The most recent call for Police Chief Greg Suhr’s firing presents San Francisco with an interesting political temperature check.

I’m getting emails saying: This is San Francisco. We’re progressive. These are the kinds of causes we support.

But is that still true?

Because with the influx of new residents, some 10,000 a year, the theory is that the ethos of the city is changing. The idea is that we’re moving to a more moderate, although still wildly liberal to the rest of America, point of view.

If Suhr leaves — and he’d be more likely to resign since it’s unlikely that either the Police Commission or Mayor Ed Lee will fire him — the Frisco Five will definitely take a victory lap. But let’s be honest, they didn’t exactly galvanize the city with their demands.

The hunger strike fizzled, and after promising a citywide strike with hundreds of supporters taking over City Hall on Monday, the turnout was meager at best. I was there at 8:30 that morning and counted just over 50 demonstrators. More people showed up later, but most of the crowd estimates were about 150 demonstrators. By late afternoon, the group quietly packed up and left.

Some went to the Police Commission to shout down speakers. I don’t think anyone saw that as a good way to build support for their cause. When Supervisor David Campos was verbally attacked at last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting, his response was that he didn’t think firing Suhr would cure the problems. Even Supervisor John Avalos, as progressive as they come, wondered why the demonstrators didn’t meet with the mayor when he went to them and asked to talk. The call to fire Suhr seemed to be losing momentum.

And that’s when Supervisor Jane Kim surprised nearly everyone by saying it was time for Suhr to leave. It forced the hand of career progressives Campos and Avalos, and they announced their support. The fact that those three voted in favor of reinstating then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, after domestic violence allegations, but now want to oust Suhr, has certainly been noted in City Hall.

Kim has done the political calculus and thinks the get-rid-of-Suhr stance is a winner with the public. You have to hand it to her. She (and political guru Eric Jaye, who advises her) have a knack for splashy headlines. She’s in a tough race for the state Senate with Supervisor Scott Wiener, and she’s done a good job of getting herself in front of the TV cameras.

It’s been almost amusing, given the two personalities. Wiener, earnest, methodical and a workaholic, is well known as a legislative machine. He seems to write a proposal a day, focusing on nuts-and-bolts issues like improving public transportation and requiring new construction in the city to install solar panels.

But on the same day Wiener’s solar plan was approved, Kim announced — free college for everyone! Her proposal to find a way to make tuition free for students at City College got the headline, and Wiener’s solar panels were a few sentences at the end of the news story.

Now Kim has another news-cycle winner with the call to fire Suhr. Ostensibly, the trigger was the blue-ribbon panel of District Attorney George Gascón, although as a Matier and Ross column pointed out this week, some of the findings seem thin at best. Asked about one of the most troubling allegations — that San Francisco officers engage in stop-and-frisk searches — panel head Anand Subramanian didn’t have many concrete details.

First he said that only “certain members of the department engage in stop-and-frisk” and then said he couldn’t provide statistics, saying the panel based their conclusions on “people who said they’d been searched and credible members of the community.”

So it will be interesting to see what specific details the report contains when it is released in the next couple of weeks.

But in the here and now, the panel has given Kim and others enough political cover to rekindle the fire-Suhr movement.

Kim is betting this stance will win her exposure and votes in San Francisco. But she’s aligned herself with the Frisco Five, and you have to wonder if everyday San Franciscans see them as representing their views.

Meanwhile, Suhr must be wondering why he’s bothering. I sat in at a town hall meeting in the Mission — which he volunteered to do, unlike some chiefs — and listened to speaker after speaker attack him personally and professionally. There’s not a chance in the world that I could have sat there and not eventually responded with a cynical remark or loss of temper.

Suhr took it, speaker after speaker, never losing his cool. He has implemented reforms and is still popular in the Bayview where, as Bayview Station captain, he won over African American residents. But he is still being called a racist and a murderer. All part of the job, he says.

But he didn’t sign up to be a political football. If he resigns, it will be because regardless of what he has done to address serious problems in the culture of SFPD, it was more important for the progressives to say they got him out.

C.W. Nevius is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns appear Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Email: cwnevius@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @cwnevius