No restraint
Cowboy cops are still running the SFPD. Can the new commission control them? Don't count on it.

By Steven T. Jones and Sitara Nieves

WHEN DISTRICT ATTORNEY Kamala Harris walked into court April 29 for a hearing in the case of accused cop killer David Hill, many of the more than a dozen San Francisco police officers in the audience reportedly hissed – an almost unheard-of public rebuke of the city's chief prosecutor.

It was just the latest episode of local cops' aggressive defiance and intimidation of Harris and others who cross them – behavior spurred by the police union and not just allowed but often encouraged by the top department brass and the mayor.

It's emblematic of a larger problem: even with a mayor who claims to be a reformer and a police chief who was given a mandate to shake up the old ways at the San Francisco Police Department, the cowboy cops who have brought the department into serious disrepute still seem to be calling the shots.

And even with a new Police Commission taking office, it's unclear whether anyone is going to challenge them.

Fajitagate fallout

The SFPD has always resisted reform and oversight. Sure, there's long been a Police Commission charged with watchdogging bad cops and setting professional standards, but that body until now has been made up entirely of mayoral appointees – and for decades San Francisco mayors have been unwilling to demand real civilian oversight of the SFPD.

Progressive San Franciscans occasionally win reforms, like the creation of the Office of Citizen Complaints, which took the investigation of complaints against the cops away from the department. But for much of its 22-year existence, the OCC has butted its head against the wall of blue, often stalled by the department in getting official documents, its recommendations regularly ignored by the Police Commission.

So in the wake of last year's ugly Fajitagate scandal – in which top police brass were charged with covering up an after-hours beating administered by off-duty cops with a history of violent behavior – reformers decided the commission needed an overhaul. The voters agreed, passing Proposition H and breaking the mayor's hold over police affairs.

Under Prop. H, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is empowered to make three appointments to the commission and reject any of the mayor's four appointments.

Yet when the final appointee – longtime city hall insider Louise Renne – got confirmed by the board April 27, both the supervisors themselves and the reformers who backed Prop. H bitterly complained about a missed opportunity to finally crack down on police abuse of power.

Put simply, the new commission is nothing like what the supporters of Prop. H had in mind.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Officer Isaac Espinoza in the troubled Bayview, the police have turned into as unified and angry a group as they've been in years. They tried to bully Harris out of her decision not to seek the death penalty, publicly shamed the new chief and union head into backing their stand, and pledged to get more aggressive with the street toughs in poor communities of color, with some even calling for cops to carry assault weapons.

And all this comes amid a push by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Chief Heather Fong to "do something" about recurring violence in poor communities like the Bayview, Hunters Point, Visitacion Valley, the Tenderloin, and parts of the Mission District. That's translated into a greater police presence in those areas – with all the potential for conflict that brings.

Days of contrast

The problem, and the shortcomings of the current solution, was vividly displayed April 20 and 21 in seemingly unrelated news events. One involved a shown of strength by the cops; the other, concerns about the weakness of the new Police Commission.

The 2,100-member Police Officers Association (perhaps emboldened by the public support Sen. Dianne Feinstein – an opponent of police oversight during her days as mayor – gave them the previous week at Espinoza's memorial) went on the offensive.

Through comments to the media and direct lobbying, POA members pressured president Gary Delagnes and Fong to join calls for Harris to pursue the death penalty or to hand the case over to state or federal prosecutors. (Despite repeated attempts, neither Delagnes, Fong, nor any other police representatives returned the Bay Guardian's calls for comment on this article.)

A unified police force held a press conference at POA headquarters – with many of the command staff present – to denounce Harris in ominous tones, posing stern-faced for the cameras that spread the images across the evening newscasts and the next day's front pages, before marching over to the Hall of Justice behind Fong.

The message: bend to our will. Or, as one political insider told us, "the cowboys are in control of this department, and they are using this issue to make sure the cowboys stay in control."

