewarded a place at the Table. A Table at which the voters emphatically rejected giving her a Seat in 2019

https://missionlocal.org/2020/09/officers-who-killed-mario-woods-used-unnecessary-force-but-will-face-no-discipline/

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 7.15.2022

In among her first significant moves as San Francisco’s district attorney, Brooke Jenkins on Friday began a massive overhaul of her office’s personnel, firing several employees and announcing the posts of four new lieutenants who will help lead her management and transition teams.

Rachel Marshall, Boudin’s director of communications and a policy adviser, was among the first to be fired.

Jenkins’ new top hires, Ana Gonzalez, Nancy Tung, Tiffany Sutton and Rani Singh, have all spent several years as prosecutors in the Bay Area, and some of them sparred publicly with Boudin in the past.

Tung, an Alameda County Assistant District Attorney, will be the chief of special prosecutions, taking on sensitive cases that could range from domestic violence to police misconduct to fraud. She will also serve as the lead liaison for the the office’s community partnerships across San Francisco.

Like Jenkins, Tung also has a history of conflict with Boudin. She ran against him for District Attorney in 2019, coming in third in the city’s ranked-choice voting contest and was cast as the candidate most in favor of stricter penalties for people accused of crimes.

Tung also publicly supported Boudin’s recall, and was rumored to be Breed’s second-choice pick for District Attorney. This year, prior to Boudin’s recall, Tung told the San Francisco NAACP that she would seek the office again if Boudin was ousted.

“I promised the public that I would restore accountability and consequences to the criminal justice system while advancing smart reforms responsibly,” Jenkins said in a statement Friday.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-D-A-Brooke-Jenkins-has-picked-an-all-female-17307823.php

Lee Heidhues 7.14.2022

I need to step away from the cauldron of political life in San Francisco.  

Recalls of democratically elected “Progressives”;  District Attorney Chesa Boudin and three School Board members this year.  An upcoming ballot measure to take away hard fought car free spaces in San Francisco  

All of this negativity in so called Progressive San Francisco sends me scurrying for solace.  

Katie Kitamura’s novel is in a place so far removed from my current reality.

I am totally lost in the story which takes place in The Hague, Netherlands.  Reading the book also takes me back to my youth when I spent nearly a year living in Amsterdam.

It’s so nice to be able to dive into the pages of this story and momentarily forget about vicious San Francisco.

Excerpted from NPR 7.22.2021

The unnamed heroine of Intimacies, Katie Kitamura’s fascinating and mysterious new novel, observes that “none of us are able to see the world we are living in — the world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality … and its extremity.”

She’s a new interpreter at The Hague, responsible for the banal function of translating legal proceedings for extremely evil defendants: genocidal former heads of state.

We know only that the narrator came to The Hague by way of New York, her father has just died after a long illness, and her mother has returned to Singapore. Even her age and ethnicity are murky and, strangely, rarely commented upon. Kitamura seems to intentionally test the boundaries of how little biographical information an author can reveal about a protagonist while still making the reader feel intimately connected to them.

Readers will get a sense of both the importance and the futility of the International Criminal Court. The narrator points out that the Court primarily prosecutes crimes against humanity in African nations, becoming an “ineffectual” instrument of “Western imperialism.”

Of the building that the Court is housed in, the narrator observes “the modern architecture still seemed incongruous, perhaps even lacking the authority I had expected.”

I couldn’t help but crave a more open, incautious narrator, someone who is more than, as the accused puts it, “part of the institution that [she] serve[s].” The novel effectively comments on the elusiveness of intimacy, but perhaps at the cost of the reader’s emotional connection to the narrator. How much of what is factually revealed helps one understand a situation — or a person — more intimately?

Even the journalists covering the International Criminal Court “had merely fragments of the narrative and yet they would assemble those fragments into a story like any other story, a story with the appearance of unity.”

Kitamura’s novel has its own appearance of unity, but ultimately illustrates how one’s interpretations can fail to help them see the world in which they live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Kitamura

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/22/1018978359/fascinating-mysterious-intimacies-doesnt-let-readers-get-close-enough

Lee Heidhues 7.9.2022

Mayor London Breed, in her quest for law ‘n order, is responsible for the incipient political Civil War raging in San Francisco. The City is now riven over a political Coup d’etat, whose backers spent 7.2MM to oust Chesa Boudin, the democratically elected District Attorney.

