San Francisco's police union is calling for a leak investigation into recent reporting by The Standard about an officer accused of repeatedly misidentifying the races of people he stopped.
The San Francisco Police Officers Association pushed for the probe in a letter to the Police Commission early Wednesday. The letter says that there was an “apparent leak of confidential information regarding a San Francisco Police Officer” and claims that a story published by The Standard contained “an image of a confidential report.”
However, The Standard’s Editor-in-Chief Julie Makinen said Wednesday that the publication stands by its reporting, did not base its reporting on the officer on leaked information and did not publish an image of a confidential report.
The Standard reported Sept. 13 that an officer allegedly misidentified the races of people he stopped in nearly half of the 50 encounters reviewed by the Department of Police Accountability, which investigates citizen complaints against officers. The investigation was spawned by a complaint alleging that the officer stopped and cited a person because of his race. The officer may be facing serious discipline as a result of the investigation.
A summary of the investigation released by the Department of Police Accountability did not name the officer or specify which race he regularly misidentified. However, The Standard reported that the officer may be Christopher Kosta based on publicly available records.
A June 2022 report by the Department of Police Accountability summarizing the complaints received by the agency includes a case number for the investigation. A public summary of the agency’s records requests to the San Francisco Police Department, in turn, repeatedly describes requests for information related to that case number as seeking data on stops by Kosta.
In a separate story also on Sept. 13, The Standard reported that the Department of Police Accountability had uncovered three ways officers inaccurately or improperly record the races of people they detain, search or pull over. Officers in San Francisco—as well as across California and in other states—are required to log such stops in a state database designed to track racial disparities.
The reporting by The Standard and findings by the Department of Police Accountability have led members of the Police Commission to call for hearings on the issue and possibly an audit examining the full breadth of the problem.
Kosta declined to speak with The Standard when approached by a reporter on Sept. 20 at the Hall of Justice, where he was testifying in an unrelated matter.
Union President Tracy McCray contended in her Wednesday letter that the information “published by The Standard included materials from confidential personnel investigations as well as an image of a confidential report. Disclosure of this information likely violates state law.”
McCray added, “The Police Commission, as well as the leadership of the Department of Police Accountability (DPA), both know this information is required to be protected. Yet, we have not heard a word of worry from the Commission or DPA regarding the information's release. Nothing. This is unacceptable.”
McCray urged the commission to “find out how the information was released. … If, after a thorough, objective investigation, it turns out that the release of information was due to plain incompetence instead of sinister agenda-pushing, who cares? We would know what to fix, which is one of the main reasons to investigate.”
The police union did not contact The Standard to inquire about how it obtained the information reported in its original story.
The Standard named Kosta based on two reports posted on the Police Commission website that included his name. One report, originally published as part of the Sept. 6 Police Commission agenda, has since been removed from the commission website and replaced with a redacted version. SFPD’s Legal Division provides the report to the Police Commission quarterly, and they posted the report without realizing that police had failed to redact the name of the officer, according to the commission's Sergeant Stacy Youngblood.
The original report included a case number related to Kosta and described information that the Department of Police Accountability had sought from the SFPD to further its apparent investigation into him.
The Standard matched those facts to other public reports published by the Department of Police Accountability on its investigations into officers to confirm further details about the case.
Those Department of Police Accountability reports did not name the officers under investigation to comply with state law; however, they included details such as dates and case numbers that The Standard compared to the unredacted reports on the Police Commission website.
The Standard’s original story included an image of one of those public reports published by the Department of Police Accountability. The San Francisco Police Officers Association referred to this picture in its letter as an image of a “confidential report,” which is not the case.