The Golden City Walter Thompson

On June 7, 2022, San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin will face a recall vote. 

The campaign to remove him from office is backed by wealthy donors and has strong support from different communities, but it’s not deeply rooted in fact. 

The basic premise for the recall: critics claim that crime is on the rise, and the DA’s embrace of decarceration — a policy that seeks to reduce the number of people we send to jail — is directly to blame. However, in 2021, just 4.2% of the incidents that were reported to SFPD resulted in an arrest, and many residents grumble that the police are on a wildcat strike. 

To learn more about what’s really driving this recall, I interviewed Boudin and Mission Local Managing Editor Joe Eskenazi.

In April 2020, about a month after San Francisco declared a state of emergency to slow the spread of COVID-19, city officials closed Great Highway, an expressway that runs along Ocean Beach. Over several months, it became the second-most popular recreation area in the city after Golden Gate Park.

But some residents didn’t like it -- detours shunted traffic onto adjacent side streets and added a few minutes to commuting times.

So, in August 2021, Mayor London Breed reopened Great Highway to vehicles, sparking an uproar among residents who took for granted that the experiment would be made permanent.

Today, I want to give you a sense of what it’s like to experience a familiar space from a new perspective, what the controversy says about San Francisco's neighborhood-based politics, and also — how hard it is to reclaim public space from automobiles.

In May 2018, San Francisco’s Board of Education adopted a resolution to create a formal plan for renaming the city’s public schools. The resolution specified that the process should be led by a blue-ribbon committee.

In January 2021, the board voted 6-1 to accept the committee’s recommendations to rename 44 schools, about a third of the city’s total. But after evidence emerged that the panel’s findings were based on poor methodology and historical inaccuracies, the controversy became national news.

For this episode, I interviewed Joe Eskenazi, who covered this story for Mission Local where he’s the managing editor. 

To bring us inside the committee’s faulty decision-making process, you’ll also hear audio captured from their Zoom meetings, along with selections from a Google spreadsheet they created to justify their decisions.

Eight months after San Francisco became the first U.S. city to order its residents to shelter in place to stem the spread of COVID-19, the number of new coronavirus infections spiked in the last month.

The city is helping businesses ride out the pandemic’s economic impact by making it easier to operate outdoors, but more restrictions are likely in the coming weeks. And with many residents traveling for Thanksgiving despite the known risks, we may be looking at another surge just in time for Christmas.

In September 1966, a white San Francisco police officer shot and killed Matthew Johnson, an unarmed 16-year-old Black boy in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood whom he suspected of stealing a car.
Within hours, outrage stirred the community to action, culminating in a three-day uprising that saw widespread looting, a citywide curfew and 2,000 National Guard soldiers dispatched to keep order.
The Bayview-Hunters Point uprising is far too big a story to condense for a single episode, but the parallels between the killings of Matthew Johnson and George Floyd are so strong, I couldn’t leave it alone.

As COVID-19 begins to spread via community contact in the Bay Area, San Francisco's government, businesses and residents are changing myriad aspects of daily life. From my perspective, this was the week the city really began to transform, so this episode examines some of the virus' early social, economic and emotional impacts. 

As I posted on Twitter, "while we cope with the novel coronavirus, let’s temporarily change #SanFrancisco’s motto from oro en Paz, Fierro en Guerra (gold in peace, iron in war) to Lavos las Manos (wash your hands)."