by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Dave Myers
Mara Elliott
Kevin Beiser
Jordan Beane
Bryan Pease
Law enforcement
issues dominated the June 22 meeting of the predominantly Queer San Diego
Democrats for Equality at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest. San
Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott, a progressive Democrat whom the club endorsed
for that position in the general election, was the featured speaker and
addressed a wide range of issues, from her struggle to get the City Council to
join Gavin Grimm’s Transgender rights case to the increased burden her office
is facing from changes in state law that reduced many felony crimes to
misdemeanors.
But there was
also an intense presentation from Dave Myers, a 30-year veteran of the San
Diego County Sheriff’s Department who’s risen to the rank of commander — and who
is currently running for sheriff against incumbent Bill Gore. Myers presented
himself as a solid law-enforcement professional, and he said that if he’s
elected one of his major priorities will be to make the sheriff’s office more
transparent — as Elliott is working to do with the city attorney’s office. But
Myers is also openly Gay, and he said that if he wins the race he’ll be the
first openly Gay male sheriff ever elected in the U.S.
After briefly
explaining what the San Diego County sheriff’s office does — it runs the county
jail system and serves as the police force for the unincorporated areas of the
county — Myers blasted his boss, Gore, and said if he’s elected the public will
learn a lot more about how the sheriff’s office actually functions. “We now
have a sheriff who does not want you to know what’s going on,” Myers explained.
“For 10 years the sheriff did nothing about suicides in the county jails until
the county grand jury called him on it. He has boasted that the county jails are the largest mental health
treatment facilities in San Diego County. I think that’s wrong. Law enforcement
can be part of the solution, but
we have to offer people more than just incarceration.”
Myers
acknowledged that former San Diego Assemblymember Lori Saldaña was in the
audience, and he seized on a question she’d asked city attorney Elliott earlier
about what can be done to make sure rape kids are tested sooner. “Bill Gore is
on record opposing the bill in the state
legislature to require testing of rape kits,” Myers said. He said part of the
problem with Gore is that he came to the sheriff’s department after a 30-year
stint at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which in Myers’ view means
he not only doesn’t understand how local law enforcement works, he’s “reactive,”
seeing law enforcement’s role as punishing crime rather than preventing it.
“Bill hasn’t
spent one day in a patrol car,” Myers said. “He hasn’t implemented body
cameras. Law enforcement began as a means of preventing crime. I’m still working every single day down the
hall from him.” Asked what his top three priorities would be if he were
elected, Myers said number one would be “inclusion: creating a department that
looks like the community. We have no
Asians or Latinos in the leadership.”
Asked what could
be done to stop law enforcement officers from killing or shooting people of
color, Myers said that he would want to build “cultural competency” among his
officers and “get people out in the community.” He said the San Diego Police
Department already does some of this, including bringing police academy
graduates to the LGBT Community Center to help them get familiar with the
issues facing San Diego’s Queer community. “The Sheriff’s Department doesn’t do
this,” Myers said. “It was only after several complaints that Gore addressed
LGBT concerns, and then only in the
leadership settings” — not among rank-and-file officers.
Myers won the
club’s endorsement unanimously, as did San Diego Unified School District board
member Kevin Beiser. He gave a short talk focused mostly on the layoff notices
the district had sent out because of a shortfall in the district’s budget. This
is a ritual the district goes through whenever it looks like they won’t have
enough tax revenue to balance the budget: teachers and staff get layoff notices
but those don’t necessarily mean they’ll be laid off. Beiser’s solution was to
push the district’s older employees to leave voluntarily through an “early
retirement incentive,” which will not only keep enough teachers on duty to hold
down class sizes, it will also save the district money because retirees who
were at the top of the salary schedule will be replaced with younger hires
making less money.
Beiser also told
the club that San Diego Unified has been a leader on environmental issues. “We
banned styrofoam lunch trays, converted our school buses to run on biodiesel
fuel, and we want to make San Diego the most solar-dependent city in the U.S.,”
he said. Beiser noted that when San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer wanted to give
a press conference in front of a solar panel array to dramatize the city’s
commitment to renewable energy, the location was a school district property.
Another issue
Beiser talked about which most people usually don’t think of as a school
concern is lead in the water supply. “We worked with the city to get all the schools tested for water quality in six weeks,”
he said. “Out of 230 sites, we only had two with elevated lead levels, and
those have been mitigated.” Beiser said that the district is also working to
lower lead levels in sites that are within the state standards because, as he
put it, “There are no safe levels of lead.”
Beiser also
pointed to his leadership on the anti-bullying policy he pushed through in 2011
and got approved by the board unanimously.
“When I was board president we extended it to Transgender students,” he said.
