San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Recalls, policing, reparations on 2022 agenda
America is two years removed from nationwide racial justice protests that signaled a new civil rights era and only one year removed from anti-democracy riots at the U.S. Capitol, which foreshadowed something much darker.
That window perfectly the often painful ebb and flow of progress in this country.
Radical change inevitably gets followed by organized backlash. The Bay Area isn’t immune to the cycle. And while we don’t know what awaits us in 2022, my hope is we find the right answers to a few questions critically important to the state’s future.
Can California fix its broken recall system? Following Republicans’ costly and misguided attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, state officials have been excaptures ploring ways to make it harder for both sides of the political aisle to weaponize the recall process — and a majority of likely voters want them to do just that. Lawmakers are in the middle of hearings to re-evaluate the recall process at local and state levels. The Little Hoover Commission, a bipartisan oversight agency, is crafting its own study for the Legislature.
But as my colleague Joe Garofoli wrote, the Legislature won’t decide whether to pursue
reforms until the spring, meaning the public may not vote on any options — be it increasing the signature threshold required to trigger a recall election or raising the bar for what merits one in the first place — until November.
Here’s what shouldn’t be lost on Californians in that time: Woven into the recall wave of 2021 was the same right-wing fear-mongering over crime that helped pushed Donald Trump into office, made conservative talk show host Larry Elder a potential replacement for Newsom and now has San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin facing his own recall election in June.
California voters have had the ability to oust politicians for any reason since 1911. But last year’s explosion of recall activity highlighted a changing social climate: Even in our blue state, conservative fear can trump nonpartisan facts, and socially regressive sentiments can be made to seem almost mainstream.
If state leaders don’t fix the recall system soon, it might not be long before a Larry Elder gets voted into the governor’s mansion.
Will the Bay Area abandon criminal justice reform in 2022? Along with the Boudin recall, we’ve seen other progressive prosecutors like George Gascón in Los Angeles and Diana Becton in Contra Costa County either have recall efforts launched against them or become recipients of vitriolic condemnation from the right for their less carceral approaches.
Meanwhile, there were Oakland city leaders who vowed to decrease police spending in 2020 only to raise the department’s budget in 2021 by $38 million over two years. Richmond explored diverting about 15% of the city’s $67 million police budget, or about $10 million, to nonpolice response units last year. But officials ultimately approved a less aggressive $3 million redistribution.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed championed redirecting $120 million from the city’s law enforcement budget to Black communities in February. But her proposed budget for this year could push the department’s funding back to all-time highs.
Pandemic surges in homicides in Oakland and thefts in San Francisco have forced both cities’ leaders to gutcheck themselves about promises they made right after George Floyd’s murder, but before the “defund” slogan was weaponized by the right.
Bay Area leaders have to decide whether they truly intend to reimagine policing, or just keep rebranding it in the cynical hope that we forget those promises.
What’s next for California’s Reparations Task Force? The best way to sum up the state reparations task force’s work in 2021 is by calling it “re-education.” The legacy of slavery in America is so deeply intertwined with inequalities in housing, education and economic power that it took the nine-member task force months to unpack the insidious tendrils for the public.
But there remain more questions than answers.
The task force is still torn over who should receive reparations: Should it be Black Californians who can directly trace their ancestry
Above: Proponents of recalling Gov. Gavin Newsom protest in Grass Valley (Nevada County). Below: Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf backs more police funds amid objections by other leaders.
to enslaved people, or all Black people who have suffered from slavery’s legacy?
The task force is also still far from having a solid vision of what reparations could look like. We may get some answers in the first of two reports the task force will issue to the Legislature this summer. A second report will come in 2023, and will include the task force’s formal reparations recommendations.
Much is riding on this work. Reparations doesn’t poll well as a concept nationally, especially among the right, and last year we saw conservative political winds blow stronger. If 2022 is the year the task force takes a stance on who should receive reparations, it’ll pave the way for California to have a better idea for how to address the wounds left by the vestiges of slavery, including mass incarceration, housing discrimination or education inequality.
Right now, the task force has a deeply-divided America’s attention. And since the statewide body is the first of its kind, its successes or failures could shape the reparations conversation in this country for years to come.