State of the City: Todd Gloria, Tide Pods, and an UnWar on Drugs

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria delivered an upbeat state of the city address earlier this week at the Balboa Theatre, touting accomplishments in building more housing, filling potholes, and a city-wide project labor agreement.

It’s an election year, and from the context of his language, it appears he’s concluded that his biggest challenges are coming from the right. Addressing homelessness and crime were major issues, framed in large part for local consumption by righties’ angst and anger suppositions. 

Hizzoner does know how to deliver an inherently political speech laced with tons of optimism and garnished with appropriate numbers to make his case. If you didn’t leave the venue feeling upbeat, you clearly weren’t part of his target audience.

He said, while the city had made progress on the goals announced when taking office in 2020, finishing up his vision posed challenges. 

Via the Union-Tribune:

• “The state of our city is getting stronger every day,” he said. “We have more work to do, but we have proven that, together, we are up to the task.”

• He acknowledged progress may not yet be apparent to everyone in every neighborhood.

• “Progress can be a tricky beast,” he said. “It doesn’t look the same to everyone — it’s often non-linear and messy.”

Searches for new police and fire chiefs will be priorities for the coming year. An online survey plus community forums in all nine city council districts have been announced as part of the process of hiring a replacement for retiring police chief David Neislet.

A newly signed executive order expanding the Complete Communities Housing Solutions will allow developers to quickly gain permits along with permission to build structures as much as four times the size a property’s zoning typically allows.

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The mayor has clearly been influenced by the right’s narratives about increasing crime, especially claims of retail theft by organized crime. He has joined the law enforcement push to weaken Proposition 47, a reform measure passed by voters that redefined some crimes and freed some held behind bars. 

Cops and right wingers have been at this for years, saying criminals are encouraged by lessened penalties. This is malarkey; nobody has ever (or ever will see) seen a would-be thief tallying up his potential haul with the calculator on his/her phone.

Although it is still being touted by too many news organizations, the National Retail Federation’s claims about a rapid increase in shoplifting was disproved and retracted. Theft of merchandise has remained at roughly the same level for almost a decade.

What is changing are the longer term potential profits for big corporate retailers, which have largely been driven by stock buybacks. Take Walmart, for instance. (It’s only a matter of time until somebody claims the recently announced store closures in San Diego were due to theft.)

From FY2006 to FY2023, Walmart's total net profit reached $243.07 billion, with share buybacks and dividend payments totaling $209.52 billion, accounting for 86% of the profit. Stock buybacks only work for so long, and the time is coming for many companies when this performance mirage ends.

The Mayor’s reference 

• “We should be locking up criminals, not laundry detergent!” 

to retail items being locked up in cabinets (which can decrease sales by as much as 20%) got noticed.by Politico and by election opponent Geneviéve Jones-Wright. 

• Gloria’s camp took issue with Jones-Wright’s jab. “He clearly states his intention to support fixes that address exploitation of Prop 47 while keeping faith with its original intent,” his director of communications, Rachel Laing, told POLITICO.

Trust me on this one, the plexiglass merchandise prisons are a propaganda move. Corporate America wants Donald Trump (and his types) in office so they can get back to their own versions of crime. 

Organized criminals targeting retail outlets often have shopping lists of high demand / high profit items. The value of their haul has nothing to do with what they steal.

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Gloria also chimed in about cracking down on fentanyl, while saying that it wouldn’t be another War on Drugs. I suppose this posturing is good for something related to perception, but is total hogwash given the lack of available treatment and the fact that incarceration can actually increase crime.

Keep in mind that San Diego is one of the safest communities in the United States, and crime is headed down according to statistics compiled by SANDAG. And any politician thinking the War on Drugs was a winning proposition should be politically exiled.

Not spoken to by the mayor (and politicians in general) is the war FOR crime being waged by disparate law enforcement organizations responding with slowdowns to citizen initiatives for criminal justice and policing reforms. It’s a win-win for those on the street beats: less paperwork and increased public fears. Sometimes it’s organized, sometimes it’s not, but it’s nearly always “unofficial.”

My bet would be that the mayor (and plenty of others) is wary of the SD Police Officers Association, which is still bitter about the attempt to make officers wear masks during the COVID pandemic, among other things.

From Dylan Matthews at Vox:

•  Police unions in general have become the most vocal interest group opposing criminal justice reforms and especially reforms to police discipline and use of force. Historically, they have, unlike most unions, been profoundly conservative institutions that uphold a particular white ethnic, “law and order”-focused variant of right-wing politics. they have been among Donald Trump’s most fervent allies;

All this crime talk is simply about driving voters to conclusions usually disproven by facts.

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As AxiosSD pointed out this morning, left unmentioned in Gloria’s speech were potential tax increases on the November ballot. 

