San Francisco, CA
People We Meet: For Arieann Harrison, eco-activism is in her DNA
Attend any neighborhood meeting in Bayview-Hunters Point, whether it’s put on by tenants groups, the neighborhood’s air protection program or the Hunters Point Shipyard’s citizens advisory committee, and you are bound to come face to face with Arieann Harrison.
Harrison, the CEO of the Marie Harrison Foundation, an environmental justice nonprofit named after her mother, is a formidable opponent to anyone with a key interest in projects that could pose a health risk to her neighbors.
That’s because Harrison has skin in the game.
Harrison lost her mother in 2019 after a long battle with lung disease. She had never been a smoker. Although it has not been proven, Arieann Harrison blames the Hunters Point Shipyard, a toxic Superfund site where her mother worked in her youth.
Later, as an adult, Marie Harrison tirelessly advocated throughout the 1990s for a transparent cleanup of the site, and fought on behalf of environmental concerns throughout the neighborhood.
Her efforts eventually helped lead to the closure of the Hunters Point Power Plant, which prior to 2006 spewed pollution over the neighborhood.
“I guess you could say it’s in my DNA,” said Harrison, when asked why she decided to turn to activism herself.
But it wasn’t an automatic calling. “I’ll be the first person to tell you,” Harrison said, sitting in Bayview’s Southeast Community Center, “I didn’t want to be nothing like my mother and father.”
As a teenager, Harrison had a taste for rebellion. At night, she would climb out of her bedroom window and change her clothes in the dark to follow the Bayview-Hunters Point-born, all-Black heavy metal band Stone Vengeance to their next gig.
“I was an angry kid,” said Harrison, who now laughs about it. “When you’re young and carefree, you don’t give a shit about anything.”
Harrison’s first love was for music. While following the band, she played her own music, writing lyrics and playing the keyboard in now-closed holes-in-the-wall across San Francisco and Oakland.
“It was a wild time,” Harrison said, recalling one memory in which she dared a member of Stone Vengeance to dive headfirst — in his leather pants — into a lake in Golden Gate Park.
“It got scary fast. It was so dark, we could just hear splashing,” said Harrison. “But it was so fun, we went back the next weekend.”
But when Harrison went to her first social-justice meeting at City College, it fit like a glove.
“I grew up in those rooms,” said Harrison, whose father was also an activist and a member of the Black Panther Party. “And I grew up with the notion that you had to do something.”
Harrison worked as a case manager in Bayview for decades, never moving from the Hunters Point waterfront, and often taking care of her younger sisters and brothers while her mother worked to gather evidence that the U.S. Navy had botched its cleanup of the shipyard.
When her mother died in 2019, Harrison was left with a very large shadow. Neighbors who knew her mother will often stop her in the street, including during Mission Local’s interview, exclaiming how they knew her mother.
“Hey, I know you!” called out one Bayview resident. “I knew her when she was just a little girl,” he said. “I knew her mother very well.”
But her fear, she said, is that one day her mother will be forgotten.
“I don’t want us to just be memorialized in pictures and street names,” she said, sitting in the community center’s cafe, in which murals of community activists are plastered over the walls. “I want our children to see the fruits of all that she’s done.”
The year after her mother died, Harrison hosted an Earth Day event. “Kids came from everywhere,” said Harrison. “There were so many kids, they covered it from the air to the ground.”
Harrison started the Marie Harrison Foundation in 2023, working with children in Bayview and across San Francisco to teach science and environmental justice.
“I wanted to see it through,” said Harrison. “I wanted to make sure that what she started did not end without a greater outcome.”
The foundation has also worked to pressure industries to reduce truck traffic and air pollution in the neighborhood and has worked to hold the U.S. Navy accountable at the shipyard. She’s also started a scholarship in her mother’s name.
When she watched her kids march into City Hall and towards the mayor’s office on Earth Day in 2019, Harrison stood back, in awe.
“I almost broke inside,” said Harrison. “Someting in me broke. I just thought, this is why. It’s like my mom’s spirit was with me, and I haven’t stopped since. And I won’t stop until we get the desired outcomes that we need.”
The San Francisco Giants are headed even farther south today as they begin a weekend road series against the Miami Marlins.
Taking the mound for the Giants will be noted bigot Landen Roupp. Roupp enters today’s game with a 4.24 ERA, 2.96 FIP, with 82 strikeouts to 32 walks in 74.1 innings pitched. His last start was in Friday night’s 5-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs, in which Roupp clearly cared more about proselytizing than he did about winning, allowing four runs on four hits with five strikeouts and two walks in four and two thirds innings.
As of the time this is being written on Thursday, the Marlins have not announced a starting pitcher for today’s game and I am off today (Happy Juneteenth!). But you can head on down to the comments for the most up to date information.
Who: San Francisco Giants vs. Miami Marlins
Where: loanDepot park, Miami, Florida
Regional broadcast: NBC Sports Bay Area
Radio: KNBR 680 AM/104.5 FM, KSFN 1510 AM
SAN FRANCISCO – An 8-year veteran of the San Francisco Police Department received a hero’s sendoff Thursday afternoon as she was discharged from San Francisco General Hospital, less than three weeks after surviving a life-threatening shooting in the line of duty.
First time opening up to the public
The backstory:
Officer Brittney Taylor was greeted by a formation of first responders clapping to show their appreciation and respect as she emerged from the hospital in a wheelchair.
The discharge marks the first time Taylor has spoken publicly since the violent encounter on the night of May 31. According to newly released police body-camera footage, Taylor was shot in the upper leg and foot by a robbery suspect following a pursuit that ended in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood.
“I almost lost my life,” Taylor said. “It’s the little things you take for granted. Holy crap, you get to sit back and look at the big picture.”
When asked if she felt any fear during the incident, Taylor admitted she did that night, though not in the moments leading up to it.
“I knew what could happen,” she said, describing the entire ordeal as an eye-opener. “It is difficult to think about it. You replay it, and it absolutely causes me to lose sleep.”
Credit where credit is due
Dig deeper:
Taylor credited the hospital’s medical team, specifically trauma surgeon Dr. Andre Campbell, with saving her life.
However, Dr. Campbell emphasized that the quick actions of Taylor’s fellow officers at the scene played a critical role in her survival.
Instead of waiting for an ambulance, officers recognized the severity of her injuries, placed her into a patrol car, and rushed her directly to the hospital.
“Which was great,” Dr. Campbell said.
Taylor also highlighted the deep bond shared within her “close-knit police family.”
A squad of female officers and their commanding sergeant have maintained a constant presence at the hospital to offer continuous support throughout her stay.
The native San Franciscan expressed that she has no regrets and hopes her experience will encourage other officers to do their best.
“I love the city,” Taylor said. “I don’t like it when people come to my city and destroy it or hurt the citizens here. That takes a toll on me. I’m going to do something about it.”
The road to recovery
What’s next:
When asked how she would respond to people calling her a hero, Taylor remained humble.
“It’s my job. I was doing my job that night. I’m glad to be put in that position of being a hero.”
Following her release, Taylor received a full police escort as she headed home.
While she notes that her full recovery could take anywhere from six months to a year, she remains resolute about her future.
“You gotta let me put my uniform back on and get back out there,” Taylor said, adding that she has no hesitation about continuing her career. “Honestly, no. I got to slow it down. I have time now.”
The Source: Interview with SFPD Officer Brittney Taylor
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced multiple hate crime charges, as well as assault and vandalism charges against an Oakland man for an incident that happened in the Castro District last month.
On Thursday afternoon, Hans Haken pleaded not guilty to one felony count of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury, one count of vandalism, one count of hit-and-run, and one count of reckless driving.
Prosecutors also allege each of the felony assault counts was a hate crime.
“In San Francisco, we have zero tolerance for any hate, hateful acts, certainly that cross the criminal line, and we will do everything that we can to protect our residents from these types of incidents,” said Jenkins at a Thursday afternoon news conference.
It was on May 16, around 5:30 p.m., when prosecutors say Haken spray-painted a homophobic slur on the wall next to Chartreuse by Roje, a gay-owned floral boutique in San Francisco’s Castro District.
“It was a reminder that even though we’re here in Castro, San Francisco, we live in this well-protected bubble that we have created very passionately and strongly, that that can still happen,” said Jeffrey Dumlao, the owner of Chartreuse by Roje. “If anything, that is what’s scary, that it happened here in broad daylight of all times.”
Dumlao says his store had already closed by that time, but Justin Donnelly, who lives above the store, heard the spray-painting and came down to confront the man and tell him to stop.
“He just became very agitated,” Donnelly said. “I tried to remain calm and just tell him, like, sir, you know, I don’t, I don’t, I’m not involved in any of that. I’m just, I live here, right, and this is, this is my home, and you know, this is vandalism.”
Donnelly says when he took a picture of Haken’s license plate, Haken got in the car and tried to run him over. Then, prosecutors say he got out of the car and punched Donnelly in the jaw while uttering homophobic slurs.
“I’m definitely doing a lot better than I was. It’s been, I don’t know, a month or so,” Donnelly said.
He says the incident has shaken him, but he’s been lifted up by the community’s support and law enforcement.
“A lot of people have said, ‘oh my god, I can’t believe something like this could happen in San Francisco, of all places.’ And the fact is that something like this can happen anywhere, but in San Francisco, we don’t stand for it, and we deal with it, so, so that makes me feel good,” Donnelly said.
In announcing the charges, Jenkins pointed out the climate in this country has become more hostile to the LGBTQ community. She says that makes it even more important for elected officials to protect that community, just like they do every other community.
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