In a city known as a progressive bastion, voters resoundingly passed two conservative-leaning ballot measures this week, on police authority and drug screening.

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By Heather Knight
March 8, 2024
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Department of Elections workers transported a box of ballots at the San Francisco City Hall voting center on Tuesday.Credit...Loren Elliott/Reuters
Have San Francisco voters lost the bleeding hearts they have been known for — or are they just frustrated?

City voters resoundingly passed two ballot measures this week that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day a few years ago. One measure gives more power to the police, and the other requires welfare recipients who are thought to have a drug addiction to enter treatment as a condition of continuing to receive benefits.

Critics of the measures said that residents had veered to the right and that billionaires had bought the city by throwing money at campaigns for the measures. But Mayor London Breed, who faces a tough race for re-election in November and who placed the two measures on the ballot, brushed off claims that the city had lost its liberal soul.

In her annual State of the City address on Thursday, Breed argued that it was progressive to invest in public safety to protect vulnerable older residents and immigrants, and to push for drug treatment for those who need it.
“We are a progressive, diverse city, living together, celebrating each other,” she said, standing at a podium at the city’s cruise ship terminal, apparently to highlight the rebound of San Francisco’s tourism industry. “That has not changed, and it will not change.”

San Francisco’s reputation has plummeted — unfairly, many residents say — since the start of the pandemic, because of open-air drug use, property crime and the sharp drop in office occupancy downtown. Breed, a political moderate by San Francisco standards, has responded by tacking to the right, and this week voters backed her priorities.

Along with the police and drug measures, voters in the primary on Tuesday supported a moderate slate of candidates for the Democratic County Central Committee, the governing body of the local Democratic Party whose endorsement will probably carry weight in the mayor’s race.

They also approved a city policy to encourage the city’s schools to offer algebra to students by eighth grade. The district had removed the course from middle school because of concerns that Asian and white students were advancing in math while Black and Latino students were not.

Proposition E, which will give the San Francisco police new powers, was approved by just under 60 percent of voters. The measure will allow the police to use drones and install surveillance cameras, and it loosens restrictions on car chases.
About 62 percent of voters backed Proposition F, which will require people receiving public cash assistance who are believed to be drug users to be screened, and to enter treatment if they are found to have an addiction.

Lydia Bransten, executive director of the Gubbio Project, which provides services for homeless people, had adamantly opposed Prop F and argued that forcing people into drug treatment wouldn’t work.

She believes the city’s long-delayed plan to open supervised sites where people can use drugs under the watchful eyes of harm-reduction specialists is the real answer to solving the city’s devastating drug crisis, which kills an average of two people a day.

The success of Prop F, she said, meant that people simply were exhausted by the drug epidemic and by City Hall’s lack of a coherent solution, and that they were eager to back anything that sounded like a real plan.

“San Francisco is still, at its heart, a progressive city,” she said. “Even progressives can be exhausted when they’re not given ideas that are effective.”
Nancy Tung, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office who won election to the Democratic committee this week as part of the moderate slate, agreed that the city was still liberal at heart.

“San Franciscans want to make sure our streets are safe,” she said. “They want better public education. They want a government that works. When did those stop being Democratic values?”

Heather Knight is the San Francisco bureau chief of The New York Times.