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Opaque Money Flows to San Francisco 'Defund the Police' Candidates

The Center for Empowered Politics is at the center for a GOTV machine for radical causes.

LEE FANG

NOV 05, 2024

∙ PAID

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The Center for Empowered Politics, an influential election advocacy group active in San Francisco, is campaigning on a claim that the city has too many police officers.

Facebook groups affiliated with CEP have posted memes stating, "more police officers or funding for SFPD won't make us safer" and "police can't keep us housed, fed and employed.” 

It’s far from idle activist sloganeering. The CEP network, which previously played a vital role in electing ultra-left prosecutor Chesa Boudin, is now behind a citywide get-out-the-vote effort to elect anti-SFPD politicians and causes.

CEP and its affiliates, including SF Rising Action Fund and Richmond District Rising, are deploying to elect a slate of far-left politicians, including Aaron Peskin, Jackie Fielder, Connie Chan, Dean Preston, Chyanne Chen, and Sharon Lai. 

Supervisor Connie Chan previously listed her affiliation as an active member of Richmond District Rising and has campaigned alongside the group on a weekly basis. At a candidate forum organized by Richmond District Rising, titled "Defund/Abolish the Police - What can it look like?" Chan questionedwhether police were necessary and said she supported removing officers from protecting public schools.

Fielder, who is running to represent the Mission District, a neighborhood that has seen an uptick in drive-by-shootings and rampant property crime, is far more extreme, having pushed to defund the entire police department. Preston, also a sitting supervisor, has used his family’s trust fund to finance local activist groups seeking to abolish the police. 

Across the state, CEP’s network is similarly pushing to defeat Proposition 36, an effort to reform and roll back aspects of Proposition 47, a sweeping measure passed ten years ago that downgraded certain property crimes into misdemeanors. 

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The passage of Proposition 47 and the far-left majority in San Francisco’s city government legislature has been blamed on the city’s dizzying downward spiral. Rampant shoplifting has forced the closure of dozens of businesses, including local retailers, clothing brands, pharmacies, and grocery stores. The San Francisco Police Department, sharply hampered from enforcing the law on many forms of property crime and facing a staffing deficit of 600 officers, has struggled to respond. 

Yet the source of CEP’s funding remains largely a mystery. According to its annual tax disclosures, the group raised over $13 million last year but does not reveal its sources of income. 

California campaign disclosures provide little sunlight in terms of who is footing the bill for voter outreach on behalf of its San Francisco slate and CEP’s push against reforming Proposition 47. In a recent filing, one of CEP’s many campaign committees disclosed receiving $80,150 from the San Francisco Foundation to support its San Francisco Rising Action Fund group. That information tells us little, given that the San Francisco Foundation is a donor-advised fund that also does not disclose its donors.

In previous years, SF Rising/CEP has received donations from billionaire interests, including Sergey Brin, the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, Susan Pritzker, and Elizabeth Simons. The James Irvine Foundation, a nonprofit backed by the fortunes of a southern California real estate empire, has also donated.

That information, however, does not provide true transparency. Current-year disclosures are lacking, and the CEP network engages in widespread electioneering concealed through a byzantine shroud of legal entities. Alex Tom, the group's director, previously boasted that he “formed (C)(3)s, (C)(4)s, PACs and an LLC ecosystem,” a reference to the legal structures behind a variety of campaign and business entities, many of which do not face campaign finance disclosure requirements