Bay area police scandal tarnishes top brass

A late-night argument over steak fajitas could in the end topple what was once considered one of the most progressive police departments in the United States.

In a move experts call unprecedented, a San Francisco grand jury last week indicted the city's police chief, his assistant chief, and others, claiming that they conspired to cover up a brawl involving three off-duty officers.

The plot and its cast of characters could be taken straight from the pages of pulp fiction: an officer with a history of violence, his father's rise to the No. 2 job in the department, and a hippie-turned-district attorney whose family's clashes with the cops date back to the 1940s.

Yet this is far more than a San Francisco story. Even as scandals and public pressure have created a momentum for reform nationwide, this investigation sends a message that even the highest law-enforcement officials can be held accountable.

"This will effect change because [senior officials] will see that the community, through grand juries, can reach out and touch them," says Ron Martinelli, a southern California consultant on police reform. "They cannot hide behind the pedestal of rank anymore."

No one imagined that San Francisco's top cops would have to. From the first, the news of a November scuffle, allegedly between three off-duty officers and two civilians over a bag of takeout food - while disquieting - was hardly unheard of. The most intriguing aspect, it seemed, was the fact that one of the cops was the son of the new assistant police chief.

But when the grand jury announced its wide-ranging indictments, a drama of Faulknerian complexity began to unravel.

On one side, leading the grand jury, is district attorney Terence Hallinan, an oft-arrested civil-rights activist of the 1960s who later supported the legalization of marijuana and prostitution as a county supervisor. A half-century earlier, his father, also an attorney, was imprisoned for defending accused Communists, and he once promised a special investigation of San Francisco police for using excessive force during a riot.

On the other side, one of the three officers implicated in the fight is Alex Fagan Jr. - the golden boy with a tarnished record. During the past 13 months, the assistant police chief's son had been cited for 16 incidents of violent behavior, six times sending people to the hospital, The San Francisco Chronicle reports. He underwent counseling three times.

"That's just utterly intolerable," says Samuel Walker, a professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, who studies police reform. "I don't think he would have survived at many police departments without his father as the No. 2 guy."

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