Under Pressure, Carter-Oberstone Escalates Misinformation on Social Media
Journalist plagiarism and the 100% probability that confidential SFPD files were leaked
In my recent article, I presented the case that SF Police Commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone leaked information on a confidential investigation to the media. There were two separate occurrences. In count #1, Carter-Oberstone clearly reposted confidential information on Twitter. This evidence cannot be disputed. Count #2 involves circumstantial evidence that a September 13, 2023 article by Michael Barba for the SF Standard could not have been written without obtaining confidential information and analysis through a leak. Amazingly, since my article was published, the Standard has retroactively reconstructed the investigative findings they claim support Barba’s original article.
Per Eleni Balkarisnan’s Mission Local article, at last week’s police commission meeting, Carter-Oberstone resorted to projecting that I am the one “known for spreading misinformation on social media.” Balkarishnan said I made accusations against Carter-Oberstone “without citing any evidence.” Apparently, Balkarishnan never read my article and is also unaware of the flood of misinformation Carter-Oberstone regularly posts on social media.
Count #1 Carter-Oberstone’s factual criminal violation of the Brown Act
On September 13, 2023, Carter-Oberstone re-tweeted (below) the San Francisco Standard’s Mike Barba’s article that exposed Officer Chris Kosta for being under disciplinary investigation. This case had been assigned solely to Carter-Oberstone.
Numerous attorneys confirmed that Carter-Oberstone’s “reposting and spreading (confidential information) on social media would constitute a violation of the Brown Act.” Clearly, Carter-Oberstone was sharing and leaking his views on the direction of an open confidential investigation.
This is indisputable evidence of Carter-Oberstone’s crime. He should be charged with a misdemeanor violation of the Brown Act, and he must be removed from the Kosta investigation case because of his lack of objectivity.
The leak and how Barba claims he caught lightning three times in his discovery of obscure anonymized documents
To date, Carter-Oberstone has been able to distract his loyal media, the Mission Local, and the SF Standard, away from his criminal Count #1, by refocusing them only to the allegations against him in Count #2. Barba has tried to convince readers that an insider did not hold his hand to uncover Kosta’s name or for a sergeant who recorded 1,139 traffic stops over a three-year period. (Further in this article, the sergeant’s stats will be the smoking gun evidence of the 100% leak.) The odds that Barba was able to connect three anonymized documents to uncover Kosta’s name, without the assistance of a leak, go against odds that add up to approximately a 1 in 3.6 billion chance.
Barba’s step #1:
In Barba’s original article, he claimed he examined the 44 citizen complaints from a June 2022, Department of Police Accountability (DPA) report. And he expected readers to believe he just happened to pick a complaint that month at random and was able to ascertain that an officer accused of merely citing a driver “for no reason,” was the thread he pulled to unravel multiple SFPD officers’ habits of inaccurately recording their interpretation of one’s race on citations. The odds of Barba gaining that information from a single line, without someone holding his hand, are about 1 in 600.[i]
Barba’s step #2: Per Barba’s original article, he somehow took just the case number (Kosta was not named) obtained in step #1 and knew how to trace it to an Investigative Summary. This is where Carter-Oberstone has seriously fooled the Mission Local, the Standard, and the public.
Carter-Oberstone is 100% correct when he claims the Investigative Summary is a public document. However, though DPA makes this report public, they do not want to reveal officers’ names on an open investigation because then they would have criminally violated the Brown Act. Therefore DPA, anonymizes this report and removes all traceable information, including officers’ names, star numbers, and case numbers. That made it impossible, without inside information,[ii] for Barba to even be able to find and link Kosta to this anonymous report.
Had the Mission Local or the Standard retraced Barba’s alleged actual steps, they would have realized Barba was describing the equivalent of him walking into a cavernous warehouse containing unlabeled files, and somehow immediately finding Kosta’s file even though Kosta’s name appeared nowhere on the exterior or inside of the file. The odds of Barba finding the Investigative Summary are about 1 in 1,000.[iii]
Barba’s (reinvented) step #3: Surprisingly, despite the harshness of my article criticizing Barba’s, neither he nor the Standard defended themselves. The steps Carter-Oberstone allegedly fed Barba to conceal his involvement were too complex for Barba to follow and thus articulate coherently in his article.
