Laptop with “sensitive material” on homicides stolen from DA employee’s car

Car break-ins in San Francisco have reached epidemic proportions, and city employees aren’t immune.

Now it’s the Office of the District Attorney’s turn. Thankfully, it wasn’t a gun stolen from a car this time. But the item lost to a burglar or burglars is tied to San Francisco homicides.

An alert sent to San Francisco police officers this week noted that a stolen work laptop left overnight in a DA employee’s car contained “sensitive information related to SFDA homicide cases.” Any officer who comes across the computer is advised to “contact an SIT or DOC immediately.” (That’s the Station Investigations Team or Department Operations Center, incidentally).

The computer was stolen earlier last week; Mission Local is not printing the address or exact date of the incident, so as not to inadvertently alert the laptop’s thief of its contents.

DA spokesman Max Szabo said that his office was in the process of drafting policy regarding the stowing of work laptops in cars prior to the theft. He declined to discuss much of the sensitive information for obvious reasons, but added that DA work computers are password protected.

The SFPD and DA, incidentally, aren’t the only city departments to fall victim to San Francisco’s wave of car break-ins. In 2015, one of the nine drones purchased by the Recreation and Park Department was purloined from an employee’s car.

More notorious, however, have been the bevy of guns filched from the parked cars of law enforcement officers in this and nearby cities.

Most infamously, the gun used to shoot Kate Steinle on Pier 14 was stolen from the car of a Bureau of Land Management employee; of late, a San Francisco police officer’s gun, taken from his private car, was used in a Mission District killing and a San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy was dismissed after a firearm was nicked from his rental vehicle.