Newsom apparently got the message, telling reporters April 21, "I'm not going to put myself in the middle of this." While Newsom shares Harris's philosophical opposition to the death penalty and said "it's her discretion," he also validated the law enforcement lynch mob: "It's made me question my own beliefs on the death penalty, so I understand where the officers are coming from."

That same spirit of deference permeated the Board of Supervisors' April 20 hearing confirming six of the new police commissioners, as well as the Rules Committee's April 21 hearing on the final nominee, Renne (who was out of town the previous week).

"This is a very difficult task," board president Matt Gonzalez said. "Absent a sense that the appointment is not going to be independent or some other concern, we should be supportive of the pick."

Yet the activist community didn't want that kind of deference; it wanted the board to scrutinize the mayor's picks and create a reformist commission willing to get tough with cops. And many activists are upset that the commission won't include a Latino or anyone who has directly experienced police misconduct.

Sups. Chris Daly, Gerardo Sandoval, and Tom Ammiano (who sponsored Prop. H) were the only supervisors to raise any real questions about the mayor's four appointments and the failure of the Rules Committee to balance them out with more activist picks.

"Folks who spent a lot of time on the police reform issue, folks who were there day to day to pass that measure in November, folks who are mobilizing to commission hearings, they don't like three of the four mayoral appointments," Daly said at the hearing.

Daly named names, predicting that attorney and former cop Joseph Alioto Veronese "will be a vote for the Police Officers Association" and that corporate attorney Douglas Chan "will be a vote to delay and deny justice on many occasions."

While less vocal at the meeting, Ammiano also said he was disappointed with the field, telling us, "I had hoped for a more populist field of applicants, and I wish the pool had been wider," even though he said the new commission is an improvement over the old one.

The three supervisors tried to spark a wider discussion and to substitute candidates who had been broadly endorsed by the activist community – civil rights attorney Victor Hwang, immigration lawyer John Trasvina, and youth advocate Kim-Shree Maufas – but to no avail.

The next day, while the cops rattled their sabers over at POA headquarters, the Rules Committee (made up of Gonzalez and Sups. Sophia Maxwell and Michela Alioto-Pier) convened to consider the final commission nominee: Renne, a former supervisor, four-term former city attorney, and head of Newsom's transition team.

Gonzalez expressed concern about her loyalties to Newsom and said commissioners "have a high degree of independence and willingness to discipline officers and command staff" but then said, "I'm inclined to give deference to a selection by the mayor."

For her part, Renne sounded some reformist themes while offering up few solutions. She said the commission should have dealt with Fajitagate earlier and noted that "most of our police officers live out of town. Do they know San Francisco? is the question I would have."

And most of all, she trumpeted her autonomy: "I believe this will be a very independent commission committed to doing what's right for San Francisco."

Yet before she won the unanimous endorsement of the committee, the supervisors got an earful from the activists. Green Party member Marc Solomon distanced himself from Gonzalez, also a Green, whom he accused of "abandoning the city."

"The community is outraged," said Solomon, a member of San Franciscans for Police Reform and Oversight (SFPRO). "The community is mortified that it came down this way."

Malaika Parker of Bay Area Police Watch told them, "The people appointed are professionals, not people who are living in the communities [where police abuse occurs]."

A few days later, after reflecting on the process, Gonzalez told us, "The criticisms are certainly valid. On the other hand, many of the folks being critical are not acknowledging how incredibly progressive this commission is."

The Renne nomination came before the full board April 27. Sandoval, Daly, and Ammiano all expressed disappointment, and even Maxwell and Sup. Bevan Dufty joined the chorus, with Dufty offering, "These commissions should look like San Francisco, and ultimately we have fallen short."

Gonzalez still defended the choices, saying, "I think if you stand back from it, this is an extremely good commission," but then he raised new concerns about Renne's status as a city hall insider.

"This is someone who was the transition-team leader, and that gives me concern once I had time to reflect on it," Gonzalez said. "I'd just as soon send it back to the mayor to get another suggestion."

