Feds back off on aid to reform S.F. police
Policing experts tapped by President Barack Obama to devise reforms for law enforcement agencies across the country say the Trump administration has largely abdicated that responsibility — and that the federal absence is hurting cities such as San Francisco.
Their remarks came during a three-day training session last week by the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives in Oakland, where Northern California police chiefs, commanders, prosecutors and — for the first time — community activists gathered to discuss police shootings, racial bias, immigration and other tough issues in law enforcement.
A refrain of the conference: Crises are made more difficult when the federal government backs away.
“They claim to support law enforcement. Everything they have done is the exact opposite,” said Ron Davis, former East Palo Alto police chief who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services under Obama. “They’ve basically cut law enforcement loose to deal with all the challenges that have been part of this country for generations — to do
it with no help, a little bit of funding, and no guidance whatsoever.”
For San Francisco, which turned to the state attorney general’s office in February for oversight after the Justice Department pulled out of a police reform agreement, the change has meant a deceleration in the implementation of 272 federal recommendations — issued a month before the 2016 presidential election — on topics such as use of force and community policing.
“Here you have a department that’s really part of the way through trying to modify their practices and their policies and essentially had all of the resources removed that had been in place when they entered the agreement. They were left in a lurch,” said Sean Smoot, a police union attorney and one of the 11 members of Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing who was involved in the review process of the Police Department.
“The momentum has slowed — through no fault of San Francisco or the state of California,” Smoot added. “That slowing of the momentum was caused by the U.S. Department of Justice pulling the rug out from under them.”
Originally, the target date to complete all of the recommendations was this June, according to San Francisco Deputy Chief Michael Connolly, who’s leading the implementation process. Without the federal partnership, the city won’t even have its first progress report by then. That report was supposed to be done last summer.
The department said it has completed roughly half of the recommendations — for instance, banning the use of the carotid restraint, or arm bar choke hold. It’s still working on tasks like auditing arrest and use-of-force data on a monthly basis.
Connolly said city and state officials are still working out the specifics of an agreement, and that it’s a “new venture” for state Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office, “so we’re taking it slow.” He said it was disappointing when federal officials abandoned the agreement.
“That federal oversight — that assurance to the community — was gone. The credibility was gone,” Connolly said. “The commitment they gave us was that they would follow through . ... There was a big deal about making the report and saying what was wrong. When it comes time to saying here’s what you’re doing well, that’s nowhere to be found.”
The Justice Department funding for a contractor to provide subject matter experts, outside validation and other support was scrapped, Connolly said. The Police Department is now working to shift items in its internal budget to find the funds for a new contractor. The cost isn’t known yet, Connolly said, but the contractor will be needed for up to two years.
Smoot said it has been “almost a year of lost time.”
“That’s a year that more officer safety was put at risk,” he said. “That’s a year that more lives were affected by the fact that San Francisco may not be using the best practices.”
A Justice Department official said shifting away from the collaborative reform model that led to reviews, like that of San Francisco, was done out of respect for local control.
“This is a course correction to ensure that resources go to agencies that require assistance rather than expensive wide-ranging investigative assessments that go beyond the scope of technical assistance and support,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement when he changed the program last year.
The agency is still providing technical assistance to police departments — an important and necessary tool to fix problems, the Obama appointees said, but one that doesn’t deal with diagnosing what was wrong in the first place.
The conference of mostly African American police brass came as Sacramento continues to reel from the shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man who was killed by officers in his grandparents’ backyard last month. Perry Tarrant, former president of the organization, said the Clark case is “absolutely a setback.”
“You’re talking somewhere between 16,000 and 18,000 different police departments or police organizations across the country where you have men and women going out every single day, doing a lot of good work,” said Tarrant, an assistant police chief in Seattle who was sent by Obama to North Carolina after the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott. “When you have an incident like this, it impacts every single one of those men and women and every one of those 16,000 to 18,000 organizations.”
But the years of the Justice Department offering intensive audits to places like San Francisco on police policies and practices are over. In an apparent effort to fill the gap, Becerra said his office would also oversee the investigation into the Clark shooting and review the Sacramento police force.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, echoing the sentiments expressed by Sessions, called such work “a local matter.” Davis, who started his career as an Oakland cop and oversaw the San Francisco reforms from his community-policing post, said that “couldn’t be further from the truth.”
“The protection of constitutional rights is a local matter but it is absolutely a federal responsibility,” he said. “I understand the idea that a lot of the process is driven locally, but when it involves constitutional rights — the government taking someone’s life — then the federal government does have potentially an accountability and oversight role. It can provide training and resources.”
Davis said “the idea that constitutional rights is a local matter but somehow you want to force local police to enforce federal immigration” was “hypocrisy.”
Former Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor, also one of the members of the Obama task force, said “the concepts of 21st century policing have not gone away” just because of the administration change. Yet he and Smoot said the report they put together as a road map for law enforcement across the country is being ignored by Trump appointees.
The result, Smoot said, has been a stream of conflicting instructions for law enforcement — like Trump’s suggestion last year that officers should manhandle suspects when putting them in squad cars.
“The time we did the task force work may have been one of the most difficult times to be in law enforcement,” he said. “I think today it’s actually harder. You’re not going to have support from the conventional channels in Washington. Your cops are confused. There were a lot of mixed messages before. Today it’s even more so.”