Last March, Gov. Newsom strongly criticized District Court judge Donna Ryu for blocking the eviction of a group of homeless people who dwelt in a particularly dirty encampment on the Berkeley-Emeryville border, the so-called Ashby-Shellmound Encampment.
Local residents had tried for years to clean the mess up, to no avail. Ryu, who has a long history of protecting encampments (she most recently prohibited San Francisco from clearing them), came under intense fire from Newsom after her Ashby-Shellmound ruling. He was so angry, he said, “I literally was talking about putting a big sign with the judge’s phone number saying, ‘Call the judge. We want to clean this up, too.’”
That threat, in retrospect, was hyperbole; Newsom has a temper. But the Governor immediately came under fire for his statement from homeless advocates, who complained that “It’s really unfortunate that the Governor chose to inject himself into this.”
SFiST, a liberal online site, also jumped on Newsom, calling him “Trump-y” and accusing him of “sucking up to Elon Musk,” who has called for a boycott of a San Francisco law firm that represents the SF Coalition on Homelessness, perhaps the city’s leading pro-homeless group.
Then, last Thursday, the eminent Dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, published a fiery op-ed piece in the Chronicle accusing Newsom as being “a threat to judicial independence.” Chemerinsky acknowledged the “need for judicial accountability” (a need underscored for the American people by the unethical antics of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas). At the same time, the Dean advised, “Great care should be taken in making sure that the [judicial] evaluation is fair and useful and does not create the wrong incentives for judges.” His insinuation is that judges like Ryu, who must run for re-election, will succumb to political pressure by being tough on offenders, including homeless people. Coming in the same week that a new group in San Francisco, Stop Crime SF, announced it will “be issuing a report card on the sentencing practices, character and conduct of the 13 Superior Court judges seeking new terms in city elections next March,” this came as an affront to Chemerinsky, who called it “an effort to intimidate judges and to try to use the crime in the city to get more conservatives elected.”
Chemerinsky is so wrong, on so many levels. For one thing, the standard defense of the pro-homeless crowd has been that any steps to limit encampments are by “conservatives” or “Republicans” or “Trumpers” who have no respect for the human rights of homeless people. Well, it’s a steaming load of crap. The people who wish to manage and limit encampments are you and me—ordinary citizens who understand that there’s nothing partisan about wanting safe, clean neighborhoods, parks and business districts.
One thing, perhaps, that conservatives and liberals can agree on is that individual judges, of whom the public knows almost nothing, can issue edicts that impact public health and safety from the privileged isolation of their benches, without the will and consent and, often, without even the knowledge of the public. The fact is, some local judges have been and remain the single greatest impediments to cleaning up encampments and fighting crime. There is no reason not to inform the public, at long last, that some judges are the enemies of order and safety in our cities. As San Francisco Deputy City Attorney Wayne Snodgrass noted, judges such as Ryu “need only look out the windows of this courthouse to see up close the dismal conditions that are present on many of San Francisco’s sidewalks.” Ryu’s ruling, he said, “is chilling the city from doing what it needs to do to promote public health and safety.”
I empathize with Gov. Newsom in his frustration with reckless judges, and I support the effort of Stop Crime SF to publicize the names and records of these judges, who are not acting in the best interests of citizens but are advancing their own freakish ideologies and are therefore abusing their power. We need something like Stop Crime SF here in Alameda County and Oakland. Only when these meddlesome judges feel heat from the People will they stop interfering with the efforts of decent, law-abiding citizens to take our cities back from the vagrants and goons that are currently, with their help, driving our cities to ruin. If these “magistrates” don’t heed us, we’ll fire their sorry asses and replace them with judges who will.
Steve Heimoff