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"The video was a stupid thing to do, but was it the worst thing since the Nazis? I don't think so," police union chief Delagnes says. "It's just another example of her pandering to the mayor."
Fong's response to Videogate has cost her in other ways. Cohen, whom she relegated to a record-keeping job at the Hall of Justice — he's out on disability after a mishap involving a file cart — has gone from obscure cop to cause célèbre with his Inside the SFPD blog. (He used it to embarrass the chief in June with the revelation — quickly seized upon by local media — that Fong had violated department policy by failing to keep her firearm certification current.)
Widely read within police and City Hall circles, the blog relentlessly ridicules Fong — something her uniformed detractors, regardless of how they feel about Cohen, say is further evidence of her having lost control of the troops.
Among other things, it has helped to popularize the chief's nickname within the department: "Feather Fong."
Mild-mannered and deferential, Fong is the antithesis of Hollywood's version of a big-city police chief. In a department whose chiefs have customarily come from the ranks of hard-nosed street cops, often with backgrounds as narcotics officers or homicide detectives, Fong spent only a few years as a beat cop on the not-so-mean streets of the Richmond before climbing the career ladder as an administrative taskmaster. Also unlike some of her profane predecessors, hers is the persona of a Girl Scout leader. People who've known her for years say they've never heard her swear.
She maintains her distance, even among associates with whom she's worked for years. Fong has a longtime boyfriend who is an inspector in the investigations bureau, but they are seldom seen together socially within police circles, department insiders say.
"She doesn't display her personal side easily," one captain says. "I didn't learn that her mother had died until a couple of months after it happened." Another Hall of Justice insider recalls a rare sit-down interview with a newspaper reporter shortly after she became chief in which Fong used the "I don't discuss my personal life" response to avoid divulging the name of her pet pit bull. (The dog has since died.) Yet she famously goes out of her way to show kindness to strangers, lending an ear to homeless people and the occasional crackpot who approaches her outside Police Commission hearings and elsewhere.
Her roots in the Chinese community go deep. The younger of two daughters born to Chinese immigrants, Fong grew up in a flat on Bannam Place, a short alley near the intersection of Union and Grant. Her father co-owned a grocery in Oakland's Chinatown until his death in 1997. Her late mother, to whom friends say Fong was especially close, was a legal secretary.
"Heather is an inspirational figure in ways that others [outside the Chinese community] have a hard time understanding," Yvonne Lee says. "When people in the Asian community refer to her as chief, it's with a special reverence for what's she's accomplished."
Every Thanksgiving for 20 years, Fong has been a fixture at Self Help for the Elderly, serving up turkey dinners until the last drumstick disappears with no thought of publicity, says Anni Chung, who directs the Chinatown-based organization. "Heather's really a social worker at heart," says Chung, who has known the chief since she foot-patrolled Clement Street in the late '70s. (Fong has a master's in social work from San Francisco State, which she acquired after joining the force.)
Even then, despite — literally — being an SFPD poster girl for minority recruitment after graduating from the Police Academy in 1977, Fong was never comfortable in the limelight, Henry Der says, and never sought credit or attention for helping break SFPD color lines as one of the first Asian women on the force.
Such humility — along with some luck — may explain Fong's almost invisible ascent through the ranks while performing a variety of vital but unglamorous tasks. The first of these, while still in academy training, was when she was tapped to transcribe hundreds of hours of audiotapes from wiretaps of Cantonese-speaking gang members to help solve the Golden Dragon Massacre, the bloodiest homicide in San Francisco history, in which five people were killed and 11 wounded at the Chinatown eatery.
She handled similarly low-profile jobs during most of the '80s and '90s. Even when former chief Fred Lau made Fong a captain in 1994, she was put in charge of the department's planning section rather than asked to head a police station.
When Newsom tapped Fong to lead the police department, she was billed as a reformer who would turn its entrenched white-male-dominated order, long dominated by Irish and Italian cops, on its head, and infuse a department crippled by scandal and stuck in malaise with new energy.
But if that was the intent, it appears many within SFPD didn't get the memo, especially with respect to the department's Achilles heel: solving murders.
As if the low solve rates weren't bad enough, in recent months the department has become the butt of jokes for its handling (or mishandling) of several high-profile cases.
Last December, in what came to be called the Cadaver Van Case, cops waited eight days before searching a Ford van hauled to a police impound yard and finding the body of Leonard Milo Hoskins, even though cadaver dogs brought to where the van had been parked in Mission Terrace had indicated something dead was inside.
In the meantime, two suspects in Hoskins' killing fled to Mexico. They were later apprehended, but through no effort by the SFPD: Incredibly, a San Diego–area do-gooder who read about the case tracked down the accused killers in Baja California and had them turned over to Mexican police for extradition.
