Policing may shape BART board races
Transit agency’s many crises likely to take back seat to law enforcement
For months, BART Board President Lateefah Simon waffled on whether to run for reelection. A staunch social justice activist, she has often sparred with the agency’s powerful police union and other opponents — and received death threats for championing reform.
But when Simon filed her papers on a recent Wednesday, she’d already mapped out a campaign. She wants to expand BART’s unarmed safety staff, including new teams of ambassadors to patrol the trains. Simon will also push for more transit service to accommodate people who don’t own cars, a personal issue because she is legally blind and does not drive.
Posing for a photo outside the elections office in Martinez, Simon put her hands on her hips and sported a broad grin.
“I did a thing today,” she wrote, posting the picture on Facebook.
Within two days, she had a challenger backed by the police union. Her race, like so many other downballot contests in the Bay Area, will probably be shaped by a national reckoning on police and racial justice.
“I’m super proud of the work I’ve done to advance progressive policing,” she said. “I’ve been there for four years. I know my job. I have been leading in a crisis, and I will continue to lead in a crisis.”
Five BART board seats are up in November. Though the agency does not have term limits, it will probably have several contentious races. BART has cycled from one crisis to another over the past several years, with slayings of passengers, open drug use, a ballooning homeless population seeking refuge on the trains, and a budget deeply scarred by COVID19. But lately, discussions on policing have consumed all the oxygen at the transit agency, and could decide the upcoming elections.
Although 89% of riders peeled away from BART during the COVID19 pandemic, crime on the system remains steady, said Officer Keith Garcia, head of the tran
sit agency’s police union. Officials are struggling to lure riders back, aware that some are afraid to return unless BART police are conspicuous, shooing transients off the trains, stopping cell phone theft and directing people to wear masks.
Yet a majority of the board wants to divert police away from nonviolent crimes, instead shifting those duties to ambassadors and outreach workers. And they have support from a vocal chorus of activists, some of whom argue that BART shouldn’t have police at all. To this day the agency is haunted by the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant, a 22yearold Black man killed by a BART police officer on the platform of Fruitvale Station in Oakland. Staff have spent years trying to rebuild trust with the public.
All of these issues are playing heavily into the board races. Only one incumbent, board member Rebecca Saltzman, has no opponents.
The marquee contest is Simon’s battle against Berkeley resident Sharon Kidd, a former member of BART’s Police
Citizen Review Board whom Simon declined to reappoint in 2017. Kidd also served as a temporary staff assistant for the BART Police Department in 2018, and she has since volunteered to conduct interviews on police hiring panels.
“Sometimes change is inevitable,” Kidd said of her candidacy. However, she described a platform that would largely preserve traditional law enforcement, adding police officers to quell crime and keeping ambassadors to make trains more welcoming.
“Many people that know my affiliation with BART, when we talk they want to see more officers,” Kidd said. “But we can’t get more officers ... because of the media degrading police.”
Some saw the police debate as an extension of a larger culture clash at the agency between board directors who represent the urban core and their counterparts in the suburbs. Generally, citydwelling board members embrace progressive policies, including a version of public safety that has social workers responding to homelessness and drug use, instead of police officers. Suburban directors tend to be more conservative, serving a constituency that complains more loudly about crime on the system.
The differences show up in other discussions as well, such as the urban directors’ push for housing around stations — in lots that suburban riders want to save for parking.
Board Director Debora Allen, who represents central Contra Costa County, said those divisions came into focus when the board’s progressive wing coalesced behind someone running to defeat her. Walnut Creek resident Jamie Salcido, a former urban designer who now works in health care, is the more visible of Allen’s two opponents. In an interview, she pledged to work collaboratively with the board. Allen, who argued for more budget cuts and police officers, has often been a dissenting voice.
“It’s clear to me that this is going to be a battle between San Francisco directors and their policy desires, and the suburbs,” Allen said.
A similar conflict is taking shape in the East Bay communities of Hayward, Livermore and Pleasanton, where board member John McPartland is fending off two rivals, including Steven Dunbar, a transit activist affiliated with Bike East Bay and the progressive group East Bay for Everyone.
McPartland’s reelection bid got tougher after he praised Confederate leader Robert E. Lee in June, calling Lee an “exemplary general.”
“I am mortified that I made that statement and that I caused that reaction and that pain to all those people,” McPartland said, reflecting on the incident.
His main adversary, Dunbar, emphasizes effective transportation rather than social issues. When he lived in Hayward a couple of years ago, Dunbar mounted his bike before dawn to catch the 5:13 a.m. train from Castro Valley Station, then pedaled along the Arroyo trail to arrive at his engineering job by 6 a.m. He has since moved to Livermore to be closer to work.
Though Dunbar does not tout a specific agenda related to law enforcement, the groups that support him have protested efforts to hire more officers.
“We’ve never felt it to be an effective way to handle qualityoflife issues on BART,” said Darrell Owens, coexecutive of East Bay for Everyone, referring to the use of police to crack down on drugs or homeless people.
Board member Bevan Dufty has challengers in San Francisco, though his race is less clearly defined. Three people are vying to unseat him, including longtime LGBT activist Michael Petrelis, bike advocate and nonprofit director Patrick Mortiere, and engineer David Wei Wen Young.
Like others, Dufty sees public safety and law enforcement among the most prominent issues shaping the BART elections. He staked out a position in June, cosponsoring a budget amendment to “deemphasize” police on calls related to homelessness or behavioral health issues.
“For the next four years, I’ll be focused on taking police out of situations that don’t require an armed response,” Dufty said, noting that he received roughly 150 emails about policing during BART’s budget discussions in May and June.
The response was startling, even for an agency that routinely fields angry feedback from riders. Of all the issues welling up at BART, Dufty said, this seemed to be the one that most captivated people.