A lot has happened since my initial post on the big hoo-hah regarding an in-house San Francisco Police Department video production.

Yesterday a local gay community media outlet, the Bay Area Reporter, carried the story that gay police officers participated in the Police Christmas-party video that stirred up the local brouhaha:

“Yes, there were gay officers in that video, but I’m obviously not going to say who they are,” Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco POA, told the Bay Area Reporter. “They were willing participants. In fact, as I’m looking at this … almost half the officers involved in the video were either black, female, or gay.”

If you want to check out the videos for yourself, go here.

Reaction to this news from the Left was as swift as it was predictable:

Transgender activist Robert Haaland said the fact that women and minorities were involved in the videos proves that simply diversifying a workforce does not eliminate homophobia, sexism, and racism.

“Even in our most diverse work places we can have intense racism and sexism. Attitudes don’t necessarily change,” said Haaland, who believes the videos have provided the city with “an opportunity for reform” and that the system should now be revamped to provide “clear markers for acceptable behavior with clear lines of accountability so that police officers will conduct themselves appropriately.”

[..]

“I’m sure [the police officers involved] all had their sensitivity trainings. They know that videos like this are not meant for the public. That adds a certain illicit quality to it, doing something they know is forbidden and yet that our homophobic and racist and sexist society also permits,” said [UC Professor of Pyschiatry Dan] Karasic.

The solution, according to an editorial in the same edition of the Reporter:

We’d like to see an improvement in the culture of the department that currently impedes openly gay male officers from being promoted past the rank of sergeant – we are unaware of any serving currently. The police force’s diversity is underutilized, and that needs to change, too. Maybe if more minority officers were promoted, they could help change the culture within the department, and bring more empathy to the job. This improved climate, in turn, would boost morale in a more positive way than the seamy videos.

Meanwhile, the officers involved have been hitting back, led by the video’s producer, Officer Andrew Cohen, who retained an entire cohort of high-powered attorneys to defend him and help shore up his public image. Also , the captian of the Bayview station who was featured in the video — Capt. Richard Bruce — has demanded an apology from Police Chief Heather Fong and Mayor Gavin Newsom for what he called “smears” and overreactions to the video by the Chief and the Mayor.

Local online outlet The Wall named Officer Cohen as it’s “Scapegoat of the Week”, and cited the favorable press Cohen has gotten in the past.

The president of the San Francisco Police Union also weighed in:

“I know [the Mayor] has to deal with a lot of constituencies in this city,” police union president Gary Delagnes said. “But just because of some videos, you don’t throw the whole department under the bus for the sake of political expediency.”

Then San Francisco Chronicle media critic Steve Winn chimed in with his view that the whole video flap was really a tempest in a teapot, and the police brass and the politicians were missing the point of the self-parodying and satirical police video entirely:

Much of the blur and static around the police video caper has to do with the unstable nature of humor across the cultural spectrum. Satire and parody, especially, have gotten swept up in an engulfing tide of mockery and scorn. In today’s accelerated media swirl, things no sooner happen in the world than they are minutely minced by everyone from radioheads Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken to the Comedy Central tag team of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert to an army of instant-response bloggers.
[...]
Satire, certainly, can and often should be scalding. The death of Richard Pryor summoned up memories of a consummately gifted comic artist who held back nothing when it came to the hot-button topics of race, drugs or sex, but reserved his most withering scorn for himself. There was, in his work, an underlying humility, a sense of things that mattered being at risk.

At its heart, satire is meant to mend rather than destroy. The ancient Roman writer Horace viewed satire as a means “to tell the truth, laughing.” For John Dryden, the 17th century English poet, “the end of satire is the amendment of vice.”

In other words, according to Winn, the videos, like all satire, are a form of ridicule which is intended to ultimately produce an outcome of reform.

Clearly, Mayor Newsom didn’t see it that way. For his part, the Mayor has defended his response to the video, denying that he and Cheif Fong overreacted or rushed to judgment:

“If this occurred in any business in the private sector, none of us, I think, would criticize the company for taking aggressive and swift action,” Newsom said. “But for some reason, some people have lowered the bar here in San Francisco.

“The bar is so low in San Francisco that people think it’s fun and games to run over an alleged homeless person, to make fun of different races and communities, to make fun of the police chief … to enact skits of people not doing their job,’ Newsom said in describing some of the content in the videos.

Yesterday all 20 of the suspended SFPD officers were cleared to return to work. An investigation and blue-ribbon comission are going to continue to look into the whole matter, and further departmental changes and disciplinary action may be forthcoming.

A couple of final points: Officer Cohen seems nonplussed by all the attention his video is getting. And part of the reason for that seems to be Cohen’s belief that his identity ought to shield him from the business end of the PC buzzsaw:

“I’m a liberal Berkeley Jew with two biracial children, who was raised by a very strong liberal woman,” he said. “I’m not going to be the victim of someone else’s weird notion of political correctness.”

But it’s one of the features of weird notions of political correctness that context, fairness and balance are removed from the equation. It’s our modern version of the Scarlet Letter or the Salem witch trials — once accused, you’re presumed guilty. Period. Never mind your track record as a dedicated cop who’s made a difference nor your “solid liberal credentials.”

Also, Steve Winn’s points about satire and culture are well taken; it’s nice to hear a nuanced cultural view expressed amidst all the yelling. I encourage you to read his excellent piece “Laugh at your Own Risk.”

Also, the Chronicle’s Debra Saunders hits the issue squarely when she points out:

[Police Chief Heather] Fong intoned, “This is a dark day — an extremely dark day — in the history of the San Francisco Police Department for me as a chief to have to stand here and share with you such egregious, shameful and despicable acts” by SFPD members.

You know, I’d save that rhetoric for when a police officer or a civilian is shot — not for a prank video.
[...]
The Special City’s homicide rate is the highest in a decade. The murder toll hit 92 Tuesday. That makes for a dark day in San Francisco.

An SFPD officer added:

Sonia Mariona, a patrol officer, said, “Our hearts are breaking right now, and nobody wants to address that. We are undermanned, we are outgunned, we don’t have support and, at every turn, we are going to be persecuted by our own department.”

Exactly. And that’s just it: whereas the Left in our city seems to see “diversity” and more quotas and community outreach and identity hires and promotions as the “solution” for the situation, the issue runs far deeper and more fundamental than that. For many years now, the city of San Francisco has uttterly failed to take public safety or public sanitation issues seriously. As a result, our police force feels outgunned, overworked, abandoned and persecuted, and this feeling seems to be shared by a wide swath of officers, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation.

Sure, perhaps there are things about Police “culture” that ought to be changed. But I say that it’s the culture of San Francisco — the political culture — that needs to change first and foremost. Let’s see the polticians and the police brass get as worked up over public safety and sanitation as they’ve gotten over these videos.

As Saunders points out:

People dying — that’s serious. And if you want to do something about it, you don’t announce you are going to suspend 20 officers or even one officer — Andrew Cohen, 39, without pay for producing the tapes. Not when you are 264 field officers short of a city mandate.

Let’s get our priorities straight.

December 16th, 2005 | Politics, SF Politics & Culture

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