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      San Francisco Mayor London Breed Draws Early Opponents in 2024 Race

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      The mayor is drawing challengers more than a year before the election, a sign that she will face a tough race in a city where most voters remain in a foul mood.London Breed sailed to victory as the mayor of San Francisco. A local who rose from the housing projects to become the first Black woman to lead the liberal city, she won a special election in 2018 and then a full term in a landslide the following year. Times were good; the pandemic had yet to happen. If homelessness and crime worried San Franciscans, few of them blamed her.No longer. Now San Francisco is reeling, its downtown plagued by fentanyl markets and tent camps, its employers straining to repopulate office buildings with a decidedly more remote labor force. More than 70 percent of voters have told pollsters that the city is on the wrong track, and some 66 percent disapprove of the mayor’s job performance.With more than a year to go before the next mayoral election, Mayor Breed has already drawn a challenge from a former ally, Ahsha Safaí, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who outpolled her in a recent survey and who was building a campaign on addressing crime, especially what he called the “retail theft crisis.” And last week, word leaked from San Francisco political circles that Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, was also planning a mayoral run.The list will inevitably grow, said Jim Ross, a longtime Bay Area political consultant who ran the 2003 San Francisco mayoral campaign of now-Governor Gavin Newsom of California.London Breed sailed to re-election four years ago as the mayor of San Francisco.Clara Mokri for The New York Times“Anything less than 10 people running in a race for mayor is a small field for San Francisco,” Mr. Ross said. “But people getting in this early and with these kinds of resources? It’s not a good sign for any incumbent. She’s going to have a challenging race.”As the pandemic has ebbed, its fiscal, spiritual and human impact has bedeviled mayors from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. But San Francisco has struggled more than most places from the fallout of Covid-19 lockdowns. Tech workers who fled downtown high rises and lofts when the pandemic hit have gotten used to remote work and have resisted returning. One-third of offices in commercial buildings downtown are vacant.Homeless people and drug users who overtook sidewalks in the city core, filling the vacuum left by absent pedestrian traffic, have sorely tested San Francisco’s ability to house and treat them, and to take back its public spaces. Exhausted and unnerved, San Franciscans have split across political, racial and class lines over how to move forward.Parents in the city school district last year led the successful recall of three board members who were criticized for keeping students out of classrooms too long during the pandemic and prioritizing social justice goals. Four months later, in June 2022, voters ousted a progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, who was faulted for being too lenient in his prosecutions.One-third of offices in commercial buildings downtown are vacant, and many employees have stayed home to work remotely.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesMayor Breed herself has fed into the outrage. In December 2021, she pointedly declared that she was sick of the petty crimes and drug use in San Francisco. She never took a position on the recall of Mr. Boudin, which political insiders viewed as a tacit endorsement. And she backed the school board recall.“It’s an incredibly difficult environment to be an incumbent in,” said Maggie Muir, a spokeswoman for Ms. Breed’s campaign.“The mayor is working incredibly hard,” Ms. Muir added. “She is making progress on downtown revitalization. She’s making progress — and yes it’s not as fast as some folks would have liked, on attacking the open-air drug markets.”Police data show homicides up by 12 percent and robberies 13 percent higher over the past 12 months. Motor vehicle thefts increased by 9 percent, but burglaries were down by 8 percent. The overdose crisis has continued unabated, with an average of about two people dying of drug overdoses every day.A pro-business moderate with progressive roots, Ms. Breed, 48, won the mayor’s job five years ago in a special election after the death of Ed Lee, the former mayor. She was re-elected with 70 percent of the vote the next year. Her current term was set to expire in 2023, but voters last year agreed to move city elections to even-numbered years starting in 2024, grouping them with federal and statewide elections, dramatically changing the mix of voters likely to turn out.More than 70 percent of voters have told pollsters that the city is on the wrong track, and some 66 percent disapprove of the mayor’s job performance. Jim Wilson/The New York TimesFurther complicating the picture is the city’s system for electing local officials, which allows voters to choose up to 10 candidates in order of preference. It is unclear how the combination of the presidential year timing and the ranked-choice system will shake out for Mayor Breed. Some analysts predict the even-year vote will yield an electorate that is more progressive than the mayor, but in elections past, the ranked-choice system has benefited her.“In the general election especially, you’ll have a lot more young people and a more ethnically diverse population,” said Adam Probolsky, president of the nonpartisan California-based polling firm Probolsky Research, whose surveys since April have shown a marked drop in support for the mayor. The timing could also attract San Franciscans who vote less regularly, he added, and who may not be as familiar with the candidates.That could create lanes for challengers to Mayor Breed.Mr. Safaí launched his candidacy in May and has been especially vocal about retail theft. “It’s the brazen nature of it. It’s the way in which people believe they can just walk into stores, grab things and walk out with impunity,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. Crime, he said, “is hitting every corner of our city.”Mr. Safaí, who was born in Iran and has a graduate degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began his San Francisco political career working in City Hall under former mayors Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom.He has firsthand experience of the city’s crime problem. Thieves broke into his house last fall while it was undergoing renovations and hauled away the stove and microwave. Mr. Safaí is calling for the hiring of 500 additional police officers.Speculation also has focused on Phil Ting, a liberal state legislator who chairs the Assembly Budget Committee and is favored by the city’s progressives; his spokeswoman said on Wednesday that he declined to comment. The progressive president of the Board of Supervisors, Aaron Peskin, is also discussed as a potential candidate, although Mr. Peskin, a fixture of San Francisco politics for the past quarter century, seemed unequivocal in an interview Wednesday that he was not running.“I am tired, and my next chapter in life is not in electoral politics,” he said. “It’s time for me to exit the stage.”Two people with knowledge of Mr. Lurie’s campaign plans confirmed that he was hosting gatherings and recruiting staff in advance of a mayoral run but declined to be named because the campaign has yet to formally launch. Mr. Lurie did not respond to requests for an interview. The San Francisco Standard, a city news site, was first to report last week that Mr. Lurie intended to challenge Ms. Breed.This week, word leaked from San Francisco political circles that Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who declared in March that “we have to rebuild our reputation and our city,” was also planning a mayoral run. Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated PressA native San Franciscan, Mr. Lurie is descended from one of the city’s most prominent families. His father, Rabbi Brian Lurie, was the executive director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco; his mother, Miriam Lurie Haas, known as Mimi, is a billionaire businesswoman; and his stepfather, the late philanthropist Peter Haas, was a descendant of Levi Strauss.Mr. Lurie is a prominent philanthropist, too, and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for anti-poverty programs through Tipping Point, a San Francisco nonprofit that he founded. His wife, Becca Prowda, is director of protocol for Governor Newsom. But in a city whose fierce local politics have been described as “a knife fight in a phone booth,” Mr. Lurie remains a political novice. He has never held office, and the knives are already out.“When you’re born or married into a billionaire family, you don’t have the experience to face hard challenges,” said Ms. Muir, the campaign spokeswoman for the mayor.Other political veterans said that Mr. Lurie might struggle to overcome his lack of name recognition among voters. “I’m sure he’s well known in the foundation community, and possibly with homeless organizations,” said Mary Jung, a longtime San Francisco political operative who supports the mayor.Mr. Probolsky, the pollster, warned that it is far too soon to count out Mayor Breed.“If you want to make the case that she’s vulnerable, she is,” he said. “But if you want to make the case that she’s done? Finished? Over? You can’t because you don’t know who will oppose her and how viable they’ll be.” More

