D.A. strikes back at police chief in dispute
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Tuesday that his office would continue investigating police shootings and other serious uses of force by officers, in spite of Police Chief Bill Scott’s decision last week to sever an agreement between the two agencies.
The agreement, ratified in 2019 and renewed last year, makes the District Attorney’s Office the lead investigative agency in police use-of-force cases and spells out how police and prosecutors will share information during those investigations.
“At the outset, I want to be clear: your decision to walk away from this agreement will not stop the District Attorney’s Office from working to protect the residents of San Francisco harmed by police violence,” Boudin wrote in a sharply worded letter to Scott.
How investigations of police shootings and other use-offorce incidents would be conducted without the agreement remained unclear, but Boudin wrote that “there is no doubt that a termination of the (agreement) will make it more challenging for us to investigate instances of police violence,” thereby damaging the public’s trust in law enforcement.
The dispute between San Francisco’s two most powerful law enforcement officials flared up as a controversial trial of a police officer began — the first in a series of prosecutions Boudin is waging against officers charged with using excessive force. In this case, Officer Terrance Stangel is accused of needlessly striking a man with a baton, causing serious injuries.
In the run-up to the trial, investigator Magen Hayashi
testified that prosecutors pressured her to withhold evidence favorable to Stangel — statements from a witness who said the man Stangel is accused of striking, Dacari Spiers, was assaulting his girlfriend.
Hayashi said under oath that she was repeatedly told the relationship between the district attorney and the Police Department is “not a two-way street,” despite language in the 2021 agreement that required sharing of information between police and the D.A. office’s investigators.
The judge overseeing the case said no significant evidence appeared to have been suppressed.
Hayashi’s statements prompted Scott to break away from the agreement. An SFPD spokesperson called Hayashi’s testimony “a whistle-blower allegation by a D.A.’s office investigator against assistant D.A.s for workplace retaliation.”
But Boudin wrote in his letter his office worked in accordance with the terms of the agreement during the investigation — as they existed in 2019. That version was in effect at the time and did not require investigators to disclose all evidence to police until a prosecution was complete. That changed when the agreement was revised in 2021, Boudin wrote, when Scott requested new language “to require rolling disclosure of evidence.”
Boudin denied that his office had violated the agreement.
The D.A. also pushed back against Hayashi’s allegations that she was pressured, saying she and her attorney had not presented evidence to support this claim.
Boudin concluded the letter by raising concerns about “the adequacy of internal discipline processes” at the Police Department, where Stangel remains employed. To Boudin, the absence of administrative discipline in this case underscored the need for another layer of accountability.
Boudin’s letter was also sent to the city’s police commission, the policysetting body for the police department. The commissioners are expected to discuss Scott’s decision to sever the agreement — without consulting them — during their scheduled meeting on Wednesday.