View the San Francisco for Thursday, May 8, 2025
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott announced Wednesday that he is leaving the San Francisco Police Department after eight years at its helm. Mayor Daniel Lurie and Scott announced his departure at a press conference Wednesday.
Scott has been hired to lead and develop a new public-safety department within LA Metro, the Los Angeles public-transit agency. “My departure comes at a time of great momentum in the SFPD and in our city under the leadership of Mayor Daniel Lurie, and I fully expect that this momentum will not only continue but get even better,” Scott said. Scott — the longest-serving chief in SFPD history, according to Lurie — served under three elected mayors and one interim. He had worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for 27 years prior to his move to San Francisco in 2017.Chief of Public Safety Paul Yep will replace Scott on an interim basis, Lurie said. “On behalf of The City, I want to thank you, Chief Scott, for your steady leadership, your commitment to reform and your dedicated service to the people of San Francisco,” Lurie said. Wednesday’s announcement capped months of speculation about Scott’s future with the department under Lurie. Lurie had pledged throughout his mayoral campaign last year to prioritize public safety, leading many to assume he would oust Scott shortly after he took office.But Scott and Lurie have regularly made public appearances aside one another during Lurie’s early days in office, and that amiability was again on display on Wednesday. His immediate fill-in will be Yep, who has deep roots in both The City and the department. A native of Chinatown and graduate of Lowell High School, Yep worked for the department for 28 years before joining Lurie’s administration.Lurie said he will work with the Police Commission to find a suitable successor for Scott. Under the City Charter, the Police Commission is responsible for forwarding Lurie a list of finalists from which he will choose. “I am committed to building a leadership team in the SFPD that builds on our early progress, strengthens and deepens the ranks of our officers and command staff, and uses all the tools available to continue our comeback,” Lurie said. Scott’s tenure is marked by evolution and change within the San Francisco Police Department, and in policing across the country. Appointed under former Mayor Ed Lee, Scott’s arrival followed a particularly turbulent period that saw The City enter a Collaborative Reform Initiative with the U.S. Department of Justice to overhaul its policing practices. After the first Trump administration pulled out of that reform effort with The City, the department worked with the California Department of Justice to put in place the 272 reforms recommended by the federal Justice Department. San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott speaks alongside then-Mayor London Breed at a news conference about 2019 crime statistics at SFPD headquarters on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.“While we may not have always agreed on issues, we valued and respected each other’s roles,” said Tracy McCray, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, in a statement. “We always believed that each of us was doing what we felt was best for public safety and best for our officers, and that we were committed to hiring and retaining the best officers for the SFPD. We wish him well.” Scott remained atop the department during former Mayor London Breed’s tenure in City Hall, and amid nationwide protests following theat the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020. He continued in the role during the recall of former District Attorney Chesa Boudin, with whomworking for The City, mirroring a national trend that intensified during the pandemic and presents a significant challenge for whoever succeeds him. As he leaves the post, Scott is as popular as ever with city legislators. The move also comes less than three weeks after San Francisco supervisors issued aHe touted The City’s homicide rate, which was its lowest in decades in 2024, and a sharp drop in car break-ins, which were counted at 31,000 in 2017 but fell to less than 10,000 last year.Kelsey McClellan © 2025 The New York Times Company As billions of dollars have flowed into artificial-intelligence startups — particularly those based in San Francisco — a growing number of people have raised concern about that investment creating a massive financial bubble that’s bound to pop. In their upcoming book, “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want,” researchers Emily Bender and Alex Hanna argue the industry is surrounded by a bubble of hype.,” researchers Emily Bender and Alex Hanna argue the industry is surrounded by a parallel bubble of hype. With their book, they hope to pierce that bubble and help everyday people see how AI really works,The writers approach the task from a background of working in and studying the industry.in 2022 at what she saw as the company’s failure to address the harm its technology was causing. She then joined the Distributed AI Research Institute, which Timnit Gebru — her former manager at Google — founded. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington who’s also on the faculty of that institution’s engineering and information schools, has been writing for years about AI and machine-learning systems work and the harm they can cause.University of Washington linguistics professor Emily Bender, who is a faculty member in its computer-science school, co-authored “The AI Con.”Tuesday, Bender and Hanna start essentially from the beginning, questioning even the term “artificial intelligence.” “AI,” they argue, is just a marketing name for a disparate collection of technologies such as language models, recommendation engines and automatic classification systems that helps obscure what those technologies do and how they work. Whenever possible, rather than referring to those systems as AI, they try to specifically and descriptively name them. They like to refer to generative AI chatbots — such as ChatGPT, for example — as “text extrusion machines.” But they don’t stop there. They dive into the history of the technology and its hype. In succeeding chapters, they argue AI in its various forms is undermining labor, being used as a cheap and poor replacement for health care and other social services, and built on stolen works from artists and other creators while sabotaging an assortment of creative work. They also try to puncture the notions that this technology is inevitable and that it is leading to some kind of potentially humanity-threatening superintelligence. That’s just more hype, they argue. Per the book’s title, they offer ways people can fight back and fight for a fairer, more just world — starting with just refusing to use AI services. In an interview last week, Bender and Hanna talked about the effects they see from AI, why they think it’s is in a bubble that will burst and what they hope readers get out of their book. