I confess to having a great deal of skepticism about “police oversight” organizations. They’re all the rage these days, especially since George Floyd. Every municipality seems to feel the need (or is being pressured to feel the need) for a civilian committee to watchdog the cops.

First Fridays, the monthly arts and food event that’s been held along Telegraph Avenue in Uptown since 2006, announced it’s taking a hiatus due to “financial constraints.” These constraints include the mounting cost of hiring police to protect the public, at the cost of $24,000 per event. This isn’t the first time that crime has shut down First Fridays: back in 2018, a mass shooting that injured five attendees forced organizers to cancel their next scheduled event.

With the abrupt closure of yet another drugstore in downtown San Francisco due to rampant theft, the question of why store security guards aren’t allowed to use force has arisen anew. It’s apparent that force is the only way to deter shoplifters, and yet these guards are not permitted to use it. In fact, they’re not even allowed to interfere with thieves, which makes me wonder why stores bother to hire them in the first place. In San Francisco, the issue of security guards reached new urgency after the shoplifter, Banko Brown, was shot and killed by a Walgreens security guard.

I chatted up a paid signature gatherer yesterday (he didn’t know who I was). When I asked how things were going, he said great; people are eager to sign. I remarked that getting 100,000 signatures seems like an uphill battle and he replied, “Oh, no, not for professional signature gatherers. We’ll have that by the end of this month.” That sounds optimistic, but I liked his confidence.

Did you happen to catch video of Thao giving her State of the City speech the other day? She reminded me of Shirley Temple, the pudgy child actress of the 1930s, in a movie about a little girl who pretends to be a Queen.