Scott Wiener: By the Police, For the Police
story by Carlos Wadkins, Quiver Watts and TJ Johnston
On June 10, Scott Wiener published an article on Medium responding to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in which he writes that seeing this violence has stirred him to take action to reform the criminal justice system. In fact, while almost all of the visions articulated in the piece are, in fact, reforms, he adds: “Reform is not enough. We need to acknowledge the system is broken, and work from the ground up to rebuild a criminal justice system that will not primarily persecute people of color.” He goes on to articulate a need to divest from police budgets, demilitarize police departments, end “broken-window” policing, abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and much more important work that should be done to move us away from our racist police system.
But for those of us working at the intersections of racial justice, homelessness, mental health and abolition in the San Francisco Bay Area, we know there are strong reasons to doubt that Scott Wiener is truly invested in making the changes he claims to be committed to. Wiener has a long history of defending violent police officers, advocating for police responses to homelessness and taking campaign money from police departments and organizations that he has never owned up to. There is, of course, space for politicians to move to the left, but without a genuine acknowledgement from Wiener of the harm his history of criminalization has caused, our distrust continues to fester.
In the City Attorney’s Office
Scott Wiener first got his foot in the door of San Francisco politics when he was hired in 2002 by a newly elected Dennis Herrera to work in the City Attorney’s office. Wiener worked for eight years as Deputy City Attorney on the City Attorney’s litigation division, the team of lawyers that defends the City and County of San Francisco from almost all lawsuits against it. These lawsuits include cases against city departments involving personal injury or property damage, malpractice suits against city hospitals, and civil rights suits against San Francisco police officers and jail staff.
In his capacity as Deputy City Attorney, Scott Wiener regularly defended the police he now claims to want to defund. In fact, during his eight years on the job, Wiener defended the city in at least 13 cases which involved alleged abuse of force by a San Francisco Police Department officer or law enforcement official. He also handled at least 11 cases involving alleged false arrest or conviction and at least four involving alleged neglect or abuse of an individual in SFPD custody. In this role, he defended abusive cops and actively worked to discredit and defeat in court those who had been abused. In a system he now acknowledges is rife with abuse, Wiener played the essential role of defending the abusers.
One of the most infamous clients defended by Wiener was the now disgraced SFPD officer Jesse Serna. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, Serna held the record for the most use of force instances of any SFPD officer between 1996 and 2004 with 57. Before he was finally fired, the city was forced to pay over $400,000 in settlements to Serna’s victims.
Scott Wiener defended Serna’s brutality in court for three separate cases, including one where a $385,000 settlement caused Serna to be moved to desk duty 2007. These three cases all involved excessive police brutality, including one in which Serna allegedly used homophobic language against his victim before using a Taser on him several times. According to attorney John Burris, quoted in the Chronicle in 2011, “I think the system worked too slowly to remove him. He lied in all these cases to justify his conduct. He was probably the most consistently vicious officer I have dealt with.” Scott Wiener took a lead role in the system that defended officers like Serna and allowed him to continue abusing his victims for years.
Jackie Fielder, Wiener’s challenger for his current State Senate seat, took him to task specifically for that in a debate livestreamed on October 3, citing Serna’s checkered past as an example of Wiener being “fundamentally a part of our broken criminal justice system.”
But Wiener pointed out the settlements of lawsuits against Serna and other City employees in defending his performance as a Deputy City Attorney.
“When the City screwed up, whether it’s a police officer or a Muni driver or a front-line City worker, we got to settle these cases,” he said.
On the Board of Supervisors
After his time in the City Attorney’s office, Wiener represented the Castro District on the Board of Supervisors (BOS) in San Francisco. His tenure there further underscores his complicity with racist policing in the City. Throughout his time on the board, Wiener incessantly pushed to criminalize homeless people, despite community outcry. He won his seat in 2010 in part through his vocal support of “Sit/Lie,” which made it a criminal act to sit or lie down on San Francisco public sidewalks punishable by six months in jail on the second offense. And while even the cops themselves admit that this was a failed policy because homeless people have no alternative, Wiener’s support for the law was unwavering.
Building on his success villainizing poor San Franciscans, the following year Wiener brought a budget proposal to the BOS advocating doubling the number of park patrol officers, from 25 to 50. The aim was to enforce laws against vandalism in public parks, despite local advocates’ concerns that the officers would be sent to harass and criminalize homeless people for necessary, life-sustaining activities. The Chronicle reported Wiener advocating for increased policing and quoted him saying, “We need to send the message that this anti-social behavior won’t be tolerated in San Francisco.” Ultimately, the City agreed to hire 10 new officers at an annual cost of $1 million.
That same year, Wiener pushed for a ban on shopping carts, camping, sleeping, and peddling at the Harvey Milk and Jane Warner plazas in the Castro in an ordinance that included language proscribing criminal penalties for violations. While the Sit/Lie ordinance made it illegal for homeless people to sit in most areas of the city between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., some public parks were exempted from that law, and Wiener took aim at the few places homeless people still could freely exist. That ban was passed in 2012 with the shopping cart language removed because he had failed to consider the nearby grocery store.
Then in 2013, Wiener successfully went back to the BOS Land Use Committee with a plan to close all public parks between midnight and 5 a.m., again sticking homeless people with fines up to $100 for infractions, and six months in jail and a $1000 fine for misdemeanors.
