It was an eventful weekend for an athlete who performs incredible feats, even if it didn’t happen on the field. San Francisco 49ers rookie Ricky Pearsall was shot in the chest Saturday in Union Square by a 17-year-old from Tracy, in an attempted robbery. In a struggle for the gun, the assailant was also shot. Video from the scene shows the wounded Pearsall walking — walking! — shirtless and escorted by police to an ambulance.
A day later, Pearsall, incredibly, was released from the hospital, the bullet having missed his vital organs. Pearsall has been moved to the NFL’s reserve/non-football injury list, meaning he’ll miss at least four games.
Politically speaking, though, the real sport has been playing out since the shooting. Politicians have characterized it as somewhere on the spectrum between an “isolated incident” and a public safety “failure.” Collectively, the story reads as “not enough police in a crime-ridden place,” when the reality in this case seems to be the opposite.
‘Anxiety’ hangover?
Mayor London Breed was on the “isolated incident” end.
“Police were on scene immediately because Mayor Breed and Chief Scott have deployed current, off-duty, and former officers to help patrol the downtown corridor,” said Joe Arellano, Breed’s campaign spokesman.
Arellano told The Standard that the “anxiety” residents might feel stems from higher pandemic-era crime rates, but District Attorney Brooke Jenkins “is standing alongside her, vowing prosecution during the city’s public safety response to a shooting.”
Mayoral challengers, on the contrary, say the shooting was the direct result of the policing shortage — and that their own policing plans are the solution.
Supervisor Aaron Peskin tried to get out in front of the obvious metaphor. “Turning this into a political football doesn’t make San Francisco safer or represent who we are as a city,” he said in a statement to The Standard. Peskin emphasized by way of solution his proposed Proposition F, which would keep retirement-age officers working as neighborhood patrols, and a recruitment plan.
Another mayoral candidate, nonprofit executive Daniel Lurie, pushed his own law-enforcement vision. “We need to make public safety the top priority,” he told The Standard. “Only then will people and businesses fully return downtown.” He vowed to restore the San Francisco Police Department to its full complement of officers and create a station in the downtown “hospitality zone.”
In the immediate wake of the shooting, candidate and former mayor Mark Farrell took to X: “Our city has suffered from a tragic series of gun shootings,” he wrote. “Enough is enough. If we want public safety in San Francisco, then we need change in City Hall.”
The perceived politicking earned him rebukes on social media and from former mayor Willie Brown Jr., who wrote in a San Francisco Examiner op-ed that Farrell’s “broadside” “could have come out of the mouth of a Fox News host” and is the “exact recipe that feeds Trump’s attack machine against cities like San Francisco.”
In a statement to The Standard, Farrell doubled down. “Because of her failure to address our officer staffing crisis,” he said of Mayor London Breed, “there were half the number of officers in Union Square yesterday compared to a few weeks ago and a number of our district stations have dangerously low staffing levels.”
Not a shortage when it counted
So if you’re keeping score: Breed is saying, essentially, there’s nothing to see here. Teams Lurie and Farrell say police staffing shortages led to Pearsall’s shooting. Team Peskin is more sanguine, acknowledging that crime rates are down but more officers would be a good idea.
So who’s right? The SFPD is indeed facing a shortage of 500 officers. Far fewer people are applying to the academy in recent years — perhaps the result, per one policing survey, of negativity from the public, the media, and/or politicians.
And yet, in this case, a shortage of police doesn’t seem to have been an issue: Cops responded quickly — and one of them, Police Department Sgt. Joelle Harrell, rendered a heroic degree of aid to Pearsall.
Nor does the robbery appear to represent a spike in crime. According to SFPD crime data, robberies are down almost 22% for the year to date. There were 186 robberies in the Financial District (which includes the Union Square neighborhood) for the year to Aug. 29, down from 223 in the same period last year.
By the end of the long weekend, the good news was that Pearsall is on the road to recovery and may be playing again soon. Beyond that, it was more or less the same old game.