Not long ago, the point was made that  consent is the new dropsy when it comes to cops circumventing the Fourth Amendment.  It’s got all the great attributes that any police officer would want from a lie, and the only witnesses to it are the cop and the criminal.  Who you gonna believe?  Bingo, the new open door policy.

And so it was used in San Francisco, where a drug raid required a lawful entry to nab the perp and grab the evidence at the Henry Hotel, a skid row joint.  The  SF Appeal provides the official details:

In the first incident on Dec. 23, four officers arrived at the Henry Hotel and obtained a master key that allowed them to open the doors to any room.

At that point, Officer Arshad Razzak wrote in his police report that officers knocked on the resident’s door, announced themselves and waited for a response.

According to the report, after hearing no response, the officers used the key to slightly open the door and, without entering the home, told a female resident they were waiting outside until they could obtain a search warrant.

The woman then gave the officers verbal permission to search the premises while officers contacted headquarters and asked for a consent form she could read, according to Razzak’s report.

A man inside the room was then arrested on suspicion of possessing 65 grams of heroin and a single rock of crack cocaine, said Deputy Public Defender Anne Irwin, who represented the suspect.

Neat.  Clean.  By the book consent.  Nothing to see here, kids, just a bunch of cops doing their job protecting your wives and daughters from rapists drug dealers.  Nobody would expect some skid row hotel to be high tech, but then how better to make sure that nobody fouls the hallways and gets away with it.  From SF Weekly :

At a press conference, deputy public defenders Tal Klement and Anne Irwin showed video taken by surveillance cameras during separate drug raids in December and January at the Henry Hotel, a residential hotel on Sixth Street’s skid row.

In both instances, the defense attorneys said, the police officers failed to get consent from the apartment-dwellers before conducting warrantless searches for narcotics.

One of the videos has been removed as being too long, but the other isn’t.



If nothing else, the video clearly shows a training gap in putting hallway video cameras out of commission.  No, officer, it’s not good enough to cover it with your hand for a few second to make the images go away.

So Public Defender Jeff Adachi alleges that the cops didn’t really get consent, even though they swore in their papers that they did.  There’s a video that shows Adachi’s got a point, no doubt to subject to a variety of expert tests during a lengthy investigation because, well, videos of cops aren’t always what they seem to be.   Unlike videos of defendants, which are exactly what they seem to be when it shows them doing the dirty.

There’s still a hitch in dealing with Officers  Arshad Razzak, Richard Yick (hey, I didn’t name them) and a couple of others. 

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón said today that his office will be investigating surveillance video taken during two drug busts at a residential hotel in the city’s South of Market neighborhood that appears to show police misconduct.

An investigation?  Cool!  Well, isn’t that all we could ask for from the Head Prosecutor?  Maybe, but maybe Gascón isn’t the perfect choice to handle the job.  You see, he just so happened, at the time these cops are caught manufacturing consent, to be the police commissioner.  As in, these cops are lying through their teeth about obtaining consent while under his dutiful watch.

Given Gascon’s ties to the Police Department, Adachi had called for an outside agency like the state attorney general’s office to investigate the case.

Gascon said he saw “absolutely no reason why I should recuse myself” from the case.”

After all, just because police officers felt entirely comfortable fabricating consent in order to bust into a room at some skid row motel under Gascon’s watch is no reason to suspect that he would be slightly protective of his legacy as an honorable police chief running an honorable police department of honorable cops with a culture of honor. Except for that damn video.

So Adachi, in what Gascon obviously sees as a gross excess of caution, calls for the state AG to handle the investigation.  What could possibly go wrong?

That request could pose another conflict of interest because state Attorney General Kamala Harris was elected in November to her current post while she was still the city’s district attorney.

That would make Harris the person embracing the cops’ claims of consent as they broke down doors at the Henry Hotel, suggesting perhaps that Harris’ assistants might not have scrutinized the police allegations with sufficient skepticism to honor that oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

One might begin to wonder what the heck is happening on the streets of San Francisco.  Karl Malden passes, and the whole place goes to seed.  Given the inbred nature of those charged with watching the watchers, making sure that the police aren’t lying through their teeth because it’s a whole lot easier to claim consent than get a warrant, or actually wait a few minutes to see if they can manipulate some scared woman into opening the door, one might never know the truth.

But for video.

H/T Sean