In 2016, Scott Wiener was also behind a twin pair of ballot measures, Propositions Q and R, that very clearly put homeless San Franciscans in the crosshairs. Wiener co-sponsored Prop. Q with then-Supervisor Mark Farrell, a measure the San Francisco Bay Guardian described as “one of the most ridiculous, mean-spirited measures to make the city ballot in years.” Using the misleading name “Housing Not Tents,” Prop. Q was actually an amendment to the police code that criminalized sleeping in tents, something the City already made illegal and did nothing to offer housing to homeless people. Instead, Prop. Q mandated that victims of cruel encampment sweeps be offered one night in a shelter, meaning that while over 1,000 people languished on the shelter waitlist, empty beds were set aside for police referrals. The successful measure has widely been criticized as a political ploy to catapult its sponsors into higher office, at the expense of vulnerable residents.
Proposition R, which Scott Wiener wrote himself, was similarly a proposal to shore up police power and criminalize homeless people. If Prop. R had passed, it would have created a special “Neighborhood Crime Unit” staffed with 60 cops tasked specifically with responding to quality-of-life crimes, such as “aggressive panhandling” and blocking sidewalks with tents. The San Francisco Police Officers Association endorsed the measure, but critics decried Prop. R as another example of “broken windows” policing. Fortunately, voters rejected that measure.
Scott Wiener’s consistent attacks on unhoused San Franciscans, who are disproportionately Black, helped him build his base for his run for State Senate. But even from Sacramento, Wiener continued to work with police and oppose progressive campaigns. Notably, he opposed Proposition C, the wildly popular legislation that’s expected to create 4,000 housing units for unhoused San Franciscans. Despite Wiener’s opposition to Prop. C, the measure drew broad support from politicians like Diane Feinstein to tech CEOs like Marc Benioff, and passed with over 60% of the vote in November 2018.
Follow the Money
Fast forward to 2020, Wiener outlined his reformist measures in a Medium piece entitled “Moving towards Decarceration: Police violence, Mass Incarceration, and Where we Go From Here.” These include bills allowing nonviolent offenders to be removed from sex offender registries and the repeal of HIV-specific felonies — bills Wiener heralds as anti-discrimination measures. He has also signed as a co-author bills ending cash bail and the death penalty in California. Additionally, he supported Assemblymember Shirley Weber’s two bills concerning an officer’s use of deadly force: one in 2018 that eventually died in the appropriations committee, and the other, which passed and that the governor signed last year.
In an effort to maintain his political profile in the time of protests against racist police brutality and the carceral state, Wiener has recently styled himself as a reformer. He is in the middle of a re-election campaign, and so this rebranding may have more to do with testing the direction of political winds than with the winds of change. Still, one year of advocating for decarceration can’t erase a whole career of defending police — in the courtroom as Deputy City Attorney or with his legislation as Supervisor. It also can’t erase the over $75,000 in campaign contributions from police unions, PACs and research groups Wiener has accepted over his political career.
It’s worth noting that in the 2016 State Senate race for District 11, Wiener defeated Jane Kim by barely 8,000 votes in the general election after Kim edged him in the primary. That race was also the most expensive in the district’s history, generating over $4.5 million in contributions to all candidates, with law enforcement organizations among the heaviest contributors to Wiener’s campaign. Wiener was able to fundraise $51,500 from political organizations affiliated with law enforcement, such as the Peace Officer Research Association of California and the California Association of Highway Patrolmen.
Throughout Wiener’s political career, committees from the San Francisco Police Officers Association have also consistently supported him with endorsements and donations. As a state lawmaker, Wiener continued to sponsor police-friendly legislation in some instances, such as Senate Bills 40 and 1045, conservatorship bills that make the number of a disabled person’s contacts with police a benchmark for psychiatric commitment.
In June, Jackie Fielder, who is vying for Wiener’s senate seat, challenged him via a Twitter thread to reject money from law enforcement groups and donate up to $25,000 to bail funds and mutual aid groups. “You can’t be in solidarity with the protesters demanding justice for George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and countless murdered Black men, women and children when you’re bankrolled by the very organizations killing them,” she wrote. A few days later, Wiener vowed to stop taking money from police unions and donate to nonprofits serving at-risk youth. But Fielder called him out for limiting his rejection of police unions’ money and not their political action committees’. In response, she tweeted that it “doesn’t account for $45,000+ from your first State Senate campaign.”
The unprecedented swell of protests and uprising across the country this summer in response to rampant police murder has caused a massive shift in the public discourse around policing. Concepts like decarceration and police abolition are finally being forced into the mainstream after decades of being pushed by organizers. To meet this, politicians like Scott Wiener have been forced to concede ground, shifting their platforms to appear as allies to the abolitionist movement. However, Wiener’s history shows that he has always been on the side of police, not the victims of their brutality who he fought against in court or the organizers who he consistently fought against to increase police budgets and power. The police know this, and that’s why they’ve funded every campaign of his career. The people he’s trying to convince that he believes in decarceration — the same people he also wants to persuade into re-electing him — ought to know it, too.
Carlos Wadkins is a political science major at San Francisco State University. He is also active with Estamos Unidos, an organization of Yuba County residents opposed to unjust ICE detention in the county jail.
Quiver Watts (they/them) is the editor of Street Sheet, a San Francisco paper covering homelessness through the words of those who live it. They are also an organizer with House the Bay, working to move unhoused people into vacant properties in the Bay Area.
TJ Johnston is a journalist covering homelessness in San Francisco. He has contributed to several Bay Area publications over the course of two decades.
