A tumultuous year in Bay Area law enforcement continued last week when Berkeley Police Chief Michael Meehan abruptly resigned after six years on the job.

Meehan won national attention — and rebukes — for a 2012 decision to send an officer to an Oakland Tribune reporter’s home after midnight to try to get him to make changes in an unflattering story. He was also in the news that year for treating the theft of his son’s stolen iPhone as a department priority, assigning 10 officers to the case.

But the years since have seemed quiet — until last month. That’s when an online publication, berkeleyside.com, obtained emails that revealed Meehan was facing withering internal fire from individual officers. A survey completed by more than half of employees of Berkeley PD featured complaints about “weak leadership, low morale, insufficient staffing and inconsistent communication,” berekeleyside.com reported.

Meehan took the criticisms hard, according to the publication, telling staffers he was plainly not doing his job well. Captain Andrew Greenwood will fill in as chief while Berkeley elected leaders decide how to name Meehan’s replacement.

San Francisco loses one chief; Oakland, three

Meehan’s exit comes after months of turmoil in larger neighboring cities.

In May, San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr resigned at the request of Mayor Ed Lee following the third police killing of an unarmed African American since December. Deputy Chief Toney Chaplin was named interim chief.

San Francisco police are also facing a federal probe over the discoveries last year and earlier this year that a total of  17 different officers had sent racist and homophobic text messages.

In June, the Oakland Police Department went through three police chiefs in nine days — aftershocks from a sordid scandal involving a teenage prostitute who goes by the name Celeste Guap (pictured). She told the Bay Area News Group that she had sex with two dozen police officers from five different local departments, in some cases while she was underage. A majority of the officers were from Oakland, including one who committed suicide in 2015 and left a note that triggered an internal probe.

The first chief to go was Sean Whent, who left the Oakland force after 19 years after being viewed as botching the investigation of his officers’ relationship with Guap. Assistant Chief Paul Figueroa lasted two days as interim chief before leaving for unspecified reasons, although Oakland Mayor Libby Shaaf indicated he was not caught up in the scandal and would resume his previous role as an OPD lieutenant. Schaaf then named Bay Area Rapid Transit Deputy Police Chief Ben Fairow as interim chief, but he was gone after a week after city officials learned of a sex scandal from Fairow’s past.

The Oakland Police Department has been run since mid-June by a civilian: City Administrator Sabrina Landreth.

Teen prostitute sues Oakland for $66 million

Guap has sued the city of Oakland for $66 million, likening her treatment by officers to “modern day slavery.” Her sexual encounters with city officers while underage “constitute unlawful forced labor, trafficking into servitude and sex trafficking of a child by force, fraud and coercion and have caused [her] to suffer unimaginable abuse, pain, and suffering that she and her family will endure for the rest of her life,” according to a report on the lawsuit by NBC Bay Area.

Guap was also in the news earlier in September after she pleaded no contest to assaulting a worker at a Florida rehab center that treats drug abuse and sex addiction.

The Oakland police force has been under federal oversight since 2003. The oversight was a requirement stipulated in the settlement of a massive civil rights case involving four OPD officers who allegedly assaulted and planted evidence on 119 plaintiffs. All but one was black.

The affluent city has been roiled three times since December by cases where police fatally shot criminal suspects who didn’t appear to be an immediate threat to police or others nearby.

One consequence was the local Black Lives Matter branch pulling out of the signature event of the Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco over reports that police were going to have a higher presence because of post-Orlando massacre fears.

Black Lives Matter, which was to be an organizational grand marshal for the parade themed “For Racial and Economic Justice,” cited concerns over the San Francisco Police Department’s “recent track record of racist scandal and killings of people of color” and how first responders can be a source of harm to “queer communities of color.”

“The Black Lives Matter network is grateful to the people of San Francisco for choosing us, we choose you too,” said Malkia Cyril, a member of Black Lives Matter, in a press release. “As queer people of color, we are disproportionately targeted by both vigilante and police violence.”

That’s from an account in the Los Angeles Times.

