Chief and mayor wavering over raid of journalist
Amid growing outrage over the police raid of a journalist, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott and his boss, Mayor London Breed, have delivered similar, carefully crafted messages.
Both have said the officers who brought a sledgehammer to the home of freelancer Bryan Carmody — an effort to find out who leaked a police report on the February death of Public Defender Jeff Adachi — had legal grounds to do so. At the same time, Scott and Breed have been far more hesitant and circumspect when it comes to whether the action was right.
Neither has apologized, nor said the May 10 search was wrong, even though California’s shield law protects journalists from being forced to reveal sources, and specifically bars police from using a search warrant as a workaround.
But they’ve openly wavered. Scott, at a news
conference Tuesday, said his department raided Carmody because he was suspected of conspiring in a theft of the report, but spoke of “lessons to be learned” and stressed he was “not trying to defend our position.” Breed, in a prepared statement three days earlier, defended the search as “legal and warranted” but added, “I am not OK with police raids on reporters. We need to do better.”
To some critics, the stances of the two officials — which have shifted in the face of scrutiny from freedom-of-the-press advocates and some supervisors— reflect an unwillingness to simply admit a mistake.
“At the end of the day, the police chief reports to the mayor,” David Campos, a former San Francisco supervisor and police commissioner, said Wednesday. “Instead of getting into the technicalities, you have to approach it as: ‘The buck stops here.’ If you’re the mayor, it’s probably better to say, ‘This was a mistake. I agree something needs to be done, but this was not the right way of doing it.’ ”
Geoffrey King, a constitutional lawyer and media studies professor at UC Berkeley, said it appeared Scott was “defending the indefensible . ... He’s trying to explain, showing the department acted in good faith, but it’s kind of too late for that.”
On Wednesday, Breed reiterated her position on the raid without addressing Scott’s news conference. She said it would be inappropriate to intervene in an active investigation.
“The chief updated the public on the course of this investigation yesterday, and like everyone else, I am eager to see how the legal process plays out,” she said.
She repeated her statement from last weekend that she was considering changes to local laws or city policies that could restrict police investigations that collide with press freedoms.
Scott said at his news conference that his department sought a search warrant because it believed Carmody “was part of the effort to illegally obtain” the report on Adachi’s death. Carmody, who sold the report to three television stations, said he did not conspire with anyone and simply received a secret report from a source — a common practice in journalism. He has not been arrested or charged.
Scott was appointed chief in late 2016 by then-Mayor Ed Lee to oversee reforms recommended by the Justice Department after several controversial police shootings. After being elected mayor following Lee’s death in December 2017, Breed has worked closely with Scott in a variety of areas, from pushing reforms to battling problems associated with homelessness to increasing the number of cops walking neighborhood beats.
Last year, Scott was passed over for the top job at the Los Angeles Police Department. Afterward, he said he was committed to leading the force in San Francisco.
Some political observers said it would be extraordinary for Breed to publicly rebuke her police chief before all the details of the investigation are revealed. Meanwhile, some city supervisors have condemned the raid, while others have barely spoken about it.
“I would like to see strong, unambivalent condemnations of the actions that took place by every elected official in San Francisco,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin said Wednesday.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen said, “I do believe the more all of us learn about this situation, the more we understand the threat that this action has caused to the free press. Even in his death, Jeff is forcing the city to confront hard truths and have tough dialogues around our most deeply held values.”
Carmody said he obtained the report from his source shortly after Adachi’s death at age 59 on Feb. 22 before selling it. When television stations aired portions of the report — which said Adachi had been with a woman who was not his wife when he died — many city officials and attorneys in the public defender’s office were outraged, believing the report’s release was an effort to smear Adachi, a fierce police watchdog.
Police visited Carmody’s Outer Richmond District home two months later, asking him to reveal who gave him the report, he said. When he refused, they showed up with a sledgehammer, battering ram and pry bar before handcuffing Carmody and seizing computers, cameras and phones at his home and office.
His attorney, Thomas Burke, argued in court this week that police violated federal and state law — including California’s broad shield law that protects journalists not only from being forced to reveal confidential sources but from giving up unpublished information like notes, recordings and pictures.
Scott on Tuesday said the search was not in violation of the shield law because Carmody “was and continues to be viewed by investigators as a possible co-conspirator in this theft.”
Police officials returned Carmody’s property on Tuesday but it is unclear whether they downloaded evidence or how they will use it. Burke, who has represented The Chronicle and its parent company, Hearst Corp., in other cases, hopes to win a motion to quash the search warrants.
The warrants, signed by two judges, were filed under seal, so it’s unclear what police wrote in the affidavits explaining their justification for the search. An attorney representing the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit group that advocates for free speech and government accountability, filed a motion to unseal the warrants.