Three weeks after sexist graffiti hit the campaign headquarters of Hillary Ronen, a candidate running for District 9 supervisor, new revelations show that a member of her opponent’s staff obtained video of the incident from a nearby gas station.
The owner of a gas station across the street said that he received a call from someone who he assumed to be the landlord of the campaign office asking for a copy of the security footage. A little while later, Gladys Soto, a staffer for the campaign of Joshua Arce, came to collect the only copy of the footage, the gas station owner said.
Ronen is alleging that Arce and his campaign withheld the video from the Police Department for three weeks, thereby interfering with a police investigation.
“The Arce campaign has been obstructing a police investigation into sexist graffiti and has been sitting on a stolen tape for three weeks,” Ronen said, adding that she has seen social media posts from Arce supporters accusing her own campaign staff of having tagged the headquarters.
Ronen said she spoke to a police sergeant who said he had not received video from the Arce campaign.
Jen Kwart, a spokesperson with the Arce campaign, said that Soto was canvassing the area along with other supporters when she got the footage on September 14 or 15. The campaign then waited about a week to give the video to the police, she said, because they were reviewing the footage and looking for additional evidence.
Arce released a press statement Friday morning saying his campaign was helping to collect evidence.
“More than a week after the incident, a member of our staff, Gladys Soto, obtained surveillance footage from a gas station across the street from the Ronen office,” the statement read. “Our staff kept looking for additional evidence for another several days and we then handed everything we had over to SFPD, just as SFPD opened their official investigation.”
The video itself, obtained anonymously by KPIX 5, appears to show a man and a woman walking by the gas station at 30th and Mission streets near 5 a.m. on September 5.
The pair then cross the street to Ronen’s campaign headquarters at 3417 Mission St. and one of them kneels at the door, apparently scrawling graffiti.
The next morning, Ronen and her staff discovered their headquarters had been tagged with “Vote Arce ya cunts.”
Arce’s statement also noted that the his campaign was not accusing Ronen’s campaign staff of the tagging, saying Ronen’s version of events “keeps changing.”
“Before Ronen accused ‘children’ of vandalizing her office, she first accused our campaign and our supporters of the crime,” the statement read. “Now she’s saying that our campaign has accused her own campaign manager of vandalizing the office.”
Ronen said Arce’s supporters have alleged “that I committed a crime against myself” and “posted online that I was obstructing justice because I was in possession of the video.”
Instead, she accused Arce’s campaign of withholding the video from police for weeks.
KPIX 5 first reported on the Arce campaign’s involvement with the security tape on Thursday.
Correction: Mission Local previously stated that the gas station owner said Gladys Soto pretended to be Hillary Ronen’s landlord. The gas station owner did not say this and only “assumed” she was the landlord. We regret the error.
Arce says on his FB page that “More than a week after the incident, a member of our staff, Gladys Soto, obtained surveillance footage from a gas station across the street from the Ronen office. My staff kept looking for additional evidence for another several days”.
Huh. I’m not sure why Arce thinks that looking for evidence is his -or his staff’s -job. It isn’t. That is withholding evidence, plain and simple.
Arce’s bizarre claim that Ronan’s “story” is changing is a complete non-sequitur. Ronan isn’t telling “a story”. She’s expressing displeasure and surprise that the Arce campaign interfered with the work of SFPD detectives by securing police work they had no rights over.
Sad.
Wow. It’s not up to Arce’s staff to look “for additional evidence for another several days”. That sort of review is the job of the police. Soto- and Arce- should have handed evidence over immediately. This looks like they withheld evidence, perhaps to see if one of their volunteers got a little too enthusiastic?
This just looks …very, very bad. And it shows tremendously poor judgment.
This is not about Ronan’s “changing story” (? really?) It’s about about a campaign that arrogates the right to keep and review police evidence.