Harvey Bernard Milk was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
The White Night riots were a series of violent events sparked by an announcement of a lenient sentencing of Dan White for the assassinations of George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco, and of Harvey Milk, a member of the city's Board of Supervisors who was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. The events took place on the night of May 21, 1979, in San Francisco. Earlier that day White had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter, the lightest possible conviction for his actions. The lesser conviction outraged the city's gay community, setting off the most violent reaction by gay Americans since the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City.
Joseph Lawrence Alioto was an American politician who served as the 36th mayor of San Francisco, California, from 1968 to 1976.
Arthur Christ Agnos is an American politician. He served as the 39th mayor of San Francisco, California from 1988 to 1992 and as the Regional Head of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1993 to 2001.
Terence Hallinan was an American attorney and politician from San Francisco, California. He was the second of six sons born to Progressive Party presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan and his wife, Vivian (Moore) Hallinan. Hallinan was educated at the London School of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Hastings College of the Law. He practiced privately in San Francisco.
Cindy Lee Sheehan is an American anti-war activist, whose son, U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, was killed by enemy action during the Iraq War. She attracted national and international media attention in August 2005 for her extended antiwar protest at a makeshift camp outside President George W. Bush's Texas ranch—a stand that drew both passionate support and criticism. Sheehan ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2008. She was a vocal critic of President Barack Obama's foreign policy. Her memoir, Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to Activism, was published in 2006. In an interview with The Daily Beast in 2017, Sheehan continued to hold her critical views towards George W. Bush, while also criticizing the militarism of Donald Trump.
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is the municipal law enforcement agency of the City and County of San Francisco, as well as San Francisco International Airport in San Mateo County. In 2000, the SFPD was the 11th largest police department in the United States.
The Black Cat Bar or Black Cat Café was a bar in San Francisco, California. It originally opened in 1906 and closed in 1921. The Black Cat re-opened in 1933 and operated for another 30 years. During its second run of operation, it was a hangout for Beats and bohemians but over time began attracting more and more of a gay clientele, and becoming a flashpoint for what was then known as the homophile movement, a precursor to the gay liberation movement that gained momentum in the 1960s.
The San Francisco Police Department began operations on August 13, 1849 during the California Gold Rush in San Francisco, California, under the command of Captain Malachi Fallon.
Oscar Grant III was a 22-year-old Black man who was killed in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009 by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California. Responding to reports of a fight on a crowded Bay Area Rapid Transit train returning from San Francisco, BART Police officers detained Grant and several other passengers on the platform at the Fruitvale BART Station. BART officer Anthony Pirone kneed Grant in the head and forced Grant to lie face down on the platform. Officer Johannes Mehserle drew his pistol and shot Grant. Grant was rushed to Highland Hospital in Oakland and pronounced dead later that day. The events were captured on bystanders’ mobile phones. Owners disseminated their footage to media outlets and to various websites where it went viral. Both protests and riots took place in the following days.
Charles Roberts Breyer is an American lawyer serving as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Breyer served as chairman of the United States Sentencing Commission from 2018 to 2022.
William Horsley Orrick III is an American lawyer who serves as a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. He had a long career as a lawyer in private practice in San Francisco, and served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the United States Department of Justice during the Obama administration.
Daniel Peter Sheehan is a constitutional and public interest lawyer, public speaker, political activist and educator.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains five of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in a statewide housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S. 348 (2015), was a United States Supreme Court case which analyzed whether police officers may extend the length of a traffic stop to conduct a search with a trained detection dog. In a 6–3 opinion, the Court held that officers may not extend the length of a traffic stop to conduct a dog sniff unrelated to the original purpose of the stop. However, the Court remanded the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to determine whether the officer's extension of the traffic stop was independently justified by reasonable suspicion. Some analysts have suggested that the Court's decision to limit police authority was influenced by ongoing protests in Ferguson, Missouri.
On July 1, 2015, 32-year-old Kathryn "Kate" Steinle was shot and killed while walking with her father and a friend along Pier 14 in the Embarcadero district of San Francisco. She was hit in the back by a single bullet. The man who fired the gun, José Inez García Zárate, said he had found it moments before, wrapped in cloth beneath a bench on which he was sitting, and that when he picked it up the weapon went off. The shot ricocheted off the concrete deck of the pier and struck the victim, who was about 90 feet (27m) away. Steinle died two hours later in a hospital as a result of her injuries.
Alejandro "Alex" Nieto was a man who was shot and killed by four San Francisco Police Department officers on March 21, 2014, in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Nieto was a bouncer at a local nightclub, and the shooting took place before he was to start work that evening. A couple called 911 when they saw him sitting on a bench and saw Nieto's taser. Nieto was wearing a taser, and the police officers alleged that Nieto pointed the taser at them. The responding police officers also said they believed that the taser was a firearm.
Hillary Ronen is an American politician and attorney who served as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from 2017 to 2025. She represented District 9, which includes the neighborhoods of Mission District, Bernal Heights, and Portola.
In January 2024 at least 187,084 people were experiencing homelessness in California, according to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is 0.48% of California's population, one of the highest per capita rates in the nation.
Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174 (1922), was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the Court unanimously held that public schools could constitutionally exclude unvaccinated students from attending, even if there was not an ongoing outbreak. In the case, the school district of San Antonio, Texas enacted an ordinance that prohibited any child from attending a school within the district unless they had been vaccinated against smallpox. One parent of a student who had been excluded, Rosalyn Zucht, sued on the basis that there was not a public health emergency. Justice Louis Brandeis wrote for the unanimous court that requiring students to be vaccinated was a justified use of "police power" to maintain public health and safety.
