The complicated legacy of S.F. Police Chief Bill Scott

San Francisco Chronicle​

10-05-2025

Since 2017, San Francisco has cycled through two sheriffs, four district attorneys and four mayors. Some moved on, others were ousted by voters, and one died. Through it all, Bill Scott endured.
His eight turbulent years leading the San Francisco Police Department make him the city's longest-serving chief since 1970. He persisted through a shifting political landscape, as the pendulum swung back and forth from protests against police killings, including that of George Floyd in 2020, to calls for aggressive crackdowns on theft, drug use and homelessness.
For every moment, Scott seemed to find a ready response. When progressive activists called for his department to defund the police, he said he was 'open' to their demands. When residents became fed up with property crime, he expanded police surveillance.
His even temperament and measured stances kept him in power, though these qualities never seemed to elicit full-throated support from anyone. While he struggled to address the street conditions that contributed to San Francisco's famed post-pandemic woes, he often resembled an antidote to the city's ugly politics and the chaos engulfing police forces across the bay in Vallejo, Antioch and Oakland.
Scott's feat of political durability came into sharp focus Wednesday, when he announced he will be leaving for a new job building a transit police agency in Los Angeles. The news followed months of speculation about his tenure under a new mayor who never quelled rumors that he wanted Scott out.
But instead of being fired, Scott got an honorable sendoff from Mayor Daniel Lurie, surrounded by family, amid a historic citywide drop in crime. It was a fitting bookend to a complicated legacy that stands out for, among other things, his sheer survival.
'It was a political environment that was completely unprecedented,' said Matt Dorsey, a city supervisor who worked as a police spokesperson under Scott from 2020 to 2022. 'During an incredibly difficult time for law enforcement in America, I watched Bill Scott meet the moment every time with equanimity and class, and I learned a lot from him.'
Agent of change
A scandal brought Scott to San Francisco. His predecessor, Greg Suhr, resigned in 2016 just hours after an officer fatally shot an unarmed Black woman. It was the latest in a string of questionable killings and other police controversies, and then-Mayor Ed Lee — who died in 2017 while in office — was under pressure to select a change agent.
Scott, a former LAPD deputy chief, thus arrived in the city tasked with completing a 272-point list of reforms recommended by the U.S. Department of Justice, even as he faced criticism over the city's open-air drug markets and car break-in epidemic and maintained an office short-staffed by hundreds of officers.
The job was even more complicated than that. Scott had to appease bitterly opposing forces: a progressive flank that demanded change over police abuse, a department full of rank-and-file cops who saw him as an outsider who didn't have their backs, and city residents and business leaders worried about crime and visitors' vivid perception of it.
While Suhr was a charismatic insider, Scott was a quiet diplomat who tried to meet everyone in the middle, according to those who worked closely with him. Often, this managed to please no one, except perhaps the mayors he served.
John Hamasaki, who often sparred with Scott as a progressive member of the San Francisco Police Commission, described the outgoing chief as a 'smart political player' who successfully navigated a jagged landscape.
'It wasn't just like two sides, there were six sides,' said Hamasaki, a civil rights attorney who left the commission in 2022. 'His decisions would upset everybody just enough, but not too much.'
To many officers, however, Scott never shed his status as an outsider. 'He was a yes man,' said Tony Montoya, a former president of the police union and longtime critic of Scott. 'He always got permission from his handlers, whether that was the mayor or other politicians, before he ever did anything. He never once stood up for the rank and file.'
One of the most tumultuous moments in Scott's tenure reflected this internal tension. In 2019, officers armed with a sledgehammer searched the home of a freelance journalist, Bryan Carmody, seeking to identify a confidential source who'd leaked Carmody a report on the death of Public Defender Jeff Adachi.
After the raid prompted a national outcry from First Amendment advocates, Scott apologized, called for an independent probe and admitted that the officers who executed the search violated department policy and probably the law. 'I'm sorry to the people of San Francisco,' he said, in a move that calmed some of the outrage. But the union called on him to resign, saying Scott blamed his officers for the probe despite being privy to it the whole time.
'He denied all culpability and was too quick to throw everyone else under the bus for his own political survival,' Montoya said.
Reforms and retail thefts
In 2020, as the pandemic shut down San Francisco, the political climate lurched again after Minneapolis police officers killed George Floyd, prompting civil unrest around the nation, including in San Francisco. That June, Scott addressed the movement to defund the police.
'We're at a time in policing in this country where the whole world is speaking to us, and we need to hear what's being said,' Scott said during a forum. 'And what's being said is we have to change the way we do policing in this country. And I think, for me, I'm open to that.'
But by December 2021, after the pandemic made homelessness more visible on the streets and drove a 56% spike in burglaries, calls for reform had mostly subsided. A wave of smash-and-grabs hit luxury stores in Union Square. Scott joined then-Mayor London Breed at a news conference calling for more police and more police surveillance, with the mayor saying she was tired of the 'bulls—' on the streets.
