In this week's column, I describe how the San Francisco Police Department is attempting to fire a 24-year veteran for resisting orders to illegally search a journalist's records.
The quest to fire Officer Frank Lee is even more extraordinary when one considers that the Department has not disciplined six officers whose illegal searches have scuttled 120 criminal cases.
Lee's dismissal case, currently before the San Francisco Police Commission, begs the question: Do cops in this town have to conduct illegal searches to keep their jobs?
The Department's current beef against Lee involves a search warrant to get the records of photojournalist Alex Welsh. Welsh earned national notoriety after he was found by detectives in 2009 snapping photographs at a murder scene. Lee, a former sex-crimes detective, was the lead inspector on that case, and he felt his top priority was to convince Welsh to provide evidence, then take the stand, against the killers of Norris Bennett.
Lee's superiors had other ideas. Lee tells the Police Commission that he was chewed out for wanting to coddle Welsh into providing evidence. Lee quotes his lieutenant saying:
"It's fucking bullshit, your soft bullshit approach. You're not in sex crimes anymore. You're in homicide. This is the way we do things. I want that evidence."
In the end, Lee did perform the search, which ended up producing no valuable evidence. Welsh clammed up, citing the portion of the California evidence code that makes journalists' records immune from police search. A judge subsequently declared the search illegal, as Lee had warned it might be.
Rather than issue a mea culpa, Lee's bosses are now trying to have him fired for insubordination for arguing against the search, then not executing it fast enough.
