During my 32-year run as Sheriff I worked with six San Francisco Mayors-- Dianne Feinstein, Art Agnos, Frank Jordan, Willie Brown, Gavin Newsom, and Ed Lee. Each Mayor had a unique style and a very different way of running the City. When it came to dealing with other elected officials, some Mayors were mostly hands-off, while others interfered as much as they could get away with. Ultimately there was a bit of wariness from each Mayor toward other City elected officials because a Mayor can’t fire another elected official and therefore doesn’t have the ultimate hammer to hold over them.
Dianne Feinstein was San Francisco's 38th Mayor, serving from 1978 to 1988. She also became the City's first female Mayor when the Board of Supervisors appointed her following the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978. Dianne then went on to win re-election twice.
Dianne Feinstein was more successful getting elected to the Board of Supervisors, which began when she won her first election campaign to the Board in 1969. As the top vote getter, she also became the Board's President, and the first woman in San Francisco history to hold that title. Again in 1973 and 1977, Dianne was the top vote getter in both elections and continued her run as Board President. It was because she was the President of the Board when Mayor Moscone was assassinated that Dianne Feinstein became Mayor in December of 1978. Since she was appointed to the office to serve out the remainder of Mayor Moscone’s term, she had to run for election in November 1979, the year I first ran for Sheriff.
Often when candidates are seeking office in the same election cycle they become acquainted on the campaign trail. People meet when waiting to speak at candidate nights; sometimes candidates share the same polling consultant or even the same campaign firm. That was not the case with me and Dianne during our 1979 election campaigns. I don’t think I ever met her or even spoke to her until after I was sworn in as Sheriff in January 1980.
I was definitely an outsider; a new face or even invisible in the political swirl. I had not run for school board or for any other lower profile City office; I was not the candidate of the Democratic Party nor of the political king makers. I was not “born and raised” in San Francisco; I had not attended St. Ignatius or Riordan or Lowell or any of the other local high schools. I was pretty much an under the radar unknown.
When I started my job as Sheriff, Dianne had already been Mayor for over a year. She had a certain way of doing things. She was very much a cheerleader for San Francisco and for its local government. As a way of taking charge of everything she held a department head meeting every Monday morning at 9:00 am. She also liked to hold meetings in the community where she expected department heads to attend. I think it was at one of those community meetings that she first acknowledged my presence, even though she couldn’t quite remember my name. She started the meeting by introducing the department leaders in the room and when she came to me she said, “and, of course, our Sheriff… Mighty Mike.” I’m guessing that as a child she was a fan of the cartoon show starring Mighty Mouse.
I always appreciated Dianne’s leadership style when she was Mayor. She was very hands-on – maybe sometimes too hands-on. But she took charge, held people accountable, didn’t seem to hold grudges and welcomed everyone onto the team.
She invited every department head to the Monday meetings, including the six holding public office (Sheriff, District Attorney, Public Defender, Treasurer, City Attorney & and Assessor). If you didn’t show up at a particular meeting, she would have a staff person call to remind you of next Monday’s meeting. She would sometimes dress down a department head over an issue, but almost never one of the elected department heads. Those she would take on one-on-one, as I soon found out.
I didn’t have too many real conflicts with Dianne, but one day early in my first term I got a phone call from the Mayor. “Mike, I wonder if you could come see me in my office.”
“Of course, Mayor. When would you like to do this?”
“Right now.”
Oh, oh. I had no idea what this was about until I walked into her office. It turned out that this was about my Work Furlough program. I had taken control over administration of the Probation Department’s rather pallid work furlough program only the year before. Although the transfer was engineered by the Board of Supervisors, the funding had to go through the Mayor’s office. At the time there was an agreement that offenders of certain types of crimes would not qualify for work furlough: arson, violence, and sex offenses.
After several months of running the program, I had a visit from a coalition of criminal justice women professionals who wanted me to accept incest offenders. The women included a deputy district attorney, a deputy public defender, a representative of the local Bar Association and a member of the Mayor’s Council on Criminal Justice. They explained that often the offender is a stepfather and getting a conviction was difficult. The man was the family bread winner and the child’s testimony was a traumatizing event. They wanted a conviction to force the offender into counseling, but the case would be vigorously fought if the man was facing jail time. The feeling was that if they could offer work furlough, they could get a guilty plea and the benefit of mandated sex offender counseling.
