Law enforcement falls apart

EDITORIAL

The state of San Francisco law enforcement is beyond bleak these days, and the people in charge — the mayor, the district attorney, and the Police Commission — are either in denial or aggressively (and intentionally) missing the point.

Consider:

• It took the mayor almost a week to acknowledge that the San Francisco Chronicle's extensive series on police brutality had any merit at all — and while he finally claimed he would force the department to start tracking statistics better, he still hasn't made a real commitment to disciplining (or firing) rogue officers.

• Police Chief Heather Fong remains largely defensive, asserting that she and her staff are doing everything possible to track force complaints better but continuing to criticize the Chron for not being nicer to the cops. Meanwhile, the head of the police union, Gary Delagnes, is attacking the mayor for daring to even (weakly) admit there might be something wrong with all this violence perpetrated in the name of San Francisco by sworn officers in uniform.

• In the middle of all of this — and in the middle of a frightening rise in murders in San Francisco — District Attorney Kamala Harris has given the top homicide prosecution post to someone who played a key role in framing two young men for a murder they didn't commit. In fact, as A.C. Thompson reports on page 12, prosecutor George Butterworth didn't turn over a key piece of evidence in that case until 2004 — a full 14 years after he should have given it to defense lawyers representing John Tennison and Antoine Goff. That evidence, a tape of a police interview with a witness, had apparently been in Butterworth's possession — and was somehow erased along the way. (Lawyers for Tennison and Goff managed to get an audio expert to restore some of it, and it seems to suggest that the cops may have been encouraging the witness by offering her a cash reward.)

It would be almost comical if it weren't so serious — but it's deadly serious, and this nonsense has to stop.

There's plenty of blame to go around, but it stops with the mayor and the Police Commission. The commission needs to send a strong message to Fong that problem cops will not be tolerated (a good start: make the chief report every week on how many disciplinary hearings she or her subordinates have held, what each case was about, and what the outcome was). Newsom needs to go beyond databases and reports and publicly warn Fong: If this inappropriate violence keeps up, San Francisco will get a new chief.

As for Butterworth, a person who cares so little about truth that he's willing to bend (or shatter) legal rules and send innocent people to prison ought to be facing charges himself, and probably shouldn't be practicing law. He clearly shouldn't be working for the DA's Office in any capacity, and if Harris won't get rid of him, his role overseeing homicide prosecutions should be a major issue when she's up for reelection. *