by Rachel Gordon, San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco cops battle for more respect, community activists demand a crackdown on rogue officers, frustrated and frightened residents plead for an end to the rising number of street killings, and the politicians promise reform.
And caught in the middle of all this is the city’s new Police Commission, impaneled five months ago under a new system mandated by voters that is intended to bring more independence to the city’s police oversight body and a higher degree of accountability to the public. Expectations -- good and bad -- are running high.
“We are in the eye of the storm right now,” said Gayle Orr-Smith, vice chairwoman of the San Francisco Police Commission. “We’re dealing with a thundering storm of outrage, frustration, pain, bewilderment, loss, mistrust.”
The verdict is still out on the new system, but the tension between commissioners and police is the most palpable in years, emerging in public debates on everything from the handling of officer-involved shootings to giving patrol cops more firepower to the San Francisco Police Department’s disclosure of sensitive records.
The latest maelstrom erupted over recent remarks Commissioner Peter Keane made regarding the department’s response to a high school fight in the Bayview District two years ago. He stated that racism may have factored into the decision to send more than 60 officers to the scene and suggested that the students, many of them African American, were left with a psychological fallout similar to what was felt by the survivors of the terrorist massacre at a Russian school last month.
That touched a nerve with the Police Officers Association, which demanded that Keane apologize and resign over those highly volatile comments. Initially, Keane refused, but later, he relented and apologized for the Russian school remarks after being lectured by fellow commissioners and the police chief and hearing the testimony of dozens of angry rank-and-file officers who showed up at last week’s Police Commission meeting.
But that didn’t end the antagonism. Keane said in an interview Friday that the message delivered to the commission by police union boss Gary Delagnes was clear: “If we don’t toe the line, they’ll come after us.”
Keane, a former public defender who now teaches law, indicated that Delagnes and his crew are out to get the reformers such as himself. “You have a very professional group of people in the Police Department administration who are really addressing the department in a very professional way,” he said. “But at the same time, you’ve got, in the leadership of the POA, the Taliban wing, the narco-cowboy wing of Starsky and Hutch cops.”
Delagnes said in a separate interview that Keane has “a political agenda,” which he cast as anti-cop and driven by the ideals held by liberal members of the Board of Supervisors who pushed the ballot measure to remake the commission. Keane, the cops recall, helped spearhead the campaign to pass the ballot measure.
“My cops are saying, ‘Why should I do anything because those guys are just waiting to put a rope around my neck?’ The cops right now in San Francisco are extremely demoralized because they really, truly wonder if people in this town really give a damn about what they do every day,” Delagnes said.
When told of the heated words, Louise Renne, the commission president and former city attorney, said finger-pointing and name-calling -- no matter who is doing it -- does no one any good.
“This isn’t a schoolyard playground. We’re dealing with serious business here,” Renne said. “Obviously, when you’re in a period of change, sensitivities run high. What we need to do now is keep our eye on the ball and focus on what’s good with the department and what needs to be improved.”
The Police Commission serves a powerful role in San Francisco, setting Police Department policy and serving as judge and jury in serious officer misconduct cases involving violations of departmental rules.
The oversight panel was once under the sole control of the mayor. But last fall, voters narrowly adopted a ballot measure to blunt the mayor’s powers, giving the Board of Supervisors three of the seven appointments to the commission, as well as crucial veto authority over the mayor’s picks. The idea was to create more checks and balance, because it is the mayor who appoints the police chief.
The current commission came into power in the aftermath of two events that profoundly affected the department -- both internally and in the community.
One was the high-profile brawl over a bag of steak fajitas on Union Street two years ago involving off-duty officers, including the son of then-Assistant Chief Alex Fagan Sr. The episode, which nearly toppled the department’s top command, shook public confidence and stunned the 2,200-member force.
The other was the brazen curbside slaying in April of Officer Isaac Espinoza, a popular cop who worked the troubled streets of Bayview-Hunters Point. His death shattered the rank-and-file and reverberated into a political battle with District Attorney Kamala Harris, who announced that she wouldn’t seek the death penalty against the officer’s killer.
Then, as the commission was holding its inaugural meeting, another layer of strife was added when officers shot and killed a suspect in the Western Addition. The debate continues in the community and at the Hall of Justice over whether the shooting was justified. The controversy has landed at the feet of commissioners.
Orr-Smith, a former police officer who also served on the old-style Police Commission when Art Agnos was mayor, said she doesn’t think the acrimony is going to go away any time soon.
“We’re testing each other,” she said, “and I can only imagine that this will continue to unfold.”