While the San Francisco Chronicle frames Board-Mayor disputes as personal battles between Daly and Newsom (a theme amplified in the paper's hysterical headline story today on a nonexistent City Hall "uproar" over Daly's comments about the Mayor at Tuesday's Board meeting), sound policy dictated the Board’s 7-4 rejection of 25% salary hikes for police officers. As Supervisor Tom Ammiano put it, “police are definitely part of the equation, but there are other parts of the equation" in addressing crime. These “other parts of the equation” include the many city-funded case managers, psychiatric outreach workers, homeless shelter staff, youth service providers, mental health counselors and the many other positions whose work reduces crime and violence in San Francisco. The Mayor’s budget allocates 2.4% wage hikes to these vital nonprofit workers, while giving police more than three times this amount in actual dollars. Attempting to secure quality social services on the cheap is not a smart anti-crime strategy.

Tom Ammiano made a very profound observation at Tuesday’s Board meeting regarding the mayor’s proposed 25% raises for police officers over the next four years. Ammiano argued that reducing crime involves far more than the “more police, more arrests” mantra, acknowledging the vital roles played by social services, housing, and education programs in steering people away from crime and violence.

San Francisco police officers are among the best-compensated officers in the United States. Their salaries are typically justified by the region’s high-cost of living.

But San Francisco officials appear to believe that nonprofit workers who prevent crime through education, outreach, or mental health services commute from the less costly Central Valley. How else to explain why the Mayor’s budget gives these nonprofit workers only a 2.4% raise, less than a third in actual dollars of the police?

The answer is that even in “liberal” San Francisco, politicians fear bucking the failed “more police, more arrests” mantra that has built California’s massive prison industrial complex. As much as San Francisco officials decry the billions upon billions spent putting nonviolent drug offenders in prison, the city’s own budget prioritizes locking people up over helping to keep people, particularly youth, out of the criminal justice system.

San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood is a perfect example of the limits of the “more police, more arrests” strategy.

In recent months, the Tenderloin police force has performed remarkably in reducing public drug trafficking. Tenderloin Captain Gary Jimenez has done everything possible to fight crime, and the officers in the community are highly motivated (one suspects Jimenez would give a swift kick in the butt to any unmotivated officers).

As important a role as the police have played in making a staggering number of arrests, neighborhood safety would not be enhanced without other positive changes in the community. These changes are both physical -- the replacement of problem businesses with positive retail, the building of housing on vacant lots, the elimination of bus shelters used for drug dealing, the transformation of SRO’s from drug-infested hovels to well-maintained supportive housing -- and service-oriented.

Together, it is these physical and service-oriented changes that permanently reduce crime in low-income communities, not more police and more arrests.

Mayor Newsom’ s budget doubles the number of homeless outreach workers, and supports many programs designed to steer youth away from the criminal justice system. But how does the Mayor expect these programs to retain quality staff through miniscule annual salary increases?

What message does is send to San Francisco’s social services community about how city leaders value their work when already higher-paid police officers get triple the raises? It says: your work improving people’s lives is not very important.

It is a message that drives talented workers out of the nonprofit sector.

Nobody takes a job as a support service worker, or a youth counselor, to get rich. But the contrast between proposed police and nonprofit salary hikes is so glaring that it sends a terrible message about San Francisco’s priorities.

Let’s hope that before the Board of Supervisors grants 25% hikes to cops, that it first ensure that city dollars are fairly distributed to the “other parts” working for safer communities.

Let's further hope that the San Francisco Chronicle starts covering the story of the disparity in compensation between police and nonprofit social service workers who also face threats of violence in their jobs. This issue has far greater impact on San Francisco's quality of life than the paper's obsession with the Daly-Newsom feud, yet has been entirely ignored in the paper's coverage of the city budget.

Send feedback to rshaw@beyondchron.org