As videos of crime in San Francisco go viral on the internet — along with instances of apparent police inaction during such crimes — one civilian group has become a frequent target: The Police Commission.
Outspoken online commentators on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, assail the group as the cause for a wide range of social ills, including sideshows, the fentanyl crisis and the city’s abdication of traffic enforcement. In general, most of the criticism comes from individuals who favor a strong law-and-order approach.
Those blaming the Police Commission for all the city’s woes, however, often have a shaky grasp of basic facts regarding San Francisco government and procedure.
So, here is a primer on what the San Francisco Police Commission actually does and does not do — its powers and its limitations. Along the way, we have addressed some of the misinformation and disinformation circulating online.
Claim: The Police Commission is controlled by insurgents appointed by the Board of Supervisors, or Chesa Boudin
The composition of the Police Commission, first established in 1878, is codified in the city charter. It has seven members, four of whom (the majority) are appointed by the mayor, and three by the Board of Supervisors. The Board’s Rules Committee must vote to approve the mayor’s appointees, and similarly must approve any decision by the mayor to remove her own appointees.
Dismantling the commission altogether would require a general vote; the Board of Supervisors, regardless of its composition, cannot unilaterally “disband” the Police Commission, as venture capitalist Garry Tan has suggested.
Mayor London Breed’s appointees are James Byrne, Larry Yee, Max Carter-Oberstone (vice president) and Debra Walker. The Board appointed Cindy Elias (president), Jesus Yáñez and Kevin Benedicto.
Ideally, commission members are independent thinkers who evaluate each decision without considering what the mayor or the Board of Supervisors might do, and members of the commission emphasize that independence.
“They just don’t know what they’re talking about,” former Breed appointee Malia Cohen said regarding commenters who spew misinformation online. “The Board doesn’t have any influence; [the Police Commission] is completely independent.”
Ideally, commission members should have criminal justice experience, too. Of the mayor’s appointees, Carter-Oberstone is an attorney who has done criminal justice work, and Byrne is an immigration lawyer. Yee is a community organizer in Chinatown, and Walker is an artist who has served on different city commissions and task forces.
Of those appointed by the Board, Elias worked as a public defender and diversion program attorney, Benedicto is a civil rights attorney with background working in criminal justice reform, and Yáñez has worked extensively with youths involved in the criminal justice system.
In general, commission votes are unanimous. That has been the case in 34 of the 38 policy proposals and decisions considered so far in 2023.
This year, police commissioners have been unanimous
on at least 34 votes and split on four
June 7: The commission voted 5-2 to rescind two policies it said SFPD had created illegally.
Jan. 11: The police commission voted 4-2 to approve DGO 9.07, which curtails pretext stops.
May 3: The police commission voted 5-1 to approve DGO 2.03., which outlines a policy around drug use by police officers.
May 17: The commission voted 3-3 on whether to rescind two policies it said SFPD had created illegally. This move failed.
Jan
March
Feb
April
May
June
July
Aug
Sept
Oct
Note: Chart includes only substantive votes affecting policy or approving commission resolutions, and excludes routine votes like approvals of minutes.
Source: minutes from Police Commission meetings. Chart by Kelly Waldron.
This year, police commissioners have been unanimous on at least 34 votes and split on four
This year, police commissioners have been unanimous on at least 34 votes and split on four
Jan. 11: The police commission voted 4-2 to approve DGO 9.07, which curtails pretext stops.
Jan
Feb
May 3: The police commission voted 5-1 to approve DGO 2.03., which outlines a policy around drug use by police officers.
March
April
May
June
June 7: The commission voted 5-2 to rescind two policies it said SFPD had created illegally.
July
Aug
Sept
Oct
May 17: The commission voted 3-3 on whether to rescind two policies it said SFPD had created illegally. This move failed.
Note: Chart includes only substantive votes affecting policy or approving commission resolutions, and excludes routine votes like approvals of minutes.
Source: minutes from Police Commission meetings. Chart by Kelly Waldron.
There are exceptions, however. Mayoral appointee Carter-Oberstone has voted for a few issues — electing Elias as commission president and rescinding inappropriately-created police department policies — that his fellow mayoral appointees opposed. On at least one occasion, Walker has joined Carter-Oberstone in diverging from the other mayoral appointees.
Another split vote took place in January, around a controversial pretext-stop policy (when an officer stops a person for a minor infraction, with the aim of discovering a further crime). Ultimately, a revised version passed unanimously.
