Frustration With San Francisco Police
Two Cases Should Prompt Embarrassment, Say Family Members of Victims

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2008

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."

Other critics detect in the muddled homicide investigations more evidence of a shortfall in the department's professionalism. In 2005, two dozen officers were suspended for making satirical videos mocking minorities. Ten years earlier, a former chief lost a mayoral election after showering nude on the air with a pair of Los Angeles disc jockeys.

"This is sort of what we've come to expect from the SFPD: It's always been kind of the Keystone Kops," said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and a Bay Area resident for three decades. "It's definitely not Michael Douglas and Karl Malden," who portrayed determined homicide detectives in the '70s TV series "The Streets of San Francisco."

Krisberg uses the department's reputation to rebut assertions that new strategies in policing, rather than demographic factors, account for the nation's declining crime rates. "It couldn't be brilliant, cutting-edge policing if even one of the most inept police departments presided over the same decline," he said.

Quintin Mecke, a community activist who works closely with the police, said the problems have survived repeated attempts at reform. The latest followed "Fajitagate," a scandal that involved a bag of takeout Mexican food, grabbed by an off-duty officer. The officer was released at the scene by colleagues who recognized him as the son of their chief. Voters responded by bringing the citizen complaint board under the Board of Supervisors.

Advocates for de la Plaza were so frustrated by that system, though, that they urged his family to involve the French government.

"I'm really glad to hear the French police are getting involved," said Gitanjali Bhushan, 38, who said she was awakened by violent thumps the night her neighbor was killed. "In talking to our police, I felt like they were planning to write it off as a suicide."

Williams, the police spokesman, acknowledged delays in processing that crime scene. "You watch 'CSI,' and they solve a case in 45 minutes," he said.

And in the cadaver van case, hindsight makes obvious the consequence of the eight-day delay. But, Williams noted, "We identified the suspects, and the suspects are in custody."

For that, Leonard Hoskins's family thanks Spring, who by chance chose to mark his 40th birthday by finding someone missing in an area he knows very well. When he Googled "Baja" and "missing," up came a newspaper article about a tourist who had chatted with the fugitives. With them were the two daughters they had found time to pick up from relatives after fleeing San Francisco.

"I actually went for the girls," Spring said.

He found them all in little El Rosario, where locals said Pinkerton was offering dance lessons for a dollar an hour. "They didn't know they were wanted. They thought they were just gringos, living the simple life," he said.

When the San Francisco police failed to call him back, and the U.S. Marshals Service asked him to wait a day, Spring walked across the courtyard to the local police comandante. Soon, five carloads of federal agents "with black overjackets and big mustaches and rifles" arrived and made the arrest without incident.

"Even if the SFPD had done what I'd told them to do the night before, make the phone call to the local people, they still would have found them before me," Spring said. "They didn't even do that. It's just ludicrous."