During the past seven years, incoming San Francisco police chief George Gascon has, in some respects, operated as an up-to-date version of the kind and composed, wise and wily sheriff played by Andy Griffith in his self-named 1960s sitcom.
In 2002 Gascon, who was then a commander in the Los Angeles Police Department, co-led an ethics course described by one official as having "the right balance of altruism and realism," just as one might imagine Mayberry Sheriff Andy Taylor doing.
In 2008, when Gascon was chief of the Mesa, Arizona, police department, an article in Phoenix New Times described how he used psychological jujitsu to turn the tables on his unpleasant foe, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, just as Taylor did when outsiders made mischief in Mayberry.
When Arpaio attempted to paint Gascon as soft on immigration by sending deputies to round up Mesa's Mexicans, Gascon countered by assigning 132 of his own officers to supervise the sweep. The resulting media attention made Arpaio look foolish.
By the time Gascon, 55, accepted the San Francisco police chief job last month, he'd earned a reputation in Mesa for keeping his finger on the pulse of the community so he could count on locals' help when things went wrong, just as Griffith's fictional sheriff always did.
But Gascon is no Sheriff Taylor in one very important respect: He has no patience for the people he has judged to be among the Barney Fifes of the world.
Notwithstanding the warm, progressive image Gascon has cultivated among the public, Mesa Police Department critics say he is a ruthless boss with dramatic plans to change the way San Francisco fights crime.
In order to build his own team in Mesa — in the face of rules that didn't allow for easy reassignments — Gascon's critics say he derailed the law enforcement careers of out-of-favor veteran officers so he could install his own command staff. By the end of his first year in Mesa, he had compelled the retirements of 10 of his top 14 commanders.
Thirty-year veteran Hector Federico was among those who decided the time was right to leave. He expects to see a similar purge among San Francisco police commanders. "I think 60 percent of the staff members that are there now will be reassigned or move on," he said.
Adds former Mesa police commander Ron Kirby, who retired in 2007 after 26 years with the force: "In San Francisco, I think you'll see the same model. He's done his homework on the command staff. And he'll be looking to replace individuals so he'll have people to work for him."
Gascon, who begins his new job during the first part of August, suggests I should weigh with skepticism the complaints of disgruntled ex-Mesa officers. But he doesn't fully dismiss predictions that he's come to San Francisco to clean house.
"I am in the process of fact finding," he said in an interview last week. "I'm trying to assess the weaknesses of various members of the team, and of the organization as a whole, and figure out what would be appropriate steps to take. Every coin has two sides. There is also the other side — there were a lot of opportunities for those who are willing to innovate and work hard."
When I spoke to Gascon, he had already placed an LAPD information systems expert inside the SFPD to help gauge needed areas of improvement. San Francisco has an exceptionally low "clearance rate," a term defined by the U.S. Department of Justice as when a suspect is arrested, charged, and turned over for prosecution. In 2002, the homicide detail cleared half its cases, while the similar-sized-city average was 61 percent. In 2007, it cleared 25 percent when the average was 53 percent.
"The clearance rates for violent crimes in San Francisco are unacceptable. They are very low by industry standards. Why are those rates very low? I'm not going to speculate. I'm going to figure out a way to improve them," Gascon said, adding that he has a message for San Francisco officers, and he wants it to be "communicated very clearly: I have no patience for people who are retired on the job. If you are retired on the job, you are going to have problems with me. Those who want to work hard are going to be revitalized. It's going to be a lot of fun."
Gascon is the first police chief hired from outside the department in more than 30 years. The last outsider, Charles Gain, took over in 1975 and tried to soften the department's reputation for brutality. Five years later, he left with a reputation for frivolousness, with exhibit A being a proposal to paint squad cars a friendly shade of baby blue.
Notwithstanding, Police Commission president Theresa Sparks said she and her colleagues interviewed candidates who were interested in a new approach to law enforcement. During his interview, Gascon wasn't shy about his intention to create major changes of a sort an insider with political ties to the department might have a harder time making.
"I think he's going to give everyone an opportunity," Sparks said. "But I also think he's going to choose his own team. I don't know if it means the same kind of upheaval they had in Mesa, but I do think that change can be kind of positive."
Sparks said that the commission might seek changes in the city's administrative code, making it easier for Gascon to hire department outsiders to serve on his command staff. "I think it's his intent to bring in an outsider," she said.
"I believe San Francisco is a world-class city," Gascon said. "And San Francisco has no reason to have the level of crime it has. It has all the tools to be the safest city in America, and I'm going to do everything I can to make that a truism."