The commission was also divided over two votes to rescind policies it said the police department created illegally.
In the four split votes of 2023, this is the how the members voted: mayoral appointees, board appointees
Topic
For
Against
Absent
Cindy Elias
Jesus Yáñez
James Byrne
Debra Walker
Kevin Benedicto
Larry Yee
Max Carter-Oberstone
Cindy Elias
May 3: DGO 2.03, which outlines a policy around drug use by police officers
Debra Walker
James Byrne,
Max Carter-Oberstone
Jesus Yáñez
Kevin Benedicto
Larry Yee
May 17: To rescind two policies it said SFPD had
created illegally, on working undercover and conducting social media investigations
Jesus Yáñez
Debra Walker
Cindy Elias
James Byrne
Kevin Benedicto
Max Carter-Oberstone
Larry Yee
June 7: To rescind the two policies in question for the May 17 vote. Claims that bureau orders were ‘illegal’ were removed.
Cindy Elias
Debra Walker
James Byrne
Jesus Yáñez
Larry Yee
Kevin Benedicto
Max Carter-Oberstone
In the four split votes of 2023, this is the how the members voted: mayoral appointees, board appointees
Topic, Jan 11: DGO 9.07, curtailing
pretext stops
For:
Cindy Elias
Jesus Yáñez
Kevin Benedicto
Max Carter-Oberstone
Against:
James Byrne
Larry Yee
Absent:
Debra Walker
Topic, May 3: DGO 2.03, which outlines a policy around drug use by police officers
For:
Cindy Elias
Debra Walker
James Byrne,
Kevin Benedicto
Larry Yee
Against:
Max Carter-Oberstone
Absent:
Jesus Yáñez
Topic, May 17: To rescind two policies it said SFPD had created illegally, on working undercover and conducting social media investigations
For:
Jesus Yáñez
Kevin Benedicto
Max Carter-Oberstone
Against:
Debra Walker
James Byrne
Larry Yee
Absent:
Cindy Elias
Topic, June 7: To rescind the two policies in question for the May 17 vote. Claims that bureau orders were ‘illegal’ were removed.
For:
Cindy Elias
Debra Walker
Jesus Yáñez
Kevin Benedicto
Max Carter-Oberstone
Against:
James Byrne
Larry Yee
Note: Chart includes only substantive votes affecting policy or approving commission resolutions, and excludes routine votes like approvals of minutes.
Source: minutes from Police Commission meetings. Chart by Kelly Waldron.
Claim: The Police Commission singlehandedly governs day-to-day police operations
The commission, as an oversight body, sets policy for the San Francisco Police Department and hears serious police misconduct cases sent its way by the chief of police or the Department of Police Accountability, another independent oversight body.
It sounds like a lot of power and, compared to other jurisdictions without much in the way of police oversight, it is. But the commission’s powers are limited — and always involve negotiations with the police department and police union.
Creation or revision of SFPD policy, for example, often takes months, if not years, from start to implementation. The commission consults with various stakeholders, like department staff, the Department of Police Accountability, and other community groups as it sees fit.
A case in point was the use-of-force policy. The Police Commission took up revisions to the policy in late 2015, and held several months of meetings with various stakeholder groups.
Once the commission unanimously signed off on the revision, the policy went through standard “meet and confer” discussions with the city’s Department of Human Resources negotiator for the San Francisco Police Officers Association. These private bargaining sessions are intended to avoid potential conflicts with police union labor contracts, but often devolve into long, stalled negotiations with the union over the specifics of the policy.
And vitriol directed toward the Police Commission is nothing new, particularly when the union doesn’t get its way.
With the use-of-force policy, meet and confer negotiations reached an impasse over ending police use of carotid restraints and shooting at moving cars. As negotiations wore on, the police union launched and paid for a misleading advertisement in November 2016 against the unanimously approved use-of-force policy, suggesting that commissioners wanted to hamstring officers’ ability to fight terrorists.
California has since banned carotid restraints or “chokeholds,” and the Department of Justice has severely limited their use. And banning officers from shooting at moving cars was already known, in 2016, to reduce police shooting deaths, as it did in New York, home to the country’s biggest local police department, half a century ago. San Francisco’s police union, however, said in the ad that adopting a policy the NYPD has had since the early 1970s would render police unable to “stop senseless slaughter.”
In December 2016, the commission unilaterally decided to end “meet and confer,” and unanimously approved the use-of-force policy. The union sued, but lost in court.
