San Francisco Police Officer Defends Controversial Video, Condemns Police Chief

Dec. 8, 2005 — -- A San Francisco police officer accused of making a sexist and racist videotape defended the video today and condemned the city's police chief for taking the controversy public.

"This wasn't intended to embarrass anyone so shame on her [Chief Heather Fong]," Officer Andrew Cohen said.

Fong and Mayor Gavin Newsom have said that up to 20 officers participated in creating or performing in the videos and face discipline.

The videos reportedly include sexist, racist and homophobic content.

In one scene, a police car runs over a black homeless women, in another an officer makes a blonde woman get out of her car and spin around for him, in another a police officer in drag flirts and flits his tongue at the police captain, who appears to use his tongue to flirt back.

The department's internal affairs division launched an investigation after the video was discovered on an officer's Web site.

Cohen said the video was made for "morale purposes."

"We did it because there's very fun and interesting characters in the station and we thought it would be fun to showcase and laugh at some of their idiosyncrasies and personalities," Cohen said. "This was interspliced video that was taken earlier and creatively and artistically put together for a laugh."

Fong disagreed.

"I think that the captains, the sergeants, the lieutenants, the command staff of this department -- their responsibility is to guide and lead the men and women of the department and if they tolerate this type of behavior they should not be in those positions," Fong said.

A spokesman for the department told "Good Morning America" Cohen had been suspended without pay, but Cohen and his attorney, Daniel Horowitz, said Cohen had not been suspended, but reassigned to the file room.

Horowitz called Cohen "an artist."

"When you look at the video you see there is social commentary mixed in with what he calls humor and there is a lot self-analytical material in there that says to the officers here is how the community sees us, we're uncomfortable with it, but we're going to use it," Horowitz said. "It really is a constructive type of approach just like Chris Rock or Mark Twain years ago used to put things out there to offend people but bring fundamental truths home."

Newsom has a different take.

"This is now about accountability," he said. "This is not cute. This is not funny. This is real. And it's about lives and it's about the public trust. … This is a gigantic wake-up call. We've known what lies beneath the surface. We've talked about changes and we've certainly made plenty of changes but now this calls for, clearly, an order of magnitude shift."