A Conversation with Mission Local’s Joe Rivano Barros (Part 1 of 2)

The senior editor talks to Michael E. Hartmann about the nonprofit news site, the visions and aims of the MacArthur and Crankstart Foundations’ criminal- and restorative-justice grantmaking in San Francisco, and the backlash in the city and state against aggressive criminal-justice reforms that began in the 2010s.

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Joe Rivano Barros is senior editor of Mission Local, a nonprofit news site based in the Mission District of San Francisco. He first joined the site as a reporter after graduating from Stanford University, then spent time at YIMBY Action, a housing advocacy group, and as a partner of The Worker Agency, a pro-labor public-relations firm. He rejoined Mission Local as an editor in 2023.

For the site, Rivano Barros has been covering philanthropic support of criminal-justice projects in San Francisco, including its District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ office’s contentious relationships with major private foundations about them. His reporting last year on the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s decision to withhold $625,000 in grant funds from the office of the DA, an elected position, caught the attention of several of us here at The Giving Review. The incident, we thought, offers insights into the tenuous relationship between philanthropy and democracy; San Francisco voters’ and MacArthur’s views on criminal-justice policy and the need for reform seem to have diverged greatly.

After the DA-MacArthur controversy, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office took over as the grant’s administrator. Also subsequent to the MacArthur dustup, as reported by Rivano Barros as well, Jenkins’ office had a similarly antagonistic conflict with the private Crankstart Foundation about a restorative-justice project. And the public California Victim Compensation Board declined to renew its contract with the office for a time, too, citing the office’s mismanagement of its funded program services. High staff turnover in the DA’s office’s Victim Services Division dating back to before Jenkins’ tenure only worsened during her tenure.

Rivano Barros was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last week. The just less than 13-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, we talk about Mission Local, the visions and aims of MacArthur’s and Crankstart’s criminal- and restorative-justice grantmaking in San Francisco, and the backlash in the city and state against aggressive criminal-justice reforms that began in the 2010s.

“We have a District Attorney’s office here in San Francisco that, I think many readers will know nationally, underwent a shift recently,” Rivano Barros tells me. In 2022, “there was a recall of the old District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, who was kind of a local progressive and one of this kind of wave of progressive prosecutors across the country.”

MacArthur’s support for certain criminal-justice policies started before Boudin’s tenure, according to Rivano Barros. “They were for all sorts of programs. They really were trying to do criminal-justice reform. They would fund different kind of collaborative programs, where the DA might be the lead agency, but would work with the public defender’s office,” he continues, “trying to divert folks from traditional criminal-justice prosecution and find alternatives.

“One of the things, the metrics, that they wanted to look at was jail numbers,” Rivano Barros says. “That was an explicit goal of the MacArthur Foundation’s support.” While jail numbers did decrease during Boudin’s time, he notes, it was “mostly because of the pandemic.”

Brooke Jenkins was appointed interim DA after the recall, then was elected in her own right later in ’22. Jenkins is a “much more kind of traditional get-tough-on-crime DA,” according to Rivano Barros. “Jail numbers of slowly climbed up back to pre-pandemic levels, and so the MacArthur Foundation took that as a reason to cut off its grant early to the DA’s office.”

In response, Jenkins’ chief of staff sent a memo to MacArthur that declared, “Our office will not be used as sharecroppers to a foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.”

“It was very clear. The message was, ‘Stop talking down to us,’” as Rivano Barros characterizes it.

Brooke Jenkins, in her public life and on her campaign, has made her identity a prominent part of her message, which is, “I know these communities and I know what folks need and … we’re going to resist this ‘white savior’ complex coming from foundations that dictate our public-safety measures.” It falls very much in line with what she’s done over the years.

Broadly, he says,

the criminal-justice reform that we saw in the 2010s is facing a backlash from voters across San Francisco and California. … There is this backlash. You can talk about whether it’s actual dissatisfaction with these policies, or whether there’s been a very-effective marketing campaign against them, or whether post-pandemic, things have gotten visually chaotic on the streets and people [are] seeing more visible homelessness and drug use and associating that with crime and then criminal-justice policies. But the voters are turning on some of the reforms from the 2010s.

Crankstart’s restorative-justice initiative encourages alternatives to incarceration, based on accused perpetrators taking some steps to ameliorate the damage they’ve allegedly caused, after which the DA waives the charges. “Restorative justice is really for lower-level offenses,” according to Rivano Barros, though “Boudin was trying to expand it to even violent assaults.” It “has really emphasized the victim and the perpetrator coming together and talking it out with the support of nonprofits in the community.”

Under Jenkins, “things kept getting dragged out in terms of implementation and then at some point, Crankstart declined to renew” the grant, Rivano Barros says. Sources told him “this would have been a layup in terms of getting the money if the DA’s office had actually been interested in pursuing this program.”

In the conversation’s second part, Rivano Barros discusses staff turnover and accusations of mismanagement in the San Francisco DA’s office, including in grants administration, and more broadly, the underappreciated role of philanthropy in local government, in terms of both the size of its funding and its influence.

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on March 3, 2025.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-conversation-with-mission-locals-joe-rivano-barros-part-1-of-2/