In another case, the Police Commission voted unanimously in 2018 to require officers involved in a police shooting or death to give statements before viewing their body-worn camera footage. The draft policy went into the meet-and-confer process with the police union — a process that took 2.5 years and did not result in any major changes.
Claim: Police aren’t permitted to get into car chases
A video posted on X in August showed a police squad car with lights on during an apparent car break-in in progress at Alamo Square. The alleged thief quickly drove away, at which point the 30-second video cut off.
Commentators took to X to slam the department for inaction, while others said officers’ hands were tied by a restrictive chase policy imposed by the Police Commission. “SF Police policy prevents chasing,” began Diane Yap, a conservative volunteer in the 2022 school board recall movement, who has more than 3,700 followers.
But Yap and other critics got some of their facts wrong.
Preemptive use of spike strips, which can halt a fleeing car, was temporarily suspended earlier this year by Assistant Chief David Lazar — not the Police Commission. Commission Vice President Carter-Oberstone this month called for that dictum to be reversed.
Further, the police officer at Alamo Square did pursue the vehicle. The department said its sergeant turned his car around and followed the suspect, but was unable to track him down. The suspect had dropped his ill-gotten goods before fleeing the scene, the police said.
Car chases are restricted in San Francisco and cities across the country because they are highly risky — just this summer, a bystander was killed and several others were injured during police chases in the Mission District that were arguably unwarranted. But the department’s current chase policy was enacted in 2013, long before any of the current police commissioners were appointed.
Further, department policy does allow for police to give pursuit in cases where officers determine that a suspect must be “immediately apprehended” due to a public safety risk. (Unless they can articulate such a risk, officers may not start a chase in instances of non-violent felonies, misdemeanors, or property crimes.)
Individual officers seem to interpret the policy liberally.
Parts of Yap’s tweet were true: Blocking the getaway car with a police car is allowed only when deadly force is believed to be at play. This has been San Francisco Police Department policy since at least 2013. And shooting at moving vehicles is not permitted, but this is another rule passed seven years ago, not enacted by today’s commissioners.
Claim: The Police Commission wants to end foot chases
A draft policy, proposed earlier this year by the police department itself, suggests that officers can initiate foot pursuits if they “reasonably believe” the suspect has done something justifying a detention or arrest.
But hundreds of individuals have now written to the Police Commission, complaining about a policy it didn’t write — and has not yet reviewed.
Late last month, commentators on X began spreading a rallying cry from nonprofit Stop Crime SF to oppose the policy.
”Proposed Police Commission General Order 5.25 will allow criminals to avoid apprehension just by running away,” read the statement from Stop Crime SF shared by many on X. “Once again, the anti-law enforcement Police Commission is making it nearly impossible for SFPD to do its job.”
Staff at the Department of Police Accountability, which provided input on the policy, were confused by the suggestion, especially since they consider the policy more permissive than similar ones in other jurisdictions.
The Police Commission “has had zero to do with its development and has, in all likelihood, never seen it,” wrote Department of Police Accountability Director Paul Henderson in a statement about the foot-chase policy. “This policy is currently being finalized by Chief [Bill] Scott, and in no way prohibits foot pursuits, nor does it hamstring officers from pursuing dangerous suspects.”
It is unclear what initiated the recent discussion of the foot-pursuit policy, which was posted on the police department’s website for public comment this spring.
Y Combinator CEO Tan, for instance, told his 360,000-plus followers that San Franciscans should “fight” the Police Commission over the policy — though it was the police department that proposed it in the first place.
Claim: Police can’t pull you over for traffic violations
Much misinformation has spread around a more recent policy (DGO 9.07), which the Police Commission began revamping in 2022 to limit the use of pretextual traffic stops, which are often racially motivated. The decision to revise the 1994 policy stemmed, in part, from a 2016 review of the police department by the U.S. Department of Justice which, in large part, focused on glaring racial disparities in the department’s traffic stop data.
Under the new policy, police will no longer pull over people solely for nine specific traffic violations, including missing a front license plate or hanging an air freshener from a rearview mirror. Though the Police Commission approved the policy after months of discussions in early 2023, it remains in “meet and confer” with the police union. In other words: The policy has not been enacted.
Some online commenters say that the policy prevents officers from stopping cars with no license plates or drivers suspected of crimes, but that is false. Drivers can, in fact, be pulled over for missing both plates or having obscured rear license plates. And police can still pull over anyone suspected of a crime.
Others point to the Police Commission for the lack of double-parking enforcement in San Francisco, but parking tickets are issued by the Municipal Transportation Agency, not the police.
