Opinion: Bay Area local leaders need protection against threats of violence

A Bay Area resident was charged in October with a felony for emailing death threats, laden with racial slurs, to Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee.

“You are a psychopath,” read one email directed at Lee. “And I’m going to torture and murder you.”

Other emails mentioned killing Oakland police officers, judges and other government officials, according to police.

Also last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law AB 789 to address escalating threats, harassment and violence against elected officials at the state level. The bill, coauthored by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, increases security spending from a $10,000 lifetime cap to $10,000 annually.

These threats, said Bonta, are “damaging our politics and discouraging community leaders from running for office.”

Although AB 789 is good news for our state legislators, it fails to address the problem for Bay Area elected leaders serving on city councils, county boards of supervisors and school boards, among other offices. Far too often, it’s at these local levels where many of our elected officials and public figures suffer ongoing harassment and threats of violence. In response, community leaders often pay for bodyguards and other security measures out of their own pockets.

These are harrowing times. As the president of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Oakland — an organization dedicated to protecting and expanding voting rights — I’m concerned not only that qualified candidates will refrain from running for office, but also that these threats will keep voters from showing up to the polls.

In a 2024 report, “Intimidation of State and Local Officeholders,” the Brennan Center for Justice found that more than 40% of all state legislators experienced threats or attacks within three years, while over 18% of local officeholders faced similar targeting. The report noted that “local and state officeholders across the country have faced a barrage of intimidating abuse,” constraining how they interact with voters. Consequently, officials may feel unsafe and narrow the policies they feel able to support.

The Brennan Center’s research also revealed the gendered and racialized nature of this crisis, with women three to four times more likely to experience abuse targeting their gender than men.

Non-White officeholders are more than three times as likely as White officeholders to experience abuse targeting their race. They concluded that if left unaddressed, “the problem stands to endanger not just individual politicians but, more broadly, the free and fair functioning of representative democracy — at every level of government.”

Based on pre- and post-election surveys conducted following the 2024 election, research from the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center found that fears of election-related violence and harassment may have led up to 6 million U.S. voters to stay home in 2024. The research found that fear of violence and harassment — especially among women and other historically marginalized groups — impacted not only how people voted, but whether they voted at all, “not because they didn’t care, but likely because they were afraid.”

This crisis demands a coordinated response that addresses the immediate safety needs of public servants, assuages voters’ fears and directly counters the normalization of political violence in our community.

Democracy itself is under attack when intimidation undermines elected officials’ abilities to serve their communities and when voters stay home on election day due to fears of violence.

Moreover, when harassers disproportionately target women, people of color and LGBTQ officials, entire communities are systematically excluded from participation in self-governance.

Protections for the Bay Area’s city councilmembers, county supervisors and school board members, among others, must be strengthened. Further, we must harden security at polling places, communicate more clearly about this growing threat and make a nonpartisan commitment to improve safety at every level of our election process.

More than ever, democracy depends on the ability of all citizens to participate safely in the political process. Protecting voters and public servants protects democracy itself.

Ernestine Nettles is president of League of Women Voters Oakland.