Pubdate: Wed, 18 Jun 2014
Source: SF Weekly (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Village Voice Media
Website: http://www.sfweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/812
Author: Chris Roberts
Column: Chem Tales

THE LAST NARC: THE SFPD'S MOST-NOTORIOUS DRUG COWBOY RIDES OFF INTO THE 
SUNSET

If you were seeking a taste of old-school police work in San
Francisco, you might try something like this:

A young man at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park sits on a blanket,
smoking marijuana. A stranger approaches him and asks to buy some. The
young man declines. Being a free spirit, he insists on sharing
instead. He pinches off a few nugs, hands them over, and refuses
payment from the stranger, who disappears.

Minutes later, he is surrounded by cops. It was a setup. He is busted.
In court, the stranger, who was an undercover police officer, swears
the operation was a clear-cut case of possession with intent to sell -
a felony. After all, the cop testifies, he stuffed a $20 bill under
the free spirit's blanket. This doesn't sell with the jury, which
returns a not guilty verdict.

The "sting" is a waste of time: Marijuana continues to be smoked and
sold in Golden Gate Park. And it's a waste of money: The cops involved
all collected overtime pay.

In modern times, this case - a relic of the Reagan-era tactics that
have swelled the nation's prisons to bursting with low-level drug
offenders - sounds absurd or fictional.

It is absurd. But it is not fictional. It happened in February, under
the watch of San Francisco's last great narc, who, after 45 years of
participating or directing this sort of thing, retired last month.
This sort of thing may now retire with him.

Greg Corrales is a true believer. There is no "recreational use," no
"medical marijuana," and no "drug prohibition." There is dope, dope
dealers, and dope fiends.

Corrales retired from the San Francisco Police Department this month,
after almost 45 years on the force - perhaps the longest-tenured cop
the SFPD has ever had.

The operation in the park was a "buy-bust" operation. In his career,
as a narcotics officer and later head of the narcotics unit - which at
its peak numbered about 50 officers (including current police Chief
Greg Suhr) - Corrales ran thousands of these stings.

And they worked. For 20 years, from 1988 to 2008, there were never
fewer than 7,500 drug arrests a year in San Francisco. Usually, there
were thousands more.

During this time, no less than one-third of the department's felony
arrests were drug busts, according to records on file with the state
Attorney General.

Who was getting arrested? Black crackheads, mostly. On his first day
in the Hall of Justice, at the height of the drug-arrest era, a
newcomer to the DA's office took an introductory tour. On exiting the
elevator at the sixth-floor jail, his tour guide, an experienced
African-American prosecutor, said: "And here's where we keep our Negroes."

"And sure enough," the man remembers now, "everybody in an orange
jumpsuit had brown skin."

This was the drug war, which cops like Corrales waged relentlessly
until SFPD ceded the field, and only recently: In 1998, there were
9,360 felony drug arrests in the city. In 2012, the most recent data
handy, there were 8,046 felony arrests, total - homicide, rape, arson,
theft, and everything else.

The narcotics unit, instantly recognizable in their "undercover"
Hawaiian shirts (preferred because "They hide a gun good," one told
me) is now a tenth its former size.

Drugs now make up an eighth of the cases at the Hall of Justice, with
1,403 felony narcotics busts in 2012. But the drug war lived on in the
Haight-Ashbury, where Corrales was the cop in charge from 2012 until
his retirement May 27.

Buy-busts were negligible there before his arrival at Park Station.
After, a quarter of all "decoy" arrests in San Francisco came from the
park. Nearly all involved marijuana.

For better or worse, there will never be another cop like
Corrales.

He was fearless. The former Marine followed up time in Vietnam by
volunteering for the department's most dangerous duty. He was the
decoy in buy-busts in the city's public housing projects, and, after
he busted a man who was later killed in the Zebra murders, offered to
be bait in a sting to net the racist killers (the brass declined his
offer).

He was also an outlaw. He did a U-turn on the Golden Gate Bridge and
fired his weapon in the air in front of police headquarters. He racked
up "hundreds" of citizen complaints, and the city paid out hundreds of
thousands of dollars to settle lawsuits against him. He, along with
Suhr, ended up indicted for messing with the investigation into the
SFPD's Fajitagate scandal (they were acquitted).

And he was such a true-blue drug crusader that when the District
Attorney declined to prosecute Castro District marijuana pioneer
Dennis Peron, Corrales ratted Peron out to the feds.

He played out the string to the end. A 2012 Bay Citizen profile
revealed the scene: a man in his 60s, gray-haired and potbellied,
wearing a shirt bearing the image of Grumpy from Snow White, wandering
the park, asking street kids to sell him some weed.

It was Corrales, a cowboy clinging to his spurs long after the
frontier had been paved over.
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MAP posted-by: Matt