SFMTA parking boss targeted minority neighborhoods, former deputy director alleges

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The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency director in charge of parking enforcement has been targeting minority neighborhoods and issuing a disproportionate number of tickets in the Mission, Bayview-Hunters Point and the Excelsior, according to a sworn deposition of the unit’s former deputy director.

Shawn McCormick, the SFMTA parking enforcement director accused of the selective ticketing, would write 50 or more citations within two hours, mostly in the Mission or Bayview, according to the testimony of James Lee, a former longtime deputy director of the SFMTA’s enforcement division. 

In comparison, residential patrol officers average 25 to 30 tickets over an eight-hour shift, according to Lee, a 33-year MTA employee who retired in January.

McCormick, who still holds the $216,000-a-year job as SFMTA’s enforcement director, declined to comment on the allegations. Lee’s deposition — taken in February 2024 — came in response to a lawsuit filed in January 2022 against the SFMTA and the city by former parking control officer Elias Georgopoulos. The retired deputy director was the city’s witness who, under questioning from Georgopoulos’ counsel, spoke about how tickets were issued.

Lee said in the deposition that issuing tickets was not even part of McCormick’s job description. Nevertheless, “He would drive from [his home in] Marin and go over to the Mission to write tickets.” According to Lee, McCormick bragged about how many tickets he could write in a short period of time to encourage his patrol officers. The majority of the areas where McCormick issued citations — in the Mission and Bayview — are neighborhoods where many of the residents are Black, Latinx or Asian.

In the 2022 lawsuit against the SFMTA and the City and County of San Francisco, Georgopoulos alleged that the department’s management created “strike teams” to target neighborhoods where disproportionate numbers of people of color lived, including Bayview-Hunters Point, the Mission and the Excelsior districts. Georgopoulos alleged in the lawsuit that SFMTA management did this because they felt residents of such neighborhoods “don’t know how to fight City Hall.”

“It’s absolutely shocking,” said Eduardo Roy, the attorney who represents Georgopoulos and deposed Lee in February. “The city should immediately conduct an internal investigation to determine why a captain is writing tickets in the Mission. I mean, his job description is not to write tickets; he’s an administrator.” 

He was allegedly so diligent about citations that he worked in the wee hours of the morning. On April 11, 2019, around 5:30 a.m., McCormick’s city-issued 2013 Toyota Prius was reportedly carjacked when he was out issuing tickets near 5800 Mission St., in the Outer Mission. Lee found it a bit unusual that McCormick issued tickets outside of the work hours. Lee found out about the incident at 5:30 a.m., meaning McCormick was already issuing tickets before that; as an acting director, Lee’s working hours were 5:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

Issuing tickets off-duty is inappropriate within the department, according to Lee, who, however, was not aware of any discipline McCormick received for this incident.

SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin has been aware of the situation for more than three years, according to an email Georgopoulos sent to six people, including Tumlin. Within the July 16, 2020, email, Georgopoulos wrote that his former boss McCormick “targets the Black and brown communities with unfair enforcements.”

The SFMTA declined to answer Mission Local’s specific questions, instead issuing a statement.

“Compliance is our goal — and we allocate parking enforcement resources based on enforcement needs of a particular area,” said SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato. “We deploy Parking Control Officers (PCOs) to cover the entire city of San Francisco. Areas with more regulations will have more officers assigned to have sufficient coverage of the street regulations.”

The City Attorney’s Office did not comment on the allegation either, instead sharing a motion the city filed on March 8, which concluded that “Plaintiff is unable to produce any evidence that creates a genuine issue of material fact or is sufficient to establish many of the essential elements of his five remaining causes of action.”

The SFMTA did not respond to Mission Local’s request to speak with McCormick. 

“No comment,” said McCormick over the phone. 

The Georgopoulos lawsuit against the city and SFMTA is proceeding and is slated to go to trial on June 24. 

This is not Georgopoulos’ first time in court. As of 2012, the city has reportedly spent about $1.2 million in defending and settling cases he was involved in for alleged assault and sexual harassment. A judge reportedly said in a 2012 ruling that Georgopoulos had a reputation as “a violent and threatening person.”

In his Feb. 27 deposition, Lee didn’t offer an explanation as to the exact reason why McCormick targeted Bayview, the Mission and the Excelsior. In the deposition, however, Lee confirmed that revenue generation via issuing tickets was an important part of parking-control officers’ jobs. 

McCormick would participate in setting annual revenue generation goals and urge employees to achieve those goals, Lee says in the deposition. Parking-control officers were encouraged to ticket more cars that had not moved during street cleaning hours, which was the unit’s number one moneymaker, he testified. “Because they were always out there, and we just didn’t have the staffing,” he said. 

According to a July 19, 2022 complaint, in order to fulfill his promise to SFMTA upper management to increase citations and revenue, McCormick created his own uniform, “dressing like a Canadian Mountie invading Poland,” the complaint said, and went to issue tickets and order vehicles towed. The conduct and McCormick’s keen interest in issuing more tickets won him the nickname “MC hammered” around his station, according to the complaint.

McCormick told Lee that he patrolled the Bayview and the Mission mainly because “they were high volume, as far as the citations, as far as being a complaint,” said Lee. 

Lee also recalled that McCormick had received one public complaint about his behavior for entering private property in order to issue a citation. 

Another time, Lee alleged that McCormick repeatedly targeted an individual tow-truck driver, despite his subordinates finding no clear violations. In his deposition, Lee said that McCormick repeatedly sent him out to cite the driver in the Mission, and checked every time Lee sent someone out to cite that driver. Lee or his subordinate went out 10 times over the course of a few weeks, but did not see any violations. Yet McCormick continued the enforcement, trying to “catch the tow driver in something improper or illegal,” said Roy during the deposition, a feeling echoed by Lee. 

Lee said that such repeated and specific targeting directed at an individual San Francisco resident could be a firing offense. According to Lee, McCormick finally stopped targeting the tow-truck driver when Lee told McCormick that the driver was no longer parking in front of his house, but blocks away at a funeral home. It is unclear why this purportedly led McCormick to change his mind. 

In addition to his claims about the targeting of Black and brown communities, Georgopoulos, who has health issues, also alleged he was discriminated against by McCormick and others at the agency. Among other claims, Georgopoulos, who is Latino, alleged that McCormick, who was his direct supervisor, called him a “spic” to his face on July 16, 2020.

Lawyers in the Georgopoulos case will depose Tumlin in the next couple of weeks, according to Roy. “That this goes on under his watch that they’re targeting minority communities,” said Roy. “That’s an equal protection claim that the city is going to have to deal with.”