NEWS > 15 October 2006

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San Francisco Chronicle - CA,
15 October 2006

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S.F. police conduct plan behin

Eight months after Mayor Gavin Newsom vowed to ride "roughshod'' over the Police Department to ensure adoption of a computerized system to track officers' use of force and other conduct, the plan has yet to be submitted to the Police Commission for a vote.

In a February interview, after The Chronicle reported on use of force by San Francisco officers, Newsom said he wanted such a system adopted by the end of the year and added the move was "in the best interest of the department in terms of public confidence and a kind of respect we are hoping to build again ...''

Since then, negotiations over the system's details have not led to a formal agreement by the participants, which include the department, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Police Officers Association.

The proposal, which involves complex technology, has yet to be put out to bid, and the department -- rather than talking about having the system in place by year's end as the mayor pledged -- is now saying it plans to have a pilot program operating before the year is over.

Deputy Police Chief Charles Keohane said the proposed tracking system will soon be presented to the department's command staff and then will be forwarded to the Police Officers Association, which has "meet and confer" rights on any such change.

"The Police Department has been saying it has been working tirelessly on this system for years, but so far it hasn't happened,'' said Commissioner Joe Veronese. "I'd like to see it materialize into an effective policy soon."

Deputy Chief Keohane said the department is moving "at light speed'' -- far faster than some other departments attempting to build similar tracking systems -- and he added he hoped the complete system could be up and running by March.

He added the department is drafting the proposal to put the system out to bid and plans to present the proposed system to the Police Commission soon. In previous meetings, commissioners have voiced strong support for this sort of the system, which was first advocated three years ago by critics, including the city controller's office.

Newsom said in an interview he was "pleased with the progress that has been made and that we will have a pilot by the end of the year. We are within 90 days of an expectation of something that usually takes three to five years in other cities. While all of us would like to have seen it yesterday, one deals with the reality of process in San Francisco on anything that deals with technology.''

Mark Schlosberg, police practices policy director for the ACLU's Northern California branch, said he has been meeting with the department on the tracking system's details and "we're very close.''

The position of the officers' union on the new regulation that will define the tracking system is not known. Keohane said, "The negotiations with the POA are down to the nitty-gritty, and hopefully, all the differences will be ironed out.''

A series of articles in The Chronicle in February reported that about 100 San Francisco officers were responsible for a quarter of the incidents of force logged by the 2,100-officer department from 1996-2004, and that in recent years San Francisco officers had more force allegations filed against them than those in San Jose, Oakland, San Diego and Seattle combined.

The series also found that the department did not have an effective, computerized system for tracking the performance of officers and often failed to intervene with officers who reported using force much more than their peers.

Implementation of the tracking system is one of two major reforms that national and local experts say San Francisco must undertake to improve local policing. The second involves strengthening the Police Commission, which oversees the department.

Tracking system crucial

Law enforcement experts view a computerized tracking system -- which can offer an up-to-date, comprehensive look at an officer's record with a few keystrokes -- as a crucial move that other cities already have embraced.

Police practices experts also say, however, that departments that want to improve officer performance and identify those who need counseling must go beyond that computerization step and change the way they manage officers on the streets.

Such deep, fundamental change is difficult for many departments to achieve, they say. Instead, change often comes because of a scandal or a lawsuit.

"I believe departments are generally incapable of reforming themselves," said Duke University law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, who wrote a report on the Los Angeles Police Department after its Rampart scandal in the late 1990s, in which officers stole drugs and beat and framed citizens.

"Reform usually involves major change, including changing the culture of a department," Chemerinsky said, "and I think it is very difficult to do from within ... absent a major scandal or significant change in personnel."

Police Chief Heather Fong has repeatedly said the department is pressing forward on the tracking system. She also said earlier this year that its officers "are very restrained in when and how they use force'' and use it only when "they must resist the force that is being used against them.''

Early intervention

More than two decades ago, law enforcement agencies began building systems capable of identifying officers with problematic performance, especially excessive use of force.

Departments used a variety of methods to intervene, including counseling and retraining, with the goal of dealing with an officer's problems before discipline became necessary.

The trend toward tracking systems was fueled by a growing awareness that a relatively small group of officers in each agency is typically responsible for a disproportionate amount of the force used on citizens.

The thinking was that if those officers could be identified, counseled, retrained or removed from the street, departments could reduce the use of unnecessary force, citizen complaints and costly lawsuits.

In the mid-1980s, San Francisco began requiring officers to report when they used force on citizens. In the mid-'90s, it also started tracking citizen complaints against individual officers.

Neither system was computerized so that supervisors could perform speedy checks on an officer's record, seeing which officers were logging the most force or quickly comparing citizen complaints with use-of-force logs.

Tracking for promotions

While many departments use tracking systems to warn of problem behavior by officers, the Justice Department says more are expanding their systems to follow positive indicators of officers' behavior -- such as arrests made or commendations -- that may identify those worthy of promotions.

In Pittsburgh, for example, the police department uses its system as a broad management tool, not just to watch for misconduct by its 866 officers.

"Officers know people pay attention to what's in there,'' said Pittsburgh police Cmdr. Linda Barone, speaking of the tracking system. "If they want to be promoted or go to specialized units, if there is nothing in the system that says you have been working at all, it has been told to them: 'Don't bother.' ''

In 1997, Pittsburgh entered into a consent decree with the Justice Department to improve its tracking of officer performance and to take other modernizing steps. Today, it has a comprehensive early intervention system: It requires sergeants to log onto the computer every day and monitor their officers' behavior.

