Former San Francisco Human Rights Commission Executive Director Sheryl Davis and nonprofit executive James Spingola have been arrested and booked into jail in connection with a corruption scandal that first rocked City Hall in 2024.

Let that sink in for a moment. The person who led the city department ostensibly charged with safeguarding fairness and equity was allegedly running a corruption scheme. You genuinely cannot make this stuff up.

Davis and Spingola — who reportedly lived together — were apparently entangled in arrangements that blurred every conceivable line between public duty and private benefit. The details of the scandal that surfaced last year were explosive enough to end Davis's tenure, and now law enforcement has decided there's enough to make arrests.

Here's what should bother every San Franciscan, regardless of political persuasion: this wasn't some obscure bureaucrat buried in the bowels of a minor agency. This was the head of a commission with real power, real budgets, and real influence over how taxpayer dollars get distributed to nonprofits. The nonprofit nexus here is particularly troubling. San Francisco funnels billions through its labyrinthine network of nonprofit contractors, and the oversight mechanisms are, to put it charitably, inadequate.

We've said it before and we'll keep saying it: when you build a government apparatus this large, this flush with cash, and this allergic to accountability, corruption isn't a bug — it's a feature. Every layer of unchecked bureaucracy is an invitation for exactly this kind of alleged self-dealing.

The arrests are a welcome sign that someone is finally taking these allegations seriously. But let's not pretend the system worked. The system created the conditions for this to happen. One arrest doesn't fix a culture.

San Francisco taxpayers deserve to know exactly where their money went, who approved it, and what — if anything — was actually delivered in return. Full transparency. Full accountability. No exceptions, especially not for the people who were supposed to be guarding the henhouse.