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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.
