Turns out the SF Chron really meant it when they said they'd be doing a week-long special on the use of excessive force by the SFPD. Here's a summary for today.
See that guy to your left? That's Officer Anthony Nelson in mid-swing, breaking up the 2003 anti-war rallies. He didn't just break up a rally, he broke up the arm of a protestor as well. Bummer for him and the city that the woman was a court reporter who earned about $250,000/year. Nelson then falsified a police report, saying that she had lunged at him with a pole and that he was in fear for his safety. Nelson almost got away with it, until another protestor produced video footage showing that the protestor, Linda Vaccarello, was carrying a piece of posterboard, with no pole, was trying to pull someone out of the way of his baton when she got hit, and that she shrieked "you broke my arm!" after he hit her. Nelson was then fired, and the city paid out $835,000. There's video footage online as well. Other stories include: pepper spray at the ball park, two broken teeth in the transport van, and a road rage incident with an off-duty cop.
Here's the situation on why we don't have a database tracking these reports, complete with stats. From 1996-2003, one SF cop accrued 26 use of force citizen complains. By contrast, in San Jose for the same time period, the cop with the most complaints had four.
And in fallout news, Heather Fong says the reason why we have so many excessive use of force allegations is that officers overreport. And the oft-quoted Peter Ragone, Newsom's press secretary, says that Newsom never said he wasn't available for interviews in the seven emails he was sent by the Chron. Notably, however, Ragone doesn't seem to say that Newsom's available for interviews now on the subject either.
Tune in tomorrow, for more police brutality! Entire series is available here.
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
This is a relevant issue, because it highlights the poor tracking of information within the department and the DA's office. The PD has dithered for years on how to analyze its crime data, with the end result that they don't, really.
On the use of force issue, I tried to find figures from comparable cities (sorry, San Jose and San Diego don't ring my bell), and the best I could find was that our percentage of crime reports with use-of-force is actually lower than average. I also couldn't help noticing that big drop in the last year studied; perhaps they could delve into that figure as well.
Yeah, as much as I snarked on the Chron for their water cooler expose, this is some fine stuff. Unfortunately, it looks like they biffed part of the story already in that the photo they used in Sunday's story is of the wrong cop.
Sorry, but I found the Chronicle's "special report" to be more akin to Entertainment Tonight than Frontline. I mean, give me a break. The Chron is straining so hard to make a scandal, it is giving itself figurative hemorrhoids.
Perhaps these reporters should consider the fact that San Francisco's problems with unnecessary use of force by its law enforcement is indicative of a far larger and more immediate problem; the "evidence" presented in this report is trite and facile in comparison to the criminal violence currently being condoned and perpetrated all over the world by the highest levels of our government.
As the evidence mounts of a corrupt administration that has lied repeatedly to the American people while it moves the country inexorably toward a fascist theocracy, and with a cowardly "loyal opposition" that seems incapable of calling attention to that fact, what San Francisco and rest of the nation desperately need is a radically reinvigorated legion of investigative journalists who are as committed to ascertaining and revealing the truth as Chronicle currently is on creating a tittle-tattle in the SFDP, the exposé of which (to me) is reminiscent in its banality of the grossly distorted motives of those who uncovered the "sex in the Oval Office" scandal of the not-so-distant past.
Well put. Overall I'm not sure this is worth a 5-story series, but they ran over 130 stories on Fajitagate.
The Chronicle has run variations of this story many times over the years. Bill Wallace and Susan Sward have practically made a career out of it. Not that it isn't newsworthy, but anyone who have been reading the Chron for a while as seen this, and the UC overpayment stories, pop up every four to five years or so.
It's true, I generally judge a Chron story as better-than-average if it has a grain of truth to it, but now they're saying that there is a tracking system with watch lists for cops that exceed their quota.
It's not clear if they're talking about complaints over use of force, or use of force itself, which is usually justified. Most OCC complaints are fake, and something like 90% of them are thrown out, so the number of complaints on an officer is often just payback from the people he arrests.
Is this just more fajita journalism? Anecdotes and bad stats from bad data?