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At the beginning of Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Mirkarimi – who chairs the board’s Public Safety Committee – formally requested that the city’s legislative analyst prepare a report on how the system works in cities where the police chief is just one among many city department heads, instead of a hand-picked mayoral operative.

The request also asks for information on cities who elect their police chief … yet another model that is doubtless making Room 200 very, very pissy right now.

If something like this were to happen in SF, the fallout would be huge: a complete shift of accountability in the police department, and a major change in the way the city looks at law enforcement.

But it’s a bomb with a verrrrrry long fuse. Mirkarimi’s request states that the information should be provided by June 1 … but then there will be hearings, and debates, additional studies, resolutions, and in the end it would probably have to come down to a ballot amendment.

Mirkarimi dashed out of town to – get this – a conference in Brazil on plastic bags and couldn’t be reached for comment (I hear it’s lovely this time of year). But he’s gone on record on numerous occasions as being extremely frustrated with the lack of law enforcement accountability and the amount of politics that goes into high level decision making. It’s no stretch to suggest that this is a result of that frustration and maybe even the beginning of a push against the Newsom administration - effectively saying “if you can’t get law enforcement right, I don’t want you to do it at all.”

But an aid to Mirkarimi downplayed such speculation, saying that this was just a request for information on how other cities of comparable size do things differently – nothing more. It is, he noted, part of a bunch of studies on the police that have recently come out: the foot patrol study, the district boundary study, the upcoming police staffing practices study (look for it in June!). The Supervisor just wants all options on the table.

Maybe. But “who sits at the table?” is a question that, once asked, probably won’t go away.