MAYOR WILLIE BROWN took another shot at district attorney Terence Hallinan last week, accusing the prosecutor of failing to move on the city's highest-profile police scandal. Hallinan has, indeed, been too slow to act on the scandal – but the mayor and his Police Commission are hardly innocent, either.

Brown claims that the San Francisco cops have completed their probe of the alleged beating of Jade Santoro and Adam Snyder by Alex Fagan Jr. – son of deputy chief Alex Fagan – and two other off-duty officers. In reality, according to several well-placed law enforcement sources we've spoken to, the San Francisco Police Department either bungled or whitewashed this case from the start: the cops failed to collect all sorts of important evidence during the course of the so-called investigation. And it will be hard for the D.A. to proceed with indictments if all he has are the results of a flawed internal investigation by the SFPD.

Still, the scandal has reached the point where it's undermining public confidence in the department. The evidence of funny business keeps building: The cops, for example, released cell phone records from deputy chief Fagan showing that the senior cop, who is in charge of day-to-day operations of the department, made numerous calls the day before the Nov. 28 incident involving his son, and numerous calls the day after – but not one call on that fateful day.

The Police Commission has been woefully negligent from the start. There has been no clearly stated demand from the commission for a complete, credible investigation and nothing in the way of a public hearing that could have addressed the possibility of a cover-up. At this point, the commission needs to address the whole affair openly: at the very least, the panel should hold an open hearing and quiz chief Earl Sanders on the scope and quality of his investigation and the preliminary results. His tenure as chief should be on the line here – and he should be told so.

But in the end, Hallinan is going to have to pick up the ball, and so far, the signs from his office are mixed at best. He's been openly critical of the department and has made all the right public statements – but this mess just keeps dragging on, and it's time for action.

If Hallinan is truly unhappy about the police work on this case, he needs to have his own, full-scale investigation under way. His deputies and detectives ought to be carting boxes of relevant paperwork out of police headquarters (before crucial evidence gets the Arthur Andersen treatment) and questioning (under oath) every cop who may know the score. He needs to tell the public – soon – if he plans to take the case to a grand jury for indictments, and if he doesn't, he needs to make public as much of his inquiry as possible. The public has good reason to suspect that everyone is complicit in this cover-up, and Hallinan needs to prove he's willing to risk the anger of the cops in an election year by blowing the whistle.
P.S.: The curious case of Fagan's cell phone records demonstrates why the phone records of all top city officials ought to be public. This is no big deal – confidential calls can be redacted.