But the effort was too little too late, and he was joined only by Daly and Ammiano as the board completed the Police Commission appointment process with an 8-3 vote. Maxwell tried to mitigate the damage by proposing an 11-member citizens' advisory committee for police issues, which will be discussed in the coming weeks, but none of the activists we spoke with thought it would do any good. Only an enforcement body like the commission, they said, can be a check on police power.

"What happens when you have a Police Commission that's not effective is more people die and more people get abused," Parker told us. "There's not much about this new commission that leads me to believe it's going to be any different."

Other activists are taking a wait-and-see approach.

"This issue is complex," said Sharon Hewitt, a progressive activist who works in the Bayview. "We need to give this commission an opportunity."

The commission cometh

The new commission includes four lawyers, two former cops, and only two appointees with community-based experience with police issues. Four commissioners are white, two are African American, and one is East Asian American. There is no Latino or Muslim representation, nor much class diversity.

"When you've got former cops on the Police Commission, that's scary," said Susie McAllister, a Bayview parent whose 13-year-old daughter was one of two girls allegedly held at gunpoint and inappropriately touched by police on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2002. "That goes right back to the trust issue. People are going to think even more than they do already: Why even speak up? The ex-cops are going to take care of their own."

Newsom's appointments were Renne, Veronese, Chan, and youth advocate Dr. Joseph Marshall.

Veronese is perhaps the most obvious target for the charge of political patronage, being a former reserve police officer with the SFPD and a partner in a law firm with his mother, Newsom backer Angela Alioto.

Veronese rejected the charges by Daly and others that he won't be tough with cops: "I don't represent the Police Department. I represent the citizens of San Francisco. I do promise to be fair to all sides."

Renne, who helped create the city's culture of automatically denying police wrongdoing during her reign as city attorney, has also raised the ire of activists (she didn't return our calls for comment).

Meshe Irizarry, director of the Idriss Stelley Foundation (Irizarry's son was killed in 2001 by San Francisco police officers), said, "We're all the most concerned about Renne – she's the worst-case scenario."

SFPRO's Solomon elaborated: "My belief is that Renne is the kind of fixer that one would put in if one did not want to fix that which needed fixing."

The most widely respected Newsom appointee is Marshall, executive director of the Omega Boys Club. Marshall told us he's been too busy to follow the controversy over the Police Commission picks but sees his role as an extension of his job, which involves working with young men and women to try to help "keep them alive, keep them free from violence, and free from incarceration."

Newsom spokesperson Peter Ragone touted the diversity of the appointments the mayor has made since taking office – including placing two Latinos and an Asian American woman in charge of the Police Department – but told us, "It's understandable what they're saying about the commission."

The Board of Supervisors' selection process has been criticized for its lack of a deliberative, consensus-based approach. Instead, the three Rules Committee members seem to have each gotten one pick: Gonzalez (who denies the selection process was this clear-cut) backed his mentor, law professor Peter Keane, Maxwell picked Bayview resident Gayle Orr-Smith, and Ammiano (who sat in for Alioto-Pier) backed transgender activist Theresa Sparks.

Orr-Smith, a Detroit police officer for eight years, has been criticized for being a former cop and executive for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Orr-Smith defended her community credentials: "I come on not as a criminal justice professional but from a resident's perspective."

Orr-Smith, who served on the Police Commission in 1988, mentioned the frustrations present in the Bayview, including the lack of economic opportunity and few chances for self-determination.

"Anyone who votes in this town can be accused of being political. I have the background that I do," she told us. "I also hear the gunshots on the corner from my house."

Sparks, who has worked on anti-discrimination issues for LGBT people and is cochair of the politically centrist Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, also distanced herself from the charges of politicism: "I'm as far from being entrenched in the system as anyone. I'm a community activist."

Keane (who was in Italy and couldn't be reached for comment) is perhaps the most widely respected in reformist circles and was supported by some activists.

"I have immense respect for Peter Keane," Irizarry said, adding one caveat: "Out of all the people SFPRO endorsed, the board went ahead and picked the one candidate of European descent."