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Alex Hanna, co-author of “The AI Con”: “The turn to AI is a move that has been consistent with worsening conditions in different industries.”A goal, at least, is for people to be able to spot the hype and push back against it and push back especially against these narratives of inevitability. It’s really frustrating to me to hear people who say, “Well, it’s here to stay. We just have to learn to live with it.” And to that, we’re like, “Well, no, actually.” One of the examples I like to point to is the hole in the ozone layer. That was a global-scale problem, and we addressed it by coming together with some regulation, and now we have many problems — but that’s not one of them. My hope is that with the book, as we pull back the curtain on what’s actually working behind these systems, we will empower people who feel a little bit off about this but don’t know quite how to say why, to be able to be confident that they’re seeing it the right way around and learn how to articulate that to people around them.The nice thing about it is I think the book does have that power. A lot of the folks we’ve talked with on this, they’re often librarians or artists or other creatives, and they’re like, “Yeah, my sense is that this is icky. But you’re actually putting your finger on a few core elements of it —” have no access to meaning. They are in some cases used as a tool to bludgeon workers, especially in creative industries. And they are doing nothing but polluting the information ecosystem and making it hard for people like librarians and writers and artists to do their job effectively with respect to maintaining and producing knowledge and culture.I think you can divide the harms into a few buckets. One is the harms that come about in the production of the technology. So you’ve got the data theft, you’ve got the labor exploitation, you’ve got the Then you’ve got these situations where the hype allows people in power to put in a so-called AI system as a Band-Aid for a place where social services are severely lacking. And a lot of harms can come from that. You’ve got places where you have automatic decision systems being deployed. And every time someone says, “Oh, it’s an AI and it’s so smart. Surely it’s making fair, objective decisions, because they’re in the computer,” that provides cover for really horrible reproductions of our systemic racism in things like welfare allocation and pretrial sentencing and so on.It’s really hard to rank it. This is why the book isn’t necessarily organized around the types of technology. We arrange it by the area in which these interventions are being made. The turn to AI is a move that has been consistent with worsening conditions in different industries — in journalism and higher ed and in science, in creativity or in graphic design. Any place where human discretion or even knowledge needs to be reliable and consistent, that is being taken away and supplanted with these tools.Ricardo Nagaoka © 2025 The New York Times Company One of the things you do with the book is to center people, talking about how these technologies are built on exploiting people or cause real harm to people, and that, ideally, these technologies would be used to assist people. Why did you feel the need to do that?One of the ways I often put it is to say, “We’ve got to keep the people in the frame.” AI is always people. And a lot of this, the parlor trick involves hiding the actual inputs that were done by people, so that it looks like the people who created this technology have actually either been a god or created a god.The notion of keeping the human in the frame dispels this notion that there is this ability of things to be completely autonomous. This is kind of what we talk about when we talk about the “doomers,” who say there’s going to be these machines that are going to become autonomous, run themselves, self-replicate, etc., which is patently absurd. If anyone’s worked in tech support, they know that’s really laughable. But also the fact that there are people who are both controlling or providing data for these systems behind the curtain. There’s also a set of incentive structures and people who are orchestrating these things. The hype doesn’t perpetuate independently of individuals. It is certain people couched in certain types of institutions perpetuate hypes for their own gains and that’s important to point to.This can’t be other than a bubble, because there’s no there there. Basically what they’ve got in the large-language models is a technology that can mimic human language use in many, many contexts. But human language use is not the same thing as actually providing the services that they’re . Is it surprising that the bubble is getting bigger before popping? Sure. Does that mean it’s not a bubble? No.I’m happy to put the stake in the ground. These big cash flows are to me kind of like, “OK, this is the year that this is really going to make or break it, right?”