Man, work for four years on your groundbreaking police brutality story, and you screw up one little thing...... Well, it's actually not really a small screwup -- in illustrating its story about one very, very bad cop, Officer Paul Haggett (56 complaints in 7 years), the Chronicle accidentally used the photograph of another man, Jack Neeley Jr. Oops. The picture has since been removed.
Mr. Neeley is a taxi driver who works as a security guard. He's not an SFPD cop, and has never been an SFPD cop. He has, however, hired a lawyer, who's in negotiations with the Chronicle over his legal rights and a possible settlement.
Chief of Police Heather Fong has used this mixup to excoriate the entire article series, saying that if the Chron can't even get its pictures right, how can they be sure the article is accurate? And media critics are asking, what does this say about newsprint in general? Sigh. On the totally not related to anything side, though -- don't you love that picture of Fong holding Neeley's picture? Next, we want a picture of Fong holding a copy of the picture of her holding Neeley's picture. It's like when Beavis says, "I want to get a tattoo of a butt with a tattoo of a butt on it -- and I want it on my butt."
Neeley says that he's been a little nervous out in public now, saying that people have come up to him and asked him if he was an undercover cop, and cabriders have thought he was a brutal SFPD officer. He says he's worried that anti-cop people will think he's Haggett and attack him. From the Chron reports, it sounds more like Neeley should be just as worried that he'll be attacked by the police instead!