San Francisco police officer Michelle Alvis appeared briefly in court this morning to request from a judge more time for her attorneys to gather defense evidence in a case involving charges that she stole cash property from an evidence locker.
Dressed in a gray suit with shoulder-length blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, Alvis until now has mostly escaped press attention stemming from her involvement along with another officer in the shooting death of an unarmed man in 2006.
But the new charges, which appear unrelated to the shooting, have thrust her back into the spotlight even though it will continue to be difficult for the public to learn all that much about the rest of her intriguing career in law enforcement.
That’s because state law specially protects officers from having any details of their personnel files released publicly, including the results of four parallel investigations into the killing of 25-year-old Asa Sullivan, who was shot 16 times by Alvis and a second officer named John Keesor.
We’ve tried unsuccessfully for two years to learn the conclusions of four standard probes into the shootings done by the SFPD’s homicide unit, the internal affairs division, the District Attorney’s Office and the Office of Citizen Complaints.