“It saddens me that there are so many aggressively ignorant people out there commenting,” said former commissioner Cohen, who noted that she continues to receive hateful comments on X, even though she left the commission more than a year ago.
Claim: The Police Commission permits illegal street vending
Online critics also blame the Commission for the city’s street vending issues, but street vending was actually decriminalized at the state level under Gov. Jerry Brown, who signed SB946 into law in 2018.
Nevertheless, police assist Department of Public Works inspectors in enforcing vendor permit regulations.
Thank you for this educational article. Mission Local is my civics class.
I have a hard time believing Dyer Reynolds doesn’t know the difference between policy and law.
She’s the best journalist in San Francisco. She broke the City Hall corruption story.
I’m not sure which possibility is worse about The Chronicle — that they didn’t know it was happening, even though many contractors were paying bribes and everyone at City Hall knew it, or that they did know and decided not to write about ti.
Reynolds claims that, but if you follow the embedded links, it’s akin to Al Gore claiming he invented the internet.
https://www.marinatimes.com/a-gay-icon-is-living-in-fear-because-of-a-twitter-meme
Can Garry Tan ever not lie? How can he speak of “sweeping out” Peskin and Safai who are termed out? Is he trying to claim term limits as victories for his network of dark money astroturf PACs? And is Supervisor Walton suddenly up for re-election again? (spoiler: no). Garry Tan faces no consequences for propagating the myth that government just doesn’t work because Breed’s hands are tied, and it’s all Preston’s fault. Venture capital chutzpah eats the world, SF is just the appetizer.
Garry Tan and his GROWSF Tech bros are as hyperbolic and full of guano as FOX. They are free market capitalists.
Thank you for this.
Eleni, excellent reporting… why? because it fully informed a topic with fact. Please keep it up. We need factual transparency on these very important issues. Unfortunately, social media allows many ill-informed scenarios to be posed masquerading as truth. Besides being confusing they delay focused action and public awareness. Thank you and MissionLocal for providing fact and context.
thank you!
It’s also important to point out that the article quotes a tweet from “Lou B” aka @Luigi CPA who is retired cop and current copagandist Lou Barberini. Lou writes for the Westside Observer, has a reactionary substack and has laundered leaks into hit pieces against Chesa Boudin. https://westsideobserver.com/news/barberini.html
Great article thank you!
Well done, appreciate the specificity of errors and corrections. The level of ignorance and half accuracies is stunning, education is critical, especially by people who could easily look up facts and yet, refuse.
D.07 is up for final approval – time to get this on this books and out of ‘meet and confer’ delays asap.
Tan’s latest shtick is whining about a random “centrist” YouTube channel getting demonetized as a dire threat to free speech online…without mentioning that the channel happens to be part of Falun Gong’s far-right Epoch Times propaganda network.
For clarity’s sake, SB 946 did not exactly “decriminalize” street vending – street vending was never a crime at the state level. What SB 946 did was mandate that California local governments **could not enact local laws** criminalizing vending on sidewalks, and needed to set up permit systems if they wanted to regulate vending.
The ruckus that we’re seeing now is the product of police no longer being able to lazily just use blanket sidewalk vending bans as their shortcut to addressing property crime: now that the law can’t be used to wreck the livelihoods of beneficial food vendors and dealers in stolen goods alike, it’s become clear that the cops currently have little competence or desire to actually do the work of investigating suspected stolen property. They barely even have any inclination to shut down permitless vendors and drive right by them at 24th/Mission plaza every day – why does anyone think they are even interested in figuring out whether those guys’ products were ripped off from Safeway and Walgreens?
Is Cindy Elias still on the SF Police Commission? She has not been at any police commission meetings in September ( the commission was dark in all of August) and her name was not read during the roll call tonight. Is she MIA, resigned, term ran out or….?
Very good reporting unpacking the facts and clarifying the cacophonous misinformation
These alt right zealots who blame 2003’s Prop H for sabotaging policing also claim that 2000’s Prop E, a product of Willie Brown and SPUR, that created the SFMTA and gave a BofS supermajority the right to reject a mayoral appointee, was another BofS power grab.
These alt right zealots do not speak accurately and have big bucks backing that misdirection up. There is no progressive power being raised to contest this full court press for total political power.
Apparently tired old Calvin Welch has some ideas, at a SDA forum today, but that all probably starts and ends with the City funding CCHO and HSN’s constituent nonprofits and calling it a day. It is getting late.