See how they run: S.F. mayoral candidates promise more Asian appointees in Chinatown forum

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Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: London Breed. Read earlier dispatches here.

It’s 39 days until the November election, and on Thursday afternoon in Chinatown, the five major mayoral candidates made their latest appeal to a heavily sought demographic: The Asian electorate.

No single issue dominated the discussion— the moderators at the Asian Pacific Islander Council-sponsored event worked assiduously to ask a wide-ranging set of questions, on topics from income inequality to food security — but public safety, as always, was a through-line.

The two reporters hosting the forum at the Chinese Cultural Center on Kearny Street — NBC and MSNBC national breaking news anchor Richard Lui, and NBC Bay Area anchor Gia Vang — brought up each of the five major mayoral candidates one at a time, questioning them for a little over 20 minutes each. 

Each candidate left before the next was invited in, none interacted, and no campaigning was allowed inside the room.

While crime was key, the candidates have all but banded together around remarkably similar postures when it comes to public safety: A fully staffed department, more police recruits, more foot patrols, and more surveillance and technology. Two — former supervisor and caretaker mayor and current venture capitalist Mark Farrell and District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí — have said they would fire San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, and all want to bolster police retirement pensions to help retention. 

Public safety aside, moderators Lui and Vang had other questions at the Chinatown forum. 

Would the candidates support hiring Asian department heads, commissioners, and other staff, commensurate with the 37 percent of the city’s population that’s Asian?

Safaí, Daniel Lurie, Farrell, and Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin all said yes (Peskin said “an absolute, unqualified, enthusiastic hell yes”). Breed said it was “not a yes or no question,” and pointed to hires like City Attorney David Chiu, City Administrator Carmen Chu, Director Ivy Lee in the new Office of Victim Rights and Services, and others. “I will do everything I can to meet that goal, and I have since I’ve been mayor.”

(Proposition 209, passed in 1996, banned affirmative action in California, including using race as a basis for hiring, so it is unclear if the candidates’ promises are legal.)

What would the candidates do to address the 42 percent of the city’s Asian residents who live in poverty? 

Breed spoke about food delivery for seniors during the pandemic and the opening of a Bayview grocery store, free for poor residents; she named housing vouchers for single-room occupancy hotels, and claimed there are no Asian seniors living on the streets in San Francisco.

“We don’t have any of our AAPI seniors who are actually homeless,” she said. “Are you saying there are no homeless AAPIs in San Francisco?” prodded Lui. None “physically on the street,” she said, but there are certainly Asian people in SROs and other congregate housing, and she would work to move them into permanent affordable housing.

Would the candidates support the creation of an Office of Food, like in Boston in New York, to “reduce and eliminate hunger … throughout the entire city.”

Safaí was the only candidate to say yes. Breed said the office already exists; it is called the Human Services Agency and has programs to provide “culturally competent meals” to people like Chinese seniors. Lurie said he is “a fan of less bureaucracy” and would study the issue. Farrell said he was open to it “if that’s what makes sense,” while Peskin said “we do not need to establish another office,” but only need “good management at the top.”

Peskin also pointed out that Breed’s budget initially cut city grants to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank and other programs before the Board of Supervisors worked to restore that funding.

On crime, Mayor Breed is the one candidate with a record, and again she sought to sell the audience on San Francisco’s turnaround, saying police drones and surveillance are bringing crime “down to its lowest level” and pointing out, by name, some of the “Chinatown beat cops” who were standing in the back of the room: “We know Will and Lauren and Talent and Dustin all work really hard to make sure that the community feels heard and respected.”

She also made one thing clear: She believes the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin was a turning point for Chinatown and the larger Asian community. Dramatic examples of anti-Asian crimes were a major part of the messaging in Boudin’s recall. Such crimes rose nationally in the aftermath of Covid-19, not just in San Francisco, and Breed said her appointment of District Attorney Brooke Jenkins had turned the page on a sordid history.

“The biggest difference now when [crime] happens, you will be arrested, you will be prosecuted and held accountable, and that will make our city safer, because people will think twice before they cross those lines,” she said. (Experts say DAs have little to do with crime rates, and Boudin did arrest and prosecute criminals.)

But it was their similarities on crime that resonated on Thursday, even in their campaign style. Breed, for instance, was not the only one to call out police officers in the room; four of the five candidates pointed to the back, where Chinatown beat officers stood, in a show of their community bona fides.

Farrell, who pointed out “some great officers I see here in the room,” said he would “make sure that everybody in San Francisco, and particularly those members in our [Asian-American Pacific Islander] community know that, as mayor, I will not tolerate hate crimes here in San Francisco.” 

District 11 Supervisor Safaí emphasized getting “officers out of their cars and on foot beats,” and hiring more officers who can speak Cantonese and other languages common in San Francisco. Lurie said the same: “We need to recruit officers that look like the communities that they serve and speak the language of the communities that they serve.”

Peskin, for his part, was the only candidate to point out that the pandemic-era anti-Asian hate was, in fact, a national problem, one he said was “normalized by none other than the president of the United States through a set of vitriolic words that … affected behaviors all over this country.” 

Peskin, like his rivals, said he, too, wants a fully staffed police force, and a “culturally competent” one at that. He name-checked even more of the officers standing in the room than Breed; Chinatown is in Peskin’s district, after all.

Still, though all five candidates touched on crime and it has been a mainstay of the campaign trail, Thursday’s forum was remarkably staid for taking place before a community that tends to vote more conservatively and has been galvanized by fear of crime, even as reported crimes are falling by double digits compared to last year’s rates, and homicides are at a 60-year low.

Outside, a few volunteers held up signs, and a trio of two cymbalists and a drummer banged a constant din over Portsmouth Square. The third floor of the Hilton hotel at 750 Kearny St., which hosts the cultural center where the forum took place, overlooks the Chinatown plaza. Republican Ellen Lee Zhou was present, confined to the street, where she lambasted the Democratic candidates inside. “Only white people running for mayor, only Black people running for mayor, no Chinese for mayor,” she spoke through a bullhorn.

The forum was light, but long. After about two hours, when Peskin exited the stage as the last speaker, the crowd had thinned somewhat. The trash cans were filled with boba cups from Little Sweet, which helped sponsor the event; all of the candidates had taken the stage with boba in tow, revealing their favorite flavors. (Breed’s? Watermelon slush.)

Breed had been the third to speak, after Lurie and before Farrell. As she walked off the stage, she engaged in more retail politics than the others: She shook hands with several people in the front row and said her hellos — while the other candidates had simply walked out — before exiting the room herself, stage left.