Mayor of crime narratives, mayor of Elsie Street, and stuff to do

Good afternoon! Let’s catch up on a few things:

• The district attorney’s office today portrayed Nima Momeni, the alleged assailant of tech executive Bob Lee, as a premeditated killer and a danger to public safety. Text messages from Momeni’s sister Khazar to Lee, and surveillance footage from the area of the fatal stabbing, were included in the motion to detain without bail.

• Expect plenty of finger-pointing, opinionating, and speculation as this case unfolds. The news, revealed first by Mission Local, that the suspect arrested in Lee’s murder is another tech executive upended some narratives about street crime. Elena Balakrishnan attended SFPD’s Thursday press conference about the case, where District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and Mayor London Breed spoke, and listened to officials plead for a more nuanced view of safety in the city. Supervisor Matt Dorsey reiterated that “violent crime numbers are not spiking in San Francisco, even if San Francisco struggles with some other crimes.”

As Eleni writes, “The emphasis certain city officials made today on withholding conclusions regarding crime in San Francisco — including that crime is in fact not as high as it seems — was somewhat surprising, considering those very same officials have used particular anecdotes to push tough-on-crime policies in the past. “

• Joe Rivano Barros has an obituary for Michael David Nolan, the “mayor of Elsie Street,” who helped mentor activists and shape movements across the city. “When Nolan moved to San Francisco in 1970—after time in Chile with the Peace Corps, six years in anti-nuclear weapon activism, and stints in news—he took up the focus that would largely define him for the rest of his life: Local organizing,” Joe writes. Watch Mission Local’s 2019 video piece on Nolan, with the Bernal Heights history-keeper talking about his political battles and his love for the Mission: “I go down there to play, and organize, and instigate, parade, make music, dance, make trouble, I dunno — and meet friends.”

• And if you, too, want to go down to the Mission to play and meet friends, take a look at some of the stuff to do that’s going on in the neighborhood.

Enjoy the weekend,

Sara