Max Carter-Oberstone on reform and the future of San Francisco’s police department
by ELENI BALAKRISHNAN MARCH 23, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
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Mayor Daniel Lurie, upon taking office, soon moved to rework San Francisco’s police commission. He kicked off commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone, an outspoken member of the oversight board who had broken ties with Mayor London Breed, despite an unspoken practice of commissioners voting in line with their appointing authority’s wishes.
The board on Feb. 25 approved Carter-Oberstone’s removal by a 9-2 vote. Lurie moved to replace Carter-Oberstone, an appellate lawyer and the commission’s vice president, with gun violence prevention advocate Mattie Scott. On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to approve Scott’s appointment.
We sat down with Carter-Oberstone to hear about his work on the commission, the state of the San Francisco Police Department and why he thinks he was ousted from his seat as perhaps the city’s most consequential commissioner.
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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Eleni Balakrishnan: How are you feeling about the whole thing? It all happened very quickly.
Max Carter-Oberstone: I have some conflicting thoughts about it. Obviously it’s not good. It’s not a good precedent for the city to have a mayor remove a chartered commissioner without providing any public explanation for why.
I’m really concerned about the harm that that will do to the independence of our citizen-led commissions, which are just an important part of how our government works here in the city. I’m concerned about the level of oversight that we’ll have over the police department moving forward. At the same time, I’m very much at peace with the process. I always understood that this was a natural consequence of doing this job with integrity.
I feel like I squeezed every last drop of public good that I possibly could have out of this job in those three and a half years. I don’t have any regrets about decisions that I’ve made.
I think the cost of being able to finish the last year of my term would have been too great — I would have had to undercut the public interest to do that. I would have to make myself an acceptable police commissioner to the mayor’s office and to SFPD’s leadership. I would have delivered fewer benefits to the public, frankly, with an extra year.
EB: Did you ever feel like Mayor Breed was going to axe you, or did she just not have the votes?
MCO: Well, we weren’t on speaking terms towards the end of her time in office. I would have taken her call, but she didn’t call. I have little doubt that she would have removed me if she thought that it was feasible, so I assume that she didn’t feel like she had the votes at the board to do it.
EB: What about this joke you made? It seems like it may have been an excuse that was pulled out to remove you?
[Carter-Oberstone purportedly offended public safety czar and retired police commander Paul Yep with an ill-advised joke: He told Yep in a sit-down meeting that, “If I knew you were going to be doing the interview, I’d have brought my bullet-proof vest!”]
MCO: It does seem that way.
EB: Do you have any thoughts to share on that, the mayor’s explanation?
MCO: Well, to be clear, it was never a public explanation. Secondhand sources, but the mayor never publicly said that, and that’s the distinction. But, my understanding is that in private, the mayor went on a frankly slanderous campaign going around telling people that I mistreated his staff.
A couple of things. When I walked into the meeting with Paul Yep and Staci Slaughter, I had already been hearing, so many people had been coming up to me for two or three weeks telling me that the mayor had a plan in place to remove me from the commission. So I doubt that anything that was said in that meeting had an effect on that.
I certainly don’t think that my innocuous comment to Paul was the thing that did it. Paul knows that reference was to the relationship that we had when Paul was a commander, where he wasn’t shy about giving me constructive criticism, and sometimes just criticism that wasn’t all that constructive. But I welcomed the feedback. I understood that that was part of my job. That’s what that was referring to. And I said it with a smile, and, I thought, a lot of affection, but it does seem to me that that was a pretext for a decision that was already made.
EB: Do you wonder if your comments about Paul Yep’s alleged drunk driving situation had anything to do with it? That never came up, I don’t think, but the timing seemed close.
MCO: It seems that this mayor is looking for police commissioners who will follow his orders and be a team player. Clearly, my comments about the credible allegations made against Paul: That he was driving drunk, crashed into a car, and then misused his official authority to intimidate the victims of his crime — obviously, I don’t think that that endeared me to the mayor’s office.
EB: And you never spoke with the mayor directly?
MCO: No.
EB: It sounds like you wouldn’t change anything. You wouldn’t compromise the work that you would be able to do moving forward, to have a different outcome?
MCO: No, I don’t think I would. I just think the cost to the public would be too great.
EB: What do you think is the state of the SFPD these days? Having watched it for the past few years, where do you think we’re at now?
MCO: When we completed or largely completed the recommendations from the US DOJ from its report in 2016, there was this big public relations push to basically say, “mission accomplished,” and we’re off in a new direction.
Having been on the commission for three and a half years, I just don’t see that.
