A widening rift made public last week between the San Francisco Police Department and district attorney over who leads investigations into officers’ shootings and other serious uses of force did not appear to narrow despite prolonged debate at the city’s police commission meeting Wednesday night that stretched into Thursday morning.
The meeting was the first opportunity for the oversight commission to address, in its agenda, the controversy since Police Chief William Scott announced canceling a groundbreaking three-year-old agreement he helped craft that puts the district attorney’s office in charge of controversial investigations.
“We need to find a way to come back to the table,” Commission President Malia Cohen said at the outset of the debate. “It’s been a week. I’m hopeful that cooler heads will prevail.”
Scott reiterated his reasoning, which he said over and over has nothing to do with influencing the ongoing jury trial in which SFPD Officer Terrance Stangel faces assault, battery and other felony charges for the 2019 beating of a Black man in response to 911 calls reporting domestic violence. Pretrial testimony in that case from a district attorney’s investigator, however, led to what the police chief described as a “collapse in trust” that reached a “breaking point” that has “catastrophically damaged the confidence” of city police officers in the district attorney’s investigations.
Scott was referring only in part to the explosive Jan. 27 testimony from district attorney investigator Magen Hayashi that she felt pressured to omit information and leave police out of a follow-up interview of a 911 caller who reported domestic violence in the Stangel case. The chief pointed to a litany of other alleged violations of the memorandum of understanding, or MOU, that included delayed information in other cases and the failure of the district attorney to coordinate with police when charging an officer that led to a scramble to disarm and remove officers from public contact after they were facing felonies.
“The men and women of this department and the nonbinary members of this department, when they’re telling me that this is a crisis, when they’re telling me that our faith in this system, this investigative process is shaken, I think that should be listened to,” Scott said. “I think that is important.”
The police chief also referenced a wrongful termination lawsuit brought in November by Hayashi’s former boss, former district attorney’s independent investigations bureau Lieutenant Jeffrey Pailet. The lawsuit alleges Pailet was fired after he pushed back against attorneys in the office for pressuring investigators to “include false, misleading and/or misrepresented information and/or exclude relevant information, in its search warrants and supporting warrant affidavits to be attested to by SFDA investigators in violation of law.”
That allegedly happened not only in the Terrance Stangel prosecution, but also in a pending case charging SFPD Officer Kenneth Cha with manslaughter for the 2017 shooting of Sean Moore.
Commissioners did not appear convinced by Scott’s expanded list of grievances, though.
“You blindsided us,” Commissioner John Hamasaki said of Scott’s sudden press release announcing he would cancel the agreement with the DA’s office last week. “You’re again blindsiding us.”