SFPD crosses a city line, blows in a door at an affordable housing nonprofit in West Oakland, and Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee is the one calling it out. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley billionaires are writing checks so fast the SF Standard already gave the whole thing a name: the Mogul Midterms. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today we're pressure-testing the reform story with a use-of-force mess across the Bay and a coordinated billionaire ballot push, both landing in the holiday-week news dump. So, two stories. Same underlying question: is SF actually getting its act together, or just getting better at protecting the people who are already winning? We'll start with SFPD in Oakland, because when an East Bay mayor goes on the record saying she's 'deeply concerned' about what your police department did in her city, that's not a side note. From East Bay Times:
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said Saturday that she was “deeply concerned” by video and reports of San Francisco police officers smashing the glass front door of an affordable housing complex in West Oakland on Thursday. San Francisco police officers were in Oakland looking for an 18-year-old man, identified as Jamil Butler, who was suspected in two armed robberies in San Francisco, a spokesperson for the SFPD said in an email Sunday.
The East Bay Times broke this one. SFPD crossed into West Oakland Thursday looking for an 18-year-old robbery suspect, smashed the glass front door of a 79-unit affordable housing complex, and now Barbara Lee is on record saying she's 'deeply concerned.' That's an East Bay mayor calling out an SF department on Oakland soil. The suspect, Jamil Butler, was wanted for two armed robberies in San Francisco, so yes, SFPD had a reason to move. But Elaine Brown, who founded the nonprofit that owns the building, says more than twenty plainclothes officers showed up, refused to show the warrant to building security, and then took a sledgehammer to the front door instead of waiting for the resident manager. That is not tight policing. And the jurisdiction piece is the part I keep coming back to. What authority does SFPD actually have to execute a search warrant inside Oakland city limits, and who at the department signed off on sending twenty-plus officers across the Bay? I don't have those answers yet, and I'm not going to pretend I do. All week we've been stress-testing the Lurie reform narrative, and it has held up. This is the first story that doesn't fit cleanly. The same department getting credit for a turnaround just drew a 'deeply concerned' from a neighboring mayor over a use-of-force incident at an affordable housing nonprofit. The progress is real — and so is the fragility. MySchoolScout writes:
Alvarado Elementary serves 518 students in kindergarten through fifth grade in San Francisco's Castro/Noe Valley area. This public elementary school maintains a student-teacher ratio of 21.6:1 with 24 full-time equivalent teachers on staff. The school demonstrates strong academic performance, earning a MySchoolScout rating of 7.8 out of 10 and ranking #1548 out of 9566 California elementary schools, placing it in the 84th percentile statewide.
Here's Hannah Wiley and Emily Shugerman at SF Standard:
But over the last year, a switch flipped in Brin — and in many Silicon Valley barons. Outrage over a proposed union-backed billionaire tax has spurred Brin into a nearly $70 million spending spree to block that effort. He’s also opened his wallet to put an end to what he has described as California’s sharp left turn.
The SF Standard's Hannah Wiley and Emily Shugerman are calling it the 'Mogul Midterms' — and the number that jumps out at me is Sergey Brin alone, $66 million into a single PAC since January, with the union-backed billionaire wealth tax as the explicit trigger. We flagged his $500K Prop D donation back on May 21st and asked whether it was a one-off. It wasn't. Brin literally moved to Nevada at the end of last year to avoid the tax, and now he's spending $66 million to make sure California doesn't pass it anyway. Let's be clear about what that is: a guy who already exempted himself personally still trying to set fiscal policy for everybody who didn't leave. Chris Larsen — Ripple co-founder, SF fixture — is in this too, and that matters because this is bigger than a Google story or even a Prop D story. The frame now is coordinated, multi-player, cross-race spending by tech billionaires alarmed by one specific mechanism. The question I keep coming back to is whether blocking this tax is the goal, or whether killing the pay-ratio methodology before it spreads to other jurisdictions is the real prize. And that ties straight into the 469 Stevenson Street problem — the same structural veto power that kills 495 units of housing at the project level through shadow appeals, are we now watching it get locked in at the electoral level by the people who benefit most from scarcity? Because if billionaires can spend their way into blocking every fiscal tool that touches them, working-class San Franciscans are the ones who'll keep paying for it. Got a tip, a correction, or a story idea for San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily? Send it to sfdailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We read every note.
We've linked the reporting behind every story in today's show notes, if you want to dig further into anything we covered. Take a look there for the pieces that caught your ear.
That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Tuesday. This is a Lantern Podcast.