SF POLICE EXPAND PROGRAM
TO IDENTIFY PROBLEM OFFICERS

By Adam Martin, Bay City News Service

February 2, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO(BCN) - The San Francisco Police Department is broadening the scope of its early identification program to intervene with counseling or other measures before individual officers commit breaches of discipline.

Chief Heather Fong said in an interview Wednesday that the department implemented the country's first early intervention program in 1997 when it began tracking complaints filed against individual officers through the Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC).

That system, while revolutionary at the time, uses only the barometer of OCC complaints to alert the department to officers with potential discipline problems, Fong said. The department intervenes when an officer receives three OCC complaints within a six-month period or four within a year.

The revised system, according to Fong and Capt. Charles Keohane of the department's legal division, will consider a variety of new behavioral indicators in addition to the OCC complaints.

"What we want to do is prevent this behavior from becoming a problem,'' Fong said.

Keohane said the department is "moving aggressively'' toward implementation of the new identification system. The process takes time, he said, because all components of the new system must be acceptable to the San Francisco Police Officers Association, the department's administration and the American Civil Liberties Union, which is working with the department on developing the new system.

So far, the department has decided upon which new indicators to use, and is now looking at how the program will fit into the organization's structure, Keohane said. It is now working to determine how to weight each indicator and how and in what manner to intervene when an officer is identified as having a potential discipline problem.

Keohane said the department is aiming at completing the new identification system by the end of 2006. He will give a report on the progress at an upcoming police commission meeting.

Representatives from the union and the ACLU were not immediately available for comment.

Copyright © 2006 by Bay City News, Inc. -- Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.

####