S.F. Cops In Hot Water Over Video

Tape With 'Shameful' Spoofs Prompts Probe, One Cop Suspended

(AP)  An officer was suspended and others face discipline after making videos containing sexist, racist and homophobic material for an office Christmas party, officials said.

About 20 officers participated in creating or performing in the videos, Mayor Gavin Newsom and Police Chief Heather Fong said.

City officials said the videos, created as a spoof about life on the force, include a skit of a white police officer in a patrol car running over a black homeless woman.

"It is shameful, it is offensive, it is sexist, it is homophobic and it is racist," said Newsom. "We're going to make sure that it ends, it ends immediately."

An attorney for Officer Andrew Cohen, who created the videos, said they were art taken out of context.

"Maybe it is dumb, and if it is dumb, who is releasing this nationally?" attorney Daniel Horowitz said on KRON-TV. "The mayor and the police chief."

The department's internal affairs division launched an investigation after the videos were discovered on an officer's Web site. They have since been removed.

In one video, which spoofed the TV show "Charlie's Angels," three gun-toting police women in T-shirts and blue jeans report to a police captain, who sits behind a desk and suggestively licks his lips.

Through the rest of the clip, a street person, an apparent transvestite, and several others lick their lips in a similar manner and say, "Ohhh, captain."

Another video showed a lazy pair of officers who ignored several dispatches while reading the newspaper, napping in their cruiser and practicing martial arts in a parking lot.

When gunshots are reported, they race off with their lights flashing and siren wailing, only to show up at a massage parlor the driver had spotted in a magazine ad.