On February 12, 2006, the head of the San Francisco Police Officers Association said that
Mayor Gavin Newsom showed "a complete and total lack of respect for the rank and file" in his response to a
San Francisco Chronicle series examining San Francisco officers' use of force. In October 2006, the vice president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, Kevin Martin, was issued a
restraining order from Susan Leff, an attorney for San Francisco's police watchdog agency. Both assemblywoman
Fiona Ma and Mayor Gavin Newsom have been endorsed by the San Francisco Police Officers Association in part due to their opposition to legislation that would increase Californians' access to police disciplinary records by rolling back a 2006
California Supreme Court ruling. In 2016, the SFPOA hired political communications expert
Nathan Ballard for what was described as a "counterattack" against police reform attempts following the controversial killing of
Mario Woods by officers and concerns about racism in the city's police department. The union's campaign against reform proponent
George Gascón was criticized for using exaggerated crime figures, and Ballard acknowledged having misread the rates. In the 2015/2016 debate about the introduction of
body cameras for officers, the union achieved what acting SFPD chief
Toney Chaplin described as a "huge concession", allowing an officer involved in a shooting to view the footage before giving a full report. While civil rights activists opposed this policy as detrimental to the cameras' purpose of increasing accountability, SFPOA president Martin Halloran justified it on the grounds that officers' memory could be affected by stress in such situations and that not allowing them to check their recollection with the video recording would expose them to "gotcha" moments. ==See also==