At a debate designed for monolingual Cantonese speakers Saturday, the District 3 candidates — speaking in Cantonese, or with their own interpreters — agreed that San Francisco needs to hire more police officers.
The answer of one of the candidates, however, led to a rare moment of contention over Danny Sauter’s consistency on the issue.
“We’re about 500 police officers short in San Francisco. We’re 50 officers short in Central Station, which is tasked with protecting Chinatown. So that’s the first priority,” said Sauter, the executive director of Neighborhood Centers Together and one of six candidates campaigning for the seat currently held by Supervisor Aaron Peskin. Peskin has termed out and is running for mayor.
Not so fast, said Moe Jamil, a deputy city attorney, who pointed to Sauter’s on-the-record remarks during a September 2020 debate, held at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. At that time, Sauter said he would not support more police.
Sauter lost to incumbent Peskin in that race, but received 43.5 percent of the vote. This time, Peskin has endorsed Jamil and Sharon Lai to succeed him.
Sauter fought back on Saturday. “We’re talking about 2024, and I support hiring more police officers,” Sauter said, adding that he — like much of the city — supported Prop. E and rejected the “cop tax” Prop. B.
More back and forth ensued and, if the situation wasn’t enough to confuse the audience — most were listening to their first debate and some had never heard of Peskin — Sauter’s interpreter went awry, translating Sauter’s position as 100 percent in favor into the exact opposite. “It is clear that our candidate just now did not support expanding the police department,” the interpreter said in Cantonese.
An attentive audience member shouted in English, “Sorry, I just wanted to say that the translation wasn’t accurate.”
The audience member later said in an interview that, in general, Sauter’s interpreter was “a really good interpreter.” Yet, even setting aside the obvious error in police policies, “All of her answers kind of elevated a lot more than what he said.”
“Some of the translation is a little interesting,” said Sandra Fong, another audience member and a longtime bilingual Chinatown poll worker. “I think the interpreters are not professional interpreters, so it makes a difference. But most of it, it’s pretty clear.”
“We tried to do the best to translate directly, and in as short an amount of time as possible,” Sauter said after the forum.
For the most part, however, the forum went well. It was moderated by Han Li, a bilingual San Francisco Standard reporter who specializes in Asian community and political coverage.
Among the six candidates, Lai and Jamil spoke without interpreters; Sauter introduced himself and his platform in Cantonese, leaving the rest to his interpreter; Eduard Navarro and Matthew Susk completely relied on their interpreters for Cantonese; and JConr B. Ortega failed to show up for the debate.
While Jamil completed the entire debate in Cantonese, he had occasional moments of difficulty. “I’m sorry if my Cantonese is imperfect or unclear, but I thought it was important to make an effort,” he said in Cantonese in his opening remarks, to loud applause from the audience.
If anything, the forum was another reminder that police and public safety will play a big role in the November election — in District 3, which includes Chinatown, North Beach, Russian Hill and the financial District, as well as the rest of the city.
First open election in 16 years
“The election is the first open election in District 3 in 16 years. So we want our community to know what’s going on,” said Jeremy Lee, president of the Rose Pak Democratic Club, which hosted the debate. To amplify the issues, Mission Local is also running a series asking each candidate a new question every week.
To see how other District 3 candidates voted in March, click here.
“The March primary had a very low turnout in the Chinese community. We hope to change that in November,” Lee added. More than 50 Chinese community members showed up for the two-hour debate that covered issues such as housing, poverty and which mayoral candidate has done most for the Asian community.
Jamil said he supports Peskin (who is also supporting him and Lai). As for Mayor London Breed, “It’s time for her to go back to her apartment and leave City Hall,” he said. The entire room burst into laughter. None of the other candidates has made an endorsement in the mayor’s race.
When asked what he thought about small businesses that dump trash on the sidewalk, “It’s completely unacceptable,” said Susk, a longtime small-business owner. “They should be fined for things like that. They should not be fined for graffiti on their windows, criminals are putting them there.”
Lai, the only Asian candidate, won wide support among the audience members.
Junting Tan, a monolingual Cantonese speaker who learned about the debate through Chinatown’s Community Tenants Association, an endorser of Lai, held Lai’s poster throughout the two-hour debate. She hoped to choose someone who could “improve the situation in San Francisco and fight for the rights of the Chinese,” Tan said. “How cramped the apartments are in Chinatown!”
Another senior woman who was from District 7 said she wanted to give Lai nine points for her outstanding performance today. She gave Sauter eight points, and the others seven points; the two non-Chinese speakers who spoke Chinese, Jamil and Sauter, should receive an extra five points for “sympathy,” she said.
She also lamented the quality of the interpretation, “Sometimes, the whole personal story was lost,” she said.
Sauter’s interpreter was far from the only one who made a mistake on Saturday. Susk and Navarro’s interpreters sometimes paused to think about how they should translate down the line, or accidentally mixed in English or Mandarin words with Cantonese.
Approaches to poverty
Chinatown has the lowest median income of all San Francisco neighborhoods, at $27,800, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The candidates debated how to move Chinatown residents out of poverty.
Navarro, a tech startup founder who’s from Spain and can speak five languages, advocated for more language services. “If you’re in a situation where language is a barrier, that moves you away from being able to access a variety of opportunities,” he said.
Susk mentioned that the majority of Chinatown and District 3 residents rely on corner stores for shopping. “We must modernize zoning to make affordable and accessible grocery stores,” he said.
Jamil wants to subsidize childcare for working families. If you have “a 3-year-old and you want to go to work, then you look at a bill which is going to cost $1,000, $2,000 or sometimes $3,000 to pay for somebody to watch your kids, that’s going to hold you down and keep you in poverty,” he said.
Lai, a former board member at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, mentioned expanding job opportunities and subsidizing job training programs, improving education funding, including continuing to fund City College and creating more community spaces for SRO students to have a place to study, and expanding transportation and food subsidies “to make sure that families that are really low income have the right to survive in this city,” she said.
Sauter echoed the point about City College, and said the first thing he would work on as a supervisor is to make sure that Chinatown is connected to the internet. He cited a March 2024 report by Chinese for Affirmative Action, which found out that 44 percent of Chinatown households don’t have an internet broadband subscription. “You need the internet to have connectivity to education, jobs, health care, friends, family; that’s just unacceptable,” he said. “So, I’ll work with our city attorney to hold our utility and internet companies accountable, and make sure that we have high-speed internet throughout Chinatown.”