Gonzalez and others have said the race and class of appointees is less important than their commitment to reform. Yet the biggest challenge facing the commission will be demonstrating it can empathize with the concerns of people who no longer trust the cops or the oversight system.

"Latino communities often feel that police officers are not there to protect and serve – instead, they see the police as potential threats," said Anamaria Loya, executive director of La Raza Centro Legal. "We need someone on the commission who is sensitive to the fear that exists in the Latino community, who has personal experience with this community, and who can trust the community."

Targeted communities

There are simple reasons why people are so concerned about adequate representation – and it has little to do with tokenism or political correctness. Communities of color have a lot of interaction with the police in San Francisco, and neither side now trusts the other.

"People suck up police misconduct here because people don't trust the police – they think if they go down there [to the Police Commission] that something will happen to them – especially if they've had issues with the police before or if they think that the police just don't like people like them," Bayview resident Tenisha Bishop said. "People here think the police are shady."

And the previous commission only reinforced that idea.

"It was so frustrating," Bishop said. "They wouldn't speak on brutality issues – they wouldn't even seem to accept what was going on. They weren't for the community. They took us for a joke."

Like many police departments and other bureaucracies, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said, the SFPD and the city leadership have tended to deny and cover up police misconduct because of concerns about city liability, both financial and political.

"In the past there has been a tendency to automatically refute any criticism, no matter what the circumstances," Adachi told us.

The result has been a crisis in the public's confidence in the department's ability to police itself. Adachi said that, particularly in poor communities of color, clients have told him they don't bother to complain about mistreatment by police because they know it won't do any good.

"It's still going to take a Herculean effort by the department, the new commission, and the OCC to get them not just back on track but where they should have been years ago," Adachi said.

Newsom and Fong have proposed an increased focus on street violence and more of a police presence in the areas where it occurs. Activists applaud the intentions and emphasis, but they also see a potential for more problems until the trust issue is dealt with.

While Newsom has said beat cops will knock on every door in the Sunnydale housing project to connect with the community and make their presence known, Adachi said, "I've had people say to me, 'I'm not answering. I don't want the police knocking on my door.' "

"The one thing that young people say makes them the most angry, or that immediately raises their blood level, is just seeing the police," La Raza Centro Legal's Loya said of her experiences working with young Latino men. "In a group of young men, almost every person has had some negative experience with a police officer."

The issue of trust is perhaps more prominent than ever right now, in these first few weeks after the killing of Officer Espinoza in the Bayview. In the days after his death, officers have called the Bayview a war zone and called for carrying assault weapons in the area.

"This incident is going to stress police and community relations," said Hwang, the civil rights attorney whom many had pushed for appointment to the commission. He cites studies showing that in the wake of officers being killed on the job, the number of officer-involved shootings tends to increase.

"It's clear that the police could begin to react and start tackling community issues in a more aggressive way," Bay Area Police Watch's Parker said. "It's even more important now that this Police Commission holds the line and makes sure that police officers aren't being abusive towards people, because that's just vengeance. The life of an officer can't mean more than the lives of hundreds of people in the same community."

"I'm praying for the Espinoza family, I really am. But the police's solution to a problem is to kill," Bayview resident McAllister said. "The best thing the Police Department could come up with is, let's kill him. And I'm sorry, but the police are the biggest gang in San Francisco. Retribution killing is doing the same thing as these street gangs, except they have the law to back them up."

Community mistrust stems, in large part, from incidents like the death of Sheila Detoy and the feeling that the POA wields more power than ordinary community members. In 1998, 17-year-old Detoy was fatally shot in the head by police officers. And more than five years after the killing, disciplinary charges against the officers are still pending.

The POA has filed a claim in court, insisting the statute of limitations has expired, in an attempt to cancel disciplinary action against the officer who shot Detoy. The officer has also been given a promotion and a raise since the shooting, adding to community outrage and frustration.

A more recent incident occurred in the Bayview on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2002, when more than a dozen police officers were implicated in a suit involving four young people. In a case police officers claimed stemmed from mistaken identity, charges have been filed against five non-African American police officers for groping two young African American girls during a search and improperly arresting and battering a 14-year-old African American boy.