Police union wary of S.F. reforms

This weekend flap came after the San Francisco Police Commission took an extraordinary step last week to impose formal limits on officers’ use of force. 

The amended policy calls for the use of “minimal” force in dealing with suspects, not “reasonable” force, which is the standard with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court. It also formally underscored the importance of officers using “de-escalation” techniques in incidents with members of the public that appear to have the potential for violence.

In negotiations with the ACLU, city leaders, the Public Defenders Office and other community groups, the San Francisco Police Officers Association strongly objected to the “minimal” force requirement. But the police union ended up agreeing not to oppose the change — for now.

The union has already emphasized it will never agree to a ban on the use of carotid restraint holds or to sharp new limits on shooting at moving vehicles.

This matters because collective bargaining laws still give the police union the chance to affect final policies.

Police may stop doing ‘anything but taking reports’

The fatal shooting of an unarmed criminal suspect in mid-May led to Police Chief Suhr’s forced resignation and his replacement on a temporary basis by one of his top aides, Deputy Chief Toney Chaplin.

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, who have broken many key stories in police controversies in recent years, released a report that may make it difficult for SFPD to attract a high-profile replacement in a nationwide search.

Morale is so bad among officers convinced that they are being treated unfairly that it could soon affect everyday policing, Matier & Ross wrote.

“The fear is, they aren’t going to do anything but taking reports,” an unnamed San Francisco police union official told the columnists.

Since the protests in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 triggered sharp, sustained criticism of police behavior, crime has gone up in several U.S. cities. The cause or causes are a matter of much dispute. But a National Institute of Justice report this month said it was plausible to see the post-Ferguson criticism affecting how police did their jobs.

But will his resignation quiet the political and social unrest in the city, or will others follow, like Mayor Ed Lee, who is surrounded by allies’ controversy, or Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White, who has been plagued by questions about her leadership and judgement? 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Voter registration in California is surging at a rate not seen since 1980, reports The San Jose Mercury News. While there are likely many factors at play, the Capitol Weekly reports that much of the credit goes to Facebook. 
• As the primary approaches and voters consider Prop. 50, which would give the Legislature the ability to suspend misbehaving lawmakers without pay, Capital Public Radio looks at how the idea came about.  
• “Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, whose father is awaiting sentencing on two felony counts of election fraud, for years has engaged in a complex series of campaign donations involving his parents and the families of other congressional candidates, federal records show,” writes The Sacramento Bee.
• Los Angeles finally opened its subway line to the ocean over the weekend, but its success will be determined by its functionality, which needs some improvement. The LA Weekly has more. 

Assembly:

• In at 1 p.m. A few Budget subcommittee hearings.

Senate:

• In at noon. Appropriations Committee hearing. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog.com @mflemingterp

New followers: @zitununykyda @futuresquares

But Suhr’s abrupt exit isn’t likely to yield a quiet interlude in San Francisco politics. Instead, the question for residents is this: Who will be the next city big shot to be taken down?

Mayor Lee is seen as a likely target of corruption investigations by both the FBI and San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon.

The FBI’s long-running “Operation Whitesuit” probe focuses on political bribery, Chinese-American gangs, money laundering and booze- and gun-running. It has already yielded criminal convictions against now-former San Francisco state Sen. Leland Yee,  former San Francisco school board president Keith Jackson and its initial target, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a legendary gang figure who claimed to have gone on the straight and narrow in recent years.

Spinning bribery web around mayor?

Chow and Lee have long had many mutual acquaintances and were seen together on many occasions at city banquets and civic functions, leading to speculation about improprieties. But it was only in late January that a specific law-enforcement threat to Lee emerged. That’s when Gascon — apparently working in concert with the FBI — arrested two former employees with the city’s Human Rights Commission on allegations that they took bribes to set up meetings with Lee. An undercover FBI agent says that Nazly Mohajer, a former agency commissioner, and Zula Jones, a former staffer, took $20,000 from him in 2011.

Lee has flatly denied any wrongdoing. But he admitted meeting the undercover agent. Meanwhile, authorities also have a tape in which Mohajer and Jones can be heard talking about ways to use the apparent bribe to pay off Lee’s 2011 campaign debts without drawing attention.

