Economist.com Cities Guide: San Francisco Briefing - December 2005

News this month

Cops gone wild?

In a big embarrassment for a city that prides itself on tolerance, San Francisco is reeling from a Christmas-party videotape made by city police officers which features skits ridiculing women, homosexuals, blacks, Asians and the homeless. One sketch has a white officer in a patrol car running over a black homeless woman. Gavin Newsom, the city's mayor, and Heather Fong, the police chief, suspended 24 officers for their alleged role in the video, which Ms Fong called “egregious, shameful and despicable.” Anyone with access to the internet has been able to download excerpts from it.

Daniel Horowitz, the attorney representing Andrew Cohen, the officer who produced the video, conceded that the humour in the skits was immature, but blamed city officials for thrusting it into the public domain. The video had been prepared for a Christmas party, but was leaked onto the web. Mr Cohen further explained that the jokes were not meant to disparage anyone. While some San Franciscans say the city lacks a sense of humour, others note that most private employers would fire workers over such shenanigans. Most of the suspended officers work in Bayview Hunters Point, a black neighbourhood with a high rate of violent crime, and black leaders have long accused the department of racism and sexism. But the scandal seems to be dying down. The city conducted hearings with the suspended officers and all 24 officers were back on the beat by December 15th; they could still face disciplinary action, however.

Tookie’s last stand

Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a 51-year-old co-founder of the Crips, a notorious Los Angeles street gang, who was convicted of killing four people during two robberies in 1979, was executed in the early hours of December 13th at San Quentin state prison. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused to grant him clemency. The governor was unimpressed with Mr Williams's transformation into an anti-gang crusader whose writings tried to discourage poor young men from joining gangs. He was nominated for two different Nobel prizes.

This decision was a challenge for the Republican governor. Mr Williams's plea for his sentence to be commuted to life had become an international cause célèbre. Jesse Jackson, Jamie Foxx, an Oscar-winning actor, and Snoop Dogg, a rap star, said Mr Williams embodied the human capacity for redemption. But Mr Schwarzenegger, beset by low approval ratings, did not want to alienate California voters by showing leniency to a convicted murderer. Californians support the death penalty (54% of Democrats and 87% of Republicans, according to a Field poll last year), and American governors rarely commute death sentences unless presented with overwhelming evidence of a defendant’s innocence or mental incompetence.

A pile of rubbish

Ron Gonzales, the mayor of San Jose, may have hoped to ride out his term's eighth and final year without stress. But a dodgy deal with a rubbish company has spawned a scandal he can't get rid of. On December 13th, San Jose's city council censured Mr Gonzales and threatened to limit his power. The mayor of America’s tenth-largest city has ignored calls for his resignation.

The scandal has been simmering for several years, but erupted into crisis in December when an independent investigator confirmed the findings of a county grand jury. The grand jury had accused Mr Gonzales and his chief aide, Joe Guerra, of violating city (and possibly state and federal) rules in their dealings with Norcal, a local company hired by the city to haul rubbish.
Messrs Gonzales and Guerra stand accused of failing to disclose a backroom deal with Norcal in 2000 that involved a $11.3m pay increase for rubbish collectors. Mr Gonzales called for the independent investigation, after initially denying the grand jury’s allegations. The result of the investigation has tainted him further, however, and rendered him ineffective for the remainder of his term.

Black Muslims

Four men have been arrested in connection with terrorising two small markets that sell alcohol in poor neighbourhoods. Police say the four are associated with an Oakland-based black Muslim group modelled on the Nation of Islam, and were among the dozen bow-tie-wearing men caught on videotape tearing apart one of the stores on November 23rd. Their arrests bring further scrutiny to Your Black Muslim Bakery, an Oakland business founded in 1968 by the late Yusef Bey, a religious leader who espoused a black Muslim brand of self-reliance.

Mr Bey’s group has been praised for bringing business to blighted neighbourhoods and putting ex-convicts to work. But it has also been criticised by law-enforcement officials, who say it uses organised-crime tactics to build its power base. Before Mr Bey’s death in 2003, his followers had been implicated in assaults and threats against police officers. Two of Mr Bey’s sons have been murdered, and a third now stands accused in the liquor-store attacks. The proliferation of such stores in poor urban neighbourhoods has long been a source of racial tension. Most store owners are immigrants from Asia and the Middle East who, black leaders say, profit by encouraging alcoholism among local customers.

Not with our money

A conservative Christian group has closed all its accounts with Wells Fargo, in protest against the San Francisco bank's dealings with “pro-gay” groups. Focus on the Family, a non-profit, right-wing religious group with an income of $146m in 2004, ceased business with Wells Fargo after learning the bank had donated $50,000 to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a Los-Angeles-based NGO. Wells Fargo's website announces the bank has donated more than $14m to pro-gay organisations in the past two decades.

A vice-president at Wells Fargo has said the bank is proud to be a “diverse organisation” that supports the local gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, as well as causes that Focus on the Family supports. He also said that the bank's donation to GLAAD came from profits on accounts in the San Francisco area, not from Focus on the Family’s home state of Colorado.

Catch if you can

December 2005

The Modern Art of Orchids

Until February 26th 2006

People have been fascinated by orchids throughout history: Confucius extolled their graceful leaves and delicate fragrance more than 2,000 years ago; British horticulturalists went wild for them when they were first brought to Europe in the 19th century; and in “The Big Sleep”, Raymond Chandler’s noir thriller, a character in a hothouse filled with orchids describes the flowers' “perfume” as having “the rotten sweetness of corruption.”

The Conservatory of Flowers is now inviting visitors to its own hothouse to view the diverse beauty of these flowers. The exhibit features sculptures and other art inspired by orchids, as well as a gallery full of live specimens. The show also explains the orchid’s biology. There is plenty of material here: there are up to 35,000 species of orchid, which account for 10% of all plant species.

The Conservatory of Flowers, John F. Kennedy Drive, Golden Gate Park. Tel: +1 (415) 666-7001. Visit the conservatory’s website for more details.

More from the San Francisco cultural calendar