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“YOU DON’T BECOME AN INDENTURED SERVANT.” – SUP. CHRISTINA OLAGUE
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BREYER GOES FOR BROKE $
10.18-10.23.2012
MOPPING UP THE D5 MESS !
The District Five race has become one of the strangest contests in recent memory, with endorsements coming and going like trading cards. First Sen. Dianne Feinstein pulled her endorsement of London Breed on the grounds that Breed said some nasty things about former Mayor Willie Brown. Then former D5 supervisor Matt Gonzalez pulled his endorsement of Christina Olague because he didn’t like her vote on the 8 Washington project and her efforts to amend ranked-choice voting. Then the San Francisco Police Officers Association pulled its endorsement of Olague because of her vote to reinstate Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. Of course, Sup. John Avalos and David Campos pulled their endorsements of Julian Davis when SF Weekly reported that he’d groped a woman. (We pulled our support for Davis, too, as did the Examiner), and soon Sup. Jane Kim, Assemblymember Tom Ammiano and the League of Pissed Off Voters followed suit. Now the only front-running candidate in the race who hasn’t lost any support at all is John Rizzo, a member of the Community College Board. As for Olague, she now has the support of Avalos and Campos — the left flank of the board. Now that she’s been viciously attacked by Lee’s staffers and allies over the Mirkarimi vote — and iced out by Lee himself, who she says won’t return her calls and who bailed out on a planned campaign appearance — Olague is talking with a newfound independence. “At the end of the day, we serve CHRISTINA constituents OLAGUE 8 SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN
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TASER FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS LATER
Police Chief Greg Suhr keeps trying to convince the Police Commission that his officers ought to be able to carry Tasers to zap dangerous suspects without killing them. The latest argument, which he raised in August: The apparently mentally ill man who attacked a cop with a box cutter, and died after she shot him, might have survived if the officer could have used a “less-lethal” taser instead. But the New York Civil Liberties Union just released a study of what happened in 11 of the police departments in that state, including the NYPD, when officers were equipped with Tasers. The results are alarming. To quote the NYCLU: • Nearly 60 percent of reported Taser incidents did not meet expert-recommended criteria that limit the weapon’s use to situations where officers can document active aggression or a risk of physical injury. • Fifteen percent of incident reports indicated clearly inappropriate Taser use, such as officers shocking people who were already handcuffed or restrained. and the city, and that’s who we should answer to,” Olague told us, agreeing that she feels freed up by recent developments, as difficult as they’ve been. “You don’t become an indentured servant.” She told us that her decision last year to co-chair the “Run, Ed, Run” cam-
• Only 15 percent of documented Taser incidents involved people who were armed or who were thought to be armed, belying the myth that Tasers are most frequently used as an alternative to deadly force. • More than one-third of Taser incidents involved multiple or prolonged shocks, which experts link to an increased risk of injury and death. • More than a quarter of Taser incidents involved shocks directly to subjects’ chest area, despite explicit warnings by the weapon’s manufacturer that targeting the chest can cause cardiac arrest. • In 75 percent of incidents, no verbal warnings were reported, despite expert recommendations that verbal warnings precede Taser firings. • Some 40 percent of the Taser incidents analyzed involved at-risk subjects, such as children, the elderly, the visibly infirm and individuals who are seriously intoxicated or mentally ill. In other words, give cops Tasers and they’ll zap away. Something SF ought to be concerned about.
paign to convince Lee to break his promise and run for a full term to the office he’d been appointed to was based on her belief that “we’d see an infusion of new energy and some more diversity” of both ideology and demographics in the Mayor’s Office.
JULIAN DAVIS
“Sadly, I’m not seeing those changes happening really,” she said. “I didn’t sign up for another four years of Gavin Newsom and those thugs, and I’ve seen a lot of that same behavior. People who played prominent roles in the Newsom administration continue to play prominent roles in this administration.” Meanwhile, Thea Selby — who snagged one of the three endorsements by both the Guardian and the Examiner — continues to run a strong and well-funded campaign that has avoided the carnage taking place in the other campaigns. “I feel like I’m in the middle watching out for flying beams,” she told us. | DAVIS, SELBY PHOTOS BY
Michael Breyer, the son of a Supreme Court justice who has never held elective office in San Francisco, is trying to buy himself the 19th Assembly District seat. He’s already spent more than $500,000 in personal money on his campaign against Assessor Phil Ting — most of it to bombard the district with negative ads. His first batch of mailers sought to portray him as the candidate of “old fashioned” San Francisco values, which in the past has been code-word language for a time when the Western part of the city was mostly white. Odd he’d use that in a district that’s now at least a third Asian, but that’s what he’s been doing. Now it’s all nasty vitriol, hit piece after hit piece. Ting beat Breyer 57-21 in the June election, but the state’s new top-two primary system gives him another shot. The last polls a couple of months ago showed Ting with a commanding lead — but when you spend a million bucks (and it may reach that level by Election Day) on attack mailers, you’re likely to gain at least some ground. Hell of a way to choose an Assembly member.
MIKE KOOZMIN/SF NEWSPAPER CO.
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