Lenore Anderson
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JAMMI resident Lenore Anderson has taken a high profile job with the office of San Francisco District Attorney Kamala D. Harris, the Tribune (May 31) reports.

Can this be the Training Director position advertised on the SF District Attorney’s website? The Tribune doesn't say. City agencies do not hire people with an informal process, and that is the only position currently posted at the SF District Attorney’s office other than intern positions. Coincidentally, that position was first posted in October 2007; Ms. Anderson left Mayor Gavin Newsom's office and joined Mayor Dellums’ staff on October 1st.  She immediately went to work to increase OPD staffing.

We wish our dear neighbor well in her new job, whatever it is, but are skeptical that her quick departure from our Mayor’s office is “absolutely not” related to dissatisfaction with a job that Julia Olmstead has called “nebulous, if not impossible” in a “stew of animosity, frustration and bad blood.” If, in the nine months that Ms. Anderson has spent as a public safety advisor in the Office of the Mayor, she has actually achieved the goal of creating an infrastructure to coordinate city services to respond to public safety needs, then that would be an astounding achievement in a City known for the insurmountable inertia of its bureaucracy.  

Ms. Anderson is co-producer of "System Failure", a half-hour documentary on the California Youth Authority.  It is a powerful indictment of a failed system and I urge you to watch it.

Ms. Anderson’s varied career and quick ascent should be an inspiration to local youth:
Native of the East Bay, “frequently in trouble” as a youth
Graduate of U.C. Berkeley, 1995
Soros Justice Fellowship grantee, 2000
Root-Tilden Kern Public Interest Scholar, NYU
Law Degree from New York University, 2001
Worked on behalf of criminal justice reform at the Guatemalan Institute for Penal Sciences and the South African Prisoners Organization for Human Rights
Director of Ella Baker Center’s Books Not Bars Family Advocacy Project, 2001 – 2006
Member, Board of Directors for the Center for Young Women's Development for five years
Juvenile Justice Consultant, San Francisco Foundation
PASS award recipient, 2004
Co-producer of System Failure, a documentary of the failings of the California Youth Authority
Panelist, Elizabeth J. Cabraser Summer Lecture Series, 2005
Deputy Director of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Criminal Justice, June 2006 – September 2007
Public Safety Director for Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, October 2007 – June 2008
The City Council recently voted to cut funding for the Public Security Advisor position that Ms. Anderson is vacating. Reportedly, Mayor Dellums considered the cut a personal slight. Councilmember Quan reportedly replied that the individual chosen to replace Ms. Anderson was already being paid by the Oakland Police Department, so there was no need to fund the position at this time.