EDITOR'S NOTES

By Tim Redmond

tredmond@sfbg.com

This is what it means to be a press-release mayor:

On Sunday the San Francisco Chronicle dropped part one of a major series on police violence. Some good, solid (if hardly surprising) stuff, demonstrating that about 100 problem cops still beat, abuse, and shoot people without justification — and get away with it, over and over again.

For me, though, the most interesting tidbit was tucked away on one of the jump pages. Reporter Lance Williams discovered (through aggressive and creative use of the Sunshine Ordinance) that the office of Mayor Gavin Newsom has been preparing for months to "defuse possible negative public reaction" to the Chron's series. And after the first story hit, Police Chief Heather Fong announced she had "considerable concerns" — not about the abusive cops but about the Chronicle stories.

Think about it: The mayor and the chief know the local daily paper is working on a series of major stories documenting how brutal cops manage to stay on the force. It's going to expose serious failures in police department management. Does the mayor take that information and demand some changes from the police chief? Does he immediately conduct his own investigation to find out why a problem that's likely to create "negative public reaction" exists in the first place?

No: The mayor's staff develops a strategy to manage the spin, and the chief tries to blame the newspaper.

Ladies and gentlemen: The substance of the Chron's revelations, while new to the printed page and the general public, have been (or sure as hell should have been) well-known inside the Mayor's Office for some time now. The problem at the San Francisco Police Department isn't that the command staff was unaware of the problem cops; it's that for years (and years and years) nobody has been willing to do anything about it. That's why we got Fajitagate, why the cops were able to frame John Tennison and Antoine Goff for murder, why Idriss Stelley was killed ... The list goes on and on.

But when the spin matters more than the substance, these things never change.

If Sup. Tom Ammiano hadn't given downtown a big scare with his proposal to force employers either to pay for health insurance or to chip in for the cost of the city providing health care to the uninsured, it's likely Newsom's new health care plan would never have emerged. But the mayor and his allies knew that Ammiano's plan was going to pass and that if Newsom vetoed the legislation, it might win on the ballot. So they came up with an alternative — and while it's terribly vague, it could actually turn out to be a very positive thing.

I know, that's a great big "could" — but the idea of the city offering basic primary care to every uninsured resident, employed or not, with businesses helping cover the cost, is a whole lot better than the current system, which encourages uninsured people to avoid seeing a doctor until they're really, really sick, then sticks the city for the entire cost of very expensive emergency care.

If this becomes another press-release project that sounds good when the mayor puts it out but either is mangled by powerful lobbyists or dies because of mayoral inattention, San Francisco will miss a great opportunity not just to save millions of dollars but also to demonstrate that properly funded public-sector health care is a real alternative. *