The Police Commission finally voted to subject five officers to a disciplinary hearing in that case – nearly three years later – and some activists say that only happened because cops feared the new commission might deal with the incident more harshly.

"The same standard has to apply for everyone – but it doesn't," Parker said. "You don't get that response when you go to the police chief and say that one of your officers just shot someone. There's no outrage there. When an officer is shot, they say, 'We need AK-47s,' that this person needs to be put to death. When an officer shoots someone, there's all these explanations of why it could have happened and that it's not the officer's fault."

Even more recent were two incidents involving the Asian community, which civil rights attorney Hwang said has also grown distrustful of the police. In November police responded to a mental health emergency involving Xi Tao Wu, 33, whom officers shot after a two-hour standoff that included no cops who could speak Cantonese and a crisis-intervention officer who arrived only at the very end of the standoff, Hwang said, adding that police records showed the officers involved called their POA rep before they called an ambulance.

Wu spent months in a coma and emerged to face charges of assaulting a police officer because he was carrying scissors when he tried to escape out a window and was confronted by officers. The incident has been front-page news in the city's Asian press.

"It's insulting," Hwang said. "But they have to get a conviction to shield the department from liability for its actions."

The other incident involved 50-year-old Gian Yu, who was also having a mental health emergency when responding police officers shot him 10 times in the head with a beanbag gun, leaving him blind. Hwang said the commission should insist on better training in dealing with mental health emergencies and community policing, as well as punishing problem officers.

"It's an institutional problem, not just one of individual officers," Hwang said. "This has the Asian community on edge about whether you should be calling the police.... And that's the message that this commission has to start sending, that you can trust the police and trust the process."

At least one new police commissioner, Marshall, believes mistrust can only start to be erased with real police accountability. "It makes it more unsafe for decent police officers when some police officers exhibit misconduct."

Solving the problem

Mark Schlosberg, police practices policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union and an author of Prop. H, told us there are some simple things the new commission can do to reform the department and win back the public trust.

"Setting a tone by making the commission more accessible to the public is very important," he said. That means making public more details of ongoing misconduct investigations, being more responsive to public comments and complaints, and demanding the same things from the OCC.

The commission also needs to overhaul the department's early-warning system, which tries to identify problem cops. Right now that system uses only citizen complaints, which aren't the best gauge in a climate in which the public doesn't believe complaining does any good. Schlosberg wants to see the system overhauled to include accidents, use of force, searches and other tactics that get thrown out of court, and resisting-arrest arrests.

During her fall campaign, District Attorney Harris also announced plans to expand the tracking of data on problem officers.

"The best way to make sure abuse doesn't happen is to catch the patterns early," Schlosberg said, citing the example of Alex Fagan Jr., who had a history of violent incidents before the notorious Fajitagate.

Other reforms Schlosberg is pushing include better training for responding to mental health crises, an expansion of racial-profiling monitoring (which now tracks only traffic stops), better whistle-blower protections, and taking misconduct into greater account during the hiring and promotions processes.

"I think Chief Fong has made a stated commitment that she wants to address these issues," Schlosberg said. "The POA has a long history of opposing a lot of these reform efforts, and it's a question of whether the chief and the commission will implement reform over their opposition."

Most of all, Mission District activist Richard Marquez said, the new commission needs to send a strong message to the POA that officers will be held accountable for their actions.

"We need militant advocates for police reform and accountability," he told us. "They need to take the hard decisions and challenge the POA. The first case will be a preview of what's to come."

"Police brutality is a disease – it's like cancer and has to be wiped out," McAllister said. "And the only way it can be wiped out is with a cure. And we, the community, are the cure. We need to set an example for the Police Department that the community is watching them. We're going to hold you responsible. People are tired of being stepped on and pushed around by the Police Department."

The Police Commission meets Wednesdays, 5:30 p.m., Hall of Justice, Room 551, 850 Bryant, S.F. (415) 553-1651.

E-mail Steven T. Jones