A book-length report released on Monday by a special blue ribbon panel found that the San Francisco Police Department was virtually run by its police union, resisted efforts by the panel to gather data, and contained a culture that actively threatened whistleblowers who attempted to flag wrong doing.
Officials at the union in question, the San Francisco Police Officers Association or POA, were not at all pleased by the report, and promptly launched an attack on San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who originally triggered the report’s existence.
Specifically, in May 2015, Gascón caused the creation of the “Blue Ribbon Panel on Transparency, Accountability, and Fairness in Law Enforcement,” after it came to light that fourteen members of the the San Francisco’s police department had exchanged a series of loathsome racist and homophobic text messages.
Although he now serves as district attorney, Gascón is very familiar with the challenges of policing. Prior to assuming the job as SF DA, he was the chief of the SFPD. And, before being appointed as San Francisco’s top cop, Gascón was hired to reform the then-troubled Mesa, Arizona, police department. Previous to Mesa, Gascón spent more than 20 years at the Los Angeles Police Department, where he last served as First Assistant Chief under Bill Bratton, which meant he ran the patrol side of the LAPD on a day to day basis during the period when that department was laboring under a federal consent decree and was still reeling from Rampart and related scandals.
He is also an attorney, and was the first cop in the nation to move laterally into the job of DA.
When Gascón created the Blue Ribbon Panel, as its website explains, the panel was specifically tasked with answering the questions raised by SF’s texting scandal—namely: Was the racial and homophobic bias demonstrated by the offensive texts a reflection of institutionalized bias within the SFPD and, if so, to what extent?
Once it was created the panel also took on two related goals:
First, the three judges who made up the panel were asked to review almost 4,000 police reports authored by the texting scandal cops to determine whether their bias affected their policing.
(According to the Blue Ribbon Panel’s website, this review is ongoing and is expected to be completed by fall 2016.)
And second, the panel’s law firm working groups were tasked with examining the extent to which bias was institutionalized within the SFPD’s policies and practices in general, and to “recommend solutions to address any bias or threat of bias they discovered.”
The results of this broader inquiry were released in a 239-page final report form on Monday. The release comes at a time when the city is still looking for a new chief of police and, as has been true elsewhere in the nation, public concern over officer shootings has grown increasingly heated.
(The report was released in an earlier, unfinished version this spring.)
The lenthy final report (which you can find here) includes 72 findings and 81 recommendations. It is critical of a number of department policies and, as mentioned earlier, points to the department’s union, the POA, as virtually running the department, and standing in the way of substantive reform.
“They are setting the tone in the department,” said one panel member, former Santa Clara County Judge, LaDoris Cordell.
And, while the panel members and the legal teams found evidence of bias, they also said they that the department’s lack of transparency, code of silence, and failure to keep reliable data made it impossible to do an accurate analysis of many of the issues they were mandated to explore.
The report also features many constructive recommendations, and makes a point of praising the fine and dedicated officers that make up the majority of the department.
Immediately after the report’s release, the POA president Martin Halloran, who had objected to the panel’s formation, denounced it and it’s report as a “Kangaroo Court,” set up by a DA with a bias against police, then equated the report’s release with the murder of police officers in Dallas:
“On Thursday, a sniper in Dallas took aim at police officers and murdered five in cold blood,” Halloran said in a written statement. “Today, George Gascón is taking aim at police officers in San Francisco with half-truths and distortions.”
The report is scheduled to be forwarded to the U.S. Department of Justice, which is conducting a review of the SFPD’s policies.
For more on the report and its findings, Alex Emslie at KQED has a good story that is worth your time.
POST SCRIPT: An interesting side note on the panel and the report is the fact that, one of the panel’s three judges is Dickran Tevrizian, a retired U.S. District Court Judge, who was also one of the seven members of LA’s Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence, which delved into problems of inmate abuse by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies.)
Those in charge bravely step forward and agree it’s someone else’s fault. It’s that darn union, what’ya gonna do? Hopefully San Francisco can lead the way on some really cool and forward thinking thought crime legislation.