Samuel Walker, one of the nation's top experts on police tracking systems, emphasized that management in a department has to be totally committed to making a system work. "Somebody has to make these things happen," Walker said. "If no one really takes the lead, these reforms won't happen, and unprofessional conduct will continue.''

Good results reported

In some cities, Walker and others report, both use-of-force incidents and citizen complaints decreased following installation of an early intervention system.

San Francisco's department proposes monitoring a greatly expanded list of behavior in addition to citizen complaints, including use of force, officer-involved shootings and discharges, internal affairs and workplace discrimination complaints, civil suits and claims, on-duty accidents and vehicle pursuits.

Newsom's 2006-07 budget includes $575,000 for the intervention system's hardware, software and maintenance costs.

Fong told The Chronicle the new system "will afford essential feedback to those officers who may need guidance or additional training in their duties, provide timely and relevant information to supervisors, and raise the level of professionalism in our department.''

Newsom said while there is some natural concern and resistance among police officers about the changes the system will require, he thinks ultimately everyone, including the rank and file, "benefits because it will allow us in an objective way to analyze data and treat everyone fairly. That builds public trust, and with public trust, comes a stronger department.''

The Police Officers Association did not respond to a Chronicle request for comment on the system. In a recent newsletter to members, association President Gary Delagnes said: "An early intervention system that is fair to all parties and is not seen as much as a punitive tool as a monitoring tool should be implemented as soon as possible.''

Police Commission

Another change that has been urged to improve oversight of San Francisco police officers involves the Police Commission.

For more than a decade, critics, including the San Francisco Bar Association, have said the commission should have its own staff to help it formulate policy.

By law, the commission has the power to fire officers or to impose any suspension longer than 10 days; it also sets the general orders that spell out department policy.

The seven-member commission -- composed of volunteers appointed by the mayor and Board of Supervisors -- now has only a sergeant and a clerk on staff. It relies on the department for reports on policy issues.

After persistent lobbying by police Commissioner Theresa Sparks, the 2006-07 city budget includes $50,000 for a hearing officer and an $89,000 performance auditor who will do commission work but remain a department -- not a commission -- employee.

"We need to look at whether our policies on use of force are strong enough,'' Sparks said. "But until we have staffing resources, we are for all practical purposes ceremonial.''

In Los Angeles, the commission has had a staff of analysts focused on policy issues for more than a decade.

"The benefit of having the independent review and oversight is that the department knows there will be such a review'' of anything it proposes, said Richard Tefank, executive director of the city's Board of Police Commissioners.

At a recent seminar co-chaired by former Police Chief Anthony Ribera and former chief and Mayor Frank Jordan, Schlosberg of the ACLU said additional commission staffing is a critical need.

"The Police Commission is overwhelmed by the issues on its plate," Schlosberg said.

Some witnesses at the seminar said the commissioners would not be so overwhelmed if they didn't have to conduct lengthy hearings on every officer who might deserve more than a 10-day suspension, the maximum that can now be imposed by the police chief.

Fong said in an interview after the seminar: "The chief should have authority to impose suspensions of 45 to 90 days when appropriate."

Difficult prospect

Often, change in a department must be imposed from outside.

After the 1991 Los Angeles police beating of motorist Rodney King, Congress passed a law allowing the Justice Department to file "pattern or practice'' suits for violations of citizens' civil rights.

Since 1997, Justice has used that law to file several lawsuits against police agencies and then hammer out consent decrees to force change.

In some instances, private citizens have sued departments to produce change, winning court-enforced agreements.

In Oakland, the Police Department entered into a settlement in 2003 with 119 citizens who alleged that four officers known as "the Riders'' had beaten or framed them. The settlement paid $10.5 million to the plaintiffs and their lawyers and committed the department to reforms expected to cost $10 million more by 2008.

The reforms include establishing a comprehensive system to track officer behavior and performance, an expanded and more accessible internal affairs bureau to investigate citizen complaints, more sergeants to supervise officers on the streets and changes in the field training program to prevent the assigning of problem officers to train new recruits.

Oakland has found one of the most difficult reforms to comply with has been the tracking system, which the department says it hopes to finish installing late in 2007 -- more than a year after it had hoped. Oakland Police Capt. Paul Figueroa estimates the cost of the system "could easily be $2.5 million to $3 million."

San Francisco has faced no such outside impetus, and city leaders historically have not pushed hard for police reform.

Major reform would be difficult to achieve, said John Keker, a prominent defense attorney who served as Police Commission president under Mayors Art Agnos and Willie Brown.

"San Francisco hasn't had a scandal as grievous as Rampart in L.A. or the Riders in Oakland," said Keker, "and there hasn't been an allegation of organized brutality here -- it's been random.''

Without a major scandal, Keker said, very little can change because no mayor or police chief wants to tangle with the Police Officers Association, which "to some extent runs the department. So nothing happens.''

The Police Officers Association did not respond to requests for comment.

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Article sourced from

San Francisco Chronicle - CA,15 October 2006

S.F. police conduct plan behin

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San Francisco Chronicle - CA,
15 October 2006