At least one media outlet described choice of a Puppet District Attorney as an Academy Award style slap in the face to Chesa Boudin.  Breed could have been a diplomat and tried to cool the political heat.  Instead, she turned it to a boil.

Chesa Boudin’s supporters have taken notice.  Just today Chesa issued a cryptic “Good Morning” on his Twitter site. As of this evening nearly 1100 people have “Liked” it. The pressure on Chesa to run in the November 8, 2022 election is intense. By her action Breed has laid down a marker.

She did it intentionally.

On July 7, 2022 London Breed named Brooke Jenkins as Puppet District Attorney to replace Chesa Boudin.  The same Chesa Boudin she campaigned against for eight months as the most visible leader in the Recall campaign. Jenkins has now been handed the job by a Mayor who values loyalty over ethics. A Mayor who holds grudges. A Mayor who willfully ignores what common sense dictates.

London Breed could have selected an interim DA who did not participate in the Coup d’etat and would have assumed the office without the questions which now hang over the Puppet DA Brooke Jenkins.

Breed’s leadership, or abdication of it,  in the Coup d’etat resulted in the Recall of Progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

This willful incendiary decision is the most blatant manifestation of her willingness to spare no political expense to lay waste to her opponents.

It is important to step back to 2019 when Chesa Boudin was running for District Attorney.  In early October that year then DA George Gascon resigned.  One month before the November 5 election.  Rather than let an Assistant District Attorney administer the office until a new DA was elected, Breed appointed Suzy Loftus as Interim DA.  Loftus was a Breed favorite, who also happened to be running for the job.

This crass political decision may well have turned the election in Chesa’s favor. A number of voters recognized this as an act of odious nepotism.  In fact I told a reporter the day Loftus was appointed interim DA, that Breed had just handed the election to Chesa.

Unfortunately, Breed didn’t learn any lessons from this debacle.

From the moment Chesa Boudin took office she has been one of his harshest critics.  It must have grated on her to sit in on Chesa’s Inaugural at the Marines Memorial Auditorium as a packed house cheered his ascension to the DA’s office. Adding insult to injury Breed swore DA Chesa Boudin into office.

We fast forward to 2021 when the Recall movement began in earnest. Extremist Republican Richie Greenberg launched the first Recall effort. Seeing this was not going to make the Ballot, Breed’s allies swung into action.  Her cronies Andrea Shorter and Mary Jung launched a second effort which spent $1,400,000 in a mercenary signature gathering campaign.  Through it all Breed remained silent.  The Recall measure qualified for the ballot in October 2021.  The election was put on the calendar for June 7, 2022.

It was at this same time that Brooke Jenkins, an Assistant District Attorney in DA Boudin’s office, quit.  Why? She had a dispute with Chesa over sending a man to prison who was deemed to be insane.  Jenkins wanted him in prison. Chesa wanted him incarcerated in an instiution where his illness could be treated.  She quit and immediately began campaigning against her former boss.

Ironically in 2020 Jenkins made several public comments praising Boudin’s stewardship of the DA’s office, in which she was an Assistant District Attorney.

Breed said nothing during the entire Recall campaign even though everyone in San Francisco knew she supported the Coup d’etat.  A public statement reminding voters Chesa was the democratically elected DA and there is a regularly scheduled election in November 2023 may have changed the result.

Instead, Breed remained silent.

On election night, Brooke Jenkins was proudly celebrating her victory in the Coup d’etat against her former boss.

Top photo – Mayor London Breed speaks at University of San Francisco Law School graduation – May 2021

 

Lee Heidhues with editorial assistance from Liz Heidhues 7.8.2022

Mayor London Breed, who was behind-the-scenes leader in the political Coup d’etat, has rewarded Brooke Jenkins by anointing her the chief Law Enforcement official in San Francisco.

July 8, 2022 will go down as one of the most abhorrent and desultory days in San Francisco’s political history.  

It is a vile and disgusting travesty seeing City Hall hacks and hangers-on cheer on a Puppet District Attorney who was a shameless agent in the ousting of Progressive DA Chesa Boudin.

The swearing-in of Puppet District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, a leader in the political coup d’etat ousting Progressive DA Chesa Boudin, ranks right up with the worst travesties in the City’s history.

