Baghdad-by-the-Bay

Public Firing Squad, San Francisco. Two of five trigger-pullers were previously disciplined for "excessive force". To wit: "Cuevas allegedly fired his gun at three men in 2009 when he was an Antioch police officer, hitting two of them in the back, according to a federal lawsuit which is still pending in court" (SF Examiner)

What is happening in Super Bowl City? Top line, the 2016 city budget will be approximately $9B (Mayor's Office Budget PDF) for 880K people - in a state of 55M with $122B budget (SF Chronicle, 1/7). The 2016 San Francisco city figure is up from $6.6B in just 2009, when local alt-press lovingly documented San Francisco as the worst-run city in America (SF Weekly). Flash forward to 2015, Washington DC based WalletHub.com found:

In an effort to determine the "Best Run City in America," Bay Area cities ranked near the bottom. Not only did Fremont come in last at No. 65, Oakland comes in at No. 60, San Jose at No. 59, and San Francisco No. 54. (WalletHub)

San Francisco is the geo-political, geo-financial power plant of the Greater San Francisco Bay Area from De Anza missionaries (1776) - founders of the eponymous Mission District - through 1849ers gridiron namesake, USA statehood (1850), anti-Chinese Opium Den Ordinances (1875), Panama Pacific Exposition (1915), and personified by Local Baby Girl (1933) > Stanford alumnae (1955) > SF Board of Supervisors (1969) SF Mayor (1978) > USA CA Senator (1992) Dianne Feinstein.

Historically, SF money culture contrasts w South Bay, Santa Clara Valley ranchero, engineering culture. In the figure of Feinstein and in the economy of national security, those cultures complement and reinforce. Silicon Valley as ARPA network partner (SRI, UC 1969), database developer (Oracle 1977), cryptographic resource, encryption frenemey (Apple 2010s), drone supplier, AI competitor, et al barely scratches the surface of the fed's Bay Area interests. The story of Ash Carter's Valley visit wrapped in Wired's Star Wars issue? My guess is that the pun was intended ("DOD Head Ashton Carter Enlists Silicon Valley to Transform the Military", Nov 2015) Hillary Clinton enlists private email servers to store SPA grade state secrets - and Silicon Valley to provide law enforcement with cryptographic backdoors across networks for signal intelligence in a kind of Manhattan Project - which, technically, makes no sense. But which invokes warm-feelings of Cold War nuclear weapons and makes for great PR. Like when Disney staged Stromtroopers at the White House (12/19/15) and Hillary shouted out JJ Abrams in #DemDebate #1 later that same afternoon (12/19/15).

The Force Awakens

Staff for San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee (3x) went in for corruption January 2016. SF Examiner calls the arrests part of sweeping "corruption" in The City. The TransBay budget is busting $2B. Which appears to not count CalTrain connection to 4th/King. Without which the project is a transportation hub to nowhere. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown writes publicly that the City cannot disclose the project's true cost; further that the City must not publicly disclose the true cost:

In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in. (July 2013)

My guess is no one really knows the size of the hole to dig. But assuming that your goal is to fill it in with money, hypothetically, all hope to make it as big as possible. Makes sense. Who wouldn't want a huge hole filled in with money?

January 2016: feds convict SF's Shrimp Boy (where "shrimp" is a common euphemism for "heroin") of standard drug war crimes: " money laundering and illegal booze trafficking to arranging the murders of two San Francisco gang rivals" (San Jose Merc). The case yielded a glimpse of tangential but direct political collusion with organized crime. Summer 2015, SF-native and California State Senator Leyland Yee and staff faced smuggling charges stemming from "$2 million arms deal that would include the purchase of shoulder-fired missiles from Islamic rebels in the Philippines" (CNN). It's unclear at time of writing to who those missiles would be smuggled. I need to follow up on that.

Contemporary rendering of battle during joint French, UK drug war contra Qing Dynasty (details). The first opium war lasted 1839-1842; the second, shown here, October 8, 1856 – October 18, 1860. The French artist, Emile Bayard, of this scene also rendered the iconic image of Les Miserable.

To the best of my knowledge, 2015/16 SF Chinatown's are among the higher-profile politically-organized Chinatown crime cases since Peter Fok-leung Woo synthesized the 14K Triad "China White" heroin smuggling network with the NYC Democratic political machine of 1970s and 1980s (NY Times). But San Francisco's trans-Pacific geopolitics lends itself to deeper geo-political history. To wit, Shrimp Boy inherited San Francisco Chinatown office space vacated by Sun Yat-sen ~100 years ago. Born 1866 in the aftermath of the UK's Second Opium War contra Hong Kong, Sun exiled to SF Chinatown before becoming the first president of the Republic of China. Revered on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, Sun's statue in SF's St Mary's Square went up 1937 (NY Times).

New York Times (details).

Locally, SF Examiner showed the shattered Shrimp Boy's Ghee Kung Tong safe reported used by Sun Yat Sen, Source.