“Then we created the first student affairs office for LGBT students to train
staff and support GSA [Gay-Straight Alliance] clubs. We now have GSA’s in all
our district’s high schools and virtually all of our middle schools. We have
forms where you can report being bullied online. We also have done great work
protecting Muslim students. I couldn’t have done all this without your help.”
Mara Elliott: Taking Up
Transgender Rights
City Attorney
Mara Elliott began her presentation to the Democrats for Equality by describing
her successful drive to get the San Diego City Council to file an amicus
curiae (“friend of the court”) brief to the
U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Gavin Grimm. Grimm is a female-to-male
Transgender person in Gloucester County, Virginia who in his senior year of
high school asked to use the men’s restroom on campus. He got permission from
the principal, but the school board later overruled this and passed a policy stating
that students would have to use the restrooms “limited
to the corresponding biological genders.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up Grimm’s
case and sued in federal court. They won a decision at the Fourth Circuit Court
of Appeals based on a policy from the Obama administration that public schools
receiving federal funds couldn’t discriminate against Transgender students that
way. The city of San Francisco filed an amicus brief before the Supreme Court, which had agreed to hear
the Gloucester County school board’s appeal, and organized other cities in
California to join the case.
At first Elliott didn’t think she’d have a problem getting
the San Diego City Council on board. After all, she said, “we have a couple of
laws on the books that protect Transgender expression.” But when she took it to
the City Council, “all hell broke loose,” she recalled. City Councilmember
Chris Cate accused Elliott of “bringing divisive ‘D.C. politics’ to San
Diego” and saying that instead of getting involved in outside litigation,
Elliott should focus on “shutting down illegal
marijuana dispensaries and combating sex trafficking.” Eventually the
Council did join Grimm’s case on a
party-line vote. All five Democrats on the Council — Barbara Bry, Chris Ward,
Myrtle Cole, Georgette Gomez and David Alvarez — voted to join the case.
Republican Councilmember Scott Sherman voted no, Cate and Mark Kersey abstained
and Lorie Zapf wasn’t at the meeting at all.
Elliott may have
won the battle at the City Council, but Gavin Grimm lost the war at the Supreme
Court. The real villain was — who else? — President Donald Trump, who in the
meantime had got rid of the Obama-era policy Grimm and his ACLU attorneys had
relied on in his lawsuit. The Trump administration left it up to individual
states to decide whether to force Transgender students into the restroom of the
gender they don’t identify with or
present as, and the Court accordingly withdrew consideration of the case and
canceled the already scheduled hearing last March.
Grimm’s case
isn’t the only issue on which Elliott has crossed swords with the Trump
administration. “The other amicus
request we got was when a government entity asked us to join a challenge
against Trump’s travel ban,” she said. “That is not constitutional, and San
Diego is a very welcoming city. So we were identified as a city that would have
interest in that lawsuit. I thought this is something I need our Council to
hear about and support. At the time we brought that case, we had a student who
was unable to return to the United States from his holiday over the December
break, so we were directly impacted. We also had 14 companies that said, ‘We
can’t hire some of the individuals we need to hire. This is not going to work.
My concern, too, is that we’re a border city, and we have a lot of travel with
Mexico. So if you permit a ban like that on seven countries, what’s to prevent
a ban like this from standing and perhaps closing out some of our neighbors?”
Once again,
Elliott got called out on joining the case by two Republican Councilmembers who
said she should resign because “these are not local issues. Neither [the Grimm
case nor the travel ban] are local issues.” But she felt confident that these are local issues, because San Diego has a reputation as
“a welcoming city” and had already passed policies defending the rights of
immigrants and Transgender people. Elliott has also held press conferences
about hate crimes, as well as an issue you might not think would be on the city
attorney’s radar screen: poaching. She’s moved aggressively against abalone and
lobster poachers to protect these endangered species. The big problem in
enforcing the laws against poaching is, not surprisingly, finding the poachers;
“We have cameras on our waterways, but not as many as we need,” she said.
California law
splits the job of prosecuting crimes between county district attorneys, who try
felons, and city attorneys, who handle misdemeanors. But the line between the
two got blurred big-time when California voters passed Proposition 47, which
reclassified a lot of crimes formerly considered felonies — especially
nonviolent drug offenses — as misdemeanors. What’s more, it applied
retroactively — so a lot of people who had been given felony sentences were
released earlier than expected because their crimes were no longer felonies and
therefore they were let out once they’d served the length of a misdemeanor
sentence.
