A resolution being voted on today by the Board of Supervisors, sponsored by John Avalos, has got the Police Officers Association riled up because it paints a broad picture of all police as racist and violent, and provides blank check support to protesters who in some cases have targeted local police, despite the fact that the deaths they are protesting did not happen here. As the Examiner shows us, the non-binding resolution generally condemns America's "broken and racially biased police and justice system" and urges the federal government to make reforms in order to achieve "equal justice under the law."
At the Board's November 25th meeting, Avalos introduced a resolution "urging the Department of Justice to expedite its investigation of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, to initiate reforms of the Ferguson Police Department and St. Louis County Police Department, and to investigate the St. Louis County Grand Jury process." It appears the resolution being voted on today is a revised version of that resolution in light of the Eric Garner case in New York and the protests that have been filling the streets of SF and Oakland the last several weeks.
Though the resolution is on the one hand a generic call to action by a liberal city's city council aimed at racial injustice nationwide, the San Francisco Police Officers Association is crying foul because, as President Martin Halloran says, Avalos is using "inflammatory rhetoric" that can not go unchallenged in light of how it may encourage local protesters to launch attacks on police officers. "Dissatisfied with simply condemning the Ferguson and Staten Island incidents," Halloran wrote in a letter to Avalos, "you have instead used a very broad brush to paint all of America's law enforcement professionals as racists, militaristic occupiers."
Halloran seems concerned that Avalos's language might work to incite violence against SFPD officers like what was seen on Black Friday. It's likely the case, however, that local protesters don't need the Board of Supervisors to give them permission to whatever they're going to do.
Anyway, people, quit it with the violence, k? Love, SFist.
Update: The full resolution, as well as Holloran's response, are now embedded here. In the resolution, Avalos notes that "since 2000, 97 San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) officer-involved shootings have occurred, resulting in 33 deaths and 35 people being injured." And he makes special note of the March 21, 2014 shooting of Alex Nieto, who was "shot at least ten times, and nearly nine months after the shooting, none of the names of the officers involved in his killing have been released."
