Frustration With San Francisco Police

SAN FRANCISCO -- What came to be called the Cadaver Van Case began when San Francisco police waited eight days before looking inside a Ford van, even though their cadaver dogs signaled it might contain something dead. By the time police discovered the body inside, the van's owners had more than a week's head start on a pursuit that turned out to be not all that hot.

The fugitives were apprehended in Mexico last month, but not through the efforts of a department determined to make up for any embarrassment.

Instead, the marketing director of a San Diego pest control company located Richard Carelli and Michelle Pinkerton in a small Baja California town. Armed with a newspaper clipping and a stack of wanted posters he had copied with $150 of his own money at Kinko's, concerned citizen James R. Spring tracked the fugitives down in a day and a half.

"It's truly amazing the way the police take it so nonchalantly," said Ureena Hoskins, the sister of the dead man. She first alerted officers about her late brother, Leonard, after hearing a neighbor say he saw Carelli hit him in the head with a board. "I don't know if they don't want to do their jobs or what's going on. It was just unbelievable to me."

The Hoskins case is not, however, the latest humiliation to the SFPD. French detectives are asking to "assist" the department in its controversial probe into the death of Hugues de la Plaza.

City detectives first surmised that de la Plaza, a French citizen found dead last June, stabbed himself three times in the chest, then washed and hid the knife somewhere in his San Francisco apartment, the site of a bloody struggle that woke up the neighbors.

Almost a year later, the case is still not listed as a homicide, and key forensic work remains undone, including analysis of the blood smeared on several walls and on the victim's cellphone, found beside his body. The French are awaiting permission from the Justice Department to do it.

"I don't see how it can be anything but an embarrassment, but they never cease to amaze me: They're not ashamed of anything," said Melissa Nix, who was de la Plaza's girlfriend. She, with other outraged friends, pressed the case with San Francisco's detectives, police commission, district attorney and the office of Mayor Gavin Newsom (D). "I mean, look at the Cadaver Case! They don't seem to care how they're perceived," she said.

A police spokesman begged to differ.

"If you were talking to someone in our department, they wouldn't say we screwed up. Someone else would say we did screw up. That's all a matter of opinion," Sgt. Wilfred Williams said. "Are these cases an indication of some larger problem? Again, that's a matter of opinion. We wouldn't say we necessarily have a problem."

Others do. Ross Mirkarimi, who chairs the public safety committee of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors, said the two cases underscore weaknesses in a police force plagued by poor leadership and inadequate resources. He said that the homicide closure rate appears to be extremely low but that precise figures are impossible to obtain from a balkanized department that in some cases keeps records on paper.

"There needs to be some course reversal of homicides not getting solved," Mirkarimi said. "The worst message being sent is that the worst crime can be committed."