• Lateefah Simon, Kamala Harris’ protégé and the likely winner of the federal congressional seat representing the East Bay, has campaigned on defunding the police throughout her career.

• While president of the Akonadi Foundation, Simon funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP) to support their efforts to defund the Oakland PD.

• But the Terror Project appears to have used the money to fund a get rich scheme, with the organization giving hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to their nonprofits and LLC run by board members and their friends and families.

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As the Democratic nominee, Lateefah Simon is poised to win the race for California’s 12th Congressional District, which stretches from Oakland to San Leandro, in the upcoming November election. The incumbent, Rep. Barbara Lee, is vying for Dianne Feinstein’s now-vacant Senate seat. If Simon wins Lee’s seat, she’ll represent over 750,000 people and control a congressional seat that’s traditionally been a stepping stone to significant influence over national politics.

Simon’s party bonafides are unquestionable: she worked on re-entry programs — initiatives designed to support formerly incarcerated people returning to the the community — under then-SF District Attorney Kamala Harris, whom she describes as a “mentor,” co-chaired Gavin Newsom’s taskforce on police reform, and recently stewarded the charitable giving of ultra-rich Democratic donors like Patricia Quillin (Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings’ wife). As president of BART’s Board of Directors, Simon lobbied for decriminalizing fare evasion statewide and led the successful charge to defund transit police and invest in unarmed “community ambassadors,” after which violent crime on BART increased (though the move earned the organization an award for “innovations in public safety”).

“Lateefah is a visionary,” Newsom said in his endorsement of her run for Congress. “She is a proven leader who effects the kind of change that makes her vision a reality.”

One consistent cornerstone of this “vision” involves defunding the police. In the 1990s, at the outset of her career, Simon was an associate of STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a Bay Area militant Maoist group that attempted, among other things, to galvanize support for convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal by “draw[ing] connections between Mumia’s case and issues here in the Bay Area, like police brutality.” Her longstanding sympathy for campaigns to defund Bay Area police departments, which she has publicly likened to law enforcement in apartheid South Africa and described as “riddled with anti-blackness,” is well-documented.

But less well-known are the details of how, between 2016 and 2023, Simon leveraged her access to millions of funding dollars while president of the Akonadi Foundation, a Bay Area “racial justice grantmaking” nonprofit bankrolled to the tune of almost $35 million by real estate moguls Wayne Jordan and Quinn Delaney, to funnel money to a small circle of activists, who seem to have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal kick-backs while working to defund the Oakland Police Department (OPD) of $18 million.

As Lee Fang reported, in 2020 Simon greenlit at least $60,000 of funding to nonprofit Affect Real Change, which it would use to fund two other orgs: the Anti Police-Terror Project, co-founded by Cat Brooks and Oakland city councilwoman Carroll Fife’s husband Earl Harper, and Community Ready Corps, also run by Earl Harper. Then, in 2022, the Rosenberg Foundation, where Simon is Board President, gave three-year, “unrestricted grants” of $250,000 to Brooks and the Terror Project’s vice president Chaney Turner (also currently one of Oakland’s cannabis commissioners) for their “work to end and replace the incarceration and criminalization of young people of color.” In total, APTP, which was only incorporated as a nonprofit in 2021, received over $8 million in two years, from organizations including Akonadi, Rosenberg, the San Francisco Foundation (where Simon is a trustee), the Arch Community Fund (controlled by San Francisco socialist Supervisor Dean Preston), and Solidaire Network (funded by Mark Zuckerberg’s charity, among others, and where Preston’s brother sits on the board).

Where did the $8 million go? In significant part, it appears, into the pockets of APTP’s co-founders — particularly Earl Harper. Per the Terror Project’s financial disclosure statements, it gave $400,000 to Affect Real Change for “radical redistribution gifts,” which is strange given Affect Real Change is (or was) the Terror Project’s own fiscal sponsor and was, itself, granted money by Simon to support it. But the apparent circularity makes more sense in light of Affect Real Change’s three-person board, where Harper’s mother — whom he pays an $84,000 salary — sits, and from which Harper himself takes a salary of nearly $150,000. (It is unclear what else Affect Real Change uses the rest of its grant money for; it has no website and its most recent 990 states its mission is to “conduct community improvement project [sic] by working with other community organizations, officials and community leaders.” It lists the majority of its expenses as “other.”)

This “radical redistribution” has also entailed considerable bookkeeping oversights. For instance, on its 2022 financial disclosure form, APTP initially said it gave $400,000 to the Christopher LaVell Jones Foundation, a local nonprofit. But Brenda Grisham, who founded and runs the organization, claimed she only received $200,000 from the group. She told Pirate Wires that when the discrepancy came to her attention, she called APTP, whose employees told her it was due to an “accounting error” and did not elaborate further. Several months later, APTP quietly filed an updated form which claimed they had actually allocated $200,000 to Grisham’s Foundation and $200,000 to Lower Bottom Playaz, a local theater company with which APTP co-founder Cat Brooks frequently collaborates.

