Recall Chesa Boudin — Yes on H
Based on my personal experience of his failure to stop a senseless prosecution of a PTSD victim and my observations of people released by Chesa causing death and damage, I am voting YES on H.
Taking Care of the Poor, San Francisco Style, 2021
There is something humanly disturbing and wrong about how we have decided to NOT handle poor homeless people in need. Here's what I saw on Castro Street last week.
How to Save Black Lives
Black Lives Matter. Period. The deaths of black men at the hands of police are tragedies that we as a society must work to stop. Demands for change are appropriate and necessary. But, I worry that anti-police and anti-government protests don't help us move forward. To me there is a difference between insisting on systemic changes and insisting that authorities are evil. In the 1960’s governors stood in the doors of schoolhouses to keep black people out, politicians publicly advocated segregation, and law enforcement openly planned how to violently attack marchers. There is no 2015 -- or 2020 -- equivalent [...]
Meditations on The Thin Blue Line
It's been 40 years since my dispatching days at Long Beach Police. Have things changed? I remember working the day shift and wondering why whenever a certain officer radioed that he was going to investigate a suspicious subject on his own initiative, a unit or two would immediately go to his assistance. He didn't ask for back-up, but units who were supposedly busy magically cleared and showed up at his side. Unit 7 -- or was it Unit 21? some details fade -- was rarely alone with someone he stopped. Other units investigated people and wrote tickets without other cops [...]
Talking to LGBT Refugees About the Orlando Shootings
There is no place where you are absolutely safe. No place in the world. The men and women whom my church's Refugee Guardian Group has helped all fled their home countries to avoid being beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation. Most of our clients come from Muslim countries. They know first-hand the deadly acts against LGBT people carried out in the name of Islam. The news from Florida this morning must have sounded frighteningly familiar. Today I contacted the four men for whom I have been a mentor. I wanted to check in. How were they after the murders at [...]
Throw Back Thursday
I logged into Weather Underground this morning for a quick view of what the days are going to be like in Ashland for my long weekend stay. Years ago I'd pinned four frequently looked at cities to the WU menu. There along with home town San Francisco, destination Ashland, and ancestral home of Middleborough is Kayseri, Turkey. Four years ago I'd put Kayseri on my dashboard so I could easily find out what the weather was like for the then-21-year-old gay refugee I talked with almost daily on Skype. He'd escaped with his life from Iran into Turkey where he was [...]