Issue Position: Neighborhood Safety: Keeping Our Communities Safe

Issue Position

One of the challenges of living in an urban environment is to ensure good public safety. We all want neighborhoods, parks, and public spaces where our children, families and friends can gather and thrive. This requires a broad range of efforts, including having a robust police force, making pedestrian safety improvements, shoring up the seismic safety of our building stock, and improving our criminal justice system. Safer communities also require investments in education and community building. I work very hard to improve neighborhood safety:

Analyzing Police Staffing Needs and Crime Trends

I've been a leading voice to ensure that our police department is adequately staffed and that it keeps up with our growing population. Public safety depends on various factors - including housing, education, and employment - but adequate police staffing is an important factor. When a city doesn't have enough officers, public safety suffers. The San Francisco Police Department is under-staffed, due to years of not funding police academy classes. When I took office, I immediately advocated for reinstating police academy classes, and working with the Mayor and my colleagues, we implemented a six year staffing plan to get staffing back up to improved levels. I also requested an analysis by our City Controller to determine what optimal police staffing is for San Francisco, based on population growth and also comparisons to peer jurisdictions. The analysis showed that we need hundreds more police officers, and I authored a resolution to make it official city policy to achieve that staffing goal.

Sentencing Commission

As a result of state realignment -- under which the state prison system will save money by sending more prisoners to county jail -- San Francisco will seen an increase in the number of prisoners in our jails. Moreover, crimes that used to result in state prison sentences will now result in county jail sentences. To prepare for this new system, it's important for the San Francisco criminal justice system to have policies and practices in place to ensure that we don't over-crowd our jails -- in other words, to ensure that people who need to go to jail go to jail while those who don't, don't. I authored legislation, working closely with District Attorney George Gascon, to create a temporary Sentencing Commission, bringing together all stakeholders in the criminal justice system, to formulate these practices.

Earthquake Preparedness Legislation: Community Safety Element and Soft Story Retrofits

Under California law, local governments must adopt Community Safety Elements to set broad policies for earthquake preparedness and resilience. I sponsored legislation to adopt such a plan for San Francisco. I also sponsored legislation to require owners of vulnerable soft-story apartment buildings to retrofit the buildings so that they do not collapse in an earthquake.

Basic Standards of Behavior in Our Plazas

Harvey Milk Plaza and Jane Warner Plaza, both at Castro and Market, are the Castro's town squares. They are key assets for the community. Through quirks in the law, they have essentially no rules governing behavior of those using them. As a result, abuse has occurred. I authored legislation to impose basic standards, including banning camping, sleeping, and smoking.

Improving Street Light Reliability

San Francisco's streetlights are old, deteriorated, and focused on lighting streets instead of sidewalks. As a result many locations in our city our unnecessarily dark at night, which reduces public safety. I held two major oversight hearings to flesh out the maintenance and capital funding challenges facing our streetlight system, and I then authored legislation setting basic maintenance standards and long-term city policy to improve the streetlight system. I also successfully advocated for more funding for streetlight maintenance, resulting in a twenty-fold increased.

Minimizing Sidewalk Clutter and Improving Placement of Utility Boxes

Particularly as San Francisco grows and our sidewalks become more crowded, we need to be smart and strategic about how we manage these limited spaces, including how we place or don't place objects on our sidewalks. I've been very active in ensuring that our city departments make good decisions in this area, since a poorly placed utility box, news rack, or kiosk can cause long-term problems in a neighborhood. I've been particularly active around the issue of utility cabinets on our sidewalks. Utilities have a right under state law to place their cabinets on city sidewalks. I authored legislation that significantly tightens the process by which utilities and that requires utilities, if requested, to allow murals on the cabinets and to pay to install and maintain greenery around them. The legislation also requires the city to hold a hearing annually to determine whether it is technically feasible to place the cabinets underground; if so, utilities will be responsible for undergrounding them.

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