More police secrecy

MOST OF THE time, when a prominent person in San Francisco gets arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated or engaging in some other criminal act that involves inebriation, the results of that person's blood-alcohol test, administered by the police soon after the incident, quickly become public knowledge. The cops routinely include that information in arrest reports.

But when three off-duty San Francisco cops, including the son of the deputy chief, got into a fight outside a Union Street bar last November, no blood-alcohol test was taken for several hours. Then the results of that test were kept secret. And last week, Judge Kay Tsenin issued a verbal order barring release of that information.

The order to seal the alcohol tests was just the latest example of a case that's been driven by secrecy from the start. Even the grand jury transcripts, which are technically a public record, aren't widely available: Thanks to some very bad state legislation, orchestrated by the trade group representing court reporters, copies of the transcript cost more than $800 – and it's illegal for any media outlet to post the documents on the Web, where people could read them and reach their own conclusions.

If, as sources tell the Bay Guardian (see "Punch-Drunk," page 12), the three cops involved in the fight were legally drunk, it has major implications for the entire scandal: The delay in testing the officers could have been a part of a conspiracy to cover up the incident.

Tsenin should release the records immediately. And the state legislature needs to move quickly to close the loophole in public records law and make key documents, like grand jury transcripts, easily and publicly available.