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      In reversal, California school district adopts curriculum on LGBTQ+ figures

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      A school district in southern California has decided to adopt the state’s new social studies book and curriculum after previously rejecting it for its reference of LGBTQ+ figures in history.The Temecula Valley unified school district voted to accept the curriculum following a lengthy meeting on Friday where parents, teachers and community members spoke for and against it. The decision has been welcomed by Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, for thwarting an attempt to “whitewash history” and removed the threat of sanctions against the school district for not adopting the curriculum.The board voted to reject the material in May and even in its acceptance of the curriculum on Friday it said it would strike out anything mentioning Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and politician who was assassinated along with San Francisco mayor George Moscon in 1978. Milk, who has become a totemic figure in the push for LGBTQ+ equality in the US, is thought to have been the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California.Milk does not feature in the new social studies textbook, a school board member told CNN, but is listed in supplemental material along with a range of other historical figures’ biographies.“Fortunately, now students will receive the basic materials needed to learn,” said Newsom. “But this vote lays bare the true motives of those who opposed this curriculum. This has never been about parents’ rights. It’s not even about Harvey Milk – who appears nowhere in the textbook students receive. This is about extremists’ desire to control information and censor the materials used to teach our children.”California’s department of education will investigate the school district over the episode, which pitted some board members against a 2011 state law that requires students to get instruction about “the role and contributions” of LGBT people, as well as those of different ethnicities, cultures and disabilities.The president of the school board, Joseph Komrosky, called Milk a “pedophile” during a May meeting that resulted in the textbook being barred. Komrosky has said he will resist any attempt to implement the new textbook and accused Newsom of overstepping his authority.“I’ve already instructed the superintendent, if books come from shipping and receiving, to say ‘no,’ and we’ll ship them right back,” Komrosky said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe furor in California follows a wave of book bans in schools and libraries across the US, often driven by conservative activists who have opposed mentions of LGBTQ+ people, or accurate portrayals of America’s history of slavery. Meanwhile, least 492 bills attacking LGBTQ+ rights have been introduced in state legislatures, according to the ACLU. More

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      California faces backlash as it weighs historic reparations for Black residents

