San Francisco's Blue Balls Problem

Left: "The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress!"

It seems that this city has to have a police scandal of some kind every few years, which is then used to try and pry some changes inside a hidebound department, but usually only ends up with the replacement of a politically hapless police chief.

The newest scandal, of course, is about a series of blue humor videos produced for a Christmas party at Bayview station. The videos feature a number of sociocultural stereotypes reinforced by the basic nature of police work. The police officer/videographer made the mistake of putting some of the more humorous clips on a website, and then the leaks to the press and Mayor’s Office came-a-flowing.

There is nothing new about this phenomenon, nor about political bluenoses making a scandal out of it. What is truly unfortunate about this particular case is the timing, which seems rather deliberate.

Many people who are not police officers will find some of the imagery in these videos offensive. The question comes however, whether it should even be judged by standards outside the environment of what police work has become:

Excerpts from "You Might Be A Cop If..." You believe that 25% of people are a waste of protoplasm. You identify a negative "teeth to tattoo" ratio just by looking at a person. You find humor in other people's stupidity. You have ever wanted to hold a seminar entitled "Suicide, get it right the first time." You believe that "too stupid to live" should be a valid verdict. You have ever had to put the phone on hold, so you could laugh uncontrollably. You walk into places and people think it's high comedy to seize a co-worker and shout "they've come to get you, bill or fred, or whoever." People shout "I didn't do it!" when you walk into a room and they think it's original and hugely funny.

Police work by its very nature breeds both pathos and cynicism. In contrast, politics tends to ignore pathos and feed off of cynicism.

There is a bigger problem at work here, however. Last week, the mayor’s office pulled a boner its continuing struggle to implement “community policing” in San Francisco. As reported in the Sentinel, top aides agreed to policy recommendations made by what is essentially a constituency satisfaction committee, and they did this without the mayor’s or police chief’s knowledge. The recommendations not only seem to hark back to the old community relations model of police appeasement of pressure groups without actually changing police practices, they appear to undermine the very chain of command structure within the stations. This turkey was apparently accepted by mayoral aides who were a bit too eager to please and should know better. Chief Heather Fong rightly decided to reject the proposal, and the Mayor appears to have concurred with her decision.

This is a big issue. Much bigger than the tempest in the toilet bowl currently churning on our front pages. And that issue leads to even bigger issues.

The first issue is that the SFPD suffers from very specific institutional problems, which keep it alienated from the public it’s supposed to be policing, and keep it from developing innovative leadership and implementing modern policing strategies.

Much of this is caused by the reactionary politics of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, which represents all officers up to the Deputy Chief level. That should no longer be the case. Police officers from the rank of Lieutenant on up should be Members of the Municipal Executives Association, not the POA. This divorces police leadership from the reactionary concerns of line officers en masse and also allows the POA to free itself up to advocate for police working conditions as opposed to focusing on the arcane politics of agency leadership. It also allows police leadership to develop closer ties to the leadership of other city departments, and get a better feel for where crime impacts government.

Another big problem is the apparent lack of agency leadership with experience from outside SFPD. Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Here comes the ghost of Charles Gain.” Not necessarily. The fact is Newsom might’ve been better off naming either Heather Fong or Greg Suhr as Chief at the beginning of his term as Mayor and bringing in an outsider as head of Patrol Division, such as former Irvine Chief Mike Berkow, who is now head of Professional Standards at the LAPD. Instead, Newsom blindly put his support behind Alex Fagan, who was already under fire for his son’s involvement in Fajitagate. When Chief Fagan himself imploded, Newsom (and Fong) were left at further political disadvantage.

Left: Charles Gain's (center, with Cecil Williams and Jim Jones on the right) ideological attempts to reform the SFPD are permanently associated in the mind of SFPD officers with the chaos of the '70s

The problem we have now is that we have a Police Chief in Heather Fong who knows and wants to do the right things, but is politically ineffectual. She is surrounded by enemies and knows it, and it limits her effectiveness. That fact that she put her foot down on the political sideshow in the Western Addition is promising. But people keep asking how long she can last.

The final problem is that Police managers and politicians in San Francisco need to understand exactly what “Community Policing” is supposed to be. It’s pretty clear that they don’t. Every program SFPD has enacted in this area, including current ones, are based upon the old “Community Relations” model and heavily gatekeeper driven. But THAT issue deserves a column of its own. Don’t worry, it’s coming.