Enter Carter-Obestone to the Standards’ rescue with a Twitter alibi on September 26th that he believed distanced himself (below):
Two falsehoods are easily disproved from Carter-Oberstone’s tweet:[iv]
a) An “accidental” release of confidential information is a pretty big fact that Barba’s original article curiously made absolutely no mention of it. (I’m sorry Eleni, but you should factcheck Carter-Oberstone by reading Barba’s original article. It’s not there.) and
b) Just like SFPD cannot post information on the fire departments or the mayor’s website, SFPD is not allowed to publish on the police commission’s website. However, Carter-Oberstone chose to misinform and demonize SFPD for information that the Police Commission posted.
On Twitter, I immediately questioned Carter-Oberstone whether he was providing Barba with a scripted alibi.
I want to bring to my readers’ attention, that here is documentable evidence I can predict the future, especially when it involves Carter-Oberstone.
On October 5, 2023, SF police union president, Tracy McCray, emailed a letter to the Police Commission demanding an investigation into why Kosta’s name was exposed. The Police Commission posted McCray’s letter on their website, and either Carter-Oberstone alerted the Standard, or the Standard spends all day monitoring the police commission website. Because, within just a couple hours, as I predicted, the Standard ran with Carter-Oberstone’s alibi by reconstructing the findings of Barba’s original investigation.
The staff at the Standard claimed that Kosta’s name had magically appeared briefly on the Police Commission’s website and was then removed and “replaced with a redacted version.” How convenient! The Standard is retroactively claiming, after Carter-Oberstone advised them on Twitter, that Kosta’s name was exposed only briefly, and they just happened to be looking at the Police Commission website at that exact time, and they forgot to disclose this huge fact in Barba’s original article, and they never took a screenshot to document their lucky discovery.[v] [vi]
The odds of the Standard and Barba finding Kosta’s name amongst 600 officers’ names during this narrow window of time, about 1 in 6,000.[vii]
The combined odds of Barba’s three fortunate investigative findings are about 1 in 3.6 billion.[viii] I think that meets the 50+% threshold of probable cause that a criminal leak occurred, and an investigation is warranted.
The smoking gun: how Barba proved there is a 100% chance confidential information is being leaked
Still unaddressed is the other leak about a sergeant that Barba exposed.
In Barba’s September 13th article, he wrote, “The Standard reviewed a roughly three-year period of SFPD’s stop data ending in 2021…. The Standard identified four other officers whose race reporting stretch the limits of reality. One sergeant, for example, reported all but six of the 1,138 people were white.” The confidential information about the sergeant’s traffic stops could have only come from the release of confidential information on an ongoing investigation.
In Carter-Oberstone’s February 25, 2023 tweet, he stated the three-year database Barba mentioned is extremely difficult to find, yet he is in possession of the “data himself.” What a coincidence.
Despite the difficulty it would have been for Barba to independently find the databases, which Carter-Oberstone admits he is in possession of, here are the reasons it was impossible for Barba to access confidential information on the investigation of an SFPD sergeant without a leak:
a) Officers’ names, star numbers, ranks, or other forms of identification are not included in the three-year database. So, how was Barba able to obtain this information on the sergeant’s rank, the quantity of his stops, and the races he recorded on traffic tickets? Unless that analysis was leaked to Barba.
b) A week after Carter-Oberstone tweeted what the Standard should have found in their investigation, the Standard’s staff writers followed his advice and retroactively claimed that they found Kosta’s name temporarily exposed when DPA requested traffic citation information from SFPD. But that creates a contradiction for the Standard: why does DPA have to jump over hurdles with SFPD to get a particular officer’s traffic stop history, when Barba and the Standard staff writers stated they simply obtained an SFPD sergeant’s specific traffic stop information from publicly available databases? Both can’t be true.
The only way Barba and the Standard could have accessed the details on the sergeant’s traffic stops is if it was leaked to them. The leaker provided to the Standard, an incredulous route they could claim they took to uncover Kosta’s information, but the leaker left Barba and the Standard unprepared without a story on how how they obtained the details on the sergeant. That forced the Standard to fabricate that the sergeant’s traffic data came from the raw databases. However, in (a) above, we learned that specific information is not disclosed in those databases and here in (b), we learned that DPA can’t obtain that specific traffic information from those databases either. The odds are that the person leaking the sergeant’s confidential investigation leaked Kosta’s confidential information as well.
c) SFPD public records will show that I requested and obtained the ginormous database Carter-Oberstone speaks of. Yet, despite all claiming they analyzed this database, there is no SFPD record that Barba or the Standard, or the Chronicle, ever requested this database.
d) For a while now, hasn’t DPA and Carter-Oberstone been analyzing this SFPD data in their efforts to build a case to layer more paperwork collection on SFPD? So, isn’t that where Barba obtained this analyzed information from?
e) Is it not coincidental that Barba’s three-year database matches the same time frame of the database Carter-Oberstone provided to the Chronicle in January 2023? Just as Barba has stumbled on articulating his reconstructed findings to protect his leaker, similarly, Susie Neilson still has no clue where her database or the analysis on it came from. Seven months Susie, still waiting.