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      As California considers implementing large-scale reparations for Black residents affected by the legacy of slavery, the state has also become the focus of the nation’s divisive reparations conversation, drawing the backlash of conservatives criticizing the priorities of a “liberal” state.“Reparations for Slavery? California’s Bad Idea Catches On,” commentator Jason L Riley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, as New York approved a commission to study the idea. In the Washington Post, conservative columnist George F Will said the state’s debate around reparations adds to a “plague of solemn silliness”.Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2022 polling from the Pew Research Center. Both found that more than 80% Black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed.Pew found that roughly two-thirds of Hispanics and Asian Americans opposed, as well.But in California, there’s greater support. Both the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be.When delving into the reasons why people resist, Tatishe Nteta, who directed the UMass poll, expected feasibility or the challenges of implementing large programs to top the list, but this wasn’t the case.“When we ask people why they oppose, it’s not about the cost. It’s not about logistics. It’s not about the impossibility to place a monetary value on the impact of slavery,” said Nteta, provost professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It is consistently this notion that the descendants of slaves do not deserve these types of reparations.”In California, notions of deservedness may be tied to a commonly referenced facet of the state’s identity – that it joined the union as a free state in 1850.“The fact that supposedly serious people in San Francisco are considering a plan that would give $5,000,000 in reparations to every Black resident in their city in a state that never had slavery is a joke,” Republican representative Lauren Boebert tweeted in March.On Newsmax, Michael Reagan – son of President Ronald Reagan, who signed the 1988 bill apologizing and giving reparations to Japanese Americans for their imprisonment during the second world war – called reparations a “cash grab” and a “scam” that will force non-Black residents to “include the state in their will”.“No one should be taking this seriously at all. This is hilarious,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said of San Francisco’s proposal on The Five. “They don’t want this. What they want is to divide people, to create another commotion over race … White leftists do worse things to Blacks than the Aryan Nations ever could.”Under the Fox clip online, a comment with nearly 700 likes reads: “A state that never ALLOWED slaves wants to take billions of dollars from people who never OWNED slaves to give to people who never WERE slaves. Welcome to California.”But the state’s history is more complicated, said A Kirsten Mullen, co-author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century with William A Darity Jr, professor of public policy, African and African American studies and economics at Duke University. Both she and Darity – who is also her husband – are members of the expert team appointed by the task force.Even though the state constitution banned slavery, Mullen said, the Fugitive Slave Law allowed slaveholders to use violent measures to return enslaved people who entered California before its statehood. Many Confederates traveled west, too: brothers John and Joseph Le Conte, for example, became prominent early faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. John Le Conte, a physicist who espoused white supremacy, served as its first acting president.The task force’s final report, which follows last year’s 500-page interim report, lays out the state’s role in detail, from how enslaved people were brought to California during the Gold Rush to how prevalent KKK members were among city officials. It also looked beyond slavery to the harms and ancillary effects of other forms of racism, such as housing segregation, unequal education, medical experimentation and sterilization, mass incarceration and greater risk of death from Covid-19.“California, though it has this reputation, it’s not necessarily well deserved for being a more liberal place,” Mullen said. “Ultimately, what [the people of that time] learned was there was no place where Black people were treated with respect and had equality.”That history left a stark economic divide. For every dollar that white families earn today, Black families earn 60 cents, according to a report from the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan thinktank.“The racial wealth gap is a premier indicator of the cumulative effects of intergenerational racism in this country,” Mullen said.Those who oppose reparations for the wrongs of centuries past may not think modern recipients deserve compensation, Nteta said, but they also don’t think they deserve to be the ones responsible for compensation.“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, whose ancestry includes slave owners, told reporters in 2019. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president.”In recent research that he plans to investigate further, Nteta and his team found greater support for a range of reparations for victims of Jim Crow policies – many of those harmed are alive today, and so are their children.This recency is also likely a part of why the Civil Liberties Act, which offered $20,000, an official apology and other redress to Japanese Americans incarcerated during the second world war, saw success, Nteta said. It was co-sponsored by Congressman Norman Mineta, the nation’s first Asian American cabinet member, who was incarcerated with his family as a boy. While the legislation encountered its own hurdles, it eventually saw enough bipartisan support to make it to the desk of a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who signed the bill in 1988.In California, Mullen and the economists on the expert team were tasked with determining dollar figures for specific harms.The preliminary projection to address housing discrimination, for example, estimated up to $148,099 per Black resident, or $3,366 for each year in California from 1933-1977, the height of redlining practices. The estimate to address these harms could exceed $800bn, more than 2.5 times the state’s budget of $300bn. Restitution over time could take a variety of forms, such as cash payments, community investments, tuition assistance and housing grants, like the city of Evanston, Illinois, introduced in 2019.Cash payments are less popular than other types of compensation in the UMass polling data, and California governor Gavin Newsom has not endorsed the idea of large cash payments. For many in the reparations movement, Nteta said, the larger conversation goes beyond the payments themselves.“This is about recognizing one of the nation’s original sins, and the nation as a collective entity atoning for that and doing so substantively,” Nteta said.But backlash against progress towards racial equality is nothing new. Mullen said this is the human response to change, particularly when any majority’s station is challenged.It happened when newly emancipated Black people were denied 40-acre land grants, when the black codes restricted their rights following the end of the civil war, through Jim Crow and beyond. Historically, she said, punishments also extended to white allies who aided Black people.“There are still lots of ways that folks are protecting their hegemony,” Mullen said.What is new is the pervasiveness of discussion. She credits this to the expanded availability of information – documentation of more than 100 massacres between Reconstruction and the end of the second world war, online archives of Black newspapers, databases through the Library of Congress and more.“It’s impossible to read it, to learn it without at least having to question what you’ve been taught, what you’ve read, and wonder what the implications are,” Mullen said. “Some of it is our fear of what we stand to lose.”Both Nteta and state assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, a member of the nine-person task force, noted that the size and influence of California – the nation’s largest economy – drives the volume of discussion about reparations.“As California goes, so goes the rest of the country,” Jones-Sawyer said. “I think that’s why there’s pushback, because people really do understand that if we’re able to resolve this in some fashion, it will start the resolution of a lot of these problems across the nation.”As the nation enters a presidential election cycle, Nteta expects the potential for political fallout to limit Democratic focus on reparations. Decades of scholarship, he said, makes the case that Democrats tend to lose national elections when they center the interests or experiences of African Americans.“I think this will go under the broad umbrella of ‘This is where “wokeness” gets you – to a place where you’re sending $5m to individuals simply because of the color of their skin,’” Nteta said. He expects to hear Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech used to make the case that reparations are antithetical to our overarching values – content of character – even though King himself supported reparations.For decades, the idea of studying reparations found little traction at the federal level. Beginning in 1989, Representative John Conyers opened each session of Congress with HR 40 – named after the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule for the newly emancipated – until his retirement in 2017.But public attitudes might be changing slowly for a number of reasons, Nteta said, including the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the work of the Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to the ways white supremacy surfaced during the years of the Trump presidency.Representative Sheila Jackson Lee has since revived HR 40 and, in 2021, Congress voted to advance the bill. It was met with unanimous opposition from Republicans on the House judiciary committee, who saw a panel’s findings as a foregone conclusion.But if any state could pass legislation, it’s California, Nteta said, since a large percentage of the legislature is progressive, many of whom can avoid fallout because their term limits are approaching, and it has a progressive governor who has sometimes bucked national trends. If it passes in California, it may hit the dominoes of states with similar political characteristics, like Massachusetts or New York.The task force’s final report makes a significant number of recommendations, including a formal apology, updates to the language of the state constitution, recruitment of more African American educators, declaration of election day as a paid holiday to increase access to the polls, expanded rights for incarcerated people and more.Jones-Sawyer and state senator Steven Bradford, also a member of the task force, will work to put forward legislation next year. He said he hopes it will serve as a blueprint for other marginalized people, too.“It is so critically important to do this for the welfare of the economy, the welfare of the social system, the welfare of public safety, the welfare of our educational system,” Jones-Sawyer said. “All of that benefits when we are not kept down.” More