What I do see is an almost nonstop procession of scandals coming out of this police department, that include unethical and sometimes just flagrantly unlawful conduct, like purchasing drones without getting Board [of Supervisors] approval — that clearly violates state law. The SF SAFE scandal, not just the scandal itself, but the way it was handled in the aftermath, and the chief of police reneging on his public promise that he would do a full audit of every receipt.
He signed a letter responding to the controller’s office saying that he would complete that recommendation. But then when SFPD reached out and asked SF SAFE for all the receipts, SF SAFE didn’t respond.
Then the chief basically just said, “Well, we’re not going to pursue it further.” As though we don’t have so many different powers at our disposal to get things done. By the way, you could just ask the DA’s office for the documents.
EB: And the DA’s office didn’t have them?
MCO: We didn’t even ask. So those are just a couple of examples. What underlies these is that the leadership, after working with them closely for all these years, most of the folks on our command staff just flat out don’t believe in accountability and transparency. They do not believe that they should have to answer to anyone, let alone any outside citizen oversight body.
They will say the words “We welcome oversight and accountability.” But then when it’s happening in practice, their actions don’t reflect their public statements.
I want to be clear, I’m talking about the leadership. I’m not talking about the folks that you see out on the street doing the job. But until we have a culture change among leadership, we’re going to keep seeing these scandals that we see — like, it’s almost every other month.
EB: Do you feel like the police reform work that has been done had some impact in shifting the culture? And now people say that police reform is dead, whereas before there was some semblance of reform happening that was pushing the needle a little bit. Do you agree with that?
MCO: I mean, look, I wasn’t here in 2016 when we almost got taken into federal receivership. There’s been some really important reforms made since then that have had a big effect on how we do policing in the city, there is just no doubt about that.
Our use of force policy change that happened in December 2016 was revolutionary in a lot of ways. It’s still probably the best policy in the country, certainly a model policy. I don’t want to suggest that there haven’t been really important reforms and that those reforms haven’t produced really important changes. They have.
But I just think when the folks who are leading the department don’t really believe that they should have to answer to anyone, I don’t have a lot of confidence that you won’t see a lot of the really unfortunate and disturbing conduct that we’ve seen over the last few years.
EB: You personally have spearheaded a bit and took on a role on the commission — I know commissions are supposed to be independent, but I don’t know that that’s always the case, and it felt like you took the police commission in a new direction. What work are you proudest of? What do you feel has been working or has moved things in the right direction?
MCO: I think the biggest policy reform was obviously the pretext stop policy. I’m really proud of the quality of the policy that ended up getting passed. It reflected just the enormous amount of public outreach that we solicited from every corner of the city, from law enforcement, some of the subject matter experts at SFPD, but also, Commissioner Benedicto and I went into closed-door meetings with patrol officers and took feedback for hours on end, we took feedback from members of the general public who lived in every corner of the city.
I’m just really proud of the end product, which I think reflected evidence-based best practices and reflected the local concerns of San Franciscans.
What I started to realize the longer I was on the commission, though, is that the pretext stop policy took years and an enormous amount of effort to just complete one policy. You can’t do one of those every year, right?
One of the biggest powers that commissioners have is just to call hearings on matters of public interest and ask the chief of police the really difficult but necessary questions that need to be asked.
It only takes one commissioner to ask a question, and policies can be revised as the composition of the commission changes. But what can never be undone is those hearings that we had, because that information now belongs to the public forever.
I’m thinking about the SF SAFE scandal, where we had important hearings, or when it came out that the department was using victim rape kit DNA to investigate the victims of crimes. There are just dozens and dozens of these hearings, and I took those really seriously and put a lot of time into researching and preparing so that we could deliver a real, tangible benefit to the public.
EB: What do you think of commission reform? Do you think that was connected, this whole push for commission reform, with you and the police commission?
MCO: It seemed connected, but it also was the brainchild of a single billionaire, too. It could just reflect his idiosyncratic policy preferences, and he’s never called me up to chat with me, so I couldn’t tell you what was really driving it for him. But it seems connected.
EB: What hopes do you have for your fellow commissioners moving forward, now that things are likely to be different?
MCO: Things are likely to be different. It’s clear that this mayor wants to put people on the commission who will do as they’re told. So that’s going to mean that the commission is politicized in a way that it shouldn’t be. It means also that the mayor won’t have to take accountability for a lot of his public safety positions, because he’ll just communicate them privately to his commissioners and have them do it.
My hope is, it still just takes one commissioner to ask the questions that need to be asked. My strong hope is that there are still commissioners on the commission who will be inclined to do that.
EB: Are there any specific areas that, if you were still going to be on the commission this coming year, you would have focused in on, or that you hope people take up?
MCO: Vehicle pursuits. We’re already seeing the tragic collisions that everyone told us were going to happen in the wake of Prop. E, and figuring out what the police commission can do within the constraints of Prop. E to just protect the public from the consequences of these pursuits, I think would have been something I’d focus on.