• 1934 – Longshoremen’s Union workers shot by the San Francisco Police Department during an 83-day Strike, peaking with killing of two Strikers on “Bloody Thursday” July 5 
• 1960 – San Francisco Police Department officers brutally dragging protesters down City Hall stairs during notorious House unAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings 
• 1968 – Beatings of students by SFPD Tac Squad during the student Strike at San Francisco State 
• 1978 – Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk assassinated at City Hall by ex-cop Dan White 

Puppet DA Jenkins quit her job as an Assistant District Attorney in October 2021 after a dispute with DA Chesa Boudin over her insistence on sending a mentally handicapped man to prison.

Jenkins then spent the next eight months attacking DA Boudin she had previously praised on the record.

On June 7, 2022 her treachery was rewarded when 55 percent of the voters in San Francisco, following a vicious 7.2MM campaign funded with money from America’s most reactionary financiers, ousted Progressive DA Chesa Boudin.

Now the apostasy continues.

Will a lazy and compliant Media, aggressive agents in the destruction of a Progressive District Attorney, step away from their gaslighting and attack Puppet DA Brooke Jenkins with similar harsh scrutiny?

Will the portion of the public that brought into play Law ‘n Order rants, lies and half truths to destroy Chesa Boudin, cast a similar jaded eye at the Puppet DA?

Top photo – Puppet DA Brooke Jenkins being sworn in by San Francisco Superior Court Presiding Judge Samuel Feng 7.8.2022

Every Picture Tells a Story – Post Roe v Wade in San Francisco

Lee Heidhues – 7.5.2022

Street art at the Walgreens Store in the Outer Richmond District

Clip from documentary Gimme Shelter – Interview with Sonny Barger following Altamont concert

Lee Heidhues 7.3.2022

This afternoon I had a conversation with someone who has carefully studied the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (FAMSF) ballot measure now being circulated by well paid mercenaries whose sole goal is to destroy car free areas in San Francisco. This citizen then told me about the bigger and potentially most destructive part of this mercenary signature campaign.

What the voters of San Francisco are unaware of is that this ballot measure has another horrific goal embedded in its text.

• STOP THE PROJECT WHICH WILL SAVE THE COASTLINE SOUTH OF SLOAT BOULEVARD AND PRESERVE THE OCEANSIDE WATER POLLUTION CONTROL PLANT

The FAMSF ballot measure would do much more than simply eliminate car free areas in San Francisco. It is a dangerous environmentally destructive measure.

The voter had refused to sign the Petition for all the reasons shown below.

Furthermore, the intention of this ballot measure is total destruction of:

• JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park
• The Great Walkway along the Pacific Ocean
• Car free zone on Martin Luther King Drive in Golden Gate Park
• Bernice Rogers Way
• Effectively decapitate all the Slow Streets programs in San Francisco

Next year The Great Highway from Sloat to Skyline Boulevard is scheduled for permanent closure. This stretch of land is eroding and falling into the Pacific Ocean. The City’s OCEANSIDE WATER POLLUTION CONTROL PLANT wastewater treatment facility is located in this area.

The reason for the closure, years in the planning, is to maintain the integrity of both the collapsing coastline and the wastewater treatment plant.

Should this ballot measure qualify and pass in November, San Francisco will be confronted with a financial and environmental catastrophe.

The woman who alerted me to this disaster in the making said we are talking about “Billions of dollars” should the OCEANSIDE WATER POLLUTION CONTROL PLANT project grind to a halt.

The mercenaries circulating the FAMSF petition are saying nothing about this disaster in the making to the environment.

The only language in the misleading ballot initiative reads, “Sloat Boulevard to Skyline” can be found on pages seven and nine (see attached link). There is not one word about the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant or the eroded coastline.

Click to access AccessForAll_LegalText.pdf

This is shameful and disgraceful treachery to mislead the voters.

The voters of San Francisco cannot let themselves be conned by this vicious dishonest petition campaign which the mercenaries are willfully failing to disclose the full impact of this obscene initiative

Last September The San Francisco Chronicle published an extensive article about the work being done along the Pacific Ocean by The Great Highway. The voters must be educated about what’s at stake should this misguided ballot measure qualify for the November ballot.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-to-save-southern-part-of-S-F-s-Ocean-Beach-16444844.php

Top photo: Roads, underground infrastructure and a major city wastewater treatment plant are at risk of being swallowed by the sea.
Amy Osborne/Special to The Chronicle

 

 

 

Lee Heidhues 7.1.2022

It’s a scandal. While America gets ready to celebrate its Independence Day one of its international sports stars is rotting in a Russian jail.