All the evidence points towards Carter-Oberstone as the leaker.
Count #2: The probable cause that Carter-Oberstone is the leaker
a) The confidential information on Officer Kosta case came from an internal leak on a case that was assigned to Carter-Overstone. He is the custodian of the file, and he is the most familiar with the case.
b) Carter-Oberstone established his reckless enthusiasm for his increased-traffic-stop-records cause when he was willing to break the law and repost Barba’s article.
c) Carter-Oberstone was dishonest when he misplaced blame on SFPD for exposing names on the Police Commission website.
d) It was Carter-Oberstone who created the retroactive unredacted/redacted story on Twitter before the Standard staff chose to use it.
e) Carter-Oberstone has been working with DPA’s Paul Henderson for months to add another layer of recordkeeping for SFPD traffic stops. The information on Kosta, the mystery sergeant, and two others would be in their analysis. How did Barba end up with it?
f) Carter-Oberstone claims he has possession of the three years’ worth of traffic data that there is no trail the Standard ever requested,
Dear Mike Barba and Eleni Balkarisnan, isn’t the media plagiarizing Carter-Oberstone’s analysis?
First, there sure is a lot of documentable evidence here.
Second, if Carter-Oberstone is innocent, then why isn’t he calling for an investigation to clear his name and the reputation of the Police Commission? What is he afraid of?
Third, there is a real problem with media sites trusting, without verification, what Carter-Oberstone produces. If Carter-Oberstone is lying on Twitter, what’s to say the three-year data analysis he provided to both the Standard and Susie Neilson is accurate? Policies for SFPD are being framed by Carter-Oberstone’s cherry-picked statistics and no one in the media is verifying his work.[ix] In fact, there is no trail that the Standard or the Chronicle ever obtained the raw data in these databases to even attempt analyze it. For Barba or Nielson to be taking credit for work that was performed only by Carter-Oberstone, is tantamount to plagiarism.
This leak should be investigated by an independent agency!
[i] There are 50 cases listed each month multiplied by 12 months, equals 1 in 600.
[ii] How did Barba even know these anonymous narratives existed?
[iii] Footnote #1 above multiplied by two years of cases under investigation.
[iv] Carter-Oberstone’s lawyer-speak. He is not accused of leaking documents; he is accused of leaking analysis and information.
[v] Standard, we know Carter-Oberstone has access to the unredacted version of this form so don’t now include an unredacted photo.
[vi] I have issued public records requests to the Police Commission asking for all electronic communications referencing the temporary exposure of Kosta’s name. Surely, if Kosta’s name was exposed, there will be an electronic trail.
[vii] The 600-name list Barba claims he saw Kosta’s name is posted approximately 36 times per year. Conservatively, I multiplied 600 by 10.
[viii] 1/600 x 1/1,000 x 1/6,000 equals 1 in 3.6 billion.
[ix] In Susie Neilson’s article, produced by Carter-Oberstone, she claimed that during traffic stops, SFPD used the word “smoke” more than 100 times over a three-year period. But the words “license, registration, insurance” were used fewer than 100 times over a three-year period. A ridiculously inaccurate analysis.
Despite San Francisco Police Commission appointed member Max Carter-Obserstone’s (MCO’s) repeated denials, it appears Lou Barberini’s article has caught MCO “dead to rights” — an idiomatic suggestion meaning that both all available evidence and all circumstantial evidence illustrates definitively that a person accused of doing whatever they were accused of doing have been caught doing something wrong, with undeniable evidence against them.
From my perspective, it appears Barberini caught MCO red-handed in the act of the crime of leaking confidential information from an ongoing, active investigation. The San Francisco Police Officer’s Association (SFPOA) and Officer Chris Kosta’s lawyers should follow-up on Barberini’s exposé of the origins of this leaked information.
So, too, should the San Francisco Ethics Commission, and other San Francisco government oversight bodies. That’s because there are express provisions in the “Statement of Incompatible Activities” (SIA) that is applicable to all members of both the Police Department and members of San Francisco’s Police Commission. The applicable SIA — https://sfethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Police_Department_and_Police_Commission_SIA.pdf — clearly contains in it’s title (San Francisco Police Commission and Police Department Statement of Incompatible Activities) that it is applicable to MCO as an appointed member of the Police Commission, just as it applicable to every beat copy, Sergeant, Captain, and the Chief of Police.