Former city Supervisor Bevan Dufty and other Lee allies have floated the theory that he is the victim in the case, done in by overzealous, imprudent aides. But Gascon didn’t just accuse Mohajer and Jones of bribery and money-laundering. He also filed related charges against Jackson, the already-convicted school board president — clearly trying to depict the alleged bribery as part of the larger criminal conspiracy that the FBI’s been targeting for many years.

Fire chief accused of ignoring severe problems

But Schur and Lee aren’t the only San Francisco leaders in hot water. Joanne Hayes-White, the longest-serving fire chief, is accused of ignoring public concerns and of borderline incompetence.

Hayes-White joined the San Francisco Fire Department in 1990 and quickly moved up the ranks, becoming chief in 2004. Her defenders depict criticism of her as politically driven, especially by a fire union with whom she has locked horns.

But a KQED report last month — while noting the union’s key role in the criticism of the chief — pointed to several areas of legitimate concern. The short list:

• According to a 2015 grand jury report, Hayes-White has done a weak job of making sure emergency-response times meet acceptable standards and has failed for years to address the reason for delays: an aging ambulance fleet prone to breaking down.
• Her department has a backlog of investigations on cases large and small, with some dating back four years. Hayes-White is blamed for refusing to listen to outside voices who say she needs to beef up her arson task force.
• Her department is accused of doing a bad job of regularly performing adequate safety checks on San Francisco’s hundreds of older apartment buildings. Hayes-White’s top aide admitted problems after a fatal four-alarm fire in the Mission District in January 2015.

But she had little choice after a bombshell San Francisco Chronicle investigation documented that the building had passed its most recent safety inspection in August 2014 despite a number of obvious warning signs. At the building, the newspaper wrote, “fire inspectors found safety violations for years — missing fire extinguishers, blocked fire escapes, inoperable smoke alarms and locked exits … . The building also had no fire alarm or sprinkler system because state and local laws don’t require those protections for older buildings with more than 16 apartments. And though the building had a required smoke alarm that could have alerted tenants to the fire, it never sounded. Residents told The Chronicle that someone disabled it after repeated false alarms.”

Hayes-White’s defenders depict the criticism as being ginned up by the fire union to gain advantage in ongoing debates about pay, staffing and hiring. But KQED’s reporting suggests that there is more in play than just political jousting.

Over the last 16 months the department has come under criticism for doing a weak job of documenting fire safety violations in the city’s older apartment buildings after a series of deadly fires. It has also come under scrutiny for moving too slowly to reduce a backlog of hundreds of fire investigations going back several years.

Fire chief for 12 years as problems built

Hayes-White, who was appointed fire chief in 2004 and by some accounts is the longest-serving fire chief of a large city in the U.S., can’t say she inherited her department’s problems. A San Francisco native, she joined the department in 1990 after graduating from the University of Santa Clara and quickly moved up the ranks, being promoted to lieutenant in 1993, captain in 1996 and then acting battalion chief that same year.

During her 26 years with SFPD, the quality of department management has been increasingly questioned.

Last June, a civil grand jury report found, among other things, the Fire Department’s emergency medical response times fail to meet state standards, in part because of “a chronic lack of serviceable ambulances.” The grand jury also found that half the department’s ambulance fleet exceeded its expected service life of 10 years and that the agency lacks a strategic plan for replacing ambulances and other emergency equipment. …

One high-profile example of the equipment problems: the failure of the department’s “jaws of life” devices after last November’s tour bus crash in Union Square.

The complex tools, used to cut open vehicles in which victims are trapped, were unable to cut through the high-grade steel of vehicles involved in the accident.

That’s also from KQED.

Mayor and police chief also have many critics

Meanwhile, Mayor Lee appears to be the ultimate target of an influence-peddling corruption investigation by San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon that is apparently piggybacking on information from the far-reaching FBI probe that led to the corruption convictions of former state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, and legendary Chinatown gang figure Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, among others. In January, Gascon arrested two former employees of the city’s Human Rights Commission and alleged they had tried to sell access to Lee to an undercover agent.

