By John Diaz
The San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — A procession of lunchtime diners at a popular eatery across from AT&T Park stop to say hello to San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr, who, as usual, is wearing his blue uniform. The greetings are not limited to people he has worked with in his three decades on the force. Suhr, 52, is a native San Franciscan whose family roots in the city date to the Gold Rush. He accepts the interruptions with good humor.
“His mother was my babysitter,” Suhr explained after one long-lost acquaintance exchanged pleasantries and left his business card.
In recent years, San Francisco has been engaged in a vigorous debate about whether an outsider was needed to shake up what some perceive as a “good old boy” culture in its 1,800-member force.
Chief George Gascón, who came from Mesa, Ariz., determined to challenge and modernize the department, clearly fit the outsider-reformer model. Then, 18 months into his department overhaul, Gascón answered outgoing Mayor Gavin Newsom’s call to succeed Kamala Harris as district attorney.
In Suhr, interim Mayor Ed Lee said he tapped “a reformer from the inside out.” Suhr already has shown a willingness to disrupt the comfort zone of the status quo by shifting 40 officers in tasks forces dealing with narcotics, gangs, vice and robbery to night and weekend duty. His rationale: They should be working when 65 percent of violent crime occurs.
It was a classic execution of reform from the inside. Suhr met with the officers, explained the need for the change, asked for volunteers - and, predictably, encountered apprehension.
“By the end of the week, they came back with how it can happen - and it happened that fast,” he said in an interview last week. “We had a problem, we talked about it, we figured it out together.”
Perhaps the real test of a chief’s ability to confront the ranks from which he arose will come with the first major allegations of police misconduct on his watch.
On July 16, it appeared that just such a case would land on Suhr’s desk with the fatal shooting of 19-year-old parolee Kenneth Wade Harding as he was running from police who had stopped him for failing to pay a Muni fare. It turned out that the bullet that entered Harding’s neck and lodged in his head came from his own handgun.
But in the tense days before the origins of the gunshot were determined, with community tensions running high, the advantages of having a chief who had previously served as Bayview Station captain were readily apparent. Suhr and a legion of top city officials, including the mayor, went to the Bayview Opera House to hear residents’ concerns. Suhr took much of the heat. But he had enough history with the community to know that behind the “35 people acting out” were 250 neighborhood residents who “came out to have a conversation.”
Suhr was asked if he felt vindication that the investigation vindicated his officers. He preferred to focus on his empathy for the residents.
“Think of what everyone saw - there was a body, there was blood, the gun was gone and it was right in the middle of the town square,” he said. “And then, within days, you were telling them scientifically that they didn’t see what they saw. ... If I wasn’t a 30-year police officer ... it would be hard to convince me.”
The latest crisis facing the department - rampant violence at the Aug. 20 49ers-Raiders game at Candlestick Park - also drew on the chief’s history in the city. The magnitude of the hostility within the crowd caught the department by surprise and led to much second-guessing about whether more officers should have been deployed.
Suhr, who has been going to 49ers games since his childhood, said the ugliness of the atmosphere was unprecedented, even for games at night or against archrivals. He is convinced that many regular ticket holders sold or gave away their seats to the exhibition game - and they ended up in the hands of people who came looking for trouble, not to watch football.
“We were holding our collective breath that we thought we were going to make it to the end ... bruised but not broken,” he recalled. “Then all of the sudden, for the first time in my career at a Giants or 49er game, shots rang out. Our worst fear realized. ... Thank God nobody was killed.”
Suhr does not anticipate a recurrence, but is taking no chances. Stadium security and tailgating rules were immediately tightened for all games. He is looking warily at the team’s final home game, Dec. 19, on a Monday night against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“I really want that game to have playoff implications,” he said. “I’m counting on 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh.”
One thing is certain: Suhr will be on the scene and would be in the stadium even if he weren’t chief of police.
Copyright 2011 San Francisco Chronicle