. There was a sharp decline in Nvidia’s stock and associated stocks. Is this going to be the same kind of thing? I don’t know. It’s hard to say. But there’s no there there. The path to monetization is very narrow. The Icons for the smartphone apps DeepSeek and ChatGPT are seen on a smartphone screen in Beijing, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025.These systems are consistently sold as reasoning machines. If we had something that could actually do what they say it can do, then there’d be tremendous possibility for disruption in all kinds of sectors. But there’s not. It’s not there. So, that’s what I mean.Not only are they not as sophisticated as they’re being sold, but there’s no pathway from a synthetic text extruding machine to something that can do what they’re claiming it can do. The Sam Altmans and the Amodeis at Anthropic would like us to believe that something called artificial general intelligence is right around the corner and that these were just mere steps away from it on this particular path. It’s inevitable, it’s close. It’s just a question of who gets there fastest and first. And none of that is proven, and there’s actually no good reason to believe any of it. But that functions as some of the marketing that’s keeping the hype bubble inflated.A Warm Line operator is seen working at a desk at the Mental Health Association of San Francisco headquarters in 2017.A free statewide mental-health phone line created in San Francisco could shut down in the next few months if Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed state budget passes, according to Mark Salazar, executive director of the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. Newsom must release a revised 2025-26 budget plan on or before May 14. His January proposal did not include $20 million in allocated funds requested by the Mental Health Association of San Francisco for each of the next three years to continue running theThe line provides peer counselors all day, every day, who offer support for those struggling with their mental health before they reach crisis points, providing an alternative to 911 or other emergency resources. Peer counselors answered nearly 40,000 calls last month, according to the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. But the organization’s previous funding allocation runs out when the current budget year ends June 30. And its champion for the last two rounds, former Assemblymember Phil Ting, is no longer in Sacramento to advocate for those funds.He testified last week at the California Senate Budget Subcommittee on Health and Human Services, and he said Democratic Assemblymembers Matt Haney and Catherine Stefani, who represent San Francisco, and Democratic state Sens. Josh Becker and Angelique Ashby support the funding. Mark Salazar, the Mental Health Association of San Francisco’s executive director speaks at the Redefining Crazy Conference in San Francisco on April 22, 2024.Salazar said that Californians call in for support for everything from workplace stress to times of major uncertainty, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, in the aftermath of the November presidential election or amid the recent Los Angeles wildfires.each month, according to the Mental Health Association of San Francisco’s own data. The organization had not received more than 15,000 calls in a month during the prior two years, according to the data, and Salazar said the spike has continued since the election. “It could be really just someone wanting to talk or looking for resources or services,” he said. “Even sometimes we link them to therapists — what’s funny is therapists link people back to us because folks can’t afford .” Amid the increased demand, Haney, Stefani and other assemblymembers wrote to the Senate subcommittee calling for the renewal of Warm Line funding. “This funding will ensure continuous, culturally responsive non-crisis support for Californians navigating mental health challenges, reduce burdens on crisis systems and bolster the state’s continuum of care,” the letter said. The letter cited a 2021 analysis that found that an emergency room visit can cost between $2,000 and $4,000. Without the use of the warm line, 15% of callers said they might have sought that type of intervention instead. Salazar’s hope is that Newsom will include at least some funding for the line in the next version of the budget. He said the association could operate a pared-down version of the Warm Line with $10 million to $15 million per year, but it would no longer be able to operate 24/7. A hotline operator works at their desk at the Mental Health Association of San Francisco headquarters on Thursday, Nov. 30, 2017.Salazar said this would severely affect the association’s ability to reach folks at times when they’re feeling most vulnerable. The majority of calls come in between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m., during what Salazar calls the “shift change” where people are getting off of work and needing to process their days.Kalyn Jones, a counselor and assistant manager with the line based in Shasta County, said that its counselors offer an outlet for people who might not have an easily accessible support system. Even if callers do, she said they might not be ready to share yet. Having worked with the Warm Line since 2021, she said it bridges gaps in places like the county in which she calls home. “The accessibility of the Warm Line is something that is just vital, especially when navigating mental health resources,” she said. “Folks sometimes are coming from a smaller community, there’s not a lot of resources in the environment.” Ann, who asked to go by a pseudonym for privacy concerns, said someone with the National Alliance on Mental Illness first referred her to the Warm Line around four years ago. The Central Valley resident said she had just left a toxic workplace; she was struggling with physical health issues, and, eventually, facing homelessness. She felt very alone, she said. “I was in contact with Social Security and ready to wrap it up — to barely go outside,” she said. “I didn’t trust anybody.” But after connecting to the Warm Line and being referred to a peer support group, she said, she felt stronger. Ann said she was able to face challenges and found herself helping other people in the group as well. Those in charge noticed, she said, and three years ago she became a certified peer specialist — now one of 150 others similar to her on the other end of the phone. “I had received so much and still do — it was important for me to be able to give back,” Ann said. “Nothing compares to the service.” While her journey was a difficult one, she said she comes to each call with the same compassion and care she received when she needed it most. “We have created trust, and trust has been established,” Ann said. “Without that, I’m concerned for people and where they’re going to turn.”Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. 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