Police Chief Suhr faces multiple problems. On Feb. 1, the Justice Department launched a probe into his department after complaints from the ACLU and African-American groups over police violence. In December, cellphone videos caught officers shooting to death Mario Woods, a 26-year-old crime suspect, as he walked away from them toward an open area. The contention that Woods was an immediate threat to public safety has drawn broad ridicule.

Suhr has faced criticism from both sides: from officers who say he doesn’t stick up for them in an era in which police feel under siege and from activists who say he has condoned bad behavior for years.

Suhr is also caught in the middle in a scandal that began a year ago over text messages showing officers using racist and racially charged language. Activists wants the 14 officers involved to be fired. Suhr’s most prominent response has been to ask his officers to make a seven-point pledge not to be racist and intolerant.

But a fresh round of racist texts from another group of officers emerged late last month, prompting national coverage of the disarray within Suhr’s department. Gascon, the DA, told The New York Times that he had profound questions about the SFPD’s internal culture, given that “officers involved in the new case were sending offensive texts even as the city investigated 14 of their colleagues last year for sending and receiving similar messages.”

Yee was not the initial target of what has been described as a “massive sting operation” launched by the Justice Department centering on Bay Area politics. Instead, he was only ensnared in a bribery probe involving a fake, FBI-created software firm seeking government contracts, which led to the discovery of his other crimes.

Meanwhile, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon is building off the FBI’s probe with his own prosecutions. In late January, he announced that two former employees with the city’s Human Rights Commission had been arrested for allegedly trying to sell access to Mayor Ed Lee. Nazly Mohajer, a former agency commissioner, and Zula Jones, a former staffer, allegedly took $20,000 from an undercover agent.

Although he met with the undercover agent, Mayor Lee has strenuously denied any role in the alleged bribery and money-laundering. But the fact that Mohajer and Jones were taped discussing how to break the money into smaller amounts to surreptitiously pay off Lee’s 2011 campaign debts has added to the loud whispering campaign that suggests the San Francisco mayor may be the FBI’s — and/or Gascon’s — ultimate target.

The FBI’s initial target was Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a leader of a San Francisco-based gang that had ties to Chinese business groups and politicians, including Lee. Chow was convicted in January on federal racketeering charges after his defense — claiming to be a reformed ex-criminal turned humanitarian and businessman — fell short.

It is not clear what sort of arrangement that the FBI and Gascon have — whether certain crimes will be prosecuted by the Justice Department and others by the San Francisco DA. But the most intense focus of the past month has been on Gascon’s attempts to keep a file of evidence related to the charges announced in January from being disclosed. He has so far persuaded a federal judge to keep it under wraps, arguing that its disclosure would reveal undercover agents and ruin promising corruption investigations.

“The evidence is a time bomb waiting to explode,” declared city Public Defender Jeff Adachi, who speculated that Lee or a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors might be implicated.

Lee appears to think he’s the target, or a target, of the investigations. According to campaign records, he spent $19,000 of his political funds last year on criminal defense attorneys. This year, he’s used allies to depict Gascon as launching a politically motivated smear effort.

Democratic strategist Nathan Ballard described Gascon as a craven publicity hound in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times.

“If the DA has the goods on Mayor Lee, he already would have come out with it. There has never been one credibly sourced allegation of pay-to-play being brought forward,” Ballard told the Times.

But Gascon is winning plaudits from San Francisco’s alternative media, which has long seen the city as a hotbed of corruption and phony progressives.

The SF Weekly recently praised the Cuban-American DA for blasting Police Chief Greg Suhr — and Mayor Lee — for allegedly blocking attempts to reduce misconduct within San Francisco police ranks. The department has drawn sharp criticism since the Dec. 2 shooting death of stabbing suspect Mario Woods.

Though police had credible reason to believe Woods was armed and dangerous, cellphone video of him being shot as he walked away from officers has generated raucous protests.

