I can still smell the rustic smell of the floorboards of my grandparents’ store on Potrero Hill. After school, while other kids played ball, I priced ramen packets and translated utility bills for neighbors who spoke the same Toisanese dialect as my grandparents. On weekends, I watched shoplifters case the candy aisle and prayed no one shoved my grandparents during the evening rush.
Those memories followed me into the San Francisco Police Academy, into every midnight tour in South of Market neighborhood, and into the cramped union hall where, last month, 689 officers — more than had ever voted in a leadership election — chose me to be the first Asian American president of the 79-year-old San Francisco Police Officers Association (POA) in July.
I know what some readers are thinking: Why should anyone outside the department care who runs the POA?
Because representation is not a vanity metric; it is leverage. Asian Americans are the city’s single largest racial group, nearly 37 percent of the population, yet we make up barely one-fifth of sworn officers and, until now, precisely zero of the union’s presidents. That mismatch matters in a year when videos of elders being punched, shoved, and slashed have ricocheted across the internet and when reported anti-Asian hate crimes in the city jumped more than fivefold between 2020 and 2021…