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Police accountability was almost invisible as an issue during the just-concluded election campaign for mayor in which three of the supervisors, including Newsom and runoff survivor Matt Gonzalez, were candidates. Not even Supervisor Tom Ammiano, a mayoral also-ran who played a key role in Prop. H's being put on the ballot, had much to say on the subject. Its disappearance as an election issue provides a powerful, if unintended, statement about the lack of will on the part of the city's political class to tackle police misconduct. That silence is all the more remarkable coming on the heels of Fajitagate, the scandal stemming from an incident last November in which three off-duty cops, including Fagan's son, were accused of beating up two men outside a Union Street bar over a bag of steak fajitas.
Indeed, there are those who question whether advocates understandably frustrated by the barriers to police reform in a city that prides itself on championing individual rights may even come to regret the measure. "I would say Prop. H addresses some small things," says University of Nebraska at Omaha criminal justice professor Samuel Walker, who has written extensively about civilian oversight issues. "But it's doubtful whether allowing an 11-member board of supervisors to help govern a police department strengthens political accountability rather than weakens it."
It's a Wednesday night in October, and in a drab hallway outside a fifth-floor hearing room at the Hall of Justice a half-dozen uniformed cops are seated on a bench like relief pitchers in a bullpen, talking politics. One expresses alarm that his wife's best friend has said she intends to vote for Prop. H. "People don't realize what this thing means," the cop says. "Yeah," interrupts one of his buddies. "But they better wise up quick unless they want [Supervisor] Chris Daly and that crowd running the [Police] Department."
Inside the hearing room, where the five members of San Francisco's Police Commission have emerged from behind closed doors to conduct the public portion of their weekly meeting, police reform isn't on the agenda. But it is clearly on the minds of many in the audience. Nearly all of the three dozen or so seats are filled, occupied mostly by students, parents, and at least one teacher from Thurgood Marshall Academic High School in the Bayview. The evening is an anniversary of sorts, marking slightly more than a year since a garden-variety fight in a school hallway escalated into something much worse. The official version of what happened, as endorsed by the police, is that it was a student uprising that required more than 60 cops, some in riot gear, to quell. The "community" version is that it was police who rioted after school officials and a cop assigned to the school panicked and overreacted.
Like many disputes involving the SFPD, the jury is still out on this one. Whether there will ever be an authoritative airing of what happened at Thurgood Marshall on Oct. 11, 2002, appears doubtful. Last February, DA Terence Hallinan, at the urging of then-Chief Sanders, dropped criminal charges against a handful of students and a teacher stemming from the incident, in the interest of "community healing." Justified or not, critics smelled a whitewash. And, as is its legacy in such matters, the Police Commission has done nothing to diminish the skepticism. For more than a year, a contingent from the school has demanded that the panel hold a hearing on the matter. In typical fashion, the commission has ignored the group.
If there's consolation, it is that the Police Commission ignores everyone who shows up to complain about the cops. The panel's members are President Connie Perry, an attorney with the state Insurance Department; real estate brokers Victor Makras and Sidney Chan; longtime insurance executive Angelo Quaranta, who owns Allegro, the Russian Hill restaurant and political watering hole that recently closed; and Wayne Friday, a columnist with the Bay Area Reporter, a gay newspaper. The part-time commissioners, who are paid $100 per month, typically conduct their meetings as a model of efficiency, often disposing of up to a dozen agenda items in a matter of minutes. But the portion of their sessions required by law to be set aside for public comments typically turns into a parade of the discontented, with two dozen or more people railing against alleged abuses as the commissioners sit as expressionless as sphinxes, almost never responding.
"It's beyond frustrating," says Malaika Parker, who heads Bay Area Police Watch, an independent watchdog group. "Anyone can see what happens. When someone from the [police] command staff gives a report, the commission is attentive, responsive, and polite. It's all very good-natured. But the minute a member of the public stands up and starts talking about police brutality, [the commissioners] stare through you like you're not even there." Van Jones, a veteran SFPD critic and executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, puts it succinctly. "You could put five goldfish in an aquarium and set them up on that rostrum, and they couldn't be any less responsive to the citizenry than this Police Commission."
As the civilian body appointed by the mayor (with confirmation by the Board of Supervisors), the commission has long been the main point of contact with citizens who have a beef with the SFPD. And common misperceptions about the OCC's autonomy to the contrary, the commission has the power to manage, organize, and reorganize the OCC as it sees fit. Owing its allegiance (until the passage of Prop. H, at least) exclusively to the mayor, it rarely challenges his authority or rejects his chosen police chief.
When it comes to holding police accountable, the commission's image under Brown and his predecessors for the past two decades has taken a beating along with that of the department. For years, the SFPD has promoted people to high posts who've been the targets of serious internal discipline or civil lawsuits alleging brutality or other civil rights violations. The foremost example is none other than the current chief. Fagan's 1990 confrontation with California Highway Patrol officers beside a San Mateo County freeway -- in which he grabbed one officer and resisted another's attempt to place him in a hold -- resulted in the commission's suspending him for 15 days and ordering him into 18 months' of alcohol treatment. But that didn't impede Fagan's ascent up the career ladder. In 2000 he was suspended for a month without pay as commander of Northern Station after he got in two traffic accidents on the same day and walked away from one of them. Brown nevertheless appointed him as the department's second-in-command last November, and two months ago, the commission rubber-stamped him as chief following Sanders' retirement.
