Most San Franciscans know the late-night craving for Mexican. Most San Franciscans do not satisfy this craving by robbing people. And most of the time, that craving doesn’t lead to a scandal that reaches the upper ranks of the police department. I guess most of us are just lucky that way. Then again, most of us aren’t hungry and possibly drunk off-duty cops. 

On November 22, 2002 in Cow Hollow, Adam Snyder closed up his bar, the Blue Light Saloon, in the early morning. He walked out onto Union Street with a customer. Around the same time, three off-duty SFPD Officers, David Lee, Alex Fagan Jr., and Matt Tonsing left the nearby Bus Stop Saloon. The official motto of the Bus Stop was “a place where friendships are formed to last a lifetime,” but I’ve been told that most regulars add “that are forgotten the next morning.” Given what happened next, that seems fair: Snyder and his friend ran into the off-duty cops, who demanded Snyder’s food, to wit, fajitas. 

When Synder refused, a fight broke out. The precise details of the fight are still unclear, but the ramifications of the incident would rock the entire police department. Coverup, brutality, and corruption allegations were brought against the SFPD. At one point, the prosecutor handed a grand jury a blank indictment and told them to put in the names of everyone that they felt should be indicted. The grand jurors apparently felt that this should include almost the entirety of the SFPD’s leadership. 

In the next few months, the chief of police would be arrested for obstruction of justice, prompting his resignation, and his replacement would in turn resign. The fallout from the scandal wasn’t resolved until 2009. No officers were ultimately convicted of wrongdoing but it did kick off a wave of reform within the department. A civil jury returned verdicts against some of the officers in the initial fight.  There were longer-term consequences as well. SFPD had traditionally been regarded as a somewhat laid-back department, with only occasional forays into the kinds of violence and corruption that other cities’ departments were known for. Fajitagate opened up charges of old-boy networking and incompetence that the department has never fully recovered from.

You can still grab a food, although not fajitas, at the Blue Light or drink like an off-duty cop at the Bus Stop, at least when there’s not a pandemic. The last we heard from David Lee, he was training other cops on the use of body cameras. Whether or not that is ironic will likely never be known.