Call me a dreamer, but when I saw the special section in the Sunday Chronicle entitled “10 BIG IDEAS TO HELP FIX SAN FRANCISCO,” I hoped against hope that one of those “big ideas” was “Hire a lot more cops and let them crack down on crime.”

Readers of this column know that I think Oakland’s MACRO program is a joke. The city’s website claims that “MACRO's goal is to reduce responses by emergency services (Fire & Police), resulting in increased access to community-based services and resources for impacted individuals and families, and most especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).” That sounds ambitious, but the only MACRO units I’ve ever seen deployed (and I live in downtown/uptown where there are a lot of homeless people and drug addicts) have been a few vehicles cruising around. Once I saw two MACRO people offer a bottle of water to a homeless person who was living in a bus stop.

We come now to the Reparations task force’s section called “Methodologies for calculating compensation and forms of compensation and restitution.” Of course, it was always taken for granted by the members of the task force that huge amounts of money would be transferred from government and the public-at-large to the Black community. The question was simply, how much, and in what form?

This is the executive summary of the California Reparations Report. Even in its abbreviated form, it’s a long read. Today I want to focus on only one of the Report’s recommendations: namely that “the State of California will offer a formal apology on behalf of the people of California for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants.”

Last night’s local news was dominated by reports of multiple criminals being shot, in some cases fatally, either by cops or by intended victims protecting themselves.