A San Francisco official with oversight responsibilities over the city's jail system has racked up a string of criminal allegations — and has repeatedly ended up booked into the very facility he's supposed to be overseeing. Read that again. The person who is part of the system designed to ensure accountability and proper operations in our jail keeps showing up on the wrong side of the bars.

As one SF resident put it: "Straight out of a movie script. How does this even happen?"

Great question. Here's a better one: why is this person still in a position of public authority?

This is what happens when political structures prioritize ideological loyalty over basic competence — and basic lawfulness. San Francisco's progressive governance apparatus, including the oversight mechanisms created by Prop D in 2020, was sold to voters as a way to bring more accountability to law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Noble goal. But accountability only works if the people doing the overseeing are themselves accountable. When your watchdog keeps getting caught raiding the henhouse, you don't have oversight. You have a punchline.

Another local nailed it: "We cannot have people like this in power. He needs to be fired and the people who hired him exposed."

That's the bare minimum. But in San Francisco's bureaucratic maze, the bare minimum is apparently too much to ask. There's no fast-track mechanism to remove someone who is actively accumulating criminal charges while drawing a public salary. The system protects its own, even when "its own" is literally being processed through intake.

This isn't a left-or-right issue. It's a governance issue. If you can't stay out of jail, you have no business overseeing one. Every day this person remains in their role is another day San Francisco tells its taxpayers that standards simply don't apply to the people in charge.

Fire them. Yesterday.