During her
presentation, Elliott said that instances of domestic violence in San Diego had
risen 23 percent over the last year and a half — and, responding to a follow-up
question from this reporter, she blamed it largely on Proposition 47. She said
the early releases of convicts under the proposition may have “put a lot of
people on the street” who, among other things, abuse their spouses and
families. One of the programs she’s instituted against domestic violence is to
train the police “on recognizing victims of strangulation, because they often
become victims of murder.”
Elliott admitted
she’s had resistance from police and others who tend to under-report rape and
domestic violence, and in particular who classify date rapes as “domestic
violence” so the perpetrators won’t face the serious charges they deserve. Lori
Saldaña questioned Elliott, as she would Myers later in the meeting, about what
she can do to make sure victims’ rape kits get tested faster. The problem,
Elliott said, is money, and she thanked Saldaña for lobbying the city to budget
for it.
Asked about the
city’s war on homeless people, and in particular the sweeps through downtown in
which homeless people’s tents and belongings are confiscated and destroyed,
Elliott said that’s not supposed to be happening. In 2011 a federal judge
approved the settlement of a lawsuit brought against San Diego by the ACLU and a
group called the Isaiah Project, which requires that if police clear out an
encampment of homeless people for any reason, they’re supposed to give 72
hours’ notice and preserve the homeless people’s belongings and take them to
the Isaiah Project’s storage facility, which can also be used by homeless
people who need a place to keep their possessions while they look for work or
attend treatment programs. (See https://www.aclusandiego.org/judge-approves-homeless-property-class-action-settlement/.)
“If they’re just throwing things away, they’re in violation of the settlement
and we need to know about that,” Elliott said.
Elliott, not
surprisingly, saw this issue as a subset of the general problem involving
homeless people and what the city is — or isn’t — doing about them. “We’ve all
been very slow,” she admitted. “My office is serious about getting homeless
people off the streets. We have six attorneys, a litigator and staff working on
abatement issues. We’re just the attorneys, but I want us to make sure our
policies are legal and we have the resources to implement them. We’re getting
support from the County of San Diego. There are certainly ways things could be
better.”
One of the
things Elliott is proudest of is that she’s doing the community outreach she
promised during her campaign, having her deputies meet with citizen groups
throughout the city. She’s also proud of setting up outreach programs to keep
people who’ve just been released from custody for misdemeanor crimes from
re-offending by helping them find work, treatment if they have alcohol or drug
or mental issues, housing and whatever other assistance that will keep them
from returning to jail. Like Myers, she sees the job of law enforcement as
being as much about preventing crime as
punishing it.
Elliott got a
rather hostile question criticizing her for endorsing Republican Summer Stephan
to replace Bonnie Dumanis as San Diego County District Attorney. The questioner
also criticized State Senator Toni Atkins for endorsing Bill Gore for
re-election as county sheriff over Dave Myers, though Myers hadn’t yet
announced when Atkins endorsed Gore. Both Gore and Stephan were appointed to
their jobs by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors after their
predecessors resigned.
It’s a frequent
pattern in San Diego politics: an officeholder who wants to leave office and
wants a particular person to succeed them steps down before their term is up so
their anointed successor can get appointed to the position and run as an
“incumbent.” In the 1990’s voters in the city of San Diego passed a city
charter amendment to stop this — it prevented anyone who accepted a midterm
appointment to the City Council from running for the same seat in the next
election — but the practice is still perfectly legal in county government.
Elliott defended
her endorsement of Stephan, partly because no Democrats have announced for the
race, and partly because the two have known each other for decades. “I went to
the same law school,” she said. “Her sister works for me. We work together on
domestic violence and I need her help. I don’t agree with the process (by which
Stephan was appointed), but I endorsed the person for what she’s achieved.”
The club also
heard from two Democrats running against Lorie Zapf for District 2 on the San
Diego City Council. Jordan Beane, a former lobbyist for the San Diego Chargers,
said the hearing on the Gavin Grimm amicus
filing wasn’t the only city meeting Zapf didn’t bother to attend. “She missed
the vote on Soccer City, she missed the hearing on the Mission Bay
rollercoasters — which are in her district — and she missed the first meeting
of the San Diego County task force on homelessness,” he said. “In view of her
voting record, though, maybe we’re better off when she doesn’t show up for work.”
Attorney Bryan
Pease, who’s also going after Zapf’s City Council seat in next year’s election,
talked about his own experience standing up to Donald Trump at the campaign
rally in 2016 where protesters were blocked by police from coming anywhere near
the event. “I stood in front of 200 riot cops and said they were violating the
Constitution, and they arrested me,” he said. “I also sued to save the La Jolla
seals. My specialty is knowing how to get things done. We need evidence-based
solutions to the homeless problem and we need to confront SDG&E so we can
set up our own community-based power authority.”
