All eyes are on San Francisco this electoral season, with dark money groups pouring millions of dollars into candidates they believe can remake the city to serve their kleptocratic interests. Beyond a contentious mayoral race, key supervisor races have just as much, if not more, power to shape San Francisco’s political identity. Incumbents in a number of districts face stiff competition as the Phoenix Project’s usual suspects seek to erase all traces of progressive politics from the Board of Supervisors.

In District 1, Supervisor Connie Chan faces a familiar challenger in Marjan Philhour. In an election decided by 125 votes, Chan narrowly won her current seat in 2020 over Philhour. With a newly gerrymandered District 1 however, the right-wing SuperPACs clearly see Philhour as their ticket to establishing a foothold in the San Francisco legislature. 

Philhour has amassed more money than any other supervisorial candidate, a whopping $455,310 for November. In addition, Philhour has been accused of commingling the funds for her DCCC campaign with the funds for her supervisor campaign. As part of the Democrats for Change slate, Philhour joined a group of candidates backed by tech tycoons like Chris Larsen and Garry Tan who ensured that their candidates fundraised three times more dollars than the progressive candidates.

Given this influx of right-wing money, it’s no surprise to see Philhour’s campaign take a turn towards the kind of reactionary, fear-mongering about crime that appeals to the uber-wealthy base she serves. Her campaign has consistently made crime the biggest issue in this race. She places public safety as the number one priority on her campaign website and repeatedly claims Supervisor Chan wants to “dismantle policing.” (Philhour fails to mention that she, too, supported Mayor London Breed’s plan to divert police resources to support Black communities.)

Philhour has strongly defended Mayor Breed’s aggressive and inhumane sweeps of homeless encampments and argued that there is little to no police presence in District 1, despite Supervisor Chan’s support for police department budget increases and hiring incentives. 

Crime has not always been Philhour’s focus issue, despite its outsized presence in her current campaign. In 2016, Philhour lost the race for District 1 to Sandra Fewer despite out-fundraising Fewer by more than $600K. Outside real estate and tech groups spent more than $750K on Philhour’s campaign compared to the $50K raised by Fewer from outside interest groups (primarily labor unions). 

In a statement on her campaign’s priorities, Philhour listed housing affordability and transit infrastructure well before public safety. Crime never came up at all in a Reddit AMA she hosted in the run-up to this election. Backed by money from Flynn Investments, Trinity Properties and Gruber & Gruber Properties, Philhour repeatedly defended loosening affordable housing requirements and encouraged the kind of luxury development these groups stood to benefit from.

Her 2020 campaign against Connie Chan similarly emphasized housing development as her number one priority with scant discussion on the approaches to public safety that she has now made her defining policy. In fact, her stances on public safety in 2016 and 2020 hardly resemble her current tough talk. In 2016, she called for the kind of community policing that progressive candidates in the city support and in 2020, she supported Mayor Breed’s reallocation of $120M from the SFPD budget towards community groups working with marginalized communities. 

It’s hard not to view this turn towards public safety cynically when comparing the current crime data for the Richmond District with the data around these elections. The SFPD crime dashboard began sharing district level crime statistics in 2017, right after the Philhour-Fewer election. Below are totals of violent crime and property crime in The Richmond district for 2017, 2020, and 2024 over the same period of time (January 1st to September 29th).

From these numbers, overall crime has precipitously dropped from 3,488 to 2,024 total incidents between 2017 to 2024. This is a 42% drop. Major crimes like homicide (1 to 0) and rape (15 to 2) have dropped as well as property crimes like larceny (2,812 to 1,363) and robbery (79 to 62). If Philhour’s campaign around public safety is not being motivated by the statistics, what else could it be motivated by?

While this pivot in campaign focus may make it seem difficult to pin down Philhour’s stances, her beliefs can actually be found by following the money behind her. When the real estate tycoons wanted help building luxury towers in the Richmond, Philhour was there to push their vision through. Now, with right-wing billionaires seeking to criminalize homelessness, Philhour is more than happy to misrepresent crime in her neighborhood and stoke fears to deliver these kleptocrats the political power they seek.