Now the U.S. Justice Department has concluded that there is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing that it is going to review SFPD and its history. Yahoo News has details:

“We will examine the San Francisco Police Department’s current operational policies, training practices and accountability systems, and help identify key areas for improvement going forward,” Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a statement.

 

At the conclusion of the review, the Justice Department will give San Francisco police a list of best practices it can follow to ensure fairness in its interactions with citizens.

 

San Francisco police will then report back to the Justice Department on a periodic basis to show it is following the practices, a Justice Department official said.

The ACLU of Northern California and African American activists welcomed the announcement.

Officers asked to pledge not to be racists

Meanwhile, San Francisco police are also being called out, in essence, by their chief, who is asking them to pledge to not act like racists, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

“People that would use racial epithets, slurs and things like that clearly fall below the minimum standard of being a police officer,” Police Chief Greg Suhr [said]. “A cop needs to show character and point that out.”

Suhr noted that a website — notonmywatchsfpd.org — had been launched to emphasize what he expects out of his officers. This is from its “About” description:

SFPD created the Not On My Watch initiative … in an effort to improve relationships between police officers and the diverse communities they serve.

 

“This first-of-its-kind pledge is about recognizing that we need to guard against our own implicit biases,” said SFPD Chief Greg Suhr, “and to call out anyone who is intolerant or bigoted.”

 

Since 2011, SFPD policy has prohibited biased policing. The inspiration for the Not On My Watch project came from SFPD Sergeant Yulanda Williams, president of Officers for Justice. “It tells everyone that I am going to treat them with dignity and respect,” said Sgt. Williams. “And at the same time, we’re encouraging them to trust us, respect us and allow us to help them by delivering the type of police service that makes for viable, stable communities.”

Selling police chief as idealist may prove difficult

This initiative may play well in San Francisco and nationallly, but Suhr’s critics will question his sincerity and idealism. He’s had to deal with two rounds of harsh news coverage since last summer.

The city had to spend nearly $1.5 million to defend him from a whistleblower’s lawsuit with embarrassing allegations and persuasive evidence that Suhr mishandled a domestic violence case to help a friend.

He’s also accused of giving special breaks to a family friend in his attempt to secure a job as a San Francisco officer.

By Chris Reed

Unlike officials in New York, Washington and some other cities in the Northeast, elected leaders and law-enforcement officials in California took a generally measured and in some cases muted response to Monday’s terrorist attack at the iconic Boston Marathon.

The most specific expressions of alarm and concern came in San Francisco, which hosts the locally popular Bay to Breakers race on May 19 and the America’s Cup international sailing competition this summer and fall. Mayor Ed Lee and Police Chief Greg Suhr vowed to closely review security plans for the events and make sure they were strong. Suhr even compared his level of wariness over what the future might hold to where it was on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.

In Sacramento, organizers of popular running events such as the California International Marathon and the Komen Race for the Cure reviewed security plans. Marathon director John Mansoor told the Sacramento Bee that what happened in Boston had sent a “shock wave through the running world.”  Mansoor spoke of the difficulty of securing an entire 26-mile marathon route, as opposed to just a race’s start and finish lines.

Upgrades at major events, or no changes at all

Elsewhere in the Golden State, the rhetoric was much more muted.

In Oakland, police said they would have an increased presence in coming days at Oakland A’s and Golden State Warriors games.

In Los Angeles, police officials announced plans for higher-profile security at major events, such as Dodgers games. Airport police confirmed that security had been increased at the Los Angeles, Van Nuys and Ontario airports, which are all under the control of the city of Los Angeles. LAX was the site of a domestic terrorism incident on July 4, 2002, that is rarely mentioned in overviews of homegrown terror.

Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said that events that draw large crowds, starting with but not limited to sporting and entertainment events, would have additional deputies on hand.

In San Diego, officials didn’t disclose any additional security measures. The San Diego police union, however, warned on Twitter of a phone scam called “Donations for the Boston Explosion.”

The Eureka Times-Standard said Humboldt County law enforcement authorities had taken no additional security steps beyond calling for “vigilance.”