Perhaps we should have made more of a big deal about this yesterday, but San Francisco just elected its first ever female sheriff, Vicki Hennessy which is more of a big deal to the New York Times probably than to us, given that we've had a female chief of police already, and we currently have a female fire chief. (Also, Hennessy already technically served as sheriff when she was appointed Interim Sheriff during Mirkarimi's 2012 ethics investigation.)
The Times connects her election to the scandals that plague her predecessor, Ross Mirkarimi though for locals it's the domestic violence case and not the recent kerfuffle over Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez's release and subsequent alleged murder that people associate with him.
When she takes office in January, Hennessy says she wants to bring "a sense of calm" back to the Sheriff's Department, and promises she'll be less of an activist sheriff than Mirkarimi, casting herself as more of an executive and administrator. "I’m open to ideas," she says. "I don’t have to be the one to come up with them."
Hennessy also said she would treat sanctuary city cases on a "case-by-case basis," and that when it comes to transgender inmates, whom Mirkarimi said this year would be house according to their declared gender, she would "set that up so it works well for us."
And it should be noted, Hennessy is no relation to former, longtime SF Sheriff Mike Hennessy who actually endorsed Mirkarimi for the job.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi called Hennessy's election a "victory" this week, telling the Daily Caller, "In [Hennessy’s] statements about [SF's sanctuary city policy], she said she would view these issues about turning over people on a case by case basis. She had disagreed, as most of us did, with what the current sheriff did, but I wouldn’t, in friendship, think that it was a bad night for Democrats because Vicki Hennessy won in San Francisco."
Interestingly, Senator Dianne Feinstein also got dragged into the Mirkarimi defeat story when she got into a verbal scuffle with Senator Ted Cruz yesterday. Cruz brought up the sanctuary city policy again, and Feinstein had to explain that Mirkarimi's defeat was "multi-faceted."
Previously: 2015 Election Wrap-up: Peskin In, Mirkarimi Out, Props F And I Go Down