San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Claim police get paid over Pride march raises doubt
Mang-Git Ng was waiting for his Sunday morning craft coffee at Hey Neighbor in the Portola when he pushed open an unlocked chainlink gate and was amazed at what he saw: Pressed between the Highway 101 soundwall and the backs of businesses on San Bruno Avenue was a landscaped, terraced park, two long city blocks from end to end, yet intriguingly narrow enough to draw him in.
“I’m always down to explore new places in the city. It’s what makes San Francisco so cool,” said Ng, 33, a tech worker who lives in the Castro. “This is a good use of space next to the freeway that would otherwise be dead.”
And that’s what it has been since the 1960s — just a Caltrans easement used as a dumping ground for junk rolled down the embankment before the sound wall went in, and used as a neighborhood dump for appliances and stuff too large for the bin. But in the past four years it
The Freeway Greenway will not officially open until June 2023, but the gates are open on weekends, and it is drawing visitors.
has been emptied out and backfilled with soil and plants, and timber for the terrace and gravel for the walkway. Now it is a neighborhood park so new that it does not yet have a name.
But it has a sponsor, the Portola Garden Club, which volunteered to take on what has to be the dirtiest volunteer project in a neighborhood with a long history of volunteerism.
“Garbage, washing machines,
Shortly after San Francisco police, firefighters and sheriff ’s deputies announced last week that they would sit out this year’s LGBTQ Pride Parade unless the organizers reverse a controversial ban on uniforms, a former police commissioner weighed in with an eyebrow-raising tweet.
“SFPD won’t march in Pride because they can’t wear their uniform, even tho they could wear all the SFPD clothes they want,” tweeted John Hamasaki, a criminal defense attorney and reliable critic of police who stepped off the commission in March.
“Real problem is — they won’t get paid all that overtime if they aren’t in uniform/on duty. It’s not about Pride, It’s about (money),” punctuating the missive with an an emoji of a
sack of cash.
The tweet, which several city officials said was inaccurate, added fuel to an already ferocious debate that spilled into City Hall. Pride’s board of directors voted this year to prohibit law enforcement uniforms as a concession to people who feel they have been harmed by police, following on the heels of other cities that instituted similar policies.
Officers and sheriff ’s deputies who saw the rule as an affront to their work and their contributions to police reform opted to bow out of the event in protest. San Francisco firefighters joined them, as did Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Matt Dorsey.
Hamasaki’s widely viewed tweet put a new spin on the fight, implying that LGBTQ officers’ insistence on marching in uniform stems from financial motivations and not a sense of dignity tied to their work, which they said was at the root of their resistance.
“While I appreciate that former Commissioner Hamasaki has a true desire to see policing be more just and more equitable, the former commissioner has missed the mark with his tweet,” Officer Kathryn Winters, a trans woman and spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Officers Pride Alliance, told The Chronicle.
She said Hamasaki is wrong, “as officers who march in Pride generally do so offduty and do not get paid overtime to march in Pride.”
Carolyn Wysinger, president of the San Francisco Pride board, said the issue of pay never came up during months of negotiations with the Pride Alliance over whether to allow uniforms.
“The organization has no knowledge” of any department rules requiring officers to be paid once they don a uniform,
Police officers dance during the 2014 Pride Parade in San Francisco. A former police commissioner’s tweet raised questions about whether the S.F. Police Department’s decision to abstain from the parade this year was financially motivated.
Wysinger said.
In some rare cases, officers who are assigned to work on the day of the parade can march during their shifts if they are granted a series of approvals, with the expectation that they could be radioed to a call at any time. Such cases are the exception, Winters said.
“Those who are working (that day) will sometimes even use accrued time off during the parade time so that they can march and not worry about getting called away,” she said. Most parade participants simply take the day off.
Hamasaki told The Chronicle he believed that officers
are on duty and expected to work every time they wear their uniforms, an inference he made after several conversations with Police Chief Bill Scott about whether police should anticipate getting paid every time they do public service for the community unrelated to law enforcement — such as backpack giveaways or “coffee with a cop” events.
“One long-standing issue I have with the department is their unwillingness to give back to the community outside of paid shifts,” Hamasaki said, noting that he wants to see officers ingratiate themselves with communities by doing volunteer work and
serve the public on their own time.
While Scott agreed on the importance of community service, Hamasaki recalled, the chief told Hamasaki that when officers are in uniform, they are on duty. Scott was not immediately available for comment.
“His rationale was ... that if people see police officers in uniform there is an expectation that they are on duty and required to help with every situation that arises,” the excommissioner said.
He thought the same logic applied to the parade: that if officers wore their uniforms, they could expect to be on the
clock, and receiving payment, and that many of them who had signed up to work that day could earn overtime.
Winters said that hypothesis is incorrect.
“Officers marching in Pride wear their uniforms, and most if not all are either totally off for the day or have taken the day off,” she said.
But Hamasaki dug in, acknowledging only that he’s “happy to hear that some of the participating officers will be doing so off the clock.”