Elsewhere, the Terror Project gave another “redistribution gift” of $55,000 to “Chaney Turner LLC” — presumably the personal corporation of its own vice president Chaney Turner — and $400,000 to a mutual-aid fund operated by Community Ready Corps (CRC), which, like Affect Real Change, is… also run by Earl Harper. Community Ready Corps was also set to receive a $2.1 million contract from a local community college to provide “community-based security services” to replace campus police, until student journalists discovered its listed address was a vacant building and, more pressingly, neither Harper nor CRC had the licenses required to perform this work. The state later fined CRC $5,000 and issued the organization a citation.

Incidentally, Harper and CRC came under additional scrutiny last February after Harper (who also goes by Tur-Ah Ak) allegedly “pushed, choked, and punched” Vincent Williams, a homeless advocate, as Williams tried to persuade those living in an encampment at Fitzgerald Park, in Harper’s wife’s district, to accept an offer of shelter. As Jack Henry Mueller has recently reported in a deep-dive on Harper's background, besides the battery charge Harper received after this episode, he was also arrested and sentenced to two years probation on a firearm charge in 1997.

Since that was a lot of names and acronyms, here’s a bullet-point list to sum it up:

• Using her positions at the head of a nonprofit and on the board of another non-profit, Oakland’s next congresswoman — Kamala Harris’ protégée Lateefah Simons — funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Anti Police-Terror Project for defund the police advocacy.

• The Anti Police-Terror Project — co-founded by Earl Harper — gave at least $800,000 to organizations run by Harper and at which his mother and, until recently, wife are board members, along with $55,000 to the personal LLC of APTP’s vice president.

• Community Ready Corps, Harper’s organization which received $400,000 from APTP, was set to receive a $2.1 million state-funded private security grant until it emerged that Harper and CRC lacked the appropriate licenses to do this work.

But this isn’t to say the Terror Project didn’t affect any real change (pun intended) while its leaders were enriching themselves. The organization, which says it “seeks [to] eradicate police terror in communities of color,” architected the successful push to defund the Oakland Police Department of $18 million (and cut 50 police officer jobs) in 2021, and redirect the money into “alternative methods of violence prevention.” It also published a letter signed by dozens of Oakland nonprofit leaders, including Lateefah Simon, demanding “reparations” exclusively for black people, priority COVID testing status for “anyone of African or African American ancestry,” tax deferral and loan forgiveness exclusively for black businesses, and requirements that the city “contract specifically with black businesses.” (Oakland’s city council agreed to debate the letter, and later approved $150,000 to fund a study of “the ongoing harms [to] Oakland’s black community” based on it.)

On the streets of Oakland, the fallout from these efforts has been swift and devastating. Last year, roughly 1 in 30 local residents was a victim of carjacking. Robberies are up 38% in the past year. Gun violence remains widespread. Scores of restaurants and stores by the airport have shut, citing the frequency of armed heists. At one intersection, the city had to replace traffic lights with stop signs because those living in a nearby encampment kept stealing the lights' electrical copper wiring. Oakland PD, which went without a permanent police chief for the 15 months between last February and this past May, faces an 18% job vacancy rate and soaring rates of officer resignations. And this February, in an attempt to restore order to an increasingly lawless city, Newsom announced he would deploy dozens of state police officers to Oakland.

Unsurprisingly, many who benefitted from the defund movement have placed the blame for this crime surge on law enforcement. Thus, when Tuan Le, an Oakland police officer, was shot to death while responding to the armed robbery of a cannabis dispensary this past December, Chaney Turner, VP of the Terror Project, appeared to place the blame for Le’s death on Oakland PD, saying: “When our police department [does] not take [cannabis businesses] seriously, these are the outcomes you get.”)

Or perhaps these are the outcomes you get when you throw hundreds of millions of dollars, with little-to-no oversight, at activists working toward a nebulous political goal (“reimagining public safety”), while concurrently stripping resources from law enforcement. Ultrarich liberals — many of whom, like Quinn Delaney and Wayne Jordan, live ensconced in suburban mansions removed from urban decay — write multi-million dollar checks to activists to assuage their guilty consciences. The results? In Oakland, funding for “impact reports,” race-based redistribution gifts, and spa treatments abounds. But violence — gunned-down teenagers, brutalized victims of sex trafficking, robbed family businesses — remains a ubiquitous fact of life.

In any event, though wealthy politicians like Lateefah Simon — who made over $460,000 a year trying to defund the Oakland PD as president of the Akonadi Foundation and over $550,000 a year as the head of the Meadow Fund, Patricia Quillin’s Netflix-funded charity fortune — may be able to insulate themselves from the realities of their police defunding policies, ordinary citizens of Oakland increasingly cannot. Yet given Simon’s endorsement list is a who’s-who of elite California political operatives, and that she has already secured the Democratic party nomination, her victory is all but inevitable. As Kamala Harris, who began her political career in the Alameda County DA’s office, Gavin Newsom, who was once a San Francisco city supervisor, and Barbara Lee, who has represented the Bay Area her entire career, all show, proximity to Bay Area political power often foretells prominence in Washington. And once Simon is situated there, will anyone even remember a few million in East Bay kick-backs?

— Sanjana Friedman