Despite Progressive Policies, S.F. Police, Public at Odds

In a city where questioning authority is a civic sport, where street demonstrations are an everyday event, and where activists will even pack Library Commission hearings to denounce public officials, it has never been easy to be a cop.

But lately, officers say, it has become nightmarish. Tensions are so high that one police union official calls his city the toughest place in the nation to be pounding a beat.

“It’s without a doubt the most difficult city in America to be a cop,” said Gary DeLagnes, vice president of the police officers’ union, a 20-year San Francisco police veteran and the subject of dozens of citizens’ complaints. “Cops are finally saying: You know what? We’ve had it.”

The war between San Francisco, a town famed for its tolerance, and its Police Department erupted two years ago when a black parolee suspected in a burglary died in custody after a fight with several officers.

The death of Aaron Williams unleashed racial tensions many believed did not exist in their town and culminated in calls for far-reaching reforms of the department’s disciplinary system, hiring practices, arrest policies and training programs.

On paper, the city’s 2,000-member Police Department is one of the nation’s most progressive. It has strong civilian oversight, and policies promoting everything from community policing to the aggressive recruitment of gays and lesbians.

Reflecting the liberal nature of the city it protects, the department long ago rejected the paramilitary model of the Los Angeles Police Department. There is no spit and polish here. Instead, men and women alike sport earrings, wear their hair long and their uniforms casual.

“We encourage our officers to be individualistic,” said Sherman Ackerson, a 25-year veteran of the force who is now a public affairs officer. “We’re looking for problem-solvers.”

Officers have for years received cultural sensitivity training in the academy, including lectures from representatives of the city’s myriad ethnic groups and have taken trips to such sites as the Museum of Tolerance, the Holocaust museum in Los Angeles. Once on the street, officers are encouraged to build ties with the neighborhoods they police. They patrol on foot, on bicycles and on horseback.

Although the city is a compact 42 square miles, with 750,000 residents, it maintains 10 district stations. Most have recently been remodeled to include community meeting rooms, encouraging police officers and residents to come together.

But scratch beneath these surface reforms, say critics ranging from lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union to members of the county Board of Supervisors, and you find a department that deeply resents the multicultural, tolerant city it operates in.

“There is an old guard, a white, male police union that seems to be the barrier to modernizing this Police Department,” said John Crew, an ACLU attorney who has spent 14 years dealing with police issues in San Francisco.

A Hail of Criticism From Rights Activists

Since Williams’ death, the department has been grilled on its policies in public hearings before the Board of Supervisors, accused of harboring rogue officers and of resisting reforms.

Police officers have faced a hail of criticism from civil rights activists and elected officials for using too much force, too often, in making arrests. On the street, officers sometimes find themselves being videotaped by citizens determined to document what they see as police brutality.

In fact, the head of the city agency charged with overseeing the police says she would like to have every interaction between officers and citizens videotaped.

Critics say they are pushing the department hard because they see San Francisco as leading a nationwide trend toward greater civilian oversight of police departments, just as the city has been on the cutting edge of so many other social and political issues.

Police officers see themselves as victims of citizen oversight gone berserk.

“It’s not to say that we don’t make mistakes,” DeLagnes said. “But it is getting so every time you go to a dispute here, you take somebody on, you have 15 citizens screaming at you, taking pictures of you. It is a feeling of sort of being on an island. We have no faith in the Police Commission, no faith in the Office of Citizens Complaints, no faith in [the department’s] Management Control.”

The department’s critics respond in kind.

“You’re talking about a Police Department that has some real trigger-happy people, and they don’t get in trouble,” said Van Jones, a fiery young civil rights attorney who has launched a hotline for victims of police mistreatment.

“I think that San Francisco prides itself on its liberal image and wants to cover up the treatment of certain people. It likes to think of itself as this shiny castle on the hill, but it is a dungeon as far as treatment of certain people is concerned.”

