After investigations into serious
misconduct, findings of systemic bias cast a pall on law enforcement and
question the city’s faith as a progressive beacon
While everyone in San Francisco appears to
agree that there’s a problem with the police department, few can agree on the
path forward. Photograph: Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images
Julia Carrie Wong in San
Francisco
A court filing by a US attorney
pulled back the curtain of the San Francisco police department in March last
year, revealing a shockingly ugly culture in which sworn officers of the law
exchanged text messages expressing such sentiments as “All niggers must fucking
hang” and “Cross burning lowers blood pressure”.
The ensuing scandal – which
implicated 14 officers and compromised thousands of criminal cases – cast a
pall on the police department and shook San Francisco’s faith in itself as a
progressive beacon.
Elected leaders and the police
brass quickly and forcefully denounced the officers involved and promised
reform. But even as the city attempted to clean up the mess, another group of
at least four San Francisco police officers was exchanging text messages that
mocked the community response to the scandal, used racist slurs and denigrated
LGBT people.
The revelation last week of that
second batch of bigoted text messages has prompted another round of
recrimination between city leaders and again raised the question: how can this
be happening in liberal San Francisco?
“We seem to have a continuation
of the problem,” said George Gascón, the city’s district attorney. “Last year
the police department indicated that this was an isolated incident. I differed
then because you don’t just have 14 people being racist without there being a
wider problem.”
It is perhaps easier to identify
that problem from a text message reading “White Power” than it is from a
department’s overall work product, but statistics paint a damning picture of
law enforcement in the city by the bay.
You don’t just have 14 people
being racist without there being a wider problem
George Gascón
San Francisco’s population is
just 5.8% black, but black adults make up 40% of all arrests in the city and
56% of inmates in the San Francisco county jail. A 2015 study found that black
adults were seven times as likely to be arrested as whites, and black women were
13.4 times as likely to be arrested as white women.
What is often overlooked in
discussions of the racist text messages is the fact that both were discovered
in the course of investigations into serious misconduct by SFPD officers.
The first batch was revealed in
the course of a federal investigation into a group of officers who were caught
on video illegally searching and stealing property from residents of
single-room occupancy hotels. Six officers were ultimately indicted in the
corruption case, which resulted in multiple convictions.
The second batch came out because
of a criminal investigation into allegations of rape against officer Jason Lai.
The investigation found insufficient evidence to support a sexual assault
charge, but Lai was charged with six misdemeanor counts of misusing police
records. Another officer, Lt Curtis Liu, allegedly interfered with the
investigation into Lai.
Gascón pointed to another
troubling case as evidence of systemic bias in the SFPD: Operation Safe
Schools. The joint SFPD/DEA effort was supposed to target drug dealing near
schools and resulted in the arrest of 37 people – all black. Leaked
surveillance video of the operation revealed undercover officers eschewing
arrests of non-black people engaging in the same criminal activity as the black
people they did arrest.
A former San Francisco police chief himself,
Gascón has increasingly positioned himself as the standard bearer of police
accountability in San Francisco, squaring off against the police chief and
police union, the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association.
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Last year, Gascón empaneled a
blue ribbon taskforce to investigate misconduct and the “culture of bias” in
the police department. (In a sign of how politics work in this one-party town,
the SFPOA has fired back at Gascón by, in essence, accusing him of being the
real racist.)
“If you’re an African American
member of the community, or if you’re LGBT, you’re going to have to start
questioning what kind of treatment you’re going to get from police if this kind
of behavior goes on unabated,” Gascón told the Guardian on Thursday. It’s a
striking statement coming from a man who regularly sends people to prison based
on the testimony of police officers.
But while everyone in San
Francisco appears to agree that there’s a problem with the SFPD, few can agree
on the path forward.
“There’s a certain thing in the
culture where these people think that they’re defending and protecting, and
they can be a law unto themselves, and it has to be reformed,” said supervisor
Aaron Peskin, the mayor’s primary foil on the city’s board of supervisors.
“Everyone thinks that that can’t
be in San Francisco, but it is. The best guy to reform it is [police chief]
Greg Suhr, because’s he’s one of them,” Peskin added. “At least I used to think
that.”
Suhr has faced noisy calls for
his resignation since the police killing of Mario Woods on 2 December 2015.
Woods was killed in a barrage of police gunfire that was caught on video, and
his death has prompted ongoing protests against Suhr and San Francisco’s mayor,
Ed Lee, with many pressuring Lee to fire Suhr.
Lee declined to answer queries
from the Guardian as to whether he intends to fire or stand by Suhr. His staff
released a statement reading: “Mayor Lee has zero tolerance for bigotry and
racism in our San Francisco Police Department. Chief Suhr did the right thing
in taking immediate disciplinary action and seeking immediate termination.”
Supervisor David Campos, a
frequent opponent of the mayor who served on the police commission for three
years, thinks that calls for the chief’s firing or resignation are “too
simplistic”.
“The buck stops with the mayor,”
he said. “The mayor is doing on police reform what he’s doing on homelessness
or the housing crisis: taking passive steps only when he feels he has to, with
the hope that the issue will go away. But the thing about these issues is that
they don’t go away.”
Campos points to the mayor’s
embrace of a Department of Justice inquiry into the police department as an
example of a half-measure. The review will be carried out by the department’s
office of community-oriented policing services, not the civil rights division,
meaning that it won’t result in a binding settlement.
“A lot of people feel like it’s
not a real review,” Campos said. “He [the mayor] does the right thing and then
he steps back from it.”
Jeff Adachi, the city’s elected
public defender and a longtime advocate of criminal justice reform, also points
to a lack of leadership from City Hall.
