LET US STIPULATE that Kevin Allen, the director of the Office of Citizen Complaints, is far from perfect. As A.C. Thompson reported June 29, Allen has failed for the past 18 months to file the crucial reports that track problem police officers who have repeated complaints filed against them. Last year Thompson found a backlog of unfinished investigations into cops who shot civilians. The Police Commission has a right and responsibility to look into those sorts of job-performance issues.

But we don't care whom Allen is kissing – and neither should the commission. In fact, the off-duty San Francisco cop who decided to turn paparazzo, shoot photos of Allen and a friend making out in public, and pass them on to department brass should be told he was way out of line.

The story, as reported by Phil Matier and Andy Ross in the San Francisco Chronicle, began several weeks ago, when Officer Brian Peagler, a member of the police gang task force, stopped at a convenience store near his home in Millbrae and spotted Allen "locked in an R-rated embrace with an unidentified woman" in the parking lot. Peagler, the story goes, went home, grabbed a camera, came back to the scene, and started snapping away. The photos, and a report on supposedly "lewd and lascivious conduct" and "public display of affection" wound up on his captain's desk, where it made its way all the way up to the chief's office and eventually was the subject of a closed-door commission meeting.

A few things to keep in mind:

San Francisco has a long list of unsolved homicides. Gang violence remains a serious problem in the Mission District. There are rogue cops going around beating people up – and sometimes shooting people – without adequate accountability. The police department wastes millions of dollars a year paying sworn officers to do jobs that civilians can do just as well, at much less expense.

There are, in other words, real crime problems on the streets of San Francisco, and real issues for the police chief and the commission to worry about. Allen's love life is not one of them.

The commission ultimately decided to take no action on the matter, which in effect exonerated Allen – but that was a totally weak and inadequate move. What Peagler did was wrong on so many levels that it defies all logic and common sense, and by allowing the whole matter to get this far, the department and commission have sent a terrible message to the community.

Think about it. Peagler is a San Francisco cop, who was off duty in Millbrae. Sure, he's a sworn law-enforcement officer, and if someone was robbing the store or committing armed assault in the parking lot, he'd have a duty to intervene. But aggressive lip-lock – even if it went beyond Millbrae standards of decency, which this apparently didn't (both Allen and his pal were fully clothed) – is hardly an emergency criminal situation that required an off-duty officer's intervention. If he was that upset, he could have, well, called the (local) cops.

Taking a photo of someone in a public place isn't illegal. But doing it under the color of law – that is, with the intent to file the photos as part of a police report – raises immediate privacy issues. SF cops can't photograph protesters or activists unless they have good reason. If they went around town snapping pix of every couple making out on the street, there'd be public outrage.

When Peagler's photos arrived on the captain's desk, they should have gone right into the wastebasket, and Peagler should have been told to destroy the negatives, get back to work fighting gangs – and never, ever pull a stunt like that again. The chief should have sent the same message to the captain, and by the time this smelly mess got to the commission level, it should have been a disciplinary matter – not for Allen but for Peagler and his superiors.

This all sounds like a minor, San Francisco-style incident that's hardly a big deal.

But it's actually important: San Francisco has always had a proud reputation as a city that doesn't play gotcha politics with people's personal lives, as a place that actively rebels against the national trend toward moralizing, spying, and character assassination. Cops with cameras watching public displays of affection is a scary trend, and the mayor and the commission need to put a very public stop to it now.