This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Mayor London Breed sits with San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins at City Hall during Jenkins’ swearing in ceremony on Friday, July 8, 2022. Jenkins succeeded former DA Chesa Boudin, who was ousted after a recall election earlier this year.

From left: Fire chief Jeanine Nicholson and Mayor London Breed listen to police Chief Bill Scott during a news conference at City Hall, Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021, in San Francisco, Calif. The mayor and city officials announced a series of new initiatives to help address growing public safety and health concerns across the city.

San Francisco has a Black mayor, district attorney and police chief, marking an unprecedented level of representation in a city with a marginal and declining Black populace. Yet these officials appear willing to drag the city into a new mass incarceration era where the folks destined to suffer the most are Black and Latino.

This current battle over public safety priorities is just the latest example that, in San Francisco, Black residents can be well represented in political office but poorly represented when it comes to the issues that affect them most.

How did we get here? History tells the story.

The 1940s introduced a devastating social experiment known as “urban renewal” to American cities. In San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, for instance, 2,500 Victorian homes were destroyed and 883 businesses closed for new housing and economic investment that never came. The nearly 20,000 families who were displaced became part of a decades-long mass exodus that resulted in San Francisco going from a peak of 96,000 Black residents in 1970 to less than 45,000 today, according to U.S. Census estimates.

During the past 26 years, some notable Black politicians have ascended to powerful positions in San Francisco, including former Mayor Willie Brown, former District Attorney Kamala Harris and current Mayor London Breed. Like their non-Black counterparts, they’ve been unable to reverse the fortunes of the city’s disappearing Black population, who remain overrepresented among the unhoused, the low-income and the incarcerated.

When much of America was calling for police departments to be defunded following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton, another Black politician, spoke of taking money from local law enforcement and investing it in the African-American community. That developed into the Dream Keeper Initiative, a two-year plan to redirect $120 million from law enforcement to housing, jobs and education programs in Black neighborhoods.

But after launching it in February 2021, Breed quietly changed the funding stream so that only half the money would come from law enforcement and the other half would come from the general fund. While the initiative has shown early promise, Breed’s decision to change how it was paid for is telling.

She did it at a time when viral videos of cops beating, rubber-bulleting and tear-gassing Black Lives Matter protesters had been replaced by viral videos of shoplifters and homeless encampments. Breed has continued moving with the political winds, threatening to arrest people struggling with substance abuse; authoring legislation to expand police surveillance powers; and appointing a district attorney who helped lead the recall against Chesa Boudin, with whom Breed publicly clashed.

Breed’s public safety priorities have been put into action by police Chief Bill Scott, who tried to end a contract that had the District Attorney’s Office investigate police shootings, in-custody deaths and other use-of-force incidents.

Scott was appointed by former Mayor Ed Lee in late 2016, after a six-month investigation by the U.S. Justice Department found the San Francisco Police Department disproportionately stopped, searched and used force against people of color at a higher rate than white people.

Scott was supposed to bring a new era of reform and positive change. It has yet to begin. According to a Chronicle analysis of state attorney general data from 2019 to 2020, police in San Francisco are still stopping, searching and using force against Black people at disproportionate rates, even though Black people are less likely to be found with contraband.

Though new District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has been on the job for only a few weeks, she has already cemented herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and has been non-committal about retaining the Innocence Commission, which investigates potential wrongful conviction cases and was started by her predecessor.

There is no disputing that crime is a legitimate concern for many San Francisco residents, particularly Asian-American residents dealing with a rise in bias crimes and Black and brown communities that have long suffered the most when violence spikes. But rather than addressing these concerns, Breed and her allies are taking advantage of them — repackaging the drug war tactics that hollowed out neighborhoods in the 1980s and 1990s without making anyone safer.

Hakeem Jefferson, a professor of political science at Stanford University, isn’t surprised by the seemingly counterintuitive dynamic of Black politicians misrepresenting Black constituents. That’s because nonwhite candidates have to navigate a political structure that wasn’t created for them to succeed and makes it more likely for them to break through if they’re moderate.

“This is the rule and not the exception in part because Black electeds ... have to do some kind of coalition building with white liberals,” he said, referring to voters and campaign donors. “What you have here is a recipe for tough-on-crime policies. (Breed and Jenkins) are going to lean into this because that’s what the polity appear to be demanding.”

This is how someone like Breed becomes mayor, because she favors the business-friendly policies that appeal to affluent donors in San Francisco, where stratospheric tech wealth has broadened the chasm between the rich and the poor and where performative liberalism gets mistaken for actual liberalism.

When Breed was running for mayor in 2018, she benefited, more than any other candidate, from campaign contributions from big names within the tech industry. The list included Twitter co-founder Evan Williams; Gayle Conway, the wife of tech industry investor and political fundraiser Ron Conway who funneled money into the Boudin recall; and Chris Larsen, the billionaire executive chairman and co-founder of Ripple who has funded the installation of private security cameras throughout San Francisco and has publicly supported Breed’s police surveillance push.

While San Francisco’s ranked-choice election system, which allows residents to rank political candidates in order of preference, has amplified the voting power of “Black neighborhood strongholds,” explained University of San Francisco professor James Taylor, the improved representation hasn’t always translated into improved policies.

That’s disappointing when you consider San Francisco’s legacy of Black activism. It’s a legacy that spans Mary Ellen Pleasant — known as “the mother of the California Civil Rights Movement” — who lived here while helping slaves elude their captors via the Underground Railroad in the 1800s; the Black Panther Party members who distributed the party’s national newspaper from an office in the city in the 1960s; and the leadership collectives behind present-day racial justice nonprofits like SF Black Wall Street and MegaBlack SF.

History shows us that San Francisco’s most revolutionary Black leaders were more likely to operate outside the local political system than within it. They probably understood that it’s easier to be a successful politician in San Francisco if you serve the system instead of trying to change it.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Justin Phillips appears Sundays. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips

Justin Phillips joined The San Francisco Chronicle in November 2016 as a food writer. He previously served as the City, Industry, and Gaming reporter for the American Press in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In 2019, Justin also began writing a weekly column for The Chronicle's Datebook section that focused on Black culture in the Bay Area. In 2020, Justin helped launch Extra Spicy, a food and culture podcast he co-hosts with restaurant critic Soleil Ho. Following its first season, the podcast was named one of the best podcasts in America by the Atlantic. In February, Justin left the food team to become a full-time columnist for The Chronicle. His columns focus on race and inequality in the Bay Area, while also placing a spotlight on the experiences of marginalized communities in the region.