Although San Francisco’s police troubles have not drawn the sort of national attention that was focused on the LAPD in the wake of the Rodney G. King beating and the O.J. Simpson murder trial, officers and their critics say this department operates under a level of day-to-day scrutiny unheard of in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles has no independent office of citizen complaints and, critics of San Francisco police acknowledge, the LAPD also operates in a culture far more willing to accept policing.

“Any police department is a mismatch with this city,” said Gerard Koskovich, a gay activist who closely monitors cases of police misconduct. “The conventional thinking about police departments doesn’t sit well with San Francisco, a city that welcomes eccentricity, personal freedom and personal expression. There is a public culture here that appears to many people with a more strait-laced attitude to border on disorder.”

Its very nature makes San Francisco a good test case for police reform nationwide, some experts believe.

“If you can’t reform a department with two progressive men at the top and a progressive mayor, maybe you can’t reform police departments,” said John Burris, an Oakland-based defense lawyer who has represented dozens of defendants in cases against the Oakland and San Francisco police departments. “This is a very important laboratory test for other big city departments.”

Burris says San Francisco’s commitment to strong civilian oversight is due to the political clout of a well-organized, relatively wealthy gay community. It is a community with a history of clashing with police.

Gays remember the days when police would routinely roust them from bars and bathhouses.

“If it was just about blacks and Hispanics, as it is in other big cities, this level of civilian oversight wouldn’t have happened,” Burris said. “The gay community in San Francisco is the lifeblood of the reform effort there.”

Brown Promised to Clean Up Department

In his inaugural speech 18 months ago, Mayor Willie Brown--endorsed by the police union during his campaign--promised to clean up the department, pledging it would be “representative and reflective of the people, comfortable with the people, understanding the language, understanding the soul of this city in every respect.”

Brown took some early steps that cheered the department’s critics and alarmed some officers.

He appointed the first Asian American to head a big city department--police veteran Fred Lau. He named the city’s first black deputy chief, Earl Sanders, as the second in command.

Rank-and-file officers view Lau as fair-minded, but weak. Sanders, a storied homicide detective, is controversial because for years he served as an expert witness against police officers in suits alleging excessive force.

In an interview, Sanders said he and Lau are determined to weed out the bad officers that make up what he estimates to be about 2% of the force.

The mayor also installed a lesbian civil rights attorney, Mary Dunlap, as head of the independent Office of Citizens Complaints, and, over the protests of the police union, named a black lesbian activist, Pat Norman, as head of the Police Commission.

Dunlap and Norman receive high marks from some civil rights activists, but Jones points out that the Office of Citizens Complaints still receives about 1,200 complaints annually and the number appears to be rising. (By comparison, the LAPD, which polices a city with almost five times the population of San Francisco, receives fewer than half as many complaints each year, department records indicate.)

Too many officers, critics say, are working to undermine the strong civilian review system by failing to fully cooperate with the Office of Citizens Complaints and by funding top-drawer legal defenses for every officer accused of misconduct. Too many police officers are willing to tolerate out-of-control officers who use excessive force, particularly against gays, blacks and Latinos.

Dead Man Seen as Local Rodney King

The fault line between the department and its critics began to crack open June 4, 1995. That was when Williams, high on cocaine, resisted arrest by several officers who responded to a break-in at a veterinary office, according to transcripts from the Police Commission’s disciplinary hearing.

When the fight was over, a handcuffed Williams, whom eyewitnesses said was kicked, pummeled and repeatedly pepper-sprayed by officers as he struggled wildly in the street, was stretched face-down in a police van for the five-minute drive to a police station. When taken from the van, Williams was not breathing. He was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.

The county coroner ruled that Williams died of heart failure brought on by acute cocaine poisoning, and that he suffered only superficial scratches and bruises in his struggle with the officers.

But many in the black community regarded Williams as San Francisco’s Rodney King, a victim of out-of-control officers. They demanded that the initial officer on the scene, Marc Andaya, be fired and criminally prosecuted for allegedly kicking Williams in the head while he was handcuffed.

