No way in hell 2 patrol cops are gonna do all the paperwork or are encouraged to go track down the various video footage to find out who hit you. They might refer it to a detective. Who wont action something that will likely result in a misdemeanor offense or very light straight to probation felony at best. Especially when you consider detectives workloads. It makes a certain degree of sense when considering prioritization. The detectives supervisor would probably lambast them for deciding to spend the half day to track all that down when more serious crime could have been pursued instead.
Meanwhile the detective has way more incentives in his social group to prioritize finding the person who hit the SFPD detective. The detectives supervisor might even tell them to drop everything and prioritize to help internal office politics!
But the same crime shouldn't get vastly higher priority because the victim is a cop (situations in which a cop is targeted because they're a cop excluded, but that wasn't the case here).
>"In the second case you mentioned it’s easy to imagine they got a full recording of the event and thus had more to work with than half a license plate number."
It seems like you're deliberately imagining circumstances favorable to the police.
Why would the officer have a body cam if not on duty? GP is correct, you're ignoring what was written and fabricating details.
A couple of weeks later there was a report of a hit and run on an SFPD officer. Very similar circumstances - he was not in uniform, he just happened to be a police officer who was hit by an inattentive driver. Hard enough to knock him down but not break anything. They caught the guy within a couple of hours.
Cops care about cops. If they can protect the citizens that they're supposed to, that's a nice little bonus, but given the choice between protecting other cops vs. non-cops, they'll always choose other cops.