Civic

San Francisco based community newspaper the "Bay Area Reporter" began publishing on April 1st, 1971 chronicling the earliest days of Queer activism. On this episode we speak with the publisher and news editor about the history covered in its pages and the challenges of running a commercial newspaper amid a pandemic in the digital age.

Pandemic or no, sanitation workers are still collecting the city's waste material. Civic hitches an early morning ride with Recology recycling driver Gareth Willey to get a sense for how the pandemic has changed his work. While the decreased traffic has made the streets a little less crowded, the bins he empties are now piled high with cardboard boxes from mail orders, which poses a challenge.

Volunteers are calling seniors to make sure they know how to get vaccine appointments if they want them. Former state Senate candidate and public bank advocate Jackie Fielder recently launched a political action committee, Daybreak PAC, and has shifted some campaign organizing infrastructure toward a vaccine access effort. Phone bank volunteers now reach out to seniors living in neighborhoods like the Bayview, to ask if they would like to get vaccinated but face any barriers to doing so. Fielder and a phone banker, Sayuri Falconer, talk about the initiative.

Former police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial in Minneapolis, charged with the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, when Chauvin was an officer. Charging decisions are made by district attorneys, and San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin says if the Minneapolis incident had occurred locally, he would have brought criminal charges against Chauvin. He also discusses recent cases in which local law enforcement officers have killed or seriously injured people and why he did or did not bring criminal charges against those officers.

Roger Marenco, president of the Transport Workers Union Local 250 A, says hundreds of Muni workers have been infected with the coronavirus and two have died from complications of COVID-19. For others, he said, the pressures of the job coupled with the additional dangers posed by a global pandemic have taken a psychological toll. We talked about how operators are handling this and what changes he would like to see, including actions passengers could take.

The continued rise in violence against Asian-Americans, in particular against elders, has spurred communities into action. In Chinatown, a few different groups of volunteers can regularly be seen patrolling the street, keeping an eye out for potential problems. This week, Civic walked along with the Chinatown Safety Patrol.