The San Diego Sun recently interviewed the two candidates facing off in the San Diego mayoral election. Incumbent Todd Gloria and challenger Larry Turner were both asked similar questions about themselves, each other and the city’s top hot button issue of homelessness. Turner’s story is here; Gloria’s was posted on October 16.
The city of San Diego mayoral race could be a grassroots Cinderella story in the making.
A little more than a year ago, police officer Larry Turner gave The San Diego Sun the scoop that he was running for mayor. Lots of people saw the story. But few believed a cop, who’s an Independent, could make a dent in a mayoral race against an incumbent Democrat in a Democratic stronghold where all nine seats on the San Diego City Council are held by Dems.
In the March primary election, the downtown cop, who was previously a Marine for 23 years, gained enough traction to finish second, qualifying him to run in the November 5 general election.
Current Mayor Todd Gloria won the primary with 49.99% of the vote in a five-person race. Turner garnered 23.07%.
Throughout 2024, Turner campaigned tirelessly. His nonstop series of “Larry Listens” meet-and-greets were held in neighborhoods all over the city. If only a dozen people showed up, Turner…listened. Several organizations invited both candidates to debate. The mayor usually declined. Turner always said yes. At least once, a group hosted a debate with Turner squaring off against an empty chair.
Eventually, Turner and Gloria did both meet in two television debates, on 10News (KGTV) and KPBS.
Fairy godmother or not, with less than a month left in the General Election, and mail-voting already underway, recent polls showed Gloria with a tenuous 37%-32% lead over Turner, with roughly 30% undecided.
Turner expressed supreme confidence about his chance of winning. “We’ve seen polling that the majority of that 30% of undecideds are Democrats who feel like they should, but can’t, bring themself to vote for Gloria. And now they know about me. In the beginning, nobody knew what my name was.”
Now they sure do.
I watched the evolution of his recognition. A year ago, Turner and I stood outside Modbom, an East Village restaurant which at the time inhabited the northwest corner of Fault Line Park. As we chatted, Turner nearly had his car ticketed by a fellow police officer.
This year in October, I interviewed Turner inside Izola, the buzzworthy bakery that’s taken over the Fault Line Park corner. Five times in an hour, people interrupted our interview to say hello to Turner. That included each of Izola’s owners and a woman walking a dog who challenged him to “Make me vote for you.” Turner spent more than five minutes chatting about East Village with the woman. As she walked away she nodded her head, looked back to wave and said, “You got my vote.”
In a race where the number-one hot-button issue is homelessness, Turner says he’s uniquely qualified to take the lead on the never-ending problem of unsheltered residents.
First, there’s his more-than-two decades in the Marines. Since he had a college degree, Turner entered the military via officer candidate school. As a second lieutenant he specialized in intelligence. As he moved up in military ranks, Turner took on more responsibility and gained command over bigger teams. After 23 years, he’d become a lieutenant colonel. He says he oversaw international forces that numbered in the thousands. His executive-level job required him to be good at training and also have knowledge of budgets and financials.
“I entrusted the right people and put together great teams,” Turner says. “I know how to smell out the right people with the right skill sets and then empower them. That’s what I’ll do as mayor.”
Second, as SDPD’s Community Relations Officer for the Central District for eight years, Turner worked downtown and personally got to know homeless folks. He says he knows them by name, has been in their tents to chat and has earned their trust.
“You can read the paper or watch documentaries about homelessness and think you’re smart about it, but you don’t really know about it until you personally get in there,” Turner says.
He claims to have had discussions with homeless advocates as well as policy makers who all have wildly different ideas for a plan to get out of the abyss.
“As a cop, I see up close how messed up the system is,”Turner says. “And I was able to make some friends on the street and push a lot of people into the right programs. I was also supposed to work closely with elected officials and their teams.”
He says elected officials frequently didn’t want to hear frontline assessments from cops like him.
I brought up an accusation made by District 3 City Councilmember candidate Coleen Cusack. She says the day job of certain police officers is “to chase homeless people around, just to keep telling them to move, move, move, move, move.”
