The Chron Calls Out The Cops
We're taking a break from our usual SF Chronicle mockery for this irony-free moment: Well done! The Chron splashes the results of its years-long investigation into claims of police brutality in the SFPD on page A1 of today's Sunday papers, and it does not look good. Yow. The Chron put together a database of all the reported use-of-force incidents throughout the city from 1996-2004 (something the SFPD itself has never gotten around to doing), and discovered that 100 officers (about 5% of the force) constitute 25% of the complaints. San Francisco has more brutality claims filed against it than Oakland, San Jose, San Diego, and Seattle combined -- 535 in 2003, for example, as opposed to 91 in Oakland, 83 in San Jose, 62 in San Diego, and 167 in Seattle. To be fair, SF has more officers than any of those other cities do, but the numbers are still out of proportion from what you'd expect.
The Chron notes that police officers have a hard job, and that everyone agrees that an officer will have to use force occasionally to quell people resisting arrest. The issue here, though, are officers like the one who broke the arm of an anti-war protestor (and then falsely claimed she was threatening him), off-duty officers who attack motorists honking at them when they take too long at an intersection, and of course, the famous Fajitagate incident. We probably all also agree that something's gotta be done about that too.
What's more, Mayor Gavin Newsom -- the guy who hasn't met an interviewer he wouldn't talk to, who'd happily agree to be interviewed by your fourth-grader's school newsletter committee if you asked -- repeatedly refused to comment for the article. The Chron did discover, however, that the SFPD had lodged a complaint against it for discussing this article in the context of a meeting about police protection for possible union strikes -- and that the police department was planning a huge positive PR blitz to "counterbalance" this article once it came out. Well, no wonder Newsom went apes**t over that Bayview video -- gotta protect the rep! (is the Chron's also working on a story about MUNI corruption too? Maybe that would explain the weird cable car thing from last month.)
More details from the article after the jump.
The Chron notes that because the SFPD hasn't really made any efforts to track or monitor complaints, they don't really know, except anecdotally, who's a problem cop and who's not. Thus, the group of about 100 repeat-offender cops are never disciplined, never monitored, and are in fact usually left in charge of training rookie officers, who then begin to adopt a more violent outlook in their jobs. Instead, the city repeatedly gets sued, and has in fact spent over $5 million of your tax dollars in settling police-brutality suits over the the last nine years (which, the Chron notes, could have paid for 60 new officers on the street instead). And as a result, public trust in the police drops.
The Chron also profiles one cop, Officer John Haggett, who has been the subject of 56 citizens' complaints from 1982-1989 (a seven-year period). While Officer Haggett has won awards for his bravery, he has also been suspended three times for excessive force allegations, including the time he raided an AIDS benefit, choked one attendee from behind and falsely arrested three people -- and the time he shot an unarmed man to death. Yikes.
By contrast, the Chron also profiles Officer Joe Garrity, who worked in the Tenderloin district until 2004, who exemplifies the good cop ideal, and has only three use-of-force incident reports in his record over the eight-year period of 1996-2004.
The Chron also puts together one of its always-fascinating graphs (we've always been fond of the Chron's graphics department) about the number of use-of-force incidents for the year 2003, broken down by location. The Bayview and the Mission have the highest percentages of reports (13.5% of incidents yielded a use-of-force report), but the two highest-crime areas, SoMA and the Loin, had a 2.5% and 5.2% rate, respectively. And not related to the news article, but hey -- love the little icons on the chart too!
The Chron promises they'll be covering this issue for the next month. We're excited to read it -- and we're pleased to see the Chron taking on real local problems through high-quality investigative journalism. Let's see more of it!