While Gascon was ruthlessly cleaning house in Mesa, the incompetence of San Francisco's police department was becoming the talk of the nation.
In May 2008, SFPD failings became a topic of national discussion when the Washington Post published a story whose headline began, "Frustration with San Francisco Police; Two Cases Should Prompt Embarrassment."
The story described a case where police cadaver dogs indicated that an impounded vehicle contained human remains, yet officers waited eight days before looking inside it to find a body — giving the van's owners a running start. In what has become a San Francisco tradition where amateurs or frustrated friends and families of victims feel compelled to take investigations into their own hands, a concerned citizen tracked the fugitives in Mexico without any help from San Francisco police.
In what the Post story described as "the latest humiliation to the SFPD," San Francisco detectives surmised that Hugues de la Plaza, a French citizen, stabbed himself in the chest multiple times and washed and hid the knife before collapsing and dying. After heavy lobbying from de la Plaza's family and friends, a court order forced San Francisco police to allow the evidence to be reviewed by French investigators, who determined de la Plaza was murdered.
The case was one of several instances where apparent murders were not classified as homicides by San Francisco police that year (see our story "Stiffed," 9/10/08). Some victims' family members suspected police were gaming the numbers to make the murder rate appear lower, something a homicide lieutenant strongly denied at the time.
While Gascon wouldn't comment on the particulars of the de la Plaza investigation, he said there would be no fudging of the numbers on his watch.
"If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it's a duck," he said. "A homicide is a homicide. A suicide is a suicide. You can tell one from another. I'm not interested in playing games with the numbers. If we have 150 homicides, we have 150 homicides. Playing with numbers, playing with definitions, is not a way to make the community safer."
It's not as if public officials haven't been aware of problems with San Francisco's finest. A 2003 measure gave the police commission more independence and greater powers in handling misconduct cases. But the revamped commission has become a bureaucratic albatross, dragging down the department with a 1,000-case backlog that could take years to clear.
Meanwhile, a much-ballyhooed consultants' report issued last year said the department must better analyze crime data, put more deskbound officers on the street, reorganize the way it conducts investigations, and collect better statistics. This was the latest in years' worth of studies that have essentially said the same thing: San Francisco hosts a dysfunctional department reminiscent of 1980s New York, or 1990s Los Angeles — before these departments were reorganized under Gascon's mentor, former NYPD Chief and current LAPD Chief William Bratton.
In this light, bringing in a Bratton-trained outsider seemed to the Police Commission just what San Francisco needed. "There were a lot of great programs done in Los Angeles," Sparks said. "Chief Bratton really is an innovator in best practices."
"The San Francisco Police Department has been studied to death," Gascon told me, echoing the kind of can-do talk that must have sounded like music to world-weary police commissioners during his job interview. "It's time to actually do things. We're going to have to get the stakeholders together and say, 'There's no more money, no more people, and we have 30 to 60 days to fix this stuff.'"
San Franciscans are used to hearing "fix-it" talk from incoming chiefs, eight of whom have left during the past two decades. Gascon, however, has the chops to back the talk. He has overseen at first hand the full-scale bureaucratic warfare required to overhaul a police department on the skids.
As assistant chief of police in Los Angeles, Gascon was quietly pushing to eliminate the department's cowboy-bluster approach to policing, long before that sort of reformist talk became fashionable in the 2000s. And in Mesa, he was praised for his outreach to community leaders, making them feel they had a stake in building a new type of police force built on transparency and accountability.
"I've been in Mesa for 22 years, and when Gascon was selected, it was the first time that Mesa went outside its comfort zone," Mesa park ranger John Goodie said. "A lot of officers retired; others went to different agencies. He came in with a no-nonsense shake-and-bake attitude to get the police department headed in the right direction. He brought in new things that were done in Los Angeles — he introduced big city policing. Mesa is a city of 450,000. So the things he brought in were desperately needed."
A Cuban immigrant, Gascon joined the LAPD in 1978. He quit in 1981 to get a law degree and run a car dealership, rejoined the force in 1987, and was admitted to the California bar in 1996. But he remained a cop.
As Gascon rose through the ranks, a corruption scandal involving a group of renegade cops in an LAPD antigang squad erupted in the late '90s. One officer in the Ramparts division was implicated in covering up a bank robbery and police shooting, and later accused 70 other officers of misdeeds. The U.S. Department of Justice ordered reforms, including beefed-up officer training in squishy-seeming fields such as ethics and civil rights. Some top L.A. cops, including then-Chief Bernard Parks, bristled at the federal hand-holding. But Gascon saw an opportunity to proselytize about his ideas regarding the "right way" of policing.
