Getting away with murder in deadly San Francisco

San Francisco’s much maligned homicide clearance rate is in the spotlight as the French government has stepped into a cold case murder occurring in the city two years ago. 

The inquiry comes on the heels of the “unusual” case of a Jewish activist who managed to fall through to his death via a disabled elevator shaft.

San Francisco’s 800 plus unsolved murders rate ranks as one of the highest in the nation. 

Cold Case One:  Hugues de la Plaza. San Francisco police investigators who have yet to declare the case a slaying and suggested the man stabbed himself to death in his apartment.  De la Plaza’s Hayes Valley apartment was locked.

Police first said he may have stabbed himself after ingesting drugs, but no bloody knife was recovered and no drugs were found in his system. No suicide note was found, but de la Plaza had written on a notepad, among other things: "Learn as if you were to live forever," and, "Live as if you were to die tomorrow."  An unlikely suicide note.

Cold Case Two: Dr. Daniel J. Kilman.  Dr. Daniel J. Kliman, an Alameda physician and one of the Bay Area's foremost pro-Israel activists, stepped into an open elevator shaft by accident and died.

Police Inspector Matt Krimsky said Kliman apparently fell through an open elevator door on the seventh floor, although the building's manager insists the door must have been secured.

The elevator in that shaft was out of order at the time, building manager Brad Bernheim said. By design, doors to a malfunctioning elevator are clamped shut and can be opened only by a mechanic, said a spokesperson for Cal/OSHA.

The SF/Weekly’ s Snitch reported recently that San Francisco’s Police Department clearance rate has been dropping in recent years. In 2002 the homicide detail cleared about 50 percent of its cases while the average for similar-sized cities was 61 percent. In 2007, when officially there were 98 homicides, the SFPD homicide detail clearance rate was 25 percent compared to a statewide average of 53 percent.

In 2002 the San Francisco Chronicle conducted a seven-month investigation which resulted in a three-part series that revealed a department with substandard violent crime investigations and a homicide detail hamstrung by lax policies, promotion standards that favored mediocrity, scant resources --- for example, homicide inspectors did not have city e-mail accounts or Internet access until just last year --- and poor oversight that lacked any kind of peer review.

With the intervention of the French government in the De La Plaza cold case, and the international attention on the “accidental” fall of Dr. Kilman, the city’s near record high homicide rate and inability to prosecute the murderers has become a national embarrassment.

Final Note:  Even as San Francisco police are under pressure to make more arrests to help cut the city's high homicide rate, the department is running short of investigators to take on new slayings because of an overtime cap imposed by a cash-strapped City Hall.

Four of the Police Department's 20 homicide inspectors are near or at the maximum number of overtime hours they may log during the fiscal year that ends June 30, officials say. As a result, their bosses have told them they can investigate only cases they already have and can't work new ones. {San Francisco Chronicle)