The price of embarrassment? $369,000

San Francisco settles with journalist after dumb SFPD over-reaction

This week San Francisco paid Bryan Carmody $369,000 for the inconvenience of being at home last May when police knocked down his door, put him in handcuffs, confiscated his computers, cellphones and kept him in custody for five hours.

That doesn’t sound like much compensation to me, but apparently this is settled, pending approval by the Board of Supervisors.

It just should not be forgotten.

Of all of the small time, tin-pot, we-make-our-own-law-here embarrassments the city has suffered, this was a new low.

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The story, as you recall, began when Public Defender Jeff Adachi passed away unexpectedly in a compromising situation. He was in an apartment he did not own with a woman who was not his wife.

While there is real hurt for the family, Adachi was an elected public official and reporting the facts, however awkward, is the job of the media. It was not until even more salacious details, suggesting drug use for instance, that there were complaints about privacy violations. (The coroner later determined that Adachi overdosed on cocaine and alcohol.)

Carmody admitted he sold some of that information to three TV stations, although as is his right under the First Amendment, he refused to divulge his source to the police. Suspicions, however, ran to someone in SFPD, who might have disliked Adachi. Not unlikely. Adachi pissed the cops off, as Public Defenders generally do.

And that was when everyone lost their freakin’ minds.

A shortened version is that the cops were so fired up about this that they obtained search warrants (and that’s plural, five in all) for Carmody’s house — somehow thinking it would be OK to neglect to tell the judge(s) that Carmody was a working journalist. Which would have killed the warrant.

Next stop, battering down Carmody’s door and rushing in with guns drawn. Even Police Chief William Scott later admitted “The look of that was not good.”

Duh. What were you thinking?

The SFPD official view for a while was that they were duty bound to root out these terrible news leaks. That Carmody had somehow stolen the information.

Oh please. The SFPD leaks like a sieve. And if they won’t tell you anything, call the Police Officers Association. You’ll have to beg them to get off the phone.

Carmody makes his living selling leaked information. Does that give you an idea of how common it is?

If I were going to take a wild guess, I’d say the Public Defenders office was hurt and angry at the dings in Adachi’s reputation. And they pitched a fit and convinced everyone that to be fair they had to track down and punish the leaker.

It was a stupid over-reaction from the jump. And instead of realizing it, stepping back and putting it in perspective, Scott doubled down, defending the raid. And Mayor London Breed appeared to be protecting him.

To be clear, Scott seems like a perfectly fine guy, and as far as I know has been a good chief. But this was a big, fat, embarrassing national-news screwup. If I’d been asked at the time, I would have said he should have been fired.

Instead, some two weeks after the raid, Scott issued an apology. Mayor Breed stepped up called the action “unacceptable.”

It was. And now the city is out $369,000 and they still don’t know who the source was.

But I keep coming back to something Scott said back in his May 24 apology. He said what kept bothering him were the “initial warrants . . . the issue is the clarity in the warrant.”

You mean when your department essentially lied to judges, declining to tell them Carmody was a journalist even though you knew he was?

“That is going to be a concern that has to be explored further,” Scott said at the time.

And? Has it?

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Bring Steph Curry back now — why?

The Steph Curry peekaboo show has surely just about run its course. Time to make a call. Either he’s playing or he’s sitting out the last 20-some games.

In my Santa Rosa Press Democrat column I vote sit.

Lots of people don’t agree, of course. Steve Kerr is militantly refusing to consider his first off-season without a playoff game in five years. Kerr said the other day that the team still had “a third of a season to play,” but 20 games in an 82 game season sounds more like a quarter to me.

Kerr’s point is they are going to treat every game seriously, striving ever harder to get better and improve. And Steph can be a part of that.

Which would have been a lot more convincing if they hadn’t traded a total of four players for draft choices at the start of last month. That’s four healthy bodies traded for four empty jerseys. No wonder they have been playing with eight players.

Giving up on Alex Burks and Glenn Robinson was telling. And a reminder that just because you buy into the Warrior culture doesn’t mean the Warrior culture buys into you.

Burks and Robinson were useful players and popular with the team. Interesting that the day after they were gone the team started an eight-game losing streak.

Still, there are those final 20 games.

One more thing about Newsom’s State of the State

We talked last week about how Gov. Gavin Newsom devoted his State of the State to homelessness. And that’s true, but it also meant that he’d need to reference other contributing problems, like mental health.

And as we said, Newsom took a significant stand, advocating for conservatorship. He spoke of the pain of the families, significant others and friends, who begged mental health officials to find a safe place where a severely mentally disabled person could live, even if he or she resisted the idea.

Last week came the story by Jocelyn Wiener in Cal Matters. It tells the story of the family of Mark Rippee, a blind, homeless man with a traumatic brain injury and paranoid schizophrenia. His sisters, Linda Privatte and Catherine Hanson, tried for years to get him into safe confinement.

And last month their brother Mark, homeless and alone, walked into the path of an oncoming vehicle. His injuries are severe enough to require multiple surgeries.

The sisters are advocating for another look at the 1967 Lanterman-Petris-Short law, which limits involuntary confinements.

And now they are being heard. Newsom mentioned taking a hard look at L-P-S in his address. And, an audit of the law is due out in June.

It isn’t easy to consider the idea of confining someone against their will. Or compelling them to take their meds.

But talk to the families. Talk to the sisters who visited Mark Rippee in the hospital.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cwnevius@gmail.com. Twitter: @cwnevius. Comments and suggestions accepted gladly. Criticisms, not so much.