San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco police officer who produced videotaped skits that the mayor and police chief denounced as racist and sexist has resigned.
“I fought a good fight,” Andrew Cohen, 44, who joined the Police Department in 1995, said Tuesday. “I can’t waste any more of my life on this stuff.”
Cohen, who is out on disability for shoulder and other injuries, will officially leave the department in July. Neither Chief George Gascón nor department spokeswoman Lt. Lyn Tomioka would comment, calling it a personnel matter.
Cohen was an amateur filmmaker and the department’s videographer when he produced the skits that got him in trouble in 2005.
One depicted an officer running over a homeless woman, and another showed a male officer pulling over a female motorist and ogling her. Another showed officers attempting tai chi to vaguely Asian music, then heading into a massage parlor.
Cohen intended to show the videos at the Bayview Police Station’s Christmas party. After his captain told him not to, he posted them on his Web site.
Mayor Gavin Newsom and then-Police Chief Heather Fong publicized the videos in December 2005. Fong, calling it “an extremely dark day” for the department, said the videos showed “shameful and despicable acts” by on-duty police and immediately suspended two dozen officers.
Most of the suspensions were lifted a short time later. Cohen won reinstatement in 2007, after a state appeals court suggested that Fong had acted out of an excessive concern for public relations.
He still faced disciplinary charges, however, both for making the videos and for leaking Fong’s videotaped deposition in his legal fight against the department.
Cohen has posted dozens of entries in a blog portraying the disciplinary charges as persecution for what he considered an inside joke never intended for public dissemination. He also sued the city, saying he was being discriminated against, and has continued to earn his $95,000 salary during stints in the record room and on disability. The suit was dismissed last year.
Six other officers remain on desk duty pending a resolution of disciplinary cases stemming from the videos.
Gascón has offered several of the officers a chance to keep their jobs if they participate in a videotaped apology that would be played to the rank and file. The officers would have to drop any litigation against the city.
Cohen received no such offer. He said Tuesday that he was tired of fighting the growing number of disciplinary cases against him, including three the department filed last year.
He said the charges included failing to show up for interviews when the department knew his attorney couldn’t attend.
“I have upwards of 20 charges against me,” Cohen said. “They have been relentless. ... It’s pretty shameful.
“I’ve given up on everything,” he said. “If I keep fighting, it will be years before I get anything accomplished. I have to move on with my life.”
Copyright 2010 San Francisco Chronicle