If my memory serves me, every City employee and every member appointed to official Commissions having oversight of a City Department, are required to sign the SIA applicable to their respective departments, since each City department has separate SIA’s tailored to their Department’s unique duties and jurisdictions. When he was appointed to the Police Commission, MCO may have had to sign a statement acknowledging he would comply with the SFPD SIA.
This is relevant precisely because the SFPD and Police Commission SIA expressly states in § IV-B, Use of City Work-Product, that police officers and Commission members may not publish or otherwise use (especially not use in social media Tweets) non-public materials prepared on City time without previously obtaining appropriate authorization to do so. “Appropriate authorization” includes authorization granted by law, including San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance, California’s Public Records Act, and the Ralph Brown Act, among other laws.
It’s thought all of these laws prohibit release of the confidential information about any sergeant’s traffic stops that could have only come from the release of confidential information about an ongoing investigation by either SFPD or the Department of Police Accountability DPA). Assuming there is a DPA investigation — not an SFPD investigation — of Officer Kosta that may have been assigned to Commissioner Carter-Oberstone, that investigation is confidential work-product of the Police Commission covered under the SIA’s “work-product” prohibition containing information that shouldn’t have been leaked to local news media.
Since news of the Officer Kosta case appears to have come from an internal leak about a case that was assigned to Carter-Oberstone, this appears to also be a violation of the SIA applicable to MCO, and deserves to be investigated by San Francisco’s Ethics Commission, up to and including removing Carter-Oberstone from the Police Commission, along with civil fines that may be applicable, and a prohibiton against holding future appointment on any other City Boards and Commissions.
I had to wonder whether Carter-Oberstone’s September 26th Twitter post that Barberini included in this article contained a Freudian slip typo. Not only did MCO’s 9/26 Tweet contain the glaring error ascribing the leaked officer’s name (Chris Kosta) as having been posted to SFPD’s website when Max should have acknowledged it was temporarily posted on the Police Commission’s web site (not SFPD’s) before being taken down. But in his 9/26 Tweet, Max’s opening clause read “1. I did now, nor have I ever, leaked confidential documents.” Too bad he didn’t proofread his own Tweet before uploading it. In a Freudian slip, did Max mistype the word “now,” rather than typing the word “not” — in a subconscious and affirmative admission that he did now leak confidential information, when he may have meant to type “I did not, nor have I ever …”?
I assume Barberini included that Tweet from an essentially uneditable screen capture, and didn’t edit or alter MCO’s Tweet..
In his article, Barberini clearly documented that the “leaked” information had come from MCO. It’s as clear of a “cookie crumb” trail as a Hansel and Gretel story, even though MCO appears to be merely quibbling over a distinction between leaked “documents” in his denial, vs. leaked “information.”
It also seems clear from reading Barberini’s reporting that San Francisco Chronicle reporter Susie Neilson, San Francisco Standard reporter Michael Barba, and Mission Local reporter Eleni Balkarisnan have refused to provide how they acquired the sources of data they relied on in their articles.
And it seems clear to me that the three reporters’ beef with Barberini is that he has exposed their complicity with Max Carter-Oberstone in publishing leaked confidential data involving an on-going investigation. The three appear annoyed that they’ve been rightly, and publicly, exposed for not independently verifying from another corroborating source, and not independently analyzing the sources of data they claim to have “analyzed.” So much for the three reporters’ investigatory skills.
Barberini is also absolutely right to question whether Neilson or Barba took credit for data analysis performed only by Carter-Oberstone, which would be tantamount to plagiarism — given that Barberini uncovered that neither Neilson nor Barba had placed public records requests to obtain the database Carter-Oberstone himself admitted is extremely difficult to come by. Although “MCO” may have obtained that database himself, it’s not clear how and where he obtained the database, whether he obtained it as a public record and had not obtained it as “work product” in his role as a Police Commissioner, or whether there were restrictions on whether “MCO” could share that database with others, such as journalists.
The three reporters appear peeved Barberini could trace this Hansel and Gretal saga so easily back to Max, and expose MCO as the likely source of their misguided articles perpetuating publication of leaked confidential information about an active investigation that appears to violate Officer Kosta’s due process rights.
— Patrick Monette-Shaw
Spookily, Carter-Oberstone’s name, the more I hear it, the more it comes to resemble an anagram of ‘Obfuscation.’