London Breed (11 August 1974-) was the acting Mayor of San Francisco (D) from 12 December 2017 to 23 January 2018 (succeeding Ed Lee and preceding Mark Farrell) and from 11 July 2018 (succeeding Farrell).
Biography[]
London Breed was born in San Francisco, California in 1974, and she was raised in public housing. She graduated from UC Davis in 1997 and from the University of San Francisco in 2012, and she was named to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Commission in 2004 after raising over $2.5 million to renovate the African American Art & Culture complex. In 2010, Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed her to the San Francisco Fire Commission, and she was then elected to the Board of Supervisors in January 2013. Her goals were to protect affordable housing, increasing public safety, improving environmental health, and modernizing public transportation. On 8 January 2015, she succeeded Katy Tang as President of the Board of Supervisors; in this post, she served as acting Mayor from Mayor Ed Lee's sudden death in December 2017 until Mark Farrell's appointment as Mayor in January 2018. She won the June 2018 special election to serve a full term as Mayor, and she focused on fighting homelessness in her city, endorsed Michael Bloomberg in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and criticized Governor Newsom's appointment of the first Hispanic US Senator from California, Alex Padilla, as "a real blow to the African-American community" in a social media post on 20 December 2020. During Breed's tenure, San Francisco suffered from rising crime rates, homelessness, and a drug epidemic, manifested in the city's surge in robberies and motor vehicle theft and public defecation. Retailers and restaurants blamed rising crime when closing locations, although the shoplifting rate decreased by 5% from 2019 to 2023 due to the usage of plainclothes and uniformed SFPD officers to detain large, organized groups of thieves in retail stores.