A 2002 LA Weekly article describes how Gascon finagled grant money to create a training curriculum in which officers were required to think their way through dangerous jams — without gunning down or bludgeoning suspects. Gascon also put in for the job of LAPD chief. That role instead went to Bratton, who'd just spent two years as chief of the NYPD implementing a policing strategy called CompStat, in which the department took special pains to gather month-to-month crime data in order to better scrutinize individual commanders' results. By paying closer attention to more accurate statistics, police managers are able to set specific, realistic crimefighting goals, then reward or punish officers based on whether they meet these targets.
Though he'd vied for Bratton's job, Gascon soon became an enthusiastic acolyte and assistant chief. But it was no secret that Gascon wanted to run his own show. When he took the job as Mesa's chief in 2006, the move was seen by some as an attempt to prove his mettle for a big-city command post.
In Mesa, some of Gascon's detractors accused him of applying a one-size-fits-all policing formula he learned in Los Angeles. Just as Bratton had done in L.A., Gascon held regular meetings discussing crime patterns and evaluating precincts' response.
He set up individual "community forums" including African-Americans, Hispanics, business leaders, disabled people, and clergy. The stated aim was to improve the department's ties to Mesa grassroots. The real-life effect was to give Gascon the tools to manage the kind of crisis his officer-students used to analyze in his Los Angeles ethics training sessions. Earlier this year, when a videotape surfaced of a Mesa officer slamming a handcuffed African-American suspect's face against a car trunk, Gascon was quick to gather members of his African-American forum.
"The chief got members of the African-American community to come to the police station," Goodie recalled. "A few hours later, there was a press conference and the media was shown the tape. We, the forum members, could then say, 'Hey, the chief called us in; the Mesa Police Department is investigating the behavior of this particular officer.' That was something pretty transparent."
In the world of traditional policing, Gascon's brand of "transparency" — in which he went straight to community leaders and the media before an officer's behavior had been thoroughly investigated — might be considered grandstanding.
Gascon had been in Mesa for 14 months when he called a press conference condemning a commander who had served on the board of a police-linked nonprofit. A nonprofit staffer had been accused of improperly paying family members to raise funds. The state attorney general eventually declined to press charges, and the disgraced commander quietly retired. In some law enforcement circles, this behavior might be considered a violation of officers' rights.
"In ordinary disciplinary cases, I always tried to be very cautious in terms of making public statements, particularly if I didn't have all the facts, and if public statements could compromise the fairness of the process, I tried to keep the lid on that type of information as much of possible," said Tony Ribera, director of the International Institute of Criminal Justice Leadership at the University of San Francisco, who served as San Francisco's police chief for four years in the '90s.
Ribera's close-to-the-vest policy has been typical of San Francisco police chiefs ever since. Also typical is that Ribera will be best remembered for a widely covered scandal that compromised his ability to run the department. For months, reporters filled columns with news of allegations that he had sexually harassed his spokeswoman. He was cleared in 1995, but stepped down the following year.
In 2002, Chief Earl Sanders resigned for purported health reasons after he was accused of helping cover up reports that an off-duty officer — who happened to be the son of Assistant Chief Alex Fagan — had beat up a civilian after asking for a bite of fajitas. Fagan succeeded Sanders, and stepped down within a year after failing to quell the scandal by then known as Fajitagate. Outgoing Chief Heather Fong, meanwhile, is best known for her clumsy handling of Videogate, in which some officers made satirical movies deemed insensitive to minorities.
In this light, Gascon's reputation as a cutthroat public relations warrior may serve as his secret weapon as he prepares an upheaval that will leave angry, PR-savvy San Franciscans in its wake.
During two interviews with SF Weekly earlier this month, Gascon suggested that he's aware that his plans for changing the way San Francisco police fight crime will require stepping on toes. And he seemed to be ready to take criticism — and, when necessary, give it.
In permissive San Francisco, public officials have been loath to even discuss, let alone attack, the crime surrounding the city's ubiquitous drug traffic. Gascon suggested he might be willing to risk the wrath of the social libertarian set by focusing on crimes that might not have been aggressively prosecuted before. "We're going to reduce the peddling of drugs, street sales of drugs," he said. "And to the extent that drugs involve gang activity, violence, or people competing for a corner, we're going to go after that."
And despite his reputation in conservative Mesa as a coddler of undocumented immigrants, Gascon told me he'll concentrate on policing immigrant communities, including illegal ones: "I think it's a mistake to give anybody a get out of jail card. If you're committing crimes other than crossing the border illegally, the police should be using every tool in the bag against you."