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      Republican’s non-profit paid PR firm that also represents her for-profit work

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      The legal non-profit the Center for American Liberty, helmed by Harmeet Dhillon, paid more than $132,000 to a public relations firm that simultaneously represents the California Republican national committeewoman in her capacity as head of her own for-profit law firm and Republican activist.According to a client list published by Praetorian Public Relations, whose proprietor is Matt Shupe, the Contra Costa county Republican chair, the firm also represents other partners and associates of Dhillon Law, other state Republican officeholders, and individuals at the center of the Center for American Liberty’s culture-war driven lawsuits.The revelations further blur the lines between Dhillon’s non-profit work, her legal career and the political ambitions that saw her challenge the incumbent national RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, in an election held last January.Dhillon is also a rising media star on the Republican right.Asked about the ties between CAL and Praetorian PR, Joan Harrington, a fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the Santa Clara University and an expert on non-profit law and ethics, said: “Every way in which [Dhillon] is benefiting from the non-profit should be considered compensation,” adding: “it should be disclosed.”The Guardian previously reported that the CAL’s IRS filings showed that CAL had paid Dhillon Law $1.32m in fees, and that according to the 2021 filing, Dhillon additionally drew a $120,000 salary for a two-hour weekly commitment.In that reporting, the executive director of CAL, Mark Trammell, wrote: “The 2021 Form 990 should show Ms Dhillon working 40 hours per week. That correction will be made shortly through an Amended Form 990.”At the time of reporting, CAL had removed the 2021 IRS filing from its website. But a copy of the filing lists Praetorian alongside Dhillon Law, Blitz Digital and Eimer Stahl LLP as one of the four biggest contractors to the organization.Praetorian’s client list includes Trammell, who is billed as “executive director and general counsel to the Center for American Liberty”. The list bills Dhillon, however, as “Managing Partner, Dhillon Law Group”, “Chairwoman, Republican National Lawyers Association”, “California’s RNC National Committeewoman”, and only lastly as “Founder and CEO of the Center for American Liberty”.The client list also includes Dhillon Law attorneys who have worked on CAL cases, including Krista Lee Baughman and Ron Coleman.It also includes CAL clients: the rightwing Internet personality Andy Ngo (billed as an “investigative reporter”); 18-year-old “detransitioner” Chloe Cole; and “Social Media and Cultural Influencer” Rogan O’Handley, who posts on various social media sites under the handle “dc_draino”.CAL is assisting Ngo in a suit against Rose City Antifa which has been running since 2020, and whose delays led an Oregon judge to award a limited judgment last February, and forced Ngo’s team to move that the judgment be vacated. The Guardian contacted Ngo’s attorney, James Buchal, to ask about the delays but received no response.CAL is sponsoring O’Hanlon’s suit against the California attorney general over O’Hanlon’s Twitter ban in 2020, and Chloe Cole’s suit against Kaiser Permanente over gender-affirming care she received in her early teens.Neither CAL’s filings nor the Praetorian PR client list specify whose efforts CAL is paying for.In response to questions about the relationship between CAL and Praetorian PR, and on whether CAL was paying for promoting Dhillon’s non-CAL work, Trammell, CAL’s executive director, wrote in an email: “The Center for American Liberty compensates Praetorian Public Relations only for services rendered to the Center for American Liberty.”Trammell continued: “Any services that Praetorian Public Relations renders to its many other clients are not paid for by the Center for American Liberty. Any assertion to the contrary is categorically false.”He added: “GuideStar awarded the Center for American Liberty with a Gold rating for its commitment to transparency.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Guardian pressed Trammell to clarify whether CAL paid for none, some, or all of Dhillon’s PR services with Praetorian, but received no response.The Guardian also emailed Praetorian and the CAL clients Ngo, Cole and O’Hanlon, asking each whether they were paying for Praetorian’s themselves, or being subsidized by CAL.Although Ngo frequently screenshots and pastes reporters’ questions to his 1.3 million-follower Twitter account, neither he nor the other CAL clients responded.Social media posts suggest Shupe, the Praetorian boss, and Harmeet Dhillon have a warm personal friendship.In a January 2022 Instagram post, Shupe described Dhillon as “my favorite client”. The same month, Dhillon described Shupe on Twitter as the “best PR pro in CA”. In another Shupe Instagram post the previous October, the pair posed, smiling with the far-right congressman and former Ohio State assistant wrestling coach, Jim Jordan.Apart from managing PR for CAL, Dhillon, attorneys from her law firm and CAL and Dhillon Law clients, Praetorian lists various west coast Republican officeholders as clients, including Dhillon’s California RNC colleague Shawn Steel.According to his LinkedIn page, Shupe has been a Republican party office holder since 2011, serving variously as vice-chair of the California College Republicans, executive director of the San Francisco Republican party, and as chair of the Contra Costa county Republican party since 2018. He was communications director for the failed California gubernatorial campaign of John Cox in 2018, and a consultant in the former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer’s failed attempt to displace Gavin Newsom in a 2021 recall election.Shupe did not respond to an emailed request for comment.Harrington, the non-profit ethics expert, explained that financial transparency was not just important for donors, and that “the public has an interest” in knowing how the finances of tax-exempt organizations are run.“Non-profits have the luxury of being tax exempt,” Harrington said, adding that “the rest of us pay more tax to support non-profits” as a result.“Transparency is important so that the world knows that this money is being spent properly.” More

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      Los Angeles councilman faces criminal charges including embezzlement