I was sympathetic with the dilemma that they faced and thought they had made a good case. I explained that we had a “no sex offender” rule. They pointed out that this issue had been vetted by a committee of the Mayor’s Criminal Justice Council who agreed with their recommendation, so I said that if the District Attorney recommended this outcome I would make a few exceptions. Three months later, I had two incest offenders in the program. Then someone snitched me off to Mayor Feinstein.
Dianne was alone in her office when I entered. This seemed unusual since she generally had a staff member in meetings to create the record. At her offer, I took a seat. She got right to the point:
“Sheriff, I thought we had an understanding that there would be no sex offenders in the work furlough program.”
I wasn’t quite ready for this, so I just launched into the arguments presented to me by the women advocates. When I got to the part that it was the recommendation of a committee from the Mayor’s Criminal Justice Council, Dianne almost bolted out of her chair and said, “What committee is that?”
“I believe it is called the Committee on Child Abuse and Sexual Exploitation.”
Dianne immediately picked up the phone on her desk and punched in some sort of speed dial number.
“Rotea?” Rotea Gilford was a police officer and political handyman who was the Mayor’s point person at the Criminal Justice Council.
“Rotea, I’m sitting here with the Sheriff and he tells me that some MCJC committee has recommended letting sex offenders on the work furlough program. Is that right?”
I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, but it was apparent that Rotea confirmed my story.
Just before loudly hanging up the phone, Dianne quite curtly said, “Well, abolish that committee.”
She then looked me straight in the eye and said, “Now, Sheriff, shall we debate this in the court of public opinion?”
I agreed that an adjustment would be made and headed back to my office. I let the two incest offenders complete their sentences on work furlough, but never accepted another. Some battles are just not worth fighting.
This is my favorite Dianne photo. The Mayor was on one of her "clean up the city" campaigns and would schedule specific clean-up events by Supervisorial district. She would then "invite" the pertinent Supervisor to join her, as well as any other City officials who lived nearby. On this particular day sometime in 1983, it was an Outer Mission District clean up and since I lived in Bernal Heights, I joined her in the festivities.
Dianne wanted to know how it was possible to smuggle a gun into the jail. (Didn’t we all. The truth of the matter was never discovered.)
“Isn’t everyone searched before entering the jail,” she asked.
I explained that we didn’t search employees or health department staff, other than looking inside any bag or backpack they might have. And, we looked inside of the brief case of attorneys.
“You mean you don’t pat search everyone who comes into the jail?”
“No, Mayor, we do a visual search of staff and other people with official business, and a more thorough search if something seems suspicious.”
“Well, Sheriff, I think you should pat search everyone who comes into the jail. If I came down to the jail, I would expect to be pat searched.”
I don’t know what got into me, but I said, “Well, Mayor, if you came to the jail, I would personally do a pat search.”
Dianne didn’t have a come back to that, but gave me a look that was somewhere in the range of annoyed. But I’m sure I saw just a bit of an amused smile in there as well.
Dianne was often viewed as a schoolmarm character or maybe a blue blood with little real-world awareness. She grew up in Pacific Heights, attended private schools and went to Stanford. She could be a bit naive when it came to life on the streets. She was, after all, a rich person running a government serving a lot of poor people. She once told me that she couldn’t respect a woman who wrote to me to plead for the release of her criminal husband so he could get back to work.
Her first Chief of Police was a veteran Irish cop named Cornelius “Con” Murphy. Murphy was an old school cop, but wily enough to fit in as Chief to the cheerleading Mayor. People said Dianne picked him because he looked like he was created by Hollywood casting. He was also one to let it be known when the Mayor’s view of the world was not exactly in sync with his.
At the weekly Monday meetings, Dianne always had Chief Murphy give a summary of crime statistics from the past week. This was the day before any type of sophisticated computerization of crime stats, so I felt that Murphy was sometimes putting his thumb on the scale, or was just winging it.
One Monday as Murphy was droning on about car break-ins, murders and rapes, a statistic about rapes caught Dianne’s ear.
“Chief,” she said, “it seems like the number of rapes has risen dramatically compared to last week. What seems to be going on there?”
I couldn’t believe Murphy’s answer because it was straight out of a boys’ school locker room joke.
“Well, Mayor, it seems like some of the working girls are coming into the stations to report rape and giving a name when it is really a case of not getting paid.”
Con then looked straight at me and winked. I about choked.
Dianne sagely nodded and told Murphy to keep an eye on it.
At the next Monday’s meeting the rape statistics were again pretty high. After he read them, Dianne interrupted to say, “Is that those working girls again, Chief?” The Chief agreed that it was.
Fortunately, in subsequent weeks the rape statistics took a downward turn. I don’t know about the actual rapes, but the statistics were down.
