Public Defender No. 1: Jeff Adachi's Revolution 

Page 4 of 5

Adachi's work on pension reform was necessarily distinct from his job as public defender, and it alienated some of his own employees, who spoke publicly and in private against the campaign. He campaigned on his own time to place a reform measure, Proposition B, on the ballot in 2010 (it lost) and again in 2011. He jumped into the mayoral campaign in August 2011 at the last minute, in an attempt to keep the spotlight on the pension issue, leading some critics to speculate that the entire pension issue was a stalking horse to raise his political profile for the run. ("The pieces now fall into place," then-Supervisor Sean Elsbernd said at the time to SF Weekly. "In the end, what Jeff is really all about is Jeff.")

Adachi's 2011 pension Proposition D did not pass, nor did he win the mayoral race, but his campaign inspired labor and the "city family" to negotiate a compromise measure, Proposition C, which did pass. Adachi takes credit for getting the city to the point where Prop. C was passable. "In my view, it only sort of patched the problem," he says, "but at least it was a step in the right direction. At least it's going to help sustain the pension fund during hard times." And he sees what he did as in line with what public defenders do: taking care of problems others in government cannot or will not address. "Nobody dealt with it," he says. "I would see this as entirely consistent with public defenders taking on unpopular issues."

The other convulsion Adachi touched off in San Francisco politics began on March 2, 2011, and continues to reverberate today. That day, he called a press conference and screened for the media surveillance camera footage his office had acquired from the Henry Hotel in SOMA. He also posted the videos on YouTube.

The videos showed San Francisco narcotics police entering rooms in the residential hotel with a master key and removing items during two December 2010 drug busts. The events portrayed in the video contradicted the officers' police reports and constituted illegal searches, Adachi alleged at the time. Subsequent videos released by Adachi and private attorneys showed more illegal searches and thefts by police officers at various residential hotels around the city.

Then-police Chief Jeff Godown criticized Adachi's tactic of going straight to the media. "We are under attack every day by the public defender's office," he complained to the Chronicle at the time "There isn't anything I've seen based on the videotape or the police report that leads me to believe that we have any issues."

But the issues were real, and the searches at the Henry Hotel soon ballooned into one of the largest scandals in SFPD history. District Attorney George Gascon quickly threw out the cases involved in the searches, but Adachi pressed for more. He wanted a review of all the criminal cases the officers had been involved in and for the investigation to be conducted independently of the DA's office, since Gascon had been police chief at the time of the busts. The FBI soon took over and, in 2014, six officers were indicted on charges that included criminal conspiracies to deal drugs and steal from suspects, conspiring to threaten and intimidate residents in order to conduct illegal searches of SRO hotels, and falsifying police reports. Two of those officers were convicted of several federal corruption charges last December. Another pleaded guilty and testified against his former co-workers.

The scandal flared up again in March of this year when one of the officers, Sgt. Ian Furminger, applied for bail while he appeals his 41-month prison sentence. In response, federal prosecutors filed a motion that included transcripts from racist, sexist, and homophobic texts Furminger had exchanged with other police officers.

The racist text messages drew national attention in a country now on heightened alert for concrete evidence of racism in policing. Adachi again called for a thorough review of all the cases the involved police officers had been part of — this time, he got his wish. Gascon has now enlisted three retired judges to join a task force to investigate biased policing and review more than 3,000 cases for signs of racial bias affecting arrest decisions or leading to wrongful convictions.

"I think we did more with releasing the Henry Hotel video tapes than other reforms that were put in place through the Police Commission, because we exposed what was happening. And I think it's going to have a positive effect," Adachi says. "It's already had a positive effect."

It's ironic, but not surprising, that the racist language used by corrupt San Francisco police officers in text messages has prompted a more significant response from the city's law enforcement establishment than has decades of ongoing and unhidden evidence of systemic racial bias in the treatment of African-Americans. The establishment is more offended by the use of a racial slur than it is by the steady stream of black defendants who move daily through the courtrooms of the Hall of Justice, largely unseen and unthought-of, accused of crimes the city's white population gets away with regularly.

"I remember when I first started as a public defender," Adachi says in his office on a Saturday morning in May. "I was watching court and I saw these two people being sentenced. One was this middle-aged white man, and he had his family in the front row. Beautiful family — he had this little blond, blue-eyed daughter sitting in the front row, and the judge, who was white, looked over at his family and nodded in approval. He had an eloquent lawyer. He had embezzled $800,000 from the University of California — embezzled over two or three years — but the judge looked at him very compassionately and gave him probation.