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      Prosecutors charged a Los Angeles city councilman with 10 counts, including embezzlement and perjury, on Tuesday in the latest criminal case to upend the scandal-plagued governing board of the nation’s second-largest city.Curren Price Jr faces five counts of embezzlement of government funds, three counts of perjury and two counts of conflict of interest, according to the Los Angeles county district attorney’s office.Price was charged for having a financial interest in projects that he voted on as a council member, and having the city pay nearly $34,000 in medical benefits for his now wife while he was still married to another woman, the Los Angeles county district attorney, George Gascón, said in a statement.Between 2019 and 2021, Price’s wife allegedly received payments totaling more than $150,000 from developers before Price voted to approve projects, according to Gascón’s statement. He also is accused of failing to list the money his wife received on government disclosure forms.“This alleged conduct undermines the integrity of our government and erodes the public’s trust in our elected officials,” Gascón said.Price called the charges “unwarranted”.In a letter to the Los Angeles city council president, Paul Krekorian, Price said he was stepping down from committee assignments and leadership responsibilities “while I navigate through the judicial system to defend my name”.“The last thing I want to do is be a distraction to the people’s business,” he wrote.The council and city government have been shaken by a series of recent scandals.In March, former Democratic city councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas – a one-time legislator, county supervisor and a fixture in local politics for decades – was found guilty in federal court of seven felonies, including conspiracy, bribery and fraud.Last year, a racism scandal that shook public trust in Los Angeles government triggered the resignations in October of then city council president Nury Martinez and a powerful labor leader, Ron Herrera.After an FBI investigation, two other former city council members pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges in recent years.Former mayor Eric Garcetti, who left office in December, was shadowed by sexual harassment allegations against one of his former top aides.To residents, the cumulative effect “makes the whole body politic of LA look rotten, look illegal”, said Jaime Regalado, former executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles.At a time when the city is struggling with an out-of-control homeless crisis, crime, and soaring housing and rent costs, “it makes everything harder,” Regalado said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA criminal complaint said a consulting firm operated by Price’s wife received a series of payments from companies incorporated or co-owned by Thomas Safran & Associates, GTM Holdings/Works and GTM Holdings, before the councilman voted to approve funding for the companies’ projects.Emails seeking comment from those entities were not immediately returned on Tuesday evening.Price was first elected to the council in 2013 and currently serves as its president pro tempore. His district includes South Los Angeles and parts of the city’s downtown. His term is set to expire in 2026.Price, who is Black, has successfully navigated changing demographics in his district – which has become increasingly Latino – and is known for being attentive to communities that are diverse.The councilman had attended a city council meeting earlier on Tuesday.Mayor Karen Bass’s office said in a statement that she had not seen the charges but was “saddened by this news”.Price’s attorney, David Willingham, declined to comment, saying he had not seen a copy of the criminal complaint.The charges were first reported on Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times. More

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      Democrat Barbara Lee on righting the wrongs of US history: ‘When we tell the truth, healing occurs’

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      When the California congresswoman Barbara Lee first introduced a bill proposing a national commission on racial healing, the US had erupted in grief and rage over the murder of George Floyd.Since then, the movement to provide restitution and reparations to Black Americans has gained momentum. As has the backlash.Several US cities are exploring similar efforts to acknowledge and apologise for systemic injustices. And in Lee’s home state, a taskforce has suggested billions in compensation to Black residents for decades of state-sanctioned discrimination.Meanwhile, Florida blocked the teaching of AP African American studies, book bans sweeping US school districts have targeted writings about race, and nearly two dozen US states have tried to stifle attempts to teach an honest version of American history by banning the teaching of “critical race theory”.Lee, the highest-ranking Black woman appointed to Democratic leadership in the House and a candidate for the US Senate, told the Guardian that she was undeterred. Last month, she and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey reintroduced the legislation to create a commission of “truth, racial healing and transformation” that would work in conjunction with other congressional efforts to study reparations and educate the public about the historic atrocities undertaken and sanctioned by the US government.The bill establishes the arrival in America of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans as the event that “facilitated the systematic oppression of all people of colour”. And it tasks a commission of experts with memorialising the injustices inflicted on Black Americans as well as the abuse of Native Americans, the forced removal of Mexican migrants, the discriminatory ban against Chinese labourers and the colonisation of the Pacific.The Guardian spoke with Lee about the country’s long road to accountability. This interview has been condensed and edited.What does it mean to push for this commission on truth and racial healing, and to push for reparations amid unprecedented rightwing efforts to erase African American history from schools and public libraries?I think what gets lost is that people need to see this as a unifying movement.A lot of people push back on reparations because they get defensive, thinking it’s about them.But this was a government-sanctioned system of slavery. It was a policy of the United States government to enslave Africans. So we’re talking about policies that have brought us to this point of systemic racism. And so the government has a responsibility, and the private sector has a responsibility to step up and repair the damage. There’s no need to get defensive.I find that more people are beginning to understand. To the legacy of slavery, all you have to do is look at the disparities in criminal justice, in mass incarceration, in healthcare and employment. There’s generational trauma as well as generational impacts which we see each and every day in this country.You have people who are racist and uncertain about African Americans, for example, and who don’t know the history, who don’t know the context. But once the truth is told, healing occurs – that’s a human phenomenon. Once you have the truth told, then you can move towards unification. As Americans, you can move towards healing.How do you get such an effort going amid a growing, extreme rightwing movement in Congress?Well, this is the moment to push it forward. There’s no better moment given what we see taking place in terms of trying to deny and destroy our history in this country, and before we were brought here, enslaved. You have to keep educating the public.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd you just have to keep going. Just like Dr King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice – and we have to believe in that.This idea of a truth commission first emerged in South Africa, and now more than 40 countries have launched similar efforts.This is not a unique concept. This is an international concept of what the right thing to do means. And it’s already happened here, in our own country.The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians investigated the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war, and formed the basis of 1988 Civil Liberties Act to grant survivors a public apology and monetary reparations.And I’m so proud of the fact that Japanese Americans are supporting the reparations movement for African Americans.And I’m really proud of California. We had legislation, which Governor Newsom signed, to establish a taskforce, which is coming forward with some recommendations on how to repair the damage in California. And I think California has established a model for the country, and I think other states need to do this as well.And that model is having a government-sanctioned entity that has certified experts, activists and academics, elected officials who go around and listen to people, listen to the descendants of slavery, listen to what the laws were and policies were, and listen to how they are impacting people today. And I think that once that happens, then, again, you have the healing that can take place.Your bill to set up a truth commission complements another bill, HR 40 – the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act – which has been reintroduced every year since 1989. Do you see a future in which monetary reparations might be provided for Black Americans?Whatever the commissions come up with is the appropriate form of reparations – whatever the experts come up with will help repair this damage, I support. More

