Gary Delagnes, the brash former president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, is known for dramatic flourishes. But some say he may have gone too far by showing off a confidential criminal rap sheet at a recent community meeting.

It’s against state law for Delagnes, a retired police inspector who now works as the union’s consultant, to have access to rap sheets, let alone print them out for public view. Yet he and Police Officers Association President Martin Halloran used the private criminal record as a prop during a Jan. 24 public safety forum at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center.

On Thursday, the Police Department said it had opened an investigation, two days after The Chronicle began asking questions about whether Delagnes had a right to display the record.

The only people allowed to see those records, under a state law that bans “the unlawful furnishing of state summary criminal history information,” are law enforcement workers and people with special authorization from a court. The person who provided it could be charged with a misdemeanor.

San Francisco Police Department policy also prohibits any employee from using criminal history information for “curiosity, personal or political purposes” — anything other than a criminal investigation.

“They’re just blatantly putting it out there, like ‘We don’t care,’” said retired Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge LaDoris Cordell. She sat on the panel that recommended reforms for the San Francisco Police Department after several officers were accused of sending racist and homophobic text messages in 2015.

Approached at a Board of Supervisors committee meeting Thursday afternoon, Police Chief Bill Scott said he could not comment on the case. He and the police union have clashed on key policy issues involving Tasers and use of force, and Halloran publicly upbraided Scott this week for firing a rookie officer who shot an unarmed carjacking suspect to death in December.

Some political observers are now wondering whether Delagnes and Halloran are lashing out because they see their political capital in City Hall diminishing.

“It feels like we’re trying to drag them into Obama’s 21st century policing kicking and screaming,” said longtime Police Commissioner Petra DeJesus, referring to a set of law enforcement principles recommended by former President Barack Obama that were meant to improve relationships between police officers and communities.

DeJesus noted that the police union seems to resent all forms of supervision and civilian review. The Police Commission and union are now at war over Tasers. On Wednesday, the commission approved a policy on their use, while the union is behind a June ballot measure that would set less-restrictive rules.

The January forum, which was sponsored by the San Francisco Community Alliance for Jobs and Housing — Delagnes serves as its secretary — was advertised as a “community conversation” about public safety issues. But it became a political event for the Police Officers Association to promote its agenda on stun guns and auto burglaries.

The rap sheet was part of the show: Delagnes taped the record to a wall and let the stream of paper unfurl, spilling into the aisles so that audience members could bend down and peer at it, according to persons who were there.

“They represented this giant paper rollout as one person’s criminal history,” said retired ACLU attorney John Crew, who attended the meeting and was alarmed to see private information used “for a political purpose.”

Delagnes described that purpose in an interview with The Chronicle last week. The intent, he indicated, was to shift blame for San Francisco’s vehicle break-in epidemic away from the Police Department — which in 2017 made arrests in only 1.8 percent of auto break-ins — and onto the district attorney. He apparently was trying to make the point that prosecutors and courts are not treating auto break-ins seriously enough.

The person whose history was displayed — with the name redacted — had been arrested 33 times for vehicle burglaries, but “he has yet to spend a week in prison,” Delagnes said.

Weeks after the community meeting, Halloran published an article on the front page of the Police Officers Association’s March newsletter, titled “Career Criminals Are Causing Mayhem and Murder — Why Are They Allowed Back on Our Streets?” It included a detailed arrest history of two individuals, with their names included.

Police Capt. Joseph McFadden defended Delagnes, saying that he too presents rap sheets at neighborhood meetings.

“It’s used to make the public aware of what we’re dealing with,” McFadden said, adding that the sight of voluminous rap sheet can sometimes inspire a letter-writing campaign to city politicians.

Unlike Delagnes, McFadden is authorized to have the files, but he’s not supposed to show them to the public. One official on Thursday privately raised concerns that McFadden had violated both Police Department policy and state law.

Some who attended the community neighborhood meeting were angered by Delagnes’ antics, saying they represent a pattern of above-the-rules posturing by the police association.

“It is symptomatic of the SFPOA’s ‘anything goes’ approach to politics, where they too often act like the rules don’t apply to them, that their ends justify their means,” Crew said.

Delagnes, who left his job with the union four years ago, declined to say how he got the private record and was defiant in response to questions.

“We’ll continue to use these (records) until someone tells us not to,” he said.

For years that’s been the attitude of the Police Officers Association, a political organization that’s long wielded influence in City Hall. It’s always been a player in city elections, and its leaders freely attack city officials and politicians in its monthly newsletter.

In recent months, though, the group’s power appears to have been receding.

The turning point was last year, when former Mayor Ed Lee, who died in December, hired Chief Scott — an outsider from Los Angeles — instead of the union’s pick, Assistant Chief Toney Chaplin.

Scott has distanced his department from the Police Officers Association, opposing the group’s June ballot initiative to arm all officers with Tasers and pulling his command staff out of the union.

But the union has an ally in Mayor Mark Farrell, whose adviser, Nathan Ballard, is a political consultant who works as a POA spokesman but is now on a leave of absence. Ballard helped craft Farrell’s message in support of the Taser ballot initiative. The mayor’s office said Thursday night that it does not comment on ongoing police investigations.

The police union is negotiating its first new contract in 11 years with the mayor’s office. Those negotiations have to be finalized and brought to the Board of Supervisors by May 15.

This summer, Farrell will be out of office, and the association doesn’t trust the top three candidates to succeed him — Supervisors London Breed and Jane Kim, and former Supervisor Mark Leno. Delagnes said the POA will either endorse less-popular contender and former Supervisor Angela Alioto or sit out the June mayor’s race.

On top of that, several supervisors have been critical of the police union, and one — Malia Cohen — will hold a hearing Wednesday so that she and her colleagues can weigh in on the union’s contract negotiations with the mayor’s office.

Cohen suggested Thursday that the POA has lost its relevance.

“I believe that with 21st century policing, the country is moving in a different direction than our Police Officers Association,” she said, adding that the union’s mentality is “unfortunate.”