The San Francisco police commission plans to evaluate police Chief Derrick Lew and the city’s police watchdog, Paul Henderson, who leads the Department of Police Accountability, after Mission Local revealed that the two positions hadn’t been reviewed in nearly 10 years.
The last times the departments’ leaders were reviewed, in 2016 and 2017, the evaluations were prompted by controversy. The situation for Henderson is similar now — he is facing allegations of fostering a hostile work environment and a lawsuit from his former policy director; Lew has no allegations against him.
Commission President C. Don Clay said last week at a police commission hearing that the board had “been informed” there had historically been no review of either department head “except on a couple of occasions where there was going to be a firing.” He called the lack of a review process “not acceptable.”
The civilian commission oversees both the police department and the Department of Police Accountability, and has the power to fire both the chief and the director of DPA.
Mission Local informed the police commission of the lack of evaluations last month ahead of its April 1 meeting. At that meeting, Henderson was — for the first time since his appointment as DPA director nearly a decade ago — scheduled on the commission’s agenda for a “public employee performance evaluation.”
“I quite frankly thought this happened yearly, and normally the chair would do that,” said Clay, the chair, who has held the seat for 10 months. “Apparently that has never happened.”
It does not appear Henderson received a true evaluation. Clay said the closed-door hearing was scheduled in response to allegations of a toxic workplace swirling around DPA and former policy director Janelle Caywood’s lawsuit, but called the agenda item simply a “briefing of personnel issues” and not a full review.
But Clay now believes reviews are in order.
Mission Local reported that the last time the commission saw an evaluation for a police chief or DPA director on its agenda was in 2016 and 2017, respectively, and both bosses — then-Chief Greg Suhr and Director Joyce Hicks — were pushed out of their seats within weeks.
Lew has only been in the police chief spot since December and is not facing any controversies.
But Henderson may now be in the hot seat. Last year, four employees sent letters to the commission, police chief and the mayor’s chief of public safety stating that they had lost confidence in Henderson as a leader. Caywood accused him and other managers at DPA of fostering a hostile work environment, misspending funds, and, among other things, showing her a photo of a dildo and gifting a receptionist hemorrhoid medication.
Caywood filed a lawsuit against the city in March for wrongful termination and retaliation. Henderson has denied the allegations.
Clay said he has since received input from the public about the lack of evaluations, and indicated that the commission would be developing criteria and metrics to conduct annual reviews of both department heads.
“The time is right,” Clay said. “We’ve got to do our job.”
Good on ML for exposing an obvious flaw in the way the City works, and obviously, bad on the Commission for not knowing what their job is.
I guess the last one got away Scott free.