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      As Prosecutors Revisit Police Killings, Charges Are Still Rare

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      Pamela Price, a new district attorney in Northern California, is the latest to reopen cases that had seemingly been shut, including one from more than 15 years ago.Agustin Gonsalez was shot dead in 2018 by police officers in Hayward, Calif., when he refused to drop a sharp object during a confrontation on a dark street.Andrew Moppin-Buckskin was killed by Oakland officers in 2007 after he ran away following a car chase, hid under a vehicle and failed to comply with their demands.Two years ago, Mario Gonzalez died after he was pinned on the ground for more than five minutes by officers in Alameda, Calif.In all three cases, prosecutors determined that the police should not be criminally charged, seemingly closing the book.But shortly after she became the district attorney of Alameda County in January, Pamela Price initiated a new review of those cases and five others in one of the most extensive re-examinations of police killings launched by progressive prosecutors.Ms. Price’s review is notable because her predecessors had already cleared the officers of wrongdoing and two of the reopened cases occurred more than 15 years ago.As high-profile instances of police brutality shocked the public in recent years and raised questions about official law enforcement accounts, liberal prosecutors campaigned on the promise that they would review cases that they felt were hastily closed without charges. Their efforts to revisit old cases have won praise from the activists and liberal Democrats who voted for them.But the re-examinations so far have rarely led to criminal charges.“To reopen a police use-of-force case is, in many ways, a herculean task,” said Steve Descano, the commonwealth’s attorney in Fairfax County, Va. He lost in court after he charged two federal Park Police officers for the 2017 shooting of a man who fled a car crash, a case that the Justice Department previously reviewed and declined to pursue.The incidents almost never have evidence as stark as the bystander video showing George Floyd being pinned to the ground in 2020 for more than nine minutes by Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering Mr. Floyd.The circumstances often are more ambiguous, the footage less telling. And once a district attorney writes a lengthy memo detailing why criminal charges are unjustified against a police officer, it can be difficult for a successor to overcome those arguments, absent new evidence.“Everybody is going to go through it again, and the outcome in all probability is going to be the same,” said Jim Pasco, the executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “And what’s Einstein’s definition of insanity?”The biggest hurdle for pursuing criminal charges is the wide latitude that officers have to use force. State legislatures, including California’s, have tried to narrow that ability. But officers generally can still use lethal force when they feel they or others could be killed, a level of immunity that law enforcement officials say is necessary to ensure the public’s safety.Pamela Price, the new district attorney of Alameda County, Calif., announced this year that she would review eight police killings, including one dating to 2007.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesAlameda County, Ms. Price’s jurisdiction, covers a large swath of the East Bay across from San Francisco, containing 14 cities and numerous police departments. In the county seat of Oakland, where the Black Panther Party emerged in the 1960s, a legacy of radical politics is intertwined with a troubled history of law enforcement. The Oakland Police Department has been under federal oversight for more than two decades.Ms. Price campaigned on a liberal platform that, besides reviewing old cases, included removing local residents from death row and resentencing inmates serving life sentences — an effort, she said, to restore public trust. Since taking office, she has directed her staff to seek the lowest possible prison sentence for most crimes.She said that in the past, prosecutors routinely gave officers a pass when they killed someone on the job, and she wants questionable police killings to face the same rigor that other criminal cases get.“Every case that we’re looking at now was determined under a double standard,” Ms. Price said in an interview. “Police officers received a different standard of justice than everyday people.”Ms. Price is among a growing cadre of progressive prosecutors elected over the last decade, beginning with the 2016 elections of Kim Foxx in Chicago and Kimberly Gardner in St. Louis, on promises of reducing jail populations and holding police accountable. The movement gained steam after Floyd’s murder.Some prominent district attorneys have since faced a backlash over crime concerns. Chesa Boudin was recalled last year in San Francisco, while Ms. Gardner resigned last week as she faced criticism for her handling of violent crime. Ms. Foxx is not running for re-election next year and has endured criticism from moderates and conservatives, especially for her support of eliminating cash bail statewide.In Maine, a police officer has never been prosecuted for an on-duty killing. But in July 2020, Natasha Irving, the district attorney for four counties, said she would seek charges for the 2007 police shooting death of Gregori Jackson, who was drunk and ran away after a routine traffic stop in Waldoboro, the town where Ms. Irving grew up.Three years later, however, Ms. Irving said that based on the attorney general’s review of the forensics from the case, she will not file charges.“It’s just not going to be a provable case,” she said in an interview.Karla Gonsalez stood at a memorial to her son at the site in Hayward, Calif., where he was shot and killed by police officers.