A new commission designed to provide civilian oversight for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department has finally started meeting, and already there are signs that the Mayor’s Office is trying to wire the process of hiring an inspector general to run the agency.
The Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board was created by Prop. D, a city Charter Amendment on the Nov. 2020 ballot that Breed did not support. Four of the seven board members are appointed by the supes, and three by the mayor.
The board is tasked with hiring an inspector general, who will put together a staff to investigate complaints against sheriff’s deputies.
But at the first meeting—and in phone calls with board members before the meeting—Paul Henderson, the director of the Department of Police Accountability, has been playing an oversized role in the move to establish a new department.
Henderson works for the Police Commission, which is controlled by the mayor. His record at DPA is far from stellar. From MissionLocal:
The price of investigating nearly 4,000 complaints? Some $7.8 million. The outcome? Three officers received a penalty of a 10-day suspension or harsher outcome, between 2017 and 2021.
If he’s going to help set up the new agency, it’s a reason for concern.
And at the first meeting Monday, it appeared he is prepared to do just that.
In fact, board member Julie Soo, appointed by the mayor, suggested that the board bypass the process of doing a national search for an inspector general and just hire someone Henderson puts forward.
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“I understand you have several candidates who have already been vetted by the [Department of Human Resources],” Soo said. “If we have good candidates we should go to them first.”
Board Member Jayson Wechter, who has spent most of his career working in police oversight, told me that Henderson had called him in advance of the meeting to say he has “a list of two or three candidates” to run the new organization.
At the meeting Wechter said that was “a very bad path. We want to advertise this publicly, not just go with candidates one person knows.”
Wechter argued that the panel should hire a search firm with experience in civilian oversight of law enforcement: “A lot of experts in the field will tell you that,” he said. “I would argue very forcefully for a national search.”
The inspector general, Wechter said, will be setting up from scratch a new department that will be doing civilian oversight for a law-enforcement agency that has never had it. “This is the most important decision this board will make,” he said.
The directors of these agencies tend to stay in place for a long time. If you get a weak inspector general, or someone who isn’t serious about investigating and holding accountable the deputies, the agency will be set up to fail.
That’s been the case in the past with what is now called the DPA; some directors who were not interested in being aggressive about misconduct turned the watchdog into a lapdog.
So what, exactly, is Paul Henderson, who works for a different department, doing showing up at the first meeting of the new board and telling members that they should hire one of his staff?
The only real role he is playing is that, during the Prop. D campaign, he and Sheriff Paul Miyamoto signed a memorandum of understanding putting DPA in charge of investigations into complaints against deputy sheriffs.
The Aug. 21, 2020 letter to Breed describing the arrangement reads like an argument against Prop. D. Despite that move, the measure passed with more than 60 percent of the vote.
DPA has to date produced no reports outlining any disciplinary activity against anyone in the Sheriff’s Office. And, as Deputy City Attorney Jana Clark told the board, the sheriff could end that arrangement at any time.
The new agency will replace DPA. So why would the head of DPA have any role in hiring the new inspector general?
More: Wechter said that in conversations with Henderson he got the impression that the Mayor’s Office had already signed off on a new chief of staff for the office. “Has someone been hired as a staff member [other than the board secretary]?” he asked.
Clark said she would discuss that with the board by email, but “I am not aware than anyone has been hired.”
So the board has met only once, and the agency is in its infancy, and already there are signs that the people who opposed Prop. D and have failed at police accountability want to undermine this effort, too.
