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But neither the cops who bristled at the prospect of civilian oversight nor politicians more concerned with currying the police union's favor than with promoting genuine police reform have had much to worry about. Implanted within a structure that reduced the agency to playing 90-pound weakling to the Police Department's Mr. Universe, the OCC would have almost certainly been ineffective even if Feinstein and the three men who succeeded her as mayor -- Art Agnos, Frank Jordan, and Brown -- hadn't assigned civilian police oversight a low priority.
During its first few years the agency was so ineffectual that its existence was scarcely even noticed. For the first five years, the OCC director literally didn't have a seat at the table during Police Commission meetings. Critics complained that its first director, Eugene Swann, who lasted barely a year, was unable or unwilling to make a dent in a growing backlog of citizen complaints, rarely holding hearings.
His successor, Frank Schober, who had headed the California National Guard under former Gov. Jerry Brown, shocked reform advocates by openly disagreeing with the OCC's watchdog mission. "There's absolutely no track record of any measurable output or performance by the OCC during its first four or five years, and that's no exaggeration," says Peter Keane, dean of the Golden Gate University law school. Keane was president of the Bar Association of San Francisco in the late 1980s when a few frustrated OCC staffers approached his group with tales of the agency's dysfunction. As a result, several influential lawyers friendly with Feinstein persuaded her to get rid of Schober in 1987.
By then the OCC had become a joke. Voters had envisioned that the agency would be autonomous and beyond the influence of the SFPD. But it quickly had become a police cheerleader. Schober took over promising to hold hearings on backlogged complaints and to move quickly on a number of celebrated brutality cases ignored under his predecessor. But few hearings ever materialized. Instead, the agency degenerated into a public relations arm of the Police Department.
The OCC's quarterly newsletter read like a police trade journal, its pages brimming with puff pieces extolling the SFPD for a job well done. It included coupons that the public was invited to cut out and use to vote for the OCC's "Cop of the Month." The agency even used funds from its meager budget to hire professional models to pose as police officers for billboards that were placed on Muni buses and at strategic locations around town. Neither did the OCC's image improve much under Schober's successor. Although the obsequious newsletter and cop-fawning PR campaigns were retired, the agency came away looking impotent when it finally rose up and went head-to-head with the police in a high-profile case. In 1988, United Farm Workers Union leader Dolores Huerta was nearly clubbed to death by cops trying to disperse a demonstration in front of the St. Francis Hotel. News reports suggested her ruptured spleen and rib fractures were the result of having been batoned by Tac Squad officer Francis Achim. Huerta and the ACLU filed complaints with the OCC alleging, among other things, that Achim had used excessive force.
After a lengthy investigation, the OCC agreed and asked then-Police Chief Frank Jordan to press misconduct charges against Achim. But as a harbinger of cases that have long diminished the OCC's effectiveness, a parallel probe by the SFPD's internal affairs unit concluded that no discipline was necessary. When it came time for the Police Commission to render a decision, Jordan threatened to resign rather than punish Achim. As part of a pattern from which it has rarely departed, the commission sided with the chief. In an outcome that has since become all too familiar, Huerta won an $825,000 lawsuit settlement -- the largest ever against the Police Department.
Keane insists that it wasn't until the 1990s "that there was anything approaching a legitimate attempt" within the OCC to make the agency function as voters intended. Arriving as director in 1996, civil rights attorney and law professor Mary Dunlap, who died in January after a struggle with pancreatic cancer, is credited with having turned the agency around from its years of wandering in the wilderness. She was praised for improving professionalism and for a willingness to at least take on police brass (even if unsuccessfully) in cases in which her predecessors were more likely to take a pass.
For the past two years during Dunlap's illness, and until Kevin Allen was appointed director in April, the agency was run more or less by committee, with three of Dunlap's former top aides sharing responsibility. But as the OCC's own dismal appraisal of the cooperation it receives from the Police Department reveals, the agency -- while having shaken off the torpor it had under Schober -- has hardly approached the promise invested in it 20 years ago. "For too long [the] OCC was supposed to be a watchdog and it was really a lap dog," says former ACLU attorney John Crew. "I would say it's a work in progress."
Whenever social worker and police reform advocate Mesha Monge-Irizarry needs an example of how unaccountable San Francisco's cops have become, she need look no further than a picture of her dead son.