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesIn the Virginia case pursued by Mr. Descano, Bijan Ghaisar, 25, was involved in a minor car crash and then fled in his Jeep, pursued by two officers who cornered Mr. Ghaisar in a residential neighborhood. When the vehicle moved toward a police car, they opened fire, killing him.Mr. Descano brought a case, but a judge dismissed the charges, ruling the officers reasonably feared they were in danger. His efforts to pursue the case further were rejected by the state’s attorney general and the Justice Department.Such reviews offer the possibility of justice for still grieving families but also may unrealistically raise their hopes. Karla Gonsalez, the mother of Mr. Gonsalez, the man who was killed in Hayward, said she was torn when she heard Ms. Price was reopening her son’s case.Television outlets began replaying the body camera footage of Mr. Gonsalez’s confrontation with police. For his family, all of the anger, grief and unresolved questions came rushing back. Why had the officers not tried to de-escalate the situation?“I was excited to know that it was going to be opened up again,” Ms. Gonsalez said. “At the same time, I was very nervous that it was going to be another roadblock, another failure.”Less than 2 percent of police killings result in charges, according to Philip M. Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. That figure has not budged since 2020. The number of people killed by the police is holding steady — last year it was 1,200, compared with 1,147 in 2022, according to Mapping Police Violence.“From where I sit, nothing has changed,” Mr. Stinson said.In Los Angeles County, George Gascón, who was elected district attorney in 2020, appointed a special prosecutor to reopen four cases in which his predecessor declined to file charges.Ryan Young for The New York TimesIn Los Angeles County, George Gascón, who was elected district attorney in 2020, appointed a special prosecutor to reopen four cases in which his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, declined to file charges. He also asked an independent team of experts to review more than 300 previous use-of-force cases to see if the evidence warranted criminal charges.The special prosecutor, Lawrence Middleton, had secured convictions in a 1993 federal trial against Los Angeles Police Department officers for beating Rodney King. In the new cases, he has secured indictments against two officers in the 2018 shooting death of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, who was driving a stolen vehicle and had an air rifle between his legs when he was confronted by officers in a grocery store parking lot. (“Both officers’ use of deadly force was reasonable under the circumstances,” Ms. Lacey wrote in a 2019 memo.)The re-examinations themselves take time, and liberal prosecutors may yet file criminal charges against more officers in past cases. But they said that charges should not be the only benchmark of whether their reviews are worthwhile.“I think there is huge value to reopening a case if there is probable cause, or if there is evidence that seems compelling in any way,” Ms. Irving, the prosecutor in Maine, said. “Yes, part of it is to send a message to people who would be bad actors. Part of it is to send a message to families that have lost loved ones, or individuals who have been harmed, that they count.”Ed Obayashi, a California-based expert in use of force who trains law enforcement, said in 2021 that Mario Gonzalez did not seem to be a threat to the public in Alameda and questioned why officers restrained him before he died. The police had responded to a call that Mr. Gonzalez, 26, was acting strangely in a park and talking to himself.Mr. Obayashi said this week that he did not fault Ms. Price for reviewing the case, but he also felt that if there was consensus in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office under her predecessor, Ms. Price should not have reopened it.“It’s a big concern to law enforcement because these types of decisions, to revisit old cases that former prosecutors have decided that no charges should be brought against the officer, it’s political,” Mr. Obayashi said. “It’s politically driven.”Ms. Price’s review also includes two cases from 15 years ago that occurred seven months apart and involved the same officer killing men who ran away after traffic stops, including Mr. Moppin-Buckskin. The officer, Hector Jimenez, was cleared in each case and remains with the Oakland Police Department.“For the life of me I can’t understand what Ms. Price thinks she’s doing with those kinds of cases, some 15 years after they occurred,” said Michael Rains, a lawyer for Mr. Jimenez.In Hayward, the city agreed to pay $3.3 million to settle a federal lawsuit with Agustin Gonsalez’s family but said it was a way to support his children rather than an admission of wrongdoing. The city said in April that there appeared to be no new evidence that warranted reopening the case.Mr. Gonsalez was shot in November 2018 after police officers confronted him. He was suicidal and was holding a razor blade. He refused to drop the blade and approached the officers with his arms outstretched. That’s when the two veteran police officers shot him 12 times.Karla Gonsalez recently sat in her sister’s kitchen and described her son as a father of two who was an Oakland sports fan and often drove nearly 400 miles south to Disneyland with his season pass. In the corner of her living room was a makeshift shrine, with a flickering candle and a crucifix draped over his portrait.Cynthia Nunes, Mr. Gonsalez’s cousin, said her family was grateful his case was being reopened. But they want more.“Charges actually have to be brought forward, too,” she said. “The system needs to change.”Julie Bosman More