“The mayor has not been vocal,”
he said. “His style is to say let the police commission deal with it, or
whatever.”
Adachi wants to see the
department go beyond “lip service” and “window dressing” and truly invest in
things like crisis intervention training and implicit bias training.
“The bigger question is not so
much whether [Suhr] should be fired,” Adachi said, “but is he the person who
can not only move the department beyond the scandals, but change the culture so
that new line officers can say: this is the person that I want to model myself
after.”
Sgt Yulanda Williams, a 30-year
veteran of SFPD who leads Officers for Justice, a group representing minority
and female officers, has been an outspoken supporter of reform efforts. For
her, the latest revelations are a depressing setback.
“We’re the most diverse city in
the United States, and it baffles me to think that we’re dealing with these
issues,” she said.
SFPD Racist Texts, Official
Bickering Prompt New Calls for State or Federal Intervention
Multiple observers of the San
Francisco Police Department called for state or federal investigations Tuesday.
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
By Alex Emslie APRIL 5, 2016
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Calls for a higher power to
intervene in San Francisco’s criminal justice system have reignited with
therevelation last week that a second batch of police officers traded racist
and homophobic text messages, even as the city reeled from a first batch,
revealed last year, replete with racial slurs and violent language about
African-Americans.
And exactly how the Police
Department notified the District Attorney’s Office that new messages indicating
racial bias were recently recovered from officers’ personal cellphones has
prompted the latest round of public bickering between Police Chief Greg Suhr
and District Attorney George Gascón.
That’s because prosecutors are required
to notify defendants of exculpatory evidence, or evidence that tends to show a
defendant is not guilty of a crime for which he or she is charged, under the
1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland. That includes evidence
that an arresting officer may have acted out of bias, hence the great interest
from the legal community in racist text messages from police officers.
“Every time an officer is deemed
to engage in behavior that involves moral turpitude — an officer is a thief, an
officer’s a liar, or if an officer engages in racist or sexist behavior — that
officer has to be put on a list,” said retired Superior Court of California
Judge LaDoris Cordell. “Basically, Brady officers really become useless.”
The Brady notification process is
anything but simple, though, largely because peace officer personnel
information is kept so secret in California that not even prosecutors have
direct access to it.
Suhr laid out the process that
SFPD’s Brady Unit followed regarding the latest text messages in an April 4
letter to Gascón, arguing that the department made the required notifications,
and it was up to prosecutors to either file a motion or work with Police
Department to review the personnel files in question.
But Gascón has said his office
had no way of knowing that bigoted texts were buried in tens of thousands of
pages of records seized from officers’ personal cellphones as part of an
internal sexual assault investigation of Officer Jason Lai. To avoid future
oversight, Gascón suggested Suhr make the existence of such messages public
from the outset.
Senior American Civil Liberties
Union attorney Alan Schlosser agreed.
“He [Suhr] certainly was free
back in August to say that they have uncovered more examples of this kind of
conduct, and hopefully use that to reiterate his strong stand and say what
they’re going to do about it,” Schlosser said. “But in fact it’s been kept
secret from the public, and was only revealed last week by the district
attorney. That to us was a very telling sign that the leadership of the Police
Department is not committed to transparency and to significant reform.”
So for the second time in a
little over four months, the ACLU asked the U.S. Department of Justice for a
civil rights investigation of the SFPD, noting that federal authorities
conducting a voluntary review of department policies, following the fatal
December police shooting of Mario Woods, have repeatedly said that a stronger
civil rights investigation could launch if circumstances change.
Schlosser said the public feud
between Suhr and Gascón adds to concern about San Francisco’s overall criminal
justice system.
“I think it’s troubling,” he
said. “I do think that kind of disarray does contribute to a feeling that San
Francisco needs outside help, but it has to come from a source that can
enforce.”
Officials with the U.S.
Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services conducting
the voluntary review of SFPD policies have made no official statements about
the latest racially charged scandal, despite repeated inquiries. The Department
of Justice’s Civil Rights Division did not respond to KQED’s inquiry.
“We feel new circumstances have
added to our original request to provide a compelling case for a pattern and
practice investigation,” Schlosser said.
San Francisco Public Defender
Jeff Adachi made a similar request to state Attorney General Kamala Harris
Monday, asking the California Department of Justice to launch a civil rights
investigation of San Francisco’s Police Department.
Like the ACLU, Adachi cataloged
not only the repeated scandals over racist text messages, but also SFPD’s
failure to discipline officers implicated in the first round of texts, SFPD’s
extremely disproportionate arrest rate of African-Americans, three high-profile
fatal shootings of black and Latino men, and allegations of racial bias in a
joint local-federal drug sting revealed last year.
“The incidents reveal a pattern
and practice within the police department that has allowed racism and disparate
treatment of black and Latino people to fester and grow,” Adachi wrote. “An
investigation would help settle the pressing question of whether the racism
evidenced in these incidents is endemic of a culture within the department
which allows these types of incidents to occur. But most importantly it would
help restore the confidence of San Franciscans — and those around the nation
who are watching — that the San Francisco Police Department is not engaging in
racist practices.”
A spokeswoman for the California
Attorney General said the office is reviewing Adachi’s request.
San Francisco Supervisor Malia
Cohen said Tuesday she has not stopped calling for a federal investigation
since she and board President London Breed formally requested one in January.
“When is enough, enough?” Cohen
and Breed wrote in a joint statement issued April 5. “We talk about implicit
bias training, yet time and again are confronted with explicit bias by those
who are sworn to protect the community. This behavior cannot be tolerated
without consequence; the City must rededicate itself to police reform.”
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