1:34
- ABC News
- May 25, 2019
San Francisco's top cop seeks probe of his force
The move followed two weeks of playing defense by the San Francisco Police Dept.
1:34
He charged that Carmody “went past doing [his] job as a journalist,” without specifying how.
Even then, though, Scott seemed to be starting to soften his stance on the raid, suggesting that the use of sledgehammers may not have been appropriate.
“We know that looks bad,” Scott said. “I’m not here to try to defend” the raid.
The leaked police report at the center of the raid concerned the death of a prominent San Francisco public defender and vocal critic of the city's police department, Jeff Adachi – which painted the longtime lawyer in a negative light.
The report detailed how Adachi had been with a woman who wasn’t his wife in his final hours, before he was found unresponsive in an apartment littered with empty booze bottles.
In April, one of the city’s 11 supervisors called a meeting to express her outrage over the leak of the report, according to the Washington Post. At the meeting, a deputy in the public defender’s office, Hadi Razzaq told the audience about a memo his office had compiled and forwarded to San Francisco police officials about a “stringer” – slang for a freelance reporter – who had been offering to sell Adachi’s death report to some news outlets for $2,500.
Freelance reporters as part of their job obtain information of news value -- whether it be a police report, a picture or exclusive video -- and negotiate to sell it to local news outlets, which are often too short-staffed or insufficiently budgeted to do much investigative reporting of their own.
That said, the news value of any specific piece of information or video is ultimately the decision of the news director who chooses to purchase or pass on the material.
“If it is true that this report was actually sold, it raises significant ethical concerns, and ... a betrayal of the public trust,” Razzaq noted at the April meeting.
The Post noted that police officials at the meeting \"struck a tone of contrition\" over the leaking of the report.
Ben Berkowitz, Carmody's attorney in the criminal case, told The Chronicle he now wants the police to clear Carmody's name.
“I’m calling on them to come out and clear Bryan’s name with a statement that he has engaged in no criminal activity whatsoever,” he said.
“One of the things I’ve found so offensive about the San Francisco Police Department’s conduct is it the picked on an independent journalist. They wouldn’t have dared break down The San Francisco Chronicle’s door.”
Carmody declined through his attorney to comment on Scott’s statement. He has reportedly said he did not and does not pay for information or documents.
ABC News' Nicholas Tucker contributed research to this report.
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