Jeff Adachi, San Francisco Hero

Jeff Adachi, San Francisco's elected Public Defender since 2002, died suddenly of a possible heart attack on Friday at the age of 59. It was a shocking loss for his family, friends, acquaintances, employees, and the wider political world of San Franciscans who believe in integrity and positive change.

Adachi was raised a poor boy in Sacramento by Japanese-American parents who had spent time in the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas during World War II. He went to UC Berkeley and studied law at San Francisco's Hastings College. After 15 years working for the Public Defender's office, he had risen through the ranks to chief attorney of the office.

According to Adachi's Wikipedia page: "In 2001, Kimiko Burton-Cruz, the daughter of then State Senator John Burton, was appointed Public Defender by Mayor Willie Brown. After taking office, Burton-Cruz forced Adachi out on her first day on the job, apparently for political reasons. The following year, Adachi ran against Burton-Cruz for her position and defeated her by a 55%–45% margin."

The political cabal that runs San Francisco and distributes public funds was not amused at this thwarting of their patronage system, and subsequently the Public Defender's Office was annually threatened with drastic defunding as payback.

The above photos are from a public safety union rally in 2009 by the SFPD and SFFD demanding that their budgets not be cut, ignoring the more draconian treatment of the Public Defenders' office. Adachi reasonably explained to everyone in City Hall about how fiscally insane it would be to farm out constitutionally mandated public defending duties to private firms rather than the PD's office. He was smart and persuasive enough that he managed to eventually save most of his budget.

In June of 2010, the San Francisco Grand Jury released a report called "Pension Tsunami: The Billion Dollar Bubble" detailing the unsustainable pension structure of the City and County of San Francisco, with a special chapter entitled "Slicing the Pension Pie: Some More Equal Than Others" on how the SF Fire Department and the SF Police Department were especially adroit at gaming the system, comprising 82% of the retirees receiving more than $100,000 per year in public pensions. Adachi was one of the few public figures who took the report seriously, and started a petition drive to put Proposition B on the ballot to limit some of the fiscal damage which lost after outrageous scare tactics and piles of money were employed against it.

Undeterred, he tried with another ballot measure D in 2011 and even ran for SF Mayor that year to help publicize the issue. Then-mayor Ed Lee offered a watered-down, competing version of pension reform with Proposition C which won while Prop D lost. Adachi, of course, was correct and San Francisco is still facing the same issues nearly a decade down the road.

The last time I wrote about Adachi here at Civic Center was at a Black Lives Matter rally in front of the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street in December 2014. I wrote: "Adachi noted that the problem was larger than bigoted police departments, declaring that "We are all complicit. We see judges and prosecutors routinely asking for higher bail and longer sentences for people of color for the same offenses committed by whites. And if public defenders' offices provide a lousy defense, that can be the worst thing imaginable to happen to a defendant." He pointed out that San Francisco's population is 6% black while 56% of the jail population is black, before urging the small crowd to chant, "Black Lives Matter" for the inmates in the jail above us."

Adachi was already Public Enemy Number One for the SF Police and Fire Departments and only became more so after he revealed video evidence in 2014 of police officers stealing from single-room occupancy hotel tenants while making warrantless drug busts. Adachi's sudden death on Friday at a friend's apartment on Telegraph Hill, possibly involving a mistress, has already led to all kinds of mischief on the part of the SFPD and local media, but my reaction to those rumors was "Good for him if there was a mistress because I was afraid he did nothing but work all the time."

That 2014 post ended with the following: "I used to write more about local politics on this blog but found the provincial, corrupt San Francisco City Family too depressing to think about after a while. There are a few exceptions among San Francisco's elected officials, and Public Defender Jeff Adachi is first in line, the most admirable local politician I have met since Harvey Milk. He's smart, compassionate, honest, an inspiring leader, and a great speaker. We would be lucky to have him as Mayor of San Francisco, but that will never happen, partly because he had the temerity to point out during the last mayor's race that the current municipal compensation and pension system is unsustainable, particularly among public safety unions. You don't say those kind of things and get elected Mayor." He will be deeply missed by everyone whose lives he touched. When bloggers were thought of as inferior bomb-throwers by traditional media, he treated me as if I was as intelligent and important as any other reporter who asked him a question, which is how he treated everyone. The man was very special.