It’s a waste of money, Cusack says, and criminalizes homelessness.
For a moment, sitting at a table in Izola, Turner looked pained.
“Yeah, it sucks,” he said. “It really does…I’ll say it out loud, and somebody will say, Oh my god, Larry is a threat to the way we do policing. Yeah, I am a threat. You should like that threat.”
He says everybody should agree that the police should have better training, better equipment and a lot of better things.
“We’ve got to do things a little differently,” Turner says. “We have to let social workers and mental health professionals handle a lot of stuff that cops are being asked to do…We need to rely on other professional skill sets to handle a lot of it.”
On October 10, the San Diego Police Officers Association endorsed Gloria. The SDPOA noted “increasingly concerning” comments from Turner, one of their own, about the department’s need for more officers.
Turner says he was in favor of last year’s Camping Ban on city streets that Mayor Gloria pushed through the city council. Turner now thinks it was more performative than grounded in an actual plan for having a place where downtown tent dwellers could go.
“At the time I didn’t realize they were playing a game,” Turner says. “It was bogus. Their plan was to have downtown empty of homelessness right before the election, so it’d look like they did something on homelessness. But that plan wasn’t well thought out.”
The city did create Safe Camping Sites where homeless individuals could live in city-run tent villages. There are two: a parking lot at 20th & B and a remote Balboa Park site called the O Lot. The city council recently voted to add 235 tents to both sites, which would bring the grand total to more than 700 tents.
The O Lot has been in news headlines recently due to complaints from tent residents about a rat infestation. Some at the camp say rats got into the drinking water supply. A city spokesperson says there was an “isolated rodent situation” and that no vermin made it into the water supply.
Turner says he was suspicious of the tent villages from Day 1: “I’d love to know the name of the idiot who picked fishing tents with no bottom and a hole in the top to house people. I’ve been hearing stories like rat infestations at these camps for a year.”
Meanwhile, numbers from the Regional Task Force on Homelessness show more people have become homeless than have gotten off the street for each of the past 29 months. Gloria says the Regional Task Force numbers reflect a countywide problem, not just one in the city.
As many shelters are coming to the end of their leases, or shifting to detox centers, observers say anywhere from 600 to 900 beds may be lost as soon as January.
Two shelter proposals by Mayor Gloria are located on opposite sides of the downtown airport. Both are in limbo. Gloria proposed the H Barracks site become a shelter with housing provided by huge sprung tents. Gloria amended his H Barracks plan to be a safe parking lot for people sleeping in cars.
Turner put together a plan that would make the H Barracks site a shelter for veterans. He says the community, particularly Point Loma, takes his plan much more seriously.
More recently, Gloria proposed a plan for a 1,000-person Mega Shelter at Kettner Boulevard and Vine Street. Opponents came out of the woodwork citing density issues, street safety, toxicity of the land and the lopsided deal with the city that favored the landowner.
It’s not likely Mayor Gloria will bring the Mega Shelter to a council vote before the November 5 election.
“I’d say the Mega Shelter was another political stunt,” Turner says. “To say, ‘Look, we have 1,000 beds coming.’ But it was a Hail Mary that didn’t connect.”
To successfully slow down homelessness, Turner believes a countywide solution is called for. While Mayor Gloria was reluctant to use the word when he had a staff position focused on homelessness, Turner says one of the first people he’d hire would be a “czar.”
“I’ll still be in charge of the issue but the czar will be my top general,” Turner says. “This person will be an expert, someone with a solid reputation who’s possibly come through the recovery world. It won’t be someone who’s simply read about the subject.”
Turner says as mayor he’ll continue to get his boot dirty on homelessness but he’s not afraid of giving the czar power and letting that person have credit for success.
“The czar will be empowered to oversee everything and bring all the neighborhoods together,” Turner says. “Like I said, that’s how I do it. I’m good at creating great teams that achieve success.” SDSun
California mail-in voting is underway. General Election day is November 5. For more information go to: VOTE SAN DIEGO.
