In 1994, while former Police Chief Frank Jordan was mayor, the Police Commission, with the backing of the powerful Police Officers Association, stripped the patrol specials of their status as peace officers with the ability to issue citations and book their own arrests. Behind the move, Russell explained in his 2008 SF Weekly piece, was a section of the city's administrative code letting moonlighting cops offer their own patrol services to merchants in competition with the patrol special program. The previous year, this overtime opportunity for cops raked in $9.5 million, with up to half of the city's officers participating. In late 2008, cops further differentiated themselves from their downmarket brethren when a new rule required specials to wear six-point rather than seven-point stars on their uniforms.
The problem was that Galls Uniforms on Cesar Chavez hadn't retooled their equipment to apply the special six-point star. Until last fall, the specials had made do with their old jackets. A Galls employee told me the company now makes up for the delay by offering to shave off seven-point stars and re-embroider six-point ones.
Josh Edelson
Mourners built a temporary shrine celebrating Jane Warner in the Castro.
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That Christmas, Warner's ability to face the charges was hampered when a thug broke her arm as she attempted to break up a bar fight. She discovered the fracture couldn't be properly treated because a recurrence of ovarian cancer had metastasized to her bones. She made a workers' compensation claim, which was denied. She appealed. Her cancer worsened. Meanwhile Sergeant Robert Yick, Police Department liaison to the patrol special program, telephoned and wrote to Warner, seeking to set up discipline meetings.
Ann Grogan, an old friend, obtained limited power of attorney to ask the Police Department on Warner's behalf to postpone the discipline matter. She called, wrote, and provided doctors' notes, but the department brushed off her requests.
Instead, a uniformed officer came to Warner's door four weeks before her death to deliver an added charge: Warner had undermined "the good order, efficiency, and discipline of the department" by postponing her discipline meeting.
"This is unbelievable that any decent or logical person could see that such an attempt to comply with the regulations constituted a failure," Grogan said. "It's like Officer Warner got caught up in a situation that was Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole. It's an upside-down world."
It's a world where Warner's friends and representatives believe San Francisco's finest seemed willing to stop at nothing to get in a last lick at their nemesis.
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