For officers, Andaya became the symbol of abuse they thought they were suffering at the hands of political activists run amok.

Clothilde Hewlett, then the longest-serving member of the Police Commission, was amazed at the passions the case unleashed.

“At one point, a man just stood up and kept shouting at me, over and over: ‘I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” recalled Hewlett, a black attorney.

Hewlett voted with commission Chairman John Keker, a prominent defense attorney, against finding Andaya guilty of using excessive force. With only four of five commissioners present, the charges against the officer were dismissed.

“It was political suicide,” Hewlett said of her vote. “But I was looking beyond my own political future, to making this world a better world in the future.”

Brown publicly criticized Hewlett and Keker after the Andaya hearing. Both subsequently resigned from the commission and now believe that the case has polarized the police and its critics.

“Marc Andaya and Aaron Williams have become poster boys for the respective sides in this city,” Keker said.

Since Keker and Hewlett resigned, a newly reconstituted commission appointed by the mayor found Andaya guilty of lying on his 1994 application to the department, and he was fired.

Many police officers feel demoralized by the relentless scrutiny and what they view as Andaya’s politically motivated firing.

But their critics say the department has a long way to go before it can truly claim to practice enlightened policing.

Dunlap, the head of Office of Citizens Complaints, said her department is beefing up its 25-member staff and publicizing its existence throughout the city.

“Do we have some brutal cops in the department whom we want to get rid of? Yes,” Dunlap said. “The Police Commission traditionally operated poorly. This agency operated poorly.

“How often in the history of the department has an officer been terminated as a result of misconduct? Almost never,” she said. “There’s something wrong with that.”

Now, Dunlap said, both her office and the commission have the ability and the will to clean up the department.

Out on the streets, however, some officers feel far removed from the political slugfest.

Officers Feel at Home in Rough Area

In Bayview-Hunter’s Point, one of the city’s roughest neighborhoods, Officers Melvin Thornton and James Lewis keep pumping up and down the steep hills on battered 21-speed bicycles, just as they have done for the last five years. They feel good about the job they are doing.

“There’s not a hill in San Francisco that me and Jimmy can’t climb,” boasts the 47-year-old Thornton, a wiry man who gobbles vitamin pills and drinks bottled water as he patrols.

“The dope dealers hate it because we can get around faster and come up on them quietly,” Thornton said. “But most of the people love us. We’re out there with them.”

Trading high-fives with people on the streets they patrol, Thornton and Lewis say, they feel at home.

“We haven’t had any of that negativity shown to us,” said Lewis, a tall, muscular man who sports a diamond stud in one ear. “I don’t remember anyone coming in our faces, making the Aaron Williams case an issue.”

Instead, Lewis said, residents complain to him about the lack of police presence in their high-crime neighborhood, and welcome him and his partner when they see them coming.

Wheeling his bicycle down the halls of Bret Harte Elementary School, where he mentors at-risk children four hours a week, Lewis is greeted fondly by young boys.

“He is wonderful,” Principal Cheryl Curtis said. “He’s viewed as a friend and that’s what we want. Some of the officers who have worked in the community haven’t seen themselves as servants but as jury and judge.”

Now, Curtis said, when students who have worked with Lewis transfer out of the school, their parents often call and ask whether they might come back for the weekly meetings with the officer.

Such signs of progress, Ackerson said, should persuade officers and their critics that things are indeed getting better.

“I tell cops who complain about the way things are now to have some perspective,” Ackerson said. “I remind them of where we are, and how things used to be. Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, we had the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Every single district station was bombed. Cops were being shot. You never told your neighbors you were a San Francisco police officer.”

Now, Ackerson said, the attacks on the department are far more civilized.

“We have the Bolshevik regulars barking at Police Commission hearings, sure,” he said. “But I still think it’s better this way.”