The Biden Administration is dawdling while American basketball Brittney Griner star has languished in a Moscow jail since last February,  Her continued detention on bogus drug possession charges is an outrage.

The only reason Ms. Griner is being held captive is Vladimir Putin’s evil utilization of her as a pawn while he wages his barbaric war of attrition against Ukraine. The Biden Administration could secure her release. It must secure her release and stop playing these political diplomatic games.

Excerpted from The New York Times 7.1.2022

Brittney Griner arrived in Russia in February to play basketball, one of the sport’s biggest stars. She arrived in a courtroom outside Moscow on Friday as something else entirely — a potential bargaining chip in Russia’s tense standoff with the West over the war in Ukraine, described by supporters as a hostage of the Kremlin.

After more than four months languishing in a Russian prison, and speaking no Russian, Ms. Griner, 31, went on trial, accused of carrying into the country vape cartridges with traces — 0.7 grams, the prosecutor said — of cannabis oil. In a legal system that rarely finds defendants anything but guilty, she faces up to 10 years in a penal colony if convicted.

Cherelle Griner, Brittney Griner’s wife and others have questioned whether the Biden administration is doing enough to secure Brittney Griner’s release, a view the State Department seemed determined on Friday to dispel. Elizabeth Rood, the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, attended the trial and talked with reporters afterward.

“I did have the opportunity to speak with Ms. Griner in the courtroom,” Ms. Rood said. “She is doing as well as can be expected in these difficult circumstances and asked me to convey that she is in good spirits and is keeping up the faith.”

“The Russian Federation has wrongfully detained Ms. Griner,” she said, adding, “the U.S. government at the very highest levels is working very hard to bring Ms. Griner as well as all wrongfully detained U.S. citizens safely home.”

Ms. Griner’s arrest on Feb. 17 — a week before the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — pulled her into the maw of geopolitics as President Vladimir V. Putin faced a determined Western effort to help Ukraine fight back. She has been touted in Russian state media as an asset who could be traded for a Russian arms dealer sitting in an American prison.

 

Lee Heidhues 6.29.2022

Now that London Breed, her City Hall enablers, and her Myrmidons in the MAGA funded 7.2MM ‘Safer SF No Boudin’ campaign deposed of Progressive Chesa Boudin The Chronicle will now tell the inconvenient truth for those willing to listen about SFPD.

It is racist, violent, and after 30 months of having to act like human beings, is unleashed again to abuse People of Color with impunity.

Dr. Cora Ormseth, a UCSF physician and  author, told The Chronicle. “….. if you look back at the history, (of San Francisco’s racism) it all starts to make sense.”

Nothing changes in this reactionary regressive City.

Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 6.29.2022

A new UCSF study is drawing a sharp link between lingering racial segregation and the increased threat of police violence against Black residents. The study, published Wednesday in the JAMA Network, an online medical journal, also reveals something else:

Out of 52 California counties included in the study, San Francisco had the highest injury rate for Black residents.

Black people (in San Francisco) experienced 408 injuries from 2016 to 2019, but were only expected to experience 60 injuries based on their 6% share of the county’s population.

 

“San Francisco definitely stood out and it was certainly surprising to me because it’s considered such a progressive city,” Dr. Cora Ormseth, a UCSF physician and the study’s lead author, told The Chronicle. “But then if you look back at the history, it all starts to make sense.”

 

Oakland civil rights attorney Adante Pointer said “The Black population in San Francisco is next to nothing and yet, study after study point to data-driven evidence that show officers are harassing, and using more force against Black people.”

Using statewide hospital data, the study examined 27,671 “legal intervention injuries” — or injuries requiring hospitalization and resulting from encounters with law enforcement personnel — from Jan. 1, 2016 to Dec. 31, 2019.

Statewide, the study found that Black residents accounted for 18% of police-caused injuries over the four-year period, even though they represented 6% of California’s population.

 

White San Franciscans experienced 383 injuries, slightly more than the 355 they would be expected to experience.

Del Norte County, bordering Oregon in the state’s northwest, had the highest ratio of police-caused injuries for white residents with 57 injuries vs. 11 expected.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/police-violence-Black-residents-17272732.php

Top photo:  San Francisco State Strike. SFPD assaults student demonstrators 12.3.1968