Three San
Francisco police officers accused of verbally abusing and
assaulting a gay man they caught urinating in the street
will not face possible discipline because the
department missed the deadline to take action. At a
meeting Wednesday, police commissioners expressed
frustration at the department's delay while approving an
$83,000 tentative settlement of the man's civil rights
lawsuit over the 2004 incident.
"You are talking
about a hate crime. It's just a tragedy that the
department is unable to do anything about it because it
dropped the ball so early on," Commissioner Joe
Veronese said, referring to the expired one-year
statute of limitations for disciplinary action.
Andrew Marconi,
of Sacramento, said in the lawsuit that three officers
confronted him at 2:15 a.m. on March 7, 2004, as he urinated
outside a San Francisco nightclub. Two of them began
using antigay slurs against him, he said.
"You peeing on my
streets? Do you think we want your AIDS-infected pee
on our streets?" Sgt. Jason Fox asked Marconi, according to
the lawsuit.
The man was
forced to kneel down into his urine, and Fox slammed his
head into a wall and used his hair to clean the urine
off the wall, the suit said. Fox and Officer Simon
Chan then stripped off Marconi's shirt, used it to mop
up the remaining waste, and threatened him with more
violence if he was ever caught urinating in public
again, it said.
The alleged abuse
only stopped when Marconi's friend, an off-duty
Stockton police officer, walked up and showed his badge,
prompting the officers to leave.
Fox and Chan both
denied any abuse in court documents, and Fox claimed
Marconi was drunk that night. The third officer at the
scene, who did not engage in the alleged abuse, said
in the documents that he saw no wrongdoing.
The city attorney
has said there was no evidence to support Marconi's
claims.
The case never
was investigated for possible disciplinary action because
Marconi failed to notify the Office of Citizen Complaints,
the civilian police watchdog agency. Following its own
investigation, the office would have forwarded its
findings to the police chief and commission for
further action, but none of that ever happened.
The settlement
still must go before the city's Board of Supervisors for
approval. (AP)