Photographer Julia Carrie Wong, Guardian. Looming in the background, #TransBay. A massive hole to be filled in with as much money as The City can get its hands on. Again, former mayor and active dealmaker, Willie Brown: "Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in." (July 2013)

Shows of Force make sense. Against Woods himself. Against #JusticeForMarioWoods. For a the benefit of a compliant, corporate, sanitized NFL media machine. Against all challengers to The City, within and without The Department. The Show must go on. The Force itself appears vulnerable. Vulnerable to allegations of the obvious. By virtue of inaction, the City of San Francisco both protects and projects white supremacy. Upon revelation of "bigoted" text messages sent between officers of the San Francisco PD:

Police officials blew past the one-year statute of limitations set by the state’s Peace Officer Bill of Rights (Google) for any personnel investigation, Judge Ernest Goldsmith (Google) said, and waited too long to take action on the misconduct allegations that raised issues of bias in the department and forced the district attorney’s office to re-evaluate thousands of cases handled by those officers.

The vulnerable may still be (especially) dangerous. Here, the uncensored content from SF police officers that made national news (Gawker):

In response to a text saying "All niggers must fucking hang," Furminger wrote "Ask my 6 year old what he thinks about Obama."
In response to a text saying "Just boarded train at Mission/16th," Furminger wrote "Ok, just watch out for BM's" [black males].
"I hate to tell you this but my wife friend [sic] is over with their kids and her husband is black! If [sic] is an Attorney but should I be worried?" Furminger's friend, an SFPD officer, responded: "Get ur pocket gun. Keep it available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its [sic] not against the law to put an animal down." Furminger responded, "Well said!"
In response to a text from another SFPD officer regarding the promotion of a black officer to sergeant, Furminger wrote: "Fuckin nigger."

These texts aren't only "bigoted" per Gawker's correct description. They are thinly veiled threats against the President of the United States. They are also violent threats to public safety, generally. Taken together, they are a national security threat. Not just hypothetically threatening. In Ian Furminger's case, actually threatening. Investigators discovered and disclosed the text messages above as fallout from criminal prosecution of Sergeant Furminger for robbing San Francisco drug dealers: "A jury convicted Furminger and Officer Edmond Robles in December of taking and dividing thousands of dollars that police found during searches of drug dealers and their homes." (SF Gate).

United States Justice Department (source)

For all of those charges, DOJ sought 6-8 years. Federal Judge Charles Breyer delivered a sentence of 41 months in February 2015. (TrialInsider) Charles is brother to USA Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer (bio). Both Breyers are Clinton nominees and native San Franciscans (b 1941).

Ultimately, The San Francisco Force is too weak to deter or deliver justice for a January 2015 Mass Murder in Hayes Valley. "Mass murder" isn't hyperbole. The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines "mass murder" has four or more victims (source). Killed. Not just shot. Murdered. In this case, the burst of violence occurred a stone's throw from San Francisco City Hall and 2 miles from Senator Feinstein's ~$16.5M Pacific Heights (2006) and ~$10M Presidio Heights (2013) homes. From 2009 - December 2014, Feinstein chaired the USA Senate Select Committee on Intelligence where she saw "thousands of pictures from battlefields in Syria, Iraq and Yemen". She reportedly keeps two images with her (LA Times).

Closer to home, a year after the January 2015 Mass Murder, ZERO suspects are in custody for San Francisco mass murder of SF teens. SFPD faults "the community" (April 2015). This, then, is what mass murder looks like to Twitter 2016: #4YoungMenSlainSFJan92015

KRON 4 Coverage August 2015 (source)

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, morning after (link)

This is how Baghdad-by-the-Bay - Herb Caen's affectionate pet name for San Francisco (details) - looks like King Louie's Chi-raq on Lake Michigan. Not Spike Lee's Lysistrata "comedy" - but the highly predictable war zone where the young man that conjugated "Chi-raq", coining a cottage industry (Amazon, eBay) of violence-as-entertainment, may himself be shot in the head a few days before Christmas 2015 (details). American national security data is devastating:

Bay Area ABC 7 News segment on unsolved murder in America. One of which includes Richmond's Rodney Allen Fraizer. "Police told the family roughly 18 shots were fired in the attack," (Richmond Confidential 2014).

Murder Accountability Project data via Thomas Hargrove (bio here, ABC 7 video source: YouTube)

Shooters and killers face justice much less frequently; young black moms and sons don't matter enough to earn justice. Chicago solves about a quarter of its murders (source); Illinois State Police face lawsuit for failing to disclose data on state-level insecurity (Murder Accountability Project, 2015). Investigative efficacy of Bay Area murders isn't much better. Again, the Murder Accountability Project aired on the local ABC affiliate:

Anybody that knows these towns can immediately see that black lives, families, and cities matter less.

Two American political machines: San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. One an intercontinental nexus, Baghdad-by-the-Bay; one a vast, flat interior plains state, Chi-raq. The Far West and the Midwest, both outside the old Civil War zone. Caen to close:

A small “d” democratic city run by big-buck conservatives, a place where the winds of freedom will blow your mind and your hat off, where eccentricity is the norm and sentimentality the ultimate cynicism.
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So welcome, dear visitors, to Crazytown USA. You will either be crazy about it or become as crazy as the rest of us. Either way, may you all return safely to your funny country, that large land mass slightly to the right of Baghdad-by-the-Bay.