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      With Migrant Flights, Ron DeSantis Shows Stoking Outrage Is the Point

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      The flights to California illustrate the broader bet Gov. Ron DeSantis has made that the animating energy in the G.O.P. has shifted from conservatism to confrontationalism.Ron DeSantis’s decision to send migrants from near the Mexico border to the capital city of California is at first glance the latest in a series of escalating clashes between the Florida governor and his Democratic counterpart, Gavin Newsom.But the performative gambit in the early days of Mr. DeSantis’s 2024 presidential run is better understood as an opening bid to prove to Republican primary voters that he can be just as much a provocateur, and every bit as incendiary, as former President Donald J. Trump.For Mr. DeSantis, the flights illustrate the broader bet he has made that the animating energy in the Republican Party today has shifted from conservatism to confrontationalism. And that in this new era, nothing is more fundamental than picking fights and making the right enemies, whether it’s the migrants who have slogged sometimes thousands of miles to slip through the border, the news media or the chief executive of the biggest blue state on the map.Mr. DeSantis has used this playbook before. He ordered up flights from the Texas border last year to the symbolically liberal hamlet of Martha’s Vineyard, a stunt that drew exactly the outrage he sought. Those flights are now a staple of his stump speech, usually to cheers from the crowd. His allies in the Florida Legislature earmarked $12 million of taxpayer money into the state budget this year for just this purpose.“The easiest way to prove one’s tribal loyalty in 2020s America is by theatrically hating the other tribe,” said Russell Moore, the editor in chief of Christianity Today and the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.A private charter plane that carried more than a dozen migrants, at Florida’s direction, at a Sacramento airport on Monday.Andri Tambunan for The New York TimesIn recent days, two charter flights orchestrated by the DeSantis administration carried roughly three dozen migrants from a New Mexico airport to Sacramento. The migrants, who are mostly Venezuelan, said they had been recruited from outside a shelter in El Paso, with promises of employment that California officials have said amounted to deception. Mr. Newsom, the California governor who is a potential future presidential contender himself, has suggested that the affair could merit “kidnapping charges,” calling Mr. DeSantis in a tweet a “small, pathetic man.”Mr. Moore said he believed “that migrants and asylum seekers are created in the image of God and shouldn’t be mistreated or treated as political theater for anybody.” But he could also see the more crass calculations that Mr. DeSantis is making in a polarized era where politicians are most clearly defined not by what they’re for, but who they’re against.“The one heresy that no tribe seems to allow is a refusal to hate the other tribe,” Mr. Moore said.Mr. DeSantis, who flew to Arizona on Wednesday for a border event, is not a trailblazer in this regard. It was Mr. Trump who began his 2016 campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, who promised to “build the wall” and later pitched a Muslim ban, making an “America First” approach to immigration a central theme of the party. And it was Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas who first began busing immigrants to blue cities and states last year (an idea Mr. Trump floated as president in 2018 but never pursued). Mr. DeSantis later one-upped Mr. Abbott’s buses with the dramatic flights to Martha’s Vineyard, which are now the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit.At the demographic and geographic epicenter of Mr. DeSantis’s presidential candidacy is an effort to appeal to deeply conservative evangelical voters in Iowa, where the Republicans’ 2024 nominating contest begins. Evangelical voters helped propel the Iowa victories of Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee in the last three open contests.Yet the DeSantis campaign and its allies see fighting the left as the fastest way to appeal to those voters rather than overt displays of religiosity. “Christians aren’t looking for a savior to be a president, they already have one,” said one DeSantis adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly to discuss strategy, explaining how Mr. Trump has dominated that voting bloc despite concerns about his moral character.Kevin Madden, who served as a top adviser on Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, said transporting migrants, however cynical, allowed Mr. DeSantis to agitate all the right people.Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, praying at a campaign stop in Iowa last month.Rachel Mummey for The New York Times“He’s provoking Gavin Newsom,” Mr. Madden said. “He’s provoking the most extreme liberal voices to attack him. He is provoking media voices. And that works to his favor because it endears him to the forces on the right who want to see a clash of political civilizations.”Outrage sells. Campaign contributions have repeatedly surged to the fury merchants on the right, whether the politicians selling the lie that the 2020 election was stolen or the G.O.P. hard-liners who battled Representative Kevin McCarthy’s ascent to the House speakership. An “own the libs” mentality has come to drive, if not define, the right online.On the left, Mr. Newsom has sought to elevate himself through his tussles with Mr. DeSantis, too. He ran a television advertisement in Florida attacking him last year. He challenged him to a debate. He traveled this spring to the New College of Florida, a public liberal arts institution where Mr. DeSantis is engineering a right-wing intellectual takeover. In his personal Twitter account, Mr. Newsom has slammed Mr. DeSantis by name at least 20 times.“I think I’m being generous — ‘small and pathetic’ — very generous,” Mr. Newsom said in an interview on NBC’s “Today Show” broadcast on Wednesday. He accused Mr. DeSantis of using migrants as “pawns,” adding, “He’s just weakness masquerading as strength.”Mr. Newsom’s new PAC has been running a rotation of online fund-raising ads that attack Mr. DeSantis. “In my book, a bully and a coward doesn’t deserve to be the leader of the free world,” Mr. Newsom says of Mr. DeSantis in a video ad that began running on Facebook on Wednesday.Mr. DeSantis’s round-table discussion in Arizona on border security was a government event underwritten by taxpayers, not his campaign. After days of mystery, Mr. DeSantis’s administration took credit for the Sacramento flights on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he did not mention Mr. Newsom by name, though he said “sanctuary jurisdictions” had “incentivized” illegal immigration.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a possible eventual presidential hopeful, has sought to elevate himself through his tussles with Mr. DeSantis, too.Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThen Mr. DeSantis shifted to pick another fight with President Biden. “I don’t know how you can just sit there and let the country be overrun with millions and millions of people coming illegally,” Mr. DeSantis said.Mr. DeSantis has become expert at agitating the right’s boogeymen. He once called Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, a “little elf” who needed to be chucked “across the Potomac.” And when Mr. DeSantis’s motives are questioned by reporters, his snapbacks have been quickly packaged and posted on social media in hopes of generating viral hits.If he were to become president, Mr. DeSantis has made plain he would use the White House’s powers to the fullest. He is fond of saying that although he first won the governorship in 2018 with barely 50 percent of the vote, that victory came with 100 percent of the executive authority.As governor, he proudly used the power of the state to overrule local governments, ousting a prosecutor and prohibiting school districts from imposing mask mandates. Such actions are a departure from the limited-government conservatism of yesteryear. His allies say it is a vivid signal to voters that Mr. DeSantis will leverage the powers of government to battle their enemies, at a moment when many Republicans feel that their values and nation are under siege.Cesar Conda, a former chief of staff to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida who, two decades ago, served as the top domestic policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, said that “Ronald Reagan would be rolling over in his grave using taxpayer dollars” to fly migrants from one faraway state to another.“DeSantis’s move is part of a growing strain in conservatism, endorsed by younger conservatives, to aggressively use the power and resources of government to achieve — or coerce — policy goals,” Mr. Conda said. “The ‘less government, lower taxes, more freedom’ mantra of conservatism is becoming quaint and old-fashioned, unfortunately.”Shawn Hubler More