Politics and the Police, 1996
Kevin J. Mullen
Our town is fast relapsing into a state of lawlessness . . . . While the outskirts . . . are infested with drunken Indians, who parade the main roads brandishing drawn knives and insulting unprotected females, life and property are not altogether safe . . . . Had we an alcalde devoted to the interests of the place and people, the holiday sports of the sort of character alluded to would be discontinued.
-- California Star, June 1847
In August 1991, then police chief Willis Casey stood on the steps of City Hall and announced a 6% decline in serious crime in the preceding eight month reporting period. Mayor Art Agnos showed up at the press conference on a mountain bike, praised the department for its work, and noted that the improvements had occurred after former police chief Frank Jordan, his opponent in the coming mayoral race, had left office. Candidate Jordan was quick to reply that the apparent decline was due to a backlog in entering crime information into the computer. In effect, he claimed, the books were being "cooked." Following Jordan's electoral victory, Casey and Agnos were looking for other work, and nary another word was heard about the state of crime statistics.
From the 1847 California Star attack on the town's chief law enforcement officer of that day -- just prior to San Francisco's first municipal election -- to the present, law enforcement has provided more than ample fodder for campaign rhetoric. Police departments, and what they do -- or fail to do -- are always fair game for editorial comment, but election time seems to pull out the stops. This time there are the usual charges by challengers, heralded loudly in the press, about disgraceful failures on the part of the incumbent law enforcement officials from the District Attorney to the Chief of Police.
From the recent spate of stories criticizing the Police Department and its members, one would think the town was going to hell. Not much is being said about the crime rate this time, though, which suggests that crime conditions might just be reasonably well under control. And with the picture of Civic Center's "Camp Agnos" in every voter's minds eye, criticism of the enforcement element of Mayor Jordan's Matrix program is somewhat muted. But that doesn't mean there is nothing to talk about. Reports of failures in interim computers in the City's 911 emergency dispatch system, published a few weeks before the mayoral election, could be expected to raise public hackles.
The emergency dispatch system is a legitimate subject for comment at any time, but if anyone thinks that the timing of the "revelations" in Joan Welsh's lawsuit against Chief Ribera -- with running commentary by former police chief Willis Casey -- doesn't have anything to do with politics, welcome to Wonderland.
In another story, while none of the challengers were quite ready to claim that the police department was out of control, one, for some reason or another, did call for an independent investigation into the department like that conducted by the Christopher Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department following the Rodney King incident. Then came the disclosure, dug out of depositions in the Welsh lawsuit, that almost a decade ago, the Mayor, when chief of police, had not properly pursued an investigation into threats purportedly made by a former police commissioner against himself.
More recently, the American Civil Liberties Union released a study showing that Jordan's police commission failed to conduct public meetings, as required by law, 35% of the time. Little more than a week before the election, ACLU spokesman John Crew, who during the Agnos regime was known in the department as the "Fifth Commissioner" because of his obvious influence over commission affairs, and who attends commission meetings regularly, was "shocked" to find out how often the meetings had been cancelled.
Any of the noted stories would be deserving of publication at any time, but their timing and placement just before an election raises the question of whether people with a political axe to grind are not manipulating the public information system just a bit. After the California Star's candidates prevailed in 1847, not another word was heard of drunken Indians threatening unprotected females. And after this election, although some of the listed topics will no doubt receive continuing attention, others will go the way of the crime statistic "scandal" of 1991.
What ever did happen to that backlog, anyway?