Freshly fired SF Police Commissioner VP Max Carter-Oberstone gave a lengthy exit interview, and painted both Mayor Lurie and ex-Mayor London Breed as being imperious, vindictive, and defensively secretive.
After last November’s elections, Mission Local did a series of exit interviews with candidates who’d lost their reelection bids, and those who were termed out. These were collegial and a nice idea, but none of the remarks made were particularly newsworthy.
Though Mission Local just did a little reboot of that series, and this one delivered some real inside dirt. The site gave an exit interview to former SF Police Commission VP Max Carter-Oberstone, who’s best known for blowing the whistle on then-Mayor London Breed’s secret undated resignation letter scandal in 2022, and then for being fired without explanation once Daniel Lurie took office.
And Carter-Oberstone’s version of events does, in fact, provide some explanation.
"I have some conflicting thoughts about it," Carter-Oberstone told Mission Local. "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."
Indeed, Lurie provided no explanation when he demanded the SF Board of Supervisors fire Carter-Oberstone. At the meeting where the board did the deed, only Supervisor Matt Dorsey attempted even the flimsiest explanation, giving an evasive parliamentary excuse that police commissioners “may be removed without cause.” Dorsey made no mention of Carter-Oberstone’s merits, or lack thereof, in his argument.
But Carter-Oberstone had a full house of supporters, and received raucous ovations when he addressed the board. “I’m very much at peace with the process,” he said of his ouster. “I always understood that this was a natural consequence of doing this job with integrity.”
And how did things go between him and Mayor Breed after he put her secret resignation letter practice on blast?
“Well, we weren’t on speaking terms towards the end of her time in office,” he said in an understatement. “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.”
As for being fired by Lurie, Carter-Oberstone says he never spoke directly with Lurie, nor was he approached. “My understanding is that in private, the mayor went on a frankly slanderous campaign going around telling people that I mistreated his staff,” he said.
Mission Local dug up some details on this alleged mistreatment, and this apparently refers to remarks Carter-Oberstone made to Lurie’s Chief of Public Safety Paul Yep. Yep apparently interviewed Carter-Oberstone about staying on, and Carter-Oberstone cracked the joke, “If I knew you were going to be doing the interview, I’d have brought my bullet-proof vest!”
Carter-Oberstone insists (in the words of Mission Local) that he "had a smile on his face when he delivered this line, and put his arm around Yep ‘with great affection.’”
“A couple of things," Carter-Oberstone continued. "When I walked into the meeting with Paul Yep and [Lurie Chief of Staff] 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.”
So what did have an effect on that? Well, after news broke that Yep had an alleged DUI and cover-up incident from eight years ago, Carter-Oberstone said in a statement to the SF Standard that the episode “raises serious questions about whether he is fit to serve the public in any capacity.”
Those remarks were published January 6. Lurie demanded that Carter-Oberstone be fired less than a month later.
Image: SFGovTV
