For decades, the dean of a high school in the Sunset would regularly visit Taraval Station on Friday evenings. He would proceed to the lieutenant’s office and request permission to accompany SFPD officers on a ride-along to tour his students’ fresh air study groups. While the partying students respected SFPD, it was the dean’s pen and notebook that had the potential to create the Monday morning consequences they feared most. This was the essence of community policing before the term was popularized-- multiple neighborhood institutions collaborating to engage and provide guidance to maturing teenagers.
Last month, after 10 pm on a school night, 18-year-old Daeshuh was providing his own tutoring to a 16-year-old, two 15-year-olds, and an eighth grader. His training was conducted in an old Honda Accord while driving west on Geary Boulevard without functioning taillights.
At Geary and Collins Street, the Northern 3-car’s, Buckley and Askhatsson, lit up Daeshuh and the junior varsity for their vehicle code violation. Daeshuh floored the accelerator to demonstrate to his tutees that the SF Police Commission prevents SFPD from pursuing fleeing vehicles. Daeshuh hung a right on Blake Street. Whoops dude, that’s a dead-end street.[1] Daeshuh was trapped. SFPD was able to arrest him and the other four juveniles. From this study session crew, SFPD removed from the streets, an AR-15 style rifle, two Glocks, and a Smith and Wesson. What was that 2019 Chronicle series? “Vanishing (juvenile) Violence?”
Despite the obvious value of SFPD using vehicle code violations to engage with and remove dangerous guns from the hands of adolescents, there are progressives that vehemently oppose these traffic stops. San Francisco Police Commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone (MCO), the three Board of Supervisor-appointed commissioners, and the Department of Police Accountability (DPA), believe that traffic stops for minor violations, called pretext stops, are always predicated on SFPD’s racial biases.
According to this progressive faction, unless the demographics of arrestees is proportional to the demographics of San Francisco’s population, racism must be a factor.[3] They refuse to accept that SFPD’s arrests demographically parallel the demographics of witness-described robbery and homicide suspects.
Much of Bay Area law enforcement’s removal of guns and drugs from the streets is attributable to traffic enforcement.
1) On June 12, 2023, a man was pulled over for illegal taillights in San Rafael resulting in him being arrested for a stolen gun and methamphetamine,
2) On February 24, 2023, Dacari Spiers was pulled over by SFPD for a missing front license plate leading to his arrest for a felon-with-a gun warrant and a meth pipe in his possession. Last year, Spiers had been awarded $700,000 by the SF Board of Supervisors,[4] which obviously wasn’t applied to address his meth habit.
3) On April 12, 2023, a driver was pulled over for a missing front license plate by Sonoma County Sheriffs. The driver was arrested with three guns, including a stolen AR-15. The sheriffs subsequently served a search warrant on the driver’s house and they recovered the following guns:
Through their recent presence in the Tenderloin, CHP is removing a kilo of narcotics per week. This is not the result of CHP’s better skillset, but completely attributable to the fact they do not come under the same voluminous Police Commission’s restrictions that SFPD must abide by. Thus, because CHP is exempt from MCO’s pretext stop restrictions, a kilo of poison is removed from our streets each week.
San Francisco voters should be asking why it has been historically acceptable for SFPD to provide superior parental assistance to underage drinking in the Sunset, while MCO has campaigned to prevent SFPD from aiding the parents of kids carrying guns in our most troubled and violent-prone areas? MCO, did you ever consider that SFPD’s interaction might have saved Daeshuh’s life?
Evidence of the public’s dissatisfaction with the Police Commission’s traffic stop restrictions
The Chronicle has a reputation for propagandizing progressive issues, and one would think, the newspaper appeals to its readers’ confirmation biases. In a June 15, 2023 Chronicle article, Critics blast CHP for stopping cars in SF in drug crackdown but city leaders voice support, Kevin Fagan weighed in on pretext traffic stops.
In the Chronicle comments section, readers were near unanimous on their support for not restricting SFPD’s traffic enforcement. This runs contra to the Chronicle’s position, and the overwhelming consensus is documentation of the Chronicle’s and progressives’ disconnection with the will of voters.
Before you think that we can’t direct police polices based on social media, consider how MCO and DPA use Twitter to market their agenda.
Just as Warrior fans tend to follow basketball Twitter accounts, do you think anybody but Twitter followers that are anti-law enforcement follow the DPA or MCO’s Twitter account? This is marketing to the confirmation biased at its core. If DPA and MCO can utilize polarizing social media, why can’t moderates cite the rebellion on the Chronicle?
In addition to this Chronicle readers’ straw poll, we should also factor in the 70.9% of voters that overwhelming cast their votes for Mayor London Breed in the 2019 election. Her executive appointment of MCO to the Police Commission represents the San Francisco voters’ mandate. And it is grossly unfair to the citizens of San Francisco that MCO betrayed their voices by defecting to the Board of Supervisor-appointed progressives’ side, and then campaigned so that four juveniles should be allowed to roll around SF with semiautomatic weapons exempt from engagement with SFPD.
Where’s MCO?
Per LinkedIn, MCO is no longer working for Orrick Law. He is also no longer on the Orrick Law website. Perhaps my public records request to Orrick requesting any police commission government emails MCO sent on the Orrick email system unveiled something. Or maybe Orrick busted MCO for spending so much company time counting SPFD Deputy Chief Vaswani’s tweets.
Sadly, the kids in the City would be safer if MCO no longer acted as a police commissioner too.
[1] Daeshuh prone himself on the street without being told to do so by SFPD. A mistake, as over-compliance is a telltale sign to officers that the person is trying to distract them from more serious crimes.
[2] SFPD Case #:230.321.036
[3] To determine the demographic composition of San Francisco’s population, Department of Justice’s 2016 assessment of SFPD used the race of people involved in traffic accidents. First, as any high schooler that pays his own car insurance knows, they are assessed higher insurance premiums because traffic accidents skew to younger people. Second, the DOJ factored in accidents occurring on the Bayshore Freeway, which is like factoring in the demographics on cross-country flights to determine the racial composition of Nebraska.
[4] Last year, the SF Board of Supervisor raced to grant Spiers $700,000, before Boudin’s trial of an SFPD officer for an alleged heavy-handed arrest, failed.
You just cannot make this stuff up. San Francisco should be ashamed of their elected leaders that THEY voted for. Another great report from Lou B on the facts regarding our SF.
Check out the Mayor of Dallas for the only known example of a big city Democrat Mayor who understands law enforcement, and has consistently supported doing what it takes. Crime is down three years in a row so far.