Gascon promised to attack the city's notoriously ineffective police discipline system, in which more than 200 officers languish in desk jobs rather than patrol the street, while many wait years for accusations of misconduct to be heard by the Police Commission. In a recent column ("On Thin Ice," 06/17/09), I described how this system demoralizes and embitters officers, while wasting millions of tax dollars paying cops for clerical work.
"You cannot have 200 people sitting around," Gascon insisted. "It's too costly economically, as well as in terms of public safety. If we have 10 percent of the force sitting on ice, we can't afford not to fix it. If you have a half-billion-dollar budget, and 90 percent of that is paying people, and 10 percent of them are sitting around not doing productive work, that's unacceptable."
Gascon said he'd also change the department's notorious reputation for secrecy. Routine obfuscation is a backward practice with myriad defenders within the SFPD. During the 13 years I've reported on San Francisco law enforcement, police have consistently refused to disclose basic information such as incident reports. As a matter of routine, the department cites loopholes in state public records laws that say documents can be withheld if publicity could undermine an ongoing investigation. This has allowed the department to keep the public in the dark about allegations of police incompetence or brutality, thus reducing the impetus for reform.
To name two examples among many: In February 2002, I wrote about how the SFPD hid information about the police asphyxiation of a man who'd shoplifted a blender ("Bound and Gagged," 2/20/02). And just last month the department refused to release to me three-year-old records about a fugitive shot by police, citing the "ongoing investigation" excuse.
Gascon plans an about-face toward greater openness. "I come from a world where everything is public record from day one," he said. "You don't want to undermine the integrity of an investigation, but police business is public business. We have to be careful that we do not use protecting an ongoing investigation as an excuse. We're not in the business of hiding things. I think the onus is that you have to show that the release of information actually is going to compromise an investigation. The burden should be on the side of those who wish to withhold information. The overarching principle should be openness and transparency."
Most pressing to San Franciscans has been the police department's notorious failure to bring criminals to justice. A 2002 Chronicle inquiry showed that detectives investigating violent crime were loath to leave their desks, preferring instead to pursue leads by phone, and simply let many crimes drop through the cracks.
Gascon said the solution is straightforward: improve the department's ability to obtain and analyze information about crimes, then weed out weak performers. "If the captain is not performing, or the lieutenants, officers, or sergeants, it's really simple," he said. "It's not very complicated. Good performance comes to the surface."
Mesa Command staff at the losing end of Gascon's drive to upend policing in that desert suburb didn't see a visionary. They saw a leader blinkered by preconceived notions, trucked in from Los Angeles, who was prone to making snap judgments before he'd taken the time to figure out what was going on.
The San Francisco police union is already girding for a similar battle. In the July newsletter of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, president Gary Delagnes wrote a front-page column noting that the union had fought to have an insider hired as incoming chief, and that Gascon's outsider status portends a culture clash.
Gascon arrives "via two police departments that bear very little similarity to our own," Delagnes wrote. "It's going to be interesting on both sides of the equation. I have advised him to get to know the members and don't prejudge anything or anyone until he has had the chance to meet our people."
Ex-chief Ribera echoes Delagnes' advice. He compares Gascon to the last outsider to lead the department. "Charlie Gain, in 1975, when he came in, made the decisions too quickly," Ribera said. "He came in and did some quick interviews, and made his decisions based on those interviews. There were a lot of ruffled feathers. If the new chief were to ask my advice, I'd say, 'Take your time on this.' There's no urgency. I can tell you the people in there now are all quality people. They may not fit into his current plans. But they're quality people."
Disgruntled ex-brass in Mesa describe a similar turn of events. "He came in chopping heads, and cutting out anything and everything in his path to get his message conveyed," said Federico, who retired in 2007 after 30 years. "His strong leadership style, it can be a benefit to a department. But I think he had a lot to gain by engaging his staff, which I don't think he did. He came here well prepared. He did his homework as far as the community of Mesa. But he didn't put much regard in his existing staff."
Gascon acknowledges that there was turmoil during his first year at the department. "Some people may feel they were pushed out, and if they feel that way, I'm not going to debate that," he said.
But Gascon said he had good reasons for driving what some commanders thought was a department purge: "There were people at high levels of the command staff who didn't know what the crime levels were. I remember talking to one of our command staff, and he gave me a blank stare and said he didn't know what the crime levels were. It's like walking into Microsoft and finding out they don't know what their products were or how they were performing."
In San Francisco, he adds, "I expect them to know what the business is, and what the practices are. For people who do not, that's going to be a problem."
