I watched with dismay the final weeks leading to the primary election for disgraced county supervisor Nathan Fletcher’s replacement. Although I couldn’t vote in the race, my interest in it ran deep because I worry lots about the public’s near-decimated trust in national government and trickle-down distrust of state and local government.
I want our community overall and everyone in it to have confidence in government, and I want our government to deserve such confidence. Unfortunately, the unions’ misconduct in last week’s election did nothing to reverse the trend of eroding confidence.
That’s bad enough in its own right. But it’s even worse when it happens at a time when people are witnessing rising crime as well as injustices in our policing and judicial institutions. Everyone from practicing psychologists to President Biden knows that trust in law enforcement is essential to public safety.
So why did members allow their law-enforcement unions to run dishonest attack ads against one of the candidates to replace Fletcher, San Diego City Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe, and what will members do to make sure it never happens again?
I ask as someone who has first-hand experience with the exceptional performance of local law enforcement. In March 2021, I was violently assaulted and suffered a head injury that had me bed-ridden and out of work for nearly two months.
San Diego Police Department officers took good care of my wife when they arrived on the scene. The detective assigned to the case was careful in his work and kept me abreast of the investigation’s progress. The deputy prosecutor worked hard to ensure that the assailant faced justice as swiftly as the pandemic would allow and that I was comfortable with every position “The People” took in court.
And immediately after the sentencing hearing, when the assailant made some inappropriate comments to the judge, a deputy sheriff walked me to my car so I’d have no further problems with the person who could have killed me. On a 10-point scale, I give every one of you who worked with my wife and me along the way a resounding “11.”
Though I realize that not everyone is going to have such positive experiences, I want very much for as many San Diegans as possible — whether as direct participants or, hopefully, as mere outside observers — to have the same confidence in law enforcement that I had at such a major low point in my life. That’s why I find so troubling the ads put out by the SDPD officers’ union and the prosecutors’ union against Montgomery Steppe, who ultimately won the primary with more than 40% of the vote compared to the distant third-place finish of the unions’ preferred candidate.
The unions’ ads misleadingly accused Montgomery Steppe of presiding over a 450% murder increase — in what was the first year of her City Council tenure — and falsely accused her of trying to cut police funding when she voted — over vocal opposition of many defund-the-police activists — to approve SDPD’s requested budget every time. The ads were debunked by La Prensa, drawing this observation from Union-Tribune columnist Michael Smolens: “But in post-election analyses, none is likely to be more sliced and diced than the effectiveness of the law-enforcement unions’ campaign against Montgomery Steppe.”
I care not about the ads’ ineffectiveness in achieving your unions’ political objectives. Rather, I’m greatly troubled by the community-wide effects of falsities funded by union members and propagated by your union leadership.
They have tarnished your credibility the next time law enforcement is accused of using its offices to go after a political opponent, covering up wrongdoing committed by the politically connected, hiding information to conceal wrongdoing within your own ranks, or discriminating based on race, gender, etc. Do you really think your denials will be widely believed as your critics waive dishonest political ads as the proverbial “Exhibit A?”
It takes a very long time to earn a positive reputation and just a split second to lose it. People remember the bad far more and far longer than they remember the good. No amount of touting the positive experiences of someone like me will overcome the short-term or long-term damage inflicted by deceptions like those disseminated by your unions.
Our community deserves to feel good about the work you do. I urge you to stop your unions from giving the community solid reasons for feeling otherwise.
Cory Briggs is a San Diego attorney practicing public-interest and government-accountability litigation.
