From Seattle writer and consultant Matt Rosenberg...: San Francisco Police Video Flap Is A Travesty

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San Francisco Police Video Flap Is A Travesty

December 11, 2005

As I noted in this recent post, San Francisco Police Chief Heather Fong last month acknowledged the department is short some 264 sworn officers; and the SF Chron noted in the same article that SF police are also 95 short of the budgeted 302 inspectors, or detectives. With crime exceeding national averages in all but one category, in most cases by quite large margins, San Francisco's police need all the help they can get. But instead, they're now getting political abuse from the highest levels of city government, over an admittedly dumb bunch of private videos some officers made.

Twenty-four San Francisco cops, most of whom worked at the Bayview station, have been suspended in connection with the videos, which were intended to be shown at a Christmas party, but rather curiously ended up on an officer's personal Web site instead. Some of the spoof images included police making G-rated gay verbal banter, an officer running over a homeless person, officers ogling female motorists, and officers doing tai chi.

Sophomoric, somewhat insensitive? Yes. But given the city's insufferably self-righteous identity politics and jackbooted enforcement of multiculturalism and all forms of diversity except the political, it should come as no surprise that regular working stiffs in the police and probably fire department too, will every now and then indulge in humorous - to them - emotional steam release.

Not too smart to record it on video, though, as the San Francisco 49ers learned earlier this year. Some letters of reprimand might have been in order for the police involved. Instead we get the city's top officials posturing in extremis.

Chief Heather Fong said Wednesday that the videos were "egregious, shameful and despicable." Mayor Gavin Newsom declared that they were insensitive to women and minority groups. He also said the Police Department's culture needed to be changed, and he ordered the formation of a blue-ribbon commission to try to do that.

Today, the Chron's latest article on the cop video affair breathlessly analyzes Newsom's supposedly savvy political instincts in getting ahead of the perceived public relations crisis by hanging the cops out to dry. However, in a seperate piece, the Chron's political columnists Matier and Ross actually get it right:

Newsom's very vocal call for radical change in the San Francisco Police Department in the wake of the video scandal is a classic example of a politician trying to get out from under a steamroller headed his direction. Only in this case, Newsom jumped into the steamroller's cab and put the pedal to the metal -- bruising more than a few feelings along the way, and maybe even hurting himself in the process. "I know he has to deal with a lot of constituencies in this city," police union president Gary Delagnes said. "But just because of some videos, you don't throw the whole department under the bus for the sake of political expediency."

For all the crap thrown at cops by the media and liberal interest groups, they're vital to our cities and we need to treat them with more respect, including when they screw up. I'm still waiting for some news on easing the police manpower shortage in San Francisco. Maybe they'll get around to that after the blue-ribbon commission on police department culture completes its work.

Myself, I think the culture that needs to be investigated in San Francisco is that of the city's elected officials and voters. Here is a place, after all, where the departing president of the (city-county) Board of Supervisors hires a "graffiti artist" to spray paint the words "Smash The State" on his office walls as he moves out.