S.F. cop in 2nd shooting this year
Officer who killed man Wednesday had wounded another in January
The vast majority of San Francisco’s 2,200 police officers will retire without ever firing a gun on duty. But the officer who killed a man this week as he allegedly stabbed a Subway sandwich worker was the same officer who wounded a man in the city’s only other police shooting this year, said the public defender’s office.
The back-to-back shootings by the same officer, Kenneth Cha, are rare, but experts on police use of force advised caution in scrutinizing the officer’s actions.
“The mere fact that an officer is involved in two deadly force situations doesn’t in itself prove anything,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former New York police officer. “There is no predictability of when an officer is going to have to fire their gun. You can have one improper shooting and one totally proper shooting. You want to keep your objectivity when you analyze it.”
Though police officials have not identified the officer who shot 26-year-old Nicholas Flusche as he allegedly stabbed a Subway employee Wednesday on Market Street, the public defender’s office said it was Cha, who wounded Sean Moore during a Jan. 6 encounter outside his Ocean View home. The public defender’s office is representing Moore, who faces criminal charges.
The office and community
activists have criticized the earlier shooting, saying the officers’ body camera footage showed Cha and Officer Colin Patino unnecessarily escalating a tense situation with Moore, who, according to his family, has a history of schizophrenia. But police officials say Cha fired to defend himself and his partner from Moore, and they released photos showing the officers had been bloodied by Moore.
“I feel like with Sean’s case, Kenneth Cha overreacted,” said Deputy Public Defender Brian Pearlman. But in the Subway store shooting, he said, “I have no idea. He might have had to save someone’s life, and that is the right thing to do.
He continued, “Even if it is a justified shooting that he will be cleared on, just doing that so quickly after being back on the street again is definitely concerning. It could just be bad luck, but it’s hard to make a judgment without knowing the facts of the other case.”
Since 2000, only three other San Francisco officers appear to have been involved in more than one shooting, according to records released by the Police Department. Most recently, Officer Nathan Chew, who was cleared of criminal charges and civil liability in the 2014 fatal shooting of Alejandro “Alex” Nieto on Bernal Hill, fatally shot 26-yearold Nicolas McWherter last year after McWherter shot and seriously wounded Officer Kevin Downs.
Ed Obayashi, an attorney and Plumas County sheriff ’s deputy who is an instructor at the Alameda County Regional Training Center on use-of-force investigations, said no national database tracks officers who have used deadly force in the line of duty. Therefore, there are no statistics for how often officers are involved in multiple incidents. But repeat incidents are “extremely rare,” he said.
“It’s extremely rare because, contrary to popular belief, the overall majority of cops never fire their weapon during their career,” Obayashi said.
Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, whose office plans to represent Moore in a potential lawsuit, said he handled a case in the 1990s involving an Oakland police officer who shot a 16-year-old high school student and then killed a homeless woman less than six months later.
“The thinking was that he wasn’t emotionally suited for the work and he wasn’t suited to be in Oakland in many ways,” Burris said. “I haven’t seen anything like that recently, and I hope that means (police departments) are exercising some restraint and are assessing the situation better and are appreciating the repercussions that flow from it. I do believe many officers are affected by the use of deadly force, whether they were right or wrong at the time. They are affected emotionally and I think and hope that that is cause for reflection.”
For a variety of reasons, some officers never return to street duty after a shooting, but most do. San Francisco police Sgt. John Crudo of the internal affairs unit told The Chronicle last year that after a shooting, officers are placed on paid administrative leave for a minimum of 10 days. During that time, they meet with peer counselors and mental health counselors and receive a replacement gun.
The officers must prove themselves at the gun range as well as with a use-of-force simulator, which puts officers in a number of scenarios that require them to choose what to do and which weapon to use, if any.
A return-to-duty panel consisting of the officer’s supervisors as well as homicide and internal affairs investigators convene within five business days to discuss the facts of the shooting and decide whether to recommend to the chief that the officer be allowed to return to regular duty.
Pearlman said that after the Moore shooting, he was concerned with the amount of experience Cha and Patino had. Both had spent less than a year on the street with no training supervisor, and neither had been through the department’s crisis-intervention training.
But studying an officer’s actions to determine if red flags exist should never be limited to shootings, law enforcement experts said. They said police departments must study other factors such as any complaints filed against officers or whether their uses of force follow a concerning pattern.
While department officials should try to learn from each shooting, O’Donnell said, they also need to be wary of making officers fearful to use force when necessary.
“You don’t want to create an environment in which somebody is being stabbed and the police don’t want to shoot,” O’Donnell said. “That’s a real issue, too.”