EB: Have they confirmed whether those pursuits were permitted because of Prop. E? Was that ever confirmed for any of them?
MCO: I always ask. The chief is usually pretty cagey about it, but he did, I believe, confirm that this latest one on Super Bowl Sunday would not have happened. He was pretty clear.
EB: Any other takeaways from your time on the commission?
MCO: A couple of things about the removal process, maybe. I was very aware that I didn’t have the votes when I walked into the hearing room. I thought it was nevertheless really important to make the case to the public for why this was an abuse of power and why this was so harmful to our system of government.
In my day job, I do a lot of reading of judicial opinions, and there’s a majority opinion, but then there’s sometimes there can be one or more dissenting opinions. Why do judges bother writing an entire dissent if they lost? Only the majority opinion is the law.
One of the reasons is that sometimes dissents that are written with sufficient intellectual and moral clarity end up persuading a more enlightened future court. Some of the most important Supreme Court decisions were once dissenting opinions. That’s how I thought about the removal hearing — we were going to be in the dissent today, but we were speaking to a future, more enlightened Board of Supervisors and mayor. And I was just overwhelmed and touched by just how many people showed up. It was really the people’s dissent. So that’s my hope.
The other thing is, in contrast to all of the public comment opposing the mayor’s conduct, there was only one supervisor who even tried to defend Lurie’s unprecedented move.
EB: Was it unprecedented?
MCO: It is unprecedented [to have the board ratify the removal of a commissioner for no adverse cause]. As far as I know it’s never happened in modern history, since the board has needed to confirm a removal, that it’s never been invoked. So since 2003, when Prop. H passed.
Most of them were completely silent, and I think it’s because they knew that what they were doing was wrong. Only [Supervisor Matt] Dorsey spoke up to offer any defense, and it was, frankly, like a confused and tepid defense of the mayor.
Prop. H, which overhauled the police commission, just plastered all over it, everything about it is to take power away from the mayor, inserting the Board into not just removal, but confirmation, giving the Board seats, which it didn’t have. He provided a revisionist history, somehow claiming that the Board had no role to review the mayor’s decisions. Then he likened it to the advice and consent obligation of the U.S. Senate — the advice and consent provision of the U.S. Senate was put in by the people who founded this country, who had just finished fighting a war to wrest this country from the grip of a foreign king. They put it in there to limit executive power. And the Senate votes down presidential nominations all the time. So he interestingly got that part right, but he just left out the historical tidbit that this is like one of the most important checks on executive power that we have on the federal level.
I was just touched, people seemed to understand why this was so wrong. A woman stopped me in the gym to tell me she was starting a letter-writing campaign for me, and the barista at my coffee shop told me that she supported me. Just a lot of people on the street just stopping me to [show support].
A lot of it is because of what’s going on at the national level. And we’re seeing Trump dismantle independent oversight agencies. I think people are just primed to understand why this is just so wrong. I’m more than a little bit inspired by that.
EB: Why do you think the Board members didn’t say anything?
MCO: I’ll let them explain their vote themselves. But they understand very well that what they were doing was wrong, and that they were doing it for political reasons. You know, go back to 2020 — one police commissioner nominee had to withdraw because he knew the Board was going to vote him down, and the other one didn’t withdraw, and they voted down Nancy Tung, 10 to 1. They didn’t rubber-stamp the mayoral selection.
And that hearing included an impassioned speech by [Supervisor] Shamann Walton, talking about why the Board has an independent role to play, why Nancy wasn’t the right commissioner at that time. And Supervisor [Rafael] Mandelman was there, he also voted her down. For Debra Walker’s nomination [to the Police Commission], several Board members voted against her.
So the folks up there, they’re very much aware of the role that they are supposed to play. And they just rolled over and decided not to do that on that day.
EB: What’s next for you? Are you out of this semi-political life in San Francisco?
MCO: Yeah. I did this job without regard to politics, which is probably why I was removed, ultimately. I’ve never had a big interest in elected politics, and this job hasn’t inspired a new interest.
EB: So you’re going back to being a private citizen? Will we see you around?
MCO: I think I’m going to follow more the George W. Bush model. You know, after his term was over, he kind of went to doing dog paintings and didn’t really inject himself a lot into political life. I think that’s a good model.
I’m trying to spend as much additional time with my son. When I told him I was removed, he was so hyped. He was like, ‘We need to celebrate. We need to make dinner this weekend, and make our own menus.’ It was just so much drudgery and just grueling work to be on the commission. So just as a human, I’m kind of glad to let it go.
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ELENI BALAKRISHNAN
Eleni reports on policing and criminal justice in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter @miss_elenius.More by Eleni Balakrishnan