Scott's political limberness was perhaps most striking during the term of District Attorney Chesa Boudin. The former public defender took office pledging to reduce incarceration and charged a string of San Francisco officers over deadly shootings and other uses of force he deemed excessive — though these killings were far less controversial than the ones that happened under Suhr.
Boudin was despised by the officers union and quick to dish out his own attacks on police. The tension was so omnipresent that Dorsey, then the police spokesperson, hung a whiteboard in his office to track the number of days since Boudin 'publicly blamed the San Francisco Police Department for something.'
Nonetheless, Scott and Boudin often made a point of showcasing their collaboration, in stark contrast to past city police chiefs and DAs. In a 2021 public service announcement, the two leaders stood stiffly, shoulder to shoulder, denouncing violence in the community. 'Together,' they said in unison, 'we will make San Francisco safe.'
So it was arresting when, in early 2022, that show of civility took a sharp turn. The blowup between Scott and Boudin stemmed from an agreement that gave the DA's office the lead role in investigating police shootings and in-custody deaths, as well as in deciding whether to prosecute them.
Under the deal, Boudin's administration both investigated and prosecuted Officer Terrance Stangel after a baton beating. But in the lead-up to the trial, one of the case's investigators testified that her superiors had instructed her to withhold evidence from a report that may have been beneficial to Stangel. Scott then accused Boudin's office of violating the terms of the agreement.
Though Boudin denied wrongdoing, Scott felt he needed to take a stand for his officers. He threatened to pull out of the agreement. The testimony 'went through our police department like a firestorm,' he said then. 'There was a crisis of trust.'
But Scott backed off his threat after facing opposition at the police commission. While he didn't endorse what would become a successful recall of Boudin, his fracturing relationship with him didn't help the DA's chances of staying in office.
'We have our differences,' Scott told the Chronicle at the time. 'I don't get into the recall thing because I think that's not appropriate for the chief of police. … I need to make the best of the working relationship with the district attorney and his office so we can try to keep the city safe.'
Scott and Boudin's successor, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, have temporarily extended the agreement 21 times, as recently as this month.
Crime on a roller coaster
As the Stangel case was heading toward trial — where the officer would be acquitted — Scott was fighting a perception that some of his officers were mailing it in, disillusioned by local and national movements that said police were too violent.
In one case, in late 2021, officers responding to a 911 call about a burglary at a marijuana business watched as a person exited, hopped in a car, executed a three-point turn in front of police vehicles and drove away.
Compounding the problem, San Francisco police — like their counterparts in other cities — had little success shutting down open-air drug markets amid record overdose numbers fueled by fentanyl. The department needed outside help. Starting in 2023, the CHP and California National Guard joined in a wave of coordinated busts.
Reported crime fell during Scott's tenure, then surged back at levels that angered residents, then dropped again more dramatically. Overall crime reports, from car break-ins to assaults and rapes, decreased 42% from 2017 to 2024, and are down an additional 28% this year, according to department data. Homicides plunged to the lowest level in six decades. While cities across the country also saw big drops, San Francisco outpaced those of its same size, a Chronicle analysis found.
'He's leaving on a high note,' said Mark Dietrich, a Richmond District resident who is active in community anti-crime measures and who credits much of the progress to the department's embrace of technologies including cameras, drones and license plate readers.
Another milestone for Scott came early this year, when the state Department of Justice announced it would step away from its role monitoring the SFPD's post-scandal reforms. State officials said the force had achieved substantial progress by checking off 97% of the recommended goals.
The DOJ's report noted that long-running racial disparities remained in how the department's officers used force. But it also lauded a reduction in police shootings and overall uses of force, along with new policies intended to root out bias.
In 2015 and 2016, the two years before Scott's arrival, city police shot and killed nine people, compared with an average of roughly two a year from 2017 to 2024, according to a nationwide Washington Post database.
Perhaps the biggest change Scott encountered in his eight years was the city's drift toward moderate Democratic politics, cemented by the recall of Boudin, the subsequent election of Jenkins and other centrist candidates, and voters' passage last year of a slate of police-friendly policies. Scott had a freer hand.
But by the end of his term, Scott faced near-constant speculation that he was on borrowed time. A leading contender in last year's mayor's race, Mark Farrell, said he would fire Scott on Day 1 if elected.
And yet there Scott stood at City Hall on Wednesday, having survived long enough to go out on his own terms. He spoke of how he'd always wanted to live in San Francisco. At one point, he fought back tears. And he expressed gratitude toward people he said had helped him along the way.
He even thanked Farrell.