Failures of SF Office on Sexual Assault Complaints Draw Scrutiny

Six years after San Francisco created an office meant to help sexual assault survivors and hold city departments accountable for their handling of complaints, the Board of Supervisors is digging into why the initiative hasn’t appeared to bring about meaningful change.

In a City Hall hearing on Thursday morning, supervisors questioned those in charge of the Office of Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention, or SHARP, following high-profile allegations against a rising local political star and a San Francisco Chronicle review of public records finding that SHARP fell far short of its mission.

The office is mandated to help survivors navigate San Francisco’s bureaucratic systems and report city officers should they fail to help. SHARP was also tasked with suggesting policy reforms for government agencies to better help victims; it has proposed no such policies for the San Francisco Police Department, the district attorney’s office or San Francisco General Hospital, the three largest city agencies that sexual assault survivors often encounter, the Chronicle reported.

Sheryl Evans Davis, the executive director of the Human Rights Commission, which oversees SHARP, said during the hearing that although officials have performed meaningful community outreach, SHARP didn’t meet its mission to reform city government.

“We are apologetic and regretful, but we are also committed to doing better,” Davis said. “We’ve had some shortcomings here.”

During the hearing, Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who led SHARP’s creation in 2018, said she will soon introduce legislation to house SHARP within a new city agency, the Office of Victim and Witness Rights. The legislation will also require SHARP to report regularly on its efforts and enhance the office’s confidentiality powers to better protect survivors who come forward.

“SHARP was supposed to look inward at our departments, and we just lost sight of it,” Ronen said.

Ronen called for the hearing after an April report by the San Francisco Standard revealed that multiple women had reported alleged stalking, abuse and rape by Jon Jacobo, a rising star in local progressive politics — and that three of them filed separate police reports that appear to have languished.

More allegations gripped San Francisco’s political scene over the next month: Sexual misconduct accusations emerged against Kevin Ortiz, the co-chair of the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club, an advocacy group, and a rape allegation from 2010, resurfaced against Jay Cheng, the head of Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, a moderate Democrat-aligned political group. The San Francisco Democratic Party created a committee to look into sexual misconduct in its ranks, which met for the first time last week.

While headlines have focused on the Democratic Party, the hearing’s scope was wider. Supervisors said they wanted to discuss how best to help victims and did not focus on the multiple accusations against San Francisco Democrats.

The San Francisco Police Department presented data showing sexual assault cases in San Francisco have risen since SHARP was created. In 2020, 712 sexual assault cases were reported to SFPD, and by 2023, the number of cases rose to 1,062. Of those assaults, 223 were forcible rape.

“The numbers we just saw from the police department, they’re outrageous,” Ronen said.

Ronen said SHARP’s failures stem from its failure to hire people with expertise in reforming government. Its staffers have strong community outreach experience, she said, but since there are only two of them, the office may need to hire more.

Over the last five years, the office has received 72 complaints about city responses to victims through the SHARP website and 187 complaints through community engagement. The office is handling 33 ongoing investigations.

During public comment in Thursday’s hearing, Luis Gutierrez-Mock, a local advocate, said more needs to be done about people who are widely known to have allegations of sexual harassment or rape.

“For many of us here, we were friends and community members of Jon Jacobo, and what was done to hold him accountable?” Gutierrez-Mock said.