There’s a citywide increase in sales tax to fund general city services, talked about by the mayor and Councilmember Raul Campillo, a citizens' initiative to increase county sales taxes for transit, road and infrastructure spending, and the San Diego Housing Federation’s proposed fee on sales of homes beginning at $2.5 million, to create a revenue source for low-income housing.

According to AxiosSD:

• After the primary election on March 5, attention will shift to the November ballot and whether there's enough space for three local tax increases — assuming all three marshal the support necessary to qualify in the first place

It should be noted that the sales tax measures were set up in such a manner that they would require 50+1% of the vote. The transit sales tax will have to overcome the recent history of troubled leadership at SANDAG and the local GOP’s war on what they called (proposed for the next decade) mileage tax.

Finally, there’s pressure on the mayor and nearly all local politicians to “do something” about unhoused populations. I would have been thrilled if any politician had the guts to say (lack of) housing is a systemic problem as theft signed a law eliminating single family housing as the default residential zoning designation.

In the meantime, the (maybe) well-meaning advocates for the not-in-my-back-yard homeless detention facility known as Sunbreak Ranch are calling on the City Council to “temporarily” shut down Brown Field flight operations based on the City Emergency Decree eliminating Federal Aviation Administration oversight of the property.  

They’re hoping to “parachute in” a “homeless triage center” for the City and County of San Diego complete with all the facilities (built by the military), logistics, and services needed. It will only be temporary until a suitable site appears (in a mirage outside Borrego).

So many “ifs,” so little time.

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Friday’s Substack Links to Ponder

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Trump's Fraud Trial Outburst is a Preview of His Presidency Via Jill Filipovic

• The last day of Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York was a doozy. The former president gave a surprise statement in court which went swiftly and predictably off the rails. The fraud case against him, he said, was actually “a fraud on me.” New York attorney general Leticia James, he opined, “should pay me,” and not the other way around (she is seeking $370 million as a penalty for the alleged frauds). He berated the judge — the same man who will decide the outcome of this case, in which there is no jury — saying, “You have your own agenda, I certainly understand that” and declaring that “you can’t listen for more than one minute.”

• One of his lawyers, Alina Habba, was similarly unhinged:

• In her theatrical presentation, Ms. Habba criticized the attorney general for drinking Starbucks in the courtroom and, she claimed, for having her shoes off during closing arguments.

• “They’re not living in the real world,” Ms. Habba said. “They’re living in this crazy world,” she said, prompting Justice Engoron to question the relevance of the attorney general’s footwear situation.

• Dramatic, self-aggrandizing, and deeply disrespectful displays from broadly incompetent lunatics who have somehow been elevated to power: That is the Donald Trump story in a nutshell.

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NO INDICTMENT for Brittany Watts – Grand jury dismisses charges against Ohio woman arrested for miscarriage. Via Jessica Valenti

• Brittany’s case epitomizes everything we know about the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes: Women charged are often turned in by healthcare providers; Brittany was turned in by a nurse. Prosecutors will often bring charges that are seemingly unrelated to abortion and miscarriage in order escape criticism; in this case, Warren County charged Brittany with ‘abuse of a corpse’. And, of course, Brittany is Black; women of color are disproportionately targeted over their pregnancy outcomes.

• The media coverage, too, followed a predictable pattern. Local media outlets demonized Brittany, first reporting that the fetus was so “big” that her toilet had to be removed by plumbers. The truth was that police tore apart Brittany’s bathroom looking for the fetal remains. The media coverage was made to be as sensationalist as possible—and to make Brittany look callous and cruel.

• The prosecutor’s office tried to do the same, arguing that the fetus “was large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet and she went on [with] her day.” He was offended that Brittany didn’t seem sufficiently traumatized. From Timko, Brittany’s lawyer:

• “I just want to know what [the prosecutor] thinks she should have done. If we are going to require people to collect and bring used menstrual products to hospitals so that they can make sure it is indeed a miscarriage, it’s as ridiculous and invasive as it is cruel.”

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Musk uses megaphone to promote misleading claims about voting, push for severe restrictions Via Judd Legum at Popular Information

• This week, Elon Musk has repeatedly promoted false and misleading claims about voting to his 168 million followers on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. Musk then used these erroneous claims to justify massive restrictions on voting in the United States, including eliminating early voting, abolishing most mail-in voting, and imposing new identification requirements. 

• On January 9, for example, Musk posted that "Arizona clearly states that no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections." This revelation was accompanied by an image posted by an X user named Mark Jeffery, a cryptocurrency investor and self-published author of science fiction novels. A highlighted portion of the image states that individuals who do not provide proof of citizenship will be provided with a “federal only” ballot.

• On January 10, Musk posted that he recently learned "illegals are not prevented from voting in federal elections," and that "came as a surprise." That claim is absolutely false.