Deputy Chief Derrick Lew has today been named chief of the San Francisco Police Department, succeeding interim chief Paul Yep and former longtime chief Bill Scott.
Lew is a 20-plus year veteran of the department. He joined the department in 2003 and served at Taraval Station covering the Westside. In 2006 he was nearly killed by a cousin of Mayor London Breed in Silver Terrace; Lew’s partner then shot and killed Charles Breed, who had earlier allegedly shot and killed two people.
Lew received a medal of valor for the incident.
Lew rose through the ranks and was put in charge of the city’s drug enforcement through the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center. Earlier this year he, like Lurie and the former police chief, acknowledged that cracking down on drug activity was displacing people to other neighborhoods like the Mission.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
Joe was born in Sweden, where half of his family received asylum after fleeing Pinochet, and then spent his early childhood in Chile; he moved to Oakland when he was eight. He attended Stanford University for political science and worked at Mission Local as a reporter after graduating. He then spent time at YIMBY Action and as a partner for the strategic communications firm The Worker Agency. He rejoined Mission Local as an editor in 2023. You can reach him on Signal @jrivanob.99.
Managing Editor/Columnist. Joe was born in San Francisco, raised in the Bay Area, and attended U.C. Berkeley. He never left.
“Your humble narrator” was a writer and columnist for SF Weekly from 2007 to 2015, and a senior editor at San Francisco Magazine from 2015 to 2017. You may also have read his work in the Guardian (U.S. and U.K.); San Francisco Public Press; San Francisco Chronicle; San Francisco Examiner; Dallas Morning News; and elsewhere.
He resides in the Excelsior with his wife and three (!) kids, 4.3 miles from his birthplace and 5,474 from hers.
The Northern California branch of the Society of Professional Journalists named Eskenazi the 2019 Journalist of the Year.