IT STARTED with a minor drunken altercation over some Mexican steak fajitas.

By the time it was over, seven of San Francisco’s most senior police officers had been charged — the first time in American history that the entire command structure of a major city police force had been effectively suspended from duty.

In San Francisco they call it Fajitagate: a term that has become synonymous with a profound discontent in this city, whose liberal exterior masks a deeply conservative core.

At 2am on November 20 Jade Santoro and Adam Snyder were making their way home from a bar with a takeaway of steak fajitas when they bumped into three clearly drunk young men standing outside the Bus Stop Saloon.

Mr Santoro and Mr Snyder were asked to give up their fajitas. They refused, and a fight broke out. Mr Snyder suffered a broken nose, concussion and cuts and abrasions on his face, arms and legs. “I went and picked up my fajitas that had slid over to the side of the street,” Mr Snyder said in his subsequent grand jury testimony, “and at that point it was kind of a lost cause, so I threw them away.”

What made the incident notable was that the three drunk young men were all off-duty San Francisco police officers. Not only that, but one of them, Alex Fagan Jr, was the son of Alex Fagan Sr, who, that very night, had been celebrating his promotion to assistant police chief.

What happened immediately after the brawl is the subject of much debate. According to Terence Hallinan, the San Francisco District Attorney, the Fajita Three, as they are now known, were given preferential treatment by the officers who arrived at the scene. They allowed the suspects to speak to one another, change clothes and avoid blood-alcohol tests for several hours. The officers also failed take the victims to the suspects to make an immediate identification.

To Mr Hallinan it was symbolic of a pernicious problem in San Francisco’s police force. “Our police department is terrible,” he told The New Yorker magazine. “There’s a ‘good old boy’ tradition.”

What happened next, however, was astonishing by any standards. On February 27 the District Attorney asked a grand jury to bring charges against the Fajita Three. He also read the jurors the law on conspiracy to obstruct justice and gave them a blank indictment form, on which they could write the names of any other officers they wanted to charge. They wrote the names of San Francisco’s seven most senior police officers, including Earl Sanders, the respected police chief.

The officers concerned, apart from Chief Sanders, walked into the office of San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and deposited their weapons and badges on his desk. They would take voluntary leave, they said. Chief Sanders took medical leave, having apparently suffered a minor stroke on the day of his arraignment.

Fajitagate took on racial overtones when African-American officers vented their fury at the sight of Chief Sanders, a black man, having his mugshot taken at one of his own police stations. Mr Hallinan, who is white, remained unrepentant.

But it took only days for his case to implode. By April all the charges against the senior officers had been dropped.

It took until last week, however, for Chief Sanders, who said yesterday he would go straight from medical leave to retirement, to be found “factually innocent” by the court. Over the next few weeks and months, the other six indicted senior officers will seek similar exonerations from the judge.

The Fajita Three, meanwhile, remain free, after their charges were dropped by Mr Hallinan, who feared that the judge would throw them out. He is expected to start from scratch again with a hearing today against the three men, but the case is unlikely to reach court before November, when Mr Hallinan will find out whether he has been re-elected.

If